R. Morris - A Vengeful Longing

Picked up a little whore on Sadovaya Street. Not much older than eleven.

‘Oh my God,’ said Virginsky, dropping the book. He bent to retrieve it.

‘Don’t worry about that. There’s no need to read it. It pre-dates the period in which we are interested. As do these.’ Porfiry handed over all but one of the other notebooks. ‘This one is the last. The year is given as 1854. Fourteen years ago. That would be around the time that Raisa was at Madam Josephine’s. I wonder.’ Porfiry flicked through the pages rapidly. ‘Just as I thought. The very last entry. Raisa. And he is at Madam Josephine’s. This is very interesting. He says that he went there with some other men. Old school-friends. Two of them are named. Golyadkin and Devushkin. A third man is referred to only as the “Uninvited One”. It is he who goes with Raisa.’ Porfiry read on in silence for a moment, then looked up at Virginsky. ‘I confess to feeling a terrible apprehension concerning this uninvited one. I would not be surprised if we had found our murderer.’ He closed the book. ‘All we have to discover now is his identity.’ Porfiry clutched the notebook to his chest. ‘And how he was able to do it, of course.’

The morning light through Yaroslav Nikolayevich’s drawing-room window was clear and uncompromising. The prokuror himself was pacing the room, in a manner that somehow combined anxiety with authority. He was anxious, clearly, for the whole sorry business to be over. His guest, Ruslan Vladimirovich, was seated on a sofa. Porfiry noted that Vakhramev’s remarkable imperturbability had abandoned him. His eyes stared, wild and distraught now, at the six kid-bound notebooks on the table before him.

‘How did you get them?’

Porfiry weighed his choices for a moment, in which he exchanged a glance with Virginsky. ‘Your daughter alerted us to their existence.’

‘Tanyushka knew about them?’

‘I’m afraid so. She found the key to your concealed bookcase.’

‘No!’

Porfiry studied the pattern in the tablecloth.

‘Has she, do you know, read them?’

Porfiry nodded. Vakhramev placed his hands over his face so that the high, broken sounds of his distress snagged in his fingers.

‘What is left for me now?’ he said at last. Still he did not take his hands from his face.

Porfiry looked at Yaroslav Nikolayevich, who shook his head in disapproval.

‘I am sorry for you,’ said Porfiry to Vakhramev, in conscious response to the prokuror ’s severity.

‘Are you?’ As Vakhramev dropped his hands, he seemed to release a blast of bitter fury. ‘You have brought this on me. Was it really necessary to go looking for these?’

Porfiry placed a crooked forefinger to his lips. The touch was comforting. ‘Yes. It was necessary. Besides, Ruslan Vladimirovich, you must realise that Tatyana had already read them. That was nothing to do with me. All that has changed is that you now know that she has.’

‘All that has changed! All that has changed is that I have nothing left to live for! She can have no respect for me. And if she has no respect for her father, how can she respect herself? I have destroyed her.’

‘These were not the only books we found in your study,’ said Porfiry gently.

Vakhramev closed his eyes. His mouth stretched taut, like a child’s the moment before tears. A huge spasm worked its way through his body.

‘She saw those too!’

‘I was not referring to those books. I meant, there was a copy of the Holy Bible on your desk. You have practised the forms of religion, perhaps the time has come to open your heart to its message. The word of the Lord comes like a thief in the night.’ Porfiry shot a stealthy glance at Virginsky.

Vakhramev opened his eyes and looked at Porfiry wildly. A sound escaped him that could have been laughter, though it was a mirthless sound, and barely human. ‘Do not mock me! I do not believe. I have never been able to believe. At least, not since I was a child. I may wish I did, but I cannot. I am a vile worm. I cannot escape my nature. The only escape’ — Vakhramev’s face seemed to sink in on itself, as if it masked a vacuum — ‘is death.’

‘Pull yourself together,’ said Porfiry firmly. ‘You are alive. You must carry on living. That is your duty. You will find a way to believe.’ Porfiry looked down at the notebooks. ‘You have brought this on yourself. In some part of you, you have desired this. At any rate, you always knew this day would come. Certainly, you did less than you could have to prevent it. You say you are a worm. No. That’s not the case. All these’ — he gestured at the books — ‘are the actions of a man. Face up to them. Face up to yourself. And draw a line.’

‘I cannot draw a line,’ Vakhramev got out desperately.

‘How do you think Tatyana knew where to find the key? After all, you had taken great pains to conceal it.’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Really? Her room adjoins your study, does it not?’

‘What are you suggesting?’

Porfiry glanced again at Virginsky. ‘Could it ever have been possible that the door to her room was left ajar, allowing her to spy on you as you went to the hidden bookcase?’

Vakhramev’s flinching glance away contradicted his words: ‘No. I was always careful. I think.’

‘You think?’

Vakhramev bowed his head. ‘Is it really possible?’

Porfiry did not take his eyes from him. ‘I believe so.’

‘Am I so depraved?’ The question from Vakhramev was barely audible.

‘Please understand,’ said Porfiry crisply, almost impatiently now. ‘I’m not interested in moral judgements. I am only interested in the truth. Possibly that is what motivated you, too. It was not a question of wanting to corrupt Tatyana. It was rather that you wanted the hypocrisy to end.’

‘What good has it done me?’

‘I believe it was necessary.’ Again Porfiry looked at Virginsky. ‘And what is necessary is always right. Now, we must clear up a few things regarding Colonel Setochkin’s death. You know that Tatyana considers you perfectly capable of being his murderer. We must show her that you are not.’

‘I may as well be. To take the life of a Setochkin is a lesser crime than those she knows me guilty of.’

‘Nonsense. This will be painful for you, I’m sure. But we are all men here. We must talk about a certain incident related in one of your journals. The last entry, in fact, in the last book.’ Porfiry picked up the relevant notebook and found the page. ‘It is here, where you mention a prostitute called Raisa. Was this the woman whose photograph I showed you?’

‘It was all so long ago.’

‘Come now. Please. No pretence. We have gone past that point.’

‘No. You don’t understand. I really can’t remember. That was why I wrote it all down. So that I could forget. I was tormented by my actions. I could not get them out of my mind. And I found that as I wrote something down, my memory was cleared of it. I was able to divide that part of me from the rest of me, from the respectable Ruslan Vladimirovich Vakhramev, who was able to go about his respectable business untroubled by these. . disreputable memories. Until of course he sinned again.’

‘I do understand that. But this is the last entry, dated fourteen years ago. I cannot help but feel there must have been something significant about it. I mean to say, why did you stop here?’

‘Because I stopped. Believe me, I have not been with a prostitute since that day. I have found other outlets.’

‘The Priapos books?’

Vakhramev nodded.

‘What enabled you to break with prostitutes?’ pressed Porfiry.