“Reveille,” Andrei said wearily.
The Mute opened his eyes and got up. Izya raised his head and looked at Andrei through swollen eyebrows.
“Where’s Pak?” Andrei asked, looking around.
Izya sat up, sank his hooked fingers into his mop of hair, and started scratching furiously. “Daaamn…” he mumbled in a thick voice. “Listen, I’m desperately hungry… How long can this last?”
“We’ll leave straightaway,” Andrei told him, still looking around. “Where’s Pak?”
“Gontolibry,” Izya replied, yawning fervently. “Ah, yuck, I’m totally wasted, dammit…”
“Where did he go?”
“He went to the library.” Izya jumped to his feet, picked up his small volume, and started stuffing it into his rucksack. “We decided that he’d go and select some books in the meantime. What time is it now? Seems like my watch has stopped…”
Andrei glanced at his own watch. “Three,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“Maybe we could eat first?” Izya tentatively suggested.
“As we walk,” said Andrei. He had a vaguely uneasy feeling. Something was bothering him. Something was wrong. He took the automatic from the Mute, narrowed his eyes, and strode out onto the incandescent steps.
“That’s just great…” Izya grumbled behind him. “Now we eat on the move. I waited for him, like an honest man, and he won’t even let me eat right… Hey, Mute, hand me that rucksack…”
Andrei walked quickly between the pediments, without looking back. He was hungry too, his insides felt sore, but something urged him to keep moving, and move fast. He arranged the strap of his automatic more comfortably on his shoulder and glanced rapidly at his watch again. It was still one minute to three. His watch had stopped.
“Hey, Mr. Counselor!” Izya called to him. “Take this.”
Andrei stopped for a moment and accepted two hard biscuits with a filling of fatty canned pork. Izya was already zestfully crunching and chomping. Andrei examined his sandwich as he walked along, trying to see which side would be most convenient to bite on, and asked, “When did Pak leave?”
“Well, he went almost immediately,” Izya said with his mouth full. “The two of us looked over the Pantheon, and we didn’t find anything interesting, so he set off.”
“That was wrong,” said Andrei. He’d realized what was worrying him.
“What was wrong?”
Andrei didn’t answer.
4
There was no sign of Pak in the library. Of course; he was never intending to come in here. The books were still lying in a heap, exactly like before.
“Strange,” said Izya, turning his head this way and that in bewilderment. “He said he was going to pick out everything on sociology.”
“He said, he said,” Andrei growled through his teeth. He kicked the nearest plump volume with the toe of his shoe, turned around, and ran down the stairs. “So he outfoxed us after all. Cunning old slant-eye outfoxed us. The Jew of the Far East…” Andrei didn’t really understand what the Jew of the Far East had done that was so cunning, but every fiber of his being cried out that he had been outfoxed.
Now they stuck close to the walls as they walked along—Andrei on the right side of the street and the Mute, who had also realized things were looking ugly, on the left. Izya tried to set out straight down the middle, but Andrei yelled at him so fiercely that the archivist immediately dashed back and fell in behind him, walking with him step for step, sniffing in indignation and scornfully snorting. The visibility was about fifty meters; beyond that the street looked as if it were submerged in an aquarium, with everything blurred and trembling, shimmering and glimmering—waterweed even seemed to be rippling above the surface of the road.
When they drew level with the movie theater, the Mute suddenly stopped. Andrei, who was watching him out of the corner of his eye, stopped too. The Mute stood there motionless, as if he were listening to something, clutching his naked machete in his lowered hand.
“I smell burning,” Izya in a low voice behind Andrei.
And Andrei immediately caught the smell of burning too. That’s it, he thought, gritting his teeth.
The Mute raised the hand holding the machete, gestured along the street, and moved on. They covered another two hundred meters or so, taking every possible precaution. The burning smell grew stronger—a cocktail of hot metal, smoldering rags, diesel oil, and some other sweetish, almost appetizing odors. What happened back there? Andrei thought, gritting his teeth so hard he heard his temples crack. What have they gone and done? he repeated over and over in his anguish. What’s burning back there? Because that’s where the burning is, no doubt about it… And at that moment he saw Pak.
He immediately thought it was Pak because the body was wearing the familiar jacket of faded blue denim twill. No one else in the camp had a jacket like that. The Korean was lying on the corner of the street, with his legs sprawled out and his head lowered onto his short-barreled, handmade automatic. The short barrel was pointing along the street in the direction of the camp. Pak looked unusually fat, as if he’d been inflated, and his hands were a glossy bluish-black.
Before Andrei could even grasp what he was really seeing, Izya shoved him aside with a strange croaking sound and trampled on Andrei’s feet as he darted across the intersection and went down on his knees beside the dead body.
Andrei gulped and looked toward the Mute, who was nodding emphatically and pointing to something up ahead with his machete. Andrei spotted another body up there, at the very limit of visibility—someone else fat and black was lying there. And now through the haze Andrei caught sight of an image, distorted by refraction—a column of gray smoke rising up over the roofs.
Lowering his automatic, Andrei cut across the intersection. Izya had already gotten up off his knees, and when Andrei got close, he realized why: the body in the light blue denim twill exuded an unbearable, sickly sweet odor.
“My God…” said Izya, turning his dead face, streaming with sweat, toward Andrei. “They killed him, the scum… All of them together aren’t worth even his little finger…”
Andrei glanced down briefly at the ghastly, bloated puppet with a black, gaping wound where the back of its head ought to be. The sun glinted dully on a scattering of copper cartridge cases. Andrei walked around Izya and cut slantwise across the street, no longer hiding or stooping over, toward the next bloated puppet and the Mute, who was already squatting down beside it.
This one was lying on his back, and although his face was appallingly swollen and black, Andrei recognized him: it was one of the geologists, Quejada’s deputy for surveying work, Ted Kaminski. It seemed especially horrible that he was dressed in nothing but his shorts and, for some strange reason, a wadded jacket like the drivers wore. He had obviously been shot from behind, and the burst of gunfire had passed right through him—on his chest the jacket was peppered with holes, with clumps of gray wadding sticking out of them. An automatic rifle with no ammunition clip was lying about five steps away.
The Mute touched Andrei on the shoulder and pointed ahead, to where there was another body, doubled up and huddled against the wall on the right side of the street. It turned out to be Permyak. He had obviously been shot in the middle of the street—there was still a dried-out black patch on the cobblestones there—but in his agony he had crept over to the wall, leaving a thick black trail behind him, and died with his head tucked down, clutching his bullet-shredded stomach in his arms with every last ounce of strength.