The Gentle Axe

by R. N. Morris

  Porfiry nodded encouragement.

  Looking down at his notes, Dr. Pervoyedov continued: “Well, let us start with the big fellow.”

  “Borya.”

  “Yes, yes. Indeed. You remember I drew attention to the absence of bruising around the neck. That naturally made me suspicious. When examining the lungs, I noticed that although the lungs themselves appeared to be healthy, the covering of the lungs was inflamed. And then, when I came to test the stomach contents—”

  “What did you find?” interrupted Porfiry eagerly.

  “Vodka. A hell of a lot of vodka in there. That of course masked the smell.”

  “The smell of what?”

  “Of prussic acid.”

  “I see.”

  “Yes. The test for prussic acid was positive. A deep and rather beautiful blue.”

  “He was poisoned.”

  “It appears so.”

  “How was it administered, do you know?”

  “I’m inclined to think it was in the vodka.”

  “His own flask was full,” mused Porfiry.

  “Exactly. The vodka in his stomach could have been given to him by person or persons unknown.”

  “Who then strung him up on the tree in an attempt to make it look like suicide. I wonder if the line of bruising around his abdomen has anything to do with that?”

  “Very likely, Porfiry Petrovich. Very likely.”

  “Excellent work, Doctor. And what about Goryanchikov?”

  “I am more or less certain that the wound in the head was administered post-mortem.”

  “The lack of blood over his face led me to suspect as much. How did he die, then? Was he poisoned too?”

  “I have detected no traces of any known poison. However, sections of the lung parenchyma reveal ductal overinsufflation consistent with asphyxia. And I retrieved something very interesting from his larynx.” The doctor held up a small feather, taken from the file.

  Porfiry crossed to where the trolley had stopped its glide. He bent down and stared into the first of the jars. Goryanchikov’s head stared back at him, its mouth and the mouthlike wound in its forehead gaping in supplication. “Someone held a pillow over his face,” said Porfiry.

  9

  Beneath the Milliner’s Shop

  VIRGINSKY TRUDGED THROUGH the wet snow lying along the southern Fontanka bank, heading northeast. The sprawl of the Apraxin Market lay ahead of him, across the frozen river. The ice seeped into his soul from his feet, through his gaping uppers.

  It would be so easy to end it all. One letter to his father was all it required. If the old man knew what misery he was living in, he would be sure to send him some money. There would be no need to grovel for forgiveness, or—even more unthinkable—grant it. Merely to explain the facts, that was all that was required.

  Father,

  You are my father. I am your son. I am badly in need of new shoes. I have no money for food or rent.

  Your son,

  Pavel.

  That was all that needed to be said. Perhaps he could add, in a spirit as it were of magnanimity:

  We will talk of other things at another time.

  Yes, that seemed to hint at reconciliation. He was throwing out a few crumbs of hope to the old man, without committing himself to any concessions or admissions.

  But of course, he knew that he would never write the letter.

  Perhaps the investigator was right. He was too proud after all. He often felt himself humiliated, especially in his present circumstances. The two things went together, he believed: a heightened sensitivity to humiliation and excessive pride. If only he could shake off them both. Independence of means was the only way to do it, and a letter to his father would not help him there. He could not bear to owe his father anything, not now, not after all that had happened. If he could not have independence of means, he would at least have independence of spirit or, failing that, independence of behavior. No one would tell him what to do.

  He imagined composing a different letter to his father:

  Sir,

  You are not my father. I am not your son. I am badly in need of a new pair of shoes. I have no money for food or rent. And yet I want nothing from you. If you choose to send me money, that will be your decision. I do not ask for it. I do not expect it. I shall not consider my self in your debt. If you choose not to send me money, it will be for the better. I will not think of you again and ask you to do the same regarding me.

  Yours,

  The human entity who is known by the name Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky without acknowledging kinship to any other man bearing that name (i.e., you).

  How he hated his name.

  Of course, there was another way to end it all. It had been in his mind all along. Simply to lie down in the snow now and wait for the cold and hunger to do their work. The end would come soon enough, and there would be no pain.

  It was a comforting fantasy, but he kept on walking. He realized he was walking away from the investigator’s damnable jars and all that they entailed.

  He was suddenly certain that the whole ridiculous, tawdry mess had gone on long enough. It was time to bring it to an end; and what was more, he would do it by the second of the two means he had considered. But first there were matters to attend to. He hastened his step as he turned onto Gorokhovaya Street, crossing the Fontanka by the Semenovsky Bridge.

  IT WAS DARK by the time he reached Sadovaya Street.

  He walked with his head bent down, not meeting any face, looking only at his shoes kicking through the sludge. It was easy to imagine that those feet did not belong to him. He didn’t feel the cold anymore, nor his exhaustion, his hunger, or his pain. His certainty of purpose had overridden everything.

  He had to see Lilya.

  But it was harder than he had imagined to find the milliner’s shop. Admittedly, he had hoped that a mysterious force would draw him straight to it. The one other time, long ago, that he had been there, it had been dark and he had been drunk. He was as good as blindfolded. When he had fled from it, he quickly became lost in this city, which had never truly been his home.

  He was aware of a presence ahead of him. His cowed glance took in a dark, bulky figure. He had a sense of a dim orange glow bobbing around it and then soaring up into the darkness. A streetlamp flared and lit the workman beneath. In his refusal to look the city’s lamplighter in the eye, Virginsky recognized a puzzling mixture of defiance, humility, and fear. The lamplighter passed on into the darkness at Virginsky’s back, leaving a trail of illumination. The transformation wrought by his restless wick was so sudden and complete that it was difficult to believe in it. Virginsky felt himself to be entering a realm of deception. His instinct was to shun it. But to speak to Lilya—as another, more urgent imperative demanded—he had to press on into the light, crunching diamonds underfoot.

  He knew from Lilya that Fräulein Keller’s establishment was on Sadovaya Street, but where exactly she had never revealed. She didn’t like to talk about the place, to the extent that she had begged him never to mention it.

  He thought he remembered a side entrance to the shop he was looking for, and iron steps there leading down to the basement. None of the shops he saw now had that configuration.

  He heard voices. A group of young cavalry officers, already in their cups, were exchanging ribald jokes. The deceptive light glinted coldly on the buttons and decorations of their greatcoats. He recognized in their voices and their leering grins the same harsh appetite that had once drawn him to Fräulein Keller’s, in the company of a similar group. Perhaps, he conjectured, they were heading to that very place now! He hung back before following them.

  Their progress was slow and interrupted, but Virginsky matched their pace, careful always to remain at the same distance from them. He kept to the edge of the streetlamp’s glow, out of its brilliance. All the same he felt sure that they would notice him. He tried to imagine what he would say if he became the object of their contemptuous attention. But no words
came to mind, and the only outcome of the adventure he could envisage was a beating for himself. He would not resist. He would surrender himself to their violence, as if he deserved it. He wondered, in fact, if he were not trying to provoke it by following them. He seriously considered calling out insults to them. A belief in his own invisibility suddenly overcame him. It was a giddy and dangerous moment. He was prevented from doing anything reckless by a sudden outburst from one of their number, who fell to his knees and began singing “One Night of Gladness” in a perfectly acceptable tenor voice.

  “Like a moment you passed,

  Night of gladness I knew…”

  The interlude was enough to give Virginsky pause. He remembered his original purpose and was amazed how close he had come to jeopardizing it. He was following the cavalry officers because he believed they would lead him to Lilya. The thought of Lilya in connection with these young men inspired in him an overpowering disgust. At the same time it confirmed him in his mission. He had to find Lilya, now. There were questions he had to ask her.

  He had come close to asking her questions before: “How many men? How many times?” And other questions, which he could barely frame in his mind. But her anguished reticence had always touched him. And yet if he was honest, he would say that part of what touched him was anger and part of that anger was directed against her.

  The musical soldier began the next verse:

  “She despises my grief,

  She is heartless and cold,

  She has bartered her youth

  For splendor and gold…”

  These men, these drunken, loathsome men, with their grins and buttons, to say nothing of their sentimental hypocrisy—it was men like these Lilya went with. (How he hated the euphemism—he knew full well what it stood for!) Perhaps tonight, this very night, they would be her customers. His mind forced an image of Lilya into the midst of these privileged hooligans, her clothes falling away beneath their manicured pawings. Her face fluctuated between childlike innocence and meretricious depravity. He had only ever seen the former expression on Lilya, his Lilya. He had seen it the first time he met her, even there, in the depths of Fräulein Keller’s establishment. But he did not doubt the existence of another Lilya, with another face. He hated that Lilya as much as he hated these men.

  The singer was hoisted to his feet and cajoled into moving on. His fellows were evidently impatient. Virginsky continued to track them as they made their veering way along the Prospect, the lyrics of the folk song trailing in the crisp air:

  “Earth and sky, fare you well,

  To the river I go,

  Where the waters are deep,

  O’er my heart let them flow…”

  Virginsky was disproportionately agitated by the words. Of course, the river was not flowing at this time of the year. But allowing for that one small change of detail, he could almost believe that the oaf had read his mind and sung his thoughts.

  It wasn’t long before they came to a stop again. A new tone to their laughter, a gunshot excitement, alerted Virginsky to a significant change in their mood and roused him from his preoccupations. He looked around to see hats floating in a callously illuminated shopwindow. He could hear the officers discussing money. Virginsky was in no doubt. This was the place. And there to confirm it was the wrought-iron stairway at the side.

  The financial negotiations became heated and drew in all the officers. Virginsky took the opportunity to slip past the jostle of smooth backs and down the stairs. He sank into darkness, stumbling the last few steps. Was this really the place? He heard the cavalry officers move on and felt the certainty drain from him.

  A paneled door formed itself in front of him as his eyes became accustomed to the gloom in the stairwell. He groped for and found the bellpull. There was no answering sound.

  He filled the silence with doubts. The questions now were for himself. Why had he allowed himself to be led by the cavalry officers? He saw that there was no logic or consistency to his behavior. This irritated him, and yet he got some satisfaction from the fact that he was still capable of objectivity in his self-analysis. If this did turn out to be the place, perhaps it would also turn out that he had always known how to get here. He had wanted to involve the cavalry officers in his own guilty knowledge; he had wanted, in fact, to pass it on to them and in so doing absolve himself. But it was possible that they had never had any intention of coming to Fräulein Keller’s. It was merely another coincidence that they had led him here. The sinfulness and hypocrisy were all his. They, perhaps, were as innocent as babes, at least in this respect. If so, he hated them even more.

  A panel in the door opened, and a beam of light projected into Virginsky’s face. There was a scornful cackle.

  “Hello?” Virginsky called out, shielding his eyes.

  “What you want?” came a deep, heavily accented female voice.

  “Is Lilya there? I must speak to her.”

  This was met with more of the same laughter. Virginsky suddenly felt that the beam of light and the laughter were one and the same. The laughter existed only inside the beam of light. With their harsh, corrosive force on his face, he had never felt himself more exposed.

  “Tell her it’s Virginsky.”

  The panel closed; a moment later the door itself was opened, and the small frail figure of a girl was pushed out.

  “Pavel Pavlovich, what are you doing here?”

  “Lilya? It is you, Lilya, isn’t it?” Virginsky had only caught a glimpse of her, momentarily silhouetted in the doorway. But even in that moment he had noticed something different about her appearance.

  “Yes, of course it’s me. What’s the matter? Why do you ask?”

  “You have a new coat.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s trimmed with fur.”

  “Yes. What of it?”

  “Business must be good.”

  “Please, Pavel Pavlovich. Please don’t be cruel. It’s not what you think.”

  “How does it feel when they touch you?”

  “Please, Pavel Pavlovich.”

  “You must get some pleasure from it. I can’t see that you would be able to do it at all if you didn’t get some pleasure from it.”

  “Why do you want to make me suffer?”

  “Nonsense! Can there never be candor between a man and a woman about such things? Can’t you see? It’s not my intention to judge you. I have no right. It’s just hypocrisy I hate. I want to understand. I want to know the truth. The truth about it all.”

  “And then? When you have the truth? What will become of me?”

  “No, Lilya, you can’t ask me that. Or rather, you can’t hold me to my answer. But you must understand this: we cannot proceed on the basis of lies and hypocrisy. I must have the truth.”

  “And what do I get?” The force of her anger surprised him. “There’s only one thing I will tell you. This door has closed behind me for good. I am never coming back to this place or this life. I will kill myself and my darling Vera before I go back in there.”

  Her weight was nothing as she pushed past him, and yet he was buffeted by the force of her repulse. He noted, with that remarkable objectivity that he had already admired in himself, that he wanted to hurt her even more than before.

  “Goryanchikov!” he called after her.

  She was halfway up the stairs when she stopped to face him. Looking up, he saw her haloed by a streetlamp. “What of him?” she demanded.

  Virginsky did not know what he was going to say next. He wanted to tell her that he had seen Goryanchikov’s head floating in a jar. Instead he said: “He was one of them, wasn’t he? I saw it in your eyes when you were together. The look of fear that he would betray you. And in his eyes, something else, something nasty and possessive.”

  “All that has nothing to do with you.”

  “You’re right. None of this has anything to do with me. I have no right to interrogate you in this way. I’m surprised you allow it. It’s up to you what you do with yo
ur body, who you sleep with, for what reasons. It’s nothing to do with me.”

  “Very well then.” But she stood for a moment without turning from him.

  “Lilya.”

  “What?”

  “He’s dead. Goryanchikov is dead. That’s what I came to tell you.”

  He couldn’t see the details of her face as she took this in. “I have to go” was all she said. The tread of her galoshes set off a muted ringing.

  Virginsky hid his face in his hands.

  10

  Beneath the Milliner’s Shop Again

  PORFIRY PETROVICH LIT a cigarette. He was appreciative of the opportunity the flaring match gave him to take in his surroundings. The paneled door that briefly appeared was unexpectedly impressive. He shook the match out before it burned his fingers. The details of the door faded. Porfiry blinked, as if testing the darkness with his eyelashes. He coughed once as he waited for the unheard bell to be answered. He felt that he need not have coughed, or that the cough had a psychological rather than strictly physiological origin. The truth was, even in the impenetrable blackness of this night, he felt himself spied upon. And whenever he experienced this sensation, all his actions struck him as false.

  At last a small panel in the door opened. Light fled the interior as if scandalized.

  “Yes, mein Herr?”

  “Fräulein Keller?”

  “Do I know you?”

  “I would like to make your acquaintance.”

  Her laughter revealed the indecency as well as the absurdity of his idea. “I always like to make new friends, especially when they are a handsome gentleman like you.” She held the door open for him, treating him to a smile that was more ironical than coquettish. Even so, and despite her age (he judged her to be past the midpoint of her fifth decade), that smile set his heart thumping. It was not that he found it attractive. But there was knowledge in it, and experience. Her face was wearied by habits he could only guess at. Perhaps the most wearisome of all: this habit of opening the door to strangers, of assessing their predilections and facilitating fulfillment. Her smile stripped him bare but did not even show her teeth.