Past two in the morning, Raskolnikov wakes on his sofa and everything returns in one flash. Fever shakes him as he strips his clothes hunting for blood. He finds congealed drops on his trousers, cuts away the threads, then remembers the stolen trinkets still in his pockets and stuffs them into a hole under the wallpaper. For a moment he feels triumph, then horror: Is that hidden? Is that the way to hide things? He destroys the axe noose, finds more stains on pocket lining and sock, and spends hours unable to move or dispose of the rags.
Nastasya and the porter knock with a police summons. Raskolnikov opens the door clutching the cut cloth in his fist; she giggles at the rags he sleeps with like treasure, and he hides them under his coat praying she does not mean arrest. The notice orders him to the district office at half past nine. He dresses in fever, almost confessing on the stairs, then walks to the station expecting the murder to be known, even thinking he might simply tell.
Relief crashes over him when the complaint is only an I O U from his landlady. It's certainly not that, he thinks, and joy makes him reckless. He snaps at the explosive assistant superintendent Ilya Petrovitch, then watches amused as Ilya berates the German landlady Luise Ivanovna over a drunken author. Nikodim Fomitch calms the scene and Raskolnikov pours out a pathetic story about poverty and broken promises. Then, dictating his debt declaration, he overhears officials discuss the pawnbroker murders: Koch, the student witness, the unfastened door, the house like a regular Noah's Ark. He nearly confesses to Nikodim Fomitch, stands, faints, and wakes to sharp questions about going out yesterday around seven. Released, he hears them still debating the case and hurries home repeating: a search, there will be a search at once. His terror returns full force.
Coming Up in Chapter 9
Back in his room he finds the loot still in the wall. He must hide it before the police come, and every passerby on the street feels like a witness Raskolnikov rushes home expecting a search, but the room is untouched and the loot still bulges from the wall. He pockets every trinket and the purse, then tries to dispose of them in the.
