The Greatest Russian Stories of Crime and Suspense (6 page)

“Hadn’t we better ask the porter?”

“What?”

“Where she’s gone and when she’ll be back.”

“Hm … Damn it all!… We might ask … But you know she never does go anywhere.”

And he once more tugged at the door-handle.

“Damn it all. There’s nothing to be done, we must go!”

“Stay!” cried the young man suddenly. “Do you see how the door shakes if you pull it?”

“Well?”

“That shows it’s not locked, but fastened with the hook! Do you hear how the hook clanks?”

“Well?”

“Why, don’t you see? That proves that one of them is at home. If they were all out, they would have locked the door from outside with the key and not with the hook from inside. There, do you hear how the hook is clanking? To fasten the hook on the inside they must be at home, don’t you see? So there they are sitting inside and don’t open the door!”

“Well! And so they must be!” cried Koch, astonished. “What are they about in there?” And he began furiously shaking the door.

“Stay!” cried the young man again. “Don’t pull at it! There must be something wrong … Here, you’ve been ringing and pulling at the door and still they don’t open! So either they’ve both fainted or—”

“What?”

“I tell you what. Let’s go and fetch the porter, let him wake them up.”

“All right.”

Both were going down.

“Stay. You stop here while I run down for the porter.”

“What for?”

“Well, you’d better.”

“All right.”

“I’m studying the law, you see! It’s evident, e-vi-dent there’s something wrong here!” the young man cried hotly, and he ran downstairs.

Koch remained. Once more he softly touched the bell which gave one tinkle, then gently, as though reflecting and looking about him, began touching the door-handle, pulling it and letting it go to make sure once more that it was only fastened by the hook. Then puffing and panting he bent down and began looking at the keyhole: but the key was in the lock on the inside and so nothing could be seen.

Raskolnikov stood keeping tight hold of the axe. He was in a sort of delirium. He was even making ready to fight when they should come in. While they were knocking and talking together, the idea several times occurred to him to end it all at once and shout to them through the door. Now and then he was tempted to swear at them, to jeer at them, while they could not open the door! “Only make haste!” was the thought that flashed through his mind.

“But what the devil is he about?…” Time was passing, one minute, and another—no one came. Koch began to be restless.

“What the devil!” he cried suddenly and in impatience deserting his sentry duty, he too went down, hurrying and thumping with his heavy boots on the stairs. The steps died away.

“Good heavens! What am I to do?”

Raskolnikov unfastened the hook, opened the door—there was no sound. Abruptly, without any thought at all, he went out, closing the door as thoroughly as he could, and went downstairs.

He had gone down three flights when he suddenly heard a loud noise below—where could he go? There was nowhere to hide. He was just going back to the flat.

“Hey there! Catch the brute!”

Somebody dashed out of a flat below, shouting, and rather fell than ran down the stairs, bawling at the top of his voice.

“Mitka! Mitka! Mitka! Mitka! Mitka! Blast him!”

The shout ended in a shriek; the last sounds came from the yard; all was still. But at the same instant several men talking loud and fast began noisily mounting the stairs. There were three or four of them. He distinguished the ringing voice of the young man. “They!”

Filled with despair he went straight to meet them, feeling “come what must!” If they stopped him—all was lost; if they let him pass—all was lost too; they would remember him. They were approaching; they were only a flight from him—and suddenly deliverance! A few steps from him, on the right, there was an empty flat with the door wide open, the flat on the second floor where the painters had been at work, and which, as though for his benefit, they had just left. It was they, no doubt, who had just run down, shouting. The floor had only just been painted, in the middle of the room stood a pail and a broken pot with paint and brushes. In one instant he had whisked in at the open door and hidden behind it, and only in the nick of time; they had already reached the landing. Then they turned and went on up to the fourth floor, talking loudly. He waited, went out on tiptoe, and ran down the stairs.

No one was on the stairs, nor in the gateway. He passed quickly through the gateway and turned to the left in the street.

He knew, he knew perfectly well that at that moment they were at the flat, that they were greatly astonished at finding it unlocked, as the door had just been fastened, that by now they were looking at the bodies, that before another minute had passed they would guess and completely realize that the murderer had just been there, and had succeeded in hiding somewhere, slipping by them and escaping. They would guess most likely that he had been in the empty flat, while they were going upstairs. And meanwhile he dared not quicken his pace much, though the next turning was still nearly a hundred yards away. “Should he slip through some gateway and wait somewhere in an unknown street? No, hopeless! Should he fling away the axe? Should he take a cab? Hopeless, hopeless!”

At last he reached the turning. He turned down it more dead than alive. Here he was half-way to safety, and he understood it; it was less risky because there was a great crowd of people, and he was lost in it like a grain of sand. But all he had suffered had so weakened him that he could scarcely move. Perspiration ran down him in drops, his neck was all wet. “My word, he has been going it!” someone shouted at him when he came out on the canal bank.

He was only dimly conscious of himself now and the farther he went the worse it was. He remembered, however, that on coming out on to the canal bank he was alarmed at finding few people there and so being more conspicuous, and he had thought of turning back. Though he was almost falling from fatigue, he went a long way round so as to get home from quite a different direction.

He was not fully conscious when he passed through the gateway of his house; he was already on the staircase before he recollected the axe. And yet he had a very grave problem before him, to put it back and to escape observation as far as possible in doing so. He was of course incapable of reflecting that it might perhaps be far better not to restore the axe at all, but to drop it later on in somebody’s yard. But it all happened fortunately, the door of the porter’s room was closed but not locked, so that it seemed most likely that the porter was at home. But he had so completely lost all power of reflection that he walked straight to the door and opened it. If the porter had asked him, “What do you want?” he would perhaps have simply handed him the axe. But again the porter was not at home, and he succeeded in putting the axe back under the bench and even covering it with the chunk of wood as before. He met no one, not a soul, afterwards on the way to his room; the landlady’s door was shut. When he was in his room, he flung himself on the sofa just as he was—he did not sleep, but sank into blank forgetfulness. If anyone had come into his room then he would have jumped up at once and screamed. Scraps and shreds of thoughts were simply swarming in his brain, but he could not catch at one, he could not rest on one, in spite of all his efforts …

VIL LIPATOV

GENKA PALTSEV—
SON OF DMITRI

Siberia, the place where Vil Lipatov (1927–1979) was born, remained the great love of his life and the background to all his stories. He reveled in the vast expanses of this eastern region of Russia, its rivers and forests, and this stark, cold landscape is so vividly described in his work, beginning with his first novel,
Deep Stream
, and continuing with his 1977 detective novel,
The Stolotov Dossier
, that it almost becomes a character. The son of a much-loved Bolshevik journalist, Lipatov was a true son of the Soviet Union, writing of the evils of individualism, claiming that it not only led to vice but that it was itself a vice.

Lipatov worked in the Soviet Union’s film industry, writing several screenplays, including
Ivan I Kolombina
(1975).

The hero of his short story collection,
A Village Detective
(1970), is Fyodor Aniskin, a divisional militia inspector who has been at his post in a small Siberian village for forty years, showing kindness and wisdom as a member of the close-knit community. He shares the traits that made Sherlock Holmes so successful: an acute observational ability, a logical mind and the uncanny skill of reconstructing events as if he had witnessed them first-hand.

“Genka Paltsev–Son of Dmitri” was first published in English in
A Village Detective
(Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1970).

1

M
ilitia inspector Fyodor Aniskin was considered to be the stoutest man in the village. Cherkashin, the manager of the dairy factory, weighed sixteen stone but Aniskin was a head taller and much fatter. Nobody knew exactly how much he weighed for when he was asked Aniskin used to reply, “Why don’t you weigh me yourself?” For all his obesity, however, the inspector moved about the village at a brisk pace, especially on cool days. He liked talking to people and hated the dairy manager’s guts.

Aniskin had been village militia inspector for goodness knows how long, but nobody remembered what his rank was, because he only wore his uniform once every three years when he went on some particularly important business to the district centre. For this he gave the following reason, “If I wore my uniform every day, I’d have to spend all my wages on buying new ones.” In summer he wore wide linen trousers, a grey shirt usually open at the neck showing his hairy chest and size twelve sandals. In rainy weather he wore heavy top boots and in winter felt boots which made his legs look really elephantine.

When Aniskin walked the length of the village on a winter morning the women listened to the snow creaking as he moved from one house to another and said to themselves, “Six o’clock, time to start making the dough.” In summer Aniskin rose at half past six and his round of the village was marked by laboured breathing. Between five in the afternoon and eight in the evening Aniskin had his nap, then drank tea out in the garden in summer and in his small kitchen, whose walls were pasted with colour photographs cut from the magazine
Ogonyok
, in winter.

The militia inspector’s wife was his very opposite in that she was extremely thin, with a low even voice and slanting eyes. Her name was Glafira. She did not work anywhere and was therefore regarded as a lady of leisure though nobody had ever seen her taking it easy. She always found something to keep her busy. She had a big vegetable plot, kept various animals and poultry, gathered mushrooms, berries and nuts, but for all her efforts the family was never particularly well-off, because they had many children and there was always a son or a daughter to be supported at college. Aniskin wanted all his children to have a good education. All Glafira’s babies were big, pink-cheeked and healthy.

In the summer of 196… Aniskin’s weight was calculated to be roughly nineteen stone. One stuffy July afternoon, with the time for his nap approaching, Aniskin was strolling leisurely along the village street keeping on the river side and trying to catch cool wafts from the Ob on his hot forehead. The river flowed lazily to the north, cormorants circled above it, and the ferry-boat made its way creakingly to the other side. The river was its usual self, so was the sky, and at the foot of the high bank children were bathing, snorting like horses. When they caught sight of Aniskin’s huge bulk on the rise their shouting and screaming grew louder, and the running and splashing became more energetic than ever.

“Sitting in the water all day long, can you imagine it?” said Aniskin. “Can you imagine anything like it?”

He sucked his tooth, produced a handkerchief from his pocket, examined it carefully, thought a little, then moved his legs apart and bent down to pick a bit of brick. After winding his handkerchief round the brick he threw it down to the river edge, shouting to the children, “Wet the handkerchief for me, my head’s fit to split!”