The Gentle Axe Paperback (5 page)

L
OOK AT THE EYES
,” said Dr. Pervoyedov.

“What about them?” asked Porfiry.

“No blood,” said the doctor. “In cases of strangulation, it is normal for the eyes to fill with blood.”

The rope was embedded in the soft flesh of the throat. Dr. Pervoyedov severed it with a scalpel, stroking the blade across its cords delicately, careful not to nick the skin. Then he teased it out with a pair of elongated tongs.

“Here, this is interesting,” he said. “This
is
interesting!” He lifted up the beard for them to see.

His audience closed in, their heads almost touching above the corpse. They frowned over the deep furrow that the rope had left in the neck, then came up for air. The doctor found himself surrounded by blank faces.

“One moment. This will show you more clearly.” He took a razor from his trunk and shaved away the beard in one place.

“Still I see nothing,” said Liputin with some impatience.

“That is the point, your excellency,” said Porfiry. “I think,” he added, looking to Dr. Pervoyedov for confirmation.

“Precisely. Precisely,” agreed the doctor.

“Will you kindly stop talking in riddles,” demanded Liputin.

“No bruising,” murmured Salytov, with sudden realization.

Dr. Pervoyedov nodded energetically.

“Well done, Ilya Petrovich,” said Porfiry. Despite himself, Lieutenant Salytov experienced a small surge of pleasure at the praise. But immediately afterward he was annoyed with himself and hated Porfiry even more.

“Which means?” asked the
prokuror
uneasily.

“Which
suggests,
” corrected Porfiry, “that he was already dead when he was suspended from the tree.”

“In a live subject, bruising is caused by blood being pumped to the damaged area of the epidermis. One does see marks, analogous to bruising, occurring in corpses post-mortem. But this is simply where the blood settles as the corpse lies on the ground.” As he spoke, Dr. Pervoyedov was cutting away the man’s clothes with a pair of tailor’s shears, splitting the cylinders of his sleeves and trouser legs, sectioning the panels covering the torso. “Otherwise, it is fair to say that dead men do not bruise.” At last the corpse was lying naked on a bed of tatters.

They all saw it, the purple line around the middle of the massive belly.

“And yet here there is bruising,” remarked Dr. Pervoyedov thoughtfully, pausing to record his observations in a small notebook.

“What do you make of that?” demanded Liputin.

“Nothing. As yet,” answered the doctor. “For the moment, I merely observe.” He touched the skin of the corpse in several places with his fingertips. This provoked an expression of distaste from the major general. The actual state councilor seemed rather surprised by it. “If one of you gentlemen could…” Dr. Pervoyedov mimed a pulling action as he cast a look of appeal in their direction. Neither picked up his hint. “I need to turn the body over,” he explained. “I must look at the back too.”

The expressions of the official witnesses turned to horror.

“Lieutenant Salytov,” directed Nikodim Fomich. “Kindly assist the doctor.”

“Allow me to lend a hand too,” offered Porfiry. He recognized a need to touch the skin, a need to understand something through that touch. The coldness of it he expected. But its soft, yielding compliance startled him.

Between them they hauled the naked corpse onto its front. The hirsute back showed no obvious marks.

“Interesting,” remarked the physician. “Very interesting.”

“What now?” snapped Liputin impatiently.

“Well, as you can see, the welt does not continue around the back.”

“And what conclusion do you draw from
that
?”

“It is too early. Too early, sir. My conclusions, if I have any, will be in my report. You will have that soon enough.” Dr. Pervoyedov sought Porfiry’s eyes beseechingly. After a long pause he added, “Your excellency.”

Porfiry, Salytov, and the doctor turned the corpse back over.

Dr. Pervoyedov picked up the scalpel again and began the first incision, touching the blade to a point on the right shoulder. In the silence, Porfiry was very aware of his own breathing and of his heart pumping. He wondered if it was the same for the other men, for Liputin even. He wanted to look at Liputin. He wanted to say to him,
Are you not glad to be alive?
But he continued to watch the procedure that Dr. Pervoyedov was carrying out. The doctor drew the scalpel diagonally down to the middle of the sternum. He repeated the procedure from the other shoulder and then cut down the length of the torso, deviating around the umbilicus and completing the Y-shaped incision when he reached the dead man’s groin. It left a calm wound, dark and glossy but strangely bloodless. Porfiry frowned thoughtfully and cast an inquiring glance at the wound on the head of the other corpse.

He took out a cigarette and lit it, then looked back as Dr. Pervoyedov began to peel the skin away.

P
ORFIRY’S CHEEKS GLOWED
pink from the icy air. He felt it only on his face. The rest of him was hot, swaddled in mink. His ankle-length
shuba
exaggerated the portliness of his physique, giving him the appearance of a large fur bell. The oversize
ushanka
on his head seemed to compress his form even more. The thoroughfares and open spaces of St. Petersburg were quiet and white. The buildings, both the grand stone edifices and the jerry-built wooden tenements squeezed between them, struck him as out of place. Imposed in a snowy vastness that was indifferent to them, they appeared fragile and dreamlike, no matter what arrogance or energy their construction implied.

Porfiry entered the great market of Apraxin Arcade from Sadovaya Street, near its corner with Apraxin Lane. Passing below the icon of Saint Nicholas that was suspended over the narrow wooden gate, he stepped into a dark, bustling universe. The music of a barrel organ clashed with the songs of woodworkers at their lathes and the cries of the itinerant vendors and the stallholders. Overhead, pigeons swooped with clattering wings and settled next to placid, mice-intent cats. Wooden bridges, hung with icons, spanned the passageways between the clustered booths, linking the upper stories. The areas of the market, and the trades that were conducted within them, were marked by the smells through which he wandered. The strongest aromas came as he passed the bakeries, the spice and incense sellers, the tea and tobacco traders. Then he felt the fainter but no less enticing breaths of the honey stalls and the chandlers. The fermenting complexity of the preserved fruit merchants tempted him to linger, while the dusty cough and pungent smack of the chalk and pitch dealers, their shops decorated outside with balalaikas, hurried him on. Befuddled now, he passed the harness makers, the cobblers, the metalworkers, and the jewelers. Here and there these distinct zones were complicated by the passing waft of a pastry seller, his wares balanced on his head, or by the alcoholic miasma from a tavern, or by the whiff of sanctity from the chapel next to it.

In the farthest corner, so that he had to cross the extent of the market to reach it, was the flea market, which had its own atmosphere of fustiness and must. And in the farthest corner of the flea market was Lyamshin’s Pawnbroker’s.

A querulous bell announced his entry. From the gloom of the shop’s interior came the mingled smells of mothballs and unwashed bodies. A crowd of objects pressed in on Porfiry. He ducked the musical instruments and weaponry hanging from the ceiling. His eye was drawn equally by the precious and the worthless, the jewelry locked behind glass, the shelves of chipped and cracked pots. There were rails of secondhand clothes, from luxuriant furs to threadbare petticoats. Some men had even pawned their shirtfronts and collars. He dipped his fingers into barrels of shoes and crates of spectacles and stroked the snuffboxes and thimbles laid out on trays. It was as if these objects, left to their own devices, demonstrated some natural law of affinity, the magnetism of the abandoned. And of course, there was the fact that everything in the shop had once been part of someone’s life; behind each object, however mundane in itself, was a story of despair and even tragedy.

As soon as he entered, Porfiry was aware of a booming male voice. There was something artificial about this voice and excited too: an edge of premeditated hilarity. Porfiry identified the speaker immediately, a middle-aged man with a massive paunch, his eyes shrunk by the ballooning of his ruddy-complexioned face. The man’s gesticulations drew the attention as much as the delivery of his words. His face seemed almost paralyzed into joviality, and it seemed he felt the need to compensate by making the rest of his substantial body as expressive as possible. Porfiry realized the man was reciting a speech from a play, for the benefit of the pawnbroker. The actor, for Porfiry had him down as a professional of the boards, kept his eyes cast down. He was capable of achieving a curious effect in his vocal performance. The speech had the character of a surly mumble, yet every word was clearly enunciated. More than that, his voice filled the shop. The pawnbroker, a skeletally thin individual who evidently believed it bad taste to appear too prosperous or well fed before his customers, waited for the recital to finish with his head on one side, a strained smile frozen on his features. His hands, in fingerless gloves, rested on a seven-stringed gypsy guitar that lay on the counter in front of him.

At last the speech came to its end with “Holy God, what I wouldn’t do for a bowl of cabbage soup! I’m so hungry I could eat a carthorse. Whoops—someone coming, must be his lordship.”

Porfiry clapped his hands four or five times and called, “Bravo!” The pawnbroker, however, merely grimaced and turned the guitar over.

“Osip’s monologue, from
The Government Inspector,
” said Porfiry. The theatrical type acknowledged the applause with a bow, his face gratified and friendly. There was a waft of vodka about him.

“I played the part in ’fifty-six, in the revival at the original Mariinsky Theater. You are an aficionado of the dramatic arts?”

“I am an admirer of Gogol.”

“Twenty rubles,” growled the pawnbroker, setting the guitar resonating as he put it down sharply.

“Twenty! You thief! You bloodsucker! You Jew! It cost me ten times that. It belonged to Sarenko.”

“Twenty rubles.”

“The speech alone was worth twenty rubles.”

“I can’t sell the speech. If you can prove it belonged to Sarenko, I’ll give you twenty-five.”

“You have my word.”

“Twenty-two.”

“Twenty-two! The man has a heart of stone,” cried the actor, appealing to Porfiry.

“You know how it works,” said the pawnbroker. “I can only give you what I think I’ll get for it.”

“You’ll get more than twenty-two for this. One hundred at least.”

“Twenty-two. Take it or leave it.”

“Very well. Be warned. He will suck the blood from you,” said the actor in a loud aside to Porfiry. The actor took his money and withdrew a step but did not leave. It was as though he were waiting for something. Porfiry was aware of his presence behind him as he handed the ticket to the pawnbroker.

The gaunt face across the counter regarded him suspiciously. “You have the money?”

Porfiry laid down a red ten-ruble note. He looked over his shoulder to see the actor watching him intently. The other man gave a reflex smile and made his face bland. The pawnbroker came back with a bundle of books, tied together with string.

“You’re not Virginsky,” said the pawnbroker.

“Could you cut the string for me, please? I wish to examine the books more closely.”

“You’re not Virginsky,” repeated the pawnbroker.

“Who is Virginsky?”

“The man who pawned these books.”

“Does it matter? I’m paying his debt. I have the money to redeem the pledge on his behalf. Please cut the string.”

The pawnbroker hesitated, sucking in even farther the cheeks of his death’s-head face. All his vitality was concentrated in his eyes, which were locked on Porfiry as he slipped a penknife under the string.

The first four books were Russian translations of, in turn, Moleschott’s
The Cycle of Life,
Büchner’s
Force and Matter,
Vogt’s
Superstition and Science,
and Dühring’s
Natural Dialectics.
The fifth book, in maroon cloth binding, bore the title
One Thousand and One Maidenheads.

“Ah,” came the voice at Porfiry’s shoulder as he investigated this last one, “I see you are an acolyte of Priapos.” Porfiry closed the book hurriedly. He gave the actor a stern, questioning glance. “Priapos,” his new friend explained, “my favorite publishing house.” Porfiry saw that this was the name of the book’s imprint. “There is nothing quite like the thrill of cutting the pages of the latest Priapos. If ever, my friend, you feel the need of another’s hand to guide your blade, I have much experience in such mutually advantageous manipulations.”

“Sir, I believe you are laboring under a misapprehension.”

“What’s wrong with two gentlemen enjoying a gentlemanly pursuit together? It is the same as if we were to share a bottle of fine wine or, as the redskins do, a pipe. But why stop at breaching virgin paper when there is virgin flesh to be sundered? There are girls, sir, yes, fresh, sweet, compliant girls…You have only to say. These things can be arranged.”

“I have no wish.”

“Of course, I understand. The unique pleasure of the solitary method, if I may put it like that. There is the question too of hygiene, not to mention speed. It is the rational choice. But still, a helping hand would not go amiss, I venture to suggest. Between friends, it is often the most civilized way, I find.”

“Sir, I am outraged.”

“And I am at a loss. From your other reading matter, I took you to be a rationalist and a materialist. With such an outlook, what objection could there be?”

“I have not come so far in my freethinking.”

“Then I am sorry for you.”

“And I for you.”

“Please do not be.”

“I am a magistrate.”

“Ah!”

“I am here on police business.”

“I bid you—” But the theatrical gentleman flew the shop without completing the farewell.

Feeling strangely compromised by the encounter, Porfiry turned back to the pawnbroker. The man met him with a look of open impertinence. Those eyes, intense, dark, and fiercely alive, seemed momentarily more obscene than anything in
One Thousand and One Maidenheads.

“This Virginsky,” began Porfiry.

“Pavel Pavlovich.”

“You understand now that it is a police matter.”

“I know nothing of that.”

“Can you give me a description of him?”

The pawnbroker shrugged.

“Is he particularly tall or—how shall I put it?—diminutive?”

“Not particularly.”

“I see. So there is nothing especially distinctive about his appearance?”

“He has a pale complexion and a generally disreputable appearance. But among the students of Petersburg, I dare say there is nothing distinctive about that.”

“And from your familiarity with him, I take it he is a regular customer of yours?”

“Regular enough.”

“Do you happen to know Pavel Pavlovich’s address?”

“I do.”

Porfiry added another red note to the first still on the pawnbroker’s counter.

“You have only to go to Lippevechsel’s Tenements. And ask there for Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky.”

The pawnbroker picked up the two banknotes and held the second one out to Porfiry. “This is a legitimate credit business. The debt is paid.”

Porfiry bowed and held the bow.

“I am a Jew, yes, but I am also a law-abiding citizen.”

Porfiry lifted his head, looked the pawnbroker in the eye, and met the anger there without flinching. He took back the note that he had offered.

“Would you please tie up the books for me again?” he said, as he folded it into his wallet. The pawnbroker breathed out sharply through his nostrils before complying.