Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog (20 page)

“And is there anything to go on?” asked the bishop.

“If we look, something will turn up. The thing that bothers me—”

Shiryaev did not let the nun finish what she was saying.

“Why am I standing here rooted to the spot like this!” He shook his head as if he were driving away some hallucination. “Stop her! She will lay hands on herself! She’s delirious!”

He ran out into the corridor. Pyotr Georgievich dashed after him. Arkadii Sergeevich hesitated for a moment, shrugged, and followed them.

“All still chasing after her,” declared Sytnikov.

ALTHOUGH THE MOON was already waning, it was still pleasantly round and shone as bright as a crystal chandelier, and like little lampions the stars did their best to light up the blue ceiling of the sky so that the night was not much darker than the day.

His Grace and Pelagia walked along the main alley of the park and behind them the horses drowsily set one hoof in front of another and jangled their harness as they pulled along the carriage, which seemed almost to merge into the trees and the bushes.

“Ooh, that vulture,” said Mitrofanii. “Did you see the way he sent for Korsh? He won’t back down now until he gets what he’s after. That disturbed girl has made his job easier for him—that’s one heir less. Pelagia, here is what I would like you to do. Prepare Marya Afanasievna so that the news won’t distress her so badly again. It is not easy to discover something like that about your own granddaughter. And stay here for a little while longer, be near my aunt.”

“She won’t be distressed. It seems to me, father, that Marya Afanasievna is far less interested in people than in dogs. Of course, I shall sit with her and console her as best I can, but for the sake of the investigation it would be best for me to come back to town.”

“What investigation do you mean?” His Grace asked, surprised. “The investigation is concluded. And you wanted to find out why this Naina killed the dogs.”

“That’s what’s on my mind. There is something unusual here, Your Grace, something that makes my skin crawl. What you just said about the devil getting into her was very much to the point.”

“That’s just superstition,” said Mitrofanii, even more surprised. “Surely you do not believe in satanic possession? I was speaking metaphorically; it was a figure of speech. There is no devil, but there is evil, formless and ubiquitous, and that is what seduces the soul.”

Pelagia’s spectacles glinted as she looked up at the bishop.

“But the devil does exist! Who was that grinning at the sight of human vileness all evening?”

“You mean Bubentsov?”

“And who else? He is the very devil incarnate. Spiteful, venomous, and fascinating. I am sure he is the key to all this, father. Did you see the looks that Naina Georgievna was giving him? As if she was expecting him to praise her. It was for his benefit that she played out her drama with all that wailing and gnashing of teeth. The rest of us are nothing to her, a mere theatrical backdrop.”

The bishop said nothing, because he had not noticed any such special looks, but he had more faith in Pelagia’s powers of observation than in his own.

They came out of the gates of the park into open space. Here the alleyway became a road that stretched out across the countryside to the Astrakhan highway. The bishop halted to allow the carriage to reach them.

“But why do you need to come to town? Naina will not stay there for long, surely she will go away. As soon as the news of her antics gets out, nobody will want to have anything to do with her. And she has nowhere to live there. She is bound to go away, to Moscow or St. Petersburg, if she doesn’t leave the country entirely.”

“Not for anything. Wherever Bubentsov is, that is where she will be,” the nun declared confidently. “And I need to be close by as well. As for the public condemnation, in her present bitter mood Naina Georgievna will only savor it. And she does have a place to live. I heard from the maid that Naina Georgievna has a house of her own in Zavolzhsk, she inherited it from some female relative. Not a large house, but in a lovely setting, with an orchard.”

“So you believe that Bubentsov is involved in all this?” the bishop asked, setting his foot on the step, but still in no haste to get into the carriage. “That would be most opportune. If he were caught out in some villainy, then the synod would have less faith in him. Otherwise I’m afraid I shall be no match for his zeal. In all probability the worst ordeals are yet to come. Return to the see tomorrow, then, and the two of us will put our heads together and think out our problems. I can see that we shall be requiring Miss Lisitsyna’s services in this matter.”

These mysterious words had a strange effect on the nun, who seemed at once delighted and dismayed.

“It’s a sin, father. And we vowed not to—”

“Never mind, this is important business, far more important than the previous cases.” The bishop sighed as he took his seat in the carriage opposite the father subdeacon. “It is my decision and my responsibility before God and man. Well, then, my blessings, my daughter. Farewell.”

And the carriage moved off, picking up speed and darting away almost soundlessly along the dust-covered road, while Sister Pelagia turned back into the park.

She walked along the alley with the sky bright above her, but the trees on both sides fused into dark, solid walls, so that the nun seemed to be moving along the bottom of a strange, luminous ravine.

Lying ahead of her in the middle of her path she saw a white square of some kind, with another little black square at its center. When she and the bishop had walked by here only five or ten minutes earlier there had not been anything of the kind in the alley.

Pelagia quickened her stride in order to reach this curious phenomenon and examine it more closely. When she reached it, she squatted down.

Strange: It was a large white handkerchief with a book in a black leather binding lying on it. She picked it up—it was a prayerbook. A perfectly ordinary prayerbook, the kind that could be found anywhere. What strange goings-on were these?

Pelagia was about to check whether there was anything between the pages when suddenly she heard a rustling sound behind her. Before she had a chance to turn around someone had thrown a sack over her head, scraping her cheeks. Not understanding what was happening, the nun tried to cry out, but her cry was choked off in a hoarse whisper as a loop of rope was drawn tight around the sack. And then a dark, feral terror rose up inside her. Pelagia began struggling, scrabbling with her fingers at the sackcloth and the coarse rope. But strong hands seized her and would not let her break free or loosen the stranglehold. Someone was panting behind her, breathing noisily into her right ear, but she could not even catch her breath.

She tried striking backward with her fist, but it was too awkward—there was no way to get a good swing going. She kicked out with her foot and hit something, but probably not hard enough to hurt—her habit cushioned the blow.

Feeling the ringing in her ears grow louder and the call of the deep, comforting black millpond grow stronger, the nun tore her knitting out of her waist bag, took a firm grasp of the needles, and jabbed them hard into something soft—and then again.

“U-u-ugh!”

A hollow, snarling grunt, and the grip slackened. Pelagia swung the needles again, but this time into emptiness.

There was no longer anyone holding her, no elbow pressing against her throat. She slumped down to her knees, tore off the cursed noose, pulled the sack off her head, and began gasping hoarsely at the air with her mouth, muttering: “Most…Ho…ly…Mo…ther…of…God…preserve me…from my enemies…visible…and invisible…”

As soon as the darkness cleared from her eyes a little, she gazed around keenly in all directions.

Nobody. But the points of her knitting needles were dark with blood.

CHAPTER 6

A Soirée

AND NOW WE shall omit a period of something rather more than a month and move directly to the denouement of our tangled tale, or rather, to the commencement of this denouement, which coincides with a party for select guests that took place at the home of Olympiada Savelievna Shestago. The postmaster’s wife herself preferred, in homage to contemporary art, to honor this festive occasion with the grand title of “soirée,” and so let it remain, especially since
this
soirée will not soon be forgotten in Zavolzhsk.

As for the month omitted by our narrative, one could not say that nothing at all had happened during its course—on the contrary, things had happened, a great many things, but these events had no direct connection to the main line of our narrative and we shall therefore skip through them briefly, “with a light step,” as the ancients used to say.

The modest name of our province thundered resoundingly throughout the length and breadth of Russia, even echoing beyond its borders. The newspapers of Petersburg and Moscow took to writing about us almost every day, separating into two camps, with the supporters of the first asserting that the Zavolzhsk region was the location of a new Battle of Kulikovo Field, a holy war for Russia, our faith, and the church of Christ, while their opponents, in contrast, characterized the events that were taking place as medieval obscurantism and a new Inquisition. Even the London
Times
wrote about us, although not, we admit, on the front page or even the second, saying that in a certain remote corner of the Russian Empire by the name of Zavolger (sic!) instances of human sacrifice had been uncovered, resulting in a tsarist commissioner’s being despatched to the area from St. Petersburg and the entire province being placed under his emergency administration.

Well, as far the emergency administration was concerned—that was something of an exaggeration on the part of the English, but events did nonetheless come thick and fast enough to make your head spin. Vladimir Lvovich Bubentsov, having been vouchsafed the complete support of the higher echelons, proceeded with his investigation into the case of the heads (or, rather, of their absence) with truly Napoleonic panache. A special commission was set up to deal with the case under Bubentsov’s chairmanship, with a membership consisting of special investigators sent from St. Petersburg, and also a few local investigators and police officials—each of whom was selected by Vladimir Lvovich himself. The commission was not subordinated to either the governor or the district procurator and it did not have to report to them about its activities.

Fortunately, no more bodies were discovered, but the police carried out several arrests among the Zyts and one of the prisoners had supposedly admitted that in the dark forests beyond the remote Volochaisk swamps there was a certain clearing in which on Friday nights fires were lit to Shishiga and sacks containing offerings were brought, but as for what was in the sacks, only the elders knew.

The gallant Vladimir Lvovich equipped an expedition and led it himself. He prowled through the swamps and thickets for a number of days and finally discovered a certain clearing that appeared suspicious because, although there was not actually any stone idol, there were the remains of campfires and animal bones. He arrested the headman of the nearby Zyt village, as well as another old man who, according to information in Bubentsov’s possession, was a shaman. They put the prisoners in a cart and set out with them through the wet bog, but on an island in the middle of it the convoy was attacked with clubs and knives by the men of the Zyt village, who were attempting to free their elders. The police guards (there were two of them attached to Bubentsov) took to their heels and Spasyonny was so frightened that he jumped into the swamp and almost drowned, but the inspector himself proved to be made of sterner stuff: He shot one of the attackers dead, the Circassian hacked another two to death with his terrible dagger, and the other rebels fled in all directions.

Vladimir Lvovich later returned to the village with a military detachment, but the houses were all empty—the Zyts had upped and moved away deeper into the forest. Bubentsov’s heroism was written about in all the newspapers, even the illustrated ones, where he was depicted as a fine, upstanding young man with a dashing mustache and an aquiline nose. The hero’s courage earned him an Order of Saint Anne from the emperor and also praise from Konstantin Petrovich—a fact to which the well-informed accorded greater significance than the decoration from the sovereign.

The entire province seemed suddenly to have nearly lost its mind. The forest Zyts had never been known to commit any audacities of this sort. Even during Pugachev’s time they had not rebelled, but served Mikhelson as guides, so what on earth could have got into them now?