The Cleansing Flames (St Petersburg Mystery)

by R. N. Morris

  ‘You had quarrelled with Mr Kozodavlev?’

  ‘It’s not a question of a quarrel. It is simply a statement of the – how shall I put it? – of the factual basis of our relationship. From time to time, Kozodavlev had to be reminded.’

  ‘You were never on friendly terms with him?’

  ‘I have never been on friendly terms with anyone. It is the first article in the code of conduct by which I live my life.’

  ‘Are you the author of Swine?’

  ‘Ah, you are very clever, I see, Mr Magistrate,’ mocked Prince Dolgoruky. ‘We shall have to be careful with you. Was it the letter D that alerted you? But are there not other names that begin with the letter D? Some of them, I believe, belong to more noted literary gentlemen than I.’

  ‘The plot of Swine concerns a revolutionary grouping. A closed cell, I believe it is called.’

  ‘I have heard the term.’

  ‘I’m sure you have. In Swine, one member of the cell is suspected of being an informer, and is for that reason murdered by the other members.’

  ‘I am sure the author will be gratified to know that you have read the novel.’

  ‘To be honest, I have not finished reading it. However, I am familiar enough with the novel and the circumstances surrounding its publication. It is rumoured that the author once belonged to such a group and in fact participated in a similar crime.’

  ‘It is not a rumour. It is the truth.’

  ‘You do not deny it?’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Because you must see that your action places you in a difficult position vis-à-vis the law. If you are the author –’

  ‘If!’

  ‘Even if you are not, by concealing the identity of the author, you are concealing the identity of a criminal.’

  ‘And if you have in fact read the novel, you will know that the author distances himself from the act of his fellows – whom he sees as swine. Hence the title. It is out of moral disgust that he decided to write his account.’

  ‘He would have done better to inform the authorities, supplying the real names and addresses of those involved.’

  ‘But he is not an informer,’ said Prince Dolgoruky with disgust. ‘That would make him worse than those you would have him inform against.’

  ‘To inform is a greater crime than murder?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I believe that Mr Kozodavlev had made up his mind to inform the authorities of something. Given certain hints that he put in a letter he wrote to me, it would seem reasonable to speculate that it concerned political – one may say revolutionary – crimes. He expressed the fear that this would place him in mortal danger.’

  ‘If that is so, then he was right to be afraid.’

  ‘If Kozodavlev is the author of Swine –’

  ‘What on earth makes you suggest that?’ cried Dolgoruky.

  ‘Let us for the moment imagine that he is. There would be those who would object to the fact that he had written the book in the first place. If they found out for certain that Kozodavlev was the author, they might have decided to punish him. For that betrayal, the only fit punishment would be death. Of course, it would have required someone to have pointed the finger.’ Porfiry gave Prince Dolgoruky a meaningful look.

  ‘But you are assuming that D. is Kozodavlev! I have by no means confirmed that he is.’

  ‘You would save us a lot of trouble if you simply told us who the author is.’

  ‘I do not exist to save you trouble.’

  ‘I can have you arrested.’

  ‘I would welcome it. I am not afraid of the Fortress. I hear one is well looked after there.’

  ‘Is it true that you wrote and had printed a manifesto in which you accused yourself of a number of crimes?’

  ‘Have you seen it?’ asked Prince Dolgoruky brightly.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would you like to?’

  ‘Is there any truth in it?’

  The contempt evaporated from Prince Dolgoruky’s expression. He seemed surprised by Porfiry’s question.

  ‘Marfa Timofyevna claims to believe that it is all lies,’ explained Porfiry.

  ‘She is a dear sweet girl. I regret deeply what happened between us.’

  ‘What did happen between you?’

  ‘Nothing. That is what I regret.’

  ‘You are quite the Russian Byron, aren’t you? And yet, why is it I feel this is all a pose with you?’

  ‘That is an insult. I have killed men for less.’

  ‘Then certainly I should have you locked up.’

  ‘Do you wish to see my manifesto?’

  ‘Are you really so eager to show it to me?’

  ‘Unfortunately, I have destroyed all copies of it.’

  ‘Then I will have to imagine what it said. I think I can, easily enough.’

  ‘I doubt your imagination will be up to the task.’

  ‘You forget, my imagination is fuelled by a lifetime of investigating the crimes of men.’

  ‘But you will not have encountered crimes as black as mine.’

  Porfiry sighed wearily. ‘You are a veritable genius of crime, I’m sure. And, as such, the true Hero of our Time.’

  ‘Again you insult me?’ Prince Dolgoruky’s questioning tone betrayed his uncertainty. It seemed he did not know what to make of Porfiry. ‘You are not interested in my crimes? Is it not your duty to be interested in my crimes?’

  ‘I find that I am not very interested in you, Prince Dolgoruky. You bore me.’

  Prince Dolgoruky was visibly shaken. ‘I cannot bore you. Dolgoruky does not bore anyone.’

  ‘You bore me, and I suspect you bore yourself. And that is your tragedy, to the extent that you may be said to have a tragedy. But I am not sure that you can be said to have a tragedy. If you are allowed to have a tragedy, there is the danger of your becoming slightly interesting.’

  ‘You are not serious?’

  ‘One last thing before I leave you to your . . .’ Porfiry glanced at the curtain. His smile was strangely mocking. ‘Crimes. I would like you to look at a photograph. Please try to ignore the white patches on the man’s face.’ He nodded to Virginsky to show the poster of the body from the Winter Canal.

  ‘My God, what has happened to him?’

  ‘His face, in life, would not have been like that. It is likely to have been deeply pockmarked all over. I will draw your attention also to his eyes, which are quite small, I think.’

  ‘Piggy eyes. The eyes of a swine!’

  ‘Do you recognise him?’

  ‘Recognise that? It is a monstrosity. If I had ever seen such a face, it would haunt my nightmares for ever!’

  ‘Do you have nightmares, Konstantin Arsenevich?’

  ‘Yes. Every night, the same one. I dream that the Devil has come to fetch me. I know he is the Devil, though I never see his face.’ Prince Dolgoruky’s voice trembled weakly, all hint of hauteur gone. His face appeared shockingly vulnerable, even afraid. He looked down at the photograph on the poster. ‘Perhaps I have seen it now.’

  ‘I am glad that we were able to be of service. We have provided a face for your nightmares.’

  Prince Dolgoruky turned his attention to the semicircle of children watching, as if he had only just noticed them. He looked into their faces searchingly, addressing his words to them now: ‘It is not just my nightmares. Sometimes I can hear his step during the day, when I am awake. And when something moves in the shadows, I am sure it is him.’

  Porfiry studied Prince Dolgoruky with narrowed eyes. It seemed he had at last begun to interest the magistrate.

  17

  An old obsession

  ‘What do you make of that?’ asked Porfiry as they stepped into the yard. He breathed deeply for a few moments and then lit a cigarette.

  Virginsky answered with a question of his own: ‘Did he really not interest you at all?’

  ‘Oh, perhaps a little. But I did not want to give him the satisfaction of knowing it
. There is something rather infantile about his desire to scandalise. He is like a little boy who wishes to be thought very wicked.’

  ‘So you do not consider him capable of any great crime?’

  ‘I consider him capable of great idiocy, which may well amount to the same thing. You noticed that he knew our man in the canal?’

  ‘Can you be sure?’

  ‘Oh absolutely. He is a bad liar. A simple “no” would have been more persuasive. Instead he had to work himself up over nightmares of the Devil and such like. He as good as confessed.’

  ‘You think he killed our man?’ Virginsky was astonished.

  ‘I think he may have had something to do with it, yes. As I think that Kozodavlev had something to do with it too.’

  ‘And what of this manifesto of crimes?’

  ‘It’s hard to say, without having seen it. But I would not be surprised if it turned out to catalogue every crime he has dreamed of committing but to omit the one crime of which he is actually guilty.’

  ‘I wonder that you can speak with such confidence on something that is necessarily a matter of conjecture.’

  ‘There is something cowardly and weak about him, I sensed. And yet also, a vileness that he is fully conscious of himself – and disgusted by. He plays with the idea of confession, as he does with that of wickedness. I would say he is torn by two contradictory impulses. The first, the desire to plumb the depths of his own evil, to commit the worst crime of which he can conceive. The second, the need for redemption, to achieve which he must confess his crimes – his true crimes, I mean. But before he is able to reach that point, his cowardice intervenes and subverts his intention. He has the boldness for wickedness but lacks the courage for salvation. At heart, he is a Christian, I think. And we must not forget that he is a Russian too. Yes. That is all it comes down to in the end. In many ways, he reminded me of myself. All investigation is ultimately self-investigation.’

  Virginsky’s mouth gaped, but he was so far from formulating a response that all that came out was a strangulated gasp.

  *

  When they returned to Stolyarny Lane, Porfiry found Lieutenant Salytov waiting outside his chambers.

  ‘You wish to see me, Ilya Petrovich?’ Porfiry opened the door to admit them all.

  ‘I have seen him before,’ declared Salytov, intensely.

  Porfiry and Virginsky exchanged a quizzical glance. ‘Seen . . . whom, exactly?’

  ‘Him.’ Salytov pointed at the waxen face on the poster pinned to the wall.

  ‘Our drowned rat? Please, tell me more.’

  ‘Four years ago, I was investigating a revolutionary cell based in a confectioner’s on Nevsky Prospect. Ballet’s, the shop was called.’

  ‘But there was no revolutionary cell at Ballet’s!’ objected Virginsky, who was for some reason suddenly agitated.

  Salytov directed the full force of his loathing towards the junior magistrate. ‘Is it not strange that my investigations were cut short by the bomb blast which accounted for this?’ Salytov swept a hand in front of his own face. It was the gesture of a stage magician, summoning up the disfigurement.

  ‘But that atrocity had nothing to do with the confectionery shop, as you know,’ insisted Virginsky. ‘You were following a false trail.’

  ‘This man.’ Salytov’s conjuring hand stabbed towards the poster emphatically. ‘I once saw this man in Ballet’s. He was mixed up in something, I am sure.’

  ‘Mixed up in something!’ mocked Virginsky.

  Salytov’s stare snapped onto him once again. ‘My instincts have been proven correct, have they not? He would not have been killed and dumped in the canal if he were not mixed up in something.’

  ‘If it is the same fellow,’ muttered Virginsky sceptically.

  ‘Do you know his name?’ asked Porfiry, his tone smoothly appeasing.

  Salytov hesitated. His gaze drooped, abashed. ‘No.’

  ‘But you are sure you saw him in Ballet’s?’

  ‘Yes. It was clear that he was an associate of the individual I was investigating, the lad Tolya. If you remember, Porfiry Petrovich, he was found with illegal manifestos in his possession.’

  Porfiry wrinkled his face as he squeezed out his memory. ‘I do vaguely remember something about it. But I fear that Pavel Pavlovich is right. There was nothing in it. The boy had nothing to do with any revolutionary cell.’

  ‘That we could discover. At the time.’ Salytov’s doggedness was wearingly impressive.

  Porfiry’s expression became momentarily pained. ‘Very well. Look into it. Talk to this Tolya. He may be able to supply a name, at least.’

  Salytov clicked his heels and left the room in a series of quasi-military spins and steps.

  ‘That man . . .’ began Virginsky.

  ‘. . . is, at the moment, the only chance we have of identifying our corpse,’ completed Porfiry.

  ‘But do you not see, Porfiry Petrovich? The confectioner’s was an obsession with him. Is there not a danger that the same thing will happen again? Indeed, is it not simply the resurfacing of that old obsession that has prompted him to make this connection? I defy anyone to make a credible identification based on that photograph! Perhaps if it was someone you knew well, a husband, or a brother, or a close friend. But he is talking about a man he saw once in a confectionery shop four years ago. Are you not concerned that you are encouraging him in an unhealthy fixation?’

  ‘I repeat. At the moment, he is the only chance we have.’

  *

  Once again, the tallow candle was lit and the tin trunk pulled out from under the bed. Virginsky sat with his copy of ‘God the Nihilist’ in his hands. Its celebration of human reason rang hollow, as did its faith in the ascendancy of the human conscience. It seemed to assume that the two were identical, that if a man acted in accordance with his conscience it went without saying that he would be acting reasonably, and vice versa. But Virginsky had come to realise that they were very much at odds. One could reason out a course of action against which one’s conscience screamed rebellion.

  Without knowing that he would do it, he tipped the tin trunk up, emptying the contents onto the floor. He stared sullenly at the unruly sprawl of ideas. Words and names jumped out at him, as if in retaliation for his childish petulance: ‘Saint-Simon’, ‘utopia’, ‘communism’, ‘phalanstery’, ‘freedom’, ‘the woman question’, ‘atheism’, ‘Bakunin’, ‘organisation’, ‘revolutionary’, ‘freedom’, ‘destruction’, ‘nihilist’, ‘Nechaev’. He sensed an escalation of intent, a hardening of resolve, leading right up to the ultimate phrase, the ruthless encapsulation of all the other radical concepts: the end justifies the means. It was a supremely reasonable formula.

  The stove in his room was a fat white pillar bulging out from the corner. Two black cast iron doors were set into it close to the floor, one for access to the firebox, the other for cleaning beneath the grate. Virginsky knelt down and opened the larger door.

  It was almost as if the flames were waiting for him. They lapped out towards his face as he opened the stove, their eagerness spilling out with a hungry crackle.

  Generally, he kept the fire low. The stove was efficient. As long as he maintained it, a small flame was enough to keep the chill from his room, even in winter. The days were warmer now, but a night frost could still surprise.

  But the fire in his stove was more than the means by which he warmed his room. It was a small, intense fragment of the greater fire. Staring into it, he imagined himself back in the time of that first revolution, when fire had just been discovered, and those who knew how to create and control it had power over their fellows. One could share or withhold. In the same way, one could use it benignly or destructively. Human nature being what it was, the jealous, destructive choice would always prevail. There was something, too, in the nature of fire that demanded this.

  Virginsky moved his copy of ‘God the Nihilist’ towards the aperture of the stove and fed the handbill quickly into the consuming flam
es.

  He put the rest of the manifestos back into the trunk and pushed it under his bed. A moment later, he put on his overcoat and went out.

  *

  Instinct drew Virginsky to the filthiest, darkest drinking dens on and around Haymarket Square. That is not to say that he narrowed his search down to any meaningful degree. It would have been hard to find taverns in the district that did not fit that description.

  He bought a five-kopek measure of vodka in each place he visited, which he drank quickly. After six taverns, he gave up all hope of finding the man. Frankly, it was a relief to do so, as he had no clear idea what he would say to him if he did find him. The more the evening wore on, the more likely it was that he would say something inept and revealing, thereby making a fool of himself, and also, possibly, placing himself in danger.

  His plan, such as it was, had been flawed from the outset. After all, it was perfectly possible for the man to enter a tavern he had already visited, the moment after he had left it. Their paths need never cross. As an investigative technique – if that was what it was – it was hardly more sophisticated than stumbling around aimlessly.

  And so Virginsky gave himself up to drinking and abandoned any pretence of looking for the hatchet-headed man who had given him the manifesto.

  Then it came: the hand on the shoulder, the voice in the ear, the plunging vertiginous lurch of fate – or something worse, doom – and he realised that he had never wanted to find this man, who had now found him.

  ‘My friend, we meet again.’

  Virginsky hid his panic with feigned blankness.

  The man’s mouth spiked on one side sarcastically; the suddenly familiar expression took Virginsky back to the night of Easter Sunday. ‘You mean to say, you were not looking for me?’

  ‘I . . .’ But Virginsky was at a loss for a convincing lie.

  ‘Still and all, you found me.’ The man increased the angle of his sarcasm.

  ‘Very well,’ said Virginsky. ‘Let’s say I was looking for you. Now I have found you. What next?’

  ‘Come over and join me. I have a table in the corner. Away from prying ears.’

  ‘Are you here alone?’