“My suit! He’ll tear it!” Morzhuev unexpectedly began to squeal delicately.
The two sergeants and one sergeant-major, snorting with official zeal, moved in and detached Eddy’s feet from the floor. Khavron wisely did not resist the representatives of authority, but did not let go of the grandee’s suit. The red-lipped secretary smiled venomously.
“An imminent prediction, here it is. Tomorrow, the picture Boy with a Sabre will be stolen from the restoration workshop at the Pushkin Museum! It’ll vanish in broad daylight from the guarded premises. The video camera will record nothing. Someone will put a sock on it. A price tag will be on the sock!” Khavron shouted.
Morzhuev stopped straightening his suit and glanced at Eddy with interest. The sergeant-major and both sergeants paused. Eddy was about to cheer up, but Morzhuev’s gaze had already gone out. “Take the furniture away!” he said to the police, turning away.
“Don’t forget about my fee! The address… You didn’t write down the address! I need money!” Khavron shouted, transported carefully at best out the door.
“Everyone needs money! The address will be in the report!” the sergeant-major announced with maternal tenderness.
Chapter 2
A Spirit Pygmy
Eugeny Moshkin, Petruchio Chimodanov, and Nata Vikhrova were sitting in the fireplace hall in 13 Bolshaya Dmitrovka and waiting for the return of Daphne and Methodius, who had gone to the taxidermist for fresh skins for business correspondence. They were bored, and for something to do, Nata began to ask Moshkin and Chimodanov whether they had ever fallen in love.
“Love? For me it’s irrelevant! I haven’t yet achieved anything real. I emphasize! I simply have no time for it,” Petruchio snorted.
“Now you underscore it!” Nata chuckled and raised an eyebrow threateningly.
“BUT! I’m also not very afraid… If your magic works on me, then not for long!” Chimodanov stated.
“Why’s that?”
“I was born on the same day as you. I have primordial immunity to your magic. Julitta told me this… Sooner or later I’ll recover and take vengeance. I’ll send a whole bunch of plasticine killers to you! Thousands of them! They’ll climb out of all crevices and sewers, and each will have a poisoned pin in its hand!”
Nata shivered. “I have had enough of your Zuduka! It always hides in some corner and makes mischief! It recently filled my whole pocket with toothpaste!” she muttered conciliatorily.
Realizing that he had won this round and Nata’s magic would not threaten him, Chimodanov grinned contentedly. “Here’s what I think. The smarter and more complex the creature, the more time passes from the moment of birth to the moment it falls in love. Well, for example, the hamster. It’s all of three months old and it’s already a father. In six months, a grand-dad… But an elephant will have a family only after fifty years.”
“What are you, an elephant? Thanks for admitting it,” Nata remarked mercifully.
“It’s also the same with people,” Petruchio continued, not listening to her. “Some, well, like you, Vikhrova, have already stopped developing at thirteen. And what’s there for them to do next? Unwilling to learn. Too early to lie in a coffin. Still have time to work. The only thing remaining is to fall in love. Those who are smarter, first learn, get settled in life, and then fall in love at around thirty or thirty five. I don’t know why, but it’s always this way.”
Nata looked at Chimodanov through a hole in her fist. “Here’s what I suggest to you,” she purred maliciously. “When would you intend on falling in love? At thirty-five? Why so early? What if you don’t manage? Fall in love at seventy! In the meantime, take mama by the arm and install traffic lights with her.”
Chimodanov could not find an answer, and Nata had already turned to Moshkin, “And you, Gene? Were you ever in love?”
Eugeny moved his lips and glanced hesitantly at her. His answer sounded strange. “Do dreams count?” he asked.
Nata’s jaw dropped like the rating of a politician who accidentally ate a live kitten in front of the camera. “How’s that? You dreamt of someone? Or you were in love in a dream?”
“Why was? I still am,” Moshkin replied seriously and did not answer any more questions, despite all of Nata’s persuasion.
Vikhrova’s curiosity was never satisfied. She had no choice but to stroll around the hall, examining and twirling the occasional knickknacks and black magic protective talismans in her hands.
The hall, recently arranged from nothing in the literal sense by the efforts of Ares with Julitta helping him, was located on the second floor exactly between the student rooms. Four doors faced each other in pairs.
“It’ll be quite good for you here, my chicks! All kinds of trash eternally crowd in reception below. Not a single succubus will poke in here, and I don’t even talk about agents!” Julitta said.
“Shielding runes?” Moshkin asked, having had time to pick up superficial knowledge.
“Nope. Ask her over there!” Julitta said and somehow incomprehensibly looked at Daphne, either approvingly or, on the contrary, defiantly.
Daph smiled modestly. “Just a twig of an Eden beech… I accidentally had it in my backpack and I slipped it under the threshold. Spirits of Gloom can’t stand our plants.”
“And Ares? He allowed it?” Nata asked incredulously.
“Not enough power in a small branch to bother him particularly.”
“So, does he know or not?”
“Not that he knows, and at the same time not that he doesn’t know… Let’s say this: he closes his eyes to small things, because his office is downstairs, and Tukhlomon annoyed him badly…” Julitta announced with a smile.
The aforementioned conversation took place the previous night, and in the morning, Ares and Julitta took off in haste to Tartarus for some celebration connected with the hunchback Ligul. Methodius did not particularly get to the heart of it. Ares said that he would explain everything later. Soon, Methodius and Daph also left. As already said, to the taxidermist.
“I didn’t really have one sneaker, no? Well, this morning?” Moshkin suddenly asked. He had already sat for about three minutes with an unhappy face, gathering courage for this simple question.
“Not one,” Nata assured him.
“You’re sure? Hundred percent?”
“Over two hundred.”
“Then I’ve lost the second one! Did anyone see it anywhere?” Moshkin complained.
“Watch over your goulashes yourself, dearie! I’m not the sultan’s eighteenth wife to you, in charge of shoes,” Nata remarked.
“I did… Took them off for all of a minute, and then…” Eugeny, smiling guiltily and amiably, showed off a foot in a white sock.
“I love looking at other people’s socks! And if I throw up?” Nata asked.
Chimodanov chuckled. As recently as the morning before yesterday he had the opportunity to observe how Nata learned to read a rat’s innards. However, the divination did not go right from the very beginning, according to Julitta’s assertion, because Nata was chewing gum while gutting the dead rat.
“It’s disrespectful. Magic doesn’t like that,” Julitta remarked.
“You think… I don’t care…” Nata said.
Now she was sitting at the table, on which Marie de’ Medici[2] once kept