The Winter Queen Read Online Free PDF Page A

police inspector Fedoruk was summoned from his station to the building of the Moscow Fire Insurance Company on Podkolokolny Lane at the request of the Kaluga landowner’s wife Avdotya Filippovna Spitsyna (temporarily resident at the Boyar Hotel). Mrs. Spitsyna testified that beside the entrance to the bookshop a certain respectably dressed gentleman, who appeared to be about twenty-five years of age, had attempted to shoot himself. He set a pistol to his temple, but apparently it misfired and the failed suicide fled the scene. Mrs. Spitsyna demanded that the police find the young man and hand him over to the spiritual authorities for the imposition of a religious penance. No search was undertaken because no crime had been committed.
    “There you are—isn’t that just what I was saying!” Erast Fandorin cried triumphantly, feeling himself totally vindicated.
    “Wait a moment, young man, that’s not all,” Grushin interrupted. “Listen to what comes next. Page nine.”
Report of police officer Semenov (he’s from the Rogozhskaya Precinct). Between ten and eleven he was summoned by the petty bourgeois Nikolai Kukin, the shopkeeper at the grocery store Brykin and Sons, opposite the Malaya Yauza Bridge. Kukin informed him that a few minutes earlier a student had climbed onto one of the stone bollards of the bridge and set a pistol to his head, clearly intending to shoot himself. Kukin heard a metallic click, but there was no shot. After the click the student jumped down onto the road and walked away quickly in the direction of Yauza Street. No other eyewitnesses have been found. Kukin is petitioning for a police post to be set up on the bridge, since last year a girl of loose morals drowned herself there and this is damaging his trade.
    “I don’t understand it at all,” Fandorin said with a shrug. “What strange kind of ritual is this? Could it be some secret society of suicides?”
    “No…what society?” Xavier Grushin said slowly, then began speaking faster and faster as he gradually became more animated. “There is no society, my fine young gentleman—it’s all much simpler than that. And all that business with the cylinder is clear now—it just never occurred to me before. It’s this student of ours, Kokorin, who’s been playing pranks. Look here.” He got up and strode quickly over to the map hanging on the wall beside the door. “Here’s the Malaya Yauza Bridge. From there he went along Yauza Street, idled away the time for an hour or so until he ended up on Podkolokolny Lane beside the insurance company, gave landowner’s wife Spitsyna a good fright, and then carried on toward the Kremlin. Some time after two he reached the Alexander Gardens, and there, as we know only too well, his journey came to an end.”
    “But why? And what does it all mean?” Fandorin asked, gazing hard at the map.
    “What it means is not for me to judge. But I have a good idea how things happened. Our pampered student and gilded youth decided to bid the world farewell. But before he died he wanted to give his nerves a bit of a thrill. I read somewhere that it’s called American roulette. It was invented in America, in the goldfields. You put a single shot in the cylinder, give it a twirl, and then—bang! If you’re lucky you break the bank; if not, then it’s good-bye and farewell. So our student deliberately set out on his voyage around Moscow to tempt fate. It’s quite possible that he tried to shoot himself more than three times, but then not every eyewitness will bother to call the police. That landowner’s wife who likes to save souls and Kukin with his private interest were vigilant enough, but God only knows how many attempts Kokorin made altogether. Or perhaps he struck a bargain with himself: I’ll dice with death so many times, and then that’s it. If I live, then so be it. But then, that’s just me fantasizing. That was no stroke of infernal bad luck in the Alexander Gardens. By two o’clock our