Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog (30 page)

“But we have been told all this before,” Berdichevsky observed with annoyance. “It is a plausible account, but founded completely on suppositions. Where is this definite clue of yours?”

“Matvei Bentsionovich, I promised you that I would check the alibis of all the leading figures in the case. That is what my agents have been doing today. Yesterday Pyotr Georgievich got completely drunk, carried on shouting and weeping until late into the night, and then the servants fed him herbal infusions to sober him up. That is an alibi. Mr. Sytnikov went straight from here to Madam Gruber’s establishment on Warsaw Street, and stayed there until morning in the company of a certain Zemphira, whose passport gives her name as Matryona Sychkina. That is also an alibi.”

“A fine old two-fingered believer,” said Vladimir Lvovich with a whistle. “I am prepared to wager that Zemphira Sychkina looks at least a little bit like Naina Georgievna—the honorable gentleman has been licking his lips over her for a long time.”

Donat Abramovich held his peace, nonplussed at such a turn of events, but the look that he cast at Bubentsov made it clear that the perceptive psychologist was correct in his supposition.

“But as for Mr. Shiryaev,” said the chief of police, claiming his dramatic effect after all, “he has no alibi at all. Furthermore, it has been established beyond all doubt that he did not return to Drozdovka for the night, nor did he stay in any of the hotels in the town or go to any of his friends here. Permit me to ask you, sir,” he said severely, addressing Stepan Trofimovich, “where and how did you spend last night?”

Shiryaev hung his head and gave no reply. His chest was heaving strenuously.

“There is your definite clue, as good as a confession.”

Lagrange directed Berdichevsky’s and Bubentsov’s attention toward the exposed criminal with a picturesque gesture. Then he clapped his hands loudly three times.

In came two policemen who had obviously been informed about everything in advance, because they immediately walked across to Shiryaev and took him by the arms. He shuddered, but even now he still said nothing.

“Take him to the station,” ordered Felix Stanislavovich. “Put him in the nobles’ cell. Mr. Berdichevsky and I will arrive soon to interrogate him.”

They led Stepan Trofimovich to the door. He kept turning around to look at the princess, and she looked back at him with a strange smile, unusually gentle and almost affectionate. Not a single word passed between them.

When the prisoner had been taken away, Spasyonny crossed himself and declared: “Suffer not for long the doers of evil, for they shall fall into profound torment.”

“As you see,” Lagrange said modestly, addressing primarily Bubentsov and Berdichevsky, “the investigation really did not take very long. Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you all for your assistance and I beg your forgiveness if I have caused you any unpleasant moments.”

These restrained and noble words were pronounced in a stately manner appropriate to the occasion, and when Naina Georgievna started speaking, everyone assumed at first that she was talking about Felix Stanislavovich.

“Now there is a truly noble man for you, not like all the rest,” the young lady said thoughtfully, as if she was talking to herself, and then suddenly raised her voice. “Alas, dear gentlemen guardians of the law. You will have to release Stepan Trofimovich. I deliberately tried to test him, to see if he would tell you. But just imagine—he didn’t! And I’m certain that he will accept hard labor without giving me away…. Stepan Trofimovich did not commit any murder, because he spent the whole of last night at my house. If my words are not enough for you, then question the maid. The way he intervened to defend my honor yesterday touched some chord inside me…But that is of no interest to you. What are you all gawping at?”

She gave a most disagreeable laugh and cast a strange glance at Vladimir Lvovich—challenging and imploring all at once. He smiled without saying anything, as if he was waiting to see if there were any more confessions to come. But when it became clear that everything had been said, the investigative experiment was a categorical failure and Lagrange had been reduced to total confusion, even seeming to have lost the power of speech, Bubentsov turned to the representatives of authority and inquired mockingly: “Well, then, is the evening’s program over? May I go? Undershirt, fetch me my cloak.”

The secretary slithered out of the salon without a murmur and came back half a minute later, already wearing his peaked cap. He handed his lord and master a light velvet cloak with a cape and a uniform cap.

“Good day to you,” Bubentsov said sardonically. He bowed and walked toward the door.

In his foppish outfit he looked from behind exactly like some dandified Guards officer, which, strictly speaking, was exactly who he had been until quite recently.

“The same cloak,” Naina Georgievna declaimed in a loud voice. “The same cap. How it gleamed in the moonlight…”

It was not clear whether the young woman was playing the part of the disconsolate Ophelia or she really had lost her wits and was raving.

“We shall leave your rotten little swamp. Perhaps we shall marry and I shall have children. Then I shall be forgiven everything,” the princess continued with her gibberish. “But first all debts must be repaid, full justice must be established. Isn’t that so, Vladimir Lvovich?”

Vladimir Lvovich stood in the doorway, looking back at her in bewildered amusement.

Then Naina Georgievna proceeded royally past him, brushing him gently with her shoulder, and disappeared into the drawing room. Apparently she had at last learned to make her exit not at a run, but a walk.

“A young lady of iron,” Donat Abramovich drawled in evident admiration. “I do not know to whom she intended to pay back her debts, but I should not like to be in their place.”

“Well, yes,” said Berdichevsky, summing up. “Felix Stanislavovich, Shiryaev will have to be released.”

The chief of police started muttering: “But it still doesn’t mean a thing. They still absolutely must be interrogated. Shiryaev, and Telianova, and the maid. It could be a criminal conspiracy. Any kind of low trickery can be expected from a perverse and hysterical creature like that.”

But no one was listening to him. One by one the participants in the experiment made their way the door.

POLINA ANDREEVNA LISITSYNA returned to her lodgings with the colonel’s widow in a state of profound preoccupation. The venerable Antonina Ivanovna took to her bed immediately after supper and at this late hour she was already dreaming serenely, and so there was no one to distract the houseguest with conversations and questions.

Once in her room, the ginger-haired lady quickly undressed, but she did not proceed with her bedtime toilet, as might have been expected; instead she took a bundle of black robes out of her travel bag and in less than a minute she had transformed herself into the meek Sister Pelagia. Treading softly, she walked along the corridor and slipped out through the kitchen into the street.

The moonless, windy night eagerly accepted the black-robed nun into its equally black embrace, and the nun flitted past the sleeping houses like a faint shadow.

From Pelagia’s point of view, Police Chief Lagrange’s investigative experiment had proved very useful indeed—so useful, in fact, that it had become a matter of urgency for her to talk to Naina Georgievna face-to-face straightaway, without waiting for tomorrow to come. The mysterious photograph entitled “Rainy Morning” had left no impression whatever in Polina Andreevna’s memory, and yet her intuition told her that it might well hold the key to this entire unpleasant episode. Of course, it would have been simpler to go straight to the princess’s house in the character of Mrs. Lisitsyna, but respectable ladies did not go driving around the town alone at night, and they certainly did not wander about on foot—that would attract far too much attention. But who would take any notice of a humble nun?

It was quite a long walk, all the way to the bank of the River, where the old house that Naina Georgievna had inherited stood. It was getting near midnight. At that time of night in Zavolzhsk the only people not sleeping are lovers and police constables on guard duty (although the latter are probably also asleep, in their little booths), and so the nun did not encounter a single living soul along her way.

Our town has a strange appearance on a wet and windy autumn night. It is as if the entire population has been spirited away to a distant, unknown land by some mysterious magical spell, leaving behind only the dark houses with their black windows, the streetlamps with their flames burning low, and the foolish bell towers with their orphaned crosses. And if someone who cannot sleep because his nerves are on edge should start to get frightening ideas into his head, it would be very easy indeed to imagine that power has changed hands in Zavolzhsk and that until the sun and the daylight return, the town will be ruled by the powers of darkness—from whom any kind of foul nastiness may be expected.

In general, the town was a bad place to be out in. Deserted, lifeless, frightening.

CHAPTER 9

Night. The River

WHEN PELAGIA TURNED off into Varravkin cul-de-sac, which led to Naina Georgievna’s house, the sky suddenly lit up without the slightest sound—which made the sight all the more eerie—with a blindingly bright sheet of lightning, and the darkness that followed seemed so dense that the nun was forced to stop, no longer able to make out the outlines of the houses. No sooner had she grown accustomed to it and taken a few more steps than there was another white flash and again she was obliged to wait with her eyes squeezed tightly shut until her pupils, violently assaulted by this atrocious glare, had expanded once more. But this time she could hear a slow, distant rumble of thunder.

And so it went: a dozen or so steps in pitch-darkness, then a momentary orgy of satanic brightness, then again blackness, filled with the low growling of the storm advancing on the town.

The house proved easy to find. Varravkin cul-de-sac ran right to it. Another blaze of lightning lit up the little house with its dead, boarded-up attic floor, the wooden fence, and the leaves of the trees behind it, with their whitish undersides all turned upward by the gusty wind. When the peal of thunder died away she could hear the agitated River roaring in indignation somewhere behind the house and the trees. The bank here rose up especially high, and the channel was narrowed by almost six hundred yards, so that even on the most tranquil of days the confined torrent seethed in anger as it went rushing past the steep cliff, and in bad weather the River grew so furious that it seemed enraged with the town for pressing it so hard and strove to wash away the hateful bank and bring Zavolzhsk tumbling down into its foaming waters.

The orchard that began immediately behind the house merged almost imperceptibly with a birch grove where the public of Zavolzhsk loved to stroll on fine evenings—from the top of the precipice the view across the open expanse of the River was so very fine. It was clear that this grove was already doomed, that in a year or two, or five at the most, the River would undercut it, tear it down, and carry it away downstream, all the way to the Caspian or even beyond. Some wave would cast up a sodden, salt-soaked birch trunk on a distant Persian shore, and swarthy-skinned people would gather around to behold this great marvel. After the high waters of spring one of the birches was already on the point of tumbling over the steep cliff, only clinging on with its final snag of root, dangling above the rushing rapids like a white finger pointing outward and upward. The wildest of the young boys were in the habit of rocking up and down on it, and many people said that the tree ought to be pushed over the edge out of harm’s way before there was a tragic accident, but somehow no one had ever gotten around to doing it.

Pelagia shuddered in the wind as she stood for a moment at the gate, gazing at the dark windows of the house. It seemed as though she would have to wake Naina Georgievna. That was awkward, of course, but this was a serious matter.

The gate creaked in complaint as it opened and the steps of the old porch squeaked in different voices, like the keys on a broken old piano. The nun listened to see if she could hear any sound from inside the house. It was quiet. What if nobody was there?

Resolutely grasping the bronze knocker that took the place of a bell, she knocked loudly. And again she listened.

No, there was someone there after all—she thought she heard a voice say something, or was it the squeak of a door hinge?

“Open the door!” the nun shouted. “It is I, Sister Pelagia from the episcopal see.”

Had she imagined it then? There was not a sound.

She pushed and pulled at the door—it was bolted on the inside. That meant they were at home, but asleep and so could not hear her. Or perhaps they could hear her, but they did not wish to let her in?

Pelagia knocked again, a little longer this time, to make it quite clear that she was not going to leave empty-handed. The echoing crash of the bronze knocker was so thunderous that someone—either the mistress of the house or the maid—was bound to wake up.

And once again, from somewhere deep inside the house, she heard a low voice calling, this time quite distinctly. As if someone had sung a few notes quietly and then fallen silent.

That was really strange.

Pelagia came down from the porch and walked around under the windows. As was only to be expected, they were slightly open—it had been muggy earlier in the evening, as the thunderstorm approached. Hoisting up her habit almost as far as her waist, the nun climbed onto the step in the wall, grabbed hold of the windowsill, and pushed the window frame.