‘What killer? Gdlevsky killed himself! Ah yes, you don’t know anything about it!’
‘Himself ?’ Masa picked up the piece of iron pipe. ‘Rike zat?’ He took off his bowler hat and pretended to hit himself on the back of the head. ‘Rike zat very difficur’, Columbinesan. No, young man was sitting at tabur. Someone crimbed in window. Young man frightened, ran towards door. Kirrer catch him and hit him on back of head with pipe.’
He squatted down beside the body and poked about in the bloody mess with his fingers. Columbine grabbed hold of the edge of the table as the room suddenly swam before her eyes.
‘Skurr smashed to smi-the-reens,’ said the Japanese, clearly savouring the impressive word. ‘Very, very strong kirrer. No many so strong. That good. Wirr be easier for masta to find him.’
Columbine was still struggling to recover from this new shock. Gdlevsky hadn’t committed suicide? Someone had killed him? But who? What for? It was ludicrous, insane!
‘We have to send for the police!’ she muttered.
The only thing she wanted was to get out of that room with its fresh smell of slaughter as soon as possible.
‘I’ll do it. I’ll go down to the yard keeper!’
Masa shook his head.
‘No, Corumbine-san. First ze masta. Ret him rook. Porice rater. Wait here. I go rook for terephone.’
He was gone for about twenty minutes, and those were the worst twenty minutes of Columbine’s life. That was what she thought as she stood at the window, looking out at the lights shining beyond the black bulk of the Petrovsky Park. She was afraid to turn round.
When she heard a light rustling sound behind her, she squeezed her eyes shut and cringed, pulling her head down into her shoulders. She imagined Gdlevsky’s corpse getting up off the floor, turning its shattered head and walking towards the window with its hands reaching out. There is nothing worse than standing with your back to an unknown danger. Columbine squealed and swung round.
It would have been better if she hadn’t.
Gdlevsky had not got up off the floor, he was still lying there, face down, but his hair was moving in a strange manner. Columbine looked closer and saw two mice crawling about in the wound and sniffing at it.
Choking on her own scream, she dashed to the door, flew out on to the stairs and ran into Masa on his way back up.
‘I rang from night chemist’s,’ he reported. ‘Masta at home. He come now. He very gratefuw to you, Corumbine-san. You can go home. I must be here, cannot see you to cab. Zis is unforgivabur.’ And the Japanese bowed guiltily.
God, how she ran to get away from those cursed Kleinfeld apartments! She ran all the way to Triumphal Square before she found a night cab.
When she had caught her breath and gathered her thoughts a little, she started pondering on the meaning of what had happened. The meaning proved to be simple, clear and frightening.
Since Gdlevsky had not killed himself but been killed (Masa had proved that irrefutably), there was only one creature that could have done it – if, of course, you could call this force a creature. No one had climbed into the attic window from the fire ladder. It was not someone, but Something that had entered the room. That was the explanation for a blow of such monstrous, superhuman power.
‘Death is alive,’ Columbine repeated to herself, gazing with wide-open eyes at the cabdriver’s stooped back.
The creature that went by the name of Death could walk round the city, look into windows, strike blows of fearsome power. It could love and hate, it could feel insulted.
How Gdlevsky had insulted Death was clear. The arrogant boy had declared himself her Chosen One, when he had no right to that title, he had arbitrarily invented Signs that did not really exist. He was a genuine impostor, and for that he had suffered the fate of impostors.
The sheer grandeur of what had happened set her trembling.
Columbine meekly handed the driver the extortionate sum of two roubles, although the journey should have cost seventy-five kopecks at the most.
She didn’t remember walking upstairs to the fifth floor, but as she was taking off her lilac mourning apron, a small rectangle of thick white paper fell out of the pocket. She picked it up absentmindedly and read the single word written on it in beautiful Gothic letters: ‘Liebste’4.
At first she smiled, imagining that shy Rosencrantz had finally plucked up the courage to take decisive action. But then she remembered that the German had not come near her even once during the whole evening, so he couldn’t possibly have slipped the note into her pocket.
But who had written it? And why in German?
In German, Death was a male noun – der Tod.
‘So now my turn has come,’ Columbine said to her reflection in the mirror.
The reflection’s lips smiled, its eyes staring in wild fright.
Columbine opened her diary and tried to describe her feelings. With a trembling hand she traced out the words: ‘Have I really been chosen? How jolly and how frightening!’
III. From the ‘Agents’ Reports’ File
To His Honour Lieutenant-Colonel Besikov (Private and confidential)
Dear Lieutenant-Colonel,
I must confess that your note, delivered this morning by courier, came as a great shock to me. I already knew about the murder of Gdlevsky, because even before your messenger arrived I had a visit from one of the ‘lovers’ who was absolutely shattered by the incredible news. My initial response to your request to provide the detective police with every possible assistance was intense indignation. I decided that you had lost all sense of proportion and wished to reduce me to the status of a petty informer from Khitrovka.
However, after I had calmed down a little, I took a slightly different point of view of the matter. A genuine tragedy had occurred. A young man with an immense talent that promised great things – perhaps as great as Lermontov or Pushkin – had been killed at the age of eighteen, before he could make any substantial contribution to Russian literature. A few brilliant poems will find their way into anthologies and collections, but that will be the poor youth’s entire legacy. What a bitter, senseless loss! If Gdlevsky had laid hands on himself, as he was planning to do, that would have been a tragedy, but his murder is worse than tragic. It is a national disgrace. It is the duty of every patriot who holds dear the honour of Russia to do everything in his power to assist in clarifying this shameful affair. Yes, yes, I regard myself as a true Russian patriot, it is well known that the most sincere and passionate patriots are always drawn from the national minorities (to which you and I belong).
And so I have decided to do everything in my power to assist your colleagues from the police. Having analysed the information that you provided about the circumstances of the crime, I was struck by the following.
It is not clear why anyone would wish to murder a person who intended in any case to kill himself only a minute or an hour later.
And if someone did resort to murder for some purpose or other, then why did they not disguise the crime as a voluntary death? Nobody would ever have thought of suspecting foul play when the farewell poem had already been written.
The first explanation that comes to mind is coincidence – just as Gdlevsky was preparing to commit suicide (you wrote that he had a loaded pistol ready in the drawer of his desk), a robber who knew nothing about the young man’s fatal intentions climbed in through his window and hit him over the head with a length of metal pipe. A cruel joke played by fate. You write that the police regard this account of events as the most likely and ask my opinion.