Porfiry placed the sheet back on top of the pile and turned to Katya with a smile. “And you keep it tidy for him. It seems to me Anna Alexandrovna runs a well-ordered household. She is a good mistress, I would say.”
“The best.”
“Tell me, did anything else unusual happen on the day of the argument? Did Goryanchikov or Borya have any visitors, for example?”
“There was a boy,” answered Katya with surprise.
“A boy? What boy is this?”
“I don’t know. I had never seen him before. It was strange. He insisted on seeing Stepan Sergeyevich. And on his way out he called on Borya in his shed. Soon after that they had their argument. And soon after that Stepan Sergeyevich went out.”
“Wearing his shuba?”
“Of course…as Anna Alexandrovna has said.”
“And how soon after Stepan Sergeyevich went out did you notice that Borya was missing?”
“Well, of course, the yard needed clearing. We couldn’t open the door for the snow. We had to ask Osip Maximovich’s man Artur to do it for us. He wasn’t happy about that, I can tell you. Considers himself above such tasks.”
“And who has kept the yard clear for you in Borya’s absence?”
“Anna Alexandrovna has come to an arrangement with one of the neighbors’ yardkeepers. He sometimes helps us out when Borya goes missing.”
“This boy interests me. Was he a friend of Anna Alexandrovna’s daughter perhaps?”
“No!” cried Katya, outraged at the suggestion. “He was a scruffy little urchin. Sofiya Sergeyevna would have nothing to do with the likes of him. Besides, he was only about ten years old.”
“And how old is Sofiya Sergeyevna?”
“She was thirteen at her last birthday.”
“I see. Tell me more about this boy. Did you speak to him?”
“I answered the door to him. And I would have shut the door in his filthy face too if Stepan Sergeyevich hadn’t come down and seen him.”
“Did Stepan Sergeyevich know the boy?”
“I don’t think so. But he heard him asking for him by name.”
“So he had the boy admitted and brought him up here to his room? How long did the boy stay?”
“Not long. Ten minutes at the most. If that.”
“Does Stepan Sergeyevich give lessons as a tutor?”
“Not anymore. And this boy was not the sort of boy to have lessons. He had a stupid face.”
“You took against the boy, I can see.”
“He left a trail of dirty footprints throughout the house. It was a job to get them out.”
“And what about Stepan Sergeyevich? Did you like Stepan Sergeyevich?”
The question went unanswered.
“Katya?”
“One should not speak ill of the dead.”
“He was a difficult man to like, though, wasn’t he?”
“He was a devil.”
“Do you know a friend of Goryanchikov’s called Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky?”
“I believe there is a gentleman of that name who visited from time to time.”
“Did he visit on the day of Goryanchikov’s disappearance?”
“No. However, it’s strange you mentioned it…He called to visit Stepan Sergeyevich yesterday.”
“Yesterday? What time was this?”
“It was late. Very late. Anna Alexandrovna and her daughter had both gone to bed. He knocked the whole house up.”
“And he asked to see Stepan Sergeyevich?”
“He demanded to be admitted to his room.”
Porfiry fumbled in his pockets for his enameled cigarette case. A severe frown from Katya deterred him from opening it. Nonetheless, in this instance, he found the touch of it stimulating enough.
OUTSIDE, Porfiry finally lit the cigarette he craved. The blizzard he had seen massing from Goryanchikov’s room had blown itself out. But the courtyard had already been cleared. Porfiry felt sorry for Borya, whose death had been so quickly and easily compensated for, as if erased beneath a snowfall.
Inside the yardkeeper’s shed it was as if the objects of his life were shaping themselves around the fact of his death, around his physical absence. There was an old paint-spattered wooden chair, its seat worn and polished by many sittings. It was crammed in next to a folding card table, the baize threadbare and stained. The samovar on it seemed to possess an air of mournful disappointment. Chipped cups milled around it without purpose. The sawdust had settled on the floor, around an assortment of bricks and logs. The bottom of a barrel was propped up against one of the shed’s sides. Life continued only in the cobwebs that grew heedless over the tools and tins of his occupation.
Porfiry backhanded a line in the air, a conjurer’s gesture, as he checked off the row of hanging axes. But of course, he did not need to do this. He could see perfectly well where the missing axe should be. He could judge too, from its position in the hierarchy of axes, that its size matched that of the bloodied axe found on Borya.
He stared at the gap and wondered at the mind that had chosen this axe over the three others hanging there. The second-smallest axe had been taken. The chances were that it was snatched in haste. But even so, some exercise of intent must have been involved, whether conscious or unconscious. Why, for example, was the smallest axe not taken, which would surely have been more convenient? The axe, or rather the absence of this particular axe, had to point at something. It was in precisely such a detail that the killer would betray himself.
Porfiry brought his hand back and in the air drew a vertical line up and then back down the gap formed by the missing axe. He realized that he had crossed himself. His hand came to rest on a small birch box that lay on the shelf beneath the axes. He picked up the box and discovered that it was locked.
In an upstairs apartment, seated alone at a card table, Marfa Denisovna looked down at hands disfigured by warts. She laid out the cards for a game of solitaire. She accepted the fall of the cards in the same way as she had accepted her warts, and all the other things sent by God. Without pleasure or complaint.
Marfa Denisovna was sixty-six, as old as the century. It was a convenient coincidence, because if she ever forgot her age, she only had to ask the year.
Deep peach-stone whorls lined her face. She lacked lips entirely and showed as little as possible of her eyes. Her body was wiry and compact. There was not much to her physically, but she was far from frail. The passage of time had worn away all softness from her, leaving a human kernel. Her shoulders were draped in an enormous black shawl. A delicate lace bonnet seemed out of place on her tightly pinned-up, almost metallically hard gray hair.
She did not look up as Anna Alexandrovna came in.
“Has he gone?”
“Yes.”
“Who was he?”
“An investigator.”
“What did he want?”
“They have found Stepan Sergeyevich and Borya.”
Marfa Denisovna moved the ace of spades up.
“Dead. They are both dead.” Anna Alexandrovna’s voice was distant and empty.
Marfa Denisovna moved the seven of hearts across, placing it on the eight of clubs.
“Marfa Denisovna? Did you hear me?” Now there was an edge of panic to the younger woman’s voice.
“I heard you.”
“He asked about the argument.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him what I had to.”
“So. Stepanushka is dead. Poor Stepanushka. Ah well, it was meant to be. God did not look favorably on his life. His deformity was a punishment.”
“But why should he have been punished? It was not his sin.”
“He was not the only one punished.” Marfa Denisovna laid down the cards and spread out her fingers. There was not one that was without a wart. In places the clusters of nodules distorted the shape of the finger. It had not escaped Marfa Denisovna’s notice that her affliction made it harder for her to place her hands together in prayer. She picked up the cards again and dealt out the next three.