Boris Akunin - Special Assignments

Fandorin broke off and swung round sharply to face Angelina: 'What is your verdict? Is he guilty or not?'

Pale and trembling, Angelina said in a quiet but firm voice: 'Now let him speak. Let him justify himself if he can.'

Sotsky said nothing, still smiling absent-mindedly. A minute passed, and then another, and just when it began to seem that the defence would not address the court at all, the lips of the accused moved and the words poured out - clear, measured, dignified words, as if it were not this man in fancy dress with a woman's face who was speaking, but some higher power with a superior knowledge of truth and justice.

'I do not need to justify anything to anyone. And I have only one judge - our Heavenly Father, who knows my motives and my innermost thoughts. I have always been a special case. Even when I was a child, I knew that I was special, not like everybody else. I was consumed by irresistible curiosity, I wanted to understand everything in the wonderful structure of God's world, to test everything, to try everything. I have always loved people, and they felt that and were drawn to me. I would have made a great healer, because nature gave me the talent to understand the sources of pain and suffering, and understanding is equivalent to salvation - every doctor knows that. The one thing I could not stand was ugliness; I saw it as an offence to God's work - ugliness enraged me and drove me into a fury. One day in a fit of such fury, I was unable to stop myself in time. An ugly old whore, whose very appearance was sacrilege against the name of the Lord, according to the way that I thought then, died as I was beating her with my cane. I did not fall into that fury under the influence of sadistic sensuality, as my judges imagined - no, it was the holy wrath of a soul imbued through and through with Beauty. From society's point of view it was just one more unfortunate accident - gilded youth has always got up to worse things than that. But I was not one of their privileged favourites, and they made an example of me to frighten the others. The only one, out of all of us! Now I understand that God had decided to choose me, I am the only one. But that is hard to understand at the age of twenty-four. I was not ready. For an educated man of sensitive feelings, the horrors of prison - no, a hundred times worse than that, the horrors of disciplinary confinement - are impossible to describe. I was subjected to cruel humiliation, I was the most abused and defenceless person in the entire barracks. I was tortured, subjected to rape, forced to walk around in a woman's dress. But I could feel some great power gradually maturing within me. It had been present within my being from the very beginning, and now it was putting out shoots and reaching up to the sun, like a fresh stalk breaking up through the earth in the spring. And one day I felt that I was ready. Fear left me and it has never returned. I killed my chief tormentor -killed him in front of everyone, grabbed hold of his ears with my hands and beat his half-shaved head against a wall. I was put in shackles and kept in the punishment cell for seven months. But I did not weaken or fall into consumptive despair. Every day I became stronger and more confident; my eyes learned to penetrate the darkness. Everyone was afraid of me - the guards, the officers, the other convicts. Even the rats left my cell. Every day I strained to understand what this important thing was that was knocking at the door of my soul and not being admitted. Everything around me was ugly and repulsive. I loved Beauty more than anything else in the world, and in my world there was absolutely none. So that this would not drive me insane, I remembered lectures from university and drew the structure of the human body on the earth floor with a chip of wood. Everything in it was rational, harmonious and beautiful. That was where Beauty was, that was where God was. In time God began to speak to me, and I realised that He was sending down my mysterious power. I escaped from the jail. My strength and stamina knew no bounds. Even the wolfhounds that were specially trained to hunt men could not catch me, the bullets did not hit me. I swam along the river at first, then across the estuary for many hours, until I was picked up by Turkish smugglers. I wandered around the Balkans and Europe. I was put in prison several times, but the prisons were easy to escape from, much easier than the Kherson fortress. Eventually I found a good job. In Whitechapel in London. In a slaughterhouse. I butchered the carcasses. My knowledge of surgery came in useful then. I was well respected and earned a lot; I saved money. But something was maturing within me again, as I looked at the beautiful displays of the rennet bags, the livers, the washed intestines for making sausages, the kidneys, the lungs. All this offal was put into bright, gay packaging and sent to the butchers' shops. Why does man show himself so little respect? I thought; surely the belly of the stupid cow, intended for the processing of coarse grass, is not more worthy of respect than our internal apparatus, created in the likeness of God? My enlightenment came a year ago, on the third of April. I was walking home from the evening shift. On a deserted street, where not a single lamp was lit, a repulsive hag approached me and suggested I should take her into one of the gateways. When I politely declined, she moved very close to me, searing my face with her filthy breath, and began shouting coarse obscenities. What a mockery of the image of God, I thought. What were all her internal organs working for day and night? Why was the tireless heart pumping the precious blood? Why were the myriads of cells in her organism being born, dying and being renewed again? What for? And I felt an irresistible urge to transform ugliness into Beauty, to look into the true essence of this creature who was so unattractive on the outside. I had my butcher's knife hanging on my belt. Later I bought a whole set of excellent scalpels, but that first time an ordinary butcher's instrument was enough. The result far surpassed all my expectations. The hideous woman was transformed! In front of my eyes she became beautiful! And I was awestruck at such obvious evidence of a miracle from God.'

The man in the chair shed a tear. He tried to continue, but just waved his arm and did not say another word.

'Is that enough for you?' Fandorin asked. 'Do you declare him guilty?'

'Yes,' Angelina whispered, and crossed herself. 'He is guilty of all these atrocities.'

'You can see for yourself that he cannot be allowed to live. He brings death and grief. He must be exterminated.'

Angelina started. 'No, Erast Petrovich. He is insane. He needs treatment. I don't know if it will work, but it has to be tried.'

'No, he isn't insane,' Erast Petrovich replied with conviction. 'He is cunning and calculating; he possesses a will of iron and he is exceptionally enterprising. What you see before you is not a madman, but a monster. Some people are born with a hump or a harelip. But there are others whose deformity is not visible to the naked eye. That kind of deformity is the most terrible kind. He is only a man in appearance, but in reality he lacks the most important, the most distinctive feature of a human being. He lacks that invisible, vital string that dwells in the human soul, sounding to tell a man if he has acted well or badly. It is still present even in the most inveterate villain. Its note may be weak, perhaps almost inaudible, but it still sounds. In the depths of his soul a man always knows the worth of his actions, if he has listened to that string even once in his life. You know what Sotsky has done, you heard what he said, you can see what he is like. He does not have the slightest idea that this string exists; his deeds are prompted by a completely different voice. In olden times they would have called him a servant of the devil. I put it more simply: he is not human. He does not repent of anything. And he cannot be stopped by ordinary means. He will not go to the gallows, and the walls of an insane asylum will not hold him. It will start all over again.'