His wife ran into the hall, while Nikanor Ivanovich, with a serving spoon, dragged it, the bone, now cracked along its length, out of the fire-spitting lake. And at that moment into the dining room came two citizens, and with them Pelageya Antonovna, for some reason very pale. One glance at the citizens, and Nikanor Ivanovich turned white as well and stood up.
“Where’s the loo?” asked the first man, concerned, and wearing a traditional white Russian shirt.
Something made a bang on the dining table (Nikanor Ivanovich had dropped the spoon onto the oilcloth).
“Here, here,” Pelageya Antonovna replied rapidly.
And the callers immediately headed for the corridor.
“But what’s the matter?” Nikanor Ivanovich asked quietly, following after the callers. “There can’t be anything untoward in our apartment. And your papers. I’m sorry…”
Without stopping, the first man showed Nikanor Ivanovich his papers, while at that same moment the second proved to be standing on a stool in the lavatory with his arm stuck into the ventilation passage. Nikanor Ivanovich’s eyes grew dim. The newspaper was removed, but in the wad there turned out to be not roubles, but some unknown currency, blue or green, and with pictures of some old man. Nikanor Ivanovich made it all out only vaguely, however, as he had spots of some sort swimming before his eyes.
“Dollars in the ventilation,” the first man said pensively, and asked Nikanor Ivanovich gently and politely: “Your little package?”
“No!” replied Nikanor Ivanovich in a terrible voice. “Planted by enemies!”
“It happens,” he, the first one, agreed, and, once again gently, he added: “Well then, you must hand in the rest.”
“I haven’t got any! I haven’t, I swear to God, I’ve never had them in my hands!” the Chairman exclaimed despairingly.
He rushed to the chest of drawers, pulled out a drawer with a crash, and from it his briefcase, exclaiming incoherently as he did so:
“Here’s the contract… that snake of an interpreter planted them… Korovyev. in the pince-nez!”
He opened the briefcase, looked into it, stuck his hand into it, turned blue in the face and dropped the briefcase into the borsch. There was nothing in the briefcase: not Styopa’s letter, nor the contract, nor the foreigner’s passport, nor the money, nor the complimentary tickets. In short, nothing except a folding measuring rod.
“Comrades!” cried the Chairman in a frenzy. “Arrest them! We’ve got unclean spirits in our building!”
And then at that point Pelageya Antonovna imagined who knows what; she clasped her hands together and exclaimed:
“Confess, Ivanych! You’ll get a reduction!”
With bloodshot eyes, Nikanor Ivanovich brought his fists up above his wife’s head, wheezing:
“Ooh, you damned fool!”
At this point he grew weak and dropped onto a chair, evidently deciding to submit to the inevitable[238].
At the same time, on the staircase landing, Timofei Kondratyevich Kvastsov was pressing first his ear, then his eye to the keyhole of the door of the Chairman’s apartment, racked with curiosity.
Five minutes later, the residents of the building who were in the courtyard saw the Chairman, accompanied by two other persons, proceeding straight towards the gates of the building. They said Nikanor Ivanovich looked awful, that he was staggering like a drunken man as he passed by and was muttering something.
And another hour later, an unknown citizen came to apartment No. 11, at the very time when Timofei Kondratyevich was panting with pleasure as he told some other residents how the Chairman had been swept away; he beckoned with his finger for Timofei Kondratyevich to come out of the kitchen into the hall, said something to him, and together they disappeared.
10. News from Yalta
At the time misfortune overtook Nikanor Ivanovich, in the office of the Financial Director of the Variety, Rimsky, not far from No. 302 bis and on that same Sadovaya Street, there were two men: Rimsky himself, and the Variety’s manager, Varenukha.
The large office on the first floor of the theatre looked out onto Sadovaya from two windows, and from another – right behind the back of the Financial Director, who was sitting at the desk – onto The Variety’s summer garden, where there were refreshment bars, a shooting gallery and an open-air stage. The office’s furnishing, besides the desk, consisted of a bundle of old playbills hanging on the wall, a small table with a carafe of water, four armchairs and a stand in a corner on which there stood an ancient dust-covered model of some revue. Well, and it goes without saying that, apart from all that, there was in the office a battered, peeling, fireproof safe of small size, to Rimsky’s lefthand side, next to the desk.
Rimsky, sitting at the desk, had been in a bad frame of mind since first thing in the morning, while Varenukha, in contrast, had been very animated and active in an especially restless sort of way. Yet at the same time there had been no outlet for his energy.
Varenukha was now hiding in the Financial Director’s office from the people seeking complimentary tickets, who made his life a misery, particularly on days when the programme changed. And today was just such a day.
As soon as the telephone started ringing, Varenukha would pick up the receiver and lie into it:
“Who? Varenukha? He’s not here. He’s left the theatre.”
“Will you please ring Likhodeyev again,” said Rimsky irritably.
“But he isn’t at home. I sent Karpov earlier. There’s nobody at the apartment.”
“The devil knows what’s going on,” hissed Rimsky, clicking away on the adding machine.
The door opened, and an usher dragged in a thick bundle of newly printed additional playbills. On the green sheets, in large red letters, was printed:
TODAY AND EVERY DAY
AT THE VARIETY THEATRE
AN ADDITION TO THE PROGRAMME
PROFESSOR WOLAND
PERFORMANCES OF BLACK MAGIC
WITH ITS COMPLETE EXPOSURE
Stepping back from the playbill he had thrown over the model, Varenukha admired it for a moment and ordered the usher to have all copies pasted up immediately.
“It’s good, garish,” remarked Varenukha after the usher’s departure.
“Well, I find this undertaking displeasing in the extreme,” grumbled Rimsky, casting malicious looks at the playbill through horn-rimmed spectacles, “and in general I’m surprised he’s been allowed to put it on!”
“No, Grigory Danilovich, you can’t say that: it’s a very shrewd move. The whole point here is the exposure.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know, there’s no point here at all, and he’ll always go thinking up something of the sort! He could at least have shown us this magician. You, have you seen him? Where he dug him up from the devil only knows!”
It transpired that Varenukha, just like Rimsky, had not seen the magician. The day before, Styopa had come running (“like a madman” in Rimsky’s expression) to the Financial Director with a draft agreement already written, had ordered him there and then to copy it out and to issue the money. And this magician had cleared off[239], and nobody had seen him except Styopa himself.
Rimsky took out his watch, saw that it said five past two, and flew into an absolute fury. Really! Likhodeyev had rung at about eleven o’clock, said he would be arriving in half an hour, and not only had he not arrived, he had also