“Excuse me,” Andrei said angrily. “Where can I find the deputy political consultant?
The heads in the bowler hats lazily turned in his direction. “What do you want him for?” asked the shorter of the two men.
Suddenly this man’s face didn’t seem so very unfamiliar, and neither did his voice. And suddenly it seemed strange and worrying that this man was here. He had no business being here… Andrei stooped down and, trying to speak curtly and resolutely, explained who he was and what he wanted.
“Well, come in, will you?” said the half-familiar man. “Why are you standing in the door like that?”
Andrei stepped inside and looked around, but he didn’t see anything; that smoothly shaved eunuch’s face was hovering in front of his eyes. Where have I seen him before? An unsavory kind of character… and dangerous… I shouldn’t have come in here, I’m just wasting time.
The little man in the bowler hat was studying him intently too. It was quiet. The tall windows were covered with heavy drapes, and the noise from outside barely even reached them in here. The small man in the bowler hat suddenly jumped to his feet and moved right up close to Andrei. His little gray eyes, with almost no lashes, blinked repeatedly, and a massive, gristly Adam’s apple skipped up from the top button of his coat all the way to his chin and slid back down again.
“Senior editor?” said the little man, and at that moment Andrei finally recognized him, and he felt his legs turn numb under him as he realized with paralyzing anguish that he had been recognized too.
The eunuch’s face grinned, revealing sparse, bad teeth, the little man crouched down, and Andrei felt a vicious pain in his belly, as if all his insides had burst, and through the nauseous haze in his eyes he suddenly saw the waxed floor… Run, run… A display of fireworks flared up in his brain, and the dark, distant ceiling, cobwebbed with cracks, started swaying and slowly revolving high above him… White-hot spikes thrust out of the suffocating darkness that had descended on him and jabbed into his ribs… He’ll kill me… he’s going to kill me! Andrei’s head suddenly swelled up and jammed itself into a narrow, stinking crack, skinning his ears, and a thunderous voice kept repeating languidly, “Cool it, Tailbone, cool it, not all at once…” Andrei shouted out with all his might, a thick, warm slush filled his mouth, and he choked on it and puked.
There was no one in the room. The immense drapes had been pulled back, the window was open, there was a draft of damp, cold air, and he could hear a distant roaring. Andrei struggled up onto all fours and crept along the wall. Toward the door. He had to get out of here…
In the corridor Andrei puked again. He lay on the floor for a while in blank, mindless exhaustion, then tried to get up onto his feet. I’m in a bad way, he thought. A really bad way. He sat down and felt at his face, and it was damp and sticky, then he discovered that he could only see with one eye. His ribs hurt and it was hard to breathe. His jaws hurt, and his lower belly was cramped in appalling, unbearable agony. That bastard, Tailbone. He’s maimed me… Andrei burst into tears. He sat on the floor in the empty corridor, leaning back against the gilded flourishes, and cried. He simply couldn’t help himself. Weeping, he tugged up the hem of his raincoat with a struggle and reached in under his trouser belt. The pain was appalling, but not down there, higher up. His entire belly hurt. His shorts were wet.
Someone came running out of the depths of the corridor with his boots thudding heavily and stopped, standing over him. Some policeman—sweaty and red faced, with no cap and bewildered eyes. He stood there for a few seconds as if uncertain what to do, then suddenly went dashing on, and a second policeman came running out of the depths of the corridor, tearing off his tunic as he ran.
And then Andrei realized there was a roaring, multitudinous hubbub coming from the same direction they’d come from. He got up with a struggle and dragged himself toward that hubbub, clinging to the wall, still sobbing, feeling in horror at his face and repeatedly stopping to stand for a while, hunching over and clutching his belly.
He reached the stairway and grabbed at the slippery marble banister. Down below a thick human mush was heaving about in the immense vestibule. It was impossible to understand what was happening. Searchlights installed along the gallery illuminated the mush with a cold, blinding light, and Andrei glimpsed beards of various shapes and sizes, uniform caps, the gold laces of police shoulder knots, fixed bayonets, hands with splayed fingers and pale bald patches, and from all this a warm, moist stench rose up toward the ceiling.
Andrei closed his eyes in order not to see any of it and started moving down, feeling his way, hand over hand, along the banister, advancing any way he could—backward, sideways—not really understanding why he was doing this. He stopped several times to catch his breath and groan, opened his eyes and looked down, and the sight made his agony unbearable again; he squeezed his eyes shut and started moving again, hand over hand along the banister. At the bottom of the stairs his arms finally gave out and he fell and tumbled down the last few steps onto a marble landing decorated with immense bronze spittoons. Through the haze and hubbub he suddenly heard a hoarse, strident roar: “Lookee here, it’s Andriukha! Boys, they’re killing our people up there!” Opening his eyes, Andrei saw Uncle Yura only a short distance away, mussed and disheveled, still in his dilapidated tunic, with his eyes goggling wildly and his beard splayed out, and Andrei saw Uncle Yura raise his machine gun in his outstretched hands, still roaring like a bull, and fire a long burst along the gallery, at the searchlights, at both tiers of windows in the broad hall of the vestibule…
After that there were fragmentary impressions, because consciousness ebbed and flowed together with the ebb and flow of the pain and the nausea. First he found himself at the center of the vestibule and discovered that he was stubbornly crawling on all fours toward the wide-open door in the distance, clambering over motionless bodies, with his hands skidding in something wet and cold. Someone was moaning monotonously right beside him, intoning, “Oh God, oh God, God…” The carpet was thickly strewn with splinters of glass, spent cartridges, and lumps of plaster. Some terrible men with blazing torches in their hands burst in through the open door and ran straight toward him…
Then he came to outside, in the portal. He was sitting there with his legs spread wide, propping himself up with his palms pressed against the cold stone, and there was a rifle with no bolt lying on his knees. He could smell fresh smoke, somewhere on the edge of consciousness a machine gun was roaring, and horses were squealing frantically, and he kept monotonously repeating out loud, hammering the words into his own head: “They’ll trample me to death here, they’re bound to trample me to death…”
But they didn’t trample him. He came to again in the road, at one side of the steps. He was pressing his cheek against the rough granite, a mercury lamp was glowing brightly above his head, the rifle was gone, and it felt as if he didn’t have a body, as if he were suspended in the air with his cheek pressed against the granite, and some kind of grotesque tragedy was being played out on the square in front of him, as if it were a stage.
He saw an armored car hurtling along, clanking and roaring, following the line of streetlamps bordering the square and the ring of interlocked carts and wagons, swinging its machine gun turret from side to side, belching out fire and sending glittering trails spurting right across the square, and there was a horse galloping along in front of the armored car with its head thrown back, dragging its snapped traces. Then suddenly a covered wagon trundled out from among the thick mass of carts, right across the armored car’s path; the horse jerked aside wildly, crashing into a streetlamp, the armored car braked sharply and skidded, and at that moment a tall man in black ran out into the open space, swung his arm, and fell full length on the asphalt. There was a flash of flame under the armored car, a low, rumbling blast, and the entire metal bulk subsided heavily to the rear. The man in black was running again. He rounded the armored car, thrust something into the driver’s observation port, and jumped aside, and then Andrei saw that it was Fritz Heiger, and the observation port was lit up from the inside; there was a loud blast inside the armored car and a long, smoky tongue of flame flew out of the observation port. Moving on half-bent legs, with his long arms stretched right down to the ground, Fritz sidled around the vehicle like a crab, and then the armored door opened and a shaggy bale of something enveloped in flames tumbled out onto the asphalt and started rolling about, howling piercingly and scattering sparks…