Sherlock Holmes and The Shadows of St Petersburg

by Daniel D Victor

  “Marvellous.”

  “Indeed,” said Holmes. “Though Porfiry’s manner of doing things is not my own, I never hesitate to call on the man for help.[2] On this last occasion, I met him in his office at the station house, a pale-yellow building fronted with greying white pilasters and cornices. It was particularly cold the day I arrived - close to freezing, in fact - and I was happy to go inside.

  “The police bureau is a network of small offices on the fourth floor, and to reach it I had to climb a steep set of stairs teeming with all manner of people - not only official clerks and uniformed police, but also the wretches who live in the numerous flats on the lower floors. Porfiry’s digs are attached to his office. In fact, he likes to joke that his flat is not unlike a prison-cell since both are funded by the government.”

  “A wry sense of humour,” I noted, “especially for a policeman.”

  “Just so. In that part of the city I fancy it stands him in good stead. The area remains one of the most squalid and violent parts of Petersburg. And yet, though Porfiry knew I wanted to see the lodging house that Raskolnikov occupied at the time of the murders - in fact, only a quarter-mile from the police station - my friend had too much pride in his city not to take a detour to point out the sights. Standing at a railing by the Neva, we gazed at the lengthy green-and-white façade of the Winter Palace and the stately mansions and manicured gardens along the Promenade des Anglais, the so-called English Embankment, further west.”

  “Sounds beautiful,” I said.

  “True, Watson, but like all great metropolises, Petersburg is a city of contrasts; and just minutes after showing off the magisterial residence of the Tsars, Porfiry Petrovitch was guiding me through the chaotic Haymarket to Raskolnikov’s shabby neighbourhood. Raskolnikov lived near Stoliarny Place not far from the Kokushkin Bridge that spans a foul-smelling canal south of the river.

  “From Raskolnikov’s run-down, yellow-brick building, we marched fewer than a thousand paces - Dostoevsky numbers them at seven hundred thirty - to the site of the axe murders themselves, a building of greyish-yellow colour in Srednaya Podyacheskaya Street on the other side of the small Voznesensky Bridge.”

  I stared blankly at the growing list of awkward-sounding names.

  “No matter the specific locations today,” said Holmes with a dismissive wave, “since none of the major players, with the exception of Porfiry Petrovitch himself, lives there anymore. Yet he says the whole area looks much as it did twenty years ago.

  “The nearby Haymarket is still known as the underbelly of the city; and with its wild assortment of costermongers, beggars, and livestock, it is quite the hurly-burly. A group of erstwhile musicians with concertina and tambourines produced discordant sounds in the hope of raising money, and drunks staggering about joined in song. And the smells! - the animal waste, the rotten food, the sweat of humanity. I tell you, Watson, it is not unlike some Byzantine bazaar. Think of our own Spitalfields Market.”

  I understood Holmes’ reference to the raucous marketplace in the East End, but somehow the turmoil of a Russian setting swarming with foreigners seemed much coarser than any British scene I could conjure.

  “Let us also not forget,” said he, “the taverns, brothels, and dosshouses that one expects to find adjacent to any such vanity fair. I should fancy that the prostitutes with their yellow tickets of legality are quite adept at catering to the workers and farmers and thieves who frequent the place. Is it any wonder that Dostoevsky’s murderer believed he could escape detection in such an atmosphere?”

  I nodded my head at the obvious.

  “You do realize,” said Holmes, pointing the stem of his pipe in my direction, “that at some point Dostoevsky actually lived not far from where the murders in the novel occurred, a fact that speaks for the book’s authenticity. Because Dostoevsky’s rooms were also near the police station, it was as a neighbour that he came to know Porfiry Petrovitch and from the detective himself that he acquired the gruesome details he recreated in his novel, details he sought to publish as quickly as possible.”

  With the publication of my own work coming so soon, I could well understand Dostoevsky’s eagerness.

  “Porfiry Petrovitch,” he continued, “brought me to a tavern that Raskolnikov had visited, a rundown place called the Crystal Palace. We were lucky enough to secure seating in one of the cleaner rooms. Porfiry himself used to go there with Dostoevsky.”

  “And how was the famous Russian vodka?” I could not refrain from asking.

  Holmes smiled. “We drank tea, old fellow. Porfiry does not drink spirits.”

  “Tea in the Crystal Palace - how very English,” I mused though I could picture no resemblance between the shabby establishment described by Holmes and the original Crystal Palace, the grand structure of glass and iron built in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851. “One fancies the name is ironical,” I hastened to add. (Underscoring such irony, Mrs Garnett named the tavern in French, Palais de Cristal.)

  In point of fact, on not a few occasions, Holmes and I might be seen in south London, witnessing summer fireworks in the Palace’s relocated home in Sydenham. With scientific displays from all parts of the Empire, the original Crystal Palace symbolised the progress of modern technology. (Strangely, as many times as Holmes and I had visited the place, I could never seem to identify the location of the clock chimes which I still maintain ring somewhere within its glass walls.)[3]

  “Ironical, to be sure,” said Holmes. “Porfiry Petrovitch said that the Russian Socialists hated the English Palace because it reflected the lockstep mentality forced upon the working class. But we are getting far afield, old fellow. In terms of the old axe murders that I came to investigate, it was in that tavern that Raskolnikov captured the interest of the local authorities. Remember how he told a police clerk just how he, Raskolnikov, would have performed the murders if he was the one who had killed the pawnbroker.”

  I remembered, and yet I remained sceptical. “In spite of all that you are reporting and all the various locations you have visited, Holmes, St Petersburg still seems a great distance to have travelled in order to witness the scene of a twenty-year-old crime.”

  “Crimes, Watson, crimes. There were two murders, let us not forget - those of the pawnbroker called Ayona Ivanovna and her sister Lizaveta. But to your point, I wanted information that I suspected the Petersburg police might still have. Recall that towards the end of the investigation, Porfiry Petrovitch told Raskolnikov that the police possessed absolute proof of who had killed the pawnbroker.”

  “Yes,” I remembered, “but Porfiry Petrovitch tells Raskolnikov that he will not reveal the proof since he wants the killer to confess without the coercion of inculpatory evidence.”

  Holmes paused and held up a forefinger. “A moment.”

  Only then did I notice his Gladstone, which was leaning against his chair.

  Putting down his pipe, he withdrew from inside the bag a copy of Whishaw’s translation of Crime and Punishment. (I did not know he owned one.) “I call your attention,” said he as he thumbed through the pages, “to Porfiry Petrovitch’s climactic interview with Raskolnikov.” And coming to a stop near the end, he proceeded to read the Russian detective’s remarks to the killer: “‘I hold a proof... God has sent it to me.’” (Mrs Garnett would call it “a little fact” sent by “Providence.”) “Just as you or I might respond when confronted with such a statement, Watson, Raskolnikov rightly asked, ‘What is it?’”

  In light of the fact that Dostoevsky himself never revealed this evidence, I myself entertained the very same question.

  “In order to understand more about the murders,” Holmes smiled, “I asked Porfiry Petrovitch the nature of this evidence. His answer?” Here Sherlock Holmes, never one to overlook the chance to display his acting talents, evoked a Russian accent. “‘Iss information, Mr Holmes, I hold secret a little longer
. As you English say, I shall keep it ‘close to the chest.’”

  I chuckled in spite of myself.

  “You see,” said Holmes, “from the start, Porfiry Petrovitch wanted Raskolnikov to turn himself in and acknowledge the crime on his own.” (Mrs Garnett would write, “surrender and confess.”) “Presenting him with incriminating evidence might have coerced an admission of guilt, but Porfiry was seeking a freely offered confession. Which, as we know from the novel, the villain ultimately did provide, earning him - as Porfiry had predicted - a lesser sentence - ten years in Siberia rather than a lifetime.”

  “I thought it was eight,” I said with a frown. “The epilogue provides the number.”

  Holmes shook his head. “Remember that Dostoevsky sought to finish the novel as quickly as he could - in point of fact, just after Raskolnikov’s confession. What Dostoevsky wrote following the confession is mere conjecture. Oh, the epilogue is based on the facts Raskolnikov gave to the police, and yet Dostoevsky imagined it all. Some of it - like the death of Raskolnikov’s mother - he got right, but the eight-year sentence? Simply an incorrect guess.”

  As a writer myself, I remembered sensing stylistic differences between the epilogue and the earlier text. In the epilogue, there is much narrative but little dialogue, much description but little drama. Yet even as I could understand Dostoevsky’s need for haste in making public the story, I could not comprehend the shortness of Raskolnikov’s imprisonment.

  “Eight years or ten, Holmes - either way, it is too short a time for killing two women. Here in England he would have hanged.”

  “True, Watson. The court showed mercy. But remember that by turning himself in, Raskolnikov saved the state much legal work and exonerated the poor soul who had confessed to the murders untruthfully.”

  “The house-painter Nikolay,” I said, “the man who found the dropped earrings and for his troubles was accused of the crime.”

  “And falsely confessed. Just so. And do not forget the family and friends of Raskolnikov who spoke to the positive history of the killer - how kind he had been to others, how he had rescued people in a fire - not to mention the travails of his childhood.” Holmes closed the book.

  “Two sides to the man,” I recalled, “the homo duplex to which you referred at the Gottfried murder scene.”

  “Exactly, Watson. Raskolnikov had a double nature - or so Porfiry Petrovitch believed. Raskolnikov could be full of compassion on the one hand and cold and ruthless on the other, both emotional and calculating, full of sympathy and full of self-loathing.

  “Truth be told, Porfiry Petrovitch confessed to me that he thought Raskolnikov had listened less to the police and more to Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladov, the God-fearing woman Raskolnikov called Sonia and with whom he was destined to fall in love. It was the devoted Sonia, not himself, that Porfiry Petrovitch believed to be the prime mover in getting Raskolnikov to surrender.”

  “A most interesting fellow, your Russian policeman.”

  “True, Watson, but then you and I are in the midst of our own murder case, not one already solved twenty years ago.”

  So infatuated had I become with hearing about Dostoevsky’s machinations in producing Crime and Punishment that I had almost forgotten all that I had learned when Holmes was gone. My friend was correct; it was time to return to the present, which, of course, was also connected to the past.

  “Regarding the Gottfried case, Holmes, I’m afraid it has more to do with the twenty-year old murders than you have already reported.” And I proceeded to tell him of the informer Lestrade had called the Assistant.

  Holmes steepled his fingers beneath his chin. “The Assistant, you say?”

  I nodded yes.

  “These are deep waters indeed,” he replied. “Do you not remember Dostoevsky’s account of Raskolnikov’s confession?”

  Of course! Now I recalled what the Assistant had failed to mention when Lestrade brought him to Baker Street. “Raskolnikov offered his confession to a hot-headed police assistant!” I cried. “According to Whishaw, people named him ‘Explosive.’ The man told Lestrade and me that he was called Dmitry.”

  “Pure fabrication. His real name is Ilya Petrovitch Poruchik though he sometimes calls himself Alexsandr Ilich.”

  “I do not remember-”

  “You will not find those names in the novel proper, Watson, but both appear in Dostoevsky’s notebooks. Porfiry Petrovitch showed them to me - pages and pages filled with comments on the case, all written in excellent penmanship, precise and slanted” - he used his hand to show the angle just past the vertical - “yet also a bit maddening with their share of cross-outs and inserts. Sometimes he wrote sideways in the margins; sometimes, even upside-down. And - oh, yes - one cannot forget the drawings - figures, faces, churches. The whole business is something to behold.”

  I could only imagine! What a trove of information! Little wonder that Holmes knew so much more than I about Ilya Petrovitch.

  “Lestrade told me about the Assistant’s anger,” I said. “The man’s hostility so aroused the ire of his colleagues that they had him dismissed from the force.”

  “Actually, it was Porfiry himself who dismissed him.”

  “And now,” I observed, “we discover that this informer for Lestrade actually played a significant role in the old case in St Petersburg. You should know, Holmes, that Ilya Petrovitch dismissed any such similarities as ‘coincidence’.”

  Holmes chuckled dryly. “As I am sure you are aware, Watson, I do not believe in coincidence.”

  Returning to our brandies, we both sat quietly for a few minutes. When Holmes spoke again, it was to change the subject - except, of course, it was really the same subject.

  “Regarding the other investigation in which we find ourselves entangled,” he asked, “what can you tell me of Roderick Cheek? I should like to hear more about his circumstances before I contact his sister.”

  How Holmes already knew about my meeting with the young man I could only guess. Presumably, he had got the information from Charlie Duffle before returning to Baker Street. Whatever the case, I reported to Holmes all I had learned about the strange brother of the woman who had asked us to find him - and the even stranger connection he seemed to have with the decades-old Russian murders. For good measure, I added what I knew of Cheek’s friend Arbuthnot.

  “Well done, Watson,” Holmes reassured me. Relighting his pipe, he added, “On the morrow I should like to visit the lodgings of Roderick Cheek myself.” Then he inhaled deeply and closed his eyes. Within moments, small wisps of smoke began escaping from the corners of his lips and making their journey upward, dissipating before ever reaching the ceiling.

  1 All the key Russian names in this narrative were invented by Dostoevsky for Crime and Punishment. It should be noted that in the serialization of the novel, the actual identity of the murderer was never made public. To facilitate keeping track of him, however, I, like Dostoevsky, have employed the same fictional name for the man from beginning to end - Raskolnikov. (JHW)

  2 Some seven years later, Holmes would cable Porfiry Petrovitch regarding the investigation I titled “The Golden Pince-Nez”. It was from the Russian detective that Holmes gained background regarding the Russian Nihilist organization of which Professor Coram had once been a member. (JHW)

  3 Because no such chimes have been shown to exist, Watson’s insistence remains a point of controversy ever since he first mentioned hearing them in The Sign of Four. One alternative for the source is the tower clock in the Royal Normal College for the Blind in nearby Upper Norwood. For Watson’s reference to the school itself, see “An Adventure in Darkness” (which I edited) in Sherlock Holmes Adventures in the Realms of HG Wells published by Belanger Books. (DDV)

  Chapter Eight: The Fiancé

  And so once more unto the East End. Yet again the hansom dri
ver required extra coins to take us there. Yet again the choking traffic, the muddied roads, the raucous cries, the powerful stench. Holmes absorbed everything without a murmur; but when we finally arrived in front of the Lindermann shop that Thursday afternoon, I was more than ready - stink and all - for the relative quiet within the boarding house.

  We climbed the stairs; and upon reaching Cheek’s fourth-storey room, I delivered a sharp rap on the door. Receiving no response, I knocked again only harder. This time we were rewarded not by any sounds from within, but from the door itself, obviously unlocked, which - as during my previous visit - slowly creaked open.

  “Saves me the trouble,” Holmes murmured, patting the coat pocket where he stowed his small jemmy tools.

  “Holmes, you don’t mean to say you intend to enter?”

  “Of course I do, Watson. The door is not locked.”

  “But you-”

  He walked into the room before I could accuse him of breaking the law.

  All was as it had been on my first visit in the tiny quarters, save for the pile of blankets on the bed. On this occasion, no one was under them; and yet they appeared even more haphazardly thrown together - if such a display could be contemplated.

  For his part, Holmes circled the perimeter of the small confines using the toe of his boot to test for weaknesses in the baseboard just below where the yellowed wallpaper ended. It was in such an opening that Raskolnikov had initially hidden the gold trinkets he had stolen from the murdered pawnbroker.

  Holmes next turned his attention to the drawers, pulling them out to have a look, then proceeding to examine the bookshelf. On the top, a few handwritten sheets of paper lay fastened together. Holmes quickly read through the pages and then showed them to me. Someone had translated into English Raskolnikov’s article on crime that had appeared in the Russian pamphlet called Periodical Word (Mrs Garnett translated the title as Periodical Review.) It was the same article that had so fascinated Porfiry Petrovitch in Crime and Punishment.