The Brothers Karamazov

Nikolai Parfenovich, though he did put it in the record, also displayed, on this unpleasant occasion, a most praiseworthy efficiency and administrative skill: after severely reprimanding Mitya, he at once put an end to all further inquiry into the romantic side of the case and quickly moved on to the essential. And there emerged as essential a particular piece of evidence from the pans, which aroused unusual curiosity in the investigators: namely, how Mitya, in that little room, had been trying to bribe Pan Mussyalovich and had offered to buy him out for three thousand, with the understanding that he would give him seven hundred roubles on the spot and the remaining twenty-three hundred “tomorrow morning, in town,” swearing on his word of honor, and declaring that he did not have so much money with him there, in Mokroye, but that the money was in town. Mitya remarked, in the heat of the moment, that he had not said he would certainly pay it in town tomorrow morning, but Pan Vrublevsky confirmed the evidence, and Mitya himself, after thinking for a minute, glumly agreed that it must have been as the pans said, that he was excited then and might well have said it. The prosecutor simply fastened on this evidence: it was becoming clear to the investigation (as was indeed concluded afterwards) that half or a part of the three thousand that had come into Mitya’s hands might indeed have been hidden somewhere in town, or perhaps even somewhere there, in Mokroye, thus clarifying the circumstance, so ticklish for the investigation, that only eight hundred roubles had been found in Mitya’s possession—the one circumstance, though the only one and rather negligible at that, that so far had been some sort of evidence in Mitya’s favor. But now this only evidence in his favor was breaking down. To the prosecutor’s question as to where he would have found the remaining twenty-three hundred to give to the pan the next day, if he himself asserted that he had only fifteen hundred, though he had assured the pan on his word of honor, Mitya firmly replied that he intended to offer the “little Polack” not the money, but a formal deed for his rights to the Chermashnya estate, the very same rights he had offered to Samsonov and Madame Khokhlakov. The prosecutor even smiled at the “innocence of the ruse.”

“And you think he would have agreed to take these ‘rights’ instead of twenty-three hundred roubles in cash?”

“Certainly he would have agreed,” Mitya snapped hotly. “My God, he might have got not just two, but four, even six thousand out of it! He’d immediately gather his little lawyers together, little Polacks and Yids, and they’d take the old man not just for three thousand but for the whole of Chermashnya.”

Naturally, the evidence of Pan Mussyalovich was entered into the record in the fullest detail. With that, the pans were dismissed. As for the fact of their cheating at cards, it was barely mentioned; Nikolai Parfenovich was grateful enough to them as it was, and did not want to bother them with trifles, especially since it was all just an idle, drunken quarrel over cards, and nothing more. All sorts of carousing and scandalousness had gone on that night ... So the money, two hundred roubles, simply stayed in the Poles’ pockets.

Then the little old man, Maximov, was called. He came in timidly, approached with small steps, looked disheveled and very sad. He had been downstairs all the while, huddled next to Grushenka, sitting silently with her, and “every now and then he’d start whimpering over her, wiping his eyes with a blue-checkered handkerchief,” as Mikhail Makarovich reported afterwards. So that she herself had to quiet and comfort him. The old man confessed at once, and with tears, that he was sorry but he had borrowed “ten roubles, sirs, on account of my poverty, sirs,” from Dmitri Fyodorovich, and that he was ready to return it ... To the direct question of Nikolai Parfenovich, whether he had noticed exactly how much money Dmitri Fyodorovich had in his hands, since he had had a close view of the money in his hands when he was borrowing from him, Maximov answered in the most decisive manner that it was “twenty thousand, sir.”

“Have you ever seen twenty thousand anywhere before?” Nikolai Parfenovich asked, smiling.

“Of course I have, sir, when my wife mortgaged my little village, only it wasn’t twenty thousand, it was seven, sir. And she only let me see it from far off, she was boasting to me. It was a very big bundle, sir, all hundred-rouble bills. And Dmitri Fyodorovich, too, had all hundred-rouble bills...”