Crime and Punishment (50 page)

‘Decorators? No, I didn't see them,’ Raskolnikov replied slowly and as though he were digging about in his memory, at the same instant straining the whole of his being and shivering with the torment of trying to perceive as quickly as possible where the trap was, and not to miss anything. ‘No, I didn't see any decorators, and I don't think I noticed an unlocked apartment of that kind, either… but on the fourth floor, now,’ – he had already worked out where the trap was, and felt triumphant – ‘I do remember there was a government clerk moving out of the apartment… opposite Alyona Ivanovna's… I remember… I distinctly remember… that some soldiers were carrying some sort of sofa outside and I remember being squeezed against the wall as they passed… but decorators – no, I don't remember there being any decorators… and I'm
sure there were no unlocked apartments, either. Yes, I'm quite sure…’

‘Wait a minute!’ Razumikhin exclaimed, suddenly, as though coming to his senses and realizing what was happening. ‘I mean, the decorators were painting there on the day of the murder itself, and he was there three days earlier! What are you trying to get him to say?’

‘Damn! I've got confused!’ Porfiry said, clapping his hand to his forehead. The devil take it, this case is too much for my poor brain!’ he went on, turning to Raskolnikov, almost as if in apology. The thing is, you see, it's so important we should find someone who saw them between seven and eight, in that apartment, that I went and imagined just now that you could tell us… I got completely confused!’

‘Well, you ought to be a little more careful,’ Razumikhin observed sourly.

These last words were spoken in the entrance hall. Porfiry Petrovich ushered them right to the door with the utmost affability. When they emerged on to the street they were both sullen and gloomy, and they walked several yards without saying a word. Raskolnikov took a deep breath…

‘… I don't believe it! I can't possibly believe it!’ a puzzled Razumikhin kept repeating, doing everything within his power to refute Raskolnikov's arguments. They were by this time drawing near to Bakaleyev's Tenements, where Pulkheria Aleksandrovna and Dunya had long been awaiting them. Every moment or so Razumikhin would stop in his tracks in the heat of the conversation, excited and confused by the simple fact that for the first time they had begun to talk about
it
– without any equivocation.

‘Well, don't then!’ Raskolnikov replied sardonically, with a cold and casual smile. ‘As usual, you didn't notice anything, but I was weighing up every word.’

‘That's because you don't trust anyone… Hm… I agree
that Porfiry's tone was a bit strange, though – and what did you make of that shabby character Zamyotov? – You're right, there was something peculiar about the way he was carrying on – but what was it all about? Eh?’

‘He's done a bit of thinking overnight.’

‘I don't agree! I don't agree! If they had that idiot notion in their heads they'd do all in their power to try to hide it, they'd try to play their cards close to their chests, in order to be able to pounce later on… No, what they were doing just now was brazen and ill-advised.’

‘If they had some facts, real facts, that is, or at least some well-founded suspicions, then they really would try to play a cat-and-mouse game in the hope of making an even bigger haul (and they'd have searched my place long ago, too!). But they've no facts, not one – it's all a mirage, a conjecture, just a fleeting idea – they're trying to make me lose my nerve by means of effrontery. Or perhaps he was annoyed about not having any facts, and burst out with all that because he's so irritated. But there may have been some intention behind it… I think he's a clever man… Perhaps he was trying to frighten me by showing me that he knows… There's a peculiar kind of psychology involved there, brother… Oh, but all that doesn't bear thinking about. Don't remind me of it!’

‘I know, it's insulting, it's insulting! I understand the way you feel. But… now that we've begun to talk straight (and I'm so glad that we have) – I'll admit to you now that I've noticed they've had it for ages, this idea, during all this time, oh, only in the most tenuous form, of course, as the merest creeping suspicion – but why even that? How do they dare? Where, where are the roots of these suspicions of theirs? Oh, if you only knew what a furious rage I've been in! Good Lord: just because a poor student, crippled by poverty and hypochondria, on the brink of a severe illness and delirium which may have already begun at the time in question (take note of that!), suspicious because of the poor state of his health, proud, conscious of his own worth, who has been in his room without seeing anyone for six months, and is dressed in rags and tatters and boots with no soles – appears before some wretched local policemen and puts up
with their assaults upon his dignity; whereupon they wave an unexpected debt under his nose, the overdue promissory note of court councillor Chebarov, there's a stink of rotten paint, the thermometer reads thirty degrees Réaumur, there's no air in the place, the room is jammed with people, they're talking about the murder of someone he had visited not long before, and all this on an empty stomach! How could he have failed to pass out? And to make that the basis of the whole thing! The devil take it, I understand how annoyed you must feel, but if I'd been in your place, Rodya, I'd have laughed in their faces or, even better: I'd have s-spat in the ugly mugs of the whole lot of them, with a good gobbet of spit, too, and let fly a couple more dozen gobbets in the proper direction, and left it at that. Go on, spit on them! Keep your spirits up! They ought to be ashamed of themselves!’

‘I say, he put that rather well,’ Raskolnikov thought.

‘Spit on them? But he's going to question me again tomorrow!’ he said with bitterness. ‘How can I have a showdown with them? I feel bad enough about having lowered myself to Zamyotov's level in the restaurant yesterday…’

‘The devil take it, I'll go and see Porfiry myself! I'll exert some
family
pressure on him; I'll make him tell me everything – the whole story! And as for Zamyotov…’

‘At last, he's guessed!’ thought Raskolnikov.

‘Wait!’ Razumikhin shouted, suddenly grabbing him by the shoulder. ‘Wait! You're wrong! I've just realized: you're wrong! What kind of trap was that? You say that the question about the workmen was a trap? Look, this is what it's all about: I mean, if you'd done
that
, how could you possibly let on that you'd seen the apartment was being painted… and that you'd seen the workmen? Oh, no: you'd have said you saw nothing, even if you had seen them! Who's going to make an admission like that, against his own interests?’

‘If I had done that
deed
, I would most certainly have said I'd seen the workmen in the apartment,’ Raskolnikov said, continuing his reply unwillingly and with evident disgust.

‘But why say a thing that harmed you?’

‘Because only muzhiks and the most inexperienced novices deny everything outright when they're being questioned. If a
man has even the slightest bit of intelligence and worldly wisdom, he'll try as far as possible to admit to all the external and undeniable circumstances; only he'll try to find other reasons for them, will introduce some special and unexpected feature of his own, one which gives them a totally different significance and puts them in a new light. Porfiry may easily have reckoned that I would give that sort of reply and say I'd seen the workmen for the sake of plausibility, and then insert something by way of an explanation…’

‘But I mean, he'd have told you at once that there couldn't possibly have been any workmen there two days earlier and that consequently you must have been there on the evening of the murder, between seven and eight. He'd have caught you out over a trivial thing like that.’

‘Yes, that's what he was counting on – that I wouldn't have time to consider and would hurriedly make the most plausible reply I could think of, forgetting that two days earlier there wouldn't have been any workmen there.’

‘But how could you forget something like that?’

‘The easiest thing in the world! It's over utterly trivial things like that that clever people are caught. The cleverer a person is, the less he suspects he'll be caught out over some ordinary thing like that. In fact, the way to catch a clever person is to use the most ordinary thing you can think of. Porfiry's not at all as stupid as you might suppose.’

‘If what you say is true, he's a bastard!’

Raskolnikov could not help laughing. At that same moment, however, his own animation and the eagerness with which he had made this last explanatory remark seemed strange to him, bearing in mind the fact that during the whole of the preceding conversation he had maintained a sullen air of disgust, apparently for ends of his own, and from necessity.

‘I'm getting a taste for certain aspects of this!’ he thought to himself.

But almost at that very same moment he suddenly grew agitated, as though an unexpected and disturbing thought had occurred to him. His agitation increased. They had now reached the entrance to Bakaleyev's Tenements.

‘You go in alone,’ Raskolnikov said suddenly. ‘I'll be back soon.’

‘Where are you off to? I mean, after all, we're here!’

‘I must, I must, some business… I'll be back in half an hour. Tell them when you get up there.’

‘Well, it's as you please, but I'm coming with you!’

‘Oh, so you want to make my life a misery too, do you?’ Raskolnikov exclaimed, with such bitter irritation, such despair in his gaze that Razumikhin lost heart. For a while he stood on the front steps and gloomily watched Raskolnikov striding rapidly away in the direction of the lane in which he lived. At last, gritting his teeth and clenching his fists, he swore to himself that this very day he would squeeze Porfiry till the pips burst, and went upstairs to soothe the mind of Pulkheria Aleksandrovna, who was by this time in a state of alarm at their long absence.

When Raskolnikov arrived at the building where he lived, his temples were soaked with sweat, and he was breathing heavily. He hurried up the staircase, went into his unlocked room and immediately shut the door and set it on its hook. Then, in a kind of mad fear, he rushed to the corner, to that same hole in the wallpaper where the objects had lain that day, thrust his hand into it and for a few moments probed it thoroughly, fingering every nook and cranny and every fold in the wallpaper. Not finding anything, he got up and took a deep breath. As he had been approaching the front steps of Bakaleyev's Tenements just then, he had suddenly had the notion that some object, one of the little chains, or a cufflink, perhaps, or even just a scrap of the paper in which they had been wrapped, with the old woman's handwriting on it, might somehow have slipped away and got caught in some little crack, in order suddenly to glare before him as a piece of unexpected and irrefutable evidence.

He stood still, seeming to muse, and an odd, self-disparaging, almost vacant smile fleeted across his lips. At last he took his cap and quietly went out of the room. His thoughts were jumbled. Musing, he walked out through the entrance gate.

‘There he is, that's him!’ a loud voice shouted; he raised his head.

The yardkeeper was standing by the doorway of his little cubicle, pointing straight at him for the benefit of a short man who had the air of an artisan, and was dressed in a waistcoat and something resembling a dressing-gown; from a distance he looked very like a woman. His head, in a soiled peaked cap, hung limply forward towards the ground, and indeed the whole of him seemed bent and hunched. His flabby, wrinkled face set him the other side of fifty; his small, bloated eyes stared sullenly, sourly and with resentment.

‘What's going on?’ Raskolnikov asked, going up to the yardkeeper.

The artisan gave him a surly, oblique glare, looking him over with close, fixed attention, taking his time; then he slowly turned away and, without saying a word, walked through the gateway out to the street.

‘What's going
on
?’ Raskolnikov exclaimed.

‘Oh, that fellow was asking if there was a student who lived here, he gave your name, and wanted to know whose apartment you lived in. You came down here, I pointed you out to him, and off he went. Whatever next?’

The yardkeeper was also somewhat bewildered, but not greatly so, and, having thought for a little while longer, turned and went back inside his cubicle.

Raskolnikov rushed off in pursuit of the artisan and immediately caught sight of him walking down the other side of the street, still with the same unhurried, even gait, his eyes fixed on the ground, as though he were thinking about something. He quickly caught him up, but kept behind him for a bit; at last he drew even with him and looked into his face from the side. The artisan noticed him immediately, looked him over quickly, but then lowered his eyes again, and thus they continued for about a minute, side by side and not saying a word.

‘Were you asking the yardkeeper… about me?’ Raskolnikov got out, at last, but in a voice that was somehow rather faint.

The artisan made no reply and did not even look at him. Again they said nothing for a while.

‘But why did you… come and ask for me… and then not say anything… What's the matter?’ Raskolnikov's voice
petered out; somehow he had difficulty in articulating his words clearly.

This time the artisan raised his eyes and gave Raskolnikov a black, menacing look.

‘Murderer!’ he said suddenly, in a voice which, though quiet, was clear and distinct…

Raskolnikov continued to walk at his side. His legs suddenly went horribly weak, a chill ran down his spine, and for a moment his heart almost froze; then it suddenly began to beat as though it had been released from a catch. In this manner they walked for about a hundred yards, side by side, and again without saying one word.

The artisan did not look at him.

‘What are you talking about?… Eh?… Who's a murderer?’ Raskolnikov muttered, barely audibly.

‘
You
are a murderer,’ the artisan said, even more distinctly and reprovingly, with a smile that expressed something akin to hate-filled triumph, and again he looked straight into Raskolnikov's pale face and rigid, staring eyes. At that moment they both arrived at the intersection. The artisan turned off down the street to the left, and went on his way without a look to either side. Raskolnikov stayed where he was, following the man with his gaze for a long time. When the artisan had gone about fifty yards, he saw him turn round and look at him where he stood, motionless, at the same spot. It was impossible at that distance to be sure, but Raskolnikov fancied that once again the man smiled his cold, hate-filled and triumphant smile.