A Vengeful Longing

7

The morning light through Yaroslav Nikolayevich’s drawing-room window was clear and uncompromising. The prokuror himself was pacing the room, in a manner that somehow combined anxiety with authority. He was anxious, clearly, for the whole sorry business to be over. His guest, Ruslan Vladimirovich, was seated on a sofa. Porfiry noted that Vakhramev’s remarkable imperturbability had abandoned him. His eyes stared, wild and distraught now, at the six kid-bound notebooks on the table before him.

‘How did you get them?’

Porfiry weighed his choices for a moment, in which he exchanged a glance with Virginsky. ‘Your daughter alerted us to their existence.’

‘Tanyushka knew about them?’

‘I’m afraid so. She found the key to your concealed bookcase.’

‘No!’

Porfiry studied the pattern in the tablecloth.

‘Has she, do you know, read them?’

Porfiry nodded. Vakhramev placed his hands over his face so that the high, broken sounds of his distress snagged in his fingers.

‘What is left for me now?’ he said at last. Still he did not take his hands from his face.

Porfiry looked at Yaroslav Nikolayevich, who shook his head in disapproval.

‘I am sorry for you,’ said Porfiry to Vakhramev, in conscious response to the prokuror’s severity.

‘Are you?’ As Vakhramev dropped his hands, he seemed to release a blast of bitter fury. ‘You have brought this on me. Was it really necessary to go looking for these?’

Porfiry placed a crooked forefinger to his lips. The touch was comforting. ‘Yes. It was necessary. Besides, Ruslan Vladimirovich, you must realise that Tatyana had already read them. That was nothing to do with me. All that has changed is that you now know that she has.’

‘All that has changed! All that has changed is that I have nothing left to live for! She can have no respect for me. And if she has no respect for her father, how can she respect herself? I have destroyed her.’

‘These were not the only books we found in your study,’ said Porfiry gently.

Vakhramev closed his eyes. His mouth stretched taut, like a child’s the moment before tears. A huge spasm worked its way through his body.

‘She saw those too!’

‘I was not referring to those books. I meant, there was a copy of the Holy Bible on your desk. You have practised the forms of religion, perhaps the time has come to open your heart to its message. The word of the Lord comes like a thief in the night.’ Porfiry shot a stealthy glance at Virginsky.

Vakhramev opened his eyes and looked at Porfiry wildly. A sound escaped him that could have been laughter, though it was a mirthless sound, and barely human. ‘Do not mock me! I do not believe. I have never been able to believe. At least, not since I was a child. I may wish I did, but I cannot. I am a vile worm. I cannot escape my nature. The only escape’ — Vakhramev’s face seemed to sink in on itself, as if it masked a vacuum — ‘is death.’

‘Pull yourself together,’ said Porfiry firmly. ‘You are alive. You must carry on living. That is your duty. You will find a way to believe.’ Porfiry looked down at the notebooks. ‘You have brought this on yourself. In some part of you, you have desired this. At any rate, you always knew this day would come. Certainly, you did less than you could have to prevent it. You say you are a worm. No. That’s not the case. All these’ — he gestured at the books — ‘are the actions of a man. Face up to them. Face up to yourself. And draw a line.’

‘I cannot draw a line,’ Vakhramev got out desperately.

‘How do you think Tatyana knew where to find the key? After all, you had taken great pains to conceal it.’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Really? Her room adjoins your study, does it not?’

‘What are you suggesting?’

Porfiry glanced again at Virginsky. ‘Could it ever have been possible that the door to her room was left ajar, allowing her to spy on you as you went to the hidden bookcase?’

Vakhramev’s flinching glance away contradicted his words: ‘No. I was always careful. I think.’

‘You think?’

Vakhramev bowed his head. ‘Is it really possible?’

Porfiry did not take his eyes from him. ‘I believe so.’

‘Am I so depraved?’ The question from Vakhramev was barely audible.

‘Please understand,’ said Porfiry crisply, almost impatiently now. ‘I’m not interested in moral judgements. I am only interested in the truth. Possibly that is what motivated you, too. It was not a question of wanting to corrupt Tatyana. It was rather that you wanted the hypocrisy to end.’

‘What good has it done me?’

‘I believe it was necessary.’ Again Porfiry looked at Virginsky. ‘And what is necessary is always right. Now, we must clear up a few things regarding Colonel Setochkin’s death. You know that Tatyana considers you perfectly capable of being his murderer. We must show her that you are not.’

‘I may as well be. To take the life of a Setochkin is a lesser crime than those she knows me guilty of.’

‘Nonsense. This will be painful for you, I’m sure. But we are all men here. We must talk about a certain incident related in one of your journals. The last entry, in fact, in the last book.’ Porfiry picked up the relevant notebook and found the page. ‘It is here, where you mention a prostitute called Raisa. Was this the woman whose photograph I showed you?’

‘It was all so long ago.’

‘Come now. Please. No pretence. We have gone past that point.’

‘No. You don’t understand. I really can’t remember. That was why I wrote it all down. So that I could forget. I was tormented by my actions. I could not get them out of my mind. And I found that as I wrote something down, my memory was cleared of it. I was able to divide that part of me from the rest of me, from the respectable Ruslan Vladimirovich Vakhramev, who was able to go about his respectable business untroubled by these. . disreputable memories. Until of course he sinned again.’

‘I do understand that. But this is the last entry, dated fourteen years ago. I cannot help but feel there must have been something significant about it. I mean to say, why did you stop here?’

‘Because I stopped. Believe me, I have not been with a prostitute since that day. I have found other outlets.’

‘The Priapos books?’

Vakhramev nodded.

‘What enabled you to break with prostitutes?’ pressed Porfiry.

‘Give me the book,’ said Vakhramev. He turned to the last entry. ‘I do not remember in all honesty whether this Raisa is the woman you showed me in that photograph. Her face did seem familiar, I confess. It awoke some memory. But there were so many of them, you know. It gives me no pleasure to say that. However. .’ Vakhramev tapped the page decisively. ‘I do remember the night in question. There had been a dinner in honour of Devushkin, who was leaving St Petersburg the following day for the Caucasus. Myself and Golyadkin were invited, but Golyadkin turned up with this other fellow. An old schoolfriend of his.’

‘The Uninvited One?’

‘Yes.’

‘What was his real name?’

‘I don’t remember. Or rather, I’m not sure I ever knew. He called himself the “Uninvited One”, you see, out of a perverse pride. “You don’t want me here,” he said. “But here I am.” He did his best to insult us all. Particularly Devushkin, whose party it was. After the dinner, in the course of which, if I remember rightly, he as good as challenged Devushkin to a duel — Devushkin laughed it off, of course, which only infuriated him the more — yes, after the dinner, we tried to shake him off. We pretended that the party was breaking up but we met again and took a cab to Madam Josephine’s. I had never been to that particular brothel before. It was a favourite haunt of Devushkin’s. Well, somehow, he, the Uninvited One, got wind of our plot and followed us there. He had the effrontery to demand we pay his cabdriver. Strange how all the details do come back to one. Well, he was drunk. We were all drunk and getting drunker. There was a terrible scene. Madam Josephine tried to calm things down. She offered him a new girl. Or at least Madam Josephine said she was a new girl. Can one ever believe what they say? I wonder, do you have that photograph still?’

Porfiry reached a hand into a pocket and produced Raisa’s picture.

‘I do believe that was her, you know. Yes, I’m almost certain of it. You have to realise that the light in those places was never very bright. But I remember how I felt looking at her — I feel the same thing now. I remember, you see, thinking at the time, “That girl is from a good family. That girl is afraid. How on earth did she end up here?” And I thought of my own daughter, Tatyana, who must have been five or six at the time. Do you know you can buy girls that young, perfectly legally, in the Haymarket?’

‘Please continue,’ said Porfiry.

‘Well, I looked at her and I looked at him, and I saw something horrible in his eyes, something that I knew was in my own eyes too. And that was when it ended. I swear to you that was when it ended.’

‘Do you remember if this man promised her money to buy her way out of the brothel? If he promised her a better life?’

‘Yes! That was it! He was determined to show himself better than us. It was a way of insulting us, that was all. He had no intention of going through with it.’

‘We picked up a report that this is what happened to Raisa. It would rather suggest that we are talking about the same woman.’ Porfiry’s hand delved into another pocket. He held out a photograph of Martin Meyer recovered from the escritoire in the dacha. ‘Was this the man? Is he the Uninvited One?’

Vakhramev frowned at the picture. ‘No. Not him. I am sure of it.’

Porfiry nodded. ‘Good. I did not think it would be, but I had to confirm it. This man is Raisa’s husband. In the event, it was he who gave Raisa the better life that the Uninvited One promised her. However, he himself claims not to have known until recently that Raisa ever worked as a prostitute. It would not fit with his story if he had in fact slept with her at Madam Josephine’s.’ Porfiry took back the photograph of Meyer. ‘Now then, your friend, Golyadkin, the schoolfriend of this mysterious individual — he must surely know the identity of the Uninvited One. Where may we find Golyadkin?’

‘In the Mitrofanevsky Cemetery,’ said Vakhramev. ‘He died in a boating accident three months ago.’

Porfiry let out a sigh, in which there was more than simple disappointment. ‘I doubt very much that it was an accident. Perhaps you remember which school it was they were at together?’

‘It was a private boarding school in Moscow. Golyadkin talked of it often. He had a miserable time there. I don’t remember the name.’

‘I have only one other question. Do you happen to know what age Golyadkin was at his death?’

‘He had recently celebrated his forty-seventh birthday.’

‘Thank you,’ said Porfiry, looking Vakhramev in the eye. ‘You have helped us very much. This has provided the first real breakthrough of the case and I realise that it has been hard for you to talk of these things. Allow me to shake your hand.’ Porfiry stood and held out his hand.

A sob of gratitude shook Vakhramev. The tears sprang to his eyes as he took Porfiry’s hand.