Special Assignments (21 page)

Anisii wanted to go up to Mimochka, but his neighbour from the courtroom, that interested commentator on the legal proceedings, stepped forward first.

'You'll go a long way, colleague,' he said to Mimochka's hooknosed saviour, slapped him patronisingly on the shoulder, and strode away, tapping his cane heavily.

'Who was that?' Anisii asked an usher.

'Him, sir,' the usher replied in a voice filled with unbounded admiration, 'why that was Fedor Nikiforich Plevako himself, the most brilliant lawyer in Russia. Gets people off without speaking more than a single sentence.'

At that moment, as Mimi plumped down on to the springy seat of the phaeton, she suddenly swung round and blew Anisii a kiss. The barrister also swung round. He looked sternly at the young lop-eared functionary in the white uniform jacket and suddenly did a very queer thing: he screwed up his face and stuck out a broad, bright-red tongue.

The carriage picked up speed, rumbling merrily over the cobblestones of the road.

'Stop! Stop!' Anisii shouted and went darting after it, but how could he possibly overtake it?

And what point was there, anyway?

THE DECORATOR

CHAPTER I

A Bad Beginning

Erast Petrovich Fandorin, the Governor-General of Moscow's Deputy for Special Assignments and a state official of the sixth rank, a knight of many Russian and foreign orders, was being violently sick.

The finely moulded but now pale and bluish-tinged features of the Collegiate Counsellor's face were contorted in suffering. One hand, in a white kid glove with silver press-studs, was pressed against his chest, while the other clawed convulsively at the air in an unconvincing attempt by Erast Petrovich to reassure his assistant, as if to say, 'Never mind, it's nothing; I shall be fine in a moment.' However, judging from the intensity with which his distress continued, it was anything but nothing.

Fandorin's assistant, Provincial Secretary Anisii Pitirimovich Tulipov, a skinny, unprepossessing young man of twenty-three, had never before had occasion to see his chief in such a pitiful state. Tulipov himself was in fact a little greenish round the gills, but he had resisted the temptation to vomit and was now secretly feeling proud of it. However, this ignoble feeling was merely fleeting, and therefore unworthy of our attention, but the unexpected sensitivity of his adored chief, always so cool-headed and not disposed to excessive displays of feeling, had alarmed Anisii quite seriously.

'G-Go ...' said Erast Petrovich, squeezing out the word as he wiped his purple lips with one glove. His constant slight stutter, a reminder of a concussion suffered long ago, had been become noticeably stronger as a result of his nervous discomfiture. 'G-Go in ... T-Take ... d-detailed ... notes. Photographs from all angles. And make sure they don't t-t-trample the evidence

He doubled over again, but this time the extended hand did not tremble - the finger pointed steadfastly at the crooked door of the little planking shed from which only a few moments earlier the Collegiate Counsellor had emerged as pale as a ghost with his legs buckling under him.

Anisii did not wish to go back into that grey semi-darkness, into that sticky smell of blood and offal. But duty was duty.

He filled his chest right up to the top with the damp April air (he didn't want his own stomach to start churning too), crossed himself and took the plunge.

The little hut was used for storing firewood, but there was hardly any left, because the cold season was already coming to an end. Quite a number of people had gathered inside: an investigator from the Public Prosecutor's Office, detectives from the Criminal Investigation Department, the district superintendent of police, the local police inspector, a forensic medical expert, a photographer, local police constables, and also the yard-keeper Klimuk, first to discover the scene of the monstrous atrocity - that morning he had looked in to get some wood for the stove, seen it there, had a good long yell and gone running for the police.

There were two oil lamps burning, and shadows flickered gently across the low ceiling. It was quiet, except for a young constable gently sobbing and sniffing in the corner.

'Well now, and what do we have here?' forensic medical expert Egor Willemovich Zakharov purred curiously as he lifted some dark, bluish-crimson, porous object from the floor in a rubber-gloved hand. 'I do believe it's the spleen. Yes that's her, the little darling. Excellent. Into the little bag with her, into her little bag. And the womb too, the left kidney, and we'll have the full set, apart from a few odd little bits and pieces ... What's that there under your boot, Monsieur Tulipov? Not the mesentery, is it?'

Anisii glanced down, started in horror and almost stumbled over the outstretched body of the spinster Stepanida Andreichkina, aged thirty-nine years. This information, together with the nature of her occupation, had been obtained from the yellow prostitute's card left lying neatly on her sundered chest. But there was nothing else neat to be observed in the posthumous appearance of the spinster Andreichkina.

One could assume that even in life her face had not been lovely to behold, but in death it had become nightmarish: it was livid blue, covered with blobs of powder, the eyes had slipped out of their sockets and the mouth was frozen in a soundless scream of horror. What could be seen below the face was even more horrific. Someone had slashed open the poor streetwalker's body from top to bottom and from side to side, extracted all of its contents and laid them out on the ground in a fantastic design. By this time, though, Zakharov had already collected up almost the entire exhibition and put it away in little numbered bags. All that was left was the black patch of blood that had spread without hindrance and little scraps of the dress that had been either hacked or torn to shreds.

Leontii Izhitsin, the district prosecutor's Investigator for Especially Important Cases, squatted down beside the doctor and asked briskly: 'Signs of intercourse?'

'That, my darling man, I'll particularise afterwards. I'll compose a little report portraying everything just the way it is, very prettily. In here, as you can see for yourself, we have been cast into the outer darkness.'

Like any foreigner with a perfect mastery of the Russian language, Zakharov was fond of peppering his speech with various quaint and whimsical turns of phrase. Despite his perfectly normal surname, the expert was of English extraction. The doctor's father, also a medical man, had come to the kingdom of our late departed sovereign, put down roots and adapted a name that presented difficulty to the Russian ear - Zacharias - to local conditions, making it into 'Zakharov': Egor Willemovich had told them all about it on the way there in the cab. You could tell just from looking at him that he wasn't one of us Russians: lanky and heavy-boned, with sandy-coloured hair, a broad mouth with thin lips, and fidgety, constantly shifting that terrible pipe from one corner of his mouth to the other.

The investigator Izhitsin pretended to take an interest, clearly putting on a brave face, as the medical expert twirled yet another lump of tormented flesh between his tenacious fingers and inquired sarcastically: "Well, Mr Tulipov, is your superior still taking the air? I told you we would have got by perfectly well without any supervision from the Governor's department. This is no picture for over-dainty eyes, but we've already seen everything there is to see.'

It was clear enough: Leontii Izhitsin was displeased; he was jealous. It was a serious matter to set Fandorin himself to watch over an investigation. What investigator would have been pleased?

'Stop that, Linkov, you're like a little girl!' Izhitsin growled at the sobbing policeman. 'Better get used to it. You're not destined for special assignments; you'll be seeing all sorts of things.'

'God forbid I could ever get used to such sights,' Senior Constable Pribludko muttered in a half-whisper: he was an old, experienced member of the force, known to Anisii from a case of three years before.

It wasn't the first time he'd worked with Leontii Izhitsin, either - an unpleasant gentleman, nervous and jittery, constantly laughing, with piercing eyes; always neat and tidy - his collars looked as if they were made of alabaster and his cuffs were even whiter - always brushing the specks of dust off his own shoulders; a man with ambitions, carving out a career for himself. Last Epiphany, though, he'd come a cropper with the investigation into the merchant Sitnikov's will. It had been a sensational case, and since it also involved the interests of certain influential individuals to some degree, any delay was unacceptable, so His Excellency Prince Dolgorukoi had asked Erast Petrovich to give the Public Prosecutor's Office a helping hand. But everyone knew the kind of assistance the Chief gave - he'd gone and untangled the entire case in one day. No wonder Izhitsin was furious. He could sense that yet again the victor's laurels would not be his.

'That seems to be all,' the investigator declared. 'So what now? The corpse goes to the police morgue, at the Bozhedomka Cemetery. Seal the shed, put a constable on guard. Have detectives question everyone living in the vicinity, and make it thorough - anything they've heard or seen that was suspicious. You, Klimuk. The last time you came to collect firewood was some time between ten and eleven, right?' Izhitsin asked the yard-keeper. And death occurred no later than two o'clock in the morning?' (That was to the medical expert Zakharov.) 'So what we have to look at is the period from ten in the evening to two in the morning.' And then he turned to Klimuk again. 'Perhaps you spoke to someone local? Did they tell you anything?'

The yard-keeper (a broad, thick beard, bushy eyebrows, irregular skull, with a distinctive wart in the middle of his forehead, thought Anisii, practising the composition of a verbal portrait) stood there, kneading a cap that could not possibly be any more crumpled.

'No, Your Honour, not at all. I don't understand a thing. I locked the door of the shed and ran to Mr Pribludko at the station. And they didn't let me out of the station until the bosses arrived. The local folk don't know a thing about it. That is, of course, they can see as lots of police have turned up ... that the gentlemen of the police force have arrived. But the locals don't know anything about this here horror,' said the yard-keeper, with a fearful sideways glance at the corpse.

'We'll check that soon enough,' Izhitsin said with a laugh. 'Right then, detectives, get to work. And you, Mr Zakharov, take your treasures away, and let's have a full evaluation, according to the book, by midday'

'Will the gentlemen detectives please stay where they are.' Fandorin's low voice came from behind Izhitsin. Everybody turned around.

How had the Collegiate Counsellor entered the shed, and when? The door had not even creaked. Even in the semi-darkness it was obvious that Anisii's chief was pale and perturbed, but his voice was steady and he spoke in his usual reserved and courteous manner, a manner that did not encourage any objections.

'Mr Izhitsin, even the yard-keeper realised that it would not be good to spread gossip about this incident,' Fandorin told the investigator in a dry voice. 'In fact, I was sent here in order to ensure the very strictest secrecy. No questioning of the locals. And furthermore, I request - in fact I demand - that everyone here present must maintain absolute silence about the circumstances. Explain to the local people that... a st-streetwalker has hanged herself, taken her own life, a perfectly ordinary business. If rumours of what has happened here spread around Moscow, every one of you will be subject to official inquiry, and anyone found guilty of divulging information will be severely punished. I'm sorry, gentlemen, but th-those are the instructions that I was given, and there is good reason for them.'

At a sign from the doctor the constables were about to take the stretcher standing against the wall and place the corpse on it, but the Collegiate Counsellor raised his hand: 'Wait a m-moment. He crouched down beside the dead woman. 'What's this here on her cheek?'

Izhitsin, galled by the reprimand he had received, shrugged his narrow shoulders. A spot of blood; as you may have observed, there's plenty of blood here.'

'But not on her face.' Erast Petrovich cautiously rubbed the oval spot with his finger - a mark was left on the white kid leather of his glove. Speaking in extreme agitation, or so it seemed to Anissii, his chief muttered: 'There's no cut, no bite.'

The investigator Izhitsin watched the Collegiate Counsellor's manipulations in bewilderment. The medical expert Zakharov watched with interest.

Fandorin took a magnifying glass out of his pocket, peered from close up at the victim's face and gasped: 'The imprint of lips! Good Lord, this is the imprint of lips! There can be no doubt about it!'

'So why make such a fuss over that?' Izhitsin asked acidly. 'We've got plenty of marks far more horrible than that here.' He turned the toe of his shoe towards the open rib-cage and the gaping pit of the belly. 'Who knows what ideas a loony might get into his head?'

Ah, how foul,' the Collegiate Counsellor muttered, addressing no one in particular.

He tore off his soiled glove with a rapid movement and threw it aside. He straightened up, closed his eyes and said very quietly: 'My God, is it really going to start in Moscow ...?'

'What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! Inform and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?' No matter. What does it matter if the Prince of Denmark, an indolent and blasé creature, has no interest in man? I do! The Bard is half right: there is little angelic in the deeds of men, and it is sacrilege to liken the comprehension of man to that of God, but there is nothing in the world more beautiful than man. And what are action and apprehension but a chimera? Deception and vanity, truly the quintessence of dust? Man is not action, but body. Even the plants that are so pleasing to our eyes, the most sumptuous and intricate of flowers, can in no wise be compared with the magnificent arrangement of the human body. Flowers are primitive and simple, identical within and without, turn the petals whichever way you will. Looking at flowers is boring. How can the avidity of their stems, the primitive geometry of their inflorescences and the crude forms oftheir stamens rival the purple resilience of muscles, the elasticity of silky-smooth skin, the silvery mother-of-pearl of the stomach, the graceful curves of the intestines and the mysterious asymmetry of the liver?