It seemed to Rimsky that the light of the desk lamp was going out and the desk was tilting. An icy wave engulfed Rimsky, but — fortunately for him - he got control of himself and did not fall. He had enough strength left to whisper, but not cry out:
‘Help ...’
Varenukha, guarding the door, hopped up and down by it, staying in air for a long time and swaying there. Waving his hooked fingers in Rimsky’s direction, he hissed and smacked, winking to the girl in the window.
She began to hurry, stuck her red-haired head through the vent, reached her arm down as far as she could, her nails clawing at the lower latch and shaking the frame. Her arm began to lengthen, rubber-like, and became covered with a putrid green. Finally the dead woman’s green fingers got hold of the latch knob, turned it, and the frame began to open. Rimsky cried out weakly, leaned against the wall, and held his briefcase in front of him like a shield. He realized that his end had come.
The frame swung wide open, but instead of the night’s freshness and the fragrance of the lindens, the smell of a cellar burst into the room. The dead woman stepped on to the window-sill. Rimsky clearly saw spots of decay on her breast.
And just then the joyful, unexpected crowing of a cock came from the garden, from that low building beyond the shooting gallery where birds participating in the programme were kept. A loud, trained cock trumpeted, announcing that dawn was rolling towards Moscow from the east.
Savage fury distorted the girl’s face, she emitted a hoarse oath, and at the door Varenukha shrieked and dropped from the air to the floor.
The cock-crow was repeated, the girl clacked her teeth, and her red hair stood on end. With the third crowing of the cock, she turned and flew out. And after her, jumping up and stretching himself horizontally in the air, looking like a flying cupid, Varenukha slowly floated over the desk and out the window.
White as snow, with not a single black hair on his head, the old man who still recently had been Rimsky rushed to the door, undid the catch, opened the door, and ran hurtling down the dark corridor. At the turn to the stairs, moaning with fear, he felt for the switch, and the stairway lighted up. On the stairs the shaking, trembling old man fell because he imagined that Varenukha had softly tumbled on top of him.
Having run downstairs, Rimsky saw a watchman asleep on a chair by the box office in the lobby. Rimsky stole past him on tiptoe and slipped out the main entrance. Outside he felt slightly better. He recovered his senses enough to realize, clutching his head, that his hat had stayed behind in the office.
Needless to say, he did not go back for it, but, breathless, ran across the wide street to the opposite comer by the movie theatre, near which a dull reddish light hovered. In a moment he was there. No one had time to intercept the cab.
‘Make the Leningrad express, I’ll tip you well,’ the old man said, breathing heavily and clutching his heart.
‘I’m going to the garage,’ the driver answered hatefully and turned away.
Then Rimsky unlatched his briefcase, took out fifty roubles, and handed them to the driver through the open front window.
A few moments later, the rattling car was flying like the wind down Sadovoye Ring. The passenger was tossed about on his seat, and in the fragment of mirror hanging in front of the driver, Rimsky saw now the driver’s happy eyes, now his own insane ones.
Jumping out of the car in front of the train station, Rimsky cried to the first man he saw in a white apron with a badge:
‘First class, single, I’ll pay thirty,’ he was pulling the banknotes from his briefcase, crumpling them, ‘no first class, get me second ... if not - a hard bench!’
The man with the badge kept glancing up at the lighted clock face as he tore the banknotes from Rimsky’s hand.
Five minutes later the express train disappeared from under the glass vault of the train station and vanished clean away in the darkness. And with it vanished Rimsky.
CHAPTER 15
Nikanor Ivanovich’s Dream
It is not difficult to guess that the fat man with the purple physiognomy who was put in room 119 of the clinic was Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy.
He got to Professor Stravinsky not at once, however, but after first visiting another place.[91] Of this other place little remained in Nikanor Ivanovich’s memory. He recalled only a desk, a bookcase and a sofa.
There a conversation was held with Nikanor Ivanovich, who had some sort of haze before his eyes from the rush of blood and mental agitation, but the conversation came out somehow strange, muddled, or, better to say, did not come out at all.
The very first question put to Nikanor Ivanovich was the following-.
‘Are you Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, chairman of the house committee at no. 302-bis on Sadovaya Street?’
To this Nikanor Ivanovich, bursting into terrible laughter, replied literally thus:
‘I’m Nikanor, of course I’m Nikanor! But what the deuce kind of chairman am I?’
‘Meaning what?’ the question was asked with a narrowing of eyes.
‘Meaning,’ he replied, ‘that if I was chairman, I should have determined at once that he was an unclean power! Otherwise — what is it? A cracked pince-nez, all in rags ... what kind of foreigner’s interpreter could he be?’
‘Who are you talking about?’ Nikanor Ivanovich was asked.
‘Koroviev!’ Nikanor Ivanovich cried out. ‘Got himself lodged in our apartment number fifty. Write it down — Koroviev! He must be caught at once. Write it down — the sixth entrance. He’s there.’
‘Where did you get the currency?’ Nikanor Ivanovich was asked soulfully.
‘As God is true, as God is almighty,’ Nikanor Ivanovich began, ‘he sees everything, and it serves me right. I never laid a finger on it, never even suspected what it was, this currency! God is punishing me for my iniquity,’ Nikanor Ivanovich went on with feeling, now buttoning, now unbuttoning his shirt, now crossing himself. ‘I took! I took, but I took ours, Soviet money! I’d register people for money, I don’t argue, it happened. Our secretary Bedsornev is a good one, too, another good one! Frankly speaking, there’s nothing but thieves in the house management ... But I never took currency!’
To the request that he stop playing the fool and tell how the dollars got into the ventilation, Nikanor Ivanovich went on his knees and swayed, opening his mouth as if he meant to swallow a section of the parquet.
‘If you want,’ he mumbled, ‘I’ll eat dirt that I didn’t do it! And Koroviev - he’s the devil!’
All patience has its limits, and the voice at the desk was now raised, hinting to Nikanor Ivanovich that it was time he began speaking in human language.
Here the room with that same sofa resounded with Nikanor Ivanovich’s wild roaring, as he jumped up from his knees:
‘There he is! There, behind the bookcase! He’s grinning! And his pince-nez ... Hold him! Spray the room with holy water!’
The blood left Nikanor Ivanovich’s face. Trembling, he made crosses in the air, rushing to the door and back, intoned some prayer, and finally began spouting sheer gibberish.
It became perfectly clear that Nikanor Ivanovich was unfit for any conversation. He was taken out and put in a separate room, where he calmed down somewhat and only prayed and sobbed.
They did, of course, go to Sadovaya and visit apartment no. 50. But they did not find any Koroviev there, and no one in the house either knew or had seen any Koroviev. The apartment occupied by the late Berlioz, as well as by the Yalta-visiting Likhodeev, was empty, and in the study wax seals hung peacefully on the bookcases, unbroken by anyone. With that they left Sadovaya, and there also departed with them the perplexed and dispirited secretary of the house management, Bedsornev.
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