OUR ROLE
Petersburg streets possess one indubitable quality: they transform passersby into shadows.
This we have seen in the case of the mysterious stranger.
Having arisen as a thought, he somehow became connected with the senator’s house. He surfaced there on the prospect, immediately following the senator in our story.
From the intersection to that restaurant on Millionnaya Street† we have obligingly described the route of the stranger as far as that notorious word “suddenly,”† which interrupted everything.
Let us investigate his soul. But first, let us investigate that restaurant, and even the vicinity of that restaurant. There are grounds for this.
In the investigation that we have quite naturally undertaken, we have merely anticipated Senator Ableukhov’s desire that an agent of the secret police† should doggedly follow the steps of the stranger. While the insouciant agent is still inactive back in his office, we ourselves will be this agent.
But haven’t we made fools of ourselves? Now what sort of agent are we? The real one does exist. And he’s on the alert, so help me, he is.
When the stranger disappeared through the doors of that restaurant, we turned and spied two silhouettes cutting through the fog. One was both fat and tall and conspicuous for his build. But we could not make out his face (silhouettes, after all, have no faces). And yet we did discern an open umbrella and galoshes and a hat, half sealskin, with ear-flaps.
The mangy little figure of an utterly undersized gentleman was what largely comprised the second silhouette. His face was visible: we did not manage to see his face, for we were astonished by the enormous size of a wart. Thus facial substance had been obscured by insolent accidentality (which is as it should be in the world of shadows).
Pretending to be looking into the clouds, we let the indistinct pair pass ahead. The pair paused in front of the restaurant door.
“Hmmm?”
“Here. . . .”
“That’s what I thought.”
“What measures have you taken?”
“I’ve placed a man there, inside the restaurant.”
***
“Hmmm . . . I’ll have to . . . Hmmm! . . . wish you success. . . .”
The undertaking had been set like a clock mechanism.
“Hmmmm?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Damned head cold.”
“Listen: you should accept some remuneration. . . .”
“No, you just won’t understand me!”
“Yes, I will: you’re definitely out of handkerchiefs.”
“What?”
“But you have a cold!”
“I’m not working for remuneration: I am an artist!”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“What?”
“I’m using the tallow candle cure.”
The little figure took out its snotty handkerchief:
“Be sure to report it: Nikolai Apollonovich has given a promise. . . .”
“A tallow candle is a wonderful remedy!”
“Tell them everything!”
“At night you smear your nostrils with it and in the morning you’re fit as a fiddle.”
Again the handkerchief began its work beneath the wart. The two shadows were already flowing off into the brain-chilling murk. Soon the shadow of the fat man reemerged from the fog, and looked distractedly at the spire of Peter and Paul.†
And it went into that restaurant.
AND BESIDES, THE FACE GLISTENED
“Suddenlys” are familiar to you. Why, then, do you bury your head like an ostrich at the approach of the inexorable “suddenly”?
“It” sneaks up behind your back. Sometimes it even precedes your appearance in a room. You feel horribly uneasy. In your back grows the sensation that a gang of things invisible has shoved its way in through your back, as through a door. You turn, you ask your hostess:
“Madam, would you mind if I close the door? I have a peculiar kind of nervous sensation: I can’t bear to sit with my back to the door.”
They laugh. You also laugh: as if there were no “suddenly.”
“It” feeds on cerebral play. It gladly devours all vileness of thought. And it swells up, while you melt like a candle. “Suddenly,” like a fattened yet unseen dog, begins to precede you, producing in an observer the impression that you are screened from view by an invisible cloud. This is what your “suddenly” is.
***
We left the stranger in that restaurant. Suddenly he turned around. It seemed to him that slime had gotten under his collar and had begun to ooze. He turned around. But there was nobody behind his back. And from there, from the door, something invisible shoved its way in.
At that very moment when my stranger turned away from the door, an unpleasant fat man came in through it. And as he walked toward the stranger, he set a floorboard creaking. His yellowish, clean-shaven face, inclined slightly to the side, smoothly floated on its own double chin. And besides, the face glistened.
At this point our stranger turned around. The person was waving a hat at him, half sealskin, with ear-flaps:
“Alexander Ivanych . . .”
“Lippanchenko!”†
Round the person’s shirt collar was a necktie, satin-red, loud, and fastened with a large paste jewel. A dark yellow striped suit enveloped the person. Polish gleamed on his yellow shoes.
Taking a seat at the stranger’s table, the person yelled:
“A pot of coffee! And listen, some cognac. My bottle’s there, under my . . .”
And around them was heard:
“What about you? Did you have something to drink?”
“I did.”
“Something to eat?”
“I did.”
“Then permit me to say you’re a pig.”
***
“Careful!” exclaimed the stranger. The fat man, called Lippanchenko by the stranger, was about to set his dark yellow elbow on the sheet of newspaper covering the bundle.
“What?” Here Lippanchenko, lifting the paper, saw the bundle. His lips quivered.
“Is that the . . . the? . . .”
His lips still quivered, resembling pieces of sliced salmon,† not yellowish red, but oily and yellow.
“How careless you are, Alexander Ivanovich, if I do say so.” Lippanchenko reached his clumsy thick fingers toward the bundle, all aglitter with the fake stones of his rings, all swollen, nails gnawed (and on the nails showed dark traces of brown dye, of a color identical to that of his hair; an attentive observer could draw the conclusion: why, this person dyes his hair).
“After all, the slightest movement (if I’d just set down my