Free The Gentle Axe Paperback by R. N. Morris

I am sorry for you.”
    “And I for you.”
    “Please do not be.”
    “I am a magistrate.”
    “Ah!”
    “I am here on police business.”
    “I bid you—” But the theatrical gentleman flew the shop without completing the farewell.
    Feeling strangely compromised by the encounter, Porfiry turned back to the pawnbroker. The man met him with a look of open impertinence. Those eyes, intense, dark, and fiercely alive, seemed momentarily more obscene than anything in One Thousand and One Maidenheads.
    “This Virginsky,” began Porfiry.
    “Pavel Pavlovich.”
    “You understand now that it is a police matter.”
    “I know nothing of that.”
    “Can you give me a description of him?”
    The pawnbroker shrugged.
    “Is he particularly tall or—how shall I put it?—diminutive?”
    “Not particularly.”
    “I see. So there is nothing especially distinctive about his appearance?”
    “He has a pale complexion and a generally disreputable appearance. But among the students of Petersburg, I dare say there is nothing distinctive about that.”
    “And from your familiarity with him, I take it he is a regular customer of yours?”
    “Regular enough.”
    “Do you happen to know Pavel Pavlovich’s address?”
    “I do.”
    Porfiry added another red note to the first still on the pawnbroker’s counter.
    “You have only to go to Lippevechsel’s Tenements. And ask there for Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky.”
    The pawnbroker picked up the two banknotes and held the second one out to Porfiry. “This is a legitimate credit business. The debt is paid.”
    Porfiry bowed and held the bow.
    “I am a Jew, yes, but I am also a law-abiding citizen.”
    Porfiry lifted his head, looked the pawnbroker in the eye, and met the anger there without flinching. He took back the note that he had offered.
    “Would you please tie up the books for me again?” he said, as he folded it into his wallet. The pawnbroker breathed out sharply through his nostrils before complying.

The Gamble
     
    L IPPEVECHSEL’S TENEMENTS in Gorokhovaya Street was one of those sprawling apartment buildings that seemed to have grown like an organism rather than been built to any rational plan. Ramshackle and crumbling, its various fronts and wings clustered around a series of dirty yards into which sunlight never penetrated. When the wind blew through it, it was felt by every occupant, even those huddled around one of its stoves or samovars, even one buried under a mound of rags or bent double in a cupboard. Close to Kameny Bridge, the building overlooked the Yekaterininsky Canal, which was frozen now but in the summer served as an open drain. The stench, in those high hot days, seeped in through the gaping cracks in its walls and spread throughout the building. It mingled with the smells of cooking, insinuating itself into the lives of the residents, so that it shared their intimacies and infected their dreams.
    The interior of the building was divided by flimsy partitions and lit here and there by oil lamps. Doors hung open or were lacking altogether. Families lived side by side and almost on top of one another, every room divided and sublet to meet the rent. From one side of a curtain came the cries and cracks of a beating, from the other the frenzied thump of copulation. Everywhere in the background could be heard a gentle snagging sound, as regular and constant as the lapping of the sea, an anonymous, muffled weeping.
    Porfiry, still carrying the bundle of books in one hand, stood at the threshold of an endless twilit maze. He took off his fur hat and breathed in a damp atmosphere that was heavy with the smell of waste. Clotheslines were strung across the corridors. Ragged, shrieking children ran beneath them, without any sense of the invisible boundaries of so many abutting lives. Somewhere, out of sight, a card game was in progress. Porfiry could hear the laughter and abuse, the slap of the cards, the jangle of coins.
    As he sought vainly for the source of these