R. Morris - A Vengeful Longing

‘There! You see! It must be him,’ cried Yegor.

‘There is one other thing I would like to ask you. Could you tell me of anything else out of the ordinary that has happened here today? However trivial.’

‘You mean apart from His Honour being murdered? Is that not unusual enough for you?’ Inexplicably, Yegor was shouting. Dunya placed a hand on one of his agitating arms and whispered something soothing. Yegor began to sob.

‘He loved the colonel,’ said Dunya to Porfiry. She squinted as if into the sun.

‘Yes,’ said Porfiry.

‘What will he do now?’ Dunya asked the question flatly, almost without any emotion at all.

‘Please, any small detail that you can remember may prove crucial, ’ insisted Porfiry. ‘For example, were there any other visitors today?’

Dunya whispered something to Yegor again. The butler grew calmer and dabbed his eyes with a large grey handkerchief. ‘The colonel had no visitors before that man. He was abed all the morning. There was some fellow, a public health inspector, who came to look into the quality of our water. It is something to do with the cholera epidemic. Not that we have had any cases here, I hasten to add. But he has been going in and out of all the apartments for the last few days.’

‘And he came to this one?’

‘Yes, but that was hours ago. Long before the colonel was up and about.’

‘I congratulate you,’ said Porfiry. ‘We have been trying to induce a sanitary inspector to look into a similar problem we are having at the bureau. We too have had no cases of cholera yet, just an almighty stink. So far, despite a strongly worded letter signed by myself, we have been unsuccessful.’

‘You do not need to be a sanitary inspector to discover the problem, ’ put in Virginsky, the force of his sudden contribution taking Porfiry by surprise. ‘At Stolyarny Lane, it is caused by the proximity of a canal that is used as an open drain for raw sewage. I imagine that the stench here is the result of the widespread practice of storing barrels of human excrement in yards in the height of summer. Such a practice is fine in the winter, when the waste matter freezes, but in the summer? The wonder is that there are not more cases of disease.’ Virginsky’s little speech was met with silence. He himself pinched the bridge of his nose and winced in embarrassment. He did not seem to know where to put himself.

Porfiry placed his palms together and rested his nose on the tips of his forefingers. It was a conscious effort to refocus. His thoughts were interrupted, however, by a commotion in the hall. He could make out Lieutenant Salytov’s raised voice but there was another voice, raised even higher, that he did not recognise. Before he had the opportunity to speculate further, the door opened and Salytov burst in, pushing before him a young woman, who appeared to be naked apart from the counterpane she held about her with both hands.

‘I found her in Setochkin’s bed,’ said Salytov gleefully. ‘She doesn’t speak a word of Russian.’

Her hair was dark and loosely suggested the coiffeured rings that had shaped it the night before. Traces of cosmetic showed on her face, which appeared pale. She pouted and glared at Salytov.

‘Ilya Petrovich, kindly escort the young lady back to the bedroom and allow her the opportunity to make herself decent.’

‘I fear that is something she will never be able to do,’ said Salytov. This provoked a torrent of French: apparently the girl in the throw’s understanding of Russian was greater than she had led Salytov to believe. Porfiry understood her to insist that she was a good girl.

Porfiry reassured her, also in French, that he believed her. He invited her to join him in the drawing room as soon as she was dressed. ‘ Je dois vous demander quelques questions .’

Salytov led her out, though she refused his offered hand. Porfiry looked back at the couple at the kitchen table. The stupefaction on their faces seemed genuine. So , he thought, they did not know she was there either.

An hour later, freshly perfumed and newly made-up, a necklace of pearls at her throat, her hair restored to a fragile magnificence, the unidentified French woman swept into Setochkin’s tiny drawing room almost filling it with the layers of lace and pink satin of her décolleté gown. She held a Chinese fan, decorated with peacocks, which she agitated constantly, as if it were a living thing that depended on this movement to keep it alive. She was utterly unabashed; in fact, her gait was stiff with outraged dignity. Porfiry found himself in the extraordinary position of admiring her.

With its pretty figurines, floral drapes and delicate watercolours on lilac-papered walls, the room revealed an unexpectedly feminine side to Setochkin’s taste, unless he had surrendered the furnishing of it to someone else, a sister perhaps, or his mother, or even — and more probably — a mistress. The young woman seemed perfectly at home there. Doubtless she had sat in similar rooms in similar apartments, and had possibly even advised on the furnishing of them.

‘What is this about?’ she demanded in French, as she snapped the fan shut with callous finality. It seemed she needed both hands to scoop her skirts to sit.

Porfiry answered her in French. ‘We are investigating the death of Colonel Setochkin.’ Virginsky winced at the bluntness of the statement, which was not softened by the filter of another language.

‘Alyosha? Alyosha is dead?’ The pearls at her throat rose and fell. The fan snapped open again. And now the impression was that it was the fan that caused her hand to move, and that without her holding on to it, it would flutter up to the ceiling. She controlled it enough to bring it close to the fresh flush of her throat. She showed no other sign of emotion; the powder on her face was perhaps too thick to allow it.

‘Are you sure? He was perfectly alive the last time I saw him.’

‘And when was that, mademoiselle?’

‘Really, monsieur, when do you think?’

‘Do you always sleep so late?’ Somehow, this was not the question Porfiry had meant to ask.

‘It had been an exhausting night. As I said, Alyosha was full of life. How did he die?’

‘He sustained a gunshot wound. It seems likely that that was the cause of his death.’

‘Ah, poor Alyosha. What a tragedy.’ The French woman rose from her seat and took two or three paces forwards, as though to the front of an imagined stage.

‘What is your name, mademoiselle? And how did you come to be in Colonel Setochkin’s. . apartment?’

‘My name is Alphonsine Lambert. I am here because Alyosha brought me here. We came by cab. How did you get here?’

‘It is really for me to ask the questions.’ Porfiry bowed in gentle remonstration. He angled his head to look at her, smiling indulgently. ‘Mademoiselle Alphonsine, my dear. . this may prove to be quite painful for you. Perhaps more so than you are prepared to admit. How long have you known Colonel Setochkin?’

‘He is an old friend.’ The fan swept wildly around her, almost escaping her grasp.

‘I see. And were you in the habit of returning with him to spend the night in his apartment?’

‘Please. You are not my mother. And even if you were, you would not take that tone.’ Alphonsine’s laughter was deep and disquieting. Porfiry took a cigarette from his brightly enamelled case and lit it. He was about to put the case away when Alphonsine said: ‘Don’t be a brute, darling. Won’t you let me have one?’

He offered the case without a word and lit her cigarette for her.

‘How did you meet Alyosha?’

‘The usual way. He came to see me.’ At Porfiry’s puzzled frown, she explained: ‘At the theatre.’