The Greatest Russian Stories of Crime and Suspense

by Otto Penzler

  Fear gained more and more mastery over him, especially after this second, quite unexpected murder. He longed to run away from the place as fast as possible. And if at that moment he had been capable of seeing and reasoning more correctly, if he had been able to realize all the difficulties of his position, the hopelessness, the hideousness, and the absurdity of it, if he could have understood how many obstacles and, perhaps, crimes he had still to overcome or to commit, to get out of that place and to make his way home, it is very possible that he would have flung up everything, and would have gone to give himself up, and not from fear, but from simple horror and loathing of what he had done. The feeling of loathing especially surged up within him and grew stronger every minute. He would not now have gone to the box or even into the room for anything in the world.

  But a sort of blankness, even dreaminess, had begun by degrees to take possession of him; at moments he forgot himself, or rather forgot what was of importance and caught at trifles. Glancing, however, into the kitchen and seeing a bucket half full of water on a bench, he bethought him of washing his hands and the axe. His hands were sticky with blood. He dropped the axe with the blade in the water, snatched a piece of soap that lay in a broken saucer on the window, and began washing his hands in the bucket. When they were clean, he took out the axe, washed the blade, and spent a long time, about three minutes, washing the wood where there were spots of blood, rubbing them with soap. Then he wiped it all with some linen that was hanging to dry on a line in the kitchen and then he was a long while attentively examining the axe at the window. There was no trace left on it, only the wood was still damp. He carefully hung the axe in the noose under his coat. Then as far as was possible, in the dim light in the kitchen, he looked over his overcoat, his trousers, and his boots. At the first glance there seemed to be nothing but stains on the boots. He wetted the rag and rubbed the boots. But he knew he was not looking thoroughly, that there might be something quite noticeable that he was overlooking. He stood in the middle of the room, lost in thought. Dark agonizing ideas rose in his mind—the idea that he was mad and that at that moment he was incapable of reasoning, of protecting himself, that he ought perhaps to be doing something utterly different from what he was now doing.“Good God!” he muttered, “I must fly, fly,” and he rushed into the entry. But here a shock of terror awaited him such as he had never known before.

  He stood and gazed and could not believe his eyes: the door, the outer door from the stairs, at which he had not long before waited and rung, was standing unfastened and at least six inches open. No lock, no bolt, all the time, all that time! The old woman had not shut it after him perhaps as a precaution. But, good God! Why, he had seen Lizaveta afterwards! And how could he, how could he have failed to reflect that she must have come in somehow? She could not have come through the wall!

  He dashed to the door and fastened the latch.

  “But no, the wrong thing again! I must get away, get away …” He unfastened the latch, opened the door, and began listening on the staircase.

  He listened a long time. Somewhere far away, it might be in the gateway, two voices were loudly and shrilly shouting, quarrelling, and scolding. “What are they about?” He waited patiently. At last all was still, as though suddenly cut off; they had separated. He was meaning to go out, but suddenly, on the floor below, a door was noisily opened and someone began going downstairs humming a tune. “How is it they all make such a noise?” flashed through his mind. Once more he closed the door and waited. At last all was still, not a soul stirring. He was just taking a step towards the stairs when he heard fresh footsteps.

  The steps sounded very far off, at the very bottom of the stairs, but he remembered quite clearly and distinctly that from the first sound he began for some reason to suspect that this was someone coming there, to the fourth floor, to the old woman. Why? Were the sounds somehow peculiar, significant? The steps were heavy, even, and unhurried. Now he had passed the first floor, now he was mounting higher, it was growing more and more distinct! He could hear his heavy breathing. And now the third storey had been reached. Coming here! And it seemed to him all at once that he was turned to stone, that it was like a dream in which one is being pursued, nearly caught and will be killed, and is rooted to the spot and cannot even move one’s arms.

  At last when the unknown was mounting to the fourth floor, he suddenly started, and succeeded in slipping neatly and quickly back into the flat and closing the door behind him. Then he took the hook and softly, noiselessly, fixed it in the catch. Instinct helped him. When he had done this, he crouched, holding his breath, by the door. The unknown visitor was by now also at the door. They were now standing opposite one another, as he had just before been standing with the old woman, when the door divided them and he was listening.

  The visitor panted several times. “He must be a big, fat man,” thought Raskolnikov, squeezing the axe in his hand. It seemed like a dream indeed. The visitor took hold of the bell and rang it loudly.

  As soon as the tin bell tinkled, Raskolnikov seemed to be aware of something moving in the room. For some seconds he listened quite seriously. The unknown rang again, waited, and suddenly tugged violently and impatiently at the handle of the door. Raskolnikov gazed in horror at the hook shaking in its fastening, and in blank terror expected every minute that the fastening would be pulled out. It certainly did seem possible, so violently was he shaking it. He was tempted to hold the fastening, but he might be aware of it. A giddiness came over him again. “I shall fall down!” flashed through his mind, but the unknown began to speak and he recovered himself at once.

  “What’s up? Are they asleep or murdered? D-damn them!” he bawled in a thick voice. “Hey, Alyona Ivanovna, old witch! Lizaveta Ivanovna, hey, my beauty! Open the door! Oh, damn them! Are they asleep or what?”

  And again, enraged he tugged with all his might a dozen times at the bell. He must certainly be a man of authority and an intimate acquaintance.

  At this moment light hurried steps were heard not far off, on the stairs. Someone else was approaching. Raskolnikov had not heard them at first.

  “You don’t say there’s no one at home,” the newcomer cried in a cheerful ringing voice, addressing the first visitor who still went on pulling the bell. “Good evening, Koch.”

  “From his voice he must be quite young,” thought Raskolnikov.

  “Who the devil can tell? I’ve almost broken the lock,” answered Koch. “But how do you come to know me?”

  “Why! The day before yesterday I beat you three times running at billiards at Gambrinus’.”

  “Oh!”

  “So they are not at home? That’s queer? It’s awfully stupid though. Where could the old woman have gone? I’ve come on business.”

  “Yes; and I have business with her, too.”

  “Well, what can we do? Go back, I suppose. Aie—aie! And I was hoping to get some money!” cried the young man.

  “We must give it up, of course, but what did she fix this time for? The old witch fixed the time for me to come herself. It’s out of my way. And where the devil she can have got to, I can’t make out. She sits here from year’s end to year’s end, the old hag; her legs are bad and yet here all of a sudden she is out for a walk!”

  “Hadn’t we better ask the porter?”

  “What?”

  “Where she’s gone and when she’ll be back.”

  “Hm … Damn it all!… We might ask … But you know she never does go anywhere.”

  And he once more tugged at the door-handle.

  “Damn it all. There’s nothing to be done, we must go!”

  “Stay!” cried the young man suddenly. “Do you see how the door shakes if you pull it?”

  “Well?”

  “That shows it’s not locked, but fastened with the hook! Do you hear how the hook clanks?”

  “Well?”

  “Why, don’t you see? That proves that one of them is at home. If they were all out, they would have locked the do
or from outside with the key and not with the hook from inside. There, do you hear how the hook is clanking? To fasten the hook on the inside they must be at home, don’t you see? So there they are sitting inside and don’t open the door!”

  “Well! And so they must be!” cried Koch, astonished. “What are they about in there?” And he began furiously shaking the door.

  “Stay!” cried the young man again. “Don’t pull at it! There must be something wrong … Here, you’ve been ringing and pulling at the door and still they don’t open! So either they’ve both fainted or—”

  “What?”

  “I tell you what. Let’s go and fetch the porter, let him wake them up.”

  “All right.”

  Both were going down.

  “Stay. You stop here while I run down for the porter.”

  “What for?”

  “Well, you’d better.”

  “All right.”

  “I’m studying the law, you see! It’s evident, e-vi-dent there’s something wrong here!” the young man cried hotly, and he ran downstairs.

  Koch remained. Once more he softly touched the bell which gave one tinkle, then gently, as though reflecting and looking about him, began touching the door-handle, pulling it and letting it go to make sure once more that it was only fastened by the hook. Then puffing and panting he bent down and began looking at the keyhole: but the key was in the lock on the inside and so nothing could be seen.

  Raskolnikov stood keeping tight hold of the axe. He was in a sort of delirium. He was even making ready to fight when they should come in. While they were knocking and talking together, the idea several times occurred to him to end it all at once and shout to them through the door. Now and then he was tempted to swear at them, to jeer at them, while they could not open the door! “Only make haste!” was the thought that flashed through his mind.

  “But what the devil is he about?…” Time was passing, one minute, and another—no one came. Koch began to be restless.

  “What the devil!” he cried suddenly and in impatience deserting his sentry duty, he too went down, hurrying and thumping with his heavy boots on the stairs. The steps died away.

  “Good heavens! What am I to do?”

  Raskolnikov unfastened the hook, opened the door—there was no sound. Abruptly, without any thought at all, he went out, closing the door as thoroughly as he could, and went downstairs.

  He had gone down three flights when he suddenly heard a loud noise below—where could he go? There was nowhere to hide. He was just going back to the flat.

  “Hey there! Catch the brute!”

  Somebody dashed out of a flat below, shouting, and rather fell than ran down the stairs, bawling at the top of his voice.

  “Mitka! Mitka! Mitka! Mitka! Mitka! Blast him!”

  The shout ended in a shriek; the last sounds came from the yard; all was still. But at the same instant several men talking loud and fast began noisily mounting the stairs. There were three or four of them. He distinguished the ringing voice of the young man. “They!”

  Filled with despair he went straight to meet them, feeling “come what must!” If they stopped him—all was lost; if they let him pass—all was lost too; they would remember him. They were approaching; they were only a flight from him—and suddenly deliverance! A few steps from him, on the right, there was an empty flat with the door wide open, the flat on the second floor where the painters had been at work, and which, as though for his benefit, they had just left. It was they, no doubt, who had just run down, shouting. The floor had only just been painted, in the middle of the room stood a pail and a broken pot with paint and brushes. In one instant he had whisked in at the open door and hidden behind it, and only in the nick of time; they had already reached the landing. Then they turned and went on up to the fourth floor, talking loudly. He waited, went out on tiptoe, and ran down the stairs.

  No one was on the stairs, nor in the gateway. He passed quickly through the gateway and turned to the left in the street.

  He knew, he knew perfectly well that at that moment they were at the flat, that they were greatly astonished at finding it unlocked, as the door had just been fastened, that by now they were looking at the bodies, that before another minute had passed they would guess and completely realize that the murderer had just been there, and had succeeded in hiding somewhere, slipping by them and escaping. They would guess most likely that he had been in the empty flat, while they were going upstairs. And meanwhile he dared not quicken his pace much, though the next turning was still nearly a hundred yards away. “Should he slip through some gateway and wait somewhere in an unknown street? No, hopeless! Should he fling away the axe? Should he take a cab? Hopeless, hopeless!”

  At last he reached the turning. He turned down it more dead than alive. Here he was half-way to safety, and he understood it; it was less risky because there was a great crowd of people, and he was lost in it like a grain of sand. But all he had suffered had so weakened him that he could scarcely move. Perspiration ran down him in drops, his neck was all wet. “My word, he has been going it!” someone shouted at him when he came out on the canal bank.

  He was only dimly conscious of himself now and the farther he went the worse it was. He remembered, however, that on coming out on to the canal bank he was alarmed at finding few people there and so being more conspicuous, and he had thought of turning back. Though he was almost falling from fatigue, he went a long way round so as to get home from quite a different direction.

  He was not fully conscious when he passed through the gateway of his house; he was already on the staircase before he recollected the axe. And yet he had a very grave problem before him, to put it back and to escape observation as far as possible in doing so. He was of course incapable of reflecting that it might perhaps be far better not to restore the axe at all, but to drop it later on in somebody’s yard. But it all happened fortunately, the door of the porter’s room was closed but not locked, so that it seemed most likely that the porter was at home. But he had so completely lost all power of reflection that he walked straight to the door and opened it. If the porter had asked him, “What do you want?” he would perhaps have simply handed him the axe. But again the porter was not at home, and he succeeded in putting the axe back under the bench and even covering it with the chunk of wood as before. He met no one, not a soul, afterwards on the way to his room; the landlady’s door was shut. When he was in his room, he flung himself on the sofa just as he was—he did not sleep, but sank into blank forgetfulness. If anyone had come into his room then he would have jumped up at once and screamed. Scraps and shreds of thoughts were simply swarming in his brain, but he could not catch at one, he could not rest on one, in spite of all his efforts …

  VIL LIPATOV

  GENKA PALTSEV—

  SON OF DMITRI

  Siberia, the place where Vil Lipatov (1927–1979) was born, remained the great love of his life and the background to all his stories. He reveled in the vast expanses of this eastern region of Russia, its rivers and forests, and this stark, cold landscape is so vividly described in his work, beginning with his first novel, Deep Stream, and continuing with his 1977 detective novel, The Stolotov Dossier, that it almost becomes a character. The son of a much-loved Bolshevik journalist, Lipatov was a true son of the Soviet Union, writing of the evils of individualism, claiming that it not only led to vice but that it was itself a vice.

  Lipatov worked in the Soviet Union’s film industry, writing several screenplays, including Ivan I Kolombina (1975).

  The hero of his short story collection, A Village Detective (1970), is Fyodor Aniskin, a divisional militia inspector who has been at his post in a small Siberian village for forty years, showing kindness and wisdom as a member of the close-knit community. He shares the traits that made Sherlock Holmes so successful: an acute observational ability, a logical mind and the uncanny skill of reconstructing events as if he had witnessed them first-hand.

  “Genka Paltsev–Son of Dmitri”
was first published in English in A Village Detective (Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1970).

  1

  Militia inspector Fyodor Aniskin was considered to be the stoutest man in the village. Cherkashin, the manager of the dairy factory, weighed sixteen stone but Aniskin was a head taller and much fatter. Nobody knew exactly how much he weighed for when he was asked Aniskin used to reply, “Why don’t you weigh me yourself?” For all his obesity, however, the inspector moved about the village at a brisk pace, especially on cool days. He liked talking to people and hated the dairy manager’s guts.

  Aniskin had been village militia inspector for goodness knows how long, but nobody remembered what his rank was, because he only wore his uniform once every three years when he went on some particularly important business to the district centre. For this he gave the following reason, “If I wore my uniform every day, I’d have to spend all my wages on buying new ones.” In summer he wore wide linen trousers, a grey shirt usually open at the neck showing his hairy chest and size twelve sandals. In rainy weather he wore heavy top boots and in winter felt boots which made his legs look really elephantine.