“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?