Even for someone posing as a drunk, Piotr Novak has an impressive array of shot glasses on his table. Four hours have passed since the three strangers entered the inn, and Novak has observed that Patrick Adamsky, the celebrated captain, did not have them sign the register, has not sent the boy to collect their mandatory identity papers, and did not exchange even a single word with two of them. Novak has had many chances to launch into action. He could have sent the boy off to sing to the police, or asked the card players if they knew the strange couple huddling in the corner; the question alone would have been enough. He could have even hinted to the groom, with a wink and an extra tip, that their two tired horses should receive special treatment. But instead, Novak makes a mental note to dig into the captain’s past.
In Adamsky’s defence, at least two of his three guests look nothing like killers, so perhaps he was right to decide that there was no need to report every sorry soul that comes his way. The woman isn’t large or terrifying; on the contrary, she seems gentle and fragile, while her husband looks like a cross between the village fool and a twig in his oversized clothes. His black eyes are so sunken they might have been gouged by an eagle. On the other hand, there are several details that would seem to connect these guests with the murder. First and foremost, they are obviously żyds. Their attempt to pose as Poles makes Novak chuckle. They have not touched the rum they’ve been served, they have not exchanged a single word between them – probably so as not to give away their accents – and the woman can wear a babushka’s coat and an embroidered kerchief as much as she likes, but if there’s one thing she is not, it is Polish. And then there is the older ruffian, the one who first came in to talk to Adamsky. Well, Novak knows this type of camaraderie. Men don’t behave like that with each other unless they have seen the fear of death in each other’s eyes. This older man – the one with the scarred mouth who went into the shed in the back with Adamsky, left the tavern and then returned to sit by himself at the bar – must therefore be an old army comrade of Adamsky’s. And yet they had seemed restrained when they talked. No embrace or handshake. No visible excitement. Perhaps their days of fighting shoulder to shoulder at the front have caused a rift between them?
To sum up, we have several links to the multiple versions of Radek Borokovsky’s story: an army connection, a woman (albeit not a large and terrifying one), and even a possible link to Jewish slaughter: there is no reason why that miserable, harmless-looking matchstick should not be some kind of apprentice butcher.
Could it be them? Of the three, the only one who seems capable of taking down the Borokovskys is the scar-mouthed thug. But if he was a soldier in the Russian army, why wouldn’t he just turn himself in to the police and give his version of events? After all, Radek Borokovsky is hardly known for his credibility, and his testimony would be dismissed in a heartbeat when set against the report of a veteran of the Czar’s army. Perhaps, then, the thug is the Jewish couple’s hired knife, which is why he used the ostentatious slaughtering method that is uniquely theirs. There is no reason to prefer this style of slaying other than the fact that it is distinctive and therefore sends a clear message: the Jews are responsible for the elimination of the Borokovsky family, who stood in their way. These murders might have been spurred by an ideological motive, after all.
In his head, Novak runs through the agents he has posted across the counties of Grodno and Minsk, and considers the variety of revolutionaries they are forced to confront in their daily work. He has planted fifty-two moles within the socialist underground, and fifteen more among the democratic agitators; two hundred and four agents are tailing intellectuals and thinkers, and he has one hundred and sixty informants keeping an eye on the students. Six others are looking into various charitable organisations, four are planted among the Hasidim, twenty-one among the followers of the mania for Palestine, and a dozen agents are tailing scientists. Could the three guests belong to any of these subversive movements? The socialists target Czarist officials, not humble peasants, and the democrats have such a naive hope of giving voting rights to backwards folk like the Borokovskys that killing them would be a grievous violation of their beliefs. The intellectuals, with their misguided faith in the sanctity of the human soul, usually condemn violence, even as the students are living proof that the human soul is all about reckless naivety and lustful passions. The philanthropists assuage their capitalist guilt by donating to revolutions that will ultimately lead to their beheading. The Hasidim devote most of their attention to fighting the Misnagdim, their opponents in the Jewish community. Those who dream of Palestine inevitably end up dying of malaria, and scientists usually take their own lives. It seems unlikely, then, that the killers of the Borokovsky family should belong to any one of these groups. But if they do not, what was their motive? Should Novak worry that he might have uncovered a new form of insurgency?
It has been a while since the three suspicious guests went upstairs, and Novak does not like the fact that they have lingered so long in their rooms, the very same rooms that Adamsky hastily made vacant for them. This tavern, which has always accommodated the men of Baranavichy and their prostitutes, is suddenly no longer a brothel? Do they now offer communion here instead? And what are those three doing upstairs? Sleeping? Plotting with Adamsky? Sharpening knives? How can a tramp as drunk as the one he is pretending to be weasel his way upstairs?
Novak takes up his stick and hobbles outside for a breath of fresh air. He looks up at the second floor of the tavern. The lamps are unlit, and the dark windows look like gaping mouths. He steals over to the stables. The stable boy is asleep on a haystack and a few horses are drowsing in their stalls. The night envelops Baranavichy with a soft, nebulous veil. A long way from here, in St Petersburg, Anna, his wife, and his two sons will be fast asleep. If he were to show up suddenly and surprise them, they would pretend to be happy to see him, but their smiles would only mask the intolerable embarrassment his presence imposes. Better to be standing here, dressed in rags, in the middle of the night, far away from them, because the rags are his uniform and this is his job, and because his absence from home at least has an honourable justification.
The pain in his leg grows sharper at night. Once he had recovered from his injury, he accepted Field Marshal Osip Gurko’s offer to join the Okhrana without hesitation, mostly because he feared the purposeless life that awaited him otherwise.
“Our task now is to demonstrate the same courage and dignity on the home front that we showed in battle,” Gurko told Novak, on summoning him to St Petersburg. And so Novak took up his new job filled with a sense of courage and dignity. And it was with courage and dignity that he deployed his network of agents, threatened civilians, made arrests and dragged terrified children from their beds. So far, so good. But over time, Novak has come to realise that his work requires the exact opposite of courage and dignity. The only justification for performing his despicable duties is to exercise the power vested in him by the Russian Empire.
Now he must return to the front line, which at that moment is none other than Patrick Adamsky’s disreputable establishment. He knows that if the scar-mouthed roughneck is indeed a skilled knife-murderer, protocol dictates that he should call for reinforcements. With only one healthy leg, he must be particularly careful to avoid a fight. He therefore wakes the stable boy and tells him to take an urgent message to his agents, who have probably found their way to Tomashevsky’s house of delights. The boy gets up and shakes the hay off his clothes, as if he thinks it quite normal to be roused in the middle of the night by a complete stranger and ordered to carry out a task. Specifically, this one: he must find a man named Albin Dodek, and alert agents Ostrovsky and Simansky too, at the double.
When Novak returns to his table in the tavern, he discovers with great satisfaction that he has had a stroke of luck: the scrawny Jewish toothpick, who earlier sat with his prim and proper wife, is descending the stairs, eager to join the card game. The card players take one look at him and burst out laughing, but once he flashes a few coins they are happy to oblige. They offer him a drop of cheap vodka, anticipating a quick and easy profit. The human matchstick drinks up and manages to lose an entire rouble by the end of the first hand, after which he sits rubbing his unkempt beard as though trying to draw some lesson from his loss. During the second hand, he emits a series of thoughtful “hmmm, hmmm”s, and makes a show of playing his hand only after great consideration, though it is clear to all around him that his brain must be resistant to all manner of logic. During the third hand, he makes a mistake so blatant that they begin to suspect that, instead of a brain, he must have a head of straw, and he loses five roubles in one go.
By the seventh hand, the players tell him that he is out of the card game, because he has run out of money. The matchstick pleads with them to let him stay, declaring that he will soon sweep everyone’s pockets and promising them a surprise if he does not. Happy to keep poking fun at this wretch, the card sharks let him stay in the game. After hands seven, eight and nine, he owes an additional five roubles that he does not have, and when they demand the promised surprise he takes off his hat and offers a free concert. “I am a famous singer,” he announces, expelling a mist of vodka.
“Adooooon olaaaaam . . .” he goes on, now with an extravagant vibrato in his voice. Before he has quite finished the note, a fist lands in his face and he spits out a couple of teeth. Now he is not merely a man in debt but, more pertinently, a Jew in debt to a Pole – a situation that will inevitably end badly. But before a second fist can find its target, Novak gets to his feet, pulls up a chair and declares that he will pay the żyd's debt. Instead of five roubles, he pulls out a twenty-five rouble note.
The card players look at one another in astonishment. A muscled member of the group is tempted to take the money, but his friend snatches the note from him and gives it back to Novak with a bow. “No need, Your Highness.” In a flash, the party breaks up: one of them apologises and says that his wife is waiting for him at home, another volunteers to walk with him, a third is tired, and a fourth has to get up early the next morning. Novak knows that he has just blown his cover. A drunken vagabond like him is not supposed to carry this kind of money in his purse. He persists in trying to pay the żyd's debt as they begin to leave, but the group persists in declining, and before they depart they even sit the matchstick in a chair and straighten his clothes, although it is not easy to spruce up a fool with a bloody mouth and missing teeth. The next to leave are the patrons from the adjacent table, dragging with them a stupefied drinker who had been sitting alone by the door. Finally, the only people left in the room are Novak and the żyd, who stares blankly in front of him and mumbles, “be-terem koll, yetzirrr nivraaa . . .”
Novak sits before him and empties a glass of water over his head. Dazed, the matchstick looks up at Novak like a man blinded by sunlight.
“Where is your wife?” Novak asks, calmly. “I’ll take you to her.”
“My wife?”
“Isn’t she your wife?”
“How should I know who she is? How could she be my wife? We only met today, even though she claims it was the day before yesterday. They picked me up in Telekhany, so they say, although I do not recall having been in Telekhany. How could they have picked me up from a place I didn’t go to? The Devil knows. Maybe the honourable gentleman could tell me, because all this is beyond me.”
And now an excellent opportunity has presented itself to Novak. He could load this matchstick onto his shoulder and take the stairs to the next floor without ever being suspected of his true intentions. They will probably think it was chivalrous of him to rescue their friend from a pack of card-sharks, and will never guess that he is the secret police commander of the north-western districts. But Novak’s one healthy leg can’t manage even the matchstick’s flimsy weight, and when he tries, he slips on the second step and the unconscious singer lands on his maimed thigh. Patrick Adamsky, who must have heard the thud, comes charging downstairs and grabs the two by their throats. “You miserable pigs, that’s enough for today!” He throws the matchstick towards the door and kicks Novak in the belly. The colonel tries to stand despite this humiliation, but his cane is out of reach by the stairs, so he clutches at a table and drags himself along on one foot in the direction of his third foot. Adamsky beats him to it, looks at the etchings on the cane and realises that this is not the cane of a tramp. What is more, Adamsky has seen dozens of these men with their gaits warped by a shrapnel wound, and their legs amputated below the ankle, thanks to the innovation of the great surgeon Pirogov. Now he faces Novak apprehensively. It is clear to both of them that they can be either friends or foes now, nothing inbetween.
“So. Do you have a room for me?” Novak asks, brushing dust and dirt from his shirt.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Adamsky says, assuming that this man is no more than a captain. “We are full tonight.”
“I could share with them,” Novak says. “We could all squeeze in together. Do you think they would mind?”
“They?”
“The nice couple for whom you went to such an effort to provide a room.”
Adamsky is silent.
“Did they pay you at all? With money, I mean?”
“What else would I do it for?” Adamsky chuckles. “For nothing?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“If they don’t pay, I’ll kick them all the way to the police.”
“Well,” Novak sits down, “the police are exactly what I wanted to talk to you about.”
Adamsky also sinks into a chair. “Are you . . .?”
“Not exactly,” Novak says. He’s been in the job for ten years and still finds it hard to admit that all he has become is a lousy mole in the police force, albeit a high-ranking one. “I won’t ask you for your papers, Mr Adamsky – or, should I say, Captain Adamsky.”
Novak notices that the landlord is trembling. The interrogator has gained the upper hand.
“Anyway, I am tired, it’s late, and I need a bed. As you have seen – or maybe you haven’t, busying yourself with tavern matters – I just rescued this fool from the clutches of those angry card players. I mean him no harm. And what do I ask in return? To share a room with the man whose life I just saved. His wife also seems nice – humble and shy. How did she end up in this sewer? The Devil must have had a hand in it, although I could not say for sure. Surely the two of them would like to tell me about their adventures out on the road? And in the meantime, you will have time to talk about the old days with that friend of yours. Or is he an adversary? It’s hard to tell. Either way, if you wake up in the morning and find that the couple has indeed left without paying, I will gladly take care of their bill. We can even agree to keep this a secret between the two of us, can’t we?”
At that moment, the man with the scarred mouth comes downstairs. He passes them and nods politely, then lunges at the matchstick still lying near the entrance. For a moment, it seems as though he means to revive the wretch, but instead he kicks him in the face, yanks his ear and drags him away by the scruff of the neck. They disappear upstairs. Novak scratches at the filthy floor with his cane as though annoyed by a stain, then he plants the cane on the ground and stands up, looming over Adamsky, who remains seated.
“I can see you are concerned about that man, don’t think that I haven’t noticed,” Novak says. “Is he really an old comrade, Adamsky? If he is indeed your friend, he’ll be guaranteed immunity. I think we understand each other, do we not?”
Adamsky grows pale.
“I think that if we keep those we care about close, maybe locked up in a private room, it is a safe bet that no harm will come to them, at least not tonight. And as for the others, why don’t we let fate take its course?”
Adamsky nods.