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shopkeeper replied cautiously, knitting his bushy eyebrows. Then, immediately guessing the truth, “Ah, you must be from the police, Your Honor? I’m most humbly grateful to you. I didn’t expect you would be attending to me so soon. The local officer said his superiors would consider the matter, but I didn’t really expect anything, sir, not really, sir. But why are we standing out here on the doorstep? Please, come into the shop. I’m most grateful to you, sir, most grateful.”
    He even bowed and opened the door and made a gesture of invitation as much as to say “after you,” but Fandorin did not budge. He said portentously, “Kukin, I am not from the local station. I am from the Criminal Investigation Division. I have instructions to find the stu…the person you reported to the local inspector of police.”
    “The skewdint, you mean?” the shopkeeper prompted him readily. “Of course, sir, I remember his looks most precisely. A terrible thing, may God forgive him. As soon as I saw he’d clambered up on that post and put that gun to his head, I just froze, I did. That’s it, I thought, it’ll be just like it was last year—there’ll be no tempting anyone into this shop, not even for a fancy loaf. And what fault is it of ours? What draws them here like bees to honey to do away with themselves? Stroll on down that way to the Moscow River—it’s deeper there and the bridge is higher and…”
    “Be quiet, Kukin,” Erast Fandorin interrupted him. “You’d do better to describe the student. What he was wearing, what he looked like, and why you decided he was a student in the first place.”
    “Why, he was a skewdint right enough, he was, a real proper skew-dint, Your Honor,” the shopkeeper said in surprise. “Uniform coat and buttons and little glasses perched on his nose.”
    “A uniform coat, you say?” Fandorin exclaimed abruptly. “He was wearing a student coat, then?”
    “Why, what else, sir?” asked Kukin with a pitying glance at the dim-witted functionary. “If not for that, how was I to tell as he’s a skewdint or he isn’t? I reckon I can tell a skewdint from a clerk by his coat, so I do.”
    Erast Fandorin could not really make any response to that just remark, so he took a neat little notepad with a pencil out of his pocket in order to record the witness’s testimony. The notepad, which Fandorin had bought just before entering service with the Criminal Investigation Division, had lain idle for three weeks, and today was the first time he had had any use for it. In the course of the morning he had already covered several of its small pages with his fine writing.
    “Tell me what this man looked like.”
    “Just an ordinary sort of person, really. Nothing much to look at, a bit pimply around the face, like. And them little glasses…”
    “What kind of glasses—spectacles or a pince-nez?”
    “You know, the kind on a ribbon.”
    “A pince-nez, then,” said Fandorin, scribbling away with his pencil. “Any other distinctive features?”
    “He had this terrible slouch, with his shoulders almost up over the top of his head___A real skewdint, like I told you…”
    Kukin gazed in perplexity at the ‘clerk,’ who said nothing for a long time, frowning, rubbing his lips together, and rustling his little notepad. Obviously he was thinking about something.
    In the notepad it said: “Uniform coat, pimples, pince-nez, bad slouch.” Well, a few pimples didn’t mean much. The inventory of Kokorin’s possessions didn’t say a word about any pince-nez. Perhaps he had dropped it? It was possible. The witnesses in the Alexander Gardens had not said anything about a pince-nez either, but they had not really been questioned much about the suicide’s appearance. What would have been the point? A slouch? Hm. As he recalled, the Moscow Gazette had described ‘a handsome young fellow,’ but the reporter had not been present at the incident. He had not seen Kokorin, and so he could easily