Lawrence Block - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, No. 6. Whole No. 790, June 2007

“Why don’t you take a trip, my darling?” he had asked her one evening when she complained of not feeling well. “A change of scenery will invigorate your spirits. You could travel to Moscow, maybe, or to Petersburg to see your sister. Or someplace new. To Yalta, perhaps. You might enjoy some time at the coast. You can stay for two weeks or a month or even more.” And though she had been hesitant at first, she had eventually acquiesced. A trip was planned for late summer. She bought some clothes for her journey, a new beret, a new parasol as well. Even the preparations seemed to return some glimmer of light to her soft gray eyes, and Evgeniy felt his own spirits relieved as well. At the end of her stay at the coast, he might come down personally to fetch her. They could spend a few days together. It would be a second honeymoon.

The week before her trip, he had summoned Zhmuhin, the hotel porter, to his office. Evgeniy found Zhmuhin a despicable person in many ways. The man was gaunt and angular, with a bent nose, and Evgeniy had often sensed something smug and sneering beneath his show of truckling diffidence. Plus, Zhmuhin perennially mispronounced Evgeniy’s surname as “Dridirit” — intentionally, Evgeniy believed. But Zhmuhin also possessed the keen eye and discretion necessary for his post. He was precise in his tallying of new arrivals to and departures from the town, encompassing in his recognition of small details. It had even been rumored years before that Zhmuhin was an outside agent for the Okhrana, the imperial police, and though the idea had quickly been dismissed, Evgeniy had often wondered at the possibility and as a result continued to cultivate some familiarity with the other man. As if recognizing this, Zhmuhin sometimes dropped his pretensions around Evgeniy, and too often took advantage of being treated as an equal.

After the porter had settled into one of the wing chairs opposite the mahogany desk, Evgeniy offered him a glass of cognac, asked him about who had checked in most recently at the hotel, laughed that Zhmuhin was always at the hotel, always so much work, and didn’t he ever need a holiday? And when Zhmuhin replied that he arranged to go to Petersburg each May and November, the former in honor of the emperor’s birthday and the latter to commemorate the dowager empress, Evgeniy commented that such respect was very noble, wondering beneath his words if the man’s trips to the capital might have more to do with some duties for the secret police.

“But perhaps you would also like to take another type of holiday, and sooner,” continued Evgeniy. “Perhaps somewhere warmer, perhaps to a coastal climate? Perhaps to Yalta?”

A sly smile emerged at one corner of Zhmuhin’s lips. “And why would I choose to go to Yalta?” he asked, tugging at the lapels of his gray porter’s uniform. “Is there some specific reason for such a trip?”

“I have always said that you are a clever man,” replied Evgeniy. “That you are intelligent beyond your position, and such you are.” He gestured as if doffing a hat to the porter, though he wore no hat at the time. “You are correct. It is my wife. I have decided to send her to Yalta for a holiday herself, and I would like for you to go as well.”

Zhmuhin’s smile vanished. “That sounds little like a holiday, Mr. Dridirit,” he replied, enunciating the last word. “To carry bags and open doors. I can do these things here. And you yourself have servants for such tasks. Send them along instead.” He started to rise.

“You misunderstand. Please sit, please,” said Evgeniy, careful to maintain his cheer, lacing his fingers together. “That is not at all what I’m asking. Even here you are too wise for such duties, I have always thought you so. No, I do not wish you to accompany my wife but to attend to her at a distance. You have a watchful nature, everyone knows this. I simply want you to keep such a watch over my wife while she is away.”

Zhmuhin’s eyes narrowed. He returned to his seat.

“What need is there to keep a watch over your wife?” he asked. “When I look at your wife, I see a grown woman who does not need a guardian. Don’t you agree, Mr. Dridirit?” That sly smile had returned, and Evgeniy detected some hint of salacity behind the porter’s comments. He chose to ignore the man’s studied insolence.

“Before our marriage, my wife was surrounded by her family in Petersburg,” Evgeniy replied instead, “and here she enjoys my guardianship, of course. Certainly she is a grown woman, but I have discovered that she is so young still in many ways, simple in her thoughts and her amusements, a naïf. Often I have called her my baby bird, merely a term of endearment, you see, and yet it is appropriate in so many ways that I had not intended... “He stared down at the blotter on his desk, at the inkwell and the calligraphy pen, the papers, his political responsibilities — another world in which his wife would surely be lost, and he treasured her all the more for that. “This is her first time away on her own, you see, and perhaps I fret over her well-being too much.”

They had completed their deal after that. Zhmuhin was merely to watch from a distance, not to intercede unless he found Anna Sergeyevna to be in some danger. Evgeniy in turn paid for Zhmuhin’s transportation, his lodging and meals, and a remuneration of 100 rubles for the six weeks’ work — more than half again his salary at the hotel for the same period, but the extra would ensure his attention and discretion.

During the first fortnight that his wife was away, Evgeniy began to receive short letters from her. She wrote of her walks in Verney’s pavilion and in the public gardens, of the roughness of the seas in the days and the strange light upon it in the evenings, of how everyone gathered in the harbor for the arrival of the steamer. Evgeniy smiled over her letters, envying such simple pleasures, the easy amusements that he had never been the type to enjoy. He was grateful for a wife who could appreciate them so.

Then one morning, a messenger delivered a telegram to his office. The message itself was unsigned, but in some manner the block type itself bore a familiar insolence, and despite his incomprehension of the telegram’s meaning, the words at once sent the blood rushing to Evgeniy’s face.

“Baby bird has found her wings.”

Two nights later, Philip sat in a rented Buick half a block from his own home, staring at the Land Rover that had just pulled to a stop at the curb, watching his wife escorted by another man across the lawn and into their front door. As he had throughout the evening, he struggled with the word stalker and its connotations. But he hadn’t been stalking. He had no intention to do anything. He had merely been surveying. He was simply watching the story unfold.

He should have been in Charlottesville at this point — the lie he’d told Catherine, the one he’d had to tell her. Research for his story, a quick trip to the Center for Russian Studies at UVA, dinner with a friend from college who lived there, someone he hadn’t seen in a couple of years. “So I’ll have a place to stay for free,” he had explained, plausibly enough. “And it’ll give the two of us a chance to catch up.” He’d used the last phrase deliberately — the same that he’d used when talking to Catherine about Buddy — but she hadn’t seemed to notice, and he alone had been left with a sour taste in his mouth.

So far, he’d put only a dozen miles on the rental, only a few miles between each stop: Buddy’s neighborhood first, a series of squat bungalows half a century old, freshly painted, freshly landscaped, oversized SUVs out front. A pot of begonias had already bloomed on Buddy’s own stoop; his porch swing slowly swayed nearby. Then to the restaurant, following the Land Rover across town to Glenwood Avenue and to the parking lot at 518 — a couple of extra miles crisscrossing the streets near the restaurant, Jones to West, Lane to Boylan, the parking lots adjacent to 42nd Street Oyster Bar, Southend, and Ri Ra, couples leaning toward one another, groups talking and laughing, until he found Catherine’s beige Camry on Harrington.