Boris Akunin - Special Assignments

Holy Week Thursday, 6 April

Today it fell to Anisii's lot to work with Izhitsin.

Late the previous evening, after an 'analysis' in the course of which it was determined that they now had more suspects than they required, the Chief had walked around the study for a while, clicked his beads and said: 'All right, Tulipov. We'll have to sleep on it. You go and rest; you've done more than enough running about for one day'

Anisiii had expected the decision to be: put Stenich, Nesvitskaya and Burylin under secret observation, check all their movements for the last year and perhaps also set up some kind of investigative experiment. But no, the unpredictable Chief had come to a different conclusion. In the morning, when Anisii, shivering in the dreary drizzle, arrived at Malaya Nikitskaya Street, Masa handed him a note:

I am disappearing for a while. I shall try to come at this business from the other side. In the meantime, you work with Izhitsin. I am afraid he might botch things up with his excessive zeal. On the other hand, he may not be a very pleasant character, but he is tenacious, and he could just dig something up.

EF

Well, did you ever? And just what 'other side' could that be?

The pompous investigator was not easy to find. Anisii phoned the Public Prosecutor's office and they told him: 'He was called out by the Department of Gendarmes.' He called the Department of Gendarmes and they replied: 'He went out on urgent business that can't be discussed over the telephone.' The duty officer's voice sounded so excited that Tulipov guessed it had to be another murder. And a quarter of an hour later a messenger arrived from Izhitsin - it was the constable, Linkov. He had called at the Collegiate Counsellor's and not found him in, so he'd come round to Tulipov on Granatny Lane.

Linkov was terribly agitated. 'It's an absolute nightmare, Your Honour,' he told Anisii. 'The brutal murder of a juvenile. It's terrible, terrible ...' He sniffed and blushed, evidently embarrassed by his own sensitivity.

Anisii looked at the ungainly, scrawny-necked policeman and saw straight through him: literate, sentimental, and no doubt he liked reading books; joined the police out of poverty, only this rough work wasn't for him, the poor lamb. Tulipov would have been the same if not for his fortunate encounter with Erast Petrovich.

'Come on, Linkov,' said Anisii, deliberately addressing the constable in a formal, polite tone. 'Let's go straight to the morgue; that's where they'll take her anyway'

Deduction is a great thing. His calculation proved to be correct. Anisii had been sitting talking to Pakhomenko in his watchman's hut for no more than half an hour, enjoying a chat about life with the agreeable fellow, when three droshkies drove up to the gates, followed by a blind carriage with no windows, the so-called 'corpse-wagon'.

Izhitsin and Zakharov got out of the first droshky a photographer and his assistant got out of the second, two gendarmes and a senior constable got out of the third. No one got out of the carriage. The gendarmes opened its shabby doors with the peeling paint and carried out something short on a stretcher, covered with a tarpaulin.

The medical expert was dour, chewing on his eternal pipe with exceptional bitterness, but the investigator seemed to be in lively spirits, almost even glad about something.

When he caught sight of Anisii, his face dropped: 'A-ah, there you are. So you already got wind of this? Is your chief here too?'

But when it turned out that Fandorin was not there and would not be coming, and so far his assistant did not really know anything, Izhitsin's spirits rose again. 'Well, now things will really start moving,' he told Tulipov, rubbing his hands energetically. 'So, it's like this. At dawn today the railway line patrolmen on the Moscow-Brest transfer line discovered the body of a juvenile female vagrant in the bushes close to the Novotikhvinsk level crossing. Zakharov has determined that death occurred no later than midnight. It's not very pretty, I warn you, Tulipov, it was an incredible sight!' Izhitsin gave a brief laugh. 'Just imagine it: the belly, naturally, had been completely gutted and the entrails hung all around on the branches, and as for the face ...'

'What, another bloody kiss?' Anisii exclaimed excitedly.

The investigator burst out laughing and couldn't stop, he was helpless with laughter - obviously it was nerves.

'Oh, you'll be the death of me,' he said eventually, wiping away his tears. 'Fandorin and you and that kiss of yours. Please forgive my inappropriate merriment. When I show you, you'll understand. Hey, Silakov! Stop! Show him her face!'

The gendarmes put the stretcher down on the ground and turned back the edge of the tarpaulin. Anisii was expecting to see something particularly unpleasant: glassy eyes, a nightmarish grimace, the tongue lolling out of the mouth, but there was none of that. Under the tarpaulin there was some kind of black-and-red baked pudding with two round blobs: white, with a small dark circle in the centre.

What is it?' Tulipov asked in surprise, feeling his teeth starting to chatter of their own accord.

'Seems like our joker left her without any face at all,' Izhitsin explained with morose humour. 'Zakharov says the skin was slit along the hair line and then torn off, like the peel off an orange. There's a kiss for you. And, best of all, now she can't be identified.'

Everything was still swimming and swaying in front of Anisii's eyes. The investigator's voice seemed to be coming from somewhere far in the distance.

Anyway, the secret's out now. Those rogues of patrolmen have blabbed to everyone they could. One of them was taken away in a faint. The rumours were already spreading round Moscow in any case. The Department of Gendarmes is flooded with reports of a killer who's decided to wipe out women completely. This morning they reported everything to St Petersburg, the whole truth, nothing kept back. The minister himself, Count Tolstoy is coming. So there you have it. Looks like heads are going to roll. I don't know about you, but I'm quite fond of mine. Your chief can go on playing his game of deduction as long as he likes; he's safe enough, he has protection in high places. But I'll crack this one without deduction, by sheer determination and energy. This is no time for snivelling, I reckon.'

Tulipov turned away from the stretcher, gulped to dispel the murky veil that was clouding his eyes, and filled his lungs as full of air as he could. That was better.

Izhitsin couldn't be allowed to get away with that 'snivelling', and Anisii said in a flat, expressionless voice: 'My chief says determination and energy are good for chopping firewood and digging vegetable patches.'

'Exactly my dear sir.' The investigator waved to the gendarmes to carry the body into the morgue. 'I'll damn well dig up the whole of blasted Moscow, and if it gets a bit messy, the result will justify it. If I don't get a result, my head's going to roll anyway. Have you been detailed to keep an eye on me, Tulipov? Do that then, but keep your comments to yourself. And if you feel like submitting a complaint, be my guest. I know Count Tolstoy; he appreciates determination and turns a blind eye to minor points of legality if liberties are taken in the interests of the case.'

'I have had occasion to hear that sort of thing from policemen, but such views sound rather strange coming from an official of the Public Prosecutor's Office,' said Anisii, thinking that was exactly what Erast Petrovich would have told Izhitsin if he had been in Anisii's place.

However, when the investigator simply shrugged off this dignified and restrained reprimand with a gesture of annoyance, Tulipov changed to an official tone of voice: 'Would you please stick closer to the point, Mr Court Counsellor. What is your plan?'