The morning turned out gloomy. The after-effects of a hangover? No! Not much had been drunk the night before. Just a trifle. So what was the matter?
I shifted my gaze from Magda, who had woken me, to the clock, and nearly choked with indignation. Half past five in the morning! What a joke! Had I come to a democratic country or to a bastion of totalitarianism? Where is the freedom to sleep? I shall lodge a protest!
I glued my eyelids shut, turned quickly onto my other side and tried to fall asleep. I intended to open my little eyes in three or four hours in a bright, cheerful room, stretch sweetly, ponder this and that, and then screw my eyes up, smiling at the smell of coffee tickling my nostrils, brought to me in bed by the attentive Magda… Bitch! She tore the blanket off and opened the window! What sort of Gestapo attitude to sleepers is that? I’m not the son of Kat the radio operator! As you were!
I leapt out of bed, slammed shut the window that was baring its frosty teeth, and cast about in search of the blanket…
I woke up completely. The blanket was nowhere to be found.
I had to give up on my banished sleep and stomp off to the bathroom to wash.
Over breakfast I watched the silent, sullen Magda and worked out that the moment I had breathed in the intoxicating, not entirely clean air of my native city, a little demon of sloppiness and idleness had taken up residence in me. In seven years of living outside Russia, I had never once been visited by that mixture of dreamy inactivity and blissful indifference. The whole time spent in Germany, I had been a machine programmed to carry out direct and indirect duties. I meekly performed everything that was ordered, everything that was prescribed, everything that had to be done. I was a good machine. I functioned excellently in that system, but something went out of adjustment the moment I got to Moscow.
Had the bacilli of mutiny infected my psychic system? Nonsense.
I am still the same insolent, dogged, single-minded Arbalet, a specialist in delicate matters, a fighter whose powerful torso will shield and shelter him from any calamity.
– So what have we got? – I asked Magda in a businesslike way, having devoured both little sandwiches and drained my cup of coffee.
– Memorise this. A week ago a courier from Russia turned up in Hamburg with samples of a new empathogen. He was looking for buyers for a large consignment and came out on Hans. That’s the setup of the plot. You’ll be doing the resolution. The resolution consists of you finding the laboratory where it’s produced and destroying it. Deadline – three days. As for details, I can give you one. Before his unnatural death the courier reported that the laboratory is at a dacha outside Moscow. He can’t report anything more, as you understand. While I’m getting ready, sit down and think about what you need to carry out the assignment. Time – fifteen minutes.
She got up from the table and went out.
I sat and said nothing. Said nothing for no reason at all. I wasn’t thinking, wasn’t reasoning, wasn’t weighing up what was what. I stared dully out of the window and counted the lights going on in one, two, three… ten windows. People getting ready for work, it’ll be light soon. What the hell is an empathogen?
– Dictate, I’m writing, – the meticulous Magda sprang up in front of me as if out of the ground, notebook in hand.
– First – the exact address of the shack that has to be blown apart. Second – two or three kilos of something with which the said shack can be blown apart. And third – some sort of cart to deliver the second to the first. That’s all.
– The second and third will be here the day after tomorrow. The first you find yourself. Don’t drag out the search. – She hid the notebook in her handbag, having apparently written nothing down. Then she bustled about in the hallway, put on her fur coat, called out to me from there: «Till this evening!» and, slamming the door, left.
I got up from the table, went back to my room, looked out of the window for a couple of minutes, then sat on the little sofa, lay down, tossed about and fell asleep. Heh, six in the morning she decided to wake me, the foreign fool.