“What do you mean it is invented?” Urbenin asked me. “I did not invent it at all.”
Urbenin suddenly blushed and stood up.
“It seems that you suspect me of something,” he said. “Well, you can suspect everyone, but Sergey Petrovich, you have known me for a long time.”
“I know, but this is not personal at all. Police investigators must take the circumstances into consideration, and there are a lot of circumstances in this case that tell against you, Peter Egorovich.”
Mr. Urbenin looked at me with horror, shrugged his shoulders, and said,
“But—no matter the circumstances, you should understand that I could not do this. How could I? To kill a quail or a crow is one thing—it is possible, but to kill a person, a person who is more precious to me than my own life. The mere thought of Olga was like sunshine for me. And suddenly you suspect me. And you say this—you whom I have known for many years, Sergey Petrovich. Please, let me go.”
“Yes, we can stop for now. I will continue the interrogation tomorrow, but for now, Peter Egorovich, I have to arrest you. I hope that tomorrow you will understand the importance of all of the insinuating circumstances against you that we possess, and stop wasting time and make a confession. As for me, personally I am sure that it was you who killed Olga. I cannot tell you anything more today. You can go for now.”
At the interrogation was finished. Urbenin was put under guard and placed in one of the Count’s buildings.
On the second or third day, the deputy prosecutor Mr. Polugradov arrived from the city, a man whom I cannot remember without disgust. Imagine for yourself a tall, thin man around thirty, nicely shaved, with curly hair resembling that of a sheep and very smartly dressed. His face was thin and expressionless, so that looking at him you could see only the emptiness of a fop; he spoke with a very soft, sweet, insincere, and repulsively polite voice.
About a year after my retirement, when I was living in Moscow, I received an invitation summons to be present at the court sitting of the Urbenin case. I was glad to visit the places in the countryside, which I liked, and the case gave me a reason to go there. The Count, who was then living in St. Petersburg, did not go, and sent instead a medical certificate outlining his bad health.
The case was to be heard in the local county court. The prosecutor was Mr. Polugradov, who cleaned his teeth five times a day with red English toothpaste; the defense lawyer was a certain Mr. Smirnaev, a tall and thin blond, with a sentimental face and long straight hair. The jury was drawn almost exclusively from the local farmers and residents of the town; only four of them could read, and the rest looked very confused when they were given Urbenin’s letters to his wife as evidence.
As I entered the court building, I did not recognize Mr. Urbenin; his hair had turned completely gray, and he had aged twenty years. I had expected his face to show only apathy and indifference to his fate, but I was wrong. Mr. Urbenin was passionate during the trial; he rejected three members of the jury; he gave lengthy and emotional explanations; he interrogated the witnesses; and he denied his guilt, and asked numerous questions of the witnesses who testified against him.
The witness Mr. KazimirPoshekosky testified that I had been intimate with Olga, the victim in this case.
“It’s a lie,” Mr. Urbenin cried out from his bench. “I do not trust my wife, but him I do trust!”
When I testified, the defense lawyer asked me what sort of relationship I had had with Olga, and presented the testimony of Mr. Kazimir Poshekosky, who had apprehended me in the garden pavilion. To tell the truth (that I had made love to Olga) would be to support the accused; the more dissipated the wife, the more sympathy you must have for Othello-the-husband, I understood this. On the other hand, if I were to tell the truth, I would hurt Mr. Urbenin, and he would be in terrible pain. I decided to lie.
“No,” I said. “I was not in a relationship with her.”
The prosecutor’s darkly colored description of Olga’s murder stressed the anger and hatred of the killer. “That old, worn-out dissipated man met an innocent, very young, and beautiful woman. He lured her from the path of virtue with the promise of luxury. She was young and she had grown up reading romantic novels, and sooner or later she had to fall in love. He reacted like a wild animal that sees his prey slipping out of his claws. He was enraged, like a beast whose nose is singed by a burning coal.” The prosecutor ended with the words, “She brought out the animal in him, and he treated her like a dog.”
The defense lawyer did not deny that Urbenin was guilty but asked the jury to take into consideration that he was in the state of maximum excitement, and to soften his sentence. He noted that the feeling of jealousy could torture people, and referred to the all-too-human Othello, and then went into such great detail about the play that the judge had to interrupt him to remark that “it is not necessary for the jury to know that classic piece of literature.”
The last word went to Urbenin, who swore that was not guilty: neither in deed nor in thought. He finished with the words,
“I no longer care about my own fate. But I am worried about the fate of my two little children.” He turned to the public, started to cry, and asked the public to take care of his little children. He had probably forgotten that the verdict was still forthcoming, being completely immersed in thoughts of his children.
The jury took very little time to reach a verdict. He was found guilty on all counts, lost all his rights and his estate, and he was immediately sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor.
That was the price he had to pay for his meeting with a “young woman in red,” on a May morning a few years ago.
About eight years have passed since these events. Some of the players in this drama have died; some are serving sentences for their crimes, and some simply go on living their miserable lives, waiting for death.
CHAPTER SIX THE TRUTH IS REVEALED
It was three months after the day when Mr. Kamyshev brought me the manuscript. My secretary announced that there was a gentleman in uniform waiting for me outside. Mr. Kamyshev came in.
“Sorry for bothering you, for heaven’s sake. Have you read my manuscript? What is your decision?”
“You’ll have to make some changes to it, I hope with our mutual agreement.” We waited for a few moments in silence. I was very excited; my heart was beating and my temples were pulsating. But I did not want to show my guest that I was agitated. I continued, “Yes, according to our agreement. You told me that your novel is based on a real story.”
“Yes, and I am ready to affirm this. I can introduce myself, I am Mr. Sergey Zinoviev.”
“Do you want to say that you were the best man at Olga’s wedding?”
“Yes, the best man and a friend of the household. Do you think that I am a sympathetic character in the story?” Mr. Kamyshev smiled, teasing his knee and blushing. “Is it so?”
“Yes. I like your novel; it’s better than many other crime stories. But we should make some serious changes to it.”
“What would you like to change?”
“First and foremost, you never do tell the reader who is guilty, who committed the crime.”
Kamyshev’s eyes widened and he stood up and said, “If you really think that you know the person who stabbed his wife and then strangled the only witness, then I don’t know what to tell you, nor what should we do next.”
“But Mr. Urbenin did not kill.”
“Then who did?”
“It wasn’t Urbenin!”
“Maybe you’re right. Humanum est errare. Even criminal investigators are not perfect. Judicial mistakes do get made in this world. Do you think we made a judicial mistake?”