With a conscious effort I went back to the reports. Then I remembered, what after all was only obvious, that Jeffries and Griswald were both trial court judges who regularly imposed punishment on violent offenders. But every trial court judge did that, and none of the others had been killed. I looked down and found the place where I had left off, read a few words more, and looked up. There was a difference. Jeffries, because he thought he was so much smarter than everyone else, Griswald, because he was afraid he was not, would go out of their way to let a prisoner know how much they thought he deserved what he was going to get and how much they were going to enjoy giving it to him.
They were both easy to hate.
I shook my head in a futile attempt to clear it, read down to the end of the first page of the report, and then turned to the next. The words went out of focus. One murder might be explained because of a sentence one of them had given, but what were the odds that the same man would be sentenced to two different terms in prison, one by Jeffries, one by Griswald, and only decide after he had served the second one that both judges deserved to die. And even if it were possible, there was no way to explain the confession. Flynn had to be right. The only conceivable connection between the two crimes was that the first had inspired someone else to commit the second.
I put it all out of mind, at least long enough to finish reading the police reports. There was more work to be done after that, but I could not concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes at a time. I got up from the desk, told myself that it was almost time for lunch anyway, and headed out the door.
The zinc-colored sky was crisscrossed with turbulent black clouds and there was a hush in the clean damp springtime air. I felt a light sprinkle on my face and quickened my step. I was only a few blocks from where I wanted to go, but then, a moment later, the rain began to pound down, beating on the pavement in hard fast bursts, like shrapnel from an exploding shell.
People with umbrellas struggled to get them open. A woman, one hand holding down her skirt, whirled past me. I fell into the open doorway of a small corner grocery and waited for the rain to let up. The worst of it passed in a few minutes, and, staying close to the buildings, I moved on.
I spotted the bookstore on the other side of the street half a block away. Dodging the traffic, I jogged across and spent a moment in front of the window examining the sets of used books on display. In front of a clothbound set of the collected works of Pushkin, a place card listed a price which no longer seemed quite as expensive as when it had first been posted several years before. A bell rang when I opened the framed glass door.
Anatoly Chicherin was sitting on a plain wooden chair behind the front counter. Long rows of unpainted bookshelves stretched down both sides of three narrow passageways that led toward the back. The air was stagnant, heavy with the stale dust of books that had been left to molder nearly as long as the dead bones of their mainly forgotten authors.
Five foot six, with an owlish full face and a small flabby mouth, Anatoly Chicherin wore glasses so thick that, seen through their distorted refraction, his eyes seemed to bulge right out of his head.
He looked up at the sound of the bell with a smile on his face.
With surprising agility for someone his age, he leaped to his feet and came around the counter to greet me.
“You’re a little early,” he said in a voice that when you first heard it made you think it must have come from someone else.
It was resonant, rich, a voice that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside the earth.
Chicherin turned the sign that hung in the glass door so it read CLOSED instead of OPEN, and then pulled down a shade smudged with hundreds of his own fingerprints.
“This will give us a little longer for the game,” he said. “I have the board all set up.”
He led me past two rows of Russian-titled volumes toward the dimly lit storage room in back. The Cyrillic script on the spines looked to my ignorant eye like English letters seen backward through a mirror.
Two straight-back wooden chairs faced each other across a small square wooden table with a chessboard in the middle. Flecked with the minuscule remains of a dozen dead insects, a single light bulb, suspended by a cloth-covered cord, hung down from the grease-covered ceiling. When Chicherin shut the door, shadows like black curtains fell over the walls.
On the front corner of an unremarkable metal desk, next to a pile of dog-eared journals, was a dented electric teakettle, which Chicherin proceeded to plug into the wall.
“It will just take a few minutes,” he said as he sat down opposite me. Rubbing his hands together, he glanced avidly at the chess pieces. “Shall we start, or shall we wait for the tea?”
“Let’s wait for the tea,” I replied, barely suppressing a grin. “I like to delay defeat as long as I can.”
“We’ve only been playing for six months. Did you expect to win so soon?”
“I lose every time we play, and we’ve played enough that I know we could keep playing for years and I’d never be able to beat you.”
With a laborious groan, as if something dead were being forced against its will to come back to life, the teakettle began to sizzle and then, a moment later, began to boil.
“You shouldn’t think like that,” he said while he poured the boiling water into a porcelain teapot. “You’re much better now than when we started.” He put the teapot on the side of the table and then brought us each a cup and saucer. “It needs to steep for a few minutes,” he said as he sat down.
Magnified out of all proportion by the thick-lens glasses perched on the bridge of his small snub nose, his eyes seemed to draw me toward him.
“You just need to slow down a little. You see a move and you take it. But sometimes, when you focus in like that, when you concentrate on what seems to be the main line of attack, you fail to see what is coming at you from the side, so to speak. Now,”
he said as he poured the tea, “let’s begin.”
It was over almost before the tea was cool enough to drink, another in my unbroken string of defeats.
“Much better,” he remarked as he swept the remaining pieces into a cigar box and folded up the board. Reaching for the teapot, he filled my cup and then his own. Holding the saucer in his hand, he sipped the tea, his eyes focused on me. “Now, tell me, what do you think about this business of a second judge being murdered? Is there perhaps a connection?”
My own suspicions suddenly seemed groundless and I found myself telling Chicherin what Flynn had told me. “The first one may have given the idea to someone else to do the second. Beyond that, no. The man who murdered Judge Jeffries confessed and then killed himself, so it can’t be the same person responsible for both.”
I said it as if it was simply self-evident, but his instincts were too good: He detected my doubt. “You’re not completely convinced that the man who confessed was telling the truth?”
“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “There’s no reason to doubt it. He didn’t just confess, he committed suicide. Why would he have done that if he had confessed to something he had not done?”
His eyes on me, Chicherin ran his finger back and forth over his lower lip. “My father could have given you an answer to that,”
he said presently. “He once confessed to a crime he didn’t commit.”
“In Russia?” I asked, meeting his gaze. “What was the crime?”
A faraway look came into his eyes and his mouth twisted to the side. His head began slowly to move from side to side, and I was left with the feeling that there was not much in the past that he wanted to remember. “Treason,” he replied, as he sipped more tea. “Treason against the Revolution. My father was part of the generation that came of age during the October Revolution of 1917, the generation that believed in Lenin and thought the Communist Party was history’s chosen instrument.” A shrewd smile crossed Chicherin’s small moist mouth. “Communism was the religion of the intellectuals. They believed in it the way a true Catholic believes in the Church, without question or condition.