R. Morris - The Cleansing Flames

‘In short, they lay all the evils of the present day at Professor Tatiscev’s door.’

‘It really does pain me to hear you parrot their venomous lies. It’s almost as if you believe them.’

‘I wonder what prompted them to write this article though.’

‘They are his enemies. They print lies about him in almost every issue.’

‘What is behind it though?’ wondered Porfiry as he folded the newspaper carefully and placed it thoughtfully on his desk.

‘Nothing is behind it. Or will you arrest people on the basis of libellous newspaper articles?’

‘Not at all. You misunderstand me, Pavel Pavlovich. I rather wondered if they had not been put up to it. Perhaps by our old friends from the Third Section. Such tactics are not without precedent.’ Porfiry consulted his pocket watch. ‘My goodness, is it that time already?’ He rose sharply from his seat.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Admiralty District. The medical examination is scheduled to take place there this morning.’

‘Do you wish me to accompany you?’

‘Unless you have something better to do?’ Porfiry looked meaningfully at the sofa. ‘Such as catch up on your sleep.’

‘Would that be permitted?’

‘Most certainly not, Pavel Pavlovich. Really, do you not know when I am teasing you, even after all this time?’

*

The gilt dome of St Isaac’s Cathedral caught fire in a blaze of easy splendour. A roar of approval greeted the effect, although the stone angels on the cathedral roof seemed about to take wing in panic. The sudden flare gave them a weightless, flighty vivacity. Porfiry imagined the boundless blue around the cathedral filled with the celestial beings, swooping and flapping as they sought a safe alighting place in the godless city, like seagulls swarming a fishing boat. Of course, the appearance of combustion had been caused by a shift in the sun’s position in relation to the one, wispy cloud in the sky. The angels remained attached to the roof, steadfastly static.

Below, under the gaze of the stone angels, crowds of people were streaming around the cathedral on every side, all heading in one direction: north, drawn by the noise and bustle that possessed Admiralty Square. One corner of the fair was visible from where Porfiry and Virginsky were standing, at the end of Malaya Morskaya Street where it joined St Isaac’s Square. The carnival colours and teeming movement held their gaze.

There was an undeniably savage edge to the rumble of the crowd, a ferocious hunger for something other than the simple pleasures of the fairground. No doubt many of them were already drunk. The mood seemed fractious, rather than celebratory, bordering on nasty. The grating whine of the barrel organs, incessantly churning out fragments of melody, repeated and overlapping, unmusical, meaningless and quite unpleasant, did nothing to lighten it.

‘Yarilo,’ murmured Porfiry.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘They greet the ancient deity of spring. Yarilo. Sometimes I wonder if we are a Christian nation at all.’

Virginsky offered no reply.

‘Those who wish to remove the deity from men’s affairs would do well to stand here and watch the crowds assemble at the coming of spring. It is an old, elemental instinct, and it cannot be denied.’ Porfiry turned to Virginsky and met his gaze without speaking for several moments. ‘Only delayed.’

‘You talk as though you wish to join them.’

‘Oh but I do, Pavel Pavlovich. I would far rather go with them to the fair than go where we must go.’

With a dip of his head, Porfiry indicated a pair of high double doors standing open. Wide enough to admit a carriage, this was the entrance to the building used by the Admiralty District Police Bureau as stables and storeroom. All the various carriages and wagons belonging to the bureau were housed here, together with the horses required to pull them.

From time to time, an area of the storeroom was put aside for an altogether different purpose.

A distinguished-looking elderly gentleman, wearing the red and black ribbon of the order of St Vladimir, was seated on a stool that had been placed for him on the wooden pavement, to one side of the entrance. He was propping himself up with both hands on his knees, his face an unhealthy shade of grey, eyes standing out from his face in startled horror. He directed this alarming expression towards the sound of the paving boards creaking, as Porfiry and Virginsky approached.

A sickly sweet waft of something spirituous hung about him.

Porfiry acknowledged his presence with a respectful bow. ‘Are you here to witness the medical examination? I am the investigating magistrate in charge of the case.’

‘I will not set foot in there again, sir.’

Porfiry raised one eyebrow for Virginsky’s benefit. ‘But you are here as one of the official witnesses? The law requires that we have two citizens present.’

‘You cannot make me go back in there and look at that thing. It is too much to ask of a respectable citizen.’

‘The other witness is inside, I take it?’

‘The other witness took himself off entirely.’

‘That is indeed unfortunate. We do need two witnesses.’

‘I can hardly say I blame him.’

‘Is it really so bad?’

The elderly gentleman’s expression became sheepish. ‘I’m afraid there was an unfortunate accident.’

‘An accident?’

‘At the sight of that thing. . the smell of it. . I was not able to hold on to my breakfast. I blame that doctor of yours.’ The elderly gentleman shook his head disapprovingly. He produced a silver flask from his breast pocket and took a quick swig, releasing vodka fumes to the morning. ‘I will be here if you need me. But I will not set foot in there again.’

Perversely, the witness’s words only quickened Porfiry’s eagerness to be inside.

As soon as he and Virginsky stepped through the entrance, they were met by the same swampy smell he had noticed by the Winter Canal. The light and air that flooded in with them seemed cowed by it, and hung back.

They found Dr Pervoyedov chatting blithely to his assistant — or diener , to use the accepted German term — next to a trestle table bearing the body to be examined. The cadaver’s strange, waxwork-like face was uncovered.

Both Dr Pervoyedov and his assistant were dressed in long leather aprons, darkly stained. The diener was one of the orderlies from the Obukhovsky Men’s Hospital, whom Pervoyedov had picked out on account of his aptitude for the peculiar work of the pathology laboratory. He had proven himself to have a strong stomach, in other words; one that held on to its own contents even when he was required to empty out the contents of others. That he was also a humourless and taciturn individual, as adept at retaining his thoughts as his recent meals, was perhaps understandable: Dr Pervoyedov accepted that here were two sides of the same coin. But he would have found almost any other temperament more amenable and certainly regretted the man’s habit of assuming a doglike snarl whenever he set to work dismembering a cadaver.

‘Ah, there you are, Porfiry Petrovich, there you are. And good day to you too, Pavel Pavlovich. At last, you are here. We may begin now, I presume?’

‘One moment, doctor. There has been some difficulty with the official witnesses?’

Dr Pervoyedov winked slyly towards his unresponsive diener . ‘Difficulty, you say? I can’t imagine what you mean by that.’

‘One has absented himself and the other refuses to fulfil his civic duty.’

‘No matter, no matter. We don’t need them. I always rather feel that the official witnesses are somewhat superfluous on these occasions, don’t you? They haven’t a clue when it comes to forensic medicine. If you ask them to perform the simplest task, they either keel over or vomit.’