R. Morris: A Razor Wrapped in Silk

Maria Petrovna broke off, distracted by the enamelled cigarette case which Porfiry was holding up expectantly. ‘Forgive me for interrupting you, Maria Petrovna, but I fear we are reaching the point at which it is necessary for me to smoke.’

Virginsky and Maria Petrovna watched the lighting of the cigarette, which had a ritualistic formality to it. There was a practised crispness to Porfiry’s movements, culminating in his eyelids quivering closed with an aesthete’s sensuality at the precise moment of inhalation. ‘I beg you to continue. You were talking about the decline in attendance.’

‘Yes,’ continued Maria Petrovna, somewhat nonplussed. ‘As I said, I thought nothing of it. And then Mitka stopped coming.’

‘Mitka?’

‘Dmitri Krasotkin, an employee of the Nevsky Cotton-pinning Factory. A foundling, ten years of age. All the children love to learn — really, they do! — but with Mitka it was more than that. It was something fiercer. A desperate need. He hung on my every word, picked things up so quickly. He showed a remarkable aptitude and I believe he realised that our little school offered him some hope of escaping his terrible life at the factory. It is back-breaking work they put them to, you know, and it’s a tragedy to see a boy like Mitka, who is capable of so much, worn down by it. When he repeatedly failed to attend the school, I made enquiries at the factory. He had gone missing from there too. They assumed he had run away. Truth to tell, they cared little what had become of him and were only exercised insofar as his disappearance inconvenienced them and depressed their productivity. The foreman, an Englishman called Beck, whose Russian I could barely understand, pretended to believe that I had something to do with Mitka’s disappearance. I also had an unpleasant interview with the old woman who supervised the apprentice house, who made such disgusting insinuations that I question her suitability to hold any position of responsibility over children.

‘So troubled was I by Mitka’s disappearance that I made enquiries concerning the other children who had ceased attending around the same time as he. Some had simply dropped out and I was relieved enough to discover them alive, though the conditions of their lives distressed me. However, there were two other children, Artur Smurov and Svetlana Chisova, the former a worker at the Nobel metal works, the latter employed by the Miller tobacco factory, who have also disappeared without trace, or so it seems. It was at this point that I decided to take my discoveries to the police.’

‘I see. And what was their reaction … to your discoveries?’ Porfiry stretched the question out with an ironic air of knowing what the answer would be.

‘Indifference. Nothing was done.’

‘You made a statement?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘A written statement?’

‘Yes.’

‘At which police station?’

‘It was a station near the Nevsky Cotton-Spinning Factory. On Great Bolotnaya Street. I could tell that it was simply a matter of form. They filed the statement away without even reading it.’

‘When was this?’

‘It was last Friday.’

‘That would have been the twenty-seventh. Thank you. That is helpful.’ Porfiry drew on his cigarette and exhaled with a pained expression. ‘I am afraid, Maria Petrovna, in my experience it is very difficult to find someone who does not wish to be found. Even here in St Petersburg, where we have City Guards every one hundred and fifty paces.’

‘Why are you suggesting that the children do not wish to be found? Isn’t it more likely that some harm has befallen them?’

‘One mustn’t always presume the worst, you know, even if it is a possibility. You yourself commented on the abject misery of their existences. How could they not wish to flee such horrors, especially now that you have opened their eyes to something better?’

The karet had come to a halt, signalling the termination of the discussion. The two horses shifted restively, the clop of their hooves tolling a despondent knell. Panic entered Maria Petrovna’s eyes and seized her voice, raising it a good half octave: ‘You are just like the police. You don’t care.’

‘I am merely trying to place myself in the position of one of these unfortunates. It is a fundamental technique of the investigator. If I were faced with a life of soul-destroying drudgery, I would do everything in my power to escape it.’

Maria Petrovna’s voice, though still charged with passion, returned to its original pitch and firmness of tone. ‘They have. Escape for them was the school. And that is why I know something terrible has happened to them.’

‘Let us sincerely hope not.’

‘Is that it? Is that all you will do? Sincerely hope? Are you not a father yourself?’

Porfiry gave a single slow blink. ‘No, I am not. However-’

‘But you were once a child?’

Porfiry tensed a smile.

‘Do you not owe it to the child you once were to find out what has happened to my children?’

‘We will look into it. You have my assurance.’ Porfiry broke off and peered through the rain-spattered window. A single mass of heavy grey cloud seemed intent on absorbing the city with a cold and soulless greed. The building that faced him, distorted by the prisms of moisture through which he viewed it, appeared almost impossibly dilapidated. It was strangely familiar too, like the architecture of a dream. ‘What street is this?’

‘Stolyarny Lane,’ answered Virginsky. ‘We are back at the department.’

In a city of palaces, the Naryskin Palace did everything it could to assert its pre-eminence, shouldering out of the way its neighbours on the Fontanka Embankment. Built on a plot of land assigned to the first Prince Naryskin by Peter the Great, in gratitude for his services in the war against Sweden, it overlooked the river with a flamboyantly remodelled facade, a blushing pink celebration of Russian baroque.

The evening light exploded softly over it. The day had been clear and bright, a welcome break in the sullen dampness that had squatted over the city for the past week or so. This was autumn’s other face, golden-hued and expansive, but all too briefly seen. The falling leaves had a brittle-edged crispness. There was a crunch, rather than a squelch, underfoot. But it felt like remission. To be shown their glittering city for a day only reminded the citizens of St Petersburg of what they were soon to lose, irretrievably, under the dark, endless months to come. They were days away from the first snows, and they knew it.

Maria Petrovna gazed up at the stone figures on the facade with some sympathy, seeing in their abashed poses a symbolic representation of her own uneasy relationship with the houses of the rich: that of the attached outsider. This was, after all, the world she came from, although the opulence and scale of the Naryskin residence far outstripped that of her own or any other noble family’s home.

But the Naryskin Palace was not so much a place to live as a declaration of self-importance. Ostentation was the guiding aesthetic, even in the private apartments, as if the Naryskins themselves were the ones who most needed reminding of their own wealth and status.

The rooms of the palace were rescued from an intimidating marble coldness by the crowds of portraits and busts purchased from the capitals of Europe at great expense. It was in the same spirit perhaps, to preserve his home from a devastating emptiness, that the current head of the family, Prince Nikolai Naryskin, occasionally threw open his doors, if not to the public, then to that section of the city’s populace that is usually termed ‘society’. It did not inconvenience him to do so. The palace had been planned to accommodate such gatherings. It housed a respectable concert hall, a grand ballroom, and even a theatre, which, though rather more intimate in scale, was nonetheless lavishly decorated.