The Cleansing Flames Part 43

'I mean Tatiscev. That was what our people called him.'

Major Verkhotsev laid down the paper and rolled one of his moustaches thoughtfully. 'You know, we are always on the lookout for clever young men here in the Third Section. If it should prove problematic for you to return to the Department of Justice, our door is open. I imagine it will not be the same working there without Porfiry Petrovich.'

'He is not dead yet!'

'You do not have to make a decision now. Think about it. In the meantime, my wife and I and Maria Petrovna, of course would be delighted to see you at one of our at-homes soon. If you have a moment, I shall find you a card.'

'You mean I am free to go?'

'Of course. You have given a satisfactory account of yourself.'

Virginsky seemed stunned. 'But what if I were to tell you that I really did wish the Tsar dead?'

Major Verkhotsev had found the card with the address of his family residence. He held it out to Virginsky. 'There you are. We are at home every Thursday.'

'Did you not hear what I said?'

Major Verkhotsev smiled. 'Evidently not.' He held out a hand to Virginsky. 'Until we meet again, Pavel Pavlovich, goodbye.'

'Will I be safe? From Dyavol?'

'You mean Tatiscev?'

'I don't know. Dolgoruky claimed that he was haunted by a devil. Perhaps the same will happen to me now. They blamed me for Dolgoruky's death, you know. Which means I must also be responsible for his mother's. And if Porfiry dies . . .'

'You have nothing to fear from Tatiscev. His main concern now will be to flee the country.'

'And from the Devil?'

'My dear fellow, you're one of the new generation. A rationalist. A young man with a scientific outlook. You must simply tell yourself that devils do not exist.'

Virginsky ran a hand over his face. 'I will try.'

Major Verkhotsev nodded encouragingly. 'That's the spirit. Now, I imagine you wish to go straight to see Porfiry Petrovich? He is at the Obukhovksy Hospital. I will have you taken there.'

'If it is permitted, I would rather walk. Alone.'

'Yes, of course. But, please, don't do anything silly on the way. I don't want to be fis.h.i.+ng your hat out of the river.'

'I'm not wearing a hat.'

Major Verkhotsev smiled. 'Just as well.'

The Fontanka river stretched out in front of him between parallel embankments, unnaturally straight, like a vast bolt of fabric unrolled. It was a s.h.i.+mmering cloth, made up of many subtle colours. In the peaks of its rippling surface, an incarnadine glow danced over oily depths. The river seemed somehow wider than he remembered it, as if the quality of distance had changed in the period of his strange confinement. Everything now was further away, it seemed; in particular, the barriers that divided the city had increased. And at its heart, of course, the city was emptier now, immeasurably emptier.

Across the river he saw the peculiar pseudo-medieval construction of the Mikhailovsky Castle, now the School of Engineering. He thought of the sons sent there by their fathers to acquire a useful profession, imprisoned in that red fortress by vicarious ambition. And yet, somehow, he envied them the certainty and security that such a start in life promised. He wondered if there was a young man standing at one of its windows, viewing him with an equal but opposite envy.

The day was mercilessly bright, spring a.s.serting itself with the insensitivity of the eternally recurring. The sun knew nothing of his suffering. He wondered vaguely how many days had pa.s.sed since it had all begun. All he could decide with any confidence was that it must be May.

The shriek of a solitary gull ripped the sky. It was a plangent sound, bearing hope away, as if it were a fish s.n.a.t.c.hed from the Bay of Finland.

He thought of Major Verkhotsev's last words to him. The prospect of disappearing from his life held an undeniable allure at that moment. But the river's expanse did not tempt him to suicide. No, what appealed to him was the idea of leaving a hat on the ground, with a suitable note tucked into the band, and slipping away to start a new life, with a new name, somewhere far from where he was standing now. But the trouble was that he would always want to be far from wherever he was standing.

The city's emptiness poured into him, inexplicably weighing him down. He could not understand how the core of him could feel so heavy when he knew it contained only an expanding vacuum.

It was at that moment that he first had the sense of someone, or something, standing behind him, watching him. He did not turn round. If there was someone there, the chances were that it was a Third Section spy. But surely Verkhotsev would not be as unsubtle as that? he thought. Or perhaps that was the essence of his subtlety, to order a surveillance operation so implausibly unsubtle that Virginsky was bound not to believe in it? At any rate, if it was a spy, Virginsky judged it best not to reveal that he knew he was under surveillance. He would retain the advantage if he led the other to believe that his presence was not suspected.

In fact, Virginsky's instinct was that his watcher had not come from Fontanka, 16. Indeed, he found it hard to admit where he thought it had come from, or what he thought it was. But his thoughts were acc.u.mulating around the conversation he had had with Dolgoruky about a demon. And now Virginsky's refusal to turn round came not from cunning, but from fear.

He turned to his left and started walking along the Fontanka Embankment in the direction of the Obukhovsky Hospital. He heard no footsteps, but he was dogged by the sense of another following him. The further he progressed, the more real that sense became.

He counted his steps, straining to hear an echo of his own footfall that would confirm the reality of the ent.i.ty tracking him. But if there was a man behind him, his steps were perfectly synchronised with Virginsky's.

At the tenth step, he halted, and of course there was only silence. He set off again, and halted again, this time after a further thirteen steps. Again, silence. His follower was either able to guess exactly when he was going to stop, or made no sound as he tracked Virginsky. But the sense that he was being tracked did not diminish.

Porfiry's breathing was shallow and uneven. Each breath when it came seemed like an epic victory. It left him as wearied as if he had wrestled an angel to the earth.

His eyes were closed, bulging blindly in dark sockets. The change in his physical form since the last time Virginsky had seen him was shocking. His cheeks, one of which was padded with a thick dressing, were sunken. Silver stubble over his face added twenty years to his age, or perhaps revealed his true age for the first time. The hair on his head grew in white wispy clumps, exaggerating the irregular shape of his skull, its strange protuberances seemingly forced out by the peculiar ratiocinations that occurred within. As for the rest of the body, it was hard to believe that the shrunken form beneath the covers had ever once been Porfiry Petrovich. There was nothing left of his considerable paunch. It seemed to have melted away in a fever along with the muscles of his arms and legs.

Virginsky began to shake. He fell to his knees and clasped one of Porfiry's hands in both of his, squeezing the clammy flesh as if he thought he was sealing the life in. 'Forgive me.' He lifted the hand and pressed it against his forehead.

He sensed movement on the bed. Porfiry's eyes were open now. Something like a smile flickered weakly over his lips. 'Pavel Pavlovich?'

'Yes. It is I.'

'Good.'

'I . . . did this to you.'

'No.'

'Forgive me,' insisted Virginsky.

With heroic effort, Porfiry swung his other hand over to lay it over Virginsky's with a rea.s.suring pat. It took an equal effort for Porfiry to swallow. 'Pray for me. For my soul.'

'You are not going to die!'

Virginsky felt the squeeze of Porfiry's grip. It was surprisingly strong.

'Pray for me,' repeated Porfiry.

'I . . .' He was about to say that he could not, that he did not believe in prayer, or the soul. This once, he exercised tact when it came to expressing his convictions to Porfiry Petrovich.

But Porfiry seemed to have sensed what was on his mind: 'My father . . . was a non-believer too. And yet, G.o.d gave him the gift of healing. Pray for me.' The entreaty was charged with an urgency that even Virginsky could not escape.

He closed his eyes. He tried to remember the words of Kozodavlev's prayer. 'Eternal G.o.d, the judge of all, look with compa.s.sion on this our brother.'

Porfiry lifted his head from the pillow. 'I don't know that prayer.'

'I'm sorry. It's not a proper prayer. The words just came to me.'

'G.o.d gave you the words.'

'No, I don't think so. I read it somewhere.'

'No matter.'

Porfiry's head fell back against the pillow. There was a flurry of blinking as his eyelids settled over the bulbs of his eyes. His breathing settled into a deep, regular pattern. His hand relaxed. Virginsky placed it onto the sleeping man's rising and falling abdomen.

He stayed by the bedside all night, dozing in an armchair that was found for him. He dreamt again of the merchant couple's baby but also of his own father. In this dream, the baby was alive, although his father was dead. He shook his head sharply when he woke from it, as if to deny the subconscious wish his dreaming mind had voiced.

In the morning, Dr Pervoyedov expressed himself satisfied with Porfiry's condition; indeed he described himself as more satisfied than he had been for days. He told Virginsky to go home and sleep.

Virginsky found himself on the Fontanka Embankment again. He walked alongside the gently lapping river and thought of the much smaller river that ran through his father's estate. In fact, the river ran through a birch coppice that his father had recently sold. The sale had been the cause of some tension between them at the time. His father had believed that Virginsky's anger derived from seeing his inheritance sold off, but there had been more to it than that, as Virginsky now realised, perhaps for the first time. The river was part of his childhood. It seemed that his whole childhood had been spent running breathless through that coppice; that childhood was a silver lattice made from threaded shafts of summer. But his brightest, happiest memory was of one rare afternoon sitting on the riverbank beside his father, the two of them lazily teasing the water with lines dangled from simple rods. He had looked up at his father, and in his father's gentle smile, happiness dwelt. It was the betrayal of that memory, he realised, that had provoked his anger at the sale of the coppice, not any resentment at the reduction of the estate he stood to inherit.

He crossed the Fontanka by the Semyenovsky Bridge, and it was as if he was walking over the memory of that day. He felt a renewal of the anger he had once entertained against his father, but almost as soon as it had come upon him, he was newly aware of the same unseen presence d.o.g.g.i.ng his steps that he had experienced the day before. But, unlike then, he now had the unmistakable sense that the presence was benign. Whatever it was, he was no longer afraid of it.

Forgive him! The words arrived in his consciousness as an urgent plea. At the same moment, Virginsky realised that if he forgave his father he too would be forgiven.

He would go straight home, as Dr Pervoyedov had advised. In his mind, he began to draft the letter he would write to his father as soon as he had reached his lodgings.

Acknowledgements.

My greatest debt is to Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. Porfiry Petrovich is his character, of course, not mine. If this book encourages even one reader to turn to Dostoevsky's great novel Crime and Punishment for a brush with the original Porfiry, then perhaps I will be forgiven for my shameless purloining.

I'd like to thank Rachel Yarham, Daniela de Gregorio and Mike Jacob for intervening at a crucial moment and preventing me from doing something stupid. Thanks also to Liz Yarham for giving me my first corpse.

Born in Manchester in 1960, R. N. Morris now lives in North London with his wife and two children. The Cleansing Flames follows A Razor Wrapped in Silk, A Vengeful Longing and A Gentle Axe in a series of St Petersburg novels featuring Porfiry Petrovich, the character created by Fyodor Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment. Taking Comfort was published by Macmillan under the name Roger Morris in 2006. He has written the libretto for Ed Hughes's opera Cocteau in the Underworld and his novella The Exsanguinist was published in 2010 by Didier.

by the same author.

A GENTLE AXE.

A VENGEFUL LONGING.

A RAZOR WRAPPED IN SILK.

end.