The town of Baranavichy has three inns. The one on Post Street is run by Tomashevsky, a man with a highly developed business sense and a hatred of paying taxes. Consequently, tax collectors and police officers frequently install themselves there, enjoying free drinks and “veal sausages” with the compliments of the house. Which really means that they must endure a menu that is entirely derived from cabbage: cabbage soup and cabbage salad and cabbage sausages and cabbage pie, all of which Tomashevsky passes off as “meat delicacies”. But nobody goes there just for the food, and hungry drunks do not have refined tastes. It is unlikely, Piotr Novak thinks, that the killers will go to Tomashevsky’s, and he is thankful to be spared the dubious pleasure of this cabbage den.
The second inn, on Alexander Street, is run by Vozhnyak. Even before entering the main hall, one finds oneself in a sumptuous foyer with a doorman and a place for coats. The inn’s walls are made of stone, for a change; there is a fireplace in every room and imported alcohol is served – French, at that. Anyone wishing to see and be seen in Baranavichy will come to Vozhnyak’s dressed in their finest, to smoke cigars and enjoy fine brandies. Is this a fitting locale for killers on the run? It seems unlikely, Novak decides, thinking regretfully of the fine caviar he enjoyed there on previous occasions.
All things considered, it seems likely that if the killers do indeed reach Baranavichy, and if they lack contacts in the town, they will put themselves up at Patrick Adamsky’s tavern, down one of the alleyways off Marinska Street.
A wastrel in threadbare clothes is slumped in there at this very moment, one of his soot-stained cheeks resting on a table. He orders a second shot of the cheapest vodka, a sort of jaundiced, urine-coloured juice probably concocted in a soap factory, and, when no-one is looking, he empties the drink under his chair into one of the cracks in the wooden floor. Then, he carefully pours himself a shot from the slivovitz bottle hidden in one of the pockets of the rags he calls his clothes. While there is certainly a chance of making himself conspicuous among the crowd of tramps, it is worth the risk, if only to remind himself that, unlike all the other derelicts around him, he still has a shred of dignity left.
There is another reason why Novak chose Adamsky’s tavern over all of the others. The first night after a murder is critical. The killers will not have gone far, and they might have to rely on local help. After all, for better or worse, we are all bound up together in a cycle of give and take. And if we recall that, of all the town’s innkeepers, Patrick Adamsky is the only one who boasts a military past, and link this fact with Radek Borokovsky’s testimony about the Russian army soldiers who allegedly attacked his innocent family, we might find a plausible connection.
To be frank, Radek Borokovsky’s testimony has already lost much of its credibility. As he was found inebriated and unconscious, his concerned relatives and acquaintances took him to the region’s best clinics, which happen to be its taverns, where he was administered the remedy of more liquor. Nikolai Kroll, the informant, who has already expressed a wish to make his service with the Okhrana more official, was among his treating physicians and reported the different versions of the story that emerged from Borokovsky’s mouth. After each drink, Borokovsky blurted out another tale: initially he was attacked by six soldiers led by an officer and a woman; then the officer was a woman; and, later still, he recalled two giant soldiers with a rifle who were accompanying a woman, or were they horsemen riding a horse-shaped woman? In short, he is no longer very sure of anything.
Albin Dodek pleads with his commander to arrest Radek Borokovsky and force the truth out of him through torture. “He is a born liar, a chronic drunk and a compulsive gambler.”
But Novak gives his deputy a cunning smile. He knows that the truth is not torn out of people. It is nurtured and coaxed. What good will come of interrogating this incompetent? Just another story at most, and a dubious one at that, which he will stick to for fear of being thought a liar. If they follow Novak’s methods, they will have several versions, which will allow them to compare the details, look for patterns, and deduce that the affair involves a certain number of soldiers, between one and six; one large and fearsome woman, who by force of necessity is neither an officer nor a horse; and, as Novak has already clearly identified, the throat-slitting style characteristic of żyd ritual slaughter is also evident. Moreover, if Novak insisted on interrogating Borokovsky and others of his ilk himself, then his face, the face of the authorities, would become familiar to the people of Baranavichy, and then he would not be able to blend in with the crowds at inns. For the people around him in Adamsky’s tavern do not have the faintest idea that the good-for-nothing vagabond sitting among them with his cheek flat on the table is none other than the highest ranking secret police officer in the entire region, the man who used to be Colonel Piotr Novak.