The Winter Queen

CHAPTER TWO

which consists entirely of conversation

“SAY WHAT YOU WILL, MR. GRUSHIN, BUT IT’S still odd!” Fandorin repeated vehemently. “There’s some kind of mystery here, I swear there is!” He said it again with stubborn emphasis. “Yes, that’s it precisely, a mystery! Judge for yourself. In the first place, the way he shot himself is absurd somehow, by pure chance, with the only bullet in the cylinder, as if he didn’t really intend to shoot himself at all. What kind of infernal bad luck is that? And then there’s the tone of the suicide note. You must admit that’s a bit strange—as if it had just been dashed off in some odd moment, and yet it raises an extremely important problem. The very devil of a problem.” The strength of Fandorin’s feelings lent his voice a new resonance. “But I’ll tell you about the problem later. Meanwhile, what about the will? Surely that’s suspicious?”

“And just what exactly do you find so suspicious about it, my dear young fellow?” Xavier Grushin purred as he glanced listlessly through the Police Municipal Incidents, Report for the last twenty-four hours. Usually arriving during the afternoon, this was more or less uninformative reading, since matters of great importance were not included. For the most part it was a hodgepodge of trivial incident and absolute nonsense, but just occasionally something curious might turn up in it. In this edition there was a report on the previous day’s suicide in the Alexander Gardens, but as the highly experienced Xavier Grushin had anticipated, it provided no details and, of course, it did not give the text of the suicide note.

“I’ll tell you what! Although it looks as if Kokorin didn’t really mean to shoot himself, the will, for all its defiant tone, is drawn up in full and proper order—notarized, signed by witnesses, and with the executors named,” said Fandorin, bending down a ringer as he made each point. “And I should think so—it’s an immense fortune. I made enquiries: two mills, three factories, houses in various towns, shipyards in Libava, half a million alone in interest-bearing securities in the state bank!”

“Half a million!” gasped Xavier Grushin, glancing up sharply from his papers. “The Englishwoman’s a very lucky lady, very lucky.”

“And, by the way, can you explain to me how Lady Astair is involved in all this? Why has everything been left to her and not to anyone else? Just what is the connection between her and Kokorin? That’s what we need to find out!”

“He wrote himself that he doesn’t trust our own Russian embezzlers of public funds, and the newspapers have been singing the Englishwoman’s praises for months now. No, my dear fellow, why don’t you explain to me why your generation holds life so cheap? The slightest excuse and—bang! And all with such pomp, such pathos, such contempt for the entire world. And just how have you earned the right to show such contempt?” Grushin asked, growing angry as he remembered how impudently and disrespectfully he had been addressed the evening before by his beloved daughter Sasha, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl. The question, however, was largely rhetorical, since a young clerk’s opinion on the matter was of little interest to the venerable superintendent, and he immediately stuck his nose back into the summary report.

In response Erast Fandorin became even more animated. “Ah, that is the very problem I specially wanted to mention. Take a man like Kokorin. Life gives him everything—riches and freedom and education and good looks”—Fandorin threw in good looks simply to round out the phrase, although he had not the slightest idea of the deceased’s appearance—“but he dices with death and eventually kills himself. Do you want to know why? Living in your world makes us young people feel sick—Kokorin wrote that in so many words, only he didn’t expand on it. Your ideals—a career, money, public honors—for many of us they mean absolutely nothing. That’s not the kind of thing we dream about now. Do you think there’s nothing behind the things they write about an epidemic of suicides? The very best of the educated young people are simply giving up on life—they’re suffocated by a lack of spiritual oxygen—and you, the elders of society, fail completely to draw the appropriate conclusions!”

The entire emotional force of this denunciation was apparently directed against Xavier Feofilaktovich Grushin in person, since there were no other ‘elders of society’ to be observed in the vicinity, but not only did Grushin not take offense, he actually nodded his head in evident satisfaction.

“Ah yes,” he said with a derisive chuckle as he glanced into the text of the report. “Here’s something concerning the lack of spiritual oxygen.”

The body of the cobbler Ivan Eremeev Buldygin, twenty-seven years of age, who had hanged himself, was discovered in Chikhachevsky Lane in the third district of the Meshchanskaya Precinct at ten o’clock in the morning. According to the testimony of the yardkeeper Pyotr Silin, the reason for the suicide was lack of funds for drink to relieve a hangover.

“That’s the way all the best ones will leave us. There’ll be no one but us old fools left soon.”

“You may mock,” Erast Fandorin said bitterly, “but in Petersburg and Warsaw not a day goes by without university students, and even school students, poisoning or shooting or drowning themselves.You think it’s funny…”

Repent, Mr. Xavier Grushin, before it’s too late, he thought vengefully, although until that moment the idea of suicide had never entered his head—he was a young man of far too vivacious a character for that. Silence ensued: while Fandorin imagined a modest little grave without a cross outside the fence of the churchyard, Grushin carried on running his finger along the lines of print and turning the rustling pages.

“But, really, this is dreadful nonsense,” he muttered. “Have they all lost their minds or what? Look here, two reports, one from the third district of the Miasnitskaya Precinct, on page eight, another from the first district of the Rogozhskaya Precinct, on page nine. Listen.”

At thirty-five minutes past twelve police inspector Fedoruk was summoned from his station to the building of the Moscow Fire Insurance Company on Podkolokolny Lane at the request of the Kaluga landowner’s wife Avdotya Filippovna Spitsyna (temporarily resident at the Boyar Hotel). Mrs. Spitsyna testified that beside the entrance to the bookshop a certain respectably dressed gentleman, who appeared to be about twenty-five years of age, had attempted to shoot himself. He set a pistol to his temple, but apparently it misfired and the failed suicide fled the scene. Mrs. Spitsyna demanded that the police find the young man and hand him over to the spiritual authorities for the imposition of a religious penance. No search was undertaken because no crime had been committed.

“There you are—isn’t that just what I was saying!” Erast Fandorin cried triumphantly, feeling himself totally vindicated.

“Wait a moment, young man, that’s not all,” Grushin interrupted. “Listen to what comes next. Page nine.”

Report of police officer Semenov (he’s from the Rogozhskaya Precinct). Between ten and eleven he was summoned by the petty bourgeois Nikolai Kukin, the shopkeeper at the grocery store Brykin and Sons, opposite the Malaya Yauza Bridge. Kukin informed him that a few minutes earlier a student had climbed onto one of the stone bollards of the bridge and set a pistol to his head, clearly intending to shoot himself. Kukin heard a metallic click, but there was no shot. After the click the student jumped down onto the road and walked away quickly in the direction of Yauza Street. No other eyewitnesses have been found. Kukin is petitioning for a police post to be set up on the bridge, since last year a girl of loose morals drowned herself there and this is damaging his trade.

“I don’t understand it at all,” Fandorin said with a shrug. “What strange kind of ritual is this? Could it be some secret society of suicides?”

“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.”