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.”