“Yes, we can stop for now. I will continue the interrogation tomorrow, but for now, Peter Egorovich, I have to arrest you. I hope that tomorrow you will understand the importance of all of the insinuating circumstances against you that we possess, and stop wasting time and make a confession. As for me, personally I am sure that it was you who killed Olga. I cannot tell you anything more today. You can go for now.”
At the interrogation was finished. Urbenin was put under guard and placed in one of the Count’s buildings.
On the second or third day, the deputy prosecutor Mr. Polugradov arrived from the city, a man whom I cannot remember without disgust. Imagine for yourself a tall, thin man around thirty, nicely shaved, with curly hair resembling that of a sheep and very smartly dressed. His face was thin and expressionless, so that looking at him you could see only the emptiness of a fop; he spoke with a very soft, sweet, insincere, and repulsively polite voice.
About a year after my retirement, when I was living in Moscow, I received an invitation summons to be present at the court sitting of the Urbenin case. I was glad to visit the places in the countryside, which I liked, and the case gave me a reason to go there. The Count, who was then living in St. Petersburg, did not go, and sent instead a medical certificate outlining his bad health.
The case was to be heard in the local county court. The prosecutor was Mr. Polugradov, who cleaned his teeth five times a day with red English toothpaste; the defense lawyer was a certain Mr. Smirnaev, a tall and thin blond, with a sentimental face and long straight hair. The jury was drawn almost exclusively from the local farmers and residents of the town; only four of them could read, and the rest looked very confused when they were given Urbenin’s letters to his wife as evidence.
As I entered the court building, I did not recognize Mr. Urbenin; his hair had turned completely gray, and he had aged twenty years. I had expected his face to show only apathy and indifference to his fate, but I was wrong. Mr. Urbenin was passionate during the trial; he rejected three members of the jury; he gave lengthy and emotional explanations; he interrogated the witnesses; and he denied his guilt, and asked numerous questions of the witnesses who testified against him.
The witness Mr. KazimirPoshekosky testified that I had been intimate with Olga, the victim in this case.
“It’s a lie,” Mr. Urbenin cried out from his bench. “I do not trust my wife, but him I do trust!”
When I testified, the defense lawyer asked me what sort of relationship I had had with Olga, and presented the testimony of Mr. Kazimir Poshekosky, who had apprehended me in the garden pavilion. To tell the truth (that I had made love to Olga) would be to support the accused; the more dissipated the wife, the more sympathy you must have for Othello-the-husband, I understood this. On the other hand, if I were to tell the truth, I would hurt Mr. Urbenin, and he would be in terrible pain. I decided to lie.
“No,” I said. “I was not in a relationship with her.”
The prosecutor’s darkly colored description of Olga’s murder stressed the anger and hatred of the killer. “That old, worn-out dissipated man met an innocent, very young, and beautiful woman. He lured her from the path of virtue with the promise of luxury. She was young and she had grown up reading romantic novels, and sooner or later she had to fall in love. He reacted like a wild animal that sees his prey slipping out of his claws. He was enraged, like a beast whose nose is singed by a burning coal.” The prosecutor ended with the words, “She brought out the animal in him, and he treated her like a dog.”
The defense lawyer did not deny that Urbenin was guilty but asked the jury to take into consideration that he was in the state of maximum excitement, and to soften his sentence. He noted that the feeling of jealousy could torture people, and referred to the all-too-human Othello, and then went into such great detail about the play that the judge had to interrupt him to remark that “it is not necessary for the jury to know that classic piece of literature.”
The last word went to Urbenin, who swore that was not guilty: neither in deed nor in thought. He finished with the words,
“I no longer care about my own fate. But I am worried about the fate of my two little children.” He turned to the public, started to cry, and asked the public to take care of his little children. He had probably forgotten that the verdict was still forthcoming, being completely immersed in thoughts of his children.
The jury took very little time to reach a verdict. He was found guilty on all counts, lost all his rights and his estate, and he was immediately sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor.
That was the price he had to pay for his meeting with a “young woman in red,” on a May morning a few years ago.
About eight years have passed since these events. Some of the players in this drama have died; some are serving sentences for their crimes, and some simply go on living their miserable lives, waiting for death.
CHAPTER SIX THE TRUTH IS REVEALED
It was three months after the day when Mr. Kamyshev brought me the manuscript. My secretary announced that there was a gentleman in uniform waiting for me outside. Mr. Kamyshev came in.
“Sorry for bothering you, for heaven’s sake. Have you read my manuscript? What is your decision?”
“You’ll have to make some changes to it, I hope with our mutual agreement.” We waited for a few moments in silence. I was very excited; my heart was beating and my temples were pulsating. But I did not want to show my guest that I was agitated. I continued, “Yes, according to our agreement. You told me that your novel is based on a real story.”
“Yes, and I am ready to affirm this. I can introduce myself, I am Mr. Sergey Zinoviev.”
“Do you want to say that you were the best man at Olga’s wedding?”
“Yes, the best man and a friend of the household. Do you think that I am a sympathetic character in the story?” Mr. Kamyshev smiled, teasing his knee and blushing. “Is it so?”
“Yes. I like your novel; it’s better than many other crime stories. But we should make some serious changes to it.”
“What would you like to change?”
“First and foremost, you never do tell the reader who is guilty, who committed the crime.”
Kamyshev’s eyes widened and he stood up and said, “If you really think that you know the person who stabbed his wife and then strangled the only witness, then I don’t know what to tell you, nor what should we do next.”
“But Mr. Urbenin did not kill.”
“Then who did?”
“It wasn’t Urbenin!”
“Maybe you’re right. Humanum est errare. Even criminal investigators are not perfect. Judicial mistakes do get made in this world. Do you think we made a judicial mistake?”
“No, what I think is that you didn’t just make a mistake; you made a mistake on purpose. If a criminal investigator makes a mistake, it’s not an accident.”
“Then who was the killer in this case?”
“You!!”
Mr. Kamyshev looked at me in surprise mixed with horror.
“So this is it.” He went to the window.
“Sir, what kind of joke is this story,” he mumbled. He breathed nervously at the window, trying to draw something in the condensation with his finger.
I looked at his hand, a very muscular, iron-hard hand, and imagined how he had strangled the servant in the prison cell, and how he had destroyed Olga’s tender body. The figure of a murderer standing right in front of me filled me with horror. Not for myself, but for this giant, and in general for all mankind.
“You killed her!” I said.
“Then I can congratulate you with your discovery,” he said. “How did you come to this conclusion, please tell me.”
“Yes, you are the murderer.” I said. “And you can’t even hide it. It’s between the lines in your novel, and you’re a lousy actor, trying to act in front of me now. You might as well go ahead and tell me the truth—this is all very interesting, and I’d be very curious to know.”
I jumped up and started pacing the room.
Mr. Kamyshev went to the door, looked outside, and closed it very securely. This precaution gave him away.
“Why did you close the door?”
“I’m not afraid of anything. I just thought that there might be someone behind the open door.”
“And why do you need this? Tell me. Can I start an interrogation? I should warn you that I’m not a police detective and I may get tangled up in the interrogation, and mix up some things. But in any case, first of all—where did you disappear to, after you said good-bye to your friends, when the picnic was over?”
“I just went home.”
“You know, in your manuscript, the description of your route was crossed out. Did you walk across the same forest?”
“Yes.”
“And could you have met her?”
“Yes, I could.”
“And did you meet her?”
“No, I did not.”
“In the course of your investigation, you forgot to interrogate one important witness, namely, yourself. Did you meet the victim?”
“No. There you are, my friend,” he said. “You are not an expert interrogator.” At this moment I noticed that Mr. Kamyshev was smiling at me in a patronizing way, enjoying my inability to find the answers to the questions that were torturing me.
“All right then, you did not meet her in the forest. But it would have been even more difficult for Mr. Urbenin to have found her in the forest. He wasn’t seeking her there, but you—on the contrary—being drunk and excited and angry with her—you could not escape looking for her. And why did you go through the forest and not along the country road?”
“Let us imagine that what you say is true,” he admitted.
“How can we explain your crazy state of mind on the night of the event? It seems to me that it was connected with the crime that you committed earlier that day. Then, after coming to the Count’s house, instead of asking the question directly, you waited for a whole night and a day until the police arrived. This can only be explained by the fact that the victim knew the murderer, and you were the murderer.
“Further, Olga did not name her murderer because she loved him. If it were her husband, she would have told you the name at once. She did not love him; she didn’t even care about him, but she loved you and she wanted to save your life.
“And therefore, when she came to consciousness for a few moments, why did you procrastinate instead of asking her the one question that mattered, wasting her last few minutes with secondary questions that were not connected with the event? You were dragging the time out, because you did not want her to name you as the murderer. Also, you wrote in detail about the numerous shots of vodka that you drank, but the death of “the woman in red” is never described. Why?”
“Continue, continue.”
“You didn’t study the scene of the crime on the first day; you waited for the next day to come. Why? Because the night rain would wash away all your steps in the forest. Then you don’t mention interrogating the caterers and the guests who were present at the picnic. They heard Olga yelling, and you should have interrogated them, but you didn’t, because at least one of them would have remembered that you yourself had disappeared into the forest. They were interrogated eventually, but by then they would have forgotten all the details concerning you.”
“You are smart,” Mr. Kamyshev said, rubbing his hands. “Do go on.”
“Isn’t this enough? And to prove that you killed Olga, I must remind you that you were her lover: the lover whom she traded for a man she despised, the Count. If the husband could kill from jealousy, then the lover could just as easily have done it for the same reason.
“That’s enough,” Kamyshev said, laughing. “Enough. You look so pale and excited that you don’t have to continue. But you’re right. I did kill her.”
There was silence. I paced the room and he did the same.
“Very few people could have done this; most readers would not come to this conclusion. They’re not as smart as you.”
At that moment, one of my workers from the editorial board came to my study, looked carefully at Mr. Kamyshev, put some materials on my desk, and then left. Kamyshev came to the window.
“It has been about eight years, and I am still tortured by the weight of bearing this mystery. Not by my conscience. The conscience by itself is nothing—it can be dulled by logical explanations. But when logic fails, I try to kill it with wine and women. And I am still popular among women, by the way. It surprises me that for eight years, not a single person had the slightest idea that I bore this terrible secret. So I wanted to tell people about this secret of mine in a special way—can you believe it?—I did so in the form of a book. When I wrote this novel, I thought only a few people would discover the truth. Every page has a clue to the mystery, but I was writing it for an average reader.”
My secretary Andrew came in and brought two glasses of tea.
“You are looking at me as a man of mystery, and now it’s three o’clock and it is time for me to go.”
“Stop. You haven’t told me how you killed her.”
“What else do you want to know? You know what? I killed her in a state of extreme stress; I was overcome with emotion.”
“People smoke and drink when they’re stressed. Right now, you have just seized my cup of tea instead of yours, and you smoke more often because of stress. Life is stressful.”
“I did not intend to kill her as I was walking through the forest. I was only going to find Olga and tell her that she was behaving badly. But sometimes when I’m drunk, I can get aggressive. I saw her about two hundred steps from the edge of the forest. She was standing in front of a big tree looking into the sky. I called her name, and she stretched her hands out toward me. ‘Please do not scold me, I am so unhappy,’ she told me. I was drunk and I forgave her, and we embraced. She told me that she’d never loved anyone but me all her life. Then, in the middle of all this, she said the most dreadful thing: ‘I am so unhappy,’ she said. ‘If I hadn’t married Mr. Urbenin, then I could have married the Count. And we could meet secretly.’ It was like a bucket of cold water. I was filled with disgust. I took this little creature by the shoulders and threw her on the ground, as you throw a ball in a game. And then, I was in a rage at that moment. I threw her on the ground, and then I killed her; yes, I killed her, I finished her off.”
I looked at Mr. Kamyshev and saw that there was no shame on his face. His lips spoke the words ‘I killed her, I finished her off’ with no more expression than if he’d said ‘I smoked a cigarette.’ I had a feeling of disgust toward him.
“And how about Mr. Peter Urbenin? What happened to him?”
“They say that he died on his way to prison, but this is not known for sure, and how and why.”
“What do you mean by ‘and how and why’? An innocent person was suffering, and you are asking me ‘and how and why.’”
“What was I supposed to do—go to the police and make a confession? They would like to me to do this—but they are all stupid.”
“You are disgusting.”
“And I am disgusting to myself. Perhaps I should go.”
“And Count Korneev? Where is he?”
“He is my chauffeur and personal assistant now. Mr. Kazimir—his ex-wife took his estate from him, and became rich. Look outside, you can see him! Over there.”
I looked outside and saw a small figure with a curved back, dressed in a worn-out hat and a shabby overcoat of no particular color. It was difficult to see the protagonist of the drama in this old man.
“I found out that Urbenin’s son lives in the Andreev Hotel. I would like to make a set-up so that the Count could take some money from the son of Mr. Urbenin. Thus, he would be avenged. I really must say good-bye. Adieu!”
Kamyshev bowed his head and walked out the door. I stared at my desk, lost in thought.
I did not have enough air to breathe.
A NIGHT IN THE CEMETERY
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AND OTHER STORIES OF CRIME AND SUSPENSE
Pegasus Books LLC
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Translation copyright © 2008 by Peter Sekirin
First Pegasus Books edition August 2008
Interior design by Maria Fernandez
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Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Anton Chekhov, A Night in the Cemetery and Other Stories of Crime & Suspense
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