Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel (8 page)

And after that, as he thought out loud (which was a habit the investigator had), he addressed his remarks only to Pelagia, paying no attention to the others present, even to the district police commander. Obviously Sergei Sergeevich found it more interesting, or shall we say exotic, to address his rhetorical questions to the quick-witted nun.

“Well, then, Sister, shall we examine the clothes now?” he said, picking through the victim’s wardrobe: nankeen trousers, a waistcoat, a white linen mantle with a blue stripe. “Right, then. There’s no label on the trousers. Trashy trousers, bought at a flea market. And he was traveling first class, with the ‘treasury’ The little skinflint… What do we have on the shirt? Is there a laundry mark? What do you think on that score, Sister?… You think right, our prophet didn’t employ the services of a laundry … We’ll put the boots aside for the moment, the seams have to be slit open.”

Having finished with the clothing, Dolinin looked around and nodded to himself. “Well, then, that seems to be all for the cabin. Let’s examine the periphery. And, of course, the two of us will start, my sweetheart, with the means of entry.”

He fiddled at the door, unscrewing and removing the lock with his own hands, then studying it through a magnifying glass.

“Lit-tle scrat-ches,” Sergei Sergeevich purred. “Fresh. A picklock? Or a new key? Let’s find out.”

Then he moved on to the window and found something there that interested him. He climbed up and knelt on the little table, then leaned across.

Reaching one hand back behind him, he snapped his fingers impatiently.

“A light here, a light!”

Two men dashed over to him at the same time—the captain and police commander. The first held out a kerosene lamp, the second an electric torch.

Dolinin chose progress. Shining the electric torch on the slot in the frame, he said slowly, “Someone used a hack on this. That’s clear, then. Now, Sister, there you have the answer to our puzzle. Take a look.” Pelagia looked, but she couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

“Surely you see it?” Sergei Sergeevich asked in surprise. “The screws have been backed out. And there are traces of oil. A
razin
has been at work here, it’s their trademark.” And he explained to Pelagia who the
razins
were. Although she lived by the River, she had never heard anything about these people before.

“The picture is growing clearer,” the investigator declared with a satisfied air. “There’s nothing like doing the job right! Manuila woke up when the thief had already pulled the casket out from under him. There was a fight. The
razins
don’t usually go in for murder, but this one must have lost his head over the big money. Or he got frightened. And so he hit him.”

There was a tap-tap on the door. A head in a peaked cap was thrust into the room. “Your Excellency, look, they found it on the deck. By the edge.”

Sergei Sergeevich took the canvas sack with the broken string from the policeman and rummaged inside it. He took out a pair of spectacles with gold frames, a porcelain pipe, a tailor’s rule, and a rubber ball. The investigator’s brow furrowed into deep folds of incomprehension, but almost immediately smoothed out again.

“Why, it’s a swag bag!” the master detective exclaimed. “The sack the
razins
use for putting their loot in. Here, this is the confirmation of my hypothesis!”

“Then why did the thief abandon it?” asked Pelagia.

Dolinin shrugged.

“Why would a
razin
want this trash if he’d got his hands on some serious loot? He tore it off his shoulder so that it wouldn’t get in his way, and discarded it. And he wasn’t really himself after the murder. He wasn’t used to it.”

Everything fitted. Pelagia was impressed by the sharp wits of the man from St. Petersburg, but her own thoughts were already hurrying on. “How can you tell which of the passengers is a
razin
? Do they have any distinctive features?”

Sergei Sergeevich smiled condescendingly. “If it’s a
razin—
and it definitely
is
a
razin—
then his trail has been cold for ages.”

“Where could he have gone? No one has been allowed off the steamer. The
Sturgeon
hasn’t moored at the shore.”

“And what of it? Cold water’s no problem for a
razin
, they swim like water rats. He slid down the anchor chain into the water, and he was gone. Or he jumped off earlier, immediately after the murder. Never mind. Give me a while. All the rest is just a matter of time now, Sister. I’ll send a request to all the departments along the river. We’ll find him all right…. What’s that you’re looking at there?”

While listening to Dolinin, Pelagia had gone across to the divan and carefully touched the pillow. “It doesn’t fit,” she said, leaning down and looking closer. “It simply doesn’t fit.”

“What doesn’t fit?” asked the investigator, walking up to her. “Come on now, come on, out with it.”

“Your solution to the puzzle won’t work. There wasn’t any fight, and the victim didn’t grab the killer by the hand. He was killed on the bed. Look,” said Pelagia, pointing, “there’s the imprint of a face in the pillow. That means that when the blow was struck, Manuila was lying face down. And there are drops of blood around it, oval ones. So they fell down from above. If he had jerked his head up, the drops would run on a slant.”

Sergei Sergeevich muttered in embarrassment: “Well, now, that’s right… And the trickles of blood on the face run from the back of the head to the nose. You’re right. I repent, I was careless. But then, begging your pardon, how did the body come to be on the floor, and in such a pose?”

“The killer dragged it off the divan. He pulled up his shirt and put the torn piece of a hundred-ruble bill in his hand. That’s the only possible explanation. As for why he did it—I’d rather not think about that.”

The investigator fixed the nun with a perplexed stare, paused for a little while, and shook his head. “What crazy nonsense. No, no, Sister, you’re mistaken. I think it happened differently. You have no idea how hard these so-called ‘prophets’ and ‘elders’ are to do away with. There’s some genuinely diabolical kind of energy smoldering inside them, and killing anyone possessed like that is no easy matter. I remember an instance from the time when I was still a court investigator. I was handling the case of the murder of a certain prophet of the Skoptsy sect. His spiritual sons very nearly took his head clean off him with an axe, it was left hanging by a single scrap of skin. Well, the prophet, just imagine, carried on running around the room and waving his arms for another minute. Blood spurting out of him like a fountain, his head bobbling about behind his shoulders like a rucksack, and he’s still running. How do you like that? It must have been the same with our Manuila here. The
razin
thought he’d killed him and stopped in the middle of the cabin to count the banknotes. But the dead man suddenly came to life and made a dash to get his money back.”

“With a hole like that in his head? With his brain damaged?” the doctor said doubtfully. “But then, all sorts of strange things do happen. The physiology of premortem convulsions has been too little studied by science.”

Pelagia did not argue—Sergei Sergeevichs explanation appeared more convincing than her own. So it seemed that this “puzzle” had been solved after all.

But others soon came to light.

The passenger in number thirteen

“AS YOU WISH, but even so, he still pulled up the dead man’s shirt,” said Pelagia. “Did you notice the folds? They ran down from the chest in the form of a letter V. If he had fallen, they wouldn’t have been like that.”

“Really?” Dolinin looked at the dead body, but owing to the modest nun’s good offices the shirt had been pulled down, so that no folds remained.

That did not put the holy sister off her stride. “You can look afterward, in the photographs. So it turns out the killer wasn’t at all horrified by what he had done; what he wanted was definitely to mock his victim. It takes a special personality type to act like that.”

Sergei Sergeevich looked into the meticulous witness’s eyes with extraordinary intensity. “I can sense you have some reason for saying that. Do you have any grounds for suspecting anyone?”

The investigator’s astuteness made the holy sister lower her eyes. She had no grounds for suspicion, there was no way she could have. But the abominable prank to shame the dead body and, even more so, the eyeballs that had come out of their sockets had reminded her of another trick of a similar character. Should she tell, or would that be wrong?

“Well, then?” said Dolinin, pressing her.

“It’s not really a suspicion,” the nun said, and hesitated. “It’s just that there is a certain gentleman traveling onboard … tall, with a long mustache, wearing thigh boots. And he has a glass eye. I’d like to know who that man is.”

The investigator looked at Pelagia from under his eyebrows, with his head lowered, as if he were trying to read in her face what she had left unsaid. “Tall, long mustache, in thigh boots, with an artificial eye?” he said, repeating the description and turned to the captain. “Is there someone like that?”

“There is, sir, in cabin number thirteen. Mr. Ostrolyzhensky, he has a ticket from Nizhni to Kazan.”

“In thirteen?”

Dolinin turned rapidly on his heels and went out. The others exchanged glances, but refrained from any exchange of opinions. The captain poured some water from a carafe, wiped the edge of the glass with his handkerchief, and drank voraciously. Then he poured himself some more. Pelagia, the police commander, the doctor, and the photographer watched his Adam’s apple twitching above the collar of his white tunic.
Ah, that was very wrong
, Pelagia thought uneasily.
I’ve cast a shadow on someone without any good reason…
.

The captain had barely polished off his second glass of water and set about a third, when the door swung open sharply. “Did you order all the passengers to stay in their cabins?” Dolinin barked at the captain from the doorway.

“Yes.”

“Then why is thirteen empty?”

“How do you mean, empty? I saw Mr. Ostrolyzhensky go in there with my very own eyes! And I warned him not to go anywhere until he was specifically instructed!”

“Warned him! You should have put a sailor in the corridor!”

“But it’s absolutely impossible! By your leave, I …”

The captain dashed toward the door.

“Don’t bother,” Sergei Sergeevich said with a frown of distaste. “I’ve just come from there. His luggage is all there, but the passenger’s gone. I forbid anyone to go in and touch anything. I’ve put a police constable on the door.”

“I don’t understand a thing,” said the captain, shrugging and spreading his hands.

“Search the vessel!” Dolinin ordered with a gloomy, intense expression. “From the funnel to the coal hole!”

The captain and the police commander ran out into the corridor, and the investigator spoke to the nun in a completely different tone of voice, as an equal to an equal. “This Glass-Eye of yours has disappeared. So there you have it, Mademoiselle Pelagia, puzzle number two.”

The holy sister was not offended by the ironic “Mademoiselle,” because she realized the free-and-easy form of address was not intended as mockery, but as an expression of liking.

“This man is no
razin,”
the investigator mused. “They never take tickets, especially not in first class. He’s probably a dasher. It’s their style.”

“A dasher—is that a bandit?”

“Yes, from one of the respected gangs on the River. Or else a casual migrant—there are quite a few lone wolves among them.”

The suspicious disappearance of the man with one eye freed Pelagia of her sense of guilt, and she grew bolder: “You know, that man really did look like a bandit. Only not some petty predator, not even a wolf, but something like a tiger or a leopard.” Once she had said it, she felt ashamed of her excessively flowery turn of phrase, and so she switched to a dry, businesslike tone of voice. “What I don’t understand is this. If the murder was committed by a high-class bandit, then what do we make of the sack, what was it called—a swag bag? What would a man like that want with petty theft?”

“A puzzle,” Dolinin admitted. “A definite puzzle.” And he made an entry in his notebook.

He leafed through the small pages covered in writing and sketches, and began summing up: “That would seem to be all for the initial investigation. And so, thanks to you, dear Sister, we have acquired a prime suspect. We have his description—I’ll take it down from your words in more detail later—and also his name. Although the name is most likely false. Now we need to examine the victim.” Dolinin leaned down over the corpse and frowned in annoyance. “Just look at how distorted his face is. Identification’s going to be a problem.”

“Why does he have to be identified?” the nun asked in surprise. “After all, he wasn’t traveling alone, he had companions. They’ll identify him.”