R. Morris - A Razor Wrapped in Silk

The steam room was quiet but not empty. Porfiry indicated a corner as far away as possible from any others.

They laid their hired towels out on the tiled bench that ran around the wall and sat down at right angles to one another.

‘Why are we here, Porfiry Petrovich?’ Virginsky posed the question with wry indulgence.

‘To sweat.’ Porfiry blinked rapidly. The sweat was flooding his eyes. The hot steam, too, made it difficult to see. ‘The salutary properties of the banya are well-known. I myself particularly value the steam vapour’s efficacy in clearing excess catarrh from my chest and nasal passages. At this time of year, I am prone to pneumonia. Only the banya can keep it at bay. In addition, the heat is cleansing spiritually as well as bodily. I feel the pores of my soul opening up.’ Porfiry closed his eyes and inhaled deeply through both nostrils. ‘Ideas and influences flow more freely through me. And, of course, there is the fact that one is naked. As a newborn babe.’

‘In a pointed hat.’

‘Ha! Naked, one is more aware of one’s humanity.’ With a grunt of exertion, Porfiry cracked the birch whisk down across his distended belly. The pain of the blow melted into the pain of the heat. He felt the boundary of his body open up even more, in an almost transcendent sense of physical dissolution. His wince relaxed into a blissful smile. ‘One feels the dirt and detritus of everyday life slip away. The mind is freed. The body restored. On top of all this, I find it has a palliative effect on my haemorrhoids.’

Virginsky gave a sly smile. ‘So … it was not to get away from Slava?’

Porfiry’s lips puckered out to kiss the steam. He licked the sweat dripping from his upper lip. ‘I can think here,’ was all he conceded. He laid his head back against the wall, eyes closed as he flicked his shoulders lazily with the whisk.

‘Do you not think, Porfiry Petrovich, that the arrival of the note obliges us to involve the Third Section? It does, after all, give the case a political aspect.’

Porfiry’s eyes flashed open. He shook the birch twigs towards Virginsky, striking him lightly on the chest.

‘Well?’ insisted Virginsky, evidently not satisfied with Porfiry’s response.

‘In my experience, the Third Section needs no invitation to involve itself in cases. We will be hearing from them soon enough. If Slava is indeed a spy, he will already have alerted his superiors to all that he knows — and possibly more. He suspects that I am excluding him now from our deliberations. This will provoke a change of strategy from them. I expect an overt intervention. We have come here to buy ourselves a little time.’

‘Do you not ever ask yourself whom are we fighting, Porfiry Petrovich?’

‘I am not fighting anyone,’ said Porfiry. There was a note of wounded innocence in the assertion. ‘There is a lot to consider here, Pavel Pavlovich. Are we really prepared to accuse Yelena Filippovna of murdering three children to whom she has the most tangential of connections, on the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence?’

‘You saw the marks. You saw the ring. It is not fanciful. That bruise is a precise imprint of the emblem on her ring — which she wore twisted round in such a way as to inflict just such a bruise.’

‘But the woman is dead. She cannot defend herself against the charge. And as yet, we have no motive.’

‘We must … speak to Maria Petrovna.’ Virginsky’s eyes darted uneasily, as if even he shrank from what he was suggesting.

Porfiry sighed. ‘Even to voice such allegations to someone who was a friend of the deceased is brutal.’

‘Frankly I am surprised at your fastidiousness, Porfiry Petrovich. You have never baulked at brutality before.’

Porfiry met this accusation with a look of mild rebuke. ‘But she is dead, Pavel Pavlovich!’ he insisted.

‘What difference does that make?’

‘She cannot be saved. We can only pray for her soul.’

‘With all respect, it is not our job to concern ourselves with saving people, Porfiry Petrovich. We must only uncover the truth and set in motion whatever judicial process arises from that truth. We are not concerned with souls.’

‘Perhaps you are right.’ Porfiry felt suddenly light-headed. ‘But what if she is innocent!’ He made the cry plaintively. ‘The note does not accuse her directly.’

‘Now it is you who are making a specious assumption, Porfiry Petrovich. You are assuming that whoever wrote the note knows who killed the children. But we cannot even be certain that they are referring to the same dead children. The note speaks only of children killed by the oppressive machine . That could just as easily refer to children dying of malnutrition, unnecessary disease, or factory accidents.’

‘If whoever wrote the note fulfils his promise, we are facing a bloodbath — in which all the victims will be highborn.’

‘A revolution, in other words.’

Porfiry stirred the vaporous air in front of his face with the birch whisk, as if to see more clearly.

‘If Yelena Filippovna did not kill these children then someone else did. Someone wearing a Romanov ring. Possibly — it is not beyond the bounds of possibility — a member of the Imperial Family. Perhaps you now regret allowing the Tsarevich the opportunity to make his escape to the Crimea?’

‘No!’ cried Porfiry. ‘Will you go from accusing a dead woman to making unspeakable allegations against the Tsarevich?’

Dim shapes stirred in the hot mist. The murmurs of outrage and excitement were audible.

‘Our first loyalty is to the truth, Porfiry Petrovich. Now, thanks to the Tsar’s own reforms, no one is above the law.’

‘But it always comes back to this question of why. Why would the Tsarevich murder these children?’

‘I do not insist that it is he. It could be any member of the family.’

‘You will exclude the Tsar, I trust!’

Virginsky rippled his brows. ‘To come back to your question — why would anyone? Perhaps there are some crimes concerning which the question of motive is irrelevant.’

‘Not satisfactory, I’m afraid, Pavel Pavlovich. There is always a motive, however twisted, petty, or tenuous. The motive never justifies the crime, never fully explains it. And we may divine something else at work within the criminal’s mind, whether it be sickness or …’ Porfiry looked away from Virginsky. ‘Some other influence,’ he added reticently, almost sheepishly. Virginsky narrowed his eyes, noting the evasion. ‘But the criminal himself will always provide a motive, in which he believes, categorically.’

‘Is it not sometimes the case that a criminal will provide more than one motive, and that often they are contradictory?’

‘Sometimes the criminal is the last person to understand his own motivation. However, that does not mean that we, as investigators, must forego the attempt to understand. If we give up insisting on a motive, then …’ Porfiry stared into the steam. He had the fleeting sense that it swirled in an infinite abyss, that there was nothing behind it, and therefore nothing behind anything.

‘Then what?’

Porfiry’s expression as he sought Virginsky’s eyes was despairing. ‘Then we have opened the door to moral chaos.’

‘That door is already open,’ answered Virginsky glibly. ‘You know as well as anybody that man is an irrational creature.’ When Porfiry made no reply but stared in mute indignation, Virginsky added: ‘And evil. You were going to say the word yourself, were you not? You drew back at the last moment because you understood that it undermined your argument.’

‘What do I care about arguments!’

‘In that case, you were afraid.’

‘No!’