A Vengeful Longing: A Novel (St. Petersburg Mysteries)

by R. N. Morris

  ‘It is.’

  ‘What were you doing, exactly, in your study, when the maid roused you?’

  Meyer’s expression of shock at this question was almost comical. ‘I was looking at a map,’ he said at last, his voice surprised, and then defeated. He had been so taken off his guard that he had not thought to lie.

  ‘This was part of your work?’

  ‘I . . . do . . . need to look at maps for my work, yes.’ The answer stumbled out, Meyer’s brow creased in a frown. He was a bad liar; he was evidently struggling to comprehend his own inconsistencies.

  ‘Had you taken morphine?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘It is an outrageous question.’

  ‘Which you haven’t answered yet.’

  ‘I am tired now.’

  ‘We will search your study anyhow.’

  ‘And what if you do? And what if you find morphine there? It means nothing. I am a doctor.’

  ‘You are a sanitation inspector. I imagine you are not often called upon to dispense morphine.’

  ‘I am self-medicating. I suffer from neuralgic pain.’

  ‘And you had medicated yourself that afternoon?’

  Meyer nodded minutely.

  ‘It is unfortunate,’ said Porfiry. ‘Perhaps if you hadn’t, your wife and child might still be alive.’

  ‘Bezmygin!’ shouted Meyer. ‘Bezmygin is to blame, not me!’ His fingers curled as he clutched the edge of the table, pushing his knuckles into the tabletop. It seemed for a moment that he would hurl the table at them.

  Porfiry signalled mutely to Ptitsyn.

  ‘So, Pavel Pavlovich. What do you make of all that?’ Meyer’s rancid aura lingered, even though he had been taken back to his cell. Porfiry, on his feet once more, lit a cigarette, as if to dispel it.

  ‘A connection?’ Virginsky made the suggestion tentatively.

  ‘A connection?’ Porfiry threw it back with sceptical emphasis.

  ‘With the boy Lieutenant Salytov brought in. Tolya, the apprentice from the confectioner’s.’

  ‘Whom we had to release because there were insufficient grounds for holding him. His passport turned out to be perfectly in order. And it is not a crime to have a suicide for a mother. Besides, a search of the workshop - and the boy’s lodging - turned up nothing.’

  ‘The pamphlets?’

  ‘If we searched your lodgings would we not find the same pamphlets? ’

  ‘Lieutenant Salytov is convinced he is a political agitator.’ There was something wry and teasing about Virginsky’s tone.

  ‘Lieutenant Salytov sees conspiracies everywhere.’

  ‘But what of the Ulyanka connection? The house at the eleventh verst. Did that not strike you?’

  ‘Yes, it struck me as quite possibly a meaningless coincidence. There are such things, you know. They serve to distract the investigator. ’

  ‘You said “quite possibly”. That means you equally accept that there might be something in it.’

  ‘Tolya’s mother was an inmate at the house at the eleventh verst three years ago, in sixty-five. Incarcerated for six months, at the end of which she hanged herself using a knotted sheet tied to a window bar. Meyer visited the place last year. The timings do not fit.’

  ‘But was that the first time he visited there?’

  ‘Ah, my young friend, be careful. Do not go chasing chimeras. Do not be led astray by random correspondences. They beguile the eye, but there is nothing to them, take it from me.’

  ‘Are you testing me again, Porfiry Petrovich? Is this another of your training methods?’

  Porfiry smiled ambiguously. ‘That’s something you will have to work out for yourself.’

  Virginsky curled his mouth into half a smile. ‘And what of this musician, Bezmygin?’

  ‘Poor Dr Meyer,’ said Porfiry. ‘In his eagerness to supply us with a suspect, he has provided himself with a motive.’ He took out his cigarette case and counted the cigarettes without lighting one.

  7

  Count Akhmatov’s orchestra

  They took the train from Petergofsky Station. The morning was bright and warm, the city in the full luminous grip of summer. It felt to Virginsky like they were going on an excursion. Porfiry’s cook had even prepared a lunch for them, putting a loaf of black bread, a hock of ham and some gooseberries into a small wicker basket. Porfiry had the basket on the seat next to him, as if it were the third member of their party. Most of the day-trippers to Petergof had taken earlier trains, giving Porfiry and Virginsky the whole of a second-class compartment to themselves.

  The train gathered speed as it passed the Mitrofanevsky Cemetery. Virginsky watched the memorials and mausoleums flicker by, the grey palaces of the dead projecting sharply from the all-consuming earth. He remembered this was not an excursion after all.

  ‘Have they buried them yet?’

  Porfiry was lost in the enjoyment of a cigarette. He had been looking out of the same window, but without seeing the sombre landscape, it seemed. And by now they had left the cemetery behind. He turned a quizzical face to Virginsky.

  ‘Raisa Ivanovna and Grisha.’

  ‘Yesterday,’ said Porfiry. ‘We let Meyer out to attend the funeral. There were no other relatives.’

  ‘No one on her side?’

  ‘No one.’

  They travelled through the borderland of squalid dwellings that lay at the southern periphery of the city. Roads broke up into dirt tracks; walls crumbled; sheds and shanty houses tumbled into each other. Out of all this arose a new and sinister-seeming presence, that of looming, smoke-grimed manufactories. The train banked away from Virginsky’s sight-line, as if turning its back on the pervasive ugliness. Pulled by the direction of movement, Virginsky looked through the opposite window, across the corridor of the carriage. His gaze swooped along the momentous curve of the tracks, carried away by perspective, westward. The landscape here was taken up with a series of garden plots, another manifestation of the human instinct for purpose and production, the force that drew the hurtling train on. He picked out isolated figures, peasants, stooped and barely moving, as though they had grown out of the soil they worked.

  Clumps of woodland squatted over the horizon. In the middle distance, Virginsky glimpsed a large ochre and white house, half-concealed by trees. He stirred and sat up, then leant forward and touched Porfiry’s knee.

  ‘Ulyanka,’ said Virginsky.

  Porfiry shrugged. ‘So? Ulyanka is on the way to Petergof. This really shouldn’t come as news to you.’

  ‘But it is another connection. Now with this Bezmygin fellow.’ Porfiry smiled at Virginsky’s excitement. ‘Or another meaningless coincidence,’ he said.

  They were both silent as they watched the building dance in and out of vision behind the veil of birch.

  ‘The house at the eleventh verst,’ said Virginsky redundantly. Porfiry screwed his face up into an expression of reproof.

  The train stopped at a station on the Ligovsky Canal. The lunatic asylum remained in view, as if to provoke them. Porfiry fidgeted in annoyance. Virginsky felt somehow embarrassed. It was a relief to them both it seemed when the train pulled out.

  From Ligovo, the short next stop, the railway climbed and ran through woodland. A green translucent fire blazed around them. As they emerged they scanned the horizon hopefully for a glimpse of the sea. Now the tracks ran parallel with the Petergof Road a couple of versts away to the north, its chain of magnificent dachas spread out along the coast. Beyond it, the edge of the land crumbled into the bay.

  The summer residence of Count Akhmatov was a grand, neoclassical palace looking out over the Gulf of Finland. To reach it, they took a drozhki from New Petergof station one and a half versts back along the Petergof Road. The salted air and the flicker of light through the beech trees rekindled the holiday mood in Virginsky. There was a breeze from the sea; the morning hovered on the edge of coolness. But he felt the sun on his face and that counted for a l
ot.

  Porfiry sat with the basket of food on his lap. There was something fussy and comical about the figure he cut. It would be easy to underestimate him, thought Virginsky, looking at the placid, almost animal, expression on his superior’s face. Porfiry had his eyes closed, those hyperactive lashes of his still for the moment, as he smiled, basking in the sun. Virginsky remembered the fear and, yes, hatred he had once felt towards this man. But he realised that even when these feelings had been at their most intense, there had been room for others. Porfiry Petrovich had always fascinated him. There had been times when he had even liked the man, and wanted to be liked by him in return. Certainly, he had never made the mistake of not respecting him. Now, in retrospect, the sympathy he had at the time entertained towards his persecutor seemed inexplicable. He wondered whether he would ever entirely trust him.

  As the drozhki turned into the canopied lane that led winding up to the house, Porfiry opened his eyes and saw Virginsky looking at him. Porfiry’s smile was questioning. Virginsky met it with an ironic, slightly mocking face. ‘You are quite comfortable?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ answered Porfiry, bemused.

  ‘I was merely thinking of something you said to Dr Meyer. About sitting down. For long periods. I wondered . . .’

  ‘It comes and goes,’ said Porfiry carelessly, looking away.

  ‘I rather imagined it was just something you said. Off the top of your head, as it were. An invention.’

  ‘How could you suspect me of such a thing, Pavel Pavlovich?’

  Virginsky shrugged. ‘I thought it was part of your technique.’

  ‘Do you really believe me capable of such deviousness?’ Porfiry’s tone was hurt. ‘Besides, I am more superstitious than you allow. To lay claim to a malady one does not have seems almost to invite it. I am not so rash as to wish the complaint in question upon myself.’

  ‘What malady?’

  ‘Haemorrhoids.’ Porfiry’s expression sealed off any further discussion.

  Catching sight of the gardens, formally landscaped in the ‘French’ style, with symmetrical lawns and statue-lined avenues, Virginsky was stirred first to delight and then to anger. Really, these aristocrats! he thought, they believe that even nature must do their bidding . He looked back to Porfiry and saw now that it was he who was being watched with interest. Porfiry smiled and nodded for Virginsky to look at something: a fountain sprayed out from a statue of Neptune, within an arc of columns.

  ‘He has made his own little Petergof,’ said Porfiry.

  Virginsky allowed himself a collusive smile.

  The path curved round and brought them to the front of the house. A gleaming facade of columns faced the sea, as if demanding obeisance of it.

  Virginsky, however, was determined not to be cowed, though he was curiously discomfited by Porfiry’s basket, which was handed to him to hold as the senior investigating magistrate climbed down after him from the cab. He made sure to give it back to Porfiry at the soonest opportunity.

  The doors were opened to them by a gaunt-faced butler who affected a superior attitude, despite the fact that he was the one done up in livery. When Porfiry explained who they were and why they were there, the butler turned a contemptuous eye on the basket before admitting them.

  They followed his satin-clad back across a marble-floored reception hall towards the muted sounds of an orchestra playing. The hall was dominated by a huge painting of an Arcadian scene. How typical! thought Virginsky, hotly. He imagined the declaration he would make when he was brought into the count’s presence. You celebrate the rural idyll, adorn your walls with idealised images of shepherds and shepherdesses, yet the wealth that makes it possible was borne out of the ownership of human souls. The count will probably protest that he no longer owns any souls. Perhaps he will even claim to be a liberal, saying that he gave his serfs their freedom in advance of the reforms of ’61. But Virginsky would not spare him. You refuse to renounce the crimes of your forefathers! Your life of luxury and idleness is tainted by its source. You are the child of theft and oppression!

  With an unpleasant jolt of awareness, Virginsky recognised the face his imagination had supplied for the count in this self-soothing fantasy: it was his father’s.

  The flunky opened a door and released a blast of music that was both lush and somehow also ragged. The room they were shown into was a circular hall with a domed ceiling painted with clouds. The walls were lined with paper in which gold leaf predominated. In the middle of the hall, stretched out on a sofa, was a man of around forty, a Chinese dressing gown draped around his considerable bulk. He wore his hair long and unkempt and had his eyes closed, though he did not seem to be asleep. His expression was somewhere between the pained and the ecstatic. The musicians, who were dressed in the same pale-blue livery as the butler, were seated on a platform in front of their solitary audience. They were about twenty in number, and by the sounds of it, of varying degrees of musicianship. The string section produced a passable, even rich, sound, but one or two of the woodwind were out of tune, as well as out of time. Virginsky couldn’t see the face of the conductor, who was bringing them more or less to the end of a limping rendition of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, but his shoulders were rounded and the movements of his arms seemed rather constrained and lacking in conviction.

  When the music finished, he turned a face in which fear and hopefulness were combined to pathetic effect towards the lounging aristocrat, who did not deign to open his eyes or acknowledge the end of the piece in any way. Virginsky also discerned in the conductor’s meek and suppliant expression a stifled hatred that were it ever to be released would result in an explosion of violent passion.

  ‘Well, Yakov Ilyich,’ began Count Akhmatov at last, for it was surely he reclining on the sofa. ‘The noise your rabble produces reminds me of the female pudenda, heavenly bliss in close proximity to utter filth and degradation.’

  There was a titter of amusement from the players.

  ‘Thank you, Your Excellency.’ Yakov Ilyich smiled uneasily.

  Count Akhmatov kept his eyes closed, but his arms swept magisterially about him, trailing the loose sleeves of his dressing gown. ‘Don’t thank me, you fool. I’m insulting you! Don’t you even have the wit to know when you are insulted?’

  Yakov Ilyich shrugged and mugged for the orchestra. By such small acts of insubordination, he asserted his freedom from the tormentor on the sofa.

  The butler who had shown Porfiry and Virginsky in cleared his throat loudly and walked over to Count Akhmatov. After the flunky had whispered something in his ear, Akhmatov sat up sharply and turned a blue imperious gaze on the visitors. ‘Magistrates from St Petersburg! For Bezmygin!’ he shouted, in mock alarm. ‘You cannot arrest Bezmygin. He is a scoundrel and a philanderer, but he is my best player. Arrest one of them instead!’ Count Akhmatov pointed to a pair of flautists, little more than boys, who seemed as unhappy to be in his orchestra as he was to have them there. ‘In fact, you may arrest the whole of the woodwind section, but not Bezmygin. I am holding a masked ball tonight. I cannot do without my Bezmygin.’

  ‘Your Excellency,’ protested Porfiry, mildly, ‘we have not come to arrest Bezmygin, merely to talk to him.’

  ‘What is in your basket?’

  ‘Food.’

  ‘You have come to invite him on a picnic?’

  ‘Not exactly, sir.’

  Count Akhmatov regarded first Porfiry then Virginsky with open, almost offensive curiosity, like a schoolboy inspecting snails. He seemed particularly interested in Virginsky, perhaps sensing his hostility and wanting to provoke it more.

  ‘Very well, you have my permission to talk to him.’ Virginsky bristled at that ‘permission’ and the count allowed himself a small smile of triumph. He rose from the sofa, swishing his sleeves about him. ‘I shall retire to the orangery. My auditory senses are worn out. Yakov Ilyich, you will be busy this afternoon, I think. There is much work to be done, but you are the man to do it, of that I have no dou
bt. Now then, where is that young wife of yours? We must do our best to keep her entertained while you are occupied. It is the least we can do. It would not do for one so pretty to be bored. Though how a booby like you won such a wife, I’ll never know.’ With that, Akhmatov padded out of the ballroom, his slippers flapping mocking applause as he went.

  ‘Which of you is Bezmygin?’ Porfiry called out, when the emotional wake of the departed aristocrat had cleared from the room.

  The man who occupied the position of first violin tilted back his head and looked down superciliously. There was arrogance in his posture, but also a kind of sly wariness that undermined it. Perhaps it was this contradiction, the hint of vulnerability in his soft, dark eyes, that made him attractive to women. To Virginsky, he had the look of the Lothario who expects the husband to burst in at any moment. He laid down his instrument and stepped down from the platform. His gait was stiff and self-conscious. He held himself away from Porfiry and Virginsky as he approached them.