Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk (16 page)

Lagrange left the conservatory in a state of profound thoughtfulness. It was clear that he could not expect any help from the skitter bug. His Grace's emissary had become a total and complete idiot. But never mind—he'd manage somehow on his own. It was a clear day, and that meant it would be a bright night. There would be a new moon, just right for the Black Monk. Starting in the evening he would lie in ambush on that—what was it called?—Lenten Spit. And catch the fellow red-handed just as soon as he put in an appearance. What did it matter if he was a ghost? The year before last, when Felix Stanislavovich was still in his old job in the Privislensky Region, he had personally arrested Stas the Bloodsucker, the Vampire of Lublin himself. He'd been a sly fellow, that monster, but Lagrange had nabbed him before he could say knife.

But before going back to Ararat, he had another piece of business to finish.

As he emerged from the tropics into the delightful cool of the north, he stood for about half a minute without moving at all, then went dashing into the bushes and dragged someone out of them, kicking and struggling—the same spy who had been stalking him along the pathway, and who must have been the person listening under the window as well; it couldn't have been anyone else.

It turned out that he already knew him. Once you'd seen someone like that you wouldn't forget him: a black beret, checked raincoat, violet spectacles, bushy beard. That ignorant type from the quayside.

“Who are you?” the colonel roared. “Why were you spying?”

“We have to! Definitely! About everything!” the short little man jabbered, swallowing words and entire chunks of sentences, so that there was no discernible general sense in what he said. “I heard! The powers that be! Sacred duty! But God knows how! There's death here, and now them. And no one, not a single person. Deaf, blind, crimson!”

“Sergei Nikolaevich, dear fellow, do calm down,” Korovin said affectionately to the shouting man. “You'll have convulsions again. This gentleman came to see the young man who lives in the conservatory. And what did you imagine?” Then he explained to the colonel in a low voice. “Another patient of mine, Sergei Nikolaevich Lampier. A highly talented physicist. But extremely eccentric.”

“I should say he is,” Felix Stanislavovich muttered, his iron fingers opening and releasing his prisoner. “A total lunatic, and still wandering around at large. You have some damn strange ways of doing things here.”

The mentally unbalanced physicist clasped his hands together imploringly and exclaimed, “A terrible error! I thought I was the only one!

But it's not me! It's someone else! Something's wrong here! Everything's wrong! But that's not important! I need to go that way!” And he jabbed his finger off to one side. “I need a commission. To Paris! Masha and Toto! Let them come here! They'll see, they'll understand! Tell them all! Death! And there'll be more!”

That did it. Lagrange was sick to death of associating with idiots. He tactlessly twirled his forefinger beside his temple and walked away, but the madman still would not calm down. He overtook the colonel, ran in front of him, grabbed hold of his ludicrous spectacles with both hands, and groaned in despair. “A crimson head, crimson! Hopeless!”

IN ORDER NOT to waste time following the wandering course of the pathway between the low hills, the chief of police set off directly toward the monastery bell tower, the golden dome of which he could see glittering above the treetops. He walked through a thin copse of trees, then an open meadow, then through some yellow and red bushes, which were followed by another meadow and then the final descent from the high ground to the plain. And so he had an excellent view of the town, the monastery, almost half of the island, and the open expanse of the lake into the bargain.

There was someone sitting in an open arbor at the edge of the meadow, wearing a straw hat and a short little jacket. When he heard resolute footsteps behind him, this stranger cried out in fright and hastily covered something lying on the bench beside him with his coat.

This hasty gesture was very familiar to Lagrange from his police work. It was the way a thief caught red-handed conceals his stolen goods. He need have no hesitation in grabbing this fellow by the collar and insisting that he turn out his pockets—something incriminating was absolutely sure to turn up.

The furtive subject glanced around at the colonel and gave a gentle smile of embarrassment. “I beg your pardon, I thought it was … someone quite different. Ah, how awkward it would have been!”

At this point he noticed Felix Stanislavovich's glance of professional suspicion and laughed quietly. “No doubt you thought that I'd hidden a murder weapon here, or something equally terrible. No, sir, it's a book.” And he willingly raised his coat to reveal the book beneath it: a rather thick one, in a brown leather binding. There were only two options: either it was something obscene or it was political. Otherwise, why hide it?

But the police chief had no time for prohibited reading matter now. “What concern is that of mine?” he growled irritably. “And what way is that to carry on, pestering a stranger with all sorts of nonsense …” And he walked on to go down the path toward the town.

The talkative gentleman said to his back, “Donat Savvich reproaches me, too, for being too importunate and pestering people. I'm sorry.”

There was not a hint of offense in the voice that pronounced those words. Lagrange stopped dead in his tracks, not because he regretted having been rude, but at the sound of the doctor's name.

The colonel went back to the arbor and took a closer look at the stranger. He noted the trusting gaze of the wide blue eyes, the soft line of the lips, the childishly naïve inclination of the head with its light-colored hair.

“You must be one of Mr. Korovin's patients, then?” the chief of police asked in an extremely polite manner.

“No,” the blond man replied, again without taking the slightest offense. “I am perfectly well now. But I used to be in Donat Savvich's care. He still keeps an eye on me even now. Gives me advice, supervises my reading. I am terribly uneducated; I've never really studied anything properly anywhere.”

Lagrange seemed to have been presented with a convenient opportunity to gather additional information about the acerbic doctor. It was clear straightaway that this sissy wouldn't conceal a thing, but just come straight out with whatever he was asked for.

“Would you permit me to sit here with you for a while?” asked La-grange, walking up the step. “The view here is so very fine.”

“Yes, it is very fine—that's why I like it here. Just recently, when the air was particularly clear, do you know what thought occurred to me?” The light-haired man moved over to make way and laughed again. “Put some arrant, hardened atheist here, one of those who are always demanding scientific proof of the existence of God, and show that skeptic the island and the lake. There's the proof, and no others are needed. Do you agree with me?”

Felix Stanislavovich immediately expressed his passionate agreement, trying to figure out how he could exchange this theme for a more productive subject, but the verbose stranger appeared to have his own plans for the forthcoming conversation.

“Your joining me here is most timely. I have read a lot of important things in a certain novel, and I would really like to share my thoughts with someone. And I have a lot of questions too. You have a clever, energetic face. I can see straightaway that you have firm opinions about everything. Tell me, which human crime do you regard as the most monstrous of all?”

After thinking for a moment and recalling the provisions of the criminal code, the police chief replied, “State treason.”

“Oh, how similar our ways of thinking are! Just imagine, I also think there can be nothing worse than betrayal! That is, I don't mean the betrayal of a state (although breaking an oath is not a good thing, of course), but the betrayal of one person by another. Especially if someone weak has put his total trust in you. To pervert a child who has idolized you and lived only for you—that is really terrible. Or to mock some wretched creature who is oppressed by everyone and weak-minded and has believed in no one but you in the whole world. To violate trust or love must surely be worse than murder, even though it is not punished by the law. For it is the destruction of your own soul! What do you think about that?”

Felix Stanislavovich wrinkled up his forehead and replied at length: “Well, for the perversion of juveniles the law prescribes hard labor, but as far as the other everyday forms of treachery are concerned, things are a little more complicated, unless, of course, it's a matter of financial fraud. Many people, especially men, do not regard unfaithfulness in marriage as a sin at all. But even among our sex, there are exceptions,” he said, brightening up as he recalled a certain spicy story. “I had a classmate by the name of Bulkin. A more virtuous man you could never hope to meet; he absolutely adored his wife. After classes were over, all of our group would go off to Ligovka, to a bawdy house, but he would always go home—that's the kind of eccentric he was. When we graduated, he was appointed to the Baltic Squadron—the secret service, naturally.” The colonel hesitated, afraid that he had given himself away, and glanced anxiously at the other man. He need not have worried—there was not the slightest hint of a cloud on his countenance; he was still gazing at Lagrange with exactly the same calm interest as before. “Yes, well. Naturally, then the voyages began, sometimes long ones, for months at a time. In port all the officers dashed straight to the bordello, but Bulkin sat in his cabin, showering kisses on a medallion with a portrait of his wife. He spent about a year sailing like that until he decided he'd suffered enough torment and found an excellent compromise.”

“Yes?” the blond man asked. “But I didn't think any compromise was possible in such a case.”

“Bulkin was a bright one! Always first in our class when it came to analytical tasks!” Felix Stanislavovich exclaimed with an admiring shake of his head. “And this is what he thought up. He found a theater design artist and commissioned a papier-mâché mask that was exactly like his adored wife's face—he even glued a golden-haired wig onto it. Now when they arrived in port, Bulkin was the very first into the whorehouse. He took some slag—begging your pardon—who had a face as ugly as sin, so she'd be cheaper, naturally, put the mask of his wife on her, and after that his conscience was absolutely clear. He used to say, ‘Perhaps I am being unfaithful in body, but not in spirit, not in the least.’ And he was right! In any case, his comrades used to respect him for it.”

The story Lagrange had told seemed to present the other man with some difficulty. He began blinking his sheep's eyes and spread his hands. “Yes, I suppose that is not being entirely unfaithful … Although I don't understand very much about that kind of love …”

All his life Felix Stanislavovich had never been able to stand sentimental milksops, but for some reason he had taken a real liking to this eccentric. Indeed, he liked this fellow so much that, incredible as it seemed, he even lost all desire to winkle anything out of him by some devious deception. The colonel was quite amazed at himself.

Instead of interrogating the ideal informant about his suspect (for Dr. Korovin had, after all, been noted down by Felix Stanislavovich for special attention), the police chief suddenly began talking in a manner that was quite untypical of him. “Tell me, sir, this is only my third day on the island … that is, strictly speaking, my second, since I arrived the evening before last. It's a strange place, quite unlike any other. Whatever you take hold of, whatever you look at just evaporates, like mist. Have you been here long?”

“More than two years.”

“So you're used to it. Tell me frankly, without any mist—what do you think about all this?”

The colonel accompanied the last two words, so indefinite and even rather strange for a man used to clear, concise formulations, with an equally vague gesture that seemed to take in the monastery, the town, the lake, and something else as well.

Nonetheless, the other man understood him perfectly well.

“You mean the Black Monk?”

“Yes. Do you believe in him?”

“That many people have actually seen him? I do believe that, without the slightest doubt. It is enough to look into the eyes of the people who tell you about it. They are not lying; I can sense a lie immediately. It's a different question whether they have seen something that really exists, or only what they have been shown.”

“Been shown by whom?” Lagrange asked cautiously.

“Well, I don't know. We all, every one of us, only see what we are shown. Many things that really do exist, and which other people see, we do not, but then sometimes we are presented with something that is intended for our eyes only. Not even sometimes—it happens quite often. I used to have visions almost every day. As I now understand, that was what my illness consisted of. When someone is shown too often what is intended for only his eyes, that is probably what constitutes insanity.”

Oh, brother, I can see I won't get far with you, the colonel thought in exasperation. It was time to put an end to the useless conversation—he'd wasted almost half the day already as it was. In order to garner at least something useful from this unnecessary meeting, Felix Stanislavovich asked, “Could you tell me which way Lenten Spit lies from here, where the phantom is seen most often?”

The blond man got up politely, walked across to the railings of the arbor, and began showing him: “You see the edge of the town? Beyond it there's a large field, then the fishing boat cemetery—you can see the masts sticking up. To the left there's a white abandoned lighthouse. That reddish brown cone is the Farewell Chapel, where they hold the hermits’ funerals. And beyond that there's a narrow strip of land reaching out into the water, like a finger pointing to the island. That island is the hermitage, and the strip of land is Lenten Spit. Over there, between the chapel and the buoy keeper's hut.”