By now he was so heavy he no longer wished to bear the weight of his own body. Since the time he had accidentally stepped on the Chinese lapdog and killed it, hired porters carried him everywhere, along with the upholstered armchair in which he spent his time from morning till late at night. At one in the afternoon he would be brought to the restaurant of the Hotel Angleterre to have lunch. He was taken from there around three, even heavier than before, and transported to the theater, though not through the lobby, as he didn’t like to go that way, but instead through the side entrance that led to the dressing rooms. Dripping with sweat, the men lifted him and his chair up the narrow creaking stairs.
“Don’t tip it!” Rauch would shout when they stumbled on the cramped landings. Half dead from the strain, they carried him onto the apron, where he could direct a rehearsal of the new program as he finally dozed in peace. The porters would sit in the back row. Heads leaning against the back of the seat and mouths gaping open, they would catch some rest before their evening-time exertions: they had to endlessly move the armchair around the billiard table at Corelli’s café so Rauch could play his daily round with the chief of police.
During this time the police were taking an interest in the local bureau of an American typewriter company, which was located in the Hotel Angleterre. There was an office and also a storeroom; locked cases were stacked against the walls, people came and went, packages were brought in and taken away. During their morning rounds the maids would sweep up flax fibers and a dull-colored powder. The bureau manager was missing part of his ear and also three fingers on his right hand, which according to the police must have made it difficult for him to demonstrate the merits of the American typewriters. A search warrant was obtained, and the door of the room was broken down. The manager was sitting at the table in a dirty undershirt, a watchmaker’s magnifying glass in hand, tinkering with the innards of a music box.
“What’s all this, can’t a man take a look inside a music box?” he asked in a tearful voice. But he consented to open each case one by one. They contained brand-new, gleaming Remington typewriters. The invoices and licenses were in order. The Remington man giggled and offered the policemen American cigarettes. They each took one for later and set to work. They patted armchairs, moved wardrobes, crawled under the bed, while he blew perfect smoke rings that rose all the way up to the ceiling, and expressed mocking sympathy for the difficult lot of the copper. Despite everything they persevered. Their labors were rewarded — aside from a dozen or more dismantled music boxes lying around in disarray, they found an entire collection of flintlock pistols. They removed the weapons one by one from a hiding place behind the stove, each wrapped carefully in rags soaked in grease. The Remington man stopped joking around; the cigarette fell from his hand.
“Let’s go, Mr. Rączka,” the policemen exclaimed as they propelled him toward the door. In the hotel it was expected that the arrested man would immediately hang, but this did not come about. Someone swore they’d heard from a reliable source that the forensic experts split their sides laughing at the sight of von Treckow’s flintlocks. Before Adaś Rączka was released, a bomb exploded at the police station, tearing the chief of police himself to pieces. He did not exactly look good.
The Remington company’s hotel bill went unpaid. The desk clerk sold typewriters left and right under the counter. Mr. Lapidus preferred not to know anything about it. For at this time he was expecting a visit from Prince Belorukov-Mukhin. The prince, as his assistant had informed Lapidus by letter, desired to see the places where Natalie Zugoff had stayed, and to this end planned to sail to Stitchings from Buenos Aires on board the British liner the Commonwealth. But when this white craft, adorned with the flags of all the countries in the world, pulled into port, it transpired that neither the prince nor his assistant was on board, and the hotel automobile came back empty. An Argentine by the name of Pedro Alvarez walked from the port on foot, bowed under the weight of tripods and cameras. At the hotel he referred to the reservation made by the prince. According to the letter he presented at the reception desk, he was Prince Belorukov-Mukhin’s private photographer.
“Oh yes, prince have everything private,” he assured them in broken German. To compensate the proprietor of the hotel for his failure to appear, the prince had sent him a large portrait photograph in a gilt frame, signed with a flourish. He looked down from it with one bulging, lascivious eye. The other was covered with a black patch like a pirate’s.
Pedro Alvarez took a nail and a small hammer from his traveling case and personally hung the prince’s portrait over the reception desk, after which he showed them a Spanish-language newspaper in which, though they could not understand a word, they all could see the name of Natalie Zugoff outlined in mourning black.
“Funeral lovely as wedding,” the photographer recounted. “Was band, crowds, gold coffin, all covered in flowers white as snow, everyone cry.”
The proprietor of the hotel, perspiring and pale, had to ask whether Natalie Zugoff had really died in Buenos Aires.
“Oh no, she never come Buenos Aires. Prince long for her. Prince bury his longing.”
The photographer was in a hurry. He was immediately given access to Natalie Zugoff’s room, where, attended by the hotel staff, he set up his tripod and mounted on it a box with a glass lens that protruded like Prince Belorukov-Mukhin’s one eye. The shutter snapped over and again, preserving on negatives, from every possible angle, the bed piled with gowns.
“Prince, he love detail,” explained the photographer. Then he disappeared into the theater dressing room, amid still lifes of dried roses, tubs of powder, and tubes of lipstick. He concluded his work by taking pictures of the streets of Stitchings. Narrow and rather dark, they required long exposures. On the negatives the passersby left barely visible blurs; in places the semitransparent figure of a shopkeeper would appear in an open doorway, arms folded, his presence having been too brief to leave a clearer trace.
The people with whom Natalie Zugoff had had dealings in Stitchings were of no interest whatsoever to the prince. When the hotel maids pestered the photographer, to begin with he couldn’t understand what they wanted, but when he finally realized, he granted their request. He stayed up all night developing pictures in a dark closet with the help of the pharmacist’s boy. Just before he left he went down to the reception desk with a large group portrait still bearing the smell of reagents that was unsettling as the passing of time. The entire staff gathered in a moment, everyone wanted to see. In the back row they examined the figures of the desk clerk and the messengers, caps in hand, staring gravely straight at the camera. In the middle row the bellhops sat stiffly on chairs, their mouths curled in sneers, while at the bottom of the picture the maids assumed the poses of grand ladies.
The work was concluded; the evidence the prince had wanted was locked in a small black valise, the cameras and tripods were loaded into the hotel automobile alongside the huge pile of Natalie Zugoff’s cases. On the way to the port the axles broke. The police wrote a report. As the doctor was stitching the passenger’s injured forehead, the Commonwealth was pulling out to sea, its decks empty. It could still be seen far off as it made its way over the waves, smoke trailing from its chimney stacks. Pedro Alvarez’s return ticket was no longer valid. He sent a telegram to Buenos Aires. The reply came promptly: the prince requested above all that the black valise and its contents be mailed to him. But instead of doing so, Pedro Alvarez began furiously studying the train timetables and the brochures of the shipping lines. He kept them at hand on his bedside table; he made notes in the margins, staining the bedsheets with ink. He slept till noon. The chubby-cheeked maids would sit on his bed in their lace aprons.