Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog (33 page)

Pelagia could not go on sitting there, consumed as she was by a fever of speculation. And why should she stay where she was, if she could go and look?

She clambered out of the hut and trotted to where the withered little tree protruded from the ground. Everything was familiar in the park, the twilight and the mist were no hindrance to her, and a minute later the nun was standing beside the memorable English lawn, with the dead aspen cringing beside it.

What was its secret?

Pelagia squatted down and touched the wrinkled leaves, ran her palm down along the smooth trunk. What was this disturbed earth here, by the roots? Ah, yes, that was where Zakusai had been scraping at it with his paws.

But no, surely a puppy could not have dug up so much earth?

The nun put her nose down close to the earth as she examined the hollow.

She remembered how on the very first day the gardener Gerasim had said that the little scamp Zakusai had been taught to eat earth by his father and grandfather. Could that have been here?

If one looked closely, even the grass on this side of the aspen was different from the grass all around—shorter and sparser.

What could the dogs have been interested in here?

Pelagia took a splinter of wood and started scrabbling at the earth—it yielded reluctantly. The work would go quicker if she ran back to the hut for a spade.

And that was what she did, except that she did not take a spade, but a mattock; it would be handier to dig with.

She spat on her hands the way that the workmen had done when they laid the water main to the episcopal see, then swung, hit, and scraped. Then again, and again. The work went quickly. By about the tenth stroke, Pelagia stopped shivering—she had warmed up. The mist swirled above the grass, rising from her ankles up to her knees.

The blade sank into something crunchy, like a cabbage. Pelagia tugged the blade out, and hanging on it was something round and dark, about the size of a child’s head. Because her wits were numbed and there was a strange ringing sound in her ears, the nun did not immediately realize that it was precisely that—a child’s head: yellowish-purple, with the light hair clumped and the eye sockets sunken in mourning.

With a sudden gasp, Pelagia flung the mattock and its nightmarish prize away so abruptly that she slipped on the damp earth and tumbled into the pit that she herself had dug. As she climbed out, wailing softly, she grabbed hold of a cold, slimy root, which promptly slid smoothly out of the earth.

And then Pelagia saw that it was not a root at all, but a hand—hairy, with blue fingernails and a little stump where the ring finger ought to have been.

At this everything went dark before the poor nun’s eyes, because there is, after all, a limit to human endurance and, thanks be to God, Pelagia did not have to suffer any more frights—she suddenly went limp and slid down onto the bottom of the pit in a dead faint.

CHAPTER 10

A Borzoi Pup

WHEN SHE OPENED her eyes, Pelagia saw the vault of heaven hanging low above her, dark blue, studded with faint, motionless stars and supported, as described in the ancient books, on four pillars. This confirmed that Corpernicus had been wrong, which did not surprise the sister in the least, but even made her feel rather glad. Suspended above where she lay was the immense face of His Grace Mitrofanii—gray-bearded, handsome, and sad. Realizing that he was actually the Lord God of Hosts, Pelagia felt even more delighted, and yet she was surprised at her own blindness: How could she have failed to realize something so simple and obvious earlier? It was also suddenly clear that all of this was a dream, but it was a good dream that boded well. Perhaps it was even prophetic.

“What are you gawking at, you scandalous creature?” asked the Lord of Hosts, in the way that God was supposed to talk, with apparent strictness but with love, too. “You have profaned the most honorable episcopal bed with female flesh, such as it has never known in all its days, and you lie there smiling. How am I going to sleep now? I shall probably be tormented by worse temptations of the flesh than Saint Anthony. Look out, Pelagia, or I shall hand you over to the consistory court for indecency—that will teach you. A fine bride of Christ: Lying there covered in mud, soaking wet, almost naked, and in a pit with those revolting objects! Would you be so kind as to explain to me, your foolish pastor, how you ended up there? How did you guess that the heads of the murder victims were buried at that very spot? You can talk, can you?” Mitrofanii leaned down lower in alarm and set a pleasantly cool hand on Pelagia’s brow. “If it is hard for you, then do not talk. Your forehead is all wet. The doctor says it is the fever following a severe shock. You have been unconscious for more than a day. You were carried in people’s arms and driven in a carriage, and all the while you were just like Sleeping Beauty. What on earth happened to you, eh? You can’t say? All right, don’t talk, don’t talk.”

It was only then that the nun guessed the riddle of the pillars and the vault of heaven. It was the canopy above the old bed in the bishop’s bedchamber: brocade stars sewn on the blue velvet.

Pelagia felt very weak, but not all unwell—the exhaustion was a pleasant sensation, like after swimming for a long time.

But I was swimming, she remembered, and for a really long time, too.

She moved her lips and tried her voice. It came out slightly hoarse but clear: “Ah-ah-ah.”

“What, what’s that you say?” the bishop fussed. “Tell me, what shall I get for you? Or shall I call the doctor?”

And he leapt to his feet, ready to run for help.

“Sit down, Your Grace,” Pelagia said to him, cautiously feeling her aching shoulder muscles. “Sit down and listen.”

And she told the bishop about everything that had happened, beginning with the “investigative experiment” and right up to her terrifying excavation, the mere memory of which set her voice trembling and brought tears to her eyes.

Mitrofanii listened without interrupting, only intoning “Lord God in Heaven” or “Son of God” and crossing himself at the most critical points.

But when the nun had finished her account, the bishop went down on his knees before the icon of the Savior hanging in the corner and recited a brief but fervent prayer of thanksgiving.

Then he sat on the bed and, with his eyelashes fluttering rapidly, said: “Forgive me, my little Pelagia, for sending you into such horrors. But I shall never forgive myself, power-loving tyrant that I am. No intentions of good stewardship supported by a bishop’s crook can justify laying such a burden on any Christian soul, let alone upon the weak shoulders of a woman.”

“It offends me to hear talk of the weak shoulders of a woman,” said the nun angrily. “I should like to see what man could swim that far along the River in such a storm, and at night, too. And as for those good intentions and the crook, you should not be so free with them, either. Where in the Scriptures does it say that we should yield to the evil spirit without a battle? I think that would be the worst possible thing. You would do better, Your Grace, to tell me what you have discovered here, while I was lying in a faint. You said ‘heads’? Are they the same ones that were supposedly carried away as a gift to Shishiga? I really only saw one, and a severed hand as well. Where did the hand come from?”

“Wait, wait, don’t hurl so many questions at me all at once,” said Mitrofanii, putting his open hand over her mouth. The bishop’s fingers had a pleasant smell of book bindings and incense. “There was a second head in the pit; you did not dig quite far enough to find it. There was clothing, too. Yes, the heads are the same ones, from the bodies cast up by the River last month. And the identities have now been established—from the hand with one finger missing. Do you remember that the dead man’s arm was cut off at the wrist? Evidently it was cut off deliberately in order to make identification difficult, because it bore too distinctive a feature.”

“Ba boo ad dy?” Pelagia lowed through his palm, meaning, “But who are they?”

The bishop understood her.

“The merchant Avvakum Vonifatiev from the Glukhov district and his nine-year-old son, the boy Savva. The merchant came to see Donat Abramovich Sytnikov to sell a stretch of forest and disappeared. He was not missed at home, because he had told his wife that he was leaving her forever and would not be coming back. They did not get along; she was a lot older than he was. Apparently Vonifatiev wished to use the money he received to start a new life somewhere else. But things did not work out that way…It has been established that Sytnikov bought the forest for thirty-five thousand and paid Vonifatiev on the spot, in cash, after which the father and son set out on foot, even though the hour was late. Sytnikov says that he offered them his britzka, but the merchant refused. He said that he would take a troika at the coaching inn in the nearby village of Sholkovo, but no one at Sholkovo ever saw Vonifatiev. Of course, the police took Sytnikov in for questioning, but I think that he is innocent. He is too rich a man to take such a sin on his soul for the sake of thirty-five thousand. Or perhaps he was tempted by the devil of greed—anything can happen. But that is not the point…” Mitrofanii’s eyes glittered ardently. “The important thing about all this is that…”

He removed his hand from Pelagia’s lips in order to raise a finger in triumph, and the nun immediately made use of the freedom of speech that this gave her: “…that Inspector Bubentsov is in a fine mess,” she said, concluding the sentence for Mitrofanii.

The bishop smiled. “I was about to say ‘the satanic machinations have been confounded,’ but you, my daughter, have expressed it more precisely. The Vonifatievs were killed for money, there was no human sacrifice involved, and there is no site for the worship of Shishiga. Bubentsov had no reason to harass the unfortunate Zyts. His entire investigation and his Extraordinary Commission are not worth a bent penny. This is a gift from God to all of us. Manifested to us through you, through your talents and your bravery. Our imp of mischief has been undone. Now he will go away empty-handed and receive a severe reprimand from his protector for such an embarrassing fiasco.”

“He will not leave,” Sister Pelagia declared with quiet resolution. “And he will not receive any reprimand.”

Mitrofanii clutched his pectoral cross in his hand.

“What do you mean, he will not leave? And he will not get any reprimand? Why not? What is he going to do here now?”

“Sit in a prison cell,” the nun snapped. “And he will not get off with just a reprimand. This is a question of hard labor, father. Twenty years’ worth. For a double murder committed out of greed, and the killing of a boy, the court will not give him any less.”

“Vengefulness is a grave sin,” the bishop said in a didactic tone. “You must not give way to that feeling. Bubentsov is a scoundrel, of course, but such a crime would be too monstrous even for him: to kill two innocents, one of them a child, and cut off their heads, and all in order to further his own career? No, that is going too far, my daughter. Of course, I must admit that I also became incensed when the same idea occurred to me, but then I cooled down. No, my little Pelagia, our overweening braggart did not kill anybody, he simply chose to exploit a convenient event. And then there was the mention in the ancient manuscript of a severed head and the god Shishiga. All extremely plausible. What do we know about the murder of the Vonifatievs? Very little. That they were killed somewhere close to Drozdovka, so they had not yet gone very far from Sytnikov’s summer house. The money was taken, the bodies were thrown over the cliff into the River and they were cast up farther downstream. The heads, the hand, and the clothing were buried in the garden, under the aspen. And now it is impossible to find the culprit (or culprits). Too much time has passed.”

Pelagia was not listening. She exclaimed, “Ah, that’s why she killed the dogs!”

The nun sat up suddenly on the bed, but the sharp movement set the room swaying and shifting around her, and she lay back down. After waiting for the dizziness to pass she continued, “Now I understand. Of course, the inheritance has nothing to do with it. It is all to do with the bulldogs themselves. They ran around wherever they wanted, chasing all over the park. They caught an interesting smell under the aspen and began digging, and Naina Georgievna saw them. No doubt the first time she simply drove them away, but they kept coming back again and again. Then she decided to poison them…”

“Wait, wait,” said Mitrofanii, frowning. “That means it was Naina who killed the merchant and his son and cut off their heads? That’s absurd!”

“No, she was not the killer. But she did know who it was, and she knew about the heads.”

“An accomplice? The princess? But why?”

“Not an accomplice, more likely a witness. A chance witness. How could it have happened?” Pelagia was not looking at His Grace. She raised and lowered her eyebrows rapidly, wrinkling up her freckly forehead and gesturing with her hands—in a word, she was trying to think something through. “She often used to wander through the park in the evenings and even at night. Romantic young women are like that. She must have seen the killer burying the heads.”

Mitrofanii shook his head doubtfully.

“She saw that and said nothing? Such a heinous, satanic crime!”

“That’s it!” exclaimed the nun. “It is precisely satanic! That’s the point! She spoke some mysterious words about evil and about the devil. ‘Love is always an evil’—that was what she said.”