The Cleansing Flames (St Petersburg Mystery)

by R. N. Morris

  Certainly, the urgent sense of discovery that had stung him from his sleep had faded. He could not even remember what it was that had almost convinced him to look in the trunk. He began to relax, welcoming the slow dissolution of his being that presaged sleep.

  *

  As he had intimated he would, Porfiry visited a cemetery on the Feast of Radonitsa. He had learnt from the landlady that the children were to be buried that day, at the Smolenksoe Cemetery on Vasilevsky Island. A procession would set out from the Koshmarov Apartment Building at ten.

  There had been a subscription to help with funeral costs, to which both Porfiry and Virginsky had contributed. An edge of hostility had crept into Virginsky’s voice when he answered Porfiry’s question of whether he intended to give something, or not. It seemed that he had detected some kind of slight in the pause Porfiry allowed between the alternatives.

  It was the finest day of the spring so far. There had been an explosion of buds in the city’s gardens and parks. The bird-cherry trees were in blossom everywhere. In sending forth its shoots and stems, the earth seemed to be straining up towards the sky, drawn by its inhuman weightlessness. And yet it took a great effort of will on Porfiry’s part to lift his face towards the exuberant light.

  The Prokharchins’ friends and neighbours had done them proud. Yekaterina Ivanovna alone had given one hundred assignat roubles. No expense was spared. To bear the five small coffins were two white funerary carriages, their elaborate canopies draped in lace and decked in spring flowers. Each carriage was drawn by a pair of white horses. Ahead of the hearses walked a line of attendants, their white flowing coats and white top hats flashing brilliantly in the sunlight. Behind came the mourners in black. The way was strewn with flowers, scattered from another carriage that led the procession.

  The children’s parents clung together. It seemed more that they were pulling each other down than giving mutual support. But somehow they managed to keep walking. They were impelled by the inevitability of the procession. This is what a funeral procession is for, thought Porfiry, why it is necessary. So that those most struck by grief may know where to direct their feet.

  It was the first sight Porfiry had caught of Prokharchin. The man seemed to be in one of the stages of delirium tremens, so violently was he shaking. His feet came down with an exaggerated, slightly wayward tread, as if they were constantly trying to free themselves from the restraint of his ankles.

  It was a long slow way to the cemetery, which was at the north of the island. They crossed the river over the Nikolaevsky Bridge. Now in full flow, the heedless Neva rushed away from the shuffling line of humanity, leaving it to its woes.

  *

  Virginsky wrote out the rows of letters:

  Go

  Of m

  Stit

  No

  He felt immediately the hopelessness of the task he had been set. It was not a code. It was simply the first few letters of four lines of text. The letters in themselves meant nothing, or any meaning they suggested was illusory. They had been severed from their true meaning by a random accident. If the piece of paper had any significance at all, it was to be found in the larger, missing text. That is to say, it was beyond his reach. Therefore, no matter how much he applied himself, he would never be able to make sense of the letters in front of him.

  The fragment seemed to start with an exhortation and end with discouragement. Between was nonsense. All too appropriate, decided Virginsky.

  And yet, as Virginsky repeated the truncated chant that the letters spelled out – Go, Of m, Stit, No, Go, Of m, Stit, No – the significant detail struck him. Each of the four lines began with a capital letter. He could assume that the text these letters came from was a poem of some kind.

  With this first realisation came another: he had seen these letters before. However, he was far less certain of this than he was of the letters’ poetic provenance. He remembered waking from his dream the night before, but by now all the details of the dream were irretrievably lost to him. Had he also dreamt of pulling the tin trunk out from under his bed? His memory of that seemed to be of a different quality to the sense he had of the vanished dream.

  The mood of the previous night came back to him, in particular his sense of appalled rationality. Now, in the cold light of day, he was not so sure that his refusal to open the trunk was in fact the right decision, even from a supremely rationalist standpoint. A rationalist would be able to accept that the mind – even his own mind – was at times irrational. He would reason that this aspect of the mind must not be ignored. Ignored, it would only grow and fester in secret. Far better to confront it with its own absurdities, to wage open war constantly against its calamitous influence. Far better, in other words, to have opened the trunk and to have proven to himself the folly of his delusions.

  Virginsky pulled a wincing face. He was reasoning himself into acting like a superstitious peasant, trusting to dreams and omens. No. The trunk must remain under the bed, its lid firmly closed. Until he had another manifesto to add to his collection, that is.

  To do otherwise would be to give in to irrationalism, not to fight it.

  *

  It was after lunch when Porfiry returned to his chambers. To Virginsky, it seemed that his face was greyer than it had been when he had last seen him. There was a wan emptiness to his expression. He seemed hunched in on himself, reduced somehow. But when he spoke there was a rasp of determination, a fierce impatient quality to his voice. Judging by his voice alone, one would have said that Porfiry had been energised by the Feast of Radonitsa.

  ‘How are you getting on with those letters? Have you deciphered them yet?’

  ‘It is not a question of deciphering them,’ complained Virginsky. He took Porfiry through his reasoning, though he omitted to tell him about his dream, and his consequent indecision.

  ‘A poem? Good, yes. That is very plausible. Given Kozodavlev’s politics, it is not likely to be some verses of Pushkin. You remember what our young nihilist said. Boots over Pushkin. No, this was probably some radical manifesto, severely utilitarian in purpose. Many of them are written in verse, you know. I suppose the writers believe it will make their message more memorable. If the printed handbills are destroyed, the message will linger in the minds of those who have read it. Furthermore, it makes it easier to pass it on orally, if distribution becomes dangerous.’ Porfiry pulled open a drawer in his desk. ‘I have a small collection of such manifestos here . . .’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Yes. I. Why does that surprise you?’

  ‘What possible reason could you have to collect such material?’

  ‘Oh, all the wrong reasons, you would undoubtedly say. But I am interested to know what people are saying. And thinking. Many of these are in wide circulation. I have had a number posted to me anonymously, or thrust in my hand by passing strangers. It is not so hard to acquire them, and not so easy to destroy them. One feels that they are too interesting to destroy, although one cannot always agree with the sentiments expressed. I am a magistrate, after all. I must acquaint myself with the doctrinal edicts of the state’s enemies, if they can be regarded as such.’ Porfiry gave Virginsky a quick warning look. ‘However, I must say that it would be quite another matter for anyone to harbour such a collection in the privacy of their own home. Magistrate or not. It is the fact that I keep my collection here, in my chambers, that makes it allowable. It is logged as official evidence, you see. There can be no unpleasant repercussions.’ Porfiry took out a couple of handfuls of printed sheets. ‘A rather tedious task for you, I’m afraid, Pavel Pavlovich. Sort through these and see if you can find a section that corresponds to our fragment. And well done, by the way. It was a breakthrough to perceive that it came from a poem.’

  Virginsky frowned in bemusement as he took the manifestos from Porfiry.

  *

  It was a simple but laborious chore to look through the twenty or so pamphlets, isolating the beginnings of lines to find a sequence that matched
the letters on the fragment. Almost all of the handbills were familiar to him from his own collection.

  So when he found the poem he was looking for, it should not have been a surprise.

  But it was worse than that. He felt a sickening vertigo. As soon as he saw it, he remembered his dream of the night before. For in the dream, he had held this very pamphlet in his hands as it caught fire, burning away the words as he read them.

  He handed it to Porfiry without a word.

  ‘This is the one?’

  ‘Yes. There. The second verse.’ Virginsky recited from memory. ‘God is man-made, but no less real; / Of man’s fears, does he consist. / Stitched from such stern material, / No wonder God’s a Nihilist.’

  ‘I see. Yes. Well done. A strange work. God the Nihilist.’ Porfiry shook his head wonderingly. ‘Perhaps he is. On days like this, one cannot help wondering.’

  Virginsky’s voice faltered as he asked: ‘D-do you . . . do you remember where you got this?’ After a beat, he added, redundantly: ‘Who gave it to you?’ He held in his own mind an image of the hatchet-headed man.

  Porfiry leaned back in his seat and sighed. ‘My memory is not what it used to be. That is in itself a cause for concern, Pavel Pavlovich. The investigator’s memory is one of the chief weapons in his armoury. One must not only be able to hold on to the details of the current case one is investigating, but one must also be alert to ripples of connection from past cases. Criminals do not burst forth spontaneously. They are like the spring buds. They give the appearance of spontaneous generation, but the plants that bear them may have taken root long ago.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Virginsky, shortly. ‘I know that. You do not need to talk to me in this way. I am not a pupil in need of instruction.’

  Porfiry looked aghast. ‘Forgive me, I meant no offence. I am a foolish, forgetful old man. One falls into habits. And habits are by definition bad. I have acquired the habit of talking down to you. Whenever I succumb to it, you must reprove me, in the harshest possible terms.’

  Virginsky shook his head impatiently. ‘So you cannot remember who gave it to you?’

  ‘In essence, no.’

  Virginsky constricted his mouth and turned his back on Porfiry, as if in disappointment.

  *

  That night, Virginsky lit the tallow candle and pulled the tin trunk out from under his bed. He took the key from a drawer in his bedside table. He did not need to open the trunk to know that it was in there. He did not need to look at it, nor hold it in his hands.

  Yet he did.

  His dreaming mind had been right. He had known all along.

  He stared at the lines of doggerel without reading them. Virginsky had to accept that his mind, in its totality, was a monstrously larger entity than his consciousness. It did most of its work without his knowing anything about it. This need not alarm him, he decided, although he was uneasy about the surrender of control that it implied. His emotions were racing to keep pace with his thoughts. A surge of panic was overtaken by anger: he would not relinquish his claims to be a rational being. On the contrary, his rationalism now had to encompass this newly recognised and undeniable fact. Calmer now, he realised that he must seek to grasp with conscious thought what his unconscious mind had been up to.

  In the first place, there was the question of his resistance to opening the trunk the previous night. It would have been a simple matter to have looked inside, thereby confirming one way or another the solution which his dreaming mind had apparently furnished. A simple matter, and not at all irrational, for that was the only logical way to settle the question and restore his mental equilibrium. To confront his unconscious.

  The irrational act had been to push the trunk back under his bed without looking inside.

  It could only be that his unconscious mind had sensed the connection between Kozodavlev and the hatchet-headed man who had given him the manifesto. But why should that have provoked this strange reluctance? Of course, the answer to that was that opening the trunk and taking out the manifesto would have inevitably drawn Virginsky into the case they were investigating, and not simply as an investigator. His conversation with the hatchet-headed man would have come under scrutiny, as well as his motives and intentions at the time. He would have been forced to reveal far more of himself than he wished to, or was sensible.

  The crux of the matter was this: the man had told him that he should look for him in the taverns around Haymarket Square. To pass this on to Porfiry Petrovich was tantamount to informing on him. Virginsky may have been a magistrate, but he was not yet ready to become an informant.

  Furthermore, he himself, inevitably, would have been embroiled in whatever plan Porfiry came up with to catch the fellow.

  To have opened the trunk and looked inside would have hastened the moment that Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky was finally made to choose between his principles and his conscience; the moment, in short, when he would have to decide who he was.

  His principles and his conscience. It was unnerving to think that they were not one and the same. But when he tried to give shape to his principles, he had a vision of marvellous beings – very different from the grubby, venal populace of the day – living in vast communal phalansteries, which his imagination modelled on the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition in London. All would be equal. Every need would be met. Hunger, poverty and therefore crime would be at an end. The old institutions of church, marriage and the family would be dismantled. Women and men would be free to think – and love – as they wished. According to the principles to which he ascribed, whatever had to be done to bring about such a future was justified.

  The image that his conscience imposed on him was very different. A little girl in a christening gown, her hands loosely folded around a painted egg, her eyes open but unseeing.

  14

  The Slavophiles

  Two days later, Porfiry received a telegram from the authorities in Helsingfors. Apprentice Seaman Ordynov confirmed that the mysterious stranger who had watched him and his mates bring the body to the surface of the Winter Canal was the man identified as Kozodavlev in the Affair staff photograph.

  ‘So, Pavel Pavlovich, what do you say now? Kozodavlev was on the bridge. He was there watching, as though he expected the body to come to light now that the ice was melting. Furthermore, we have found the trace of a nihilist manifesto in his apartment. You must at least admit the possibility that he was involved in a revolutionary grouping and was on the verge of informing on it when he was killed.’

  ‘Of course. It is possible.’ Virginsky’s emphasis was intended to suggest that anything was possible.

  ‘And so, we may look further into his background?’

  ‘You do not need my permission. I believe we were waiting for the witness identification to come through. And now that we have that, it seems sensible to proceed.’

  Porfiry’s face lit up. ‘Let us visit the Slavophiles then!’

  *

  If – thought Porfiry – one were to choose one’s politics based on the physical attractiveness of the proponents of this or that cause, then the radicals would certainly win out over the Slavophiles. For one thing, the men (for they were without exception male) who comprised the editorial staff of Russian Era and Russian Soil were markedly older than their counterparts at Affair. They were all heavily bearded. Their expressions, stern to the point of forbidding, created the distinct impression that they held a grievance against anyone who dared to cross their threshold. They looked out from the territory of their office on Liteiny Prospect with the same suspicion and hatred with which they looked out from Russia. According to their siege mentality, which was clearly visible in their faces, everything that came in from outside was inevitably evil and had to be repelled.

  In other respects, the office was very similar to the one he and Virginsky had visited exactly a week ago. It was basically a domestic apartment converted to a business. There was a central arrangement of desks with hardly any space to move around them.


  A facetious thought occurred to Porfiry as he sought to appease the automatic hostility of the room with a deep bow. He knew of many famous men who had begun their careers as radicals, only to become conservatives in later years. Did they, as the more reactionary views took hold on their minds, undergo a physical transformation to match their ideological one? Of course, they would have worked on their beards. But he was thinking of something more fundamental than that: a gradual rearrangement of the structure of their faces, inevitably a contraction, a hardening.

  The oldest and most thickly bearded man in the room rose shakily to his feet. He was a frail figure, of slight build. His beard was white and divided into two points. He wore a soft velvet hat on the back of his head, which gave him a strangely bohemian appearance. His eyes were little black points in a luminously pale face. He had a large domed forehead in comparison to which the rest of his face seemed shrunken away. Both eyebrows were steeply arched, one higher than the other, in an expression of permanent quizzicality. ‘How may I help you gentlemen?’ His voice was unexpectedly kindly and welcoming. Porfiry felt at once that he had been unfair to the Slavophiles. If their expressions appeared serious, it was only because they were engaged in a serious business: that of survival, both personal and national.

  ‘I am looking for Mr Trudolyubov.’

  ‘I am he. Who might you be?’