Boris Akunin: The Winter Queen

But now at last on Erast Fandorin's left the bell tower of Holy Trinity Church, which stood beside the Boyar Hotel, hove into view above the roof of Souchet's coffeehouse, and Fandorin quickened his stride in anticipation of important discoveries.

HALF AN HOUR LATER he was wandering with a weary and dejected stride down Pokrovsky Boulevard, where the pigeons — every bit as plump and impudent as on Chistoprudny Boulevard — were fed not by old noblewomen but by merchants' wives.

His conversation with the witness had proved disappointing. Erast Fandorin had caught the landowner's wife at the very last moment — she was on the point of getting into her droshky, piled high with various trunks and bundles, in order to leave Russia's first capital city and set out for the province of Kaluga. Out of considerations of economy, Spitsyna still traveled in the old-fashioned manner, not by railway but with her own horses.

This was undoubtedly a stroke of good fortune for Fandorin, since had the landowner's wife been hurrying to reach the railway station, no conversation at all would have taken place. But no matter which approach Erast Fandorin adopted in the discussion with his garrulous witness, its essential content remained entirely unaltered: Xavier Grushin was right, it was Kokorin that Spitsyna had seen — she had mentioned his frock coat and his round hat and even his patent leather gaiters with buttons, which had not been mentioned by the witnesses from the Alexander Gardens.

His only hope now was Kukin, and Grushin was very probably right about him as well. The shopkeeper had simply blurted out the first thing that came into his mind, and now he had Fandorin trudging all the way across Moscow and making a laughingstock of himself in front of the superintendent.

The glass door bearing the image of a sugar loaf at the grocery store Brykin and Sons faced directly out onto the embankment, offering a clear view of the bridge. Fandorin noted that immediately. He also noted the fact that the windows of the shop were flung wide open (evidently because of the sweltering heat), so that Kukin might well have been able to hear a "metallic click," since the distance to the nearest stone bollard of the bridge was certainly only fifteen paces at the most. A man of about forty wearing a red shirt, a black woolen-weave waistcoat, velveteen trousers, and bottle-shaped boots peeped around the door with an intrigued expression.

"Can I be of any help, Your Honor?" he asked. "Perhaps you've managed to lose your way?"

"Kukin?" Erast Fandorin inquired in a strict voice, not expecting to derive any consolation from the imminent explanations.

"Indeed, sir," the shopkeeper replied cautiously, knitting his bushy eyebrows. Then, immediately guessing the truth, "Ah, you must be from the police, Your Honor? I'm most humbly grateful to you. I didn't expect you would be attending to me so soon. The local officer said his superiors would consider the matter, but I didn't really expect anything, sir, not really, sir. But why are we standing out here on the doorstep? Please, come into the shop. I'm most grateful to you, sir, most grateful."

He even bowed and opened the door and made a gesture of invitation as much as to say "after you," but Fandorin did not budge. He said portentously, "Kukin, I am not from the local station. I am from the Criminal Investigation Division. I have instructions to find the stu… the person you reported to the local inspector of police."

"The skewdint, you mean?" the shopkeeper prompted him readily. "Of course, sir, I remember his looks most precisely. A terrible thing, may God forgive him. As soon as I saw he'd clambered up on that post and put that gun to his head, I just froze, I did. That's it, I thought, it'll be just like it was last year — there'll be no tempting anyone into this shop, not even for a fancy loaf. And what fault is it of ours? What draws them here like bees to honey to do away with themselves? Stroll on down that way to the Moscow River — it's deeper there and the bridge is higher and… "

"Be quiet, Kukin," Erast Fandorin interrupted him. "You'd do better to describe the student. What he was wearing, what he looked like, and why you decided he was a student in the first place."

"Why, he was a skewdint right enough, he was, a real proper skew-dint, Your Honor," the shopkeeper said in surprise. "Uniform coat and buttons and little glasses perched on his nose."

"A uniform coat, you say?" Fandorin exclaimed abruptly. "He was wearing a student coat, then?"

"Why, what else, sir?" asked Kukin with a pitying glance at the dim-witted functionary. "If not for that, how was I to tell as he's a skewdint or he isn't? I reckon I can tell a skewdint from a clerk by his coat, so I do."

Erast Fandorin could not really make any response to that just remark, so he took a neat little notepad with a pencil out of his pocket in order to record the witness's testimony. The notepad, which Fandorin had bought just before entering service with the Criminal Investigation Division, had lain idle for three weeks, and today was the first time he had had any use for it. In the course of the morning he had already covered several of its small pages with his fine writing.

"Tell me what this man looked like."

"Just an ordinary sort of person, really. Nothing much to look at, a bit pimply around the face, like. And them little glasses…"

"What kind of glasses — spectacles or a pince-nez?"

"You know, the kind on a ribbon."

"A pince-nez, then," said Fandorin, scribbling away with his pencil. "Any other distinctive features?"

"He had this terrible slouch, with his shoulders almost up over the top of his head___A real skewdint, like I told you…"

Kukin gazed in perplexity at the "clerk," who said nothing for a long time, frowning, rubbing his lips together, and rustling his little notepad. Obviously he was thinking about something.

In the notepad it said: "Uniform coat, pimples, pince-nez, bad slouch." Well, a few pimples didn't mean much. The inventory of Kokorin's possessions didn't say a word about any pince-nez. Perhaps he had dropped it? It was possible. The witnesses in the Alexander Gardens had not said anything about a pince-nez either, but they had not really been questioned much about the suicide's appearance. What would have been the point? A slouch? Hm. As he recalled, the Moscow Gazette had described "a handsome young fellow," but the reporter had not been present at the incident. He had not seen Kokorin, and so he could easily have stuck in the "handsome young fellow" simply for the sake of effect. That only left the student uniform coat, and that was something that could not be discounted. If it had been Kokorin on the bridge, it meant that during the interval between shortly after ten and half past twelve for some reason he had changed into a frock coat. But where, though? From the Yauza to Ostozhenka Street and then back to the Moscow Fire Insurance Company was a long way; you couldn't possibly cover the distance in an hour and a half.

Fandorin realized with a hollow, sinking feeling that only one alternative remained open to him: to take the shopkeeper Kukin by the collar and drag him down to the station on Mokhovaya Street, where the suicide's body was still lying in the mortuary, packed in ice, and arrange an identification. Erast Fandorin imagined the gaping skull with the crust of dried blood and brains, and an entirely natural association brought back the memory of the merchant's wife Krupnova with her throat cut, who still continued to visit him in his nightmares. No, he definitely did not wish to make the trip to the "cold room." But there was some connection between the student from the Malaya Yauza Bridge and the suicide from the Alexander Gardens that absolutely had to be cleared up. Who could tell him whether Kokorin had pimples and a slouch and whether he wore a pince-nez?