The Birds Fall Down (58 page)

An elderly woman, wearing an old-fashioned black bonnet tied with strings under her chin came to a halt beside the man in the light suit, gaped at what she saw, crossed herself, and stood blinking and praying. The next minute there were people standing on each side of these two, all looking down at Kamensky as if, once he had done this extraordinary thing of lying there dead, he might be expected to do something else as extraordinary. The woman in the pale mauve glistening dress had sunk to the ground, and had twisted round and pressed her face against the young man’s legs, so that her hat was a purple circle covering the knees of his striped trousers. Some of the cabs and carriages slowed down, others kept on their way. Above the noise of the traffic there could be heard curiously wistful shouts, and sounds of running feet, and the street hummed as if it had an insect life of its own. From the archway she watched more and more people curdle into a silent assembly, looking down on the body through the bright light; and she slipped out of the shadow and joined them.

Suddenly there was amongst them a policeman, a sallow man with an angry blue-black moustache, waving his truncheon in a threat so general that it threatened nobody. The strap gave, and it fell from his hand, but he caught it in mid-air, nearly falling over as he stretched for it, and at once he had to fumble for his whistle, which had swung on its cord to the back of his neck. All his movements were going wrong, as if he were an actor in a harlequinade. He knelt down by Kamensky, felt his pulse, and then shouted to the crowd, “Who put these roses on his face?” It sounded as if the unforgivable irregularity in the proceedings was the gross mishandling of the white roses.

“Nobody, he put them there himself,” said the man in the light suit.

“What?” exclaimed the policeman. “A dead man decorated his own corpse with flowers?” He lifted the whistle to his lips, and the blasts ranged overhead like the call of furious birds.

The man in the light suit clapped his hands over his ears. “If you’ll stop that row I’ll tell you what happened. No I didn’t see it done. But I think it must have been done just before, because I saw this poor man on the street-corner down there, where the Rue Belloy runs into the avenue. I noticed him myself because he was carrying these white roses and was dressed as if he were going to call on a lady, and looked most respectable, and yet he was reeling, he seemed to have had a drop too much. When I saw he was going up the avenue the same way as me, I kept well to the rear, for he was staggering worse, I didn’t want him staggering on to me. Then I saw that his left trouser-leg had a dark line on it, as if it were wet, and then I saw there was something wet on his shoe, and then there was a red smear on the stone. I ran forward and said, ‘You’ve been hurt, sit down on a doorstep and I’ll get help,’ but he only said, very obstinately, ‘I must get there, I must get there.’ Then he nearly fell, and I put my arm round him and said, ‘Lean on me,’ but he wrenched himself away muttering that ‘the flowers mustn’t be crushed.’ But then the blood gushed out, see, it’s here on my sleeve, and he called out something I couldn’t understand, and he gave a cough and sagged into my arms and fell flat down on the pavement and stretched himself out as if he were on a bed, and his hands went up, and that’s why the flowers are over his face.”

The policeman sent another blast screaming overhead like a gull, took out a notebook and began writing, asked some questions, blew his whistle again. A bus came to an uneasy stop at the curb, the horses scuffling and slipping between the shafts, because the passengers inside and on top had all rushed to one side to see what was the cause of the commotion. On top several young men with angry faces leaned far over the side and howled abuse of the police, and slogans about freedom and Captain Dreyfus. The silent crowd turned about and looked up at them in bewilderment, the policeman dropped his notebook. Then one of the young men shouted a prolonged denunciation of the authorities for preventing the sons of the people from honouring brave men on a sacred anniversary. The white roses had evidently been transformed by the group’s preoccupations into a memorial sheaf, torn from the hands of libertarian demonstrators. The silent crowd turned back to their original position and went on looking at Kamensky as if he might know some other conjuring trick as well as lying there. The policeman, after blowing a few more blasts, began again to question the man in the light suit. Laura did not know what to do. The sunshine was very strong, it picked out in the pavement and the buildings the blue grain which summer discloses in stone, and the necks which sparkle like lump sugar. The glare made her feel sick and stupid. It was all quite different from what she had expected, and she felt she might as well go back to the apartment. But when she turned towards the archway she found Chubinov standing behind her. He did not see her because his eyes were levelled on Kamensky in that sceptical, precautionary stare. He was wearing the overcoat, but perhaps it was for the best. If anybody noticed that his face was shining with sweat they might think that the reason.

She said softly, “Vassili, let’s get out of this,” but he showed no sign of having heard her, and she repeated it. But at that moment the man in the light suit pointed straight at him. “Yes. That’s the gentleman. I don’t think he can have seen the assault, but he may have seen the assailant, for he was standing only a few yards from the poor victim when I first caught sight of him. Not,” he added, “that he can have had anything to do with the stabbing, for he was yards away.”

If Kamensky had been stabbed, then someone else had murdered him. Liberated, she took her stand beside Chubinov without furtiveness and was unperturbed while the policeman came nearer and asked him, “Did you see this man stabbed?”

Chubinov raised his eyes from Kamensky’s body and said in a weak, bewildered voice, “Did I see a man stabbed? What man?”

“Why, this one, of course, the corpse on the pavement.”

“No,” breathed Chubinov. “No. I certainly never saw him stabbed.”

“Do you know him?” The policeman looked over his shoulder at Kamensky’s body, and paused with a sudden and naive movement of self-criticism. Plainly he was thinking, “Good God, what have I been doing to leave those roses where they are? I should have had them off first thing, someone might have recognized him by now.” He went over to the body and knelt beside it, and Laura turned away and covered her eyes so that she need not see Kamensky’s face. In her private darkness she heard the policeman ask, “Do you know him?” and Chubinov answer, “I don’t know anything about him. I know absolutely nothing about him.”

Laura, keeping her head averted and one hand over her eyes, plucked at Chubinov’s sleeve, and said, “Vassili, Vassili, take me up to the apartment.”

“Miss Laura!” he exclaimed, and his arm closed tightly round her shoulders, she felt his breath near her face. “Miss Laura, I didn’t see you were there. Oh, what must you have thought of me for leaving you like that at Grissaint! Not for one moment would I have gone off like that if I had known that Nikolai was to die.”

“Stay there, both of you,” said the policeman. “What’s this about Nikolai? If you don’t know the man, how do you know his name was Nikolai?”

She could not imagine why Chubinov had not spoken to her in Russian. Quickly she said, “The man lying there isn’t called Nikolai. So far as I know. The Nikolai this gentleman means is my grandfather, who’s lying dead upstairs.”

“How did that happen? When did it happen? Are the police with him?” He sent one whistle-blast after another soaring over their heads. Apparently a police-whistle had the power of a musical instrument to convey the emotions of the performer, for these blasts sounded more desperate than the earlier ones.

“No, no,” explained Laura, shouting through the blasts, “my grandfather is Count Diakonov, and he was very old, he died of old age and a heart-attack, two days ago—” she pointed at her black dress—“and the funeral is to be tomorrow.”

“I have come to mourn the Count,” said Chubinov.

“Can’t I take this gentleman up to our apartment?” asked Laura. “We’re on the fourth floor, in here on the left. You can come and question him afterwards. When you’re ready.”

The policeman’s attention had left them. Appalled, he was listening to a sound coming from farther up the avenue towards the Étoile. Another policeman was whistling for assistance, with blasts not less desperate than his own, in the very quarter from which he was hoping help would come. A boy ran by, laughing and shouting, and when the policeman stopped him he reported that disputes had broken out among the passengers on a bus, and some had alighted and were fighting it out on the sidewalks, regarding a demonstration which had been suppressed by the police. The elderly woman in the black bonnet, who had been lost in prayer ever since she had come to a halt by Kamensky’s body, suddenly returned to time, said harshly to the policeman, “What is happening to the amenities of this district?” and walked away, tossing her head.

Chubinov met the policeman’s glazed look of grievance by a friendly pat on the arm and said, “You heard what the young lady said. Count Diakonov’s apartment. On the fourth floor. In this house. This very house, here. My name is Hippolyte Baraton, of the Villa des Mimosas, Rue Corneille, Nice. I’ll be there, ready to show you my papers.”

They hurried through the archway and across the courtyard. “A typical historical event,” said Chubinov pedantically. “Itself definite enough, yet surrounded by confusion apparently not connected with it. It is as if a drop of the extraordinary added to the ordinary produces a chemical explosion.” They got into the elevator and as it heaved and grunted upwards he took her in his arms and kissed her on the forehead. He moved and spoke as if he had grown much older since she had last seen him. “Now you’re safe. Now that all things are settled you can go on being a beautiful Russian girl, and become a beautiful Russian lady, and finally, long years ahead, a beautiful Russian old lady. I am quite content. My life has not been altogether wasted. I have saved Nikolai’s granddaughter.”

She cut into her own murmurs of gratitude. “But who stabbed Kamensky?”

“Oh, my dear!” He had to steady himself against the wall of the elevator. “Why—nobody stabbed him. I shot him.”

She broke into sobs. She could not believe it. Angrily she thought of the crucifix in the room. “What do you mean, you shot him?

You can’t have. That man said quite clearly he was stabbed.”

“Only because he didn’t hear the shot above the noise of the traffic. This type of revolver—I’ve got a silencer on it—makes just a thud. Also he didn’t see me shoot Kamensky, for I shot him from the pocket of my overcoat, through a slit in the seam, with my arm braced on my hip. It’s one of our techniques, which I have practised without ever expecting to use it. Please, Laura, don’t cry.”

“Oh, I hoped, I hoped so much that we wouldn’t have to kill him. I prayed in the room. And out there on the street, I thought that what that man said made it certain someone else had done it, and I thought we were innocent. It’s too awful, having thought it was all right, and now finding it isn’t.”

“But it wouldn’t have been all right if someone else had done it. It would have been illogical. I was the person who had a truly moral reason for killing Kamensky. I knew he meant to kill you. If anybody else had killed him, it was almost bound to be for a lesser reason. That would have shown a defect in the moral universe.”

She wished she could tell him to shut up, but it would seem ungrateful; and he looked quite dreadful. “Did we really have to kill him?”

“I killed him. Not you. It is no use shaking your head. Those are the facts, Miss Laura. And I had no choice. While Gorin was still in Grissaint, a comrade and I went through all his papers in both his rooms. They were in code. In four codes. But I knew three of them, my comrade the fourth. Miss Laura, you will try to forget all this, you will not make yourself miserable by dwelling on it. You promise?”

“Oh, tell me quickly.”

“In one of his diaries, kept in the fourth code, there was written, ‘I fear I will have to kill Laura.’ It was an entry made just before he started for Grissaint.”

She shuddered. “If you knew how he went on and on that night he got to Grissaint. Telling me I was as beautiful as my mother. And what about you? Had he got it all worked out for you?”

His mouth twisted. “The plans could not have been more perfect. I have to admire them. I was not only to be killed but utterly discredited. None of my friends would have doubted the justice of my execution, or cared to think of me again.”

The lift had been stationary at the fourth floor landing for some moments. They heard people moving about in the hall below, and Laura felt afraid. Out in the sunlight, when she had believed that someone else had killed Kamensky, she had felt weightless with innocence. Now the leaden heaviness had come back again. She hurried him through the still open door of the apartment and there in the hall it came on her that they were trapped. She cried, “But the gun. The gun. If you shot Kamensky, where is the gun?”

“Why, here in my overcoat pocket.”

“Vassili, what are we to do? They know where you are. We told them. Why, I hammered it in, I was so sure we had not killed him. But as soon as that policeman gets help they’ll examine Kamensky and find that he wasn’t stabbed but shot. And they’ll remember what the man in the light suit said, that you were near Kamensky at the street-corner. They’ll think of you. They’ll come up here. Oh, if I hadn’t thought someone else had killed Kamensky, I’d not have told them you were coming up here, I would have thought of something else. Now they’ll search you, they’ll search the apartment.”

“My dear, I’m prepared for all this, just take me to some room where we can talk,” said Chubinov, gently.

If Hélène had kept her promise and all the mourning dresses had been finished that morning, the sewing-room would be empty. It was the only place where she thought they would be safe from Tania. The air there was still acrid with the scent of black cloth, and though she threw open the window, it gave on a well, and admitted only another sort of stuffiness. Now she had time to look at him she saw that what he had done, what they had done, had worked some awful damage on him. It was impossible to detect what had changed in his appearance, but if one had seen him among a group of patients in a hospital one would have said, “That one won’t get better.” It might not be his body that would die, but something would. She wished she had not had to bring him into this horrid little room, without an armchair in it. But that hardly mattered for he had shown his natural bent by going straight to the most uncomfortable chair in the room, where the seamstress sat when she worked the sewing-machine.