The Doomed City

1

Andrei suddenly had a headache from hell. He crushed his cigarette butt into the overflowing ashtray with a sense of loathing, pulled out the middle drawer of his desk, and looked to see if there were any tablets in there. There weren’t any. Just a massive army pistol lying on top of a jumble of old documents and little tattered cardboard boxes of assorted petty stationery items lurking in the corners, plus a littering of gnawed pencil stumps, tobacco crumbs, and broken cigarettes. All this only made his headache worse. Andrei slammed the drawer shut, propped his head up with his hands over his face, and started watching Peter Block through the cracks between his fingers

Peter Block, a.k.a. Tailbone, was sitting a short distance away on a stool, with his red mitts calmly folded together on his knees, blinking indifferently and licking his lips from time to time. He clearly didn’t have a headache, but it was obvious that he was feeling thirsty. And he probably wanted a smoke too. Andrei tore his hands away from his face with an effort, poured himself some lukewarm water from a carafe, and drank half a glassful, subduing a mild spasm. Peter Block licked his lips. His gray eyes were as inexpressive and empty as ever. His massive, gristly Adam’s apple set off on a long glide down the skinny, grubby neck protruding from his unbuttoned shirt collar and then bobbed back up to his chin.

“Well?” said Andrei.

“I don’t know,” Tailbone replied hoarsely. “I don’t remember anything like that.”

You bastard, thought Andrei. You animal. “So what’s this you’ve told us?” he asked. “You hit the grocery store on Wool Lane; you remember when you hit it, you remember who you hit it with too. Good. You hit Dreyfus’s café, and you remember when you hit it and who with as well. But for some reason you’ve forgotten about Hofstadter’s shop. And that was your latest job, wasn’t it, Block?”

“I really couldn’t say that, Mr. Investigator,” Tailbone responded with excruciatingly loathsome politeness. “I beg your pardon, but that’s just someone trying to set me up. Since we quit after the Dreyfus place, you know, since we chose the path of complete rehabilitation and socially useful employment, well, since then I haven’t done any more jobs of that kind.”

“Hofstadter identified you.”

“I really do beg your pardon, Mr. Investigator”—the note of irony in Tailbone’s voice was clearly audible now—“but Mr. Hofstadter is a bit screwy, after all, everybody knows that. So he’s got everything confused, hasn’t he? I’ve been in his shop, sure I have—to buy a few potatoes or onions… I noticed before that he wasn’t quite right in the head, begging your pardon, and if I’d known how things would turn out, I’d have stopped going to his place. I mean, just look, would you ever…?”

“Hofstadter’s daughter also identified you. It was you who threatened her with a knife, you in person.”

“It never happened. Something did happen, but it wasn’t anything like that. It was her that set the knife against my throat, that’s what! One day she boxed me into that back room of theirs—and I had a really narrow escape. She’s got this obsession with sex; all the men in the neighborhood hide away in the corners to avoid her…” Tailbone licked his lips again. “The main thing is, she says to me, you come in the back room yourself, she says, choose the cabbage yourself—”

“I’ve already heard that. Tell me again what you did and where you went on the night of the twenty-fourth. In detail, starting from the moment the sun was switched off.”

Tailbone raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Right then,” he began, “when the sun was switched off, I was sitting in a beer parlor on the corner of Jersey and Second, playing cards. Then Jack Lever invited me to another beer parlor, so we went, and on the way we dropped by Jack’s place, we wanted to pick up his broad, but we stayed too long and started drinking there. Jack got tanked, and his broad put him to bed and threw me out. I went off home to sleep, but I was totally plastered, and along the way I tangled with these guys, three of them there were, they were drunk too. I don’t know any of them; I’d never seen them before in my life. They gave me such a battering, I don’t remember anything after that—I just came round in the morning right on the edge of the Cliff, barely made it back home. I went to bed, and then they came to get me.”

Andrei leafed through the case file and found the medical evaluation. The sheet of paper was already slightly greasy.

“The only fact confirmed here is that you were drunk,” he said. “The medical evaluation does not confirm that you had been beaten up. No traces of a beating were discovered on your body.”

“So the guys did a tidy job, then,” Tailbone said approvingly. “So they had stockings filled with sand… All my ribs are still aching even now… and they refuse to put me in the hospital… I’ll croak in your cells here—then you’ll all have to answer for me.”

“They didn’t ache for three days, then the moment we presented you with the medical evaluation, they suddenly started aching—”

“What d’you mean, they didn’t ache? I was in agony, they were aching so bad, I couldn’t stand it any longer, so I started complaining.”

“Stop lying, Block,” Andrei said wearily. “It’s obscene just to listen to you.”

He was sick and tired of this slimeball. A bandit, a gangster, literally caught with the goods, and Andrei still couldn’t nail him… I haven’t got enough experience, that’s what it is. The others have his kind spilling their guts in no time flat… Meanwhile Tailbone began sighing woefully, screwed up his face pitiably, rolled his pupils back up under his forehead, and started swaying on his seat, moaning feebly and clearly intending to collapse in a faint as adroitly as he could so they would give him a glass of water and pack him off to sleep in his cell. Andrei watched these loathsome antics through the cracks between his fingers with hate in his heart. Come on, then, come on, he thought. Just you dare puke on my floor—I’ll make you wipe it all up with blotting paper, you son of a bitch.

The door opened and Senior Investigator Fritz Heiger strode confidently into the office. Casting an indifferent glance at Tailbone doubled over on the stool, he walked across to the desk and perched sideways on the papers. Without bothering to ask, he shook several cigarettes out of Andrei’s pack, stuck one in his teeth, and arranged the others neatly in a slim silver cigarette case. Andrei struck a match and Fritz took a drag, nodded as an expression of gratitude, and blew out a stream of smoke toward the ceiling.

“The boss told me to take the Black Centipedes case off you,” he said in a low voice. “That’s if you don’t mind, of course.” He lowered his voice even further and puckered his lips significantly. “Apparently the solicitor general came down on our boss like a ton of bricks. Now he’s calling everyone to his office and giving them an earful too. Just wait—he’ll get around to you soon.”

Fritz took another drag and looked at Tailbone. The suspect, who had been straining his neck to catch what the bosses were whispering about, immediately cringed and emitted a pitiful moan.

“Looks like you’re done with this one, right?”

Andrei shook his head abruptly. He felt ashamed. This was the second time in the last ten days that Fritz had come to take a case from him.

“Oh really?” Fritz said in surprise. He studied Tailbone for a few seconds, sizing him up, then spoke under his breath—“With your permission?”—and slipped off the desk without waiting for a reply.

Walking right up close to the suspect, he leaned down over him compassionately, holding his cigarette away at arm’s length.

“Hurting all over?” he inquired sympathetically.

Tailbone moaned in the affirmative.

“Like a drink?”

Tailbone groaned again and reached out a trembling paw.

“And you’d probably like a smoke too, I suppose?”

Tailbone half-opened one eye distrustfully.

“He’s hurting all over, the poor soul!” Fritz said loudly, but without turning toward Andrei. “It’s a shame to watch a man suffering so badly. He hurts here… and he hurts here… and he hurts here too…”

As he repeated these words, varying the tone of his voice, Fritz made short, obscure movements with the hand that wasn’t holding the cigarette: Tailbone’s pitiful lowing suddenly broke off, to be replaced by squawking gasps of surprise, and his face turned pale.

“Get up, you bastard!” Fritz suddenly yelled at the top of his voice, taking a step back.

Tailbone immediately jumped to his feet, and Fritz swung a horrific punch into his stomach. Tailbone swayed forward and Fritz landed an open-palm uppercut on his chin with a dull thud. Tailbone swayed backward, knocking over the stool, and fell on his back.

“Get up!” Fritz roared again.

Sobbing and gasping for breath, Tailbone started hastily scrabbling across the floor. Fritz bounded over to him, grabbed his collar, and jerked him up onto his feet. Tailbone’s face was completely white now, with a green glint to it, his eyes were goggling crazily, and he was sweating profusely.

Wrinkling up his face in disgust, Andrei looked down at the floor and started fumbling in the pack of cigarettes with trembling fingers, struggling to catch hold of a cigarette. He had to do something, but it wasn’t clear what. On the one hand, Fritz’s actions were abhorrent and inhuman, but on the other hand, the way this barefaced gangster and thief, this noxious boil on the body of society, made a mockery of justice was just as abhorrent.

“I believe you’re dissatisfied with your treatment?” Fritz’s ingratiating voice was saying in the meantime. “I believe you’re even thinking of making a complaint. Well then, my name is Friedrich Heiger. Senior Investigator Friedrich Heiger…”

Andrei forced himself to look up. Tailbone was standing there stretched out to his full height, but with his entire body leaning back, and Fritz was standing right up close, leaning down toward Tailbone and hovering over him menacingly, with his fists propped against his sides.

“You can complain—you know who my present boss is… But do you know who used to be my boss before? A certain Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler! Ever heard that name before? And do you know where I used to work before? In an organization that went by the name of the Gestapo! And do you know what I was famous for in that organization?”

The phone rang and Andrei picked up the receiver. “Investigator Voronin here,” he said through his teeth.

“Martinelli,” replied a slightly strangled voice that sounded short of breath. “Come to my office, Voronin. Immediately.”

Andrei hung up. He realized he was going to get a humongous bawling-out from the boss, but right now he was glad to get out of this office—as far away as possible from Tailbone’s crazed eyes, from Fritz’s savagely thrust-out jaw, out of the congealing atmosphere of the torture chamber. What was Fritz doing this for… the Gestapo, Himmler…?

“The boss wants me in his office,” he announced in a strange, squeaky voice that didn’t seem to be his own, mechanically pulling out the drawer of the desk and putting the pistol in his holster so that he would report in due form.

“Good luck,” Fritz responded, without turning around. “I’ll be here for a while, don’t worry.”

Andrei walked toward the door, moving faster and faster as he went, and shot out into the corridor like a rocket. Beneath the gloomy vaulted ceiling, a cool, odorous silence reigned, with several ragged individuals of the male sex sitting motionless on a long wooden garden bench under the strict gaze of the guard on duty. Andrei walked past a row of closed doors and into the detention cells, past a stairway landing on which several young investigators from the latest intake puffed continually on cigarettes as they passionately explained their cases to each other, went up to the third floor, and knocked on the door of his boss’s office.

The boss was in a somber mood. His thick cheeks were drooping, his sparse teeth were bared in menace, he was breathing heavily through his mouth with a whistling sound, and he glowered at Andrei from under his brows.

“Sit down,” he growled.

Andrei sat down, put his hands on his knees, and stared out the window… The window was covered with bars, and the darkness outside it was impenetrable. About eleven o’clock, he thought. I’ve wasted so much time on that slimeball…

“How many cases do you have?” asked the boss.

“Eight.”

“How many do you intend to close by the end of the quarter?”

“One.”

“That’s not good.”

Andrei didn’t say anything.

“Your work record’s poor, Voronin. Poor!” the boss said hoarsely, tormented by his shortness of breath.

“I know,” Andrei said humbly. “I just can’t get into the swing of it.”

“Well, it’s about time you did!” said the boss, raising his voice to a whistling hiss. “You’ve been working here all this time and you’ve only closed three pitiful cases. You’re not fulfilling your duty to the Experiment, Voronin. And after all, you have people you can learn from, people you can ask for advice. Look at the way that friend of yours works, for instance, I mean… er, er… I mean Friedrich… er, er… He has his shortcomings, of course, but there’s no point in you just adopting his faults. You can adopt his virtues too, Voronin. You came to us together, and he’s already closed eleven cases.”

“I don’t know how to work like that,” Andrei said gloomily.

“Learn. You have to learn. We’re all learning. Your… er… Friedrich didn’t come here from law school either, but he works, and he works pretty well… Just look, he’s already a senior investigator. And some people think it’s time he was made deputy head of the Criminal Sector… Yes… But they’re not happy with you, Voronin. For instance, what progress are you making on the Building case?”

“None at all,” said Andrei. “That isn’t a case. It’s just nonsense, some kind of mystification.”

“Why is it mystification, when there’s testimony from witnesses? When there are victims? People are disappearing, Voronin!”

“I can’t see how it’s possible to conduct a case based on legends and rumors,” Andrei said morosely.

The boss strained and coughed, wheezing and whistling. “You’ve got to use your brains, Voronin,” he hissed. “Rumors and legends—yes. A mystical atmosphere—yes. But what for? Who needs that? Where did the rumors come from? Who started them? Who’s spreading them? What for? And most important of all—where are the people disappearing to? Do you understand me, Voronin?”

Andrei plucked up his courage and said, “I understand you, boss. But this case isn’t for me. I prefer dealing with simple criminal matters. The City’s swarming with lowlifes—”

“And I prefer growing tomatoes!” said the boss. “I adore tomatoes, and for some reason you can’t get them here for love or money… This is your job, Voronin, and no one’s interested in what you prefer. You’ve been given the Building case, so kindly get on with it. I can see for myself that you’re a fumbler. Under different circumstances I wouldn’t have given you the Building case. But under the present circumstances I am giving it to you. Why? Because you are one of us, Voronin. Because you are not just going through the motions, you’re fighting a battle here! Because you didn’t come here for your own sake but for the Experiment! There aren’t many people like that, Voronin. And that’s why I’m going to tell you something that officers of your rank aren’t supposed to know.”

The boss leaned back in his chair and said nothing for a while, with his chest whistling even more loudly and his teeth completely bared in a grin.

“We fight against gangsters, racketeers, and hooligans, everyone knows that. That’s good, it’s necessary. But they aren’t our danger number one, Voronin. First, there’s a natural phenomenon that exists here, it’s called the Anticity. Ever heard of it? No, you haven’t. And you shouldn’t have. You shouldn’t have heard of it. And don’t let anyone ever hear of it from you! It’s an official secret with a ‘double 0’ number. The Anticity. We have information that there are settlements of some kind to the north of us: one, two, several—we don’t know. But they know all about us! There could be an invasion, Voronin. It’s very dangerous. The end of our City. The end of the Experiment. Espionage is being committed, sabotage and acts of subversion are being attempted, panicky rumors and calumnies are being spread. Is the situation clear, Voronin? I can see that it is. To continue. Here, in the City itself, there are people living beside us and among us who didn’t come here for the sake of the Experiment but for other, more or less selfish reasons. Nihilists, internal recluses, elements that have lost faith, anarchists. Not many of them are activists, but even the passive ones represent a danger. The erosion of morals, the breakdown of ideals, attempts to set some strata of the population against others, corrosive skepticism. Example: a good friend of yours, a certain Katzman…”

Andrei started. The boss shot a dark glance at him from between puffy eyelids, paused, and continued.

“Iosif Katzman. A curious individual. We have information that he often sets out and travels in a northerly direction, spends some time there, and then comes back. In so doing, he neglects his own direct responsibilities, but that’s none of our business. To continue. Conversations. This is something you must be aware of.”

Andrei nodded involuntarily but immediately realized what he was doing and put on a stony face.

“To continue. The most important thing for us. He has been spotted in the vicinity of the Building. Twice. Once he was seen emerging from it. I hope I have adduced a good example, successfully linking him with the Building case. You have to get to work on this case, Voronin. This, Voronin, is a case that I can’t hand to anyone else now. There are people no less devoted than you, and with far more sense, but they’re busy. All of them. Every last one. Up to their eyes in work. So you push on with the Building case, Voronin. I’ll try to relieve you of the other cases. Tomorrow at 1600 hours come back to me to report and present your plan. Go.”

Andrei got up.

“Oh yes! A piece of advice. I advise you to pay some attention to the Falling Stars case. Advise you very earnestly. There could be a connection. That case is being handled by Chachua now; drop into his office and familiarize yourself. Consult him.”

Andrei bowed awkwardly and set off toward the door.

“One more thing!” the boss said, and Andrei halted right in front of the door. “Bear in mind that the solicitor general is taking a special interest in the Building case. A special interest! So apart from you, there’s someone else from the Public Prosecutor’s Office, and he’ll still be dealing with it. Try to avoid any lapses arising from your personal inclinations, or the opposite. Go on, Voronin.”

Andrei closed the door behind him and leaned against the wall. He could feel a sort of obscure emptiness inside himself, some kind of indeterminate void. He’d been expecting a severe reprimand, a huge dressing-down from the boss, maybe even the boot or a transfer to the police. Instead of that it seemed like he’d actually been praised, singled out from the others, trusted with a case that was considered a top priority. Only a year ago, when he was still a garbage collector, a bawling-out at work would have cast him into an abyss of woe and despair, and a responsible assignment would have raised him up on high to a peak of exultation and feverish enthusiasm. But now he sensed a kind of indefinite twilight inside himself; he cautiously attempted to figure himself out and at the same time feel out the inevitable complications and inconveniences which were, of course, bound to arise in this new situation.

Izya Katzman… A blabbermouth. A windbag. A vicious, venomous tongue. A cynic. And at the same time—there was no way around it—totally unmercenary, kindhearted, absolutely unselfish, even to the point of stupidity, basically helpless when it came to worldly matters… And the Building case. And the Anticity. Damn it all… OK, we’ll figure this out…

He went back to his office and was rather nonplussed to discover Fritz there. Fritz was sitting at Andrei’s desk, smoking Andrei’s cigarettes, and carefully leafing through Andrei’s cases, extracted from Andrei’s safe. “Well then, did you get the full works?” Fritz asked, looking up at Andrei.

Without answering, Andrei took a cigarette, lit up, and inhaled deeply several times. Then he looked around for somewhere to sit and saw an empty stool. “Listen, where’s that guy?”

“In the slammer,” Fritz replied contemptuously. “I sent him off to the slammer for the night, with orders not to give him anything to eat, drink, or smoke. He coughed up the goods, meek as a lamb, a complete confession, and he named another two we didn’t even know about. But to wrap things up the slimeball has to be taught a lesson. I’ll give you the record of interrogation.” He tossed a few files from one spot to another. “I’ve filed the record, you’ll find it yourself. Tomorrow you can hand it on to the Prosecutor’s Office. It has some curious things he told me in it—they’ll come in handy sometime.”

Andrei smoked, looking at that long, well-groomed face and those keen, watery eyes, and he couldn’t help admiring the confident movements of those large, genuinely manly hands. Fritz had grown recently. There was almost nothing left in him of the pompous young noncommissioned officer. The rather blunt insolence had been replaced by focused confidence; he no longer took offense at jokes; he didn’t put on a stony face and didn’t play the jackass at all. At one point he had become a frequent visitor to Selma’s place, and then they’d had some kind of bust-up, and Andrei had had a few words with him as well. And Fritz had calmly withdrawn.

“What are you gawping at me like that for?” Fritz inquired with benign curiosity. “Still can’t pull yourself together after the shellacking? Never mind, old buddy, a shellacking from the boss is a subordinate’s holiday of the heart!”

“Hey, listen,” said Andrei. “What did you act out that little operetta for? Himmler, the Gestapo… What sort of innovative investigative practice is that?”

“Operetta?” said Fritz, jerking up his right eyebrow. “That, my old buddy, works like a shot from a gun!” He slammed shut an open case file and got up from the desk. “I’m surprised you haven’t figured that out for yourself. I assure you, if you’d told him you used to work in the Cheka or the GPU and clicked a pair of manicure scissors under his nose, you’d have had him kissing your boots… You know, I’ve picked out a few of your cases—with the heap you have here, you’ll never plow through them in a year… So I’ll take them off your hands, and we can settle up somehow later.”

Andrei gave him a grateful look and Fritz gave him a friendly wink in reply. A helpful kind of guy, Fritz. And a sound comrade. So maybe that was the way the work should be done? Why the hell bother using kid gloves on this garbage? And it was true, everyone over there in the West had been frightened half to death with talk of the Cheka’s basement rooms, and when it came to filthy carrion like that Tailbone, any means were good.

“Well, any questions?” asked Fritz. “No? Then I’ll be going.”

He tucked the case files under his arm and stepped out from behind the desk. “Oh yes!” said Andrei, suddenly remembering. “You haven’t taken the Building case, by any chance, have you? Leave that one!”

“The Building case? My dear man, my altruism doesn’t extend that far. You can figure out the Building case yourself somehow.”

“Uh-huh,” Andrei said with morose determination. “Myself… By the way,” he said, remembering something else. “Falling Stars—what sort of case is that? I know the name all right, but what it’s all about, what sort of stars they are, I don’t recall…”

Fritz wrinkled up his forehead and gave Andrei a curious glance. “There is a case by that name,” he said. “They haven’t really handed it off to you, have they? Then you’re a goner. Chachua’s got it. A desperate case, absolutely hopeless.”

“No,” Andrei said with a sigh. “No one’s handed it to me. It’s just that the boss suggested I should familiarize myself with it. A series of some kind of ritual killings, isn’t it? Or is it?”

“No, it’s not exactly that. Although maybe it is that. That case, my friend, has been dragging on for years. Every now and then they find people smashed to smithereens at the foot of the Wall. They’ve obviously fallen off the Wall, from a great height…”

“What do you mean, off the Wall?” Andrei asked in amazement. “Is it really possible to climb up it? It’s smooth… And what for? You can’t even see the top of it.”

“That’s the point! At first some thought there was a city like ours up there too, on top, and they were throwing these people down to us over their Cliff, you know, the way we can throw things into our Abyss. But then they managed to identify a couple of the bodies: they were ours, all right, local residents… No one has the slightest idea how they managed to clamber up there. So far we can only assume that they’re some kind of desperado rock climbers who were trying to get out of the City by the upward route… But on the other hand… Anyway, it’s a pretty dismal case. A dead case, if you want my opinion. Well, OK, time I was going.”

“Thanks. Cheers,” Andrei said, and Fritz left.

Andrei moved across into his own chair, put away all the files except the Building case in the safe, and sat there for a while with his head propped on his hands. Then he picked up the phone, dialed a number, and started waiting. As usual, no one answered the phone for a long time, then someone picked up the receiver and a low male voice, clearly not sober, inquired, “Heeello?” Andrei said nothing, pressing the receiver hard against his ear: “Hello! Hellooo?” the drunken voice growled, then fell silent, and all that could be heard was heavy breathing and Selma’s voice in the distance, crooning a heartrending song that Uncle Yura had brought to the City:

Andrei hung up, croaked and grunted, rubbing his cheeks, then muttered bitterly, “Lousy tramp, she’s irredeemable…” and opened the case file.

The Building case had been opened during the time when Andrei was still a garbage collector and knew nothing at all about the murky backstage life of the City. In the sixteenth, eighteenth, and thirty-second districts, people had suddenly started disappearing on a regular basis. They disappeared absolutely without a trace, and there was absolutely no system, no sense, and no logic to the disappearances. Ole Svensson, forty-three years of age, a laborer at the paper mill, went out one evening to get bread and didn’t come back, and he never showed up at the bread shop. Stepan Cibulski, twenty-five years of age, a policeman, disappeared at night from his post, his shoulder belt was found on the corner of Main Street and Diamond Avenue—and that was all; there were no other traces. Monica Lehrer, fifty-five years of age, a seamstress, took her spitz out for walk before bed; the spitz returned home cheerful and in good health, but the seamstress had disappeared. And so on, and so on—more than forty disappearances in all.

Fairly soon witnesses turned up who claimed that shortly before the missing people disappeared, they had entered a certain Building—from the descriptions it seemed like the same one, but the strange thing was that different witnesses provided different locations for the Building. Josef Humboldt, sixty-three years of age, a hairdresser, walked into a three-story redbrick building on the corner of Second Right Street and Graystone Lane in full view of Leo Paltus, who knew him personally, and since that time no one had seen Josef Humboldt again. A certain Theodore Buch testified that Semyon Zahodko, thirty-two years of age, a farmer, who subsequently disappeared, had entered a building of precisely the same description, but this time on Third Left Street, not far from the Catholic church. David Mkrtchan related how he had met an old acquaintance from work, Ray Dodd, forty-one years of age, a cesspool cleaner, in Wattle and Daub Lane—they stood there for a while, chatting about the harvest, family matters, and other neutral subjects, and then Ray Dodd said, “Hang on a moment, I’ve just got to drop into this place, I’ll try to make it quick, but if I’m not back out in five minutes, you go on, it means I’ve been delayed.” He went into some kind of redbrick building with windows that were whitewashed over. Mkrtchan waited a quarter of an hour for him, then gave up and went on his way, and as for Ray Dodd, he disappeared without a trace forever.

The redbrick building figured in the testimony of all the witnesses. Some asserted that it was three stories high, others said it had four floors. Some noticed windows that were whitewashed over, others mentioned windows that were covered with metal gratings. And no two witnesses gave exactly the same spot as its location.

Rumors started rippling through the City. In the lines to buy milk, in the hairdressing salons, in the restaurants, it was passed on by word of mouth in an ominous whisper—the bright, shiny, brand-new legend of the appalling Red Building that wandered around the City of its own volition, settling in somewhere between the ordinary buildings, opening the ghastly jaws of its doors and lying in wait there for the incautious. Then people appeared claiming to be friends of relatives of acquaintances who had managed to escape, tearing themselves out of the grip of that insatiable brick maw. These acquaintances had told terrifying stories, presenting by way of proof scars and fractures earned by jumping from the second, third, and even fourth floor. According to all these rumors and legends, the building was empty inside—there were no robbers or sadistic maniacs waiting for you in there, no shaggy-haired, bloodsucking beasts. But the stone bowels of the corridors suddenly contracted, straining to squash their victim; the black chasms of manholes gaped open underfoot, breathing out an icy graveyard stench; mysterious forces drove men along the black, constantly narrowing passages and tunnels until they got stuck, trying to force their way through the final stony crack—and in the empty rooms with tattered wallpaper, among slabs of plaster that had fallen from the ceilings, the crushed bones decayed, projecting ghoulishly from rags that were crusted hard with blood…

At first Andrei had actually taken an interest in this case. He marked the places where the Building had been seen with little crosses on a map of the City, tried to find some consistent principle in the locations of these little crosses, and drove out to investigate those places a good dozen times—and every time at the location of the Building he discovered either an abandoned garden or a gap between buildings, or even an ordinary apartment building that had nothing to do with any mysteries or riddles.

He was bemused by the circumstance that the Red Building had never been seen by the light of the sun; he was bemused by the circumstance that at least half the witnesses had seen the Building while in a state of greater or lesser alcoholic intoxication; he was bemused by the petty but seemingly compulsory inconsistencies in virtually every testimony; and he was especially bemused by the total senselessness and absurdity of what was happening.

Izya Katzman had once remarked concerning this business that a city of a million people, deprived of any systematic ideology, would inevitably acquire its own myths. That sounded convincing enough, but people were actually disappearing for real! Of course, it wasn’t all that hard for someone to disappear in the City. They only had to be thrown over the Cliff and no one would ever be any wiser. But who would want to cast assorted hairdressers, old seamstresses, and petty shopkeepers into the Abyss? People with no money, with no reputation, and practically no enemies? Kensi had once voiced the perfectly sensible supposition that the Red Building, if it really existed, was evidently an integral part of the Experiment, so seeking an explanation for it was pointless—the Experiment is the Experiment. In the end Andrei had also settled for this point of view. There was a whole heap of work to be done, the Building case already ran to more than a thousand pages, and Andrei had stuck the file right down at the bottom of his safe, only occasionally extracting it in order to insert the latest witness testimony.

Today’s talk with the boss, however, had opened up entirely new prospects. If there really were people in the City who had set themselves the task (or for whom someone else had set the task) of creating an atmosphere of panic and terror among the general population, that lent many aspects of the Building case some comprehensibility. And then the inconsistency of the testimony from the so-called witnesses could be explained by the distortion of rumors as they were passed on, and the disappearances were transformed into ordinary murders, intended to intensify the atmosphere of terror. The constantly active sources, the distribution centers of this murky, sinister haze, now had to be sought out among the welter of idle gossip, fearful whispers, and lies…

Andrei took a clean sheet of paper and began slowly drafting out a plan, word by word and point by point. A little while later he had come up with the following:

Andrei chewed on his pencil for a moment, squinted at the lamp, and remembered another thing: contact Petrov. At one time this Petrov had really gotten Andrei’s goat. His wife had disappeared, and for some reason he decided that the Red Building had swallowed her. Since then he had abandoned all his other business and devoted himself to searching for the Building: he wrote countless notes to the Prosecutor’s Office—which were promptly forwarded to the Investigation Department and ended up with Andrei—he wandered around the City at night, was taken into the police station several times on suspicion of criminal intent, and raised Cain there, which got him locked up for ten days, and when he got out he carried on with his search.

Andrei wrote out summonses for him and two other witnesses, handed the summonses to the duty guard with orders to see they were delivered immediately, and went to see Chachua.

Chachua, an immense Caucasian who had run to fat, with almost no forehead but a gigantic nose, was reclining on the sofa in his office, surrounded by swollen case files, and sleeping. Andrei shook him.

“Eh!” Chachua said hoarsely as he woke up. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened,” Andrei said angrily. He couldn’t stand this kind of lax behavior in people. “Give me the Falling Stars case.”

Chachua sat up, his face beaming with joy. “Are you taking it?” he asked with a predatory twitch of his phenomenal nose.

“Don’t go getting all happy. It’s only to take a look.”

“Listen, what do you want to just look at it for?” Chachua exclaimed passionately. “Take the case off my hands completely. You’re handsome, young, and full of energy; the boss holds you up as an example to everyone. You’ll soon have this case unraveled—you’ll just clamber up that Yellow Wall and unravel it, quick as a flash! It’s a piece of cake for you!”

Andrei gazed at Chachua’s nose. Immense and hooked, with a web of crimson veinlets covering its bridge and bunches of coarse black hairs protruding from its nostrils, this nose lived a life of its own, apart from Chachua. It obviously just didn’t want to know about the concerns of Investigator Chachua. It wanted everyone around it to quaff ice-cold Kakhetian wine out of large glasses, following it down with juicy kebabs and moist, crunchy green herbs and salads; it wanted everyone to dance, clutching the hems of their sleeves in their fingers, with passionate cries of “Ássa!” It wanted to bury itself in fragrant blonde hair and hover above sumptuous naked breasts… Oh, it wanted many things, that magnificent, life-loving hedonist of a nose, and its multitudinous desires were all candidly expressed in its various independent movements and changes of color, and the range of sounds that it emitted!

“And if you can close this case,” said Chachua, rolling the olives of his eyes back up under his low forehead, “oh my God! What fame that will earn you! What honor! Do you think Chachua would offer you this case if he could climb up the Yellow Wall himself? Not for anything would Chachua offer you this case! It’s a gold mine! And I’m only offering it to you. Lots of people have come to me and asked for it. No, I thought, none of you can handle it. Voronin’s the only one who can handle it, I thought—”

“OK, OK, that’s enough,” Andrei said in annoyance. “Just cut the gab, will you, and let me have the file. I haven’t got time to waste on singing along here with you.”

Still prattling, complaining, and boasting, Chachua lazily got up, shuffling his feet across the littered floor, walked over to the safe, and started rummaging around in it, while Andrei watched his massive, broad shoulders and thought that Chachua was probably one of the best investigators in the department—he was simply a brilliant investigator, he had the highest percentage of closed cases—but he hadn’t been able to get anywhere with this Falling Stars case. No one had been able to get anywhere with this case—not Chachua, not the investigator before him, and not the investigator before that…

Chachua took out a pile of plump, greasy files, and they leafed through the final pages together. Andrei carefully noted down on a separate piece of paper the names and addresses of the two individuals who had been identified, and also the small number of distinguishing characteristics that had been determined for some of the unidentified victims.

“What a case!” Chachua exclaimed, clicking his tongue. “Eleven bodies! And you’re turning it down. Oh yes, Voronin, you don’t know your own good luck when you see it. You Russians always were idiots—you were idiots in the other world, and you’re still idiots in this one! What do you want this for anyway?” he asked, suddenly curious.

Andrei explained what he intended to do as coherently as he could. Chachua grasped the essence quickly enough but didn’t evince any particular delight at the idea.

“Try it, try it…” he said lethargically. “I have my doubts, though. What’s your Building, compared to my Wall? The Building’s a figment, but the Wall—there it is, just a kilometer away… Ah, no, Voronin, we’ll never get to the bottom of this case.” But then, when Andrei was already at the door, Chachua called after him, “Well, if something does come up—you get right back to me.”

“OK,” said Andrei. “Of course.”

“Listen,” said Chachua, wrinkling up his fat forehead in concentration and wiggling his nose. Andrei stopped and looked at him expectantly. “I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time…” Chachua’s face turned serious. “In 1917 you had a little bust-up in Petrograd. How did that turn out, ah?”

Andrei spat and walked out, slamming the door, to peals of laughter from the delighted Caucasian. Chachua had caught him out again with that idiotic joke. It would be better not to talk to him at all.

There was a surprise waiting for him in the corridor outside his office. A disheveled little character with drowsy eyes was sitting on the bench, huddling up in his coat to keep warm and looking frightened to death. The duty guard at the small desk with the telephone jumped to his feet and gallantly barked out, “Witness Eino Saari delivered in accordance with your summons, Mr. Investigator!”

Andrei gazed at him, dumbfounded. “In accordance with my summons?”

The duty guard was rather dumbfounded too. “You told me yourself,” he said resentfully. “Half an hour ago… You handed me the summonses and ordered me to deliver them immediately.”

“My God,” said Andrei. “The summonses! I ordered you to deliver the summonses immediately, damn you! For tomorrow, at ten in the morning!” He glanced at pale, smiling Eino Saari with the white ankle ties of his long johns dangling out from under his trousers, then looked at the duty officer again. “And are they going to bring the others right now?” he asked.

“Yes sir,” the duty officer replied morosely. “I did what I was told to do.”

“I’ll report you,” said Andrei, barely able to control himself. “You’ll be transferred to street duty—herding the crazies back home in the morning—then I’ll watch you in your misery… Well then,” he said, turning to Saari, “since this is the way things have turned out, come in.”

He pointed out the stool to the witness, sat down at the desk, and glanced at the clock. It was shortly after midnight. His hopes of getting a good night’s sleep before a heavy day tomorrow had miserably evaporated. “Right, then,” he said with a sigh, opened the Building case file, leafed through the immense pile of reports, statements, references, and forensic testimony, found the sheet with the previous testimony provided by Saari (forty-three years of age, a saxophone player in the Second Municipal Theater, divorced), and ran his eyes over it one more time. “Right, then,” he repeated. “Actually what I need to do is check a few things relating to the testimony you gave the police a month ago.”

“By all means, by all means,” said Saari, eagerly leaning forward and holding his coat closed across his chest in a womanish kind of gesture.

“You testified that at 2340 hours on September 8 of this year, your acquaintance Ella Stremberg entered the so-called Red Building as you watched, and at that time the building was located on Parrot Street, in the gap between delicatessen number 115 and Strem’s pharmacy. Do you confirm that testimony?”

“Yes, yes, I confirm it. That’s absolutely the way everything was. Only about the date… I don’t recall the precise date—after all, it was more than a month ago.”

“That’s not important,” said Andrei. “You remembered at the time, and it also happens to concur with other testimony… What I’m asking you to do now is to describe that so-called Red Building again, in greater detail.”

Saari leaned his head over to one side and pondered. “Well then, it was like this,” he said. “Three stories. Old brick, dark red, like a barracks, if you know what I mean. With sort of narrow, high windows. On the first floor they were all whitewashed over, and as I recall now, they weren’t lit up…” He thought again for a moment. “You know, as far as I recall, there wasn’t a single lit-up window. Well, and… the entrance. Stone steps, two or three… this heavy kind of door… an old-fashioned sort of brass handle… ornate. Ella grabbed hold of that handle and pulled the door toward her with a real effort, you know… I didn’t notice the number of the building, I don’t even remember if it had a number… Basically it looked like an old government building, something from late last century.”

“Right, then,” said Andrei. “So tell me, had you often been on this Parrot Street before?”

“It was the first time. And the last, actually. I live quite a long way from there, I’m never in that area, but this time it just happened that I decided to see Ella home. We’d had a party, and I… mmm… well, I flirted with her a bit, and I went to see her home. We had a very agreeable talk on the way, then she suddenly said, ‘Well, it’s time for us to part,’ and kissed me on the cheek, and before I realized what was happening, she’d already slipped into this building. At the time I honestly thought that she lived there…”

“I see,” said Andrei. “You were probably drinking at the party, right?”

Saari slapped himself on the knees regretfully with both hands. “No, Mr. Investigator,” he said. “Not a drop. I can’t drink—the doctors advise me not to.”

Andrei nodded sympathetically. “You don’t happen to remember if this building had chimneys, do you?”

“Yes, of course I remember. I really should tell you that the appearance of that building has an astounding impact on the imagination—it’s as if it were standing there in front of my eyes right now. It had this tiled roof and three fairly tall chimneys. I remember there was smoke coming out of one of them, and I thought at the time how many buildings we still have that are heated by stoves…”

The moment had come. Andrei carefully laid his pencil across the reports and statements, leaned forward slightly, and peered intently through narrowed eyes at Eino Saari, saxophonist. “There are discrepancies in your testimony. First, as forensic analysis has demonstrated, if you were on Parrot Street, there was no way you could have seen the roof or the chimneys of a three-story building.”

The jaw of Eino Saari, mendacious saxophonist, dropped open, and his eyes started darting about in confusion.

“To continue. The investigation has established that at nighttime Parrot Street is not lit at all, and therefore it is quite incomprehensible how, in the pitch darkness of night, three hundred meters from the nearest streetlamp, you could have made out such a host of details: the color of the building, the old brick, the brass door handle, the shape of the windows, and, finally, the smoke from the chimney. I would like to know how you account for these discrepancies.”

For a while Eino Saari merely opened and closed his mouth without a sound. Then he gulped convulsively and said, “I don’t understand a thing… You’ve completely flummoxed me… It never even dawned on me…”

Andrei waited expectantly.

“It’s true, why didn’t I think of it before… It was completely dark there on that Parrot Street! Never mind the buildings—I couldn’t even see the sidewalk under my feet… Or the roof… I was standing right beside the building, by the porch… but I absolutely, distinctly remember the roof and the bricks and the smoke from the chimney—that white, nighttime smoke, as if it were lit up by moonlight.”

“Yes, that is strange,” Andrei said in a wooden voice.

“And the handle on the door… Brass, and polished by the touch of so many hands… such a subtle pattern of flowers and little leaves… I could draw it now, if I knew how to draw… And at the same time it was absolutely dark—I couldn’t make out Ella’s face, I could only tell from her voice that she was smiling when—”

A new idea appeared in Eino Saari’s gaping eyes. He pressed his hands to his chest.

“Mr. Investigator!” he said in a despairing voice. “At this moment my head is filled with confusion, but I realize quite clearly that I’m testifying against myself, leading you to suspect me. But I’m an honest man—my parents were absolutely honest, deeply religious people… Everything I’m telling you now is the absolute, honest truth! That’s exactly the way it was. It’s just that it never dawned on me before. It was pitch dark, I was standing right beside the building, and at the same time I remember every brick, and I can see the tiles of that roof as if it were right here, beside me… and the three chimneys… And the smoke.”

“Hmm…” said Andrei, and drummed his fingers on the desk. “And perhaps you didn’t see all this yourself? Perhaps someone else told you about it? Had you ever heard about the Red Building before the incident with Miss Stremberg?”

Eino Saari’s eyes started darting about again. “Nnnn… I don’t recall,” he said. “Afterward—yes. After Ella disappeared, when I went to the police, after she was declared missing… there was a lot of talk then. But before that… Mr. Investigator!” he declared solemnly. “I can’t swear that I didn’t hear anything about the Red Building before Ella disappeared, but I can swear that I don’t remember anything about it.”

Andrei picked up a pen and started writing the record of interrogation. At the same time he spoke in a deliberately monotonous, officious voice, intended to inspire in the suspect a state of dreary melancholy and a sense of implacable fate propelled by the impeccable mechanism of justice. “You must realize, Mr. Saari, that the investigation cannot be satisfied with your testimony. Ella Stremberg disappeared without a trace, and you, Mr. Saari, were the last person to see her. The Red Building that you have described in such detail here does not exist on Parrot Street. The description that you give of the Red Building is not credible, since it contradicts the elementary laws of physics. And finally, as the investigation is aware, Ella Stremberg lived in an entirely different district, a long way from Parrot Street. That in itself is not evidence against you, of course, but it does arouse additional suspicions. I am obliged to detain you from this moment until a number of circumstances have been clarified… Please read the report of the interrogation and sign it.”

Not saying a word, Eino Saari approached the desk and signed each page of the report without even reading it. The pencil was trembling in his hand, his narrow jaw had dropped, and it was trembling too. Afterward he walked back to the stool, shuffling his feet, sat down limply, and said through gritted teeth, “I wish to emphasize once again, Mr. Investigator, that in providing my testimony…” His voice broke off and he gulped again. “In providing my testimony, I was aware that I was acting against my own interests… I could have made something up, I could have lied… I could easily not have become involved in the search at all—nobody knew that I had left to see Ella home.”

“This declaration of yours,” Andrei said in an indifferent voice, “is already included in the report. If you’re not guilty of anything, you are in no danger. You will now be shown to a detention cell. Take this sheet of paper and pencil. You can render assistance to the investigation, and yourself, by writing down, in as much detail as possible, who spoke to you about the Red Building, when they did so, and under what circumstances. Before or after Ella Stremberg’s disappearance, it doesn’t matter. In the greatest possible detail: who—the name and address; when—the precise date and time of day; under what circumstances—where, for what reason, for what purpose, in what tone. Do you understand me?”

Eino Saari nodded and said a soundless yes.

Looking intently into his eyes, Andrei went on. “I’m certain that you learned all the details about the Red Building somewhere else. Quite possibly you yourself have never even seen it. And I earnestly recommend that you remember who provided you with these details—who, when, under what circumstances. And for what purpose.”

He rang the bell for the duty guard, and the saxophonist was led away. Andrei rubbed his hands together, punched holes in the report of interrogation, added it to the case file, asked for hot tea, and called the next witness. He was feeling pleased with himself. Imagination and a knowledge of elementary geometry could come in useful after all. The mendacious Eino Saari had been exposed in keeping with all the laws of science.

The next witness, Matilda Husáková (sixty-two years of age, knitting work from home, a widow), was, at least in principle, a far simpler case. She was a powerfully built old woman with a small head that was covered with completely gray hair, ruddy cheeks, and cunning eyes. She didn’t look in the least bit sleepy or frightened; on the contrary, she seemed to be quite pleased with this adventure. She had turned up at the Prosecutor’s Office with her basket, balls of different-colored wool, and a selection of needles, and in the office she immediately perched on the stool, put on her eyeglasses, and started working away with her needles.

“It has come to the attention of the investigation, Pani Husáková, that some time ago, speaking among friends, you told the story of what had happened to a certain František, who supposedly entered the so-called Red Building, had various adventures there, and only escaped with some difficulty. Is that true?”

The aged Matilda laughed, deftly tugged out one needle and set in another, and answered without looking up from her knitting: “It is, that happened. I told people that story, and more than once, only I’d like to know how the investigation came to find out about it… I don’t believe I have any acquaintances among the judiciary.”

“I am obliged to inform you,” Andrei said in a confidential tone, “that at the present time an investigation is being conducted concerning the so-called Red Building, and we are extremely interested in contacting at least one person who has been inside this building…”

Matilda Husáková wasn’t listening to him. She put her knitting down on her knees and looked thoughtfully at the wall. “Who could have informed them?” she said. “Everyone at Liza’s place is reliable, unless Carmen let it slip somewhere afterward… that old blabbermouth… At Frieda’s place?” She shook her head. “No, it couldn’t be at Frieda’s place. There’s that individual who visits Liuba… a repulsive kind of old man, with really shifty eyes, and always letting Liuba buy his drinks… Now that’s something I never expected! And now it seems I’m supposed to figure out who it was and whose place it was at… Under the Germans we kept our lips buttoned up tight. After ’48 it was keep shtum again and keep an eye out. We only opened our mouths just a little bit in our golden spring—then bang, the Russians arrived in their tanks, shut your mouth again, mind your tongue… So I came here and it’s the same picture all over again—”

“Pardon me, Pani Husáková,” Andrei interrupted her. “But in my opinion you’re taking a perverse view of the situation. After all, as far as I understand, you haven’t committed any crime. We regard you only as a witness, someone who can help, who—”

“Eh, sweetheart! What kind of helpers are there in this business? The police is the police.”

“No, not at all!” said Andrei, pressing one hand to his heart for greater conviction. “We’re looking for a gang of criminals. They abduct people and all the indications are that they kill them. Someone who has been in their clutches could render invaluable service to the investigation!”

“Are you telling me, sweetheart…” said the old woman, “…are you telling me that you believe in this Red Building?”

“Why, don’t you believe in it?” asked Andrei, rather taken aback.

Before the old woman could even reply, the door of the office opened slightly, a hubbub of agitated voices burst in from the corridor, and a squat individual with a thick head of black hair appeared in the crack, shouting back into the corridor, “Yes, it’s urgent! I have to see him urgently!” Andrei frowned, but then the figure was dragged back out into the corridor and the door slammed shut.

“I’m sorry we were interrupted,” said Andrei. “I think you wanted to tell me that you yourself don’t believe in the Red Building?”

Still working away with her needles, aged Matilda shrugged one shoulder. “Well, what grown-up person could believe in that? This house, you see, it runs around from one place to another, inside it all the doors have teeth, you go up the stairs and you end up in the basement… Of course, anything can happen in these parts, the Experiment is the Experiment, but this is really over the top, after all… No, I don’t believe in it. Who do you take me for, to go believing in cock-and-bull stories like that? Of course, every city has buildings that swallow people up, and ours probably has some of its own too. But it’s hardly likely that those houses go running around from one place to another… and as I understand it, the stairs in them are perfectly normal.”

“I beg your pardon, Pani Husáková,” said Andrei. “But then why do you tell everyone these cock-and-bull stories?”

“Why not tell them, if people listen? People are bored with things, especially old folks like us.”

“So did you just make it up yourself?”

Aged Matilda opened her mouth to answer, but at that moment Andrei’s phone started trilling desperately right in his ear. Andrei cursed and grabbed the receiver. “Andrei. Sweetie pie…” Selma’s very drunk voice said in the earpiece. “I’ve locked. Them. All out. Locked. Them out. Why aren’t you coming?”

“Sorry,” said Andrei, chewing on his lip and squinting at the old woman. “I’m really busy right now, I’ll call you—”

“But that’s not what I want!” Selma declared. “I love you, I’m waiting for you. I’m all drunk and all naked, and waiting for you, I’m cold…”

“Selma,” Andrei said, speaking right into the receiver, lowering his voice. “Quit acting like a fool. I’m very busy.”

“You won’t find another girl like me anyway, not in this shshsh-… shithouse. I’ve curled right up tight in a ball… ab-solutely-ab-solutely… naked…”

“I’ll come in half an hour,” Andrei said hastily.

“You lit-tle fool! In ha-… half an hour I’ll be asleep already… Whoever takes half an hour?”

“OK then, Selma, see you in a while,” said Andrei, cursing the day and the hour when he gave this dissipated female his office phone number.

“Well, you just go to hell!” Selma suddenly yelled, and hung up. She probably slammed the receiver down so hard that she smashed the phone into pieces. Gritting his teeth in fury, Andrei carefully put down his own receiver and sat there for a few seconds, not even daring to look up as his thoughts scattered in confusion. Then he cleared his throat.

“Well then,” he said. “Aha… So you told the stories just for the sake of it, out of boredom…” He finally recalled his last question. “So should I take you to mean by that, that you made up the entire story about František yourself?”

The old woman opened her mouth again to answer, but once again nothing came of it. The door swung open: the duty officer appeared in the doorway, saluted smartly, and reported, “I beg your pardon, Mr. Investigator! The witness Petrov is demanding that you question him immediately, because he has something to tell.”

Andrei’s eyes misted over darkly… He slammed both fists down on the desk and yelled so loud it set his own ears ringing: “Damn you, duty guard! Don’t you know the regulations? What do you mean by butting in here with your Petrov? Where do you think you are, in the bathroom at home? About turn, quick march!”

The duty guard disappeared in a flash. Andrei, feeling his lips trembling, poured himself some water from his carafe with trembling hands and drank it. His throat was raw after that wild bellow. He glanced sullenly at the old woman. Aged Matilda was still knitting away as if nothing at all had happened.

“I beg your pardon,” he mumbled.

“Never mind, young man,” Matilda reassured him. “I’m not offended by you. So, you asked if maybe I made it all up myself. No, sweetheart, I didn’t. How could I possibly think up something like that? Of all things—stairs that you walk up but end up going down… I could never imagine anything like that, not even in a dream. I told it the way I was told it.”

“And who exactly told it to you?”

Still carrying on with her knitting, the old woman shook her head. “Now that I can’t recall. A woman was telling people about it in a line somewhere. Supposedly this František was the son-in-law of some woman she knew. She was lying too, of course. Standing in line you can sometimes hear things they’ll never print in any newspapers.”

“And when was this, more or less?” Andrei asked, gradually recovering his composure and already annoyed with himself for charging head-on at things like a bull at a gate.

“About two months ago, probably… maybe three.”

Right, I’ve screwed up the interrogation, Andrei thought bitterly. Damn it, I’ve screwed up the interrogation because of that slut and that jackass guard. No, I won’t let that go—I’ll give that bonehead a real roasting. I’ll make him dance. He’ll be chasing lunatics through that chilly morning air… Right, OK, but now what do I do with the old woman? The old woman’s clammed up, hasn’t she, doesn’t want to name any names. “But are you sure, Pani Husáková, that you don’t remember that woman’s name?”

“I don’t, sweetheart, I don’t remember it at all,” aged Matilda responded cheerfully, working away deftly with her glittering needles.

“But perhaps your friends remember?”

The needles’ movement slowed a little.

“After all, you did tell them the name, right?” Andrei went on. “So it’s quite possible, isn’t it, that their memories might be slightly better?”

Matilda shrugged one shoulder again and said nothing. Andrei leaned back in his chair.

“Well, this is the situation in which you and I find ourselves, Pani Husáková. You have either forgotten the name of that woman or you simply don’t want to tell it to us. But your women friends do remember it. That means we’ll have to detain you here for a little while so that you can’t warn your friends, and we’ll be obliged to keep you here until either you or one of your friends remembers who you heard this story from.”

“That’s up to you,” Pani Husáková said meekly.

“That’s all well and good,” said Andrei. “But while you’re trying to remember and we’re wasting time on your friends, people will carry on disappearing, the bad guys will be chortling and rubbing their hands in glee, and all this will happen because of your strange prejudice against the investigative agencies.”

Aged Matilda didn’t answer. She just pursed her wrinkled lips stubbornly.

“You must understand what an absurd situation we have here,” Andrei continued, trying to hammer home the point. “Here we are, kept busy day and night by all sorts of slimeballs, lowlifes, and scum, and then an honest person comes in and absolutely refuses to help us. What are we supposed to make of that? It’s totally bizarre! And this childish trick of yours is pointless in any case. If you won’t remember, your friends will, and we’ll find out that woman’s name anyway, we’ll get to František, and he’ll help us take out the entire nest of villains. As long as the thugs don’t take him out first, as a dangerous witness… And if they do kill him, you’ll be the guilty one, Pani Husáková! Not in the eyes of the court, of course, not in the eyes of the law, but from the viewpoint of conscience, the viewpoint of humanity!”

Having invested this brief speech with the entire force of his conviction, Andrei languidly lit up a cigarette and began waiting, casting inconspicuous glances at the face of the clock. He set himself exactly three minutes to wait, and then, if the absurd old woman still didn’t cough up, he would send the old crone off to a cell, even though that would be completely illegal. But he had to push this damned case along somehow, didn’t he? How much time could he waste on every old woman? A night in a cell sometimes had a positively magical effect on people… And if there were any problems about him exceeding his authority… there wouldn’t be any, she wouldn’t complain, it didn’t look like she would… but if problems did come up anyway, the solicitor general was taking a personal interest in this case, wasn’t he, and it was a reasonable assumption that he wouldn’t hang Andrei out to dry. Well, let them hit me with a reprimand. I don’t work just to earn their gratitude, do I? Let them. Just as long as I can push this damned case on even a little bit… just a tiny little bit…

He smoked, politely wafting aside the clouds of smoke, the second hand ran cheerfully around the face of the clock, and Pani Husáková remained silent, merely clacking away quietly with her needles.

“Right,” said Andrei when four minutes had elapsed. He crushed his cigarette butt into the ashtray with a determined gesture. “I am obliged to detain you. For obstructing the course of the investigation. It’s entirely up to you, Pani Husáková, but to my mind this is some kind of puerile nonsense… Here, sign the record of interrogation and you’ll be escorted to a cell.”

After aged Matilda had been led away (she wished him goodnight as they parted), Andrei remembered that they still hadn’t brought him any hot tea. He stuck his head out into the corridor, reminded the duty guard of his obligations in harsh terms and at considerable length, and ordered him to bring in the witness Petrov.

The witness Petrov was so stocky that he was almost square, with hair as black as a crow—he looked like the classic gangster, a twenty-four-karat mafioso. He sat down firmly on the stool without saying a word and started watching sullenly as Andrei sipped his tea.

“What is it then, Petrov?” Andrei said to him good-naturedly. “You come bursting in here, creating havoc, preventing me from working, and now you don’t say anything…”

“What’s the point of talking to you spongers?” Petrov said spitefully. “You should have moved your ass sooner, it’s too late now.”

“And what’s happened that’s such an emergency?” Andrei inquired, turning a deaf ear to the “spongers” and all the rest.

“What’s happened is that while you were blabbing in here, sticking to your shitty regulations, I saw the Building!”

Andrei carefully put his spoon in his glass. “What building?” he asked.

“You can’t possibly be serious!” said Petrov, instantly flying into a rage. “Are you joking around with me here? What building… the Red one. That Building. The bastard’s standing right there on Main Street, and people are walking into it, and here you are sipping on your tea… tormenting some silly old women—”

“Hang on now, hang on,” said Andrei, taking a map of the City out of the file. “Where did you see it? When?”

“It was just now, when they were driving me here… I tell the idiot, stop!—and he steps on the gas… I tell the duty guard here, get a police unit there, quick—and he dithers like a fart in a trance.”

“Where did you see it? At what spot?”

“You know the synagogue?”

“Yes,” said Andrei, finding the synagogue on the map.

“Well then, it’s between the synagogue and the movie theater—there’s this dingy dump down there.”

On the map there was a small square with a fountain and a children’s playground marked between the synagogue and the New Illusion movie theater. Andrei chewed on the end of his pencil. “When was it you saw it?” he asked.

“It was twelve twenty,” Petrov said morosely. “And now it’s probably almost one already. Don’t expect it to wait for you… Sometimes I’ve run there in fifteen or twenty minutes and it was gone already, so this time…” He gestured hopelessly.

Andrei picked up the phone and gave an order. “A motorcycle with a sidecar and one police officer. Immediately.”

2

The motorcycle roared along Main Street, bouncing over the battered asphalt surface. Andrei hunched over, hiding his face behind the windscreen of the sidecar, but he was still chilled to the bone. He ought to have brought his uniform greatcoat.

Every now and then loonies who were completely blue from the cold leaped off the sidewalk, skipping and weaving toward the motorcycle and yelling something that was drowned out by the noise of the motor—then the police motorcyclist braked, swearing through his teeth as he dodged away from the outstretched, clutching hands, broke through the lines of striped robes, and immediately revved up the motorbike again so hard that Andrei was flung backward.

Apart from the loonies, there wasn’t anyone else in the street. Only once did they come across a patrol car slowly cruising along with an orange light blinking on its roof, and they saw a baboon running across the square in front of City Hall. The baboon was tearing along at full speed, and unshaven men in striped pajamas were chasing after it with shrill giggles and piercing howls. Turning his head, Andrei saw them finally overtake the baboon, knock it to the ground, stretch out its front and back legs in different directions, and start swinging it regularly to and fro to the strains of some ghoulish, otherworldly song.

Infrequent streetlamps came hurtling toward them, between dark blocks of neighborhoods without a single light, where life seemed to have died out, and then up ahead the hazy, yellowish bulk of the synagogue appeared, and Andrei saw the Building.

It was standing there firmly and confidently, as if it had always occupied that space between the wall of the synagogue, daubed all over with swastikas, and the trashy movie theater, which had been fined the previous week for showing pornographic films at night—standing in the very same spot where yesterday scraggy little trees were growing, an anemic little fountain was splashing in a preposterously large, drab concrete basin, and a motley assortment of little kids were squealing as they dangled from rope swings.

It really was red, built of brick, with four stories, the windows of the first floor were closed off with shutters, and several windows on the second and third floors glowed yellow and pink, but the roof was covered with galvanized tin, and a strange antenna with several crosspieces had been installed beside the one and only chimney. There really was a porch with four stone steps leading up to the door, and a gleaming brass door handle, and the longer Andrei looked at this building, the more distinctly he heard a strange melody, solemn and gloomy, ringing in his ears, and he recalled in passing that many of the witnesses had testified that there was music playing in the Building…

Andrei adjusted the visor of his uniform cap so that it didn’t obstruct his view and glanced at the police motorcyclist. The fat, surly man was sitting there huddled up, with his head pulled down into his raised collar, and smoking drowsily, holding the cigarette in his teeth.

“Do you see it?” Andrei asked in a low voice.

The fat man awkwardly swung his head around and turned down his collar. “Eh?”

“The building. I asked if you can see it,” Andrei said, starting to get annoyed.

“I’m not blind,” the policeman replied morosely.

“And have you seen it here before?”

“No,” said the policeman. “Not here. But I’ve seen it in other places. What of it? You see weirder things than that around here at night.”

The music was roaring in Andrei’s ears with such tragic power that he couldn’t really hear the policeman very well. There was some kind of immense funeral taking place, with thousands and thousands of people weeping as they saw off their near ones and dear ones, and the roaring of the music gave them no chance to compose themselves, calm down, and disconnect themselves from it all…

“Wait for me here,” Andrei told the policeman, but the policeman didn’t answer, which wasn’t really very surprising, since he was already on the far side of the street, and Andrei was standing on the stone porch, facing the oak door with the brass handle.

Then Andrei looked to the right along Main Street, into the murky haze, and to the left along Main Street, into the murky haze, and said good-bye to all of this, just in case, and set his gloved hand on the ornately patterned, gleaming brass.

Behind the door was a small, quiet entrance hall, illuminated by a dim, yellowish light, with bunches of greatcoats, overcoats, and raincoats dangling from a coat stand with splayed branches, like a palm tree. Underfoot was a worn carpet with pale, indistinct patterns, and straight ahead there was a broad marble staircase with a soft, red runner, squeezed tight against the steps by well-polished metal rods. There were also pictures of some kind on the walls, and something else behind an oak barrier on the right, and someone nearby, who politely took Andrei’s portfolio and whispered, “Upstairs, please…” Andrei couldn’t make out any of this very clearly, because the visor of his cap obstructed his view very badly by sliding down right over his eyes, so that he could only see what was right under his feet. Halfway up the stairs it occurred to him that he ought to have checked the damned cap at the cloakroom with that gold-braid-festooned character who had sideburns right down to his waist, but it was too late now, and everything here was arranged so that you had to do things at the right time or not do them at all, and it was impossible to take back a single move or a single action that he had made. And with a sigh of relief he strode up the final step and took off the cap.

The moment he appeared in the doorway, everyone got to their feet, but he didn’t look at any of them. He saw only his partner, a short, elderly man in a prewar-style uniform and gleaming box-calf-leather boots, who reminded him painfully of someone and at the same time was entirely unfamiliar.

Everyone stood motionless along the walls, the white marble walls decorated in gold and purple and draped with bright, multicolored banners… no, not multicolored—everything was red and gold, only red and gold, and huge panels of purple and gold fabric hung down from the infinitely distant ceiling, like the materialized ribbons of some incredible northern lights. They all stood along the walls with their tall, semicircular niches, and hiding in the twilight of the niches were haughtily modest busts of marble, plaster, bronze, gold, malachite, stainless steel… those niches breathed out the chill of the grave, everyone was freezing, everyone was furtively rubbing their hands together and huddling up against the cold, but they all stood at attention, looking straight ahead, and only the elderly man in the semimilitary uniform, Andrei’s partner, Andrei’s adversary, strode about slowly with silent steps in the empty space at the center of the hall, with his massive, graying head tilted slightly forward and his hands held behind his back, with the left hand clutching the wrist of the right. And when Andrei walked in, and when everyone got up and had already been standing for some time, and when the faint sigh, as if of relief, had already faded away under the vaults of the hall, after tangling itself in the purple and the gold, this man continued to stride about, and then suddenly, in midstride, he stopped and looked at Andrei very intently, without smiling, and Andrei saw that the hair on the large cranium was sparse and gray, the forehead was low, the magnificent mustache was really sparse, but neatly trimmed, and the indifferent face was yellowish, with bumpy skin, as if it had been dug over.

There was no need for introductions, and there was no need for speeches of greeting. They sat down at a small encrusted table, and Andrei turned out to have the black pieces, while his elderly partner had the white ones, not actually white but yellowish, and the man with the dug-over skin reached out a small, hairless hand, picked up a pawn between his finger and thumb, and made the first move. To meet it Andrei immediately moved out his own pawn—the quiet, reliable Wang, who had always wanted only one thing, to be left in peace, and here he would be granted a certain peace, dubious and relative though it was, here, in the very center of events, which would unfold, of course, which were inevitable, and Wang would have a tough time of it, but here was the precise spot where Andrei could bolster him, cover him, protect him—for a long time and, if he so wished, an infinitely long time.

The two pawns stood facing each other, forehead to forehead—they could touch each other, they could exchange meaningless words, they could simply be quietly proud of themselves, proud of the fact that they, simple pawns, had defined the main axis around which the entire game would now unfold. But they couldn’t do anything to each other, they were neutral toward each other, they were in different combat dimensions—small, yellow, shapeless Wang with his head pulled down into his shoulders in customary fashion, and a thickset little individual with crooked cavalryman’s legs, wearing a Caucasian felt cloak and a tall astrakhan hat, with a prodigiously opulent mustache, high cheekbones, and slightly slanting eyes.

Equilibrium had been restored on the board again, and this equilibrium ought to last for quite a long time, because Andrei knew that his partner was a genius of caution, who always considered men to be the most valuable thing of all, which meant that for the immediate future nothing could threaten Wang, and Andrei sought out Wang in the ranks along the walls and smiled ever so slightly at him, but immediately turned his eyes away, because they had caught Donald’s intent, sad gaze.

His partner thought, slowly and deliberately tapping the cardboard tube of his long papirosa on the mother-of-pearl-encrusted surface of the small table, and Andrei squinted once again at the frozen ranks, but this time he was looking not at his own men but at the men whom his adversary had at his disposal. There were almost no faces that he knew: some surprisingly cultured-looking men in civilian clothes, with beards and pince-nez, wearing old-fashioned neckties and vests; some military men in unfamiliar uniforms, with numerous diamonds on their collar tabs, with medals bolted onto mounts covered with shot-silk ribbons… Where did he get men like that from? thought Andrei, feeling rather surprised, and looked again at the white pawn that had been moved out. This pawn, at least, was very familiar to him—a man of once-legendary fame who, so the adults whispered, had failed to justify the hopes placed in him and had now, so to speak, left the stage. The man clearly knew that himself but was not particularly mournful—he stood there with his crooked legs firmly planted on the parquet floor, twirling the wings of his gigantic mustache, peering around under his brows, and giving off an acrid smell of vodka and horse sweat.

Andrei’s partner raised his hand above the board and moved a second pawn. Andrei closed his eyes. He hadn’t been expecting this at all. How could it be—immediately, like this? Who was it? A handsome, pale face, inspired, yet at the same time rendered repulsive by a strange hauteur, a bluish pince-nez, an elegant, curly beard, a shock of black hair above a light forehead—Andrei had never seen this man before and couldn’t say who he was, but he was evidently someone of importance, because he was talking peremptorily and briskly with the crooked little man in the felt cloak, who only twitched his mustache, twitched his jaw muscles, and kept turning his slanting eyes off to the side, like some huge wildcat facing a confident trainer.

But Andrei had no interest in their relationship—Wang’s fate was in the balance, the fate of little Wang, who had suffered torment all his life, who had his head pulled right down into his shoulders now, prepared already for the very worst, hopelessly submissive in his preparedness, and now there were only three possibilities: Wang is taken, Wang takes, or Andrei leaves everything just as it is, suspending the lives of these two in uncertainty—in the exalted language of strategy that would be called Queen’s Gambit Declined—and Andrei was familiar with that continuation, and he knew it was recommended in the textbooks, he knew that it was elementary, but he couldn’t bear the idea of Wang hanging by a thread for hour after hour, breaking out in a cold sweat in fear of imminent death, and the pressure on him would keep building up and up, until finally the monstrous tension at this point became absolutely intolerable, the gigantic, bloody abscess burst, and not a trace would be left of Wang.

I couldn’t bear that, thought Andrei. And after all, I don’t know this man in the pince-nez at all—why should I feel pity for him, if even my brilliant partner thought for no more than a few minutes before deciding to make this sacrifice… And Andrei removed the white pawn from the board and set his own, black pawn in its place, and in that moment he saw the wildcat in the felt cloak suddenly, for the first time in its life, glance directly into its tamer’s eyes and bare its yellow, smoke-stained fangs in a carnivorous grin. And immediately a man with dusky, olive-dark skin, not Russian or even European looking, slipped through between the ranks along the walls to the blue pince-nez and swung an immense rusty blade, and the blue pince-nez flashed aside like a streak of blue lightning, and the man with the pale face of a great tribune and failed tyrant gasped feebly, his legs buckled, and his small, well-proportioned body tumbled down the ancient, chipped steps that were heated to incandescence by the tropical sun, becoming soiled with white dust and bright red, sticky blood… Andrei caught his breath, swallowed the lump that was obstructing his throat, and looked at the board again.

Two white pawns were already standing there side by side; the center had been firmly seized by the Brilliant Strategist, and in addition, from out of the depths the gaping pupil of impending doom was aimed directly at Wang’s chest—there could be no lengthy deliberations here, this wasn’t a matter of just Wang; the slightest procrastination and the white bishop would break through into open space with room to maneuver—he had been dreaming for a long time of breaking out into open space, this tall, statuesque, handsome man, a great commander, decorated with constellations of medals, badges, diamonds, and stripes, this proud Adonis with eyes of ice and the plump lips of a youth, the pride of a young army, the pride of a young country, the successful rival of other, equally haughty and arrogant individuals, bedecked with the medals, badges, diamonds, and stripes of the Western science of warfare. What was Wang to him? He had hacked down dozens of Wangs with his own hand; at a single word from him thousands of such Wangs—dirty, lice-ridden, and hungry, inspired with blind faith in him—had marched, steady and erect, against tanks and machine guns, and those who had miraculously survived, now well-groomed and paunchy, were willing to march even now, willing to do everything all over again…

No, Andrei must not let this man have either Wang or the center. And he quickly advanced a pawn that was waiting there to be used, without looking to see who it was and thinking of only one thing: covering Wang, bolstering him, defending him, if only from the rear, showing the great tank commander that Wang was, of course, in his power, but he could not move beyond Wang. And the great tank commander realized this, and the fresh glint in his eyes was drowsily concealed once again by those handsome, heavy eyelids, but evidently he had forgotten, exactly as Andrei had forgotten and now suddenly realized with some appalling inner flash of insight, that it was not they, the pawns and bishops, who decided everything here—and not even the castles, and not even the queens. And immediately the small, hairless hand slowly rose over the board, and Andrei, already realizing what was about to happen, croaked hoarsely, “J’adoube.” And in accordance with the noble code of the game, and so hastily that his fingers actually cramped, he swapped Wang and the piece that was supporting him. Fortune favored him with a pale smile: Wang was now supporting, and Wang’s place had been taken by Valka Soifertis, with whom Andrei had shared a school desk for six years, and who had already died anyway in ’49, during an operation on a stomach ulcer.

His brilliant partner’s eyebrows slowly rose up and the brownish, speckled eyes narrowed in mocking surprise. Of course he found this move ludicrous and incomprehensible; it was nonsensical from both the tactical and, especially, the strategic point of view. Continuing the movement of his small, weak hand, he halted it above the bishop, paused for a few more seconds, pondering, and then his fingers closed confidently on the lacquered head of the piece, and the bishop lunged forward and knocked gently against the black pawn, pushing it aside and establishing itself in its place. The Brilliant Strategist then slowly carried the taken pawn off the board, and a small group of intent, businesslike people in white coats had already surrounded the gurney on which Valka Soifertis was lying—Andrei’s eyes caught one last glimpse of the dark features, corroded by illness, and the gurney disappeared through the doors of the operating theater…

Glancing at the great tank commander, Andrei saw in his gray, transparent eyes the same terror and oppressive perplexity that he felt himself. The tank commander was blinking rapidly, watching the Brilliant Strategist without understanding a thing. He was accustomed to thinking in terms of the movements through space of immense masses of machines and men; in his naivety and simplemindedness, he was accustomed to believing that everything would always be decided by his armor-plated armadas, rolling on confidently through foreign lands, and by the multi-engined airborne fortresses, stuffed with bombs and parachutists, sailing through the skies above foreign lands; he had done everything possible to make sure that this clear dream could be realized at any moment necessary… Of course, he had sometimes indulged in certain doubts as to whether the Brilliant Strategist was really so very brilliant and would be able to unequivocally determine that moment and the necessary directions of the armor-plated blows, but even so, it was impossible for him to understand how it was possible to sacrifice precisely him, so talented, so assiduous, and so unique, how it was possible to sacrifice everything that had been created by such immense labor and effort…

Andrei quickly removed him from the board, away with him, and set Wang in his place. Men in blue peaked caps squeezed through the ranks, grabbed the great tank commander crudely by the shoulders and arms, took away his weapon, punched the handsome, thoroughbred face with a crunch, and dragged him off to a prison cell, and the Brilliant Strategist leaned bank in his chair, narrowed his eyes in satisfaction, folded his hands together on his stomach, and started twiddling his thumbs. He was content. He had given a bishop for a pawn and was very content. And then Andrei suddenly realized that in the Strategist’s eyes everything looked entirely different; he had deftly and unexpectedly removed the bishop that had been hindering him and received a pawn into the bargain—that was how things looked in reality…

The Great Strategist was more than a strategist. A strategist always circles around within the limits of his strategy. The Great Strategist had abandoned all limits. Strategy was merely an insignificant element of his game; it was as incidental for him as it was for Andrei—a casual kind of move made on a whim. The Great Strategist had become great precisely because he had realized (or perhaps he had known since the day he was born) that it is not the one who knows how to play according to all the rules who wins; the one who wins is the one who is able to abandon all the rules at any moment when it is necessary, to impose his own rules, unknown to his opponent, on the game and, when necessary, abandon them too. Whoever said that one’s own pieces are less dangerous than the pieces of one’s opponent? Rubbish, one’s own pieces are far more dangerous than the pieces of one’s opponent! Whoever said that the king has to be protected and moved out of danger of check? Rubbish, there are no kings that cannot be replaced if necessary by some knight or even pawn. Whoever said that a pawn, after breaking through to the final row of squares, is obliged to become another piece? Nonsense, sometimes it can be far more useful to leave it as a pawn—let it stand on the edge of the abyss as an example to the other pawns…

The damned cap kept sliding farther and farther down over Andrei’s eyes, making it harder and harder for him to follow what was going on around him. However, he could hear that the dignified silence no longer existed in the hall: he heard the clattering of tableware, a babble of many voices, the sounds of an orchestra tuning up. He caught a whiff of kitchen fumes. Someone declared in a loud, squeaky voice that rang through the entire house, “Georges! I’m deviwishwy hungwy. Teww them to bwing me a gwass of cuwaçao and some pine-app-uw, quickwy.”

“I beg your pardon,” someone said with austere politeness, right in Andrei’s ear, squeezing in between Andrei and the board—he caught a glimpse of black coattails and polished lacquer shoes, and a hand raised high in the air, bearing a loaded tray, drifted over his head. And a white hand also placed a glass of champagne by Andrei’s elbow.

The Brilliant Strategist had finally tapped and kneaded his papirosa into a state fit for smoking. He lit up and hazy, bluish smoke drifted out of his hairy nostrils, getting tangled in his magnificent but rather sparse mustache.

And meanwhile the game continued. Andrei defended convulsively, retreated, maneuvered, and so far he had managed to act so that only people who were already dead anyway were lost. There they had carried away Donald with a bullet through his heart, and beside the wineglass on the table they had placed his pistol and suicide note: “Rejoice not in arriving, in departing do not grieve. Give the pistol to Voronin. It will come in handy sometime.” And there his brother and father had already carried the body of his grandmother, Evgenia Romanovna, sewn into old sheets, down the icebound stairway and added it to the stack of corpses… There now they had buried his father in a mass grave somewhere in the Piskariovskoye Cemetery, and the morose driver, sheltering his unshaven face from the biting wind, had driven his steamroller to and fro over the frozen corpses, tamping them down so that more could be fitted into a single grave… But the Great Strategist generously, cheerfully, and sardonically disposed of friends and strangers alike, and all his well-groomed men with little beards and medals shot themselves in the temple, threw themselves out windows, died as a result of hideous tortures, trampled over each other’s dead bodies to become queens and still remained pawns.

And Andrei carried on agonizingly trying to understand what sort of game this was that he was playing, what its purpose was, what the rules were, and why all this was happening, and he was transfixed to the depths of his soul by the question: How had he become the adversary of the Great Strategist—he, a faithful soldier in the Strategist’s army, prepared at any moment to die for him, prepared to kill for him, not knowing any other goals except his goals, not believing in any means except the means indicated by him, not distinguishing the plans of the Great Strategist from the plans of the Universe? He greedily gulped down the champagne, without tasting anything at all, and then suddenly he was overwhelmed by a blinding flash of insight. But of course, he wasn’t an adversary of the Great Strategist at all. He was his ally, his faithful helper. That was it—the main rule of this game. It was played not by adversaries but by partners, allies; the game had only one set of goalposts, nobody lost, everybody won… apart, of course, from those who would not survive until the victory.

Someone touched his legs and spoke under the table. “Would you be so kind as to move your foot?” Andrei looked down at his feet. There was a dark, glistening puddle down there, and a bald dwarf on his hands and knees was fidgeting beside it, holding a dried-out rag covered in dark blotches. Andrei suddenly felt nauseous and started looking at the board again. He had already sacrificed all the dead; now he only had the living left. The Great Strategist at the other side of the table curiously watched what he was doing and even seemed to be nodding in approval, baring his small, sparse teeth in a polite smile, and at that point Andrei felt that he couldn’t go on. It was a great game, the most noble of all games, a game in the name of the greatest of all goals that humankind had ever set itself, but Andrei couldn’t carry on playing it any longer.

“I’ll step outside…” he said hoarsely. “Just for a moment.”

It came out so quietly that he hardly even heard himself, but everybody immediately looked at him. Silence fell in the hall again, and somehow the visor of his cap didn’t bother him anymore, and now he could see them clearly, eye to eye, all of his own people, all of those who were still alive.

Massive Uncle Yura with his faded army tunic gaping wide open and his roll-up cigarette crackling, looked at Andrei morosely; Selma smiled drunkenly, sprawling in an armchair with her legs hoicked up so high that he could see her little bottom in its pink, lacy panties; Kensi looked at him sagely and seriously, and standing beside him was Volodka Dmitriev, tousle-headed and as savagely unshaven as ever; and ensconced on the high, old chair that Seva Barabanov had only just abandoned to set off on his latest and final work assignment was wizen-faced Borka Chistyakov, with his aristocratic aquiline nose, looking as if he were about to ask, “Oh really, why are you bellowing like a sick elephant?”—they were all here, all his nearest and all his dearest, and they were all looking at him, and all differently, and at the same time their gazes all had something in common too, some common attitude toward him. Sympathy? Trust? Pity? No, it wasn’t that, and before he managed to understand what exactly it was, he suddenly spotted among these old, familiar faces someone he didn’t know at all, some Oriental with a yellowish face and slanting eyes—no, not Wang, but some subtle, even elegant Oriental, and he also got the feeling that someone very small was hiding behind this stranger, someone very, very small, dirty and ragged, probably a stray, homeless child…

He got up abruptly, moved the chair back with a scraping sound, and turned away from them all, and after gesturing indefinitely in the direction and for the attention of the Great Strategist, he walked out of the hall, squeezing through between shoulders and stomachs, pushing some people aside, and as if to console him, someone mumbled somewhere close by, “Well, the rules allow it—let him take a moment to think and reflect on things… We just have to stop the clock…”

Absolutely exhausted and soaked in sweat, he managed to reach the landing of the stairway and sat down directly on the carpet, not far from a torridly blazing fireplace. His cap had slipped down over his eyes again, so he didn’t even try to make out what sort of fireplace this was and what sort of people were sitting around the fireplace; he only sensed the soft, dry heat on his wet body that felt as if it had been badly beaten, and saw the half-dried but still sticky blotches on his shoes, and through the cozy crackling of the blazing logs he heard someone telling a story with measured elegance, listening closely to the sound of his own voice.

“…Just imagine—a handsome fellow, shoulders like a barn door, a holder of all three degrees of the Order of Glory—and let me tell you, they didn’t award a full set of those orders to just anybody, they were even rarer than Heroes of the Soviet Union. Well, a fine comrade, an excellent student, and all the rest of it. And yet, let me tell you, he had a certain strange quirk. He would turn up for a party at the pad of some pampered son of a general or marshal, but as soon as everyone paired up and started wandering off, it was out into the hallway, set his cap at a jaunty angle, and bye-bye. At first they thought he must have some abiding love of his own. But no—every now and again the boys would meet him in public places—in Gorky Park, say, or in various different clubs—with these absolute sluts, and always with different ones! I met him like that myself once. I looked—well, what a choice! As ugly as sin, stockings flapping round skinny legs, plastered with makeup—it’s horrible to speak of it… and back then, by the way, there wasn’t any makeup like there is nowadays—the girls used to line their eyebrows with boot blacking, as near as, dammit… Anyway, a glaring mésalliance, as they say. But he didn’t mind. Leading her along arm in arm, spinning her some kind of line, all in due order, and she’s simply melting, she’s proud and ashamed at the same time, happy as a pig in a peach orchard… And then one day at a bachelor get-together, we cornered him: come on, out with it, what is it with these perverted tastes of yours, how can you even walk with those whores without feeling sick, when the very finest beauties are pining for you… And, let me tell you, in the academy we had a Department of Education, a privileged little spot—they only accepted girls from the most illustrious families there… Well, at first he tried to laugh it off, then he gave in and told us something quite amazing. Comrades, he said, I know that I’m blessed with all the appurtenances, so to speak: I’m handsome, with medals, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I know all this about myself, he said, and I’ve received plenty of notes about it too. But there was this thing, he said, that just happened to me. I suddenly saw the misery of our women. Right through the war they never saw a single chink of light, they were starving all the time, they slaved away doing real men’s work—poor and homely, without even the slightest idea of what it’s like to be beautiful and desired. And so, he said, I set myself the goal of giving at least a few of them an experience so bright and vivid that they would have something to remember for the rest of their lives. I meet this streetcar driver, he said, or a worker from the Hammer and Sickle factory, or a miserable little teacher, who couldn’t have counted on any particular happiness even without the war, and now that so many men have been killed, she can’t see any ships at all coming in through the waves. I spend two or three evenings with them, he said, and then I disappear. Of course, when we part, I lie, I say I’m going on a long work assignment or something else that sounds plausible, and they’re left with this bright memory… at least some kind of bright spark in their lives, he said. I don’t know, he said, how it all looks from the viewpoint of high morals, but I have the feeling that by doing this I’m fulfilling at least some tiny little part of our male duty… When he told us all this, we were dumbfounded. Later on, of course, we started arguing, but the whole thing made a quite exceptional impression on us. He disappeared soon afterward, in fact. Back then a lot of us disappeared like that: orders from army command, and in the army you don‘t ask where you’re going and what for… I never saw him again.”

Neither did I, thought Andrei. I never saw him again either. There were two letters—one to our mother, and one to me. And our mother received a notification: “Your son, Sergei Mikhailovich Voronin, died an honorable death while carrying out a combat mission from the army command.” It was in Korea. Under the pink watercolor sky of Korea, where the Great Strategist first tried his strength in a skirmish with American imperialism. He played his great game there, and Seryozha was left there, with his full set of Orders of Glory…

I don’t want it. I don’t want this game. Maybe that’s the way everything has to be; maybe nothing is possible without playing this game. Maybe. Pretty certainly. But I can’t do it… I don’t know how. And I don’t even want to learn… So all right, then, he thought bitterly, it means I’m a poor soldier. Or rather, I’m just a soldier. And no more than a soldier. That selfsame soldier who doesn’t know how to reflect on things, so he has to obey blindly. And I’m not any kind of chess partner or ally of the Great Strategist, but just a tiny little cog in his colossal machine, and my place is not at the table in his inscrutable game but beside Wang, with Uncle Yura, with Selma… I’m a little stellar astronomer of average ability, and if I had managed to prove the existence of some connection between wide double stars and Schilt’s star streams, that would have been a very, very big deal for me. But as for solving great problems and achieving great things…

And at this point he remembered that he was no longer a stellar astronomer, that he was an investigator in the Public Prosecutor’s Office, and he had achieved quite a lot: using a specially trained network of agents and distinct investigative procedures to pinpoint this mysterious Red Building and infiltrate it, exposing its sinister secrets and creating all the necessary conditions for the successful elimination of this malignant phenomenon from our life…

Lifting himself up on his hands, he slid down a step lower. If I go back to the table now, he thought, I’ll never get out of the Building. It will devour me. That’s quite clear: it has already devoured many people, we have witness testimony to that. But that’s not what’s most important. What’s important is that I have to get back to my office and untangle this ball of thread. That’s where my duty lies. That’s my responsibility, what I have do now. Everything else is a mirage…

He slid down another two steps. He had to break free of the mirage and get back to work. There was nothing accidental about all this. Everything here had been superbly thought through. It was a hideous illusion, fabricated by provocateurs in an attempt to destroy belief in the ultimate victory, to pervert the concepts of morality and duty. And it was no accident that the sordid little New Illusion movie theater was there at one side of the Building. New! There was nothing new about pornography, but that place called itself new! Who were they fooling? But what was on the other side? The synagogue…

He slid down the steps, going full tilt, and reached a door with the word EXIT on it. And after he had already taken hold of the handle, when he was still overcoming the resistance of the creaking spring, he suddenly realized what the common element was in all the eyes fixed on him up there. Reproach. They knew that he wouldn’t come back. He still hadn’t realized it himself, but they already knew for certain…

He tumbled out into the street, avidly gulped down a huge mouthful of the damp, misty air, and his heart thrilled with joy to see that everything was still the same out here: murky gloom along Main Street to the right, murky gloom along Main Street to the left, and there in front of him, just across the street, was the motorcycle with the sidecar and the police driver, soundly asleep, with his head completely submerged in his collar. The fat bastard’s dozing, Andrei thought affectionately. He’s worn out. And then a voice inside him suddenly declared loudly, “Time!” and Andrei groaned and burst into tears of desperation, only now recalling the most important, the most terrible rule of the game. The rule invented specially to deal with namby-pamby sissies from the intelligentsia like him: anyone who breaks off the game loses all his pieces.

Andrei swung back around with a howl of “Don’t!” and reached out for the brass door handle. But it was too late. The Building was already leaving, slowly backing away into the impenetrable gloom of the shadowy back alleys behind the synagogue and the New Illusion. It crept away with a palpable rustling and grating, with its windowpanes rattling and floor beams creaking. A tile fell off the roof and smashed on a stone step of the porch.

Andrei clutched the brass handle with every ounce of his strength, but it seemed to have fused with the timber of the door, and the house was moving faster and faster, and Andrei was already running, almost being dragged after it, as if it were a departing train. He jerked and tugged on the door handle, and suddenly stumbled over something and fell, his cramped and twisted fingers slipped off the smooth brass whorls, he smashed his head very painfully against something, he saw a shower of bright stars, and something crunched in his skull, but he could still see the Building backing away, extinguishing its windows as it went; he saw it swerve behind the yellow wall of the synagogue, then reappear, as if it peeping out with its last two lit-up windows, and then those windows went out too, and darkness fell.

3

He was sitting on a bench facing the idiotic concrete basin of the fountain and pressing a damp handkerchief that was already warm against a massive bump over his right eye. The bump was horrific to touch and he was in absolute agony; the ache in his head felt so bad, he was afraid his skull might be fractured; his skinned knees stung; his bruised elbow had gone numb, but there were indications that it would soon be demanding his attention. Perhaps, however, all this was really for the best. All this lent what was happening an emphatic, crude reality. There was no more Building, there was no Strategist or dark, sticky puddle under a table, there was no game of chess, there was no betrayal, there was nothing but a man who was strolling absentmindedly through the dark and had tumbled over the low concrete barrier straight into the idiotic basin, smashing his stupid head and the rest of his body against the damp concrete…

In fact, of course, Andrei realized only too well that it wasn’t all as simple as that, but it was comforting to think that it had all really been a delirious delusion, that he really had tripped and smashed his head—that really made it all quite amusing, and it was certainly convenient. What do I do now? he thought hazily. So I’ve found the Building; I’ve been inside it and seen it for myself… But what next? Don’t go trying to stuff my head—my poor, aching head—with all that bombastic garbage about rumors and myths and all the rest of that stupid propaganda. That’s just for starters. So don’t forget… Actually, that was my mistake—I think I was the one stuffing everyone else’s heads. I have to release that guy right away… what’s his name… the flute man. I wonder if that Ella of his played chess in there too? Shit, but my head is hurting like hell…

The handkerchief had gotten really warm now. Andrei got up with a grunt, hobbled across to the fountain, leaned over the edge, and held the damp rag in the ice-cold stream for a while. Someone was hammering on his lump with passionate fury—from the inside. How about that for a myth! A.k.a. a mirage… He squeezed out the handkerchief, pressed it against the painful spot again, and looked across the street. The fat policeman was still sleeping. Fat scumbag, Andrei thought rancorously. Some sentry you are. Why did I bother to bring you? Just so you could catch up on your shut-eye, was it? I could have been bumped off a hundred times here. And then, of course, after that jerk had caught up on his sleep, he would have shown up at the Public Prosecutor’s Office in the morning and reported as a matter of routine that the investigator went into the Red Building last night and never came back out again. Andrei spent some time imagining how glorious it would feel right now to fill a bucket with icy water, sneak up to the fat bastard, and pour the entire bucketful down the back of his neck. Wouldn’t that just make him freak! That was how the boys used to amuse themselves at the training camp: if someone dozed off, they tied a shoe to his private parts with the laces, then put that huge, filthy shit-crusher on his face. Still half asleep, the guy would go berserk and savagely launch the shoe into space with all his might. It was very funny.

Andrei went back to the bench and found that he had acquired a companion. A scraggy little man dressed completely in black—even his shirt was black—was sitting there with one leg crossed over the other, holding an old-fashioned bowler hat on his knees. Probably the caretaker from the synagogue. Andrei gingerly sat down beside him, cautiously probing the boundaries of the lump through the damp handkerchief.

“Well, all right,” the little man said in a clear, old voice. “But what comes next?”

“Nothing special,” said Andrei. “We’ll catch all of them. I won’t just leave things like this.”

“And then?” the old man persisted.

“I don’t know,” Andrei said after a moment’s thought. “Maybe some other abomination will turn up. The Experiment is the Experiment. It’s not for long.”

“It’s for ever and ever,” the old man remarked. “According to every religion—it’s forever.”

“Religion’s got nothing to do with this,” Andrei objected.

“You still think that, even now?” the old man asked in surprise.

“Of course. That’s what I’ve always thought.”

“All right, let’s not talk about that for now. The Experiment is the Experiment, a rope is just a piece of string—plenty of people here console themselves like that, almost everybody. Which, by the way, is something that not a single religion foresaw. But I’m talking about something else. Why have we been left with freedom of will, even here? You’d think that in the kingdom of absolute evil, in a kingdom with ABANDON HOPE… written on its gates…”

Andrei waited for a continuation, but none came, and he said, “You have a rather strange perspective on all this. This isn’t a kingdom of absolute evil. It’s more like chaos, and we’re here to put it in order. And how can we put it in order if we don’t possess free will?”

“An interesting idea,” the old man said thoughtfully. “That had never occurred to me. So you believe that we’ve been given another chance. Something like a penal battalion—to wash away the blood of our transgressions at the front line of the eternal battle between good and evil.”

“What’s the battle with evil got to do with anything?” asked Andrei, starting to get annoyed. “Evil is something deliberate and purposeful—”

“You’re a Manichean!” the old man interrupted.

“I’m a Komsomol member!” Andrei protested, getting even more annoyed and feeling a terrific upsurge of belief and certainty. “Evil is always a class phenomenon. There’s no such thing as evil in general. But everything’s all muddled up here, because this is the Experiment. We have been given chaos. And if we can’t cope with it, we’ll go back to what we had there—to class stratification and all the rest of the garbage. Either we master chaos and transform it into the new, beautiful forms of human relations that are called communism…”

The old man listened for a while in bemused silence. “Well, well,” he said eventually with immense surprise. “Who could ever have thought it, who could ever have expected it… Communist propaganda—here! It’s not even a schism, it’s…” He paused for a moment. “But then, the ideas of communism are akin to the ideas of early Christianity, aren’t they?”

“That’s a lie!” Andrei protested angrily. “An invention of the priests. Early Christianity was an ideology of resignation, the ideology of slaves. But we are rebels! We won’t leave a single stone unturned here, and then we’ll go back there, we’ll go home and rebuild everything there the same way as we’ve rebuilt it here!”

“You’re Lucifer,” the old man said with reverential horror. “The proud spirit! Have you really not resigned yourself to your lot?”

Andrei carefully turned the handkerchief cold side down and looked at the little old man suspiciously. “Lucifer? I see. And who exactly would you be, then?”

“I’m a louse,” the old man replied tersely.

“Hmm…” That was kind of hard to argue with.

“I’m an insignificant insect, no one,” the old man explained. “I was no one there, and I’m no one here too.” He paused for a moment. “You have inspired hope in me,” he declared unexpectedly. “Yes, yes, yes. You can’t even imagine… how strange, how strange… What a joy it was to listen to you! Truly, if free will has been left to us, then why does there have to be resignation and patient suffering? Yes, I regard this meeting as the most significant episode in all the time that I have been here…”

Andrei examined him with alert hostility. He was mocking him, the old coot… No, it didn’t look like it… The synagogue caretaker? The synagogue! “Pardon me for asking,” he inquired ingratiatingly, “but have you been here for long? I mean sitting here on this bench?”

“No, not very long. At first I was sitting on a stool over there in that entranceway—there’s a stool in there… But after the Building went away, I moved to the bench.”

“Aha,” said Andrei. “So you saw the Building, then?”

“Of course I did!” the old man replied with dignity. “I sat there, listening to the music and crying.”

“Crying,” Andrei repeated, agonizingly racking his brains to figure all this out. “Tell me, are you a Jew?”

The old man started. “Good Lord, no! What kind of question is that? I’m a Catholic, a faithful and—alas!—unworthy son of the Roman Catholic Church… I have nothing against Judaism, of course, but… But why did you ask about that?”

“No special reason,” Andrei said evasively. “So you don’t have anything to do with the synagogue, then?”

“Not really,” said the old man. “Apart from the fact that I often sit here in this little square and the caretaker comes here sometimes…” He giggled in embarrassment. “He and I engage in religious disputes.”

“But what about the Building?” Andrei asked, squeezing his eyes shut to fight the pain in his skull.

“The Building? Well, when the Building comes, obviously we can’t sit here. In that case we have to wait until it leaves.”

“So this isn’t the first time you’ve seen it, then?”

“Of course not. It comes almost every night… Of course, today it stayed longer than usual.”

“Hang on,” said Andrei. “And do you know what Building that is?”

“It’s hard not to recognize it,” the old man said in a quiet voice. “Before, in the other life, I saw images and descriptions of it quite often. It’s described in detail in the confessions of Saint Anthony—that’s not a canonical text, now… for us Catholics… Anyway, I’ve read it: ‘And there appeared unto me a house, living and moving, and it did make obscene movements, and within I saw through the windows people who walked through its rooms, slept, and took food…’ I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the quotation, but it’s very close to the text… And also, obviously, Hieronymus Bosch… I would call him Saint Hieronymus Bosch—I owe him a great deal; he prepared me for this…” The old man made a broad, sweeping gesture with his hand. “His remarkable paintings… The Lord must surely have allowed him to visit here. Like Dante… By the way, there is a manuscript that is attributed to Dante, in which this Building is also mentioned. How does it go now…” The old man closed his eyes and raised one hand with widespread fingers to his forehead. “Er, er… ‘And my companion, reaching out his hand, dry and bony…’ Mmm… No… ‘The tangle of bloody, naked bodies in twilit chambers…’ Mmm…”

“Hold on,” said Andrei, licking his dry lips. “What sort of nonsense is it you’re spouting? What have Saint Anthony and Dante got to do with anything? Just what are you driving at?”

The old man was surprised. “I’m not driving at anything,” he said. “You asked me about the Building, didn’t you, and I… Of course, I must thank God that in His eternal wisdom and infinite benevolence He enlightened me and allowed me to prepare myself. I shall learn a very, very great deal here, and my heart breaks when I think of the others who have arrived here and don’t understand, who aren’t capable of understanding where they have come to. A harrowing failure to grasp the reality of things and the harrowing memory of one’s sins in the bargain. Perhaps that is also the great wisdom of the Creator, the eternal awareness of one’s sins without the awareness of retribution for them… Take you, for instance, young man: Why has He cast you down into this abyss?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Andrei muttered sullenly, and thought to himself, Religious fanatics are just about all that was missing here.

“No need to be shy about it,” the old man said encouragingly. “There’s no point in hiding anything here, for the Judgement has already been made… I, for instance, sinned against my own people: I was a traitor, an informer—I saw how the people whom I betrayed to the servants of Satan were tortured and killed. I was hanged in 1944.” The old man paused. “And when did you die?”

“I didn’t die,” Andrei said, his blood running cold.

The old man nodded with a smile. “Yes, that’s what many people think,” he said. “But they’re mistaken. History records cases in which people have been taken up to heaven while alive, but no one has ever heard of them being exiled alive—as a punishment!—to hell.”

Andrei listened, staring at him in a daze.

“You’ve simply forgotten,” the old man went on. “There was a war, bombs were falling in the streets, you were running to a bomb shelter and suddenly—a blast, pain, and everything disappeared. And afterward, a vision of an angel, speaking benignly in parables—and here you are.” He nodded sagely again, thrusting out his lower lip. “Yes, yes, undoubtedly that is where the impression of free will comes from. Now I understand: it’s inertia. Merely inertia, young man. You spoke with such conviction that you even shook me somewhat… the organization of chaos, a new world… No, no, it’s merely inertia. It should pass off in time. Don’t forget, hell is eternal, there is no way back, and you’re still only in the first circle…”

“Are you serious?” Andrei asked in a slightly squeaky voice.

“You know all this yourself,” the old man said gently. “You know it all perfectly well! It’s just that you’re an atheist, a young man, and you don’t want to admit to yourself that all your life—short as it was—you were wrong. Your obtuse and ignorant teachers taught you that ahead of you there was nothing, an empty void, putrefaction, that you could expect neither gratitude nor retribution for what you had done. And you accepted these squalid ideas, because you were so very young, you possessed excellent bodily health, and death was merely a distant abstraction for you. Having committed evil, you always hoped to escape punishment, because the ones who could punish you were men exactly the same as you. And if you happened by chance to do good, you demanded immediate reward from those who were exactly like you. You were ludicrous. Now you understand that, of course—I can see it in your face…” He suddenly laughed. “We had an engineer in our underground organization, a materialist; he and I often argued about life after death. My God, how he used to mock me! ‘Pop,’ he used to say, ‘you and I will finish off this pointless argument in heaven…’ And you know, I’m still searching for him here—I search, but I simply can’t find him. Perhaps there was some truth in his joke; perhaps he really did go to heaven—as a martyr. He certainly died an agonizing death… And I’m here.”

“Nocturnal disputes about life and death?” a familiar voice suddenly croaked right in Andrei’s ear, and the bench quaked as Izya Katzman, in his customary disheveled and shock-headed condition, plumped himself down on the other side of Andrei. In his left hand he was clutching a light-colored document file and with his right he immediately started fiddling with his wart. As always, he was in state of ecstatic exaltation.

Trying to sound as casual as possible, Andrei said, “This elderly gentleman here believes that we are all in hell.”

“The elderly gentleman is absolutely right,” Izya immediately retorted, and started giggling. “At least, if it’s not hell, it’s something entirely indistinguishable from it in all its manifestations. However, you must admit, Pan Stupalski, that you have not yet discovered in my career while alive even a single transgression for which I deserved to be dispatched to this place! I didn’t even commit adultery, I was so stupid.”

“Pan Katzman,” the old man declared, “I can easily accept that you yourself are entirely unaware of that fateful transgression of yours!”

“Possibly, possibly,” Izya readily agreed. “From the look of you,” he said, addressing Andrei, “you have been in the Red Building. Well, how did you like it in there?”

And at that moment Andrei finally recovered his wits. As if the murky, sticky membrane of his nightmare had suddenly burst and melted, the pain in his head had faded away, and now he could distinguish everything around him sharply and clearly, and Main Street stopped being murky and misty, and it turned out that the policeman wasn’t sleeping on the motorcycle at all but sauntering along the sidewalk with the red tip of his cigarette glowing, casting glances in the direction of the bench. My God, Andrei thought, almost in horror, what am I doing here? After all, I’m an investigator, time’s passing by, and here I am engaging in idle banter with this crackpot, and then Katzman’s here… Katzman? How did he get here? “How do you know where I’ve been?” he asked abruptly.

“It’s not hard to guess,” said Izya, giggling. “You should take a look at yourself in the mirror…”

“I’m asking you a serious question!” said Andrei, raising his voice.

The old man suddenly got up. “Good night, pánové,” he said, transferring the bowler hat to his head with a smooth movement. “Pleasant dreams.”

Andrei took no notice of him. He looked at Izya. But Izya, plucking at his wart and gently bobbing up and down on the spot, watched as the old man moved away, grinned from ear to ear, and was already choking and grunting in anticipation. “Well?” said Andrei.

“What a character!” Izya declared admiringly. “Ah, what a character! You’re a fool, Voronin, as always—you don’t have a clue about anything! Do you know who that is? That’s the famous Pan Stupalski, Stupalski the Judas! He betrayed 248 people to the Gestapo in Lodz, he was exposed twice, and both times he somehow managed to wriggle out of it and put someone else in his place. It was only after the liberation that they finally nailed him, and he was given a fair and speedy trial, but even then he ducked out of it. The esteemed Mentors deemed it useful to extract him from the noose and send him here. To complete the bouquet. He lives in a madhouse here, acts as if he’s crazy, but meanwhile he carries on with his favorite line of work… Do you think he just happened by chance to be here on the bench, right beside you? Do you know who he works for now?”

“Shut up!” said Andrei, summoning up the willpower to smother the eager curiosity that consumed him every time Izya told his stories. “I’m not interested in all that. How did you come to be here? And how the hell did you know that I’d been inside the Building?”

“I was inside it myself,” Izya said calmly.

“I see,” said Andrei. “So what happened in there?”

“Well, you know best what happened in there. How should I know what happened as you saw it?”

“And what happened as you saw it?’

“Now, that is absolutely none of your business,” said Izya, adjusting the voluminous document file on his knees.

“Did you get the file in there?” asked Andrei, reaching out his hand.

“No,” said Izya. “Not in there.”

“What’s in it?”

“Listen,” said Izya. “What business is that of yours? What are you pestering me for?”

Izya still didn’t understand what was going on. But then, Andrei himself didn’t fully understand what was going on, and his mind raced feverishly as he tried to decide what to do next.

“Do you know what’s really in this file?” said Izya. “I discovered the old City Hall—it’s about fifteen kilometers from here. I was rummaging around in there all day long; they switched the sun off and it was as dark as hell—you know there hasn’t been any lighting there for about twenty years now… I wandered round and round in circles, barely managed to find the way out onto Main Street—ruins on all sides, these wild voices yelling…”

“I see,” said Andrei. “Didn’t you know it’s forbidden to rummage around in the old ruins?”

The glint of excitement faded from Izya’s eyes and he looked intently at Andrei, as if he were beginning to catch on.

“What’s wrong with you?” Andrei continued. “Do you want to carry an infection back into the City?”

“I don’t much like the tone of your voice,” Izya said with a crooked smile. “The way you’re talking to me, it’s not right somehow.”

“And I don’t like anything at all about you!” said Andrei. “Why did you hammer it into my head that the Red Building was a myth? You knew it wasn’t a myth. You lied to me. What for?”

“What is this, an interrogation?” Izya asked.

“What do you think?” said Andrei.

“I think you’ve taken a hard knock on the head. I think you need to wash your face with cold water and generally pull yourself together.”

“Give me that file,” said Andrei.

“You go to hell!” said Izya, getting up. He had turned very pale.

Andrei got up too. “You’re coming with me,” he said.

“No damned way,” Izya said abruptly. “Show me the arrest warrant.”

And then Andrei, his blood running cold with hatred, slowly unbuttoned his holster and pulled out the pistol, keeping his eyes fixed on Izya. “Walk forward,” he ordered.

“You idiot…” Izya muttered. “You’ve totally lost your mind.”

“Silence!” Andrei barked. “Walk!”

He prodded Izya in the side, and Izya obediently hobbled across the street. Apparently his feet were badly chafed and he limped heavily. “You’ll die the death of shame,” he said over his shoulder. “When you’ve had some sleep, you’ll burn up with shame.”

“No talking!”

They reached the motorcycle, the policeman deftly flung back the flap of the sidecar, and Andrei pointed into it with the barrel of the pistol.

“Get in.”

Izya got in and sat down very clumsily, without saying a word. The policeman quickly leaped into the saddle. Andrei sat behind him, shoving the pistol into its holster. The engine roared and backfired; the motorcycle swung around and set off back to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, bouncing over the potholes and scattering the loonies who were wearily and senselessly wandering around the street, which was damp with fresh dew.

Andrei tried not to look at Izya hunched up in the sidecar. The first blast of anger had passed, and what he felt now was something like embarrassment—it had all happened too fast somehow, too hastily, in a rush, like that joke about the bear rocking the hare in a cradle with no bottom. Well, OK, we’ll get things straightened out…

In the lobby of the Public Prosecutor’s building, without looking at Izya, Andrei ordered the policeman to register the arrested man and take him upstairs to the duty guard. Andrei himself went up to his office, taking three steps at a time.

It was about four o’clock, the most hectic time of all. In the corridors suspects and witnesses stood along the walls or sat on the benches polished bright by backsides. They all looked equally hopeless and sleepy; almost all of them were yawning convulsively, with their eyes goggling blearily. Every now and then the duty guards bawled from their little desks: “Quiet! No talking!” From behind the office doors upholstered in leatherette, Andrei heard the clatter of typewriters, the droning of voices, and tearful wailing. It was stifling, dirty, and gloomy. Andrei suddenly felt nauseous—he wanted to drop into the cafeteria and drink something bracing: a cup of strong coffee, or at least a shot of vodka. And then he saw Wang.

Wang was squatting down, leaning back against the wall, in a pose of infinitely patient waiting. He was wearing his distinctive wadded jacket and his head was pulled down into his shoulders, so that the collar of the jacket pushed his ears out. His round, hairless face was calm. He was dozing.

“What are you doing here?” Andrei asked in amazement

Wang opened his eyes, got up smoothly, and said with a smile, “I’ve been arrested. I’m waiting to be called.”

“What do you mean, arrested? What for?”

“Sabotage,” Wang said in a quiet voice.

A huge thug in a filthy raincoat who was dozing nearby also opened his eyes—or, rather, one eye, because the other had swollen up in a bright purple bruise. “What sabotage?” Andrei exclaimed, dumbfounded.

“Avoidance of the right to work—”

“Article 112, paragraph 6,” the thug with the shiner explained briskly. “Six months of swamp therapy—and you’re done.”

“You keep quiet,” Andrei told him.

The thug flashed his purple eye at him and chuckled (immediately remembering the bump on his own forehead, Andrei felt it quite distinctly) and wheezed peaceably, “I can keep quiet. Why not keep quiet, when everything’s clear without words anyway?”

“No talking!” the duty guard bawled menacingly. “Who’s that there slouching against the wall? Right, unslouch yourself!”

“Wait,” Andrei said to Wang. “Where have you been summoned to? Here?” He pointed to the door of room number 22, trying to recall whose office that was.

“That’s right,” the thug wheezed helpfully. “We’re for number 22. We’ve been propping up the wall for an hour and a half already.”

“Wait,” Andrei said to Wang again, and pushed open the door.

Ensconced at the desk was Heinrich Ruhmer, a junior investigator and Friedrich Heiger’s personal bodyguard, formerly a middleweight boxer and Munich bookmaker. Andrei asked, “May I come in?” but Ruhmer didn’t reply. He was very busy. He was sketching something on a large sheet of drawing paper, leaning down his brutish physiognomy with the flattened nose to each shoulder by turns, panting and even moaning in his creative efforts. Andrei closed the door behind himself and walked right up to the desk. Ruhmer was copying a pornographic postcard. The sheet of drawing paper and the postcard were ruled off into squares. The work had only just begun, and so far only the general outlines had been plotted out on the paper. The job in prospect was titanic in scope.

“What’s this you’re doing during working hours, you vile brute?” Andrei asked reproachfully.

Ruhmer started visibly and looked up. “Ah, it’s you…” he said with evident relief. “What do you want?”

“Is this the way you work?” Andrei asked mournfully. “People are waiting for you out there, and you—”

“Who’s waiting?” Ruhmer asked, startled. “Where?”

“Your suspects are waiting!” said Andrei.

“Aah… Well, what of it?”

“Never mind,” Andrei said malignly. What he probably should do was make this character feel ashamed somehow, remind the brute that Fritz had vouched for him, after all, vouched on his own good name for an idle cretin, for a bonehead, but Andrei felt he didn’t have the strength for that right now.

“Who lamped you on the forehead?” Ruhmer asked with professional interest, examining Andrei’s bump. “Someone lamped you handsomely.”

“It’s not important,” Andrei said impatiently. “I’ll tell you why I called in: Have you got Wang Li-hung’s case?”

“Wang Li-hung?” Ruhmer stopped examining the bump and thoughtfully stuck one finger into his right nostril. “Why, what’s up?” he asked warily.

“Have you got it or not?”

“And why are you asking?”

“Because he’s sitting outside your door and waiting while you’re working on this filthy smut in here!”

“Why is it filthy smut?” Ruhmer asked resentfully. “Just look at the tits on her! Moooo! Eh?”

Andrei fastidiously pushed the photograph aside. “Hand over the case file,” he demanded.

“What case?”

“Hand over the Wang Li-hung case!”

“I haven’t got any such case,” Ruhmer said angrily. He pulled out the middle drawer of his desk and glanced into it. Andrei glanced into the drawer too. The drawer really was empty.

“Where are all your case files anyway?” Andrei asked, restraining himself.

“What’s that to you?” Ruhmer asked aggressively. “You’re not my boss.”

Andrei grabbed the receiver of the phone with a resolute gesture.

Alarm glinted in Ruhmer’s piggy little eyes. “Hang on,” he said, hastily setting his huge mitt on the base of the phone. “Where are you going to take it? What for?”

“I’m going to call Heiger now,” Andrei said spitefully. “And he’ll give you a roasting, you idiot.”

“Wait,” Ruhmer muttered, trying to take the receiver away from him. “Ah, come on, will you… Why call Heiger? We can settle this between the two of us, can’t we? First of all, you explain properly what you want.”

“I want to take the case of Wang Li-hung.”

“That Chinese, you mean? The caretaker?”

“Yes!”

“Well, why didn’t you say so to begin with? There isn’t any case against him. They’ve only just brought him in. I’m going to take his initial interrogation.”

“What was he arrested for?”

“Refuses to change his profession,” said Ruhmer, gently pulling the telephone receiver toward himself, along with Andrei. “Sabotage. He’s on his third term as a caretaker. Do you know article 112?”

“Yes,” said Andrei. “But this is a special case. They’re always fouling something up. Where’s the accompanying letter?”

Wheezing loudly, Ruhmer finally got the phone away from Andrei, put it back in its place, and turned back to the desk. This time he opened the drawer on the right, rummaged around in it, concealing the contents behind his gigantic shoulders, pulled out a piece of paper, and handed it to Andrei. He was running with sweat. Andrei ran his eyes over the letter.

“It doesn’t say here that he’s been allocated to you specifically,” he stated.

“So what?”

“So I’m taking him,” said Andrei, sticking the sheet of paper in his pocket.

Ruhmer was bothered by that. “He’s been registered to me! At the duty desk.”

“Well, call the duty officer and tell him that Wang Li-hung has been taken by Voronin. He can reregister him.”

“You can call him yourself,” Ruhmer said pompously. “Why should I bother to call him? You’re taking him, so you call. And give me a receipt to say you took him.”

Five minutes later all the formalities had been completed. Ruhmer put the receipt in a desk drawer and looked at Andrei, and then at the photograph. “Oh, those tits!” he said. “Real udders!”

“You’ll come to a bad end, Ruhmer,” Andrei promised on the way out.

In the corridor he took Wang by the elbow without saying a word and drew him along. Wang submitted without asking any questions, and it occurred to Andrei that Wang would have gone just as silently and uncomplainingly to the firing squad, the torture chamber, and any other form of humiliation. Andrei couldn’t understand that. There was something bestial and subhuman about this resignation, and at the same time something exalted that aroused an inexplicable respect, because vaguely discernible behind this resignation was some unearthly kind of understanding of the profound, hidden, eternal, essential nature of what was happening, an understanding of its eternal futility, and therefore of the unworthiness of resistance. East is East and West is West. A deceitful and unjust line, but somehow in this case it seemed apt.

“Well, what’s this that’s happened to you? Tell me about it.”

And Wang was immediately telling the story in his measured storytelling voice. “A week ago the district employment officer came to my caretaker’s lodge and reminded me that I was in blatant contravention of the law on diversified labor. He was right, I really am in blatant contravention of that law. The labor exchange has sent me a notification three times, and three times I have thrown it in the trash. The officer informed me that if I continued to shirk my responsibilities, I could be in serious trouble. And then it occurred to me that there were cases when the machine left someone in their former job. So that day I went to the labor exchange and put my record card in the machine. I was unlucky. I was given a job as director of a footwear plant. But I had decided in advance that I wouldn’t move to a new job, and I stayed on as a caretaker. This evening two policemen came for me and brought me here. That’s how it all happened.”

“I get it,” Andrei drawled. But he didn’t really get anything. “Listen, would you like some tea? We can order tea and sandwiches here. For free.”

“That would be a great inconvenience,” Wang protested. “Please don’t bother.”

“What do you mean, inconvenience!” Andrei said angrily, and ordered two glasses of tea and sandwiches over the phone. After he put the phone down, he looked at Wang and asked cautiously, “Wang, I still don’t completely understand why you didn’t want to work as the director of a footwear plant. It’s a respectable position; you would have acquired a new profession and made a real difference—after all, you’re a very efficient and industrious person… And I know that footwear plant—pilfering goes on there all the time; they carry out shoes by the crateful… That wouldn’t happen with you there. And then the pay’s much better there, and you have a wife and a child, don’t you? What’s the problem?”

“Well, I think it will be hard for you to understand,” Wang said thoughtfully.

“What is there to understand?” Andrei asked impatiently. “It’s obvious that it’s better to be the director of an industrial plant than to spend your whole life raking up trash… Or even worse, to slave away in the swamps for six months…”

Wang shook his round head. “No, it isn’t better,” he said. “The best place of all to be in is one from which you can’t fall. You can’t understand that, Andrei.”

“Why do you have to fall at all?” asked Andrei, puzzled.

“I don’t know why. But it’s bound to happen. Or you have to make such a great effort to hold on that it’s better to fall immediately. I know, I’ve been through all that.”

A policeman with a sleepy face brought the tea and saluted, swaying on his feet, then edged back out into the corridor. Andrei set a glass of tea in a tarnished metal glass-holder in front of Wang and pushed the plate of sandwiches toward him. Wang thanked him, took a sip from the glass, and took the very smallest sandwich. “You’re simply afraid of responsibility,” Andrei said disappointedly. “I’m sorry, but I have to say that’s not entirely fair to everybody else.”

“I always try to do only good for people,” Wang objected calmly. “And as for responsibility, I bear a supreme responsibility. My wife and child.”

“That’s true,” said Andrei, feeling rather confused again. “That’s right, of course. But you must agree that the Experiment demands from every one of us…”

Wang listened carefully, nodding. When Andrei finished, he said, “I understand you. You are right in your own way. But then, you came here to build, didn’t you? And I ran away to get here. You seek battle and victory, I seek repose. We are very different, Andrei.”

“What does that mean—repose? You’re slandering yourself. If you sought repose, you would have found a cozy little corner somewhere and lived there like a pig in clover. Cozy little corners are ten a penny around here. But you’ve chosen the dirtiest, most unpopular job of all, and you work honestly, without begrudging the effort or the time… What sort of repose is that?”

“Repose of the soul, Andrei. Inner repose,” said Wang. “At peace with oneself and the universe.”

Andrei drummed his fingers on the table. “Well then, do you intend to be a caretaker for the rest of your life?”

“Not necessarily a caretaker,” said Wang. “When I arrived here, I was a laborer in a warehouse at first. Then the machine appointed me the mayor’s secretary. I refused and I was sent to the swamps. I worked off my six months and came back, and by law, as a punished convict, I was given the very lowest job. But then the machine started pushing me upward again. I went to the director of the labor exchange and explained everything to him, as I have to you. The director of the exchange was a Jew, he had arrived here from an extermination camp, and he understood me very well. For as long as he was the director, they didn’t bother me.” Wang paused. “About two months ago, he disappeared. They say he was found murdered, you probably know about that. And it all started all over again… Never mind, I’ll do my time in the swamps and go back to being a caretaker. It will be a lot easier for me now—my son’s a big boy now, and Uncle Yura will help me out in the swamps…”

At this point Andrei caught himself gawping wide-eyed at Wang in a way that was incredibly rude, as if it weren’t Wang sitting there in front of him but some strange, outlandish creature. But then, Wang really was outlandish. My God, thought Andrei, what kind of life must a man have had to be reduced to a philosophy like this? Yes, I have to help him. I’m duty bound. But how? “Well, all right,” he said eventually. “Have it your own way. Only there’s absolutely no point in you going to the swamps. Do you happen to know who’s the director of the labor exchange now?”

“Otto Friese,” said Wang.

“What? Otto? Then what’s the problem?”

“Yes, I would go to him, only he’s such a little child, isn’t he? He doesn’t understand anything and he’s afraid of everything.”

Andrei grabbed the telephone directory, found the number, and picked up the phone. He had to wait a long time; Otto was obviously sleeping like a log. Eventually he answered in a halting voice that was angry and frightened. “Director Otto Friese here.”

“Hello, Otto,” said Andrei. “This is Voronin, from the Public Prosecutor’s Office.”

“The Public Prosecutor’s Office? What can I do for you?”

“What is this, aren’t you awake yet?” Andrei asked angrily. “Has Elsa worn you out, then? This is Andrei here! Voronin!”

“Ah, Andrei?” Otto said in a completely different voice. “What are you doing, calling in the middle of the night like this? My heart’s pounding, dammit… What do you want?”

Andrei explained the situation. As he expected, everything went through without a hitch. Yes, Otto had always thought that Wang was in the right place. Yes, he definitely did think that Wang would never make a director of an industrial plant. He quite openly and unambiguously admired Wang’s desire to remain in such an unenviable job (“We could do with more people like that here—everyone’s trying to climb upward, like a bunch of mountain rangers”), he indignantly rejected the very idea of sending Wang to the swamps, and as far as the law was concerned, he was filled with pious outrage at the idiots and bureaucratic cretins who had replaced the living spirit of the law with its dead letter. After all, the law existed to hinder the efforts of various tricksters to worm their way up, and it shouldn’t affect people who wanted to stay at the bottom in any way. The director of the labor exchange clearly understood all this. “Yes!” he repeated. “Oh, yes, of course!”

Andrei was left, however, with the vague, ludicrous, and annoying impression that Otto would have agreed to any proposal that he, Andrei Voronin, made—for instance, to appoint Wang as mayor or, on the contrary, lock him away in a cell. Otto had always felt a certain morbid gratitude to Andrei, probably because Andrei was the only person in their set (and perhaps in the entire City) who treated Otto like a human being… But, after all, the point at hand was really the most important thing, wasn’t it?

“I’ll see that it’s done,” Otto repeated for the tenth time. “You can stop worrying, Andrei. I’ll issue the instructions, and no one will bother Wang again.”

They left it at that. Andrei put down the phone and started writing out an exit pass for Wang. “Will you go right now?” he asked, still writing. “Or will you wait for the sun? Think about it, the streets are dangerous at this hour.”

“Thank you,” Wang murmured. “Thank you.”

Andrei looked up in amazement. Wang was standing in front of him, repeatedly bowing rapidly and shallowly, with his hands folded together in front of his chest.

“Ah, drop all the Chinese ceremony,” Andrei growled in embarrassed annoyance. “As if I’d done you some kind of good deed!” He handed Wang the pass. “I asked if you were going to go right now.”

Wang accepted the pass with yet another bow. “I think I had better go immediately,” he said, as if apologizing. “Right away. The garbage collectors have probably arrived already.”

“The garbage collectors…” Andrei repeated. He looked at the plate of sandwiches. Large, fresh sandwiches, with excellent ham. “Hang on,” he said, taking an old newspaper out of a drawer and starting to wrap the sandwiches in it. “You can take them home, for Mei-lin.”

Wang resisted feebly, murmuring something about it being an excessive inconvenience, but Andrei stuffed the bundle inside Wang’s jacket, put one arm around his shoulders, and led him to the door. Andrei felt terribly awkward somehow. Both Otto and Wang had reacted strangely to his actions. After all, he’d only tried to be just, to do everything correctly and rationally, and it had turned out like the damnedest sort of thing—some kind of charity work or string-pulling or cronyism… He hastily tried to find the right words—dry and matter-of-fact words—that would emphasize the official nature and legality of the situation… And suddenly he thought he’d found them. He stopped, raised his chin, looked Wang over from head to foot and said coolly, “Citizen Wang, on behalf of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, I offer you our profound apologies for your illegal detention. I assure you that it will never happen again.”

And after that he felt totally embarrassed. What kind of nonsense was that? In the first place, Wang’s detention had not, strictly speaking, been illegal. And second, the investigator Voronin couldn’t give any assurances about anything; he didn’t have that right… And at that point he saw Wang’s eyes—that strange look, so familiar in its strangeness, and he suddenly remembered and the memory was like a wave of scalding heat.

“Wang,” he said, his voice suddenly hoarse. “I want to ask you something, Wang.”

He stopped. It was stupid to ask, pointless. And already too late not to ask. Wang looked up at him, expectant.

“Wang,” said Andrei, and cleared his throat. “Where were you at two o’clock this morning?”

Wang wasn’t surprised. “They came for me at two,” he said. “I was washing down the stairs.”

“And before that?”

“Before that I collected the trash. Mei-lin helped me, then she went to bed and I went to wash down the stairs.”

“Yes,” said Andrei, “that’s what I thought. OK, good-bye, Wang. Sorry things turned out like this… No, hang on, I’ll see you out…”

4

Before he summoned Izya, Andrei thought the whole thing through again.

First, he forbade himself to take a biased approach to Izya. The fact that Izya was a cynic, a know-it-all, and a blabbermouth, that he was prepared to ridicule—and he did ridicule—everything in the world, that he was slovenly and sprayed saliva when he spoke, giggled repulsively, and lived with a widow like a kept man and nobody had any idea how he earned a living… in this instance all of that must be absolutely irrelevant.

Andrei also had to discard root and branch the primitive idea that Katzman was a simple disseminator of panicky rumors about the Red Building and other mystical phenomena. The Red Building was a reality—a mysterious, fantastic reality; it wasn’t clear what it was for and who needed it—but it was a reality. (At this point Andrei checked in the first aid kit and spread disinfectant on his oozing bump, looking in a little mirror.) In this plan Katzman was primarily a witness. What was he doing in the Red House? How often did he visit it? What could he tell Andrei about it? What file had he brought out of it? Or was the file really not from there after all? Was it really from the old City Hall?

Stop, stop! Katzman had repeatedly let slip… well, not let slip, of course, but simply told them about his journeys to the north. What was he doing there? The Anticity lay somewhere to the north too.

Yes, I was right to detain Katzman, even if it was done in haste. That’s the way it always goes. It all starts with simple curiosity—someone sticks his curious nose in where it doesn’t belong, and before he can say boo, he’s been recruited… Why did he refuse point-blank to give me that document file? The file is obviously from there. And the Red Building is from there! The boss obviously failed to put two and two together somewhere. No, it’s understandable—he didn’t have the facts. And he hasn’t been in there. Yes, spreading rumors is a terrible thing, but the Red Building is more terrible than any rumor. And the really terrible thing is not even that people disappear inside it forever; the terrible thing is that sometimes they come back out! They come back out, they return to live among us, like Katzman…

Andrei felt that now he had a tight grasp of the most important thread, but he didn’t have the courage to follow the analysis all the way through to the end. He knew only that the Andrei Voronin who went in through that door with the brass handle was not entirely the same Andrei Voronin who came out of that door. Something had snapped inside him in there, something had been irretrievably lost… He gritted his teeth. Oh no, you’ve miscalculated this time, my fine gentlemen. You shouldn’t have let me out. We’re not so easily broken… or bought… or moved to pity.

Grinning crookedly, he took a clean sheet of paper and wrote on it in large letters, “RED BUILDING—KATZMAN. RED BUILDING—ANTICITY. ANTICITY—KATZMAN.” That was the way it all panned out. No, boss, he thought, it’s not the rumor-spreaders we have to search for. We need to search for the people who have emerged from the Red Building alive and well—search for them, catch them, isolate them… or place them under rigorous observation… He wrote down, “People who have been in the Building—the Anticity.” So Pani Husáková would have to tell them all she knew about her František after all. The flute player could probably be released, though. But then, it wasn’t really about them… Maybe I should call the boss? Ask his blessing for the change of direction? No, it’s probably a bit too soon for that. No, if I can get Katzman to talk… He picked up the phone.

“Duty guard? Bring detainee Katzman to me in 36.”

And not only did he need to get Katzman to talk, he could. The file. There was no way Katzman could worm his way out of that… It flashed through Andrei’s mind that it wasn’t entirely ethical for him to handle Katzman’s case; he had drunk with the man on numerous occasion, and in general… But he pulled himself up short there.

The door opened and detainee Katzman, with a huge grin on his face and his hands stuck in his greasy pockets, entered the room with a slack, jaunty stride.

“Sit down,” Andrei said coolly, jerking his chin in the direction of the stool.

“Thank you,” said the detainee, grinning even more widely. “I see you haven’t snapped out of it yet.”

It was all water off a duck’s back to him, the creep. Katzman sat down, tugged at the wart on his neck, and glanced curiously around the office.

And then a cold shiver ran down Andrei’s spine. The detainee didn’t have the file with him.

“Where’s the file?” Andrei asked, trying to speak calmly.

“What file?” Katzman inquired brazenly.

Andrei grabbed up the phone. “Duty guard! Where is detainee Katzman’s document file?”

“What file?” the duty guard asked obtusely. “I’ll just take a look… Katzman… Aha… The following items were confiscated from detainee Katzman: handkerchiefs, 2; wallet, 1, empty, worn…”

“Is there a document file in the inventory?” Andrei barked.

“There isn’t any file,” the duty guard answered in a sinking voice.

“Bring me the inventory,” Andrei said hoarsely, and hung up. Then he glowered briefly at Katzman. His hatred for the man was buzzing in his ears. “Jewish pranks…” he said, restraining himself. “Where did you put the file, you bastard?”

Katzman responded immediately, in melodramatic literary style: “She grabbed hold of his hand and asked him over and over again: ‘Where did you put the file?’”

“All right,” said Andrei, breathing heavily through his nose. “It won’t do you any good, you lousy, spying scum.”

A look of astonishment flashed across Izya’s face. But a second later he already had that repulsive, taunting grin stuck on it again. “Why, of course, of course!” he said. “Iosif Katzman, chairman of the ‘Joint’ organization, at your service. Don’t beat me, I’ll tell you everything anyway. The machine guns are hidden in Berdichev, the landing site is marked by campfires…”

The frightened duty guard walked in, holding the sheet of paper with the inventory on it out in front of him. “There isn’t any file here,” he muttered, putting the inventory down on the edge of the desk in front of Andrei and retreating. “I rang the front desk, and they don’t—”

“All right, go,” Andrei said through his teeth. He took a blank interrogation form and asked, without looking up: “Full name with patronymic?”

“Iosif Mikhailovich Katzman.”

“Year of birth?”

“Thirty-six.”

“Nationality?”

“Yes,” Katzman said, and giggled.

Andrei raised his head. “Yes what?”

“Listen, Andrei,” said Izya. “I don’t understand what’s going on with you today, but bear in mind that you’ll destroy your entire career with me like this. I’m warning you as an old friend—”

“Answer the questions!” Andrei said in a strangled voice. “Nationality?”

“Just don’t you forget how they took Dr. Timashuk’s medal away from her,” said Izya.

But Andrei didn’t know who Dr. Timashuk was. “Nationality!”

“Jewish,” Izya said with loathing.

“Citizenship?”

“U! S! S! R!”

“Religious affiliation?”

“None.”

“Political affiliation?”

“None.”

“Education?”

“Higher. Herzen Pedagogical Institute, Leningrad.”

“Criminal record?”

“None.”

“Earthly year of departure?”

“Nineteen sixty-eight.”

“Point of departure?

“Leningrad.”

“Reason for departure?”

“Curiosity.”

“Period of residence in the City?”

“Four years.”

“Present profession?”

“Statistician at the Department of Municipal Services.”

“List previous professions.”

“General laborer, senior municipal archivist, office clerk at the municipal slaughterhouse, garbage collector, blacksmith. I think that’s all.”

“Family status.”

“Adulterer,” Izya replied, smirking.

Andrei put down the pen, lit up, and studied the detainee through the blue smoke for a while. Izya was grinning, Izya was unkempt and shock-headed, Izya was sardonic, but Andrei knew this man well, and he could see that Izya was nervous. He obviously had something to be nervous about, even though he had managed to ditch the file—and very deftly, it must be said. He obviously realized now that he was being dealt with in earnest; that was why his eyes were narrowed nervously and the corners of his grinning mouth were trembling.

“Well then, suspect Katzman,” Andrei said in a tried and tested chilly tone of voice. “I seriously recommend you adopt a respectful attitude toward the investigation if you don’t wish to make your own situation any worse.”

Izya stopped smiling. “All right,” he said. “Then I demand to be informed of the charge against me and also the article under which I have been detained. Furthermore, I demand a lawyer. From this moment on I won’t say another word without a lawyer.”

Andrei chuckled to himself. “You have been detained under article 12 of the Criminal Procedural Code concerning the preventive detention of individuals whose continued presence at liberty could constitute a public danger. You are accused of illegal contacts with hostile elements, concealing or destroying material evidence at the time of arrest… and also of violating the municipal ordinance that forbids travel beyond the city limits for public health reasons. You have violated this ordinance on a regular basis… And as for a lawyer, the Public Prosecutor’s Office cannot provide you with a lawyer until three days have elapsed following the time of arrest. In accordance with the aforementioned article 12 of the Criminal Procedural Code… In addition, let me clarify: you may formally protest, register complaints, and enter appeals only after you have satisfactorily replied to the questions of the initial interrogation. All in accordance with the said article 12. Is all that clear?”

He had been studying Izya’s face and he could see that everything was clear to him. It was also absolutely clear that Izya would answer the questions and wait until the three days were over. At the mention of the three-day period Izya had unmistakably caught his breath.

“Now that you have received this clarification,” Andrei said, picking up the pen again, “let us proceed. Your family status.”

“Unmarried,” said Izya.

“Home address?”

“What?” asked Izya. He had clearly been thinking about something else.

“Your home address? Where do you live?”

“Nineteen Second Left Street, apartment 7.”

“Do you have anything to tell me regarding the charges brought against you?”

“By all means,” said Izya. “Concerning the hostile elements: delirious drivel. This is the first time I’ve even heard that there are any hostile elements. I regard it as a deliberately provocative invention on the part of the investigation. Material evidence… I did not have and could not have had any material evidence with me, because I have not committed any crimes. Therefore I can neither conceal nor destroy anything. And as for the municipal ordinance—I am a former employee of the municipal archive, where I continue to work on a voluntary basis; I have access to all archival materials, and therefore also to those that lie outside the city limits. That’s all.”

“What were you doing in the Red Building?’

“That is my own personal business. You have no right to intrude into my personal affairs. First prove that they are relevant to the substance of the charges. Article 14 of the Criminal Procedural Code.”

“Have you been in the Red Building on more than one occasion?”

“Yes.”

“Can you name the people whom you met there?”

Izya gave a ghastly grin. “I can. Only that will not assist the investigation.”

“Name these people.”

“By all means. From modern times: Pétain, Quisling, Wang Ching-wei, Vasil Bilak—”

Andrei raised his hand. “I request that above all else you name individuals who are citizens of our City.”

“And why would the investigation require that?” Izya inquired aggressively.

“I am not obliged to account for anything to you. Answer the questions.”

“I don’t wish to answer your idiotic questions. You don’t understand a damn thing. You imagine that if I met someone in there, it means he really was there. But that’s not so.”

“I don’t understand. Please explain.”

“I don’t understand it myself,” said Izya. “It’s something like a dream. The delirious ravings of an agitated conscience.”

“I see. Like a dream. Were you in the Red Building today?”

“Yes, I was.”

“Where was the Red Building when you entered it?”

“Today? Today it was there beside the synagogue.”

“Did you see me in the Building?”

Izya grinned again. “I see you every time I go in there.”

“Including today?”

“Yes.”

“What was I doing?”

“Engaging in lewd behavior,” Izya said with relish.

“Specifically?”

“You were copulating, Citizen Voronin. Copulating with numerous girls at the same time and simultaneously preaching high principles to eunuchs. Impressing on them that you were not engaging in this activity for your own pleasure but for the good of all mankind.”

Andrei gritted his teeth. “And what were you doing?” he asked after a brief pause.

“I won’t tell you that. That’s my right.”

“You’re lying,” Andrei said. “You didn’t see me there. Here are your own words: ‘From the look of you, you’ve been in the Red Building…’ Consequently, you did not see me there. Why are you lying?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Izya replied breezily. “It’s just that I felt ashamed for you and decided to make you think I hadn’t seen you there. But now, of course, things have changed. Now I am obliged to tell the truth.”

Andrei leaned back and flung the pen behind his chair. “You say it’s a kind of dream. Then what difference does it make if you saw me or didn’t see me in a dream? Why try to make me think anything?”

“That’s not it,” said Izya. “I was simply embarrassed to let you know what I really think of you sometimes. But I shouldn’t have been.”

Andrei shook his head dubiously. “Well, all right. Did you bring the document file out of the Red Building too? From out of your own dream, so to say?”

Izya’s face froze. “What file?” he asked nervously. “What is this file you keep asking about all the time? I didn’t have any file.”

“Drop it, Katzman,” said Andrei, closing his eyes wearily. “I saw the file, the police officer saw the file, that old man saw the file… Pan Stupalski. You’ll have to provide an explanation at the trial in any case… Don’t exacerbate matters!”

Izya’s eyes wandered across the wall. He sat there stony-faced and said nothing.

“Let’s assume the file wasn’t from the Red House,” Andrei continued. “Then did you obtain it outside the city limits? Who from? Who gave it to you, Katzman?”

Izya said nothing.

“What was in that file?” Andrei got up and walked around the office with his hands clasped behind his back. “An individual has a file in his hands. The individual is arrested. On the way to the Prosecutor’s Office the individual disposes of the file. Secretly. Why? The file evidently contains documents that are compromising for this individual… Do you follow the train of my logic, Katzman? The file was obtained outside city limits. What kind of documents, obtained outside city limits, can compromise an inhabitant of our City? What kind, tell me, Katzman?”

Izya looked up at the ceiling, worrying away relentlessly at his wart.

“Only don’t try to worm your way out of it, Katzman,” Andrei warned him. “Don’t try to sell me another of your cock-and-bull stories. I can see right through you. What was in the file? Lists? Addresses? Instructions?”

Izya suddenly slapped himself on the knee. “Listen, you idiot!” he roared. “What sort of garbage are you spouting here? Who put all this into your head, you poor simpleton? What lists, what addresses? You crummy, pathetic Major Pronin! You’ve known me for three years—you know that I rummage around in the ruins, that I study the history of the City. Why the hell do you keep trying to pin some idiotic charge of spying on me? Think about it: Who can do any spying here? What for? Who for?”

“What was in the file?” Andrei barked out at the top of his lungs. “Stop prevaricating and give me a straight answer: What was in the file?”

At that Izya snapped. His eyes bulged out, suffused with blood. “You can just… go to hell with your files!” he squealed in a falsetto voice. “I’m not going to tell you anything. You’re a fool, an idiot, a gendarme scumbag!”

He squealed, sprayed, swore, and gestured obscenely, and then Andrei took a clean sheet of paper and wrote at the top of it, “Testimony of the suspect I. Katzman concerning the document file that was seen in his possession and subsequently disappeared without a trace.” He waited until Izya quieted down and said good-naturedly, “Let me tell you this, Izya. Unofficially. Your case is petty trash. I know you got tangled up in this business without even thinking, thanks to that idiotic curiosity of yours. If you’d like to know, we’ve had you in our sights for six months already. And my advice to you is to sit over here and write down everything just the way it is. I can’t promise you much, but I’ll do everything that lies in my power for you. Sit down and write. I’ll come back in half an hour.”

Trying not to look at Izya, who had fallen quiet out of sheer exhaustion, and feeling disgusted by his own hypocrisy but consoling himself with the thought that in this instance the goal quite definitely justified the means, he locked the drawers of his desk, got up, and walked out.

In the corridor he beckoned to the assistant duty guard, stood him at the door, and went off to the cafeteria. He had an ugly feeling in his heart and a foul, sticky taste in his mouth, as if he had gorged himself on shit. The interrogation had turned out skewed and unconvincing somehow. He’d screwed up the Red Building connection totally and absolutely; he shouldn’t even have gotten into it at this stage. And the way he’d lost the file was a real blunder—the file was the only real clue, and he had ignominiously let it slip through his fingers. For gaffes like that he ought to be thrown out of the Public Prosecutor’s Office in disgrace… Fritz probably wouldn’t have let it slip away from him. Fritz would immediately have realized what the real goods were. Damned sentimentality. Of course it was—they’d drunk together, shot the breeze together; he was Andrei’s buddy, a Soviet guy…

But what a chance it was, he thought, to rake them all in at once! And the boss goofed too: rumors, gossip… There’s an entire network of them working away right under his nose, and I’m supposed to search for the source of the rumors…

Andrei walked up to the counter, took a shot glass of vodka, and tossed it down with a feeling of revulsion. Where had Izya put that damned file after all? Had he really just thrown it out on the road? Probably—he hadn’t eaten it, had he? Maybe Andrei should send someone to look for it? Too late. Loonies, baboons, caretakers… No, the way our work’s organized is all wrong, it’s all wrong. Why is such important information as the existence of the Anticity kept secret even from employees of the Investigation Department? Why, they ought to write about it every day in the newspapers and put up posters in the streets! We need show trials! I’d have had this Katzman pegged ages ago… On the other hand, of course, you have to know how to think for yourself too. Since such a grandiose undertaking as the Experiment exists, and since people of the most various classes and political persuasions have been roped into it, it means that a certain stratification will inevitably arise… contradictions… dynamic contradictions, if you like…an antagonistic struggle… The opponents of the Experiment must be exposed sooner or later, those people who disagree with it in class terms and also those who try to warp it to suit their own interests—the déclassé element, those who lack moral fiber, and corrupted individuals, like Katzman… all sorts of cosmopolitans… a natural process. I could have figured out for myself the way all this ought to develop—

A small, firm hand was laid on his shoulder, and he swung around. It was the crime reporter from the City Gazette, Kensi Ubukata. “What are you musing about, investigator?” he asked. “Untangling a knotty case? Share your thoughts with the public. The public loves knotty cases. Eh?”

“Hi, Kensi,” Andrei said in a tired voice. “Have a glass of vodka?

“Yes, if there’s information to go with it.”

“I’ve got nothing for you except vodka.”

“OK, I’ll take the vodka without the information.”

They drank a shot each and snacked on limp pickles.

“I’ve just come from your boss,” said Kensi, spitting out the tail of a pickle. “He’s a very flexible sort of individual. One trend is rising and another is falling, the process of equipping solitary cells with washbasins is almost complete—and not a single word about the question that I’m interested in.”

“And what are you interested in?” Andrei asked absentmindedly.

“Right now I’m interested in disappearances. In the last fifteen days eleven people have disappeared without a trace in the City. Maybe you know something about that?”

“I know they disappeared. I know they haven’t been found.”

“Who’s handling the case?”

“It’s not likely to be just one case,” said Andrei. “You should ask the boss that.”

Kensi shook his head. “Somehow just recently the gentlemen investigators have been referring me to their boss, or to Heiger, a bit too often… There’s been a sudden proliferation of mysteries in our little democratic community. You wouldn’t happen to have metamorphosed into a secret police at some odd moment, would you?” He glanced into his empty shot glass and complained, “What’s the use of having friends among the investigators if you can never find out anything?”

“Duty before friendship.”

Neither of them spoke for a while.

“By the way, you know, Wang’s been arrested,” said Kensi. “I warned him all right, but he wouldn’t listen—he’s as stubborn as a mule.”

“It’s OK, I fixed everything already,” said Andrei.

“How so?”

Andrei enthusiastically told Kensi how deftly and quickly he had fixed everything. Set everything straight. Restored justice. He got a kick out of telling the story of this single successful incident in such a long, ludicrously disastrous day.

“Hmm,” said Kensi after he heard Andrei out. “Interesting… ‘When I arrive in a foreign country,’” he said, quoting, “‘I never ask if the laws there are good or bad. I only ask if they are enforced…’”

“What do you mean by that?” Andrei asked him with a frown.

“What I mean is that as far as I’m aware the law on the right to diversified labor does not specify any exceptions.”

“So you think that Wang should have been shipped out to the swamps?”

“If that’s what the law requires—yes.”

“But that’s plain stupid!” Andrei said, getting annoyed. “Why the hell would the Experiment want a bad production plant director instead of a good caretaker?”

“The law on the right to diversified labor—”

“That law,” Andrei broke in, “was devised for the good of the Experiment, not to harm it. A law can’t anticipate everything. We enforcers of the law have to know how to think for ourselves.”

“My view of the enforcement of the law is somewhat different,” Kensi said drily. “In any case, you don’t decide such matters, the court does.”

“The court would have shipped him off to the swamps,” said Andrei. “But he has a wife and a child.”

“Dura lex, sed lex,” said Kensi.

“That adage was invented by bureaucrats.”

“That adage,” Kensi said gravely, “was invented by people who wished to preserve a unified legal basis for the social coexistence of a disparate mass of free human beings.”

“That’s exactly it, disparate!” said Andrei, seizing on the word. “There simply cannot be a single law for all. There is no single law for the exploiter and the exploited. Now, if Wang had refused to move from being a director to being a caretaker…”

“It’s not your job to interpret the law,” Kensi said coldly. “The court exists to do that.”

“But the court doesn’t know Wang like I do, and it never can!”

Kensi shook his head with a crooked smile. “God almighty, what great experts you have here in the Prosecutor’s Office!”

“OK, OK,” Andrei growled. “So why not write an article about it? Idiot investigator releases criminal caretaker.”

“I would, too. Only I’d feel sorry for Wang. I wouldn’t feel sorry for you at all, you fool.”

“Well, I feel sorry for Wang too, don’t I?” said Andrei.

“But you’re an investigator,” Kensi retorted. “And I’m not. I’m not bound by the laws.”

“You know what,” said Andrei. “Just stop hassling me, for Christ’s sake. My head’s spinning already without you lending a hand.”

Kensi looked up and chuckled. “Yes, I can see that. It’s written on your forehead. Was there a raid?”

“No,” said Andrei. “I just tripped over something.” He looked at his watch. “Another shot?”

“Thanks, but no more,” said Kensi, getting up. “I can’t drink so much with every investigator. I only drink with the ones who give me information.”

“Well, screw you then,” said Andrei. “Chachua’s just shown up over there. Go ask him about the Falling Stars. He’s been making really great progress—he was boasting about it today… Only don’t forget that he’s a very modest guy: he’ll deny everything, just don’t let him off the hook, pump him really hard, and you’ll end up with a real gem!”

Moving chairs aside, Kensi set off toward Chachua, who was dejectedly hunched over a skinny little meat rissole, and Andrei gently strolled over to the door, smirking vengefully. I’d just love to wait and watch Chachua bellow, he thought. Too bad there’s no time for that… Right, then. Citizen Katzman, how have you been getting on? And God help you, Citizen Katzman, if you feed me any more of that hogwash. I won’t stand for it, Citizen Katzman…

In room 36 every possible light had been turned on. Citizen Katzman was standing there, leaning his shoulder against the open safe, avidly leafing through some case or other, fiddling with his wart in his usual fashion, and grinning like a Cheshire cat at something.

“What the hell!” said Andrei, caught off-guard. “Who gave you permission? What sort of behavior is this, dammit?”

Izya looked up at him with a mindless expression in his eyes, grinned even wider, and said, “I never realized what a huge, tangled mess you’d made of the Red Building.”

Andrei tore the file out of Izya’s hands, slammed the metal door shut with a clang, grabbed him by the shoulder, and shoved him toward the stool. “Sit down, Katzman,” he said, straining every nerve to control himself. Fury blurred everything in front of his eyes. “Have you written that statement?”

“Listen,” said Izya, “this place is simply full of idiots… There’s 150 of you cretins sitting here and you still can’t understand…”

But Andrei wasn’t looking at him any longer. He was looking at the sheet of paper with the title “Testimony of the suspect I. Katzman…” There wasn’t any testimony, but there was a pen drawing instead: a male sex organ, life size.

“You bastard,” Andrei exclaimed, and choked. “You scumbag.” He tore the phone off the hook and dialed a number with a trembling finger. “Fritz? It’s Voronin here…” With his free hand he ripped open his collar. “I really need your help here. Please, come over to my room right now.”

“What’s the problem?” Heiger asked in annoyance. “I’m about to go home.”

“Please, please!” said Andrei, raising his voice. “Just come over here!”

He hung up and looked at Izya, and immediately discovered he couldn’t look at him, so he started looking through him instead. Izya burbled and giggled on his stool, rubbing his hands together and talking nonstop, pontificating about something with a repulsive, self-righteous sort of glibness, something about the Red Building, about conscience, about idiotic witnesses… Andrei didn’t listen; he didn’t hear anything. The decision he had taken filled him with fear and a sort of diabolical merriment. Everything inside him was jigging about in excitement—he simply couldn’t wait for that moment, any time now, when the door would open and somber, angry Fritz would stride into the room, and then he would see that repulsively smug face change, contorting in horror and ignominious fear… Especially if Fritz showed up with Ruhmer. The mere sight of Ruhmer would be enough—those bestial, hairy features of his, with the flattened nose. Andrei suddenly felt a chilly sensation on his back. He was completely covered in perspiration. He could still change his move after all, couldn’t he? He could still say, “Everything’s OK, Fritz, it’s all been squared away, sorry I bothered you…”

The door swung open and in walked Fritz Heiger, sullen and irascible. “Well, what’s the problem?” he inquired, and then he spotted Izya. “Ah, hi!” he said, breaking into a smile. “What are you two up to in the middle of the night? It’s time to sleep; it’s almost morning.”

“Listen, Fritz!” Izya howled joyfully. “Explain to this blockhead, will you? You’re a big boss around here—”

“Silence, suspect!” Andrei bellowed, slamming his fist onto the desk.

Izya fell silent and Fritz instantly gathered himself, giving Izya a different kind of look.

“This bastard is treating the investigation with contempt,” Andrei said through his teeth, trying to calm down and stop trembling all over. “This bastard is refusing to talk. Take him, Fritz, make him answer the questions he’s asked.”

Fritz’s transparent Nordic eyes opened wide.

“And just what questions is he being asked?” he inquired with brisk glee.

“That’s not important,” said Andrei. “Give him a piece of paper, he’ll write it himself. And I want him to say what was in the file.”

“Got it,” said Fritz, and turned toward Izya.

Izya still didn’t understand anything. Or he didn’t believe it. He slowly rubbed his hands together and grinned uncertainly.

“Right, then, my Jewish friend, shall we go?” Fitz inquired affectionately. His grim sullenness had disappeared without a trace. “Move it, bucko!”

Izya carried on dragging his feet, and Fritz took hold of his collar, swung him around, and shoved him toward the door. Izya lost his balance and grabbed hold of the doorpost. His face turned white. Now he understood.

“Guys,” he said in a choking voice. “Guys, wait…”

“If anything comes up, we’ll be in the basement,” Fritz purred in velvet tones, smiled at Andrei, and prodded Izya out into the corridor.

That was it. Feeling a repulsive, sickening chill inside him, Andrei walked around the office, turning off the unnecessary lights. That was it. He sat down at the desk and stayed there for a while, with his head lowered into his hands. He was covered in perspiration, as if he were about to faint. His ears were buzzing, and through the buzzing he kept hearing Izya’s soundlessly deafening, desperate, choking voice: “Guys, wait… Guys, wait…” And there was the sound of music solemnly roaring, feet clacking and shuffling across a parquet floor, the clatter of dishes and indistinct mumbling: “A gwass of cuwaçao and some pine-app-uw, quickwy!” He tore his hands away from his face and stared blankly at the drawing of the male sex organ. He took the sheet of paper and started tearing it into long, narrow strips, then threw the paper noodles into the trash basket and buried his face in his hands again. That was it. He had to wait. Summon up his patience and wait. Then everything would be justified. The nauseous feeling would pass off, and he’d be able to breathe a sigh of relief.

“Yes, Andrei, sometimes one even has to resort to this,” he heard a familiar, calm voice say.

Sitting there on the stool where Izya had been sitting only a minute ago, with one leg crossed over the other and his slim white fingers clasped on his knee, gazing at Andrei with a sad, weary expression, was the Mentor. He was nodding gently and the corners of his mouth were dolefully turned down.

“For the sake of the Experiment?” Andrei asked hoarsely.

“For the sake of the Experiment as well,” said the Mentor. “But above all for one’s own sake. There is no way around it. You had to go through this too. We don’t want just any kind of people. We need a special kind of people.”

“What kind?”

“That’s something even we don’t know,” the Mentor said with quiet regret. “We only know the kind of people we don’t need.”

“People like Katzman?”

The Mentor told him yes with just his eyes.

“And people like Ruhmer?”

The Mentor laughed. “People like Ruhmer aren’t people. They’re living weapons, Andrei. By using people like Ruhmer in the name of and for the good of people like Wang, Uncle Yura… you understand?”

“Yes. That’s what I think too. And after all, there isn’t any other way, right?”

“Right. There isn’t any way around it.”

“But what about the Red Building?” Andrei asked.

“We can’t manage without that either. Without that anyone could become like Ruhmer without even realizing. Have you not sensed already that the Red Building is a necessity? Are you really the same as you were this morning?”

“Katzman said the Red Building is the delirious raving of an agitated conscience.”

“Well now, Katzman is smart. I hope you wouldn’t argue with that.”

“Of course not,” said Andrei. “That’s precisely why he’s dangerous.”

Once again the Mentor showed Andrei yes with just his eyes.

“Oh God,” Andrei exclaimed wearily. “If only I could know for certain what the goal of the Experiment is! It’s so easy to get confused, everything’s such a muddle… Me, Heiger, Kensi… Sometimes I think I know what we have in common, but sometimes it’s a kind of blind alley, it’s totally absurd… After all, Heiger is a former fascist, and even now he… Even now I sometimes find him odious—not as an individual, but as a type, as… Or Kensi. He’s something like a social democrat, some kind of pacifist or Tolstoyan… No, I don’t understand.”

“The Experiment is the Experiment,” said the Mentor. “It’s not understanding that is required of you but something quite different.”

“What?”

“If one only knew…”

“But it’s all for the sake of the majority, isn’t it?” Andrei asked, almost in despair.

“Of course,” said the Mentor. “For the sake of the benighted, downtrodden, entirely innocent, ignorant majority…”

“Which must be raised up,” Andrei eagerly put in, “enlightened, and made the master of the Earth! Yes, yes, that I understand. You can go to any lengths for the sake of that…” He paused, agonizingly gathering his scattered thoughts. “And there’s still the Anticity,” he said hesitantly. “And that’s very dangerous, right?”

“Very,” said the Mentor.

“And then, even if I’m not entirely certain about Katzman, I still acted correctly. We have no right to take any risks.”

“Absolutely!” said the Mentor. He was smiling. He was pleased with Andrei; Andrei could sense it. “The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who does nothing. It’s not mistakes that are dangerous—passivity is dangerous, specious fastidiousness is dangerous, devotion to the old commandments is dangerous. Where can old commandments lead? Only to the old world.”

“Yes,” Andrei said excitedly. “I understand that very clearly. That’s exactly what we must all take as our foundation. What is the individual? A social unit! A zero without the digit one. It’s not a matter of the individual units but the public good. In the name of the public good we must be willing to lay any burden, no matter how heavy, on our Old Testament consciences, to transgress all written and unwritten laws. We have only one law: the public good.”

The Mentor stood up. “You’re maturing,” he said almost triumphantly. “Slowly, but you are maturing.”

He raised one hand in salutation, walked soundlessly across the room, and disappeared out the door.

For a while Andrei sat there without thinking, leaning against the back of his chair, smoking and watching the bluish smoke slowly eddying around the yellow lamp hanging from the ceiling. He caught himself smiling. He didn’t feel tired anymore; the sleepiness that had tormented him since the evening had disappeared. He felt an urge to act, to work, and felt annoyed at the thought that anytime now he would have to go and sleep for a few hours anyway, in order not to burn out later.

He pulled the phone toward him with an impatient gesture, lifted the receiver, and then remembered that there was no phone in the basement. He got up, locked the safe, checked that the drawers of the desk were locked, and walked out into the corridor.

The corridor was empty, and the police officer on duty was dozing at his little desk. “You’re asleep at your post!” Andrei remarked reproachfully as he walked by.

The building was filled with a resounding silence, as it always was at this time, a few minutes before the sun was switched on. A sleepy cleaning lady was slowly trailing a damp rag across the concrete floor. The windows in the corridors were wide open; the stinking vapors of hundreds of human bodies crept out into the darkness and dispersed as they were displaced by the cold morning air.

With his heels clattering on the slippery iron stairway, Andrei went down into the basement, gestured casually with his hand for the guard who had jumped to his feet to sit back down, and swung open the low iron door.

Fritz Heiger, with no jacket and the sleeves of his shirt rolled up, was standing beside the rusty washbasin, whistling a little march that Andrei vaguely knew and rubbing his hairy, rawboned hands with eau de cologne. There was no one else in the room.

“Ah, it’s you,” said Fritz. “That’s good. I was just going to come up to see you… Give me a cigarette, I’ve run out.”

Andrei handed him the pack. Fritz pulled out a cigarette, kneaded it, stuck it in his mouth, and looked at Andrei with a smirk on his face.

“Well,” Andrei asked impatiently.

“Well what?” Fritz lit up and dragged on it with relish. “You were way off the mark. He’s no spy, he’s not even—”

“But how come?” said Andrei, stunned. “What about the file?”

Fritz chortled, squeezing the cigarette into the corner of his large mouth, and splashed out more eau de cologne onto his broad palm.

“Our little Jew is a superhuman womanizer,” he said pedantically. “He had love letters in that file. He was on his way from a woman’s place—he’d quarreled with her and taken back his letters. But he’s scared shitless of that widow of his, so being no fool, as you know very well, he tried to get rid of that file at the first convenient moment. He says he dumped it down a manhole in the road… And that’s a great pity!” Fritz continued even more pedantically. “That file, Citizen Investigator, ought to have been confiscated immediately—it would have made grade-one dirt, and we would have had our little Jew by the short and curlies!” Fritz demonstrated where the short and curlies were. Fresh bruises were visible on his knuckles. “But anyway, he signed a little report of interrogation for us, so at least we got a tuft of wool from our mangy sheep.”

Andrei fumbled for a chair and sat down. His legs wouldn’t hold him up. He glanced around again.

“I’ll tell you what,” said Fritz, rolling down his sleeves and fiddling with his cufflinks. “I see you’ve got a bump on your forehead. Now, you go to the doc and get that bump logged. I’ve already broken Ruhmer’s nose and sent him to the infirmary. Just as a precaution. During interrogation the suspect Katzman attacked investigator Voronin and junior investigator Ruhmer, causing them bodily harm. Forced to defend themselves… and so on. Got it?”

“Got it,” Andrei muttered, mechanically feeling at his bump. He looked around again. “But where is… he?” he asked with an effort.

“Ah, that gorilla Ruhmer went overboard again,” Fritz said in annoyance, buttoning up his jacket. “Broke his arm, right here… We had to send him to the hospital.”