The Fixer (14 page)

  “After that he wanted to set the stable on fire to burn the evidence but he saw I had my eye on him. When I met him in the brickyard the blood ran out of his face and he couldn’t raise his eyes at me. That was after they had killed the kid. After the funeral I went to the police, and in a week they came and arrested him. They took the matzos away and the other things that I told you about, but I went up there with Serdiuk and Richter here, to tear up the floorboards—some had certain dark stains on them that we wanted to show the police. Just then we see an old graybeard Jew run out of the stable, and the next thing the place was up in roaring flames, and the whole stable burned down in less than five minutes, so it was just by luck we saved any of the horses. We saved six and lost four. If the fire had been an ordinary kind we would’ve saved the whole ten, but being as it was, there was something that made it burn as if the wind was caught in it, and it cried out like people were dying and ghosts were going to meet them. They had said some magic words from a Zhidy book, I’ll swear to God, and upstairs where this one here had lived before they arrested him, the flames turned an oily green such as I never saw before, and then yellow, and then almost black, and they burned twice as fast as the fire in the stalls even though the loft was full of hay. In the stalls the fire burned orange and red, and it was slower, more like an ordinary fire, so we got six horses out of the burning stalls and lost the other four.”

  Richter swore every word was true and Serdiuk crossed himself twice.

  2

  Father Anastasy stiffly embraced Marfa Golov, the haggard mother of the martyred boy, a tallish, scrawny-necked woman with red-rimmed, wet, flecked gray eyes, and dark skin drawn tautly over her face, who tried to curtsy and collapsed in the priest’s arms.

  “Forgive us our transgressions, Father,” she wept.

  “You must forgive us, my child,” said the priest, in a nasal voice. “The world has sinned against you. In par-ticular, those who sin against our Lord.”

  He crossed himself, his hand like a bird, and so did some of the officials.

  Marfa Golov, when Yakov first saw her waiting for the officials to arrive, was standing, with a thick-shawled neighbor who quickly ran off when the carriages appeared, on the sagging steps of a two-story wooden house with a peaked corrugated tin roof. The house overlooked a low-walled cemetery, and in the distance the brickyard, which Bibikov stopped to stare at, its chimneys smokeless on Sunday. It was a boxlike house that had once been painted white but was now weathered gray and peeling. The grassless front yard, muddy from the rain, was surrounded by a high unpainted fence, held together horizontally on the street side by long uneven darkly weathered boards. The road in front of the house where the carriages and motorcar waited was pitted and muddy, and the carriages looked like those of a funeral party except that there was no visible hearse. Marfa, thirty-nine, the newspaper had said, and vaguely pretty, with a tense distracted manner, eyes glancing in every direction, a drawn unhappy mouth and slight chin, wore for the occasion a dark-flowered blouse, long green skirt, and pointed two-tone button shoes. She had pinned a discolored cameo at her worn throat and thrown a light scarf over her shoulders. And she had on a new white hat topped with a bunch of bright cherries that caused some interested glances. When the fixer was led through the gate into the yard, Marfa burst into sobs. One of the officials in the Prosecuting Attorney’s office and a gendarme nearby cursed the prisoner under their breaths yet loud enough for him to hear.

  “It’s surely the one,” Marfa gasped.

  “Which one is that?” Bibikov asked, snapping on his silver-rimmed pince-nez and staring at her.

  “The Jew Zhenia told me about, who had chased him with a long knife.”

  “Note the identification,” said Grubeshov to Ivan Semyonovitch. The assistant hadn’t his notebook with him, but he mentioned it to one of the policemen, who wrote it down.

  There was a green mildewed stone well in the yard and Bibikov peered down it but could see nothing.

  He dropped a small stone down the well and after a while there was a splash. The officials looked at one another but the Investigating Magistrate walked away.

  “The room’s upstairs, your honor,” Marfa said to the Prosecuting Attorney. “It’s small as you’ll see, but Zhenia was small himself for a lad his age. That’s not from me, you’ll notice, because I don’t lack size, but from his cowardly father who deserted us.” She smiled nervously.

  Marfa led them in and hurried upstairs to show the officials where the poor child had slept. They wiped their feet on a muddy rag at the door and went up in small hushed groups to stare into the dark tiny cubicle between a large untidy bedroom with a two-pillowed brass bed, and a room with a locked door Marfa said was a storeroom.

  “What can a widow do with so many bedrooms? Generally I store things. When my aunt died she left me her furniture although I have enough of my own.”

  Yakov was ordered to go up after the others had seen the boy’s room. He wanted not to go but knew that if he said so they would drag him up. He went slowly up the stairs in his clanking leg chains that rubbed his ankles sore, followed by three booted gendarmes who waited for him on the landing with drawn pistols. Marfa, Father Anastasy, Grubeshov, Ivan Semyonovitch and Colonel Bodyanksy were in the corridor as the Jew glanced furtively into the boy’s room. They watched him intently, Grubeshov’s lips pursed. The fixer had wanted to look calmly and with dignity but had been unable to. It was as though he expected a wild animal in the room to spring out at him. He glanced fearfully into the tiny cubicle with torn wallpaper and unmade cot, the crumpled bedsheet gray, soiled, the faded blanket torn. Though the room and cot were strange to him, Yakov had a momentary hallucinatory thought he had seen them before. He then recalled his cubicle in the printer’s flat in the Podol. This was what he remembered but he worried they thought he was thinking of something that would surely convict him were it known what.

  “My darling Zhenechka hoped to be a priest,” Marfa whispered loudly to Father Anastasy, dabbing at her reddened eyes with a scented handkerchief. “He was a religious child and worshipped God.”

  “It was reported to me that he was being prepared for the seminary,” said the priest. “One of the monks told me he was a dear boy, in some respects a saintly boy. I understand he had already had a mystical experience. I was also told he loved our priestly vestments and hoped some day to wear them. His death is God’s loss.”

  Marfa wept miserably. Ivan Semyonovitch’s eyes clouded and he turned away and wiped them on his coat sleeve. Yakov felt like crying but couldn’t.

  Then Father Anastasy came down and Bibikov went up the stairs, squeezing past the gendarmes. He glanced casually into Zhenia’s small room, looked around absently, then got down on his knees, and lifting the bed-sheet, peeked under the bed. He touched the floor and examined his soiled fingertips.

  “The floor may be dusty,” Marfa said quickly, “but I always empty the chamber pot.”

  “Never mind that,” said Grubeshov distastefully. “Well, what have you discovered?” he asked Bibikov.

  “Nothing.”

  The Investigating Magistrate glanced quickly into Marfa’s bedroom and stopped at the locked door of the other room as if he were listening, but did not try the knob. He then wandered downstairs. Marfa hurriedly attempted to make the boy’s bed up but Grubeshov ordered her to leave it alone.

  “It will take me only a minute.”

  “Leave it as it is. The police prefer it that way.”

  They went downstairs. Although it was drizzling outside, some of the officials were gathered in the yard. The others, including the prisoner and gendarmes who guarded him, met in Marfa’s dusty disordered parlor that smelled of tobacco smoke, stale sweet beer, and cabbage. At Grubeshov’s request, she pulled open the window vent, and with a dirty rag hastily wiped the seats of a half dozen chairs nobody sat down in. The prisoner was afraid to sit. Marfa tried to do something to the floor with a broom but the Prosecuting Attorney took it from her.

  “This can wait, Marfa Vladimirovna. Please give us your fullest attention.”

  “I just thought I’d clean up a bit,” she hurriedly explained. “To tell the truth, I wasn’t expecting so many high officials. I thought the prisoner was coming to see what he had done and why should I clean up for a dirty Jew?”

  “That’ll do,” Grubeshov said. “We’re not interested in your household affairs. Go now into the story of what happened to your son.”

  “Ever since he was little he wanted to be a priest,” Marfa wept, “but now he’s a dead corpse in his grave.”

  “Yes, we all know that and it’s a tragic story, but perhaps you ought to limit yourself to what you know about the details leading up to the crime.”

  “First shouldn’t I serve tea, do you think, your honor?” she asked, distracted. “The samovar’s boiling.”

  “No,” he said. “We are very busy and have much to do before we can return to our homes. Please tell the story—specifically of Zhenia’s disappearance and death —how, for instance, you learned of it.”

  “You,” he said to Yakov, who was gazing out the window at the rain in the chestnut trees, “you know well this concerns you so pay attention.” In the time the fixer had been in prison the city had turned green and there were sweet-smelling lilacs everywhere but who could enjoy them? Through the open window he could smell the wet grass and new leaves, and where the cemetery ended there were birches with silver trunks. Somewhere nearby an organ grinder was playing a waltz that Zinaida Nikolaevna had played for him once on her guitar, “Summer Is Gone Forever.”

  “Go on, please,” Grubeshov said to Marfa.

  She lifted both hands to straighten her hat, then caught his eye and dropped them.

  “He was an earnest boy,” Marfa quickly began, “and never gave me much trouble as boys do. As for myself I’m a widow of stainless character, pure and simple. My husband, who was a telegrapher, deserted me, as I mentioned before, your honor, and a couple of years later died of galloping consumption, which served him right for the way he mistreated us. I support myself by hard work and that’s why my house that you’re in isn’t the neatest, but my child has always had a roof over his head, and my life has been one of irreproachable toil. If you work like a horse you can’t live like the gentry, if you’ll pardon my frankness. We got along without the deserter. This house doesn’t belong to me, I rent it and sometimes let out a room or two, though one has to be careful of riffraff, especially those not given to paying what they owe to others. I didn’t want my child associating with such, so I rarely took boarders in—even though I had to work that much harder—and then only if they were genteel people. But even if he didn’t have all the advantages, Zhenia had what he needed and wasn’t above showing his appreciation by giving me help—not like some boys I could name you, for instance Vasya Shiskovsky in the next house from here. My own was an obedient lad, an angel. He once asked me if he should leave the ecclesiastical school and become a butcher’s apprentice but I advised him, ‘Zhenia, my good darling, it’s best to go on with your lessons. Get an education and when you’re rich some day, you can support your poor mother in her old age.’ ‘Mamenka,’ he answered me, ‘I will always take care of you even when you are old and sick.’ He was a saintly child, and it didn’t in the least surprise me when he came back from his Bible lesson one day and said he wanted to be a priest. My eyes were full of tears that day.”

  She glanced nervously at Grubeshov, who nodded slightly.

  “Go on, Marfa Vladimirovna, tell now what happened towards the end of March, a few short weeks before the Jewish Passover this year. And speak more slowly so that we can comprehend everything you say. Don’t slur your words.”

  “Are you paying attention?” he asked Yakov.

  “The closest, your honor, though I honestly don’t understand what this has to do with me. It’s all so strange.”

  “Only be patient,” Grubeshov said. “It will be as familiar and close as the nose on your face.”

  Several of the officials, including the army general, laughed.

  “On the morning in the week you mention,” said Marfa, darting a glance at the Jew, “it was a Tuesday I’ll never forget in my life, Zhenia woke up and got dressed in his black stockings that I had bought him for his name day and left for school as usual at six in the morning. I had to work until long after dark that day, then attend to the marketing so I naturally didn’t get home until late. Zhenia wasn’t in the house and after I had rested a while—I’ve had painful varicose veins since giving birth to my child—I went to Sofya Shiskovsky, my neighbor in the next house down a ways, whose Vasya was in Zhenia’s form in school, and asked him where my boy was. Vasya said he didn’t know because though he had seen Zhenia after school, Zhenia hadn’t come home with him as was usual. ‘Where did he go?’ I said. ‘I don’t know,’ he answered. Ach, I thought, he is at his grandmother’s, I won’t worry. But on the same night I caught the flu. I had the shakes and shivers for three days and stayed in bed in a weak condition for three more, only getting up, if you’ll excuse me, to go to the toilet, or boil up a little rice and water to stop diarrhea. Zhenia was missing for about a week—six or seven days to be exact, and when I made up my mind to get dressed and report it to the police he was found dead in a cave with forty-seven stabs on his body. The neighbors came into my house with slow steps and sad faces—they looked like dead folk and frightened me before they spoke—then when they told me what horror had happened to me, I cried out, ‘My life is over because I’ve lost my reason to live!’ “

  Marfa put her hand to her eyes and tottered. Two of the officials stepped towards her but she held onto a chair and remained upright. The men withdrew.

  “Excuse me,” Bibikov said gently, “but how is it you waited six or seven whole days before thinking to report that your son was missing? If it were my son I would have reported it at once—at the very latest on the night he had not yet appeared in the house. It’s true that you were sick but even sick people have been known to pull themselves out of bed and act in emergencies.”