Winter Rules and Le Diable Boiteux.

Another excerpt from my as-yet-unpublished crime novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, see
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/d-r-tchekhov-skirmish-with-wolves-and.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/dead-wife-new-hat-femme-morte-chapeau.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/inductive-detection.html

This long lost crime novel by Chekhov (he, himself, referred to such a work in progress in 1888) charts the misadventures of morphia-addict, D-r Anton Tchékhov, aged 28 years, as he investigates the mysterious duelling death of an aristocratic cadet in a remote snowbound northern garrison. In a contest between the animistic pagan beliefs of a Cheremissian shaman-medicineman and his own psychopathological insights as a graduate doctor, Tchékhov, weakened by tubercular fevers and drug dependency, succeeds in solving the case and saving the life of a young prostitute, Mariya.  
     In this extract we catch up with him as he leaves the garrison ballroom late at night in answer to the General’s order for the attendance of a doctor at the duelling ground.

-----------------

In the lobby Anton saw Mariya’s shoulders shake in solitary weeping. 

     He would very much have liked to take her in his arms ; to relive even for one second the breathless span of their mis-tryst.   

     Tears stained the dark red silk of her basquine ; the skirt’s belt was studded with bright rivets like a prison door. 

     He felt a quickening of the pulse, instinct with desire.

     The General brought his guest the adjutant’s polushubok – a short sheepskin coat – which Anton hastily buttoned on, pausing only to cover his dancing pumps with his galoshes.

     The gasoliers effloresced as the General opened the door.

Winter Rules

To a hungry man with a drunken headache whose every nerve shatters at the sound of breaking glass, the moon can appear, after a banquet, as an unbroken dish of slops above the rooftops. 

     So the moon appeared to D-r Tchékhov.

     Anton stood where he was bid – en prise – a hired hand waiting to be taken.

     A meteor fell and he winced as shooting pains attacked his right arm, but whether this was due to the tightness of the adjutant’s coat or his hacking cough he could not be sure.

     The General shouted for escorts to form an undertaker squad. Odd to see the General in ancient felt top-boots yet still cutting a dash in his swagger uniform.

     Shivering in third-wear uniforms and government-issue camelhair hooded bashlyki, two young ensigns, and the two bruised angel-faced recruits relieved from punishment fatigues – now thoroughly shorn and chastened – unstrapped a stretcher from the ambulance wagon’s kit of nosilki.

     Supreme in his vicegerency, the General beckoned to Tchékhov to fall into line.

     The two ensigns formed the vanguard, each carrying a bull’s-eye kerosin lantern with a reflector which sent lampblack shadows swinging in the moonlight.

     The party advanced through an inner archway and across a court towards an embattled parapet between two gun embrasures where, by a snow-covered merlon, a dark robed penitent stood with bowed head awaiting their approach.

     At the sight of a priest, Anton – as ever – shivered in apprehension. His right shoulder continued to twinge, and a new pain gnawed at his left subclavicular region ; all the conclusive signs, in truth, of the incipient tuberculosis his conscious mind had dismissed.*
     However, he could not fail to be aware of the fact that the inflammation of his leg had not subsided and, in consequence, his limp was, to his burning shame, growing hourly more pronounced.  

     To be outrun by a priest was more than he could bear.

     The General had called for the college chaplain as soon as they were clear of the ballroom, with precise orders to seal a vow from him of absolute discretion.

     Father Abiathar (so named† with forlorn expectations by his Bishop) had all the bored manner of a priest who was feeling Mondayish even though it was a Saturday, and his eyes (Anton thought) had the cunning look of a mendicant prior dismissed for simony who had been driven to peddle indulgences in bulk.

     His cincture was tight over his grain-sack belly and he smelled of pickled herring. His breath declared the buffet had allowed him a skinful of the chasse-cousin rotgut they reserved for the clergy.

     ‘Nowadays our fellows crawl out from all sorts of unexpected holes,’ said the General, sotto voce. 

     The General spoke gravely of their special mission and ordered the priest to bless his six-man snatch-squad. 

      As the only two non-combatants present, Father Abiathar and D-r Tchékhov were assigned to the rear of the column.

      Anton thought : ‘Like flies, a doctor or a priest can enter any house. Just as the the First Functionary of the Empire, the Secret Police Chief Count Shuvalov, had a right of Audience, by day and night, with the Tsar and could walk into the Emperor’s cabinet or bedchamber at any hour without risking his imperial displeasure. In this we share the advantage of the house-fly. We enter unannounced and roam at will.’

      Anton had learned from the General that the priest was called Brimstone by the students and most of the Camp. 

     He was tolerated yet heartily loathed.

     ‘It’s as useless as shooting at ravens as clergy,’ the General had said.

     To augment his meagre salary of one hundred and fifty roubles a year there were innumerable fees this Levite could exact, and he fined soldiers fifteen kopecks who had not communicated in Lent, and likewise extracted dues from the Old Ritualists.

      After he pocketed his fee the priest would wring his hands and lower his eyes like a monk who held the Chair for Abjectness. 

      ‘He speaks as though he would creep into one’s mouth,’ the General had added in disgust.

      The Levitical caste was a subject of continuing fascination for Anton and he committed to memory the details of Brimstone’s broad-brimmed, wideawake hat, his large heavy boots, the patched, dingy brown cassock and coarse hodden-gray over-mantle attached to a worn capuche which clung to his head to protect his ears.  

      Within these fuscous robes Father Abiathar concealed his priestcraft : a portable altar in a satchel, a miracle-working triptych from his collection of tchudotvornikh icons, and a crucifix wrapped in his stole, which he clutched for warmth, his hands thrust up his sleeves.

      A series of steps descended the ramparts to a path leading to the forest edge.

      They stepped out on to a tableland laid with linen-white snow.

      Under the soaring revetment the soldiers’ lamps guided them to the first of the raised logging roads covered in impacted snow.

      To keep his spirits up (and to terrify the body-snatching crew) the General sang, in his staunchest basso profundo, a verse by Nekrasov :

            In the sepulchres, King Winter said,
            With flowers of ice I deck the dead ;
            I freeze the blood in the living veins,
            And in living heads I freeze the brains.

And, as he sang, Anton’s blood, too, seemed to turn to ice as the party struck out from the shelter of the garrison and stepped into the teeth of a north wind.

     ‘In cold like this it’s Winter Rules!’ the General shouted grimly.

      Anton painfully limped ahead, outstripped the column, and drew abreast of the General who linked arms.  The two men put their heads down to face the whip of the wind.

     ‘Ten paces is the minimum but the Prince would have been perfectly within his rights to shoot at eight. At minus twenty degrees your hand’s so palsied by the chills, and the light’s so dim, that – even if you were to find a line of sight to guide your aim – you’d be more likely to wing the other fella’s second!’

     The path – lined with stunted birch and pine – began to fall away sharply. Tchékhov realised the solid going underfoot was due to successive squads of cadets beating a path to the exercise grounds which lay ahead. A deceptive surface was sprinkled with a powdering of diamond-glinting snow.  

     Beneath his feet was a skin of trodden ice which covered the tangled dead sedges, dried cotton grass and other reliquiæ of a muskeg.

     They crossed a boundary rail polished by friction from generations of Academy cadets. Anton noticed the General’s eyes never ceased to search the snow for signs of the duellists’ trail.

     The General found his second wind and, to pass the time, began to tell of sporting contests he had witnessed when he was a cadet. 

     ‘There was young Nezlobin – a very small youth – who had a dispute with his classmate Mychetzky, who was very stout. Words ran high on both sides, so little Nezlobin calls him out. Mychetzky, however, won’t have it. ‘You are so little,’ he said, ‘that I might fire at you a dozen times without hitting, whereas, the chance is that you may shoot me at the first fire.’ ‘To convince you I don’t want to take advantage of you,’ says little Nezlobin, ‘you shall chalk my size upon your body, and all hits out of the ring shall go for nothing!’ 

     Anton laughed with delight. The General paused and offered a swig from his hip-flask which Anton declined.

     ‘My God, you’re an incorporated temperance society!’ exploded the General. 

     But, under the pretext of coughing into his handkerchief, Anton managed to take a deep pull from Old Vańuška’s berézovka.  

      Soon his veins were on fire.

      ‘They were always sparring,’ resumed the General. ‘Mychetzky broke his ankle once, falling off his horse. Blamed Nezlobin for crossing his path on an exercise so they set to wrangling once more. So Nezlobin challenges him and Mychetzky accepted.  But being very lame, Mychetzky requests that he might have a prop. ‘Suppose,’ says he, ‘I lean against this road sign.’ Nezlobin, then points to a farther sign at a cross-roads a verst distant and says, ‘With pleasure, on condition that I may lean against the next.’  The joke settled the quarrel. A pity the same could not be said of the Prince.’

Le Diable Boiteux.

Curiously, at that moment, they, too, reached a junction where their path joined a corduroy road from the forest which led to the garrison by a lower route. Here, at last, two sets of footprints were visible, entering and leaving a gate giving on to the exercise grounds.   

     The old frontier scout released a grunt of satisfaction.

     ‘The Prince’s footsteps. Small heels. Impression of spurs in the deeper places. Let’s follow the scent.’

      The single set of tracks leading to the butts was regularly paced yet the returning tracks were of a different character, suggesting the dragging left foot of a limping man, so the General concluded.

     ‘Le Diable Boiteux!’ Anton whispered.

     Most fascinating of all, the two sets of tracks became three at a point where they passed close to a prostrate pine and other fagotage and led beyond, across a terrain broken by hairy tussocks and the fallen shafts of reed clumps. 

     To Anton, the springiness of their prints on the quaggy snow suggested the mossy ground and slippery pine needles underneath.

     ‘Ahah!’ exclaimed the General. ‘Enter Kulikov.’

     ‘How can you be so sure?’ urged Tchékhov, immediately rushing to the defence of the young Class-Lance-Corporal Pomidorchik.  

     The bearer party halted.

     ‘Understand this, Antosha,’ the General knelt beside the meeting place, ‘the first set of tracks pauses here, heels close together, then continues in the same direction, suggesting the acknowledgement by a senior of a junior officer’s salute.’ 

     ‘And...?’

     He straightened, stiffly, and continued.

     ‘Do-ye-see? Kulikov takes the shortcut through the forest, meets up with his adversary, salutes, crosses the tracks from the rear and joins the Prince on the lefthand side.’

     ‘I don’t see how...’

     ‘Regulations. Quote : ‘When officers are walking together, the junior officer should at all times position himself on the left so the senior officer’s saluting arm is disengaged.’ See?’

     ‘Perfectly. Our Imperial Table of Ranks is even written on the remotest Russian snow.’

     Anton rubbed his eyes. He saw only – imperfectly – that the muddle of the tracks in the snow was like a profusion of those slovenly typographical misprints on a galley proof with which he was so familiar – and which he was too fatigued to correct. 

     And Kulikov?  Where was he?

     ‘In quod. Under lock and key.’

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*    In fact, as was later proved, the right lung was badly affected, and emphysema was found to have spread to the left lung. At the end of Tchékhov’s life a relapse of pleurisy was complicated by an intestinal catarrh which indicated that the tuberculosis had spread to the abdominal region.

†    ‘Father of Excellence” - see Samuel xxiii, 9.

Lament for Amy Winehouse: The Line that Sings

Vodka from a broken wine glass. 

Stretch limo to deferred remorse.    

No tears. No hurt. No arias.                           

No chance, my friend, no chance, cos        

You’re not gonna see me cry.                             

Gone daddy’s girl, Medusan child.                  

Cool oracle. Herodias,                                           

Your wrecking crew is dragon-eyed,             

Blowin smoke and coasting thru, cos        

You’re not gonna see me cry.               

Leviticus Schleviticus!                     

Salome in your untervesh,

Black inkings immutabilis,                                    

Your virus-music cuts the flesh                 

But you’re not gonna see me cry.                      

No shivah, diva, no amens.    

No papa-mama clip your wings.      

No silence, candles, pentagrams.                   

Your wake-up call’s the line that sings:             

You’re not gonna see me cry.

Angel, you’re not gonna see me cry.

D-r Tchékhov: A Skirmish with Wolves and the Last of an English Racketeer.

As various extracts from my as-yet-unpublished crime novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, have lately suggested, a thread of healthy self-iconoclasm may be discerned in the narrative, see
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/dead-wife-new-hat-femme-morte-chapeau.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/inductive-detection.html

The transcription, then, and restoration of a long lost crime novel by Chekhov (he, himself, referred to such a work in progress in 1888) has been transgressive, revisionist and, admittedly, really rather fun.

That ‘Mestur Godam’, the loathsome English engineer 
Alfred Wellbeloved, exerted his authority over the garrison 
was plain to see in the assignment of his very own batman.

Scatological profanities

However, the handwriting of the manuscript is not wholly in Chekhov’s own distinctive pen-script, but in other hands . . . those of his siblings. My introduction to the text attempts a modest exegesis : 

Whether “A Text-book Case” (the manuscript’s working title) and the appended papers are a jeu d’esprit concocted by Tchékhov and his younger brother, Mikhail (Misha), to amuse his two headstrong older siblings, Aleksandr (Sasha) and Nicholai (Kolya), and further elaborated by Misha, must remain for scholars a matter of debate. Clearly, traces of three of Tchékhov’s brothers can be found in this text : in the scatological profanities on pages 229 & 243 can be heard the bitter tongue of Sasha in his cups ; the “pubic scribble” on page 129 is the work of the fledgling artist, Kolya, as, too, the “bugs and weeds” studies and the horrified face drawn in crayon on pages 58 and 212, respectively ; the parody of Ouida* on page 180 is clearly an exercise in style by his favoured kid brother, Misha, who was a translator of this authoress’s work. A censorious fourth hand, of course, is also busying itself (apart from Tchékhov’s) ; that hand belonging to his sister, Marya (Masha), the keeper of his conscience. 

Nevertheless, D-r Tchékhov’s painfully raw account of his detective work in his mission to unmask ‘Mestur Godam’, a corrupt English engineer, remains for the most part unbowdlerised. 

Mr Wellbeloved was a specimen of ruddy-faced foreigner as untrustworthy as any Anton had ever met.  After all, he would often reflect, was not the English Iscariot who betrayed the Dekabristi also possessed of that bifshtek complexion which set apart the perfidious sons of Albion. (Tchékhov had always resented the fact that the spy ennobled by Tsar Nicholas I for exposing the 1825 Decembrist revolutionaries’ plot was another damned Englishman.) The speech of Mr Wellbeloved tended to project from his dexter profile where his good right eye could hold sway, and shield from view the sinister facial blotch of portwine-stained bubukles that damned the malar flesh below his curdled left eye. There was no doubt that Mr Wellbeloved had his rotten side. Topped by his ice-capped brown derby and enveloped in vast sorrel-coloured furs which encased a jacket of waterproof tweed, Mr Wellbeloved wore more and more the aspect of a hairy beetle – a crooked zhuchilo – at once afflicted with a bolter’s eye and armed with a viperous sting.

So, here, having identified Anton’s antagonist, I publish for the first time three extracts from the novel, which charts how the English engineer single-handedly bribed and blackmailed a remote northern garrison into submission. And be warned. Tchékhov’s eventual showdown with ‘Mestur Godam’ is not without ‘scatological profanities’. 

Explanatory note: Morphia-addict, D-r Anton Tchékhov, aged 28 years, investigates the mysterious duelling death of an aristocratic cadet in a remote snowbound northern garrison. Despite succumbing to tubercular fevers, Tchékhov – in a contest between the animistic pagan beliefs of a shaman-medicineman and his own psychopathological insights as a graduate doctor – succeeds in solving the case.

At the General’s insistence, Tchékhov is appointed locum medical officer at the garrison. (Now read on . . . ) 

The English Ramp

Anton shifted his position in D-r Pitchinienko’s chair and stretched his legs. The sinews of his ham-strings felt drawn out like hammer wire. 
  Vańuška paused, sniffed, winked, then continued his report.
  According to Vanka, the most flagrant instance of fraud was rumoured to have been perpetrated by Wellbeloved when the existing trunk line, which connected the garrison’s railhead, had required re-ballasting “two winters since” due to falls of earth and subsidences of the track from heavy freight.
   The Englishman’s ramp had been the simple ploy to make his embankment of snow instead of earth, so that when the thaw came, by which time he had been paid, the track subsided two arshines throughout the length of his section. 
  He had escaped censure by specifying rails weighing one and a half poods to the arshine which he knew contractually could never be met by the railroadmen who were forced to make reparations to the Government account. Wellbeloved had known from the first that the contractors’ rail-steel was too light for the heavy engines and rolling stock of the state military traffic and would buckle or spread under successive loads.
  Vanka wrinked his nose as at a bad smell. 
  Of course, the contractors were never out of pocket. In the end, the Government purse paid for errors commissioned in the name of the State. He had seen with his own eyes the railway contractors’ deceptions. 
  The dodge was well known at the railhead.  
  When the government inspectors called on stock-taking visits, by the device of altering with white paint the numbers on the freight-wagons and sending them on ahead from the marshalling yards, the railwaymen made sure many of the trucks were counted twice or oftener and thus answered to the annual audit.
  Even today, Vańuška went on, the steel-rail (manufactured, Anton noted without comment, apparently at the mill which had so outraged the General when they first met) was too light to bear the reserves of water which were carried in tubs on bowser-trucks along the line. 
  Of late, one of Wellbeloved’s official commissions was to connect the Garrison’s water supply to a water-column at the loco’s refuelling-stop. 
  Since the track skirted close to the homes of the town-fathers, the work was delayed whilst Inzheneer Wellbeloved linked covertly, for a private fee, the well-connected merchants – the powerful kupetshestvo – to the public mains.

The Sanitation Inspector’s Report

On secondment at the behest of a Special Commission for State Hygiene to write a Report on Concessions granted by the Emperor of All the Russias, a reluctant Sanitation Inspector — the commandeered D-r Tchékhov (clasping a half-completed field pocket-book whose provisional title An Investigation into the Mineral Spring at ... trailed off beneath his arm) — stood on an incline above a river to observe the site for a new Water Works.  
  He was chilled to the marrow and aware his numbed toes no longer responded inside his cracked, down-at-heel boots. They were now wet as a latrine from squelching, ankle-deep, in churned snow.  
  His socks reminded him of a sopping wet, mucilaginous handkerchief on which a lingering patient has unremittingly blown his nose in the throes of acute naso-sinusitis.   
  His face was peaked ; clenched as a fist with the cold. With trembling blue fingers, he chose a fresh page and strove to write in the headlong running hand he reserved for draft copies : 

“The location is free from inundations, and in every respect well situated for this purpose or other manufactory in its vicinage, the Town being at an elevation some 25 sazhens above the level of the river. At present the Town is imperfectly supplied with water from a well (worked by machinery) situated about 4 versts outside the municipal boundary. The need to supply potable water to some 10,000 souls, the population of the Garrison and the surrounding Town, amounting to 3½ vedros per head, per diem, has prompted a proposal to convey water into the Town from a river some 12 versts distant. As the water is at times troubled (becoming clouded after a North wind) beds will have to be formed on the river banks for filtering it.” 

  Pointing to the plan, Mr. Alfred Wellbeloved (a wall-eyed English engineer with a vicious temper and “crooked face” — his enemies had branded him “Krivomordy” — who, to judge from his black-loam stomach, loved nothing better than sausages and sauerkraut) observed that the small additional source — a mineral spring streaming from the side of a hill — was conveniently located near the proposed site to yield a further 50 vedros per minute. 
  From the inset street map Tchékhov learned that three fountains were to be erected in different parts of the town, a scheme, Mr Wellbeloved murmured shiftily, now abandoned by the Town Authorities who had rejected the fontany in favour of more drinking troughs.
  Turning the page, Tchékhov made, in rough, a rapid calculation of revenue:

   Sale of Water Barrels (25 vedros capacity) to the Carriers 
   (1000 x 10 kopecks per barrel
   replenished once per diem) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36,500
   Drinking Troughs for Oxen
   (200,000 pairs at 2 kopecks per draught) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4,000
   40 odd Houses supplied with 18,000 vedros per annum  
   (say 16 roubles per mensum) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8,000
                                                                                                    -------
   Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Roubles (Silver) 48,500
   Deduct contractors’ Working Expenses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10,000

   Net Profit . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  Roubles (Silver) 38,500

Query. Anton hazarded that somewhere buried within this silvern total and the contractor’s profit were some hefty sweeteners. 
  But where to bung the boodle? He tried hard to imagine a bribe to an engineer (a crammed rendrock dynamite cartridge, void of kieselguhr, tamped with one-hundred-rouble notes?) and thought of Wellbeloved’s cold wall eye, blank to the palmgreasing of the bribe-takers from the local zemstvo who sat on the Board of Health.  
     Sensing perhaps a judgement in Anton’s prolonged silence, Mr Wellbeloved began to bluster as he folded the map and protested that the plan had been much trimmed by an authority higher than his own and that his personal advocacy of a system of adits for the water’s lodgement – as a countermeasure against frost-heave had been over-ruled.

Concluding chapter . . .

Pursued by Wolves

Ahead of him a white curtain had descended and the effort to distinguish on the horizon where earth ended and sky began soon became futile.
  The clouds multiplied into snowheads. Bursts of wind-borne leaves bombarded him like a rafale; a sure sign a whiteout blizzard was in the offing.
  Accordingly, with a chuck of the bridle, he pushed on at his ancient mount’s topmost speed, steady and perseverant despite her great age.
  Save for the furious barking of the village dogs, there was a deathlike stillness in the sombre and sleeping settlements through which the horseman passed and not one light showed.
  He passed the log pyramids of outlying homesteads, thatched with moss, their impoverished soil enclosed by broken fences and guttered with frozen boundary dykes, until, at length, he drew near to a hamlet straddling a lane leading to the marshalling yards.
  The neighbourhood well was not unlike the empty socket of a gigantic candlestick, with its broad sheets of ice spread all around it; and the ropes of frozen waterdrops strung over the stone slabs at its rim gleamed in the moonlight like the drippings from melted candle-wax.
  Beside the well, in the shadow of a tarred shingled housing which gave entrance to a donkey-engine shed, the greased spindle from a rack-and-pinion gearing-wheel protruded. 
  The words of his own Sanitation Report suddenly leapt before his mind’s eye, and he remembered the English surveyor’s audit, and its dismissal, as of little account, of the “...water from a well worked by machinery situated about 4 versts outside the municipal boundary”. 
  “Goddam!” A voice detonated with a roar like a mortar.
  Inside one of the hutments a dog whimpered in pain.
  On the frosty air wafted the aroma of the finest Turkish tobacco.
  An Akhisar sigara.
  D-r Tchékhov stared intently into the darkness and discerned the knife-slit of a lighted shutter.
  Inside the cabin, the excrescence — the sarkoma — that was the waterworks engineer, Alfred Wellbeloved, the un-beloved anglichanin, could be seen, seated, drinking spirits with the water carrier-men; the bribers and the bribed, in a conclave he had summoned to drive his subtle trade.
  “God damn his angliiskii soul!” 
  The words sprang from Anton’s lips of their own volition.
  The door was flung open and Wellbeloved appeared, fists clenched, his beefy, hairy bared arms thrust through his overalls — a poddevku, a sleeveless overcoat worn by coachmen and peasants.
  He glanced over his shoulder at the burmister and his men, and drawled in his drunkeness: “Gentlemen, I have the honour to introduce you to Saint Snivelling Bleeding-Heart-Holier-Than-Thou, in person.”
  In his look there was something simultaneously blank and insolent, like the eye of a greyhound as it chases a hare.
  He stood aside, and snarled :  “Loose the dogs on the interferin’ young cub!  Teach the fellow some manners!”
  The dogs were as near wolves as dogs can be; white, with more hair than the brutes that guarded the Camp.  
  They circled, slavering; their paws were so large they looked as if they were wearing galoshes.
  The wise old mare immediately plunged, breast-deep, into the drifts which flanked the track, a ruse which so maddened the albinic pack that they began to lope in circles, howling in frustration.
  “Otyebis! Vonyuchiy bzdum-kastrat!” Wellbeloved bawled. “Fuck off home! You preachifying mealy-mouthed half-hung cripple!  Otyebis! Pizdorvanets huyeviy! Fuck off! You lousy fucker!” 
  D-r Tchékhov called our cheerfully: “Uyobivay! Zasranets yobaniy!” He turned in the saddle and shouted as lustily as his feeble lungs allowed. “Fuck away! Fucking shitarse! Chtob tebya, govnjuka, vsiu zhizn v zhopu dryuchili!” He essayed a crisp salute. “And may you, shitarse, be fucked all your life in the arse!” 
  Very soon the Scylla-like yelps of the dogs pursued him no more, and he heard only the savage laughter of Wellbeloved ringing in his ears.
  A musket shot ripped a hole in the air above his right shoulder.
  What an idiot he’d been! 
  How imprudent to taunt the evil fellow, and risk his neck to satisfy his own dull, priggish conscience! 
  He had acted from sheer vindictiveness, and with a viciousness no different from the engineer’s in order to vent his rancour.
  In three days, life in the garrison had robbed him of all self respect, and brought him to the utter degradation of institutional mindlessness, consumed, like the common soldiers, by a crude and bitter resentment.
  Around him he saw only darkness, barbarity, monotony and the dumb, brutish indifference of callous men stripped of all humanity.
  A melancholy whistle sounded like a chamade of defeat.
  In the far distance, a railway engine laboured on a curve, and then the railway lights came into view over the brow of a hill, and a high column of grey smoke and sparks shifted fretfully hither and thither, trapped in the cutting between the forest trees.
  As though at a familiar signal, the mare whickered and broke into a risyu — a military trot at a brisk, even pace towards the flaring funnel. 
  Below them, a long goods train passed, pulled by two panting engines that belched shafts of crimson flame from their funnels, respiring like the high blowers who filled the rear ranks for draught service alongside Old Roarer.
  Soon, the double yolk of a yellow approach-signal shimmered in a glair of mist.**
  In another moment Anton had reached the track and crossed the line to enter the station yard.
  He patted the mare’s neck, smoothing a mane caparisoned by snow and, in places, standing in frozen quiffs.  Her flanks were streaked with frozen sweat.
  “She’s a regular sweetlin’,” he said to the waiting groom.
  He swung out his leg and dismounted smoothly, like a well-turned period.

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*Misha’s Ouidan Pastiche

Tchékhov tried hard to imagine how an interview with a suborned Prince might be conducted by the Deputy-Commissioner of the Internal Agency in the Secret Chancellery :

The Prince was led through a secret jib door. He retained a confused recollection of gigantic sentries, glittering officers, grave-looking ushers and other officials ; noble staircases and halls ; paintings, statues, tapestry and gilding ; then, following his guide, he entered a large apartment, at one end of which sat a man whose nod could seal the fate of millions upon millions of his fellow-creatures.
      “Good morning, my dear sir. Take a chair. I’m delighted you’re punctual ; I can see that you’re a military man.  I asked you to look me up so that we might resume our conversation of the other day.   I think I shall be able to make you a definite proposal.”
       His visitor’s eyes brightened.  The deputy-commissioner leant back in his chair and reflected for a moment.
       “To come to the point, I have an assignment for you.  If you care to take it up, I can promise you an appointment to General Staff.”
       The young man listened with amazement.
       “You don’t mean it!” he exclaimed, evidently overjoyed.
       “Yes, I do,” said the deputy softly, soothing the air with his palm.  “Listen to me.  Of course, you move in good society.  I know you do.  Well, I may say we have certain investigations to make in those circles.  Absolutely secret investigations.  Among the very best families.  I will give you their names.  Always providing you agree.”
       The Prince had visibly paled. 
       “Pardon me, commissioner, ya pro'testuyu,” the young noble ventured hesitantly, “but I am sorry to say I can’t do that.”
       “Why not?”
       “I can’t very well play spy in my own crowd!”
       “My dear fellow,” said the deputy-commissioner sententiously, “what a word to use!  There is no question of playing the spy.  Your service in this matter is to the Emperor alone. Are you not worthy of His trust?”
      The Prince was stirred and stood up. The deputat, too, rose ; but with impatience.
       “None of my people can take one step into a drawing room without being known for what they are.  Our flatfoots wouldn’t have the entrée.  Well, what is your answer : yes or no? Your future is assured if you say yes.”
      The Prince’s eyes shone with quickening zeal. 
      “If it’s a question of  collaring traitors, I’m your man.” Etcetera, etcetera, in æternum.

The quest for the truth of the Prince’s spy-masters was maddening, but Tchékhov felt himself to be drawing close.

** D-r Tchékhov’s train-spotting credentials seem to have been impeccable, see:
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/03/d-r-tchekhov-detektiv-problems-of.html

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2014)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html