Special Assignments (29 page)

He thought he'd done really well, and even managed to blush a little, but Nesvitskaya's response astonished him: she took Anisii firmly by the shoulders and turned his face to the light

'Well now, well now, I know that look around the eyes. Would you be a police spy, then? You've started working with a bit of imagination now, even picked up an imbecile from somewhere. What else do you want from me? Why can't you just leave me in peace? If you're thinking of making something of my illegal practice, then the director knows all about it.' She pushed him away in disgust.

Tulipov rubbed his shoulders - she had a fierce grip. Sonya pressed herself against her brother in fright and began to whine; Anisii stroked her hair.

'Don't you be frightened. The lady's only joking, playing games. She's kind, she's a doctor... Elizaveta Andreevna, you're mistaken about me. I work in the chancellery of His Excellency the Governor-General. In a very modest position, of course, the lowest of the low, so to speak. Tulipov, Provincial Secretary. I have my identification with me, if you'd like me to show you it. Or is there no need?' He spread his arms timidly and smiled shyly.

Excellent! Nesvitskaya felt ashamed, and that was the very way to get a lioness to talk.

Tm sorry, I see them everywhere ... You must understand ...' She picked up a
papyrosa
from the table with a trembling hand and lit it, but not straight away, only with the third match. So much for the iron doctor.

'I'm sorry I suspected you. My nerves are all shot. And then this Ermolaeva ... Ah, yes, you saved Ermolaeva, I forgot... I must explain myself. I don't know why, but I'd like you to understand

'The reason you want to explain yourself to me, madame,' Anisii answered in his thoughts, 'is because you're a lioness, and I'm acting like a hare. Lionesses get on best of all with timid, defenceless little hares. Psychology, Lizaveta Andreevna.'

But together with his satisfaction, Tulipov also experienced a certain moral discomfort - he was no police spy, but he was still doing detective work and using his invalid sister as a cover. The doctor had been right.

She smoked the
papyrosa
quickly, in a few puffs, and lit another one.

Anisii waited, fluttering his eyelids pitifully.

'Smoke?' Nesvitskaya pushed the box of
papyrosas
towards him.

Tulipov generally didn't smoke, but lionesses like it when they can order people about, so he took one, inhaled the smoke and started to cough violently.

'Yes, they're a bit strong,' the doctor said with a nod. 'It's a habit. The tobacco's strong in the North, and in the summer there you can't get by without tobacco - all those mosquitoes and midges.'

'So you're from the North?' Anisii asked naively, clumsily shaking the ash off his
papyrosa.

'No, I was born and brought up in St Petersburg. Until the age of seventeen I was my mother's little darling. But when I was seventeen, men in blue uniforms came for me in droshkies. They took me away from my mother and put me in a prison cell.'

Nesvitskaya spoke in short, abrupt phrases. Her hands weren't trembling any more; her voice had become harsh and her eyes had narrowed in anger - but it wasn't Tulipov she was angry with, that was clear.

Sonya sat down on a chair, slumped against the wall and began sniffing loudly - she was exhausted from all these new impressions.

'What did they arrest you for?' the hare asked in a whisper.

'For knowing a student who had once been in a house where revolutionaries sometimes used to meet,' Nesvitskaya said with a bitter laugh. 'There had just been another attempt on the life of the Tsar, and so they hauled in absolutely everybody. While they were getting to the bottom of things, I spent two years in solitary confinement. At the age of seventeen. I don't know how I managed not to go insane. Perhaps I did ... Then they let me out. But to make sure I didn't strike up any inappropriate acquaintances, they sent me into administrative exile - to the village of Zamorenka in the Arkhangelsk province. Under official surveillance. So I have special feelings about blue uniforms.'

And where did you study medicine?' Anisii asked, with a sympathetic shake of his head.

'At first in Zamorenka, in the local hospital. I had to have something to live on, so I took a job as a nurse. And I realised that medicine was the thing for me. It's probably the only thing that makes any sense at all ... Later I ended up in Scotland and studied in the medical faculty, the first woman in the surgical department - they don't let women get ahead too easily there, either. I made a good surgeon. I have a strong hand; from the very beginning I was never afraid of the sight of blood, and I'm not disgusted by the sight of people's internal organs. They're even quite beautiful in their own sort of way'

Anisii was on the edge of his seat. And you can operate?'

She smiled condescendingly: 'I can perform an amputation, and an abdominal operation, and remove a tumour. And instead of that, for all these months ...' She gestured angrily.

What 'instead of that'? Disembowelling streetwalkers in woodsheds?

Possible motives?

Tulipov slyly examined Nesvitskaya's unattractive, even rather coarse face. A morbid hatred of the female body? Very possible. Reasons? Her own physical unattractiveness and uncertain personal situation, being forced to carry out a midwife's duties, work that she did not like, the daily contemplation of patients whose lives as women had worked out happily. It could be almost anything, even including concealed latent insanity as a result of the injustice she had suffered and solitary confinement at a tender age.

All right, let's take a look at your sister. I've been talking too long. It's not even like me.'

Nesvitskaya removed her pince-nez and wearily rubbed the bridge of her nose with her strong fingers, then for some reason massaged the lobe of her ear; and Anisii's thoughts naturally turned to the sinister ear in the box.

How was the Chief getting on? Had he managed to figure out who had sent the 'smopackadj'?

Again it is evening, the blessed darkness concealing me beneath its dusky wing. I am walking along a railway embankment. A strange excitement constricts my chest.

It is surprising how it throws one off balance to see acquaintances from a former life. They have changed, some are even unrecognisable, and as for me, it need hardly be said.

I am troubled by memories. Stupid, unnecessary memories. Everything is different now.

Standing at the crossing, outside the barrier, there is a young girl begging. Twelve or thirteen years old. She is shuddering from the cold, her hands are covered in red goose bumps, her feet are wrapped in some kind of rags. Her face is horrible, simply horrible: suppurating eyes, cracked lips, a runny nose. A miserable, ugly child of humanity.

How can I not pity such a creature? This ugly face can also be made beautiful. And there is really nothing I have to do. It is enough simply to reveal the true Beauty of its gaze.

I follow the girl. The memories are no longer troubling me.

CHAPTER
5

Fellow Students

Holy Week Wednesday, 5 April, afternoon and evening

After despatching his assistant on his errand, Erast Petrovich prepared himself for some intense thinking. The task appeared to be far from simple. Irrational enlightenment would be very welcome here, and so the right place to begin was with meditation.

The Collegiate Counsellor closed the door of his study, sat down on the carpet with his legs crossed and tried to rid himself of all thoughts of any kind - still his vision, shut off his hearing; sway on the waves of the Great Void from which, as on so many previous occasions, there would come the sound, at first barely audible, and then ever more distinct, and finally almost deafening, of the truth.

Time passed. Then it stopped passing. A cool calm began rising unhurriedly within him, from his belly upwards; the golden mist in front of his eyes grew thicker, but then the huge clock standing in the corner of the room churred and chimed deafeningly: bom-bom-bom-bom-bom!

Fandorin came to himself. Five o'clock already? He checked the time on his Breguet, because the grandfather clock could not be trusted - and he was right: it was twenty minutes fast.

Immersing himself in a meditative state for a second time proved harder. Erast Petrovich recalled that at five o'clock that afternoon he was due to take part in a competition of the Moscow Bicycle Enthusiasts' Club, to support the poor widows and orphans of employees of the military department. Moscow's strongest sportsmen and the bicycle teams of the Grenadier Corps were competing. The Collegiate Counsellor had a good chance of repeating his success of the previous year and taking the main prize.

Alas, there was no time now for sports competitions.

Erast Petrovich drove away the inappropriate thoughts and began staring at the pale-lilac pattern of the wallpaper. Now the mist would thicken again, the petals of the printed irises would tremble, the flowers would begin breathing out their fragrance and satori would come.

Something was hindering him. The mist seemed to be carried away by a wind blowing from somewhere on his left. The severed ear was lying there, in the lacquered box on the table. Lying there, refusing to be forgotten.

Ever since his childhood, Erast Petrovich had been unable to bear the sight of tormented human flesh. He had lived long enough, seen all sorts of horrific things, taken part in wars and yet, strangely enough, he had still not learned to regard with indifference the things that human beings did to their own kind.

Realising that the irises on the wallpaper would not breathe out any scent today, Fandorin heaved a deep sigh. Since he had failed to arouse his intuition, he would have to rely on his reason. He sat down at the table and picked up his magnifying glass.

He began with the wrapping paper. It was just ordinary paper, the kind used to wrap all sorts of thing. Nothing to go on there.

Now for the handwriting. The writing was uneven and the letters were large with careless endings to their lines. If you looked closely, there were tiny splashes of ink - the hand had been pressed too hard against the paper. The writer was most probably a man in the prime of life. Possibly unbalanced or intoxicated. But he could not exclude the possibility of a woman with strong emotional and hysterical tendencies. In that regard he had to take into account the flourishes on the O’s and the coquettish hooks on the capital F’s.

The most significant point was that they did not teach people to write like that in the handwriting classes in the grammar schools. What he had here was either someone educated at home, which was more typical of female individuals, or someone who had had no regular education at all. However, there was not a single spelling mistake. Hmm. This required a little thought. At least the writing was a clue.

Next - the velvet box. The kind in which they sold expensive cufflinks or brooches. Inside it there was a monogram: A. Kuznetsov, Kamergersky Way'. That was no help. It was a large jeweller's shop, one of the best known in Moscow. He could make inquiries, of course, but they would hardly come to anything - he could assume that they sold at least several dozen boxes of that kind a day.

The satin ribbon was nothing special. Smooth and red - the kind that gypsy women or merchants' daughters liked to tie their plaits with on holidays.

Using his magnifying glass, Erast Petrovich inspected the powder box (from 'Cluseret No. 6') with especial interest, holding it by the very edge. He sprinkled it with a white powder like talc, and numerous fingerprints appeared on the smooth lacquered surface. The Collegiate Counsellor carefully and precisely blotted them with a special, extremely thin paper. Fingerprints would not be accepted as evidence in court, but even so they would come in useful.

It was only now that Fandorin turned his attention to the poor ear. Judging from the sprinkling of freckles on both sides of the ear, its owner had been ginger-haired. The lobe had been pierced, and very carelessly: the hole was wide and long. Taking that into account, and also the fact that the skin was badly chapped by cold and wind, he could conclude, firstly, that the former owner of the object in question had worn her hair combed upwards; secondly, that she was not a member of the privileged classes; thirdly, that she had spent a lot of time out in the cold without wearing any hat. The final circumstance was especially noteworthy. It was well known that street girls touted their wares with their heads uncovered even during the cold season. It was one of the signs of their trade.

Biting his lip (he still couldn't manage to regard the ear as an object), Erast Petrovich turned the ear over with a pair of tweezers and began examining the cut. It was even, made with an extremely sharp instrument. Not a single drop of congealed blood. Which meant that when the ear was severed the ginger-haired woman had already been dead for at least several hours.

What was that slight blackening on the cut? What could have caused that? Defrosting, that was what! The body had been in an ice-room - that was why the cut was so perfect: when it had been made the tissues had still not completely thawed out.

A prostitute's body placed in an ice-room? What for? What kind of fastidiousness was this? That kind were always taken straight to the Bozhedomka and buried. If they were put in an ice-room, it was either in the medical-faculty morgue on Trubetskaya Street for educational purposes, or in the forensic morgue at Bozhedomka to help with a police investigation.

And now the most interesting question: who had sent him the ear and why?

First - why?

The London murderer had done the same thing the previous year. He had sent Mr Albert Lask, the chairman of the committee for the capture of Jack the Ripper, half of a kidney from the mutilated body of Catherine Eddows, which had been found on 30 September.