The Greatest Russian Stories of Crime and Suspense by Otto Penzler

the village street keeping on the river side and trying to catch cool wafts from the Ob on his hot forehead. The river flowed lazily to the north, cormorants circled above it, and the ferry-boat made its way creakingly to the other side. The river was its usual self, so was the sky, and at the foot of the high bank children were bathing, snorting like horses. When they caught sight of Aniskin’s huge bulk on the rise their shouting and screaming grew louder, and the running and splashing became more energetic than ever.
    “Sitting in the water all day long, can you imagine it?” said Aniskin. “Can you imagine anything like it?”
    He sucked his tooth, produced a handkerchief from his pocket, examined it carefully, thought a little, then moved his legs apart and bent down to pick a bit of brick. After winding his handkerchief round the brick he threw it down to the river edge, shouting to the children, “Wet the handkerchief for me, my head’s fit to split!”
    The children rushed to get the handkerchief and Aniskin laid his hands on his paunch, inclined his head to one side and began to twiddle his thumbs. His eyes popped out lobster fashion, his neck contracted and very slowly as though somebody was keeping him in place, he turned to the man who stood behind him.
    “Well?” he said quietly.
    “Here I am,” came the equally quiet reply.
    The man was about twenty-five. He wore a checked shirt and military-type breeches tucked into high boots and there was a grey cap perched on his head. But his physical appearance presented a striking contrast to his clothes. His pale, sickly face expressed extreme melancholy and the deep-set eyes glowed in the emaciated face with a strange icon-like beauty. His build was even more incongruous. The gaunt, saintly face and thin neck rested on the powerful torso of a wrestler, with enormously broad shoulders and a huge chest. His bare arms rippled with sweat-bathed muscles and the whole was supported by thick short legs. The man’s head lived separately from his body; it was as though they belonged to different people. “Look at him,” Aniskin thought to himself. “The image of his father Dmitri. Just look at him.”
    “You’re a funny chap, Genka,” Aniskin said with an aggrieved sucking of his tooth. “You have an angel’s face and a wolf’s body.”
    “That’s not my fault, is it?” Genka retorted in a plaintive voice. “I’m not to blame for it, am I?”
    “You must be,” Aniskin answered reflectively. “If you weren’t to blame I wouldn’t have to bother with you in such heat.”
    Twiddling his thumbs on his paunch and emitting occasional smothered grunts, the inspector gazed at the Ob, and his eyes reflected the river, the water molten in the sun, the oarboat, the old poplar on the tall bank, the bend and the children who were clambering up the clayey bank. The first to reach the top was the liveliest and jolliest of them, and he ran up to Aniskin, the wet handkerchief in his hand, shouting ecstatically:
    “Here it is, Uncle Aniskin, as wet as can be!”
    For another few seconds Aniskin stood motionless, his legs apart, his head lowered. The boy grew quiet and the smile left his face. On wet feet he walked over to the inspector, touched him cautiously on the elbow, lifted his head, and looked Aniskin in the face. Then Aniskin untwined his hands and laid one of them on the boy’s shoulder.
    “Good for you,Vitaly Pirogov, son of Ivan Pirogov.”
    Taking the handkerchief from the boy he straightened up and told him sternly:
    “Go back to your swimming now, Vitaly. And you knot the handkerchief round the back of my head, Genka. I can’t see.”
    Genka, the chap in the checked shirt and top-boots, knotted the handkerchief round the back of the inspector’s head, breathing cautiously and pantingly, and then walked aside and stood quietly, as Aniskin squeezed his eyes tight with pleasure and twitched his shoulders shiveringly. Water streamed from the