R. Morris - The Cleansing Flames

Virginsky angled his head sceptically.

‘You want to meet him, don’t you?’ teased Dolgoruky.

‘You said that was out of the question.’

‘Nothing is out of the question, as far as Dyavol is concerned. Come with me, and I will take you to him.’

A white radiance, a sudden spill of spring, momentarily filled the apartment, cascading in from all the windows at once. Virginsky felt it enter his heart, emptying it of its anxieties, expanding it with light and levity. In that moment, he made his decision. ‘Very well.’

The all-encompassing flare faded as quickly as it had arrived. In its passing, Virginsky saw the particular quality he had noticed in Dolgoruky’s smile intensify. There seemed in it something malevolent and heartless that was directed entirely at Virginsky. It was unmistakably personal.

A crowded omnibus ground its way lugubriously down the centre of the broad avenue, the horses’ hooves clashing angrily with the cobbles. It was like a giant, round-shouldered beetle trudging unthinkingly along a predetermined path. Lighter, more limber vehicles — carriages, cabs and carts — passed either side of it in both directions, mayflies speeding off towards their destinies. Pedestrians dodged between the traffic: fashionable women in pairs, nursemaids with their infant charges, young bucks in military uniforms, cooks and housekeepers engrossed in the day’s marketing. A tradesman in cap and apron cleared the deposits of manure from the road in front of his store.

The sky above Nevsky Prospect was filled with magnified brilliance. The promise Virginsky had glimpsed on the walls and floor of the apartment was fulfilled a thousand times over. The street was wide and long and inhumanly straight, but the sky was touched with infinity. The strings of buildings along either side were silhouetted into insignificance, the relentless stuccoed facades drained of detail.

‘This is insane. The police will be looking for me.’

‘And you may be assured that this is the one place they will not look! Indeed, have we not passed three policemen already, and not one of them gave you a second glance?’

‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you, Dolgoruky?’

‘Why would I not?’

‘Because it’s dangerous. It may end badly, for you, as well as for me.’

Dolgoruky grinned. ‘Come now, what’s the point of being alive if one cannot take a stroll along Nevsky Prospect?’

‘I have always found it to be an overrated activity.’

Dolgoruky suddenly turned and ran out into the middle of the road, racing after the omnibus, which was heading back the way they had come. After a moment of reluctance, during which he considered the prospect of his abandonment, Virginsky gave chase.

But it was enlivening to haul himself onto the moving tailboard. A clog of passengers was getting ready to disembark at the next stop. They viewed Dolgoruky and Virginsky with disapproval. But Virginsky was immune to their animosity. He was in possession of a rare privilege, the privilege earned through audacity. He felt himself exalted. Imbued with a sense of his own superiority, he deigned to pity them their pinched faces and mundane concerns.

The Prince bounded up the iron steps to the ‘Imperial Deck’. Virginsky felt the tremor of passage in his legs as he worked his way down the narrow aisle to take the seat next to Dolgoruky. He had to admit that it felt good to be raised as high as possible in the open day, and to be moving forward in it too.

But then he remembered that they had been walking in the opposite direction. ‘We’re going back on ourselves,’ he observed.

Dolgoruky gave a frown of irritation. ‘What of it?’

‘It rather suggests that you have no particular destination in mind, but are simply leading me a merry dance.’

‘Did you see anyone else get on the omnibus at the same time as us?’

Virginsky cast a nervous glance behind, before turning to reassess the man next to him. The speed with which they had changed direction, dodged through traffic, and leapt onto a moving omnibus was evidence not of his mad unpredictability, but of a carefully worked-out plan to lay a false trail.

Dolgoruky gave the signal to get up as they approached Znamenskaya Square. Virginsky felt the drub of manageable panic in his heart, followed by a strange hilarity. The Nikaelovsky Station was at Znamenskaya Square, terminus for trains to Moscow.

‘Where are we going?’

But Dolgoruky would not answer. Virginsky realised that he was utterly in the other man’s hands, incapable of acting without his direction.

From Znamenskaya Square, they walked deep into the Rozhdestvenskaya District, at the eastern edge of St Petersburg, bounded by the Neva. It was a largely industrial area, and one which Virginsky knew well enough from a recent case. It occurred to him that he might be recognised, by one person at least, although the chances were admittedly remote. To his knowledge, Maria Petrovna Verkhotseva still had her school in the area.

The unlikely possibility of encountering Maria Petrovna quickly transformed itself in his mind into a fixed certainty. And now, far from dreading it, he almost welcomed it. Let her see what he had become! Let her see the company he kept now! The clothes he wore. The hunted, dangerous look in his eyes.

Dolgoruky led him along Kalashnikovsky Prospect, as the old Malookhtinsky Prospect was now known. They could smell the river’s proximity, though they turned down a muddy side street before they reached the embankment.

They had entered a light-industrial zone, small brick workshops that gave every impression of being hurriedly thrown up, as if shame had been the driving force to their construction. The yards around them merged together into one formless wasteland, churned up and littered with all kinds of detritus: rusting machinery, charred furniture, decomposing organic matter. It was an undefined area, the city’s edge petering away.

Dolgoruky seemed to pick one at random. He stooped over his hand as it rapped out the now familiar rhythm on the rough plank door. After a moment, a bolt shifted inside and the door was opened a crack. Dolgoruky was careful to position himself in front of Virginsky, so that only he would be seen by the doorkeeper. As the door began to open wider, he pushed himself into it, holding it so that Virginsky could come round him. As soon as they were both inside, he slammed the door to and replaced the bolt.

It was dim in the workshop, after the glare of the day. There were no lamps lit, Virginsky noted. It was several degrees cooler inside the workshop than out. Something chemical and corrosive in the chill air clawed at his corneas, drawing tears. The smell that came with it was like a punch expanding behind his nose. The light from outside was filtered through a few small, grubby panes high up in the walls. Virginsky blinked away his tears. His eyes were slow to adapt to the gloom, due to the pungent sting in the air. Gradually the featureless shadow who had admitted them became recognisable as Totsky, the young journalist from Affair , whom Porfiry had teased by calling ‘Bazarov.’ Virginsky sensed another presence, revealed in the sigh of shifting silk somewhere behind the journalist.

The young man stood awkwardly, one hand in the pocket of a threadbare tweed jacket, the other splayed tensely as if in readiness for a fight. He glared with undisguised hostility back at Virginsky. ‘Why have you brought him here?’ he demanded of Dolgoruky.

Virginsky turned to Dolgoruky in confusion. ‘Is he —?’

‘Dyavol? No.’ Dolgoruky chuckled at the absurdity of the idea.

The presence that Virginsky had sensed earlier stepped out of shadows. The bell-like shape of the figure confirmed it was a woman. The voice confirmed it was Tatyana Ruslanovna: ‘You were told to remain in the apartment!’ There was a harsh, unforgiving edge to her voice that was new to Virginsky. It filled him with despondency.