I felt encouraged when I heard all this, since I decided that the man whom I regarded as the devil incarnate had finally abandoned his habit of caution and now it would be possible to catch him red-handed.
I was lucky. Today, on the very first evening of this game, which is certainly the most hazardous known to mortal man, there was a winner – the very same Stammerer concerning whom I have already had the honour of reporting to you, and whom you, for some reason, found so very interesting. He is a most unusual individual, I have seen and heard enough to be quite sure of that, but how could you know him? A mystery.
However, I must not deviate from my subject.
When all the other members had left, I hid in the hallway and then went back into the drawing room, where the candles and the brazier had already been extinguished. It was very helpful that for certain reasons of principle the Doge does not believe in having servants.
My plan was very simple. I was counting on obtaining direct proof of the Doge’s guilt. To do that, it was sufficient to slip through the dining room, open the door into the study slightly (all the doors in the house are upholstered with soft leather, and so they do not close tightly) and wait for the master of the house to offer the Stammerer the cup of poisoned wine with his own hands. After painful deliberations, I had come to the conclusion that the Stammerer would have to be sacrificed for the sake of the cause – there was nothing that could be done about that. In the final analysis, I reasoned, the life of one man does not outweigh the chance to avert a threat to dozens, or perhaps even hundreds, of immature souls.
I was going to wait for the Stammerer to drink the poison and go out to die on the boulevard (that was the arrangement reached earlier) and then call the constable who always stands on Trubnaya Square. The death by poisoning would be recorded by a representative of authority, and if the Stammerer had not lost consciousness by the time the policeman appeared, and if he had even a shred of conscience, he would still be able to testify against the Doge, and his testimony would be incorporated in the report. But even without this testimony, I thought, the very fact of the death and my evidence would still be enough. The constable and I would immediately set out for the Doge’s apartment and detain the criminal at the scene of his crime. He would be unlikely to have already washed the glass, and there would still be traces of cyanide on it. And in addition there would be a live witness – me. And also the roulette wheel with the skull.
You must admit that it was rather a good plan. At the very least, the Doge’s part in everything would have been revealed in a most unattractive light: he had organised a deadly dangerous game at his own home, but he himself did not take part; he had prepared the poison and served it to the victim himself. And there would have been the result of all these actions – a body that was still warm. This is quite obviously a serious criminal offence. At the same time, I had reason to hope that I would be able to persuade two, if not three, of the least convinced ‘lovers’ to give evidence for the prosecution if the case went as far as court proceedings.
But now let me tell you what actually happened.
I managed to open the door slightly without making a sound, and since it was quite dark in the drawing room I could not only hear, but also see what was happening in the study without any risk of being discovered.
The Master was sitting in his chair at the desk with a triumphant, almost majestic air. Glinting on the polished surface of the desk was a crystal goblet, containing a liquid the colour of pomegranate juice.
The Stammerer was standing by the desk, and so the scene was rather reminiscent of the artist Ge’s picture Peter the Great Questioning the Tsarevich Alexei. How often I have imagined myself as the captive Tsarevich: I stand in front of the formidable Peter, wholly and completely in his power, and my heart is wrung by a sweet feeling in which the awareness that I am absolutely defenceless, the fear of punishment and the hope of paternal mercy are all mingled together. But then, unlike the Tsarevich, the Stammerer was gazing straight at the seated man without the slightest sign of fear. I could not help being amazed at such presence of mind in a man who was destined to depart from this life in a matter of only a few minutes.
Neither of them spoke, and the pause seemed to go on forever. The Stammerer was looking hard straight into the Doge’s eyes, and the Doge started to seem a little bewildered.
‘I really do feel quite sorry,’ he said, sounding slightly embarrassed, which in ordinary circumstances is not typical of him at all, ‘that this lot has fallen to you.’
‘Why so?’ the Stammerer asked in a steady voice. ‘After all, this is the greatest good fortune, is it not?’
Seeming even more embarrassed, the Doge hastily agreed: ‘Yes, yes, of course. I am certain that all the other seekers – or almost all of them – would be glad to be in your place . . . All I meant to say was that I regret parting with you so soon. You intrigue me, and we still haven’t had a chance for a heart-to-heart talk.’
‘Well, then,’ the Stammerer said, in the same even voice. ‘Let’s have a heart-to-heart talk now. I’m not in any hurry. Are you?’
I had the impression that the Doge was glad to hear these words. ‘Excellent, let us talk,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t really understand why a mature and apparently self-sufficient individual like you was so eager to become one of my disciples. In fact, the more I thought about it, the stranger it seemed. By character you are an individualist, and not at all like the seeker who recently hanged himself. If you have serious reasons to wish to die, you could quite easily have managed without all these ceremonies.’
‘But the ceremonies you invent are so amusing. And I, sir, am a very curious man.’
‘Ah, yes,’ the Doge mused, looking up at the other man. ‘You certainly are a curious man.’
‘Oh, no more so than yourself, Mr Blagovolsky,’ the Stammerer said.
Later it will become clear to you why I now consider it possible to reveal to you the Doge’s real name (by the way, in the club he goes by the name of ‘Prospero’). But then, I should also say that I had not known his name previously and heard it spoken for the first time by the Stammerer.
The Doge shrugged. ‘Well, so you have made enquiries about me and found out my real name. Why did you need to do that?’
‘I had to find out as much about you as possible. And I managed to do it. Moscow is my city. I have many acquaintances here, some of them in the most surprising places.’
‘Then what have your acquaintances who inhabit the most surprising places discovered about me?’ the Doge enquired ironically, but I could see that he was uneasy.
‘A lot. For instance, that while you were serving a seventeen-year sentence in the Schliesselburg Fortress, you tried to end your own life on three occasions. The first time, in 1879, you went on hunger strike in protest against the conditions imposed on your comrades, who had been deprived of the right to take exercise outside their cells by the prison authorities. There were three of you on the strike. On the twenty-first day you, and only you, agreed to take food. The other two remained intransigent and died.’
The Doge cringed against the back of his armchair, but the Stammerer continued implacably: ‘The second time was even worse. In April 1881 you attempted to commit self-immolation after the prison commandant sentenced you to an exemplary flogging for replying disrespectfully to an inspector. Somehow you managed to obtain matches, pour the kerosene out of a lamp and impregnate your prison robe with it, but you couldn’t bring yourself to ignite the blaze. After you were subjected to corporal punishment, you wove a noose out of threads, hung it from one of the bars on the window and were on the point of hanging yourself, but once again at the last moment you changed your mind and did not wish to die. When you were already floundering in the noose, you grabbed hold of the window ledge and started calling loudly for help. The jailers took you down and sent you to the punishment cell . . . From that time until you were released on the occasion of the coronation of His Majesty the Emperor, you caused no more trouble and made no more attempts at suicide. Your relations with the Death whom you adore seem rather strange, Sergei Irinarkhovich.’