The Winter Queen (4 page)

“No…what society?” Xavier Grushin said slowly, then began speaking faster and faster as he gradually became more animated. “There is no society, my fine young gentleman—it’s all much simpler than that. And all that business with the cylinder is clear now—it just never occurred to me before. It’s this student of ours, Kokorin, who’s been playing pranks. Look here.” He got up and strode quickly over to the map hanging on the wall beside the door. “Here’s the Malaya Yauza Bridge. From there he went along Yauza Street, idled away the time for an hour or so until he ended up on Podkolokolny Lane beside the insurance company, gave landowner’s wife Spitsyna a good fright, and then carried on toward the Kremlin. Some time after two he reached the Alexander Gardens, and there, as we know only too well, his journey came to an end.”

“But why? And what does it all mean?” Fandorin asked, gazing hard at the map.

“What it means is not for me to judge. But I have a good idea how things happened. Our pampered student and gilded youth decided to bid the world farewell. But before he died he wanted to give his nerves a bit of a thrill. I read somewhere that it’s called American roulette. It was invented in America, in the goldfields. You put a single shot in the cylinder, give it a twirl, and then—bang! If you’re lucky you break the bank; if not, then it’s good-bye and farewell. So our student deliberately set out on his voyage around Moscow to tempt fate. It’s quite possible that he tried to shoot himself more than three times, but then not every eyewitness will bother to call the police. That landowner’s wife who likes to save souls and Kukin with his private interest were vigilant enough, but God only knows how many attempts Kokorin made altogether. Or perhaps he struck a bargain with himself: I’ll dice with death so many times, and then that’s it. If I live, then so be it. But then, that’s just me fantasizing. That was no stroke of infernal bad luck in the Alexander Gardens. By two o’clock our student had simply run out of chances.”

“Mr. Grushin, you have a genuine analytical talent,” said Erast Fandorin with sincere admiration. “I can just see it all happening in front of my eyes.”

Grushin always enjoyed well-earned praise, even from a young whippersnapper.

“True enough. So there is something to be learned from the old duffers after all,” he said in a didactic tone. “You should have served on investigations as long as I have, not just in these highly cultured times of ours, but back in the Emperor Nicholas’s days. Then it was nobody’s concern what was detective work and what wasn’t. Our department didn’t even exist in Moscow then—there wasn’t even an investigations office. One day you were looking for murderers, the next you were down at the market, reading folks the riot act. The day after that you were doing the rounds of the taverns, rounding up people without passports. But it all developed your powers of observation and knowledge of people and helped you grow a thick skin—and there’s no way you can manage without that in our police work,” Grushin concluded with a broad hint, only to realize that the clerk was no longer listening but frowning instead at some thought of his own that appeared to present him with some difficulty.

“Right, then, what’s that you’re puzzling over? Out with it.”

“There’s something I can’t quite work out…” said Fandorin with a nervous twitch of his handsome half-moon eyebrows. “This Kukin says it was a student on the bridge…”

“Of course a student—who else?”

“But how could Kukin know that Kokorin was a student? He was wearing a frock coat and a hat, and no one in the Alexander Gardens identified him as a student…All the reports say ‘a young man’ or ‘the gentleman.’ It
is
a puzzle.”

“You’ve got puzzles on the brain,” said Grushin with a wave of his hand. “This Kukin of yours is a fool, and that’s all there is to it. He saw a young gentleman in civilian clothes and just imagined he was a student. Or maybe our shopkeeper has a practiced eye and he was able to recognize a student. After all, he deals with customers from morning till night.”

“Kukin’s never laid eyes on the likes of Kokorin in his dirty little shop,” Erast Fandorin objected quite reasonably.

“So what do you make of that?”

“I think it would be a good idea to question the landowner’s wife Spitsyna and the shopkeeper Kukin a bit more thoroughly. Of course, Mr. Grushin, it would be inappropriate for you to deal with such trifles, but if you will permit me, I could do it…” Erast Fandorin was already halfway out of his chair, so badly did he want Xavier Grushin’s permission.

Xavier Grushin was on the point of taking a strict line, but he thought better of it. Why not let the boy get a whiff of real, live action and learn how to talk to witnesses? Perhaps he might just amount to something after all.

“I don’t forbid it,” he declared impressively, then quickly forestalled the exclamation of joy that was about to burst from the collegiate registrar’s lips. “But first, if you don’t mind, finish the report for His Excellency. And I tell you what, my dear fellow, it’s after three already. I think I’ll be on my way home. You can tell me tomorrow where our shopkeeper got his student from.”

in which a ‘slouching skewdint’ makes his appearance

FROM MIASNITSKAYA STREET, WHERE THE CRIMINAL Investigation Division had its office, to the Boyar Hotel, where, according to the report, the landowner’s wife Spitsyna had her ‘temporary residence,’ was a walk of only twenty minutes, and despite the impatience that was consuming him, Fandorin decided to stroll there on foot. His tormentor, Lord Byron, who constricted the clerk’s sides so mercilessly, had forced such a substantial breach in his budget that the expense of a cab could well have reflected in a drastic fashion on the adequacy of his diet. Chewing as he walked along on a fish-gristle pie bought at the corner of Gusyatnikov Lane (let us not forget that in the flurry of investigative excitement Erast Fandorin had been left without any lunch), he stepped out along Chistoprudny Boulevard, where antediluvian old women in ancient coats and caps were scattering crumbs for the fat, impudent pigeons. Horse-drawn cabs and phaetons dashed by along the cobbled roadway at a pace Erast Fandorin could not so possibly match, redirecting his thoughts to his offended feelings—the very idea of a detective without a carriage and trotters was simply impossible as a matter of principle. Thank goodness the Boyar Hotel was on Pokrovka Street, but trudging on from there to the shopkeeper Kukin’s place on the Yauza would take half an hour for certain. Any procrastination now could well be fatal, Erast Fandorin tormented himself (with some degree of exaggeration, it must be said), but his lordship the superintendent had begrudged him fifteen kopecks from the state purse. No doubt the Division allocated
him
eighty rubles every month for his own regular cabby. Those were the bosses’ privileges for you: one rode home in his personal cab, while the other plodded the streets on official business.

But now at last on Erast Fandorin’s left the bell tower of Holy Trinity Church, which stood beside the Boyar Hotel, hove into view above the roof of Souchet’s coffeehouse, and Fandorin quickened his stride in anticipation of important discoveries.

HALF AN HOUR LATER he was wandering with a weary and dejected stride down Pokrovsky Boulevard, where the pigeons—every bit as plump and impudent as on Chistoprudny Boulevard—were fed not by old noblewomen but by merchants’ wives.

His conversation with the witness had proved disappointing. Erast Fandorin had caught the landowner’s wife at the very last moment—she was on the point of getting into her droshky, piled high with various trunks and bundles, in order to leave Russia’s first capital city and set out for the province of Kaluga. Out of considerations of economy, Spitsyna still traveled in the old–fashioned manner, not by railway but with her own horses.

This was undoubtedly a stroke of good fortune for Fandorin, since had the landowner’s wife been hurrying to reach the railway station, no conversation at all would have taken place. But no matter which approach Erast Fandorin adopted in the discussion with his garrulous witness, its essential content remained entirely unaltered: Xavier Grushin was right, it was Kokorin that Spitsyna had seen—she had mentioned his frock coat and his round hat and even his patent leather gaiters with buttons, which had not been mentioned by the witnesses from the Alexander Gardens.

His only hope now was Kukin, and Grushin was very probably right about him as well. The shopkeeper had simply blurted out the first thing that came into his mind, and now he had Fandorin trudging all the way across Moscow and making a laughingstock of himself in front of the superintendent.

The glass door bearing the image of a sugar loaf at the grocery store Brykin and Sons faced directly out onto the embankment, offering a clear view of the bridge. Fandorin noted that immediately. He also noted the fact that the windows of the shop were flung wide open (evidently because of the sweltering heat), so that Kukin might well have been able to hear a ‘metallic click,’ since the distance to the nearest stone bollard of the bridge was certainly only fifteen paces at the most. A man of about forty wearing a red shirt, a black woolen-weave waistcoat, velveteen trousers, and bottle-shaped boots peeped around the door with an intrigued expression.

“Can I be of any help, Your Honor?” he asked. “Perhaps you’ve managed to lose your way?”

“Kukin?” Erast Fandorin inquired in a strict voice, not expecting to derive any consolation from the imminent explanations.

“Indeed, sir,” the shopkeeper replied cautiously, knitting his bushy eyebrows. Then, immediately guessing the truth, “Ah, you must be from the police, Your Honor? I’m most humbly grateful to you. I didn’t expect you would be attending to me so soon. The local officer said his superiors would consider the matter, but I didn’t really expect anything, sir, not really, sir. But why are we standing out here on the doorstep? Please, come into the shop. I’m most grateful to you, sir, most grateful.”

He even bowed and opened the door and made a gesture of invitation as much as to say “after you,” but Fandorin did not budge. He said portentously, “Kukin, I am not from the local station. I am from the Criminal Investigation Division. I have instructions to find the stu…the person you reported to the local inspector of police.”

“The skewdint, you mean?” the shopkeeper prompted him readily. “Of course, sir, I remember his looks most precisely. A terrible thing, may God forgive him. As soon as I saw he’d clambered up on that post and put that gun to his head, I just froze, I did. That’s it, I thought, it’ll be just like it was last year—there’ll be no tempting anyone into this shop, not even for a fancy loaf. And what fault is it of ours? What draws them here like bees to honey to do away with themselves? Stroll on down that way to the Moscow River—it’s deeper there and the bridge is higher and…”

“Be quiet, Kukin,” Erast Fandorin interrupted him. “You’d do better to describe the student. What he was wearing, what he looked like, and why you decided he was a student in the first place.”

“Why, he was a skewdint right enough, he was, a real proper skew-dint, Your Honor,” the shopkeeper said in surprise. “Uniform coat and buttons and little glasses perched on his nose.”

“A uniform coat, you say?” Fandorin exclaimed abruptly. “He was wearing a student coat, then?”

“Why, what else, sir?” asked Kukin with a pitying glance at the dim-witted functionary. “If not for that, how was I to tell as he’s a skewdint or he isn’t? I reckon I can tell a skewdint from a clerk by his coat, so I do.”

Erast Fandorin could not really make any response to that just remark, so he took a neat little notepad with a pencil out of his pocket in order to record the witness’s testimony. The notepad, which Fandorin had bought just before entering service with the Criminal Investigation Division, had lain idle for three weeks, and today was the first time he had had any use for it. In the course of the morning he had already covered several of its small pages with his fine writing.

“Tell me what this man looked like.”

“Just an ordinary sort of person, really. Nothing much to look at, a bit pimply around the face, like. And them little glasses…”

“What kind of glasses—spectacles or a pince-nez?”

“You know, the kind on a ribbon.”

“A pince-nez, then,” said Fandorin, scribbling away with his pencil. “Any other distinctive features?”

“He had this terrible slouch, with his shoulders almost up over the top of his head___A real skewdint, like I told you…”

Kukin gazed in perplexity at the ‘clerk,’ who said nothing for a long time, frowning, rubbing his lips together, and rustling his little notepad. Obviously he was thinking about something.

In the notepad it said: “Uniform coat, pimples, pince-nez, bad slouch.” Well, a few pimples didn’t mean much. The inventory of Kokorin’s possessions didn’t say a word about any pince-nez. Perhaps he had dropped it? It was possible. The witnesses in the Alexander Gardens had not said anything about a pince-nez either, but they had not really been questioned much about the suicide’s appearance. What would have been the point? A slouch? Hm. As he recalled, the
Moscow Gazette
had described ‘a handsome young fellow,’ but the reporter had not been present at the incident. He had not seen Kokorin, and so he could easily have stuck in the ‘handsome young fellow’ simply for the sake of effect. That only left the student uniform coat, and that was something that could not be discounted. If it had been Kokorin on the bridge, it meant that during the interval between shortly after ten and half past twelve for some reason he had changed into a frock coat. But where, though? From the Yauza to Ostozhenka Street and then back to the Moscow Fire Insurance Company was a long way; you couldn’t possibly cover the distance in an hour and a half.

Fandorin realized with a hollow, sinking feeling that only one alternative remained open to him: to take the shopkeeper Kukin by the collar and drag him down to the station on Mokhovaya Street, where the suicide’s body was still lying in the mortuary, packed in ice, and arrange an identification. Erast Fandorin imagined the gaping skull with the crust of dried blood and brains, and an entirely natural association brought back the memory of the merchant’s wife Krupnova with her throat cut, who still continued to visit him in his nightmares. No, he definitely did not wish to make the trip to the ‘cold room.’ But there was some connection between the student from the Malaya Yauza Bridge and the suicide from the Alexander Gardens that absolutely had to be cleared up. Who could tell him whether Kokorin had pimples and a slouch and whether he wore a pince-nez?