R. Morris - The Gentle Axe

Hardly able to believe his eyes, Porfiry looked to Lilya for confirmation. She bowed her head, shamefaced. She could look him in the eye when they talked of prostitution, but this excess of religious sentiment embarrassed her, it seemed.

“I have never seen so many icons,” murmured Porfiry. “Not even in a church.”

“Oh, you will see this many and more at the icon dealers’ stalls.”

Porfiry searched her face for an explanation.

“They’re not mine! I didn’t buy them!” she cried in protest.

Vera ran between the candles shrieking. The child threw herself onto the floor and began to recite a prayer, in childish imitation of something she had evidently seen many times: “Merciful Mother of God, look down with pity on us sinners…”

“Zoya Nikolaevna?” Porfiry suggested. Lilya nodded. “But how? I mean, where did the money come from? Forgive me, but what I mean to say is, I can’t imagine that she has money to spare on such…” Porfiry gestured sweepingly. He refrained from defining the expenditure as folly.

Lilya didn’t answer. But the tension in her expression was revealing.

“There are some questions I need to ask you, Lilya Ivanovna.” Porfiry’s voice was heavy with significance. For the first time, he noticed her new and fashionably simple clothes. She wore a dark blue silk skirt with a brocade hem and a contrasting chemisette of white muslin.

Lilya nodded and led him over to the stove, away from where Vera was now playing with a new porcelain doll. She gestured for him to sit down at the table.

“I went to Fräulein Keller’s,” he began. The color flooded her face. “She told me you’d come into money. She says you’ve found a rich protector. A new boyfriend.”

Lilya shook her head hotly. “Fräulein Keller can only see things through her own eyes.”

“That’s true enough,” said Porfiry, with a half laugh. But then his face became serious as he remembered the depths he had sunk to in order to get information out of the madam. “But Lilya, I look at all this, I look at your dress, at Vera’s toys. When I saw you at the police bureau, you were dressed in hand-me-down rags.”

“I wore what I needed to wear.”

“Yes, of course. But tell me, where did all this come from?”

“Zoya found…some money. That’s all.”

Porfiry noticed the hesitation and frowned skeptically. “She was indeed lucky. But I wonder, did she not think it might belong to someone?”

“You’ve never been poor. You’ve never known what it’s like.”

“I am not here to investigate or judge Zoya Nikolaevna.”

“Why are you here?” It was the same question Raya had asked him at Fräulein Keller’s.

“You know the student Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky.” It was a statement, not a question.

Lilya stared at his strange, colorless lashes. “Yes.”

“We are currently holding him in connection with a possible crime.”

She gave an inarticulate sob of protest. Her eyes questioned and challenged him.

“Anything you can say in answer to my questions will help him.”

“You don’t believe he…”

“I don’t believe he what?”

“Is it to do with Goryanchikov?”

“You know about Goryanchikov?”

“Pavel Pavlovich told me. And…”

“And what?”

Lilya could not meet his flickering eyelashes. She looked away to answer: “Zoya found him. She found him and another man. Dead. In Petrovsky Park.”

“She has a habit of finding things, your Zoya.”

“The money, she found the money there too. It was on the other man. In his pocket.”

“How much?”

“I don’t know. I…” She tried to lie. Then saw his eyelashes. “Six thousand rubles,” came heavily.

Porfiry whistled. And began to laugh. “And she has spent it all on icons and candles, I see.”

“She has been g-generous to us.”

Porfiry smiled at the significant stammer. “It’s easy to be generous with someone else’s money.”

“But he’s dead. The man it belonged to is dead!”

“The man she found it on,” corrected Porfiry deliberately, “was a yardkeeper. How do you suppose a yardkeeper came by six thousand rubles?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you see, it has a bearing on the investigation. The police should have been told about this. When you wrote me your little note, you could have mentioned the six thousand rubles.” Lilya started in amazement. The investigator’s face chided her with gentle irony. “I see my shot has hit the mark. I’m grateful to you for the information you provided, incomplete as it was. Though if Zoya had come forward herself, it would have saved us a lot of trouble, I believe.”

“How did you know?”

“Murder in Petrovsky Park?” Porfiry repeated the words from the anonymous note in a melodramatic whisper. “I didn’t, until you told me that Zoya had discovered the bodies.” Porfiry’s expression became pained as he contemplated his next question. “Was Goryanchikov a client of yours?”

Her shocked expression demanded an explanation of him.

“When you mentioned Goryanchikov, there was something about the way you said his name. And he must have been known to you, otherwise why would Pavel Pavlovich tell you of his death, and how would you know that the body Zoya Nikolaevna had found was his? I’m afraid I asked the question in the way I did because, well, it seemed the most likely way in which any man might be known to you.”

“He came to Fräulein Keller’s. He always asked for me.”

“And what about Virginsky?”

Her brows came together. Her lips seemed to tremble. “It was never like that with Virginsky.”

“But did he know about Goryanchikov? Is it possible that he was jealous?”

“If he was jealous of Goryanchikov, why should he not be jealous of them all?”

“Perhaps he was. In some way.”

“Didn’t the other man do it? The big man hanging from the tree. Zoya said he did it. She found an axe on him. There was blood on it, she said.”

Porfiry sighed wearily.

At that moment, the door to the flat opened. Porfiry looked up to see a round ball of a woman waddle into the room. Her small wrinkled face appeared to have been pinched out of the headscarf that surrounded it. She was carrying a parcel wrapped in brown paper, tied with string.

“Babushka!” cried Vera. She abandoned her doll and jumped up, throwing herself at the old woman, whose solid form absorbed the force of her love. Vera made a great fuss of her Babushka, patting and stroking her and smiling up at her with a face that had its own, child’s, cunning. “Babushka, Babushka, my lovely Babushka! What have you brought for me today?”

The old woman, who had by now noticed Porfiry, chuckled but threw a self-conscious glance toward the kitchen table. “Now, now, child, that’s no way to greet your granny.” But she was looking at Porfiry as she said this.

Vera pawed at the brown paper parcel the old woman was holding. “Is it for me?”

“No, darling, this one’s for Granny.”

“Leave Mamma Zoya be, Vera.”

But the child clung to the old woman, pushing a cheek into the soft padding of her body. Zoya too seemed reluctant to release the child. There was defiance in the way she placed one arm around Vera’s head. With the other, she lifted the brown paper parcel to her bosom.

Porfiry rose to his feet and bowed to Zoya. She picked up the nervousness of Lilya’s movements. She saw that there was something guilty and yet obstinate in the girl’s expression. Things had been said, she knew. She pulled Vera into her for protection.

“Ah, this must be the lady about whom I have heard so much. Zoya Nikolaevna, I presume?”

Zoya was not taken in by his “lady.” She tilted her head slyly in answer.