A Razor Wrapped in Silk (21 page)
‘My friend!’ Though seemingly casual, and warmly welcoming, his choice of greeting was deliberate and pointed,
reminding the prince of Bakhmutov’s claims over him. To reinforce this he pulled the prince to him in a prolonged embrace, which von Lembke ogled with a sly grin. Prince Naryskin shuddered as he was held by the banker. The venal toady who had greeted him was bad enough, but to be pawed and petted by this Jew, while the fat German licked his lips as if he were a particularly tasty morsel of bratwurst, was more than he could endure. He would make them pay, that was for sure.
Released from Bakhmutov’s grip, Prince Naryskin’s agitation was eased by the sight of a bottle of champagne cooling over ice. Next to it, three crystal flutes had been placed in readiness on a silver tray.
Bakhmutov followed the direction of his gaze. ‘This is a great day.’ He nodded to a waiting lackey. ‘We must celebrate.’
The lackey stepped forward, his white-gloved hands grappling with the wire around the neck of the bottle.
Prince Naryskin felt an intense craving for the champagne. Even so, he had the presence of mind to object: ‘But we have yet to iron out the details of our arrangement. Perhaps we should postpone the celebrations until everything is agreed to our mutual satisfaction. The devil is in the detail, they say.’ His smile snapped into place as he fixed Bakhmutov with a challenging look.
However, the champagne cork popped, and the lackey hastened to catch the foaming spillage in the first of the flutes.
‘Prince is right,’ barked von Lembke, with his characteristic terseness. ‘Detail first.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Bakhmutov impatiently. ‘However, I am confident we will be able to arrange things in a way that we all will find highly satisfactory. Let us first drink a toast.’ He took his glass from the salver and waited for the others to do the same.
‘To Prince Nikolai Naryskin, and the great family of Naryskin of which he is the wise and noble head.’
Although they were meant to flatter, Prince Naryskin found the words strangely offensive: impertinent, in fact, coming from Bakhmutov’s mouth. ‘That’s all very well,’ said the prince, nevertheless sipping his wine. ‘But I have some demands.’
‘Demands! My friend!’ Bakhmutov beamed, as though in making demands Prince Naryskin was paying him the warmest compliment. ‘There is no need to make demands of your friends, when you know that your friends will freely give you everything you desire.’ Bakhmutov gestured expansively around him with his free hand. ‘This will be yours, all this, your bank, as much as it is ours. How do you like it?’
‘It will serve.’
Bakhmutov chortled as if the prince had uttered a great witticism. ‘And the paintings! Did you notice the paintings?’
‘I did. One in particular … a landscape by Robert.’
‘I know the one. It is yours! We will have it packed up and taken round to Naryskin Palace this very day. A small token of our measureless esteem.’
‘A gift? There will be no strings attached?’
‘Merely your signature on the titles we have drawn up.’ Bakhmutov indicated some papers on the boardroom table.
‘It will certainly go well with the three other works by the same artist that I own already.’ But the thought of his Robert collection reminded the prince of less pleasant considerations. ‘What of the outstanding debt I owe to the bank? What will become of that?’
‘Well, once you are director, it could be said to be a debt you owe to yourself,’ said Bakhmutov cheerfully. ‘Which is an interesting position to be in.’
‘Could it not be cancelled?’
‘That is precisely the kind of bold and innovative thinking that we will value once you are signed in as a director,’ said Bakhmutov enthusiastically. More cautiously he added: ‘It is certainly a possibility. However, as I am sure you will understand, it is something that will have to be put to the board. But as the board consists in us, your friends, I can foresee little to prevent you achieving the outcome you desire.’
‘You would do that for me?’
‘Why should we not? For I feel sure that you would do the same for us,
your
friends.’
‘What do you have in mind?’ asked the prince, suspiciously.
‘In fact, it would be truer to say that you would be doing it for yourself, because as a director of the bank, whatever is in the bank’s interest is in your interest too.’
‘What would you have me do?’
Bakhmutov met Prince Naryskin’s darkly anxious enquiry with a deflective smile. ‘Why discuss it now? This is a celebration. The appropriate time to go into these matters fully will be at the next board meeting. I hope and trust we will have the honour of your attendance.’
Prince Naryskin downed the rest of his champagne. He was not used to drinking in the morning. Something shifted within his perception of the room, a slight swimming of reality. His unease began to lift. He felt the situation simplifying. ‘I could have the Robert? It could be hanging in the palace today?’ Suddenly it seemed as though that was all that mattered.
*
‘And what if he finds out it is a fake?’ demanded von Lembke as he and Bakhmutov crossed the foyer of the bank, having seen a
decidedly tipsy Prince Naryskin into his carriage. As the painting in question was being lifted from the wall, Bakhmutov paused to study it with a smile of deep satisfaction. He gave no indication of having heard his partner’s question.
Dr Pervoyedov stood back from the bench, his gaze fixed on the spectroscopic eyepiece attached to his microscope. A curved brass arm clasped a small circular mirror, as though holding it up for examination. It gave the eyepiece an air of raffish inquisitiveness, which was enhanced by a metal kiss-curl at the top of the instrument’s rectangular face. Dr Pervoyedov smiled to himself at the ingenuity of the device. The mirror, and the slit towards which it was directed, allowed a spectrum of natural light to be viewed by the observer alongside the spectrum created by the sample to be inspected, so that any significant discrepancies would be more easily detected.
Outside, the first snow of the season was struggling to distinguish itself in a murky fall of sleet. The natural light in the pathology laboratory of the Obukhovsky Hospital was meagre. To compensate, Dr Pervoyedov had placed a kerosene lamp before a parabolic reflector, to direct light down towards the stage of the microscope.
The material taken from the mirror had dissolved in cold distilled water, which did not rule out its being blood. The scrapings had been brown, consistent with oxidised blood, and the resultant solution had taken on a pale pink colour, the freshness of which again suggested blood. Residues of brown oil-based paint, for example, or dye, would not have reacted in
that way. A drop of this solution was now between glass slides held by the frame of the microscope.
Squinting one eye closed, Dr Pervoyedov stooped to place the other against the brass eyepiece. His field of vision was flooded with shimmering strips of colour, contained within an infinite vault of black. There was always something miraculous in the moment when the truth of a theory was revealed in a startling, living experience. White light is made up of all the colours of the spectrum: his mind had always been capable of grasping that fact. But now his soul was bathing in it. He gazed into the vibrant strips of colour, each one both irrefutably bold and tantalisingly insubstantial. The colours existed somewhere he could never reach.
As he adjusted the lens, bringing the bands of colour in and out of focus, he was able to identify the two distinct spectra. The spectrum on the right, cast by the unfiltered light from the mirror, was clear. In the spectrum on the left, two dark bands jumped out at him immediately, one running through the green strip, the other where the green met the yellow. Dr Pervoyedov consulted Chapman’s article in the
Lancet
of June, 1863. There was a monochrome figure that endeavoured to represent the seven colours of the spectrum. Two thick black lines cut across the diagram, and although they did not look exactly like the soft-edged bands of negation that he had seen, they were in the same relative positions on the spectrum. This was blood. Arterial blood.
Dr Pervoyedov removed the slide from the microscope stage. He then lifted a test tube containing a thin pinkish solution from a rack. He drew off some of the liquid with a pipette and allowed a drop to fall on to a second glass slide.
This time he saw a single, broader, softer beam of darkness, again cutting across the green band, close to the yellow. He finely adjusted the screw that controlled the lens and the single dark strip separated into two distinct absorption lines with a fuzz of green between them.
The pattern corresponded to a second diagram in Chapman’s article. The solution made from the material taken from Yelena Filippovna’s ring was also blood, but venous blood, rather than arterial.
Dr Pervoyedov again looked through the spectroscope eyepiece to confirm his interpretation. He had succeeded in giving Porfiry Petrovich what he expected – exactly what he had expected, he shouldn’t wonder.
*
‘It would have been better, Pavel Pavlovich, if you had brought the man and not the tunic.’ Porfiry Petrovich stood at the window of his chambers, looking out at a bleak, sleet-filled sky. He turned to face Virginsky with a woeful expression. ‘Or better still, the man
and
the tunic.’
Porfiry lifted his bandaged hand. The dressing was loose and grubby, in places even stained with ink. With his free hand, Porfiry attempted to tighten it, but the cotton strip unravelled in his fumbling fingers. Porfiry shook it loose from his hand, causing a wad of gauze to fall on the floor. He picked this up and examined it. Blowing the dust off, he turned it over and placed it again on his hand. Clasping the end of the bandage with his thumb, he began winding.
Virginsky watched with a mixture of fascination and horror.
Porfiry bound the hand slowly, straining the bandage to keep it taut, and pausing after every turn to check that the
dressing was holding its shape. At last he reached the end of the bandage, to which he gave one last sharp tug before folding it under one of the tightly bound edges. As soon as he let go, the dressing returned to its earlier laxity. Porfiry let out a despairing sigh. ‘What were we talking about?’
Virginsky said nothing but looked resentfully across at the tunic, which was draped over Porfiry’s desk. Even without a Guards officer in it, the article succeeded in attaining a certain swagger.
‘Ah yes, the man in the white tunic. Of course, it was not Mizinchikov,’ continued Porfiry blithely, again beginning to re-bandage his hand. ‘A fugitive from the law – and a deserter to boot – would not draw attention to himself in such a way. Singing for alms, you say?’
‘It was not Mizinchikov,’ confirmed Virginsky with a display of impatience. ‘This man was older than Mizinchikov. And from the look of him, had been living rough for quite some time. Years, I would say. It’s strange, beneath the grime, he had surprisingly regular features. In his time, I expect he was capable of cutting quite a figure. He had the face of an actor – of a leading man gone to seed.’
‘Really? How interesting. And his hair? What colour was his hair?’
‘Difficult to tell. It was very dirty.’ Virginsky was staring at Porfiry’s dressing as he said this.
‘Dark?’
‘No. It was the colour of dirty straw.’
‘So, an ageing, once good-looking man with blond hair. No, that does not sound like a young officer of the Preobrazhensky Regiment, does it?’ Porfiry let out a wheezing chuckle. ‘The likelihood is that Captain Mizinchikov exchanged clothes with
this beggar soon after making his escape from the Naryskin Palace. We are looking for a beggar, Pavel Pavlovich. Or rather, a Guards officer in a beggar’s garb.’
‘There is no shortage of beggars in St Petersburg.’
At that moment, the clerk Zamyotov, in his usual manner, barged in without knocking. Virginsky was relieved to have some other object upon which to focus his gaze. ‘A communiqué from the Obukhovsky Hospital.’ Zamyotov held the buff-coloured envelope out towards Porfiry from the doorway, making no effort to cross the room to hand it to him. Virginsky took it from him and opened it.
‘Dr Pervoyedov writes to inform you that the substance taken from the mirror is indeed blood.’
‘I see,’ said Porfiry, striding from the window to take the letter, his preoccupation with the bandage forgotten. ‘Arterial blood, no less. Whereas the blood on the ring is venous.’
‘Is that significant?’
Porfiry mimed slashing his own throat. ‘Arterial.’ He then slapped himself on the face. ‘Venous.’
‘So the blood on the mirror is hers, most likely. And the blood on the ring is his. Just as we suspected.’
‘It would seem so. And now it occurs to me, Pavel Pavlovich, that it would be expedient to have Dr Pervoyedov apply his new contraption to analysing the stains on the front of this tunic.’
‘What else could they be but blood?’ said Virginsky. ‘They certainly look like blood.’
‘Do they? Could they not equally be soup? Or rust? Or red wine?’
‘No, not red wine,’ insisted Virginsky, with almost petulant force. ‘That is not the colour of red wine. Neither is it borscht.
And although they are rust-coloured, they could not be rust. Whatever caused these stains was liquid when it hit the tunic. The most likely explanation is blood. But as you say, Dr Pervoyedov will be able to confirm it.’
‘Yes. And shall we take bets on whether it is arterial or venous?’
‘I am not a gambling man, Porfiry Petrovich,’ said Virginsky, his cold disapproval on the edge of self-righteousness.
‘Pity.’ Porfiry seemed to notice for the first time that Zamyotov was still lurking by the door, like a porter waiting for a tip. ‘Was there something else, Alexander Grigorevich?’
‘He’s here.’
‘Who is here?’
‘The new man. Your …
servant
. I have interviewed the applicants. My recommendation is waiting to see you.’
‘I see.’ Porfiry looked down at the louche, seedy sleeve around his hand. ‘Yes. Perhaps now would be as good a time as any to see him.’