Another month went by, and I finally went off my head from physical training. One morning I set off for the bank to draw the next hundred for daily living, made out a check, and suddenly felt that something was happening to me. Very vividly I imagined myself an exceedingly important personage loaded to the gunwales with precious stones. Rubies, sapphires, emeralds and diamonds clinked in my pockets, spilled through the holes onto the floor and scattered in bright splashes in all directions.
Help! Valuables are being lost!
In a state of somnambulism I darted over to the nearest clerk and asked him to accept a few things for safekeeping. The clerk turned out to be an elderly man who had seen a thing or two and eaten more than one dog behind his little desk. He silently ran his eyes over my physiognomy and hmphed something into his mustache. Evidently he was reckoning what valuables a visitor in shorts and a singlet might have.
The vision vanished at once.
I came to myself. What now?
The answer is simple: if you call yourself a mushroom, get into the basket.
Having dealt with a second’s confusion, I quickly put on honest eyes and a broad smile. Chee-eese! The clerk, parting the corners of his lips, sent back a piece of cheese of his own. Then, hiding his skepticism in his drooping mustache, he announced the tariff. Twenty dollars a month for a «Standard» box. «Medium» would cost thirty dollars, and «Maximum»… I did not hear the establishment’s rates out to the end. With a nod of the head I agreed to everything I’d heard – «Standard will do» – informed him of my account number and laid my passport on the desk.
The señor lazily slapped at the computer keyboard with his index finger, checked the passport, stuck his crooked nose into the monitor and lit up like a new quarter. Contact! The figure denoting the balance of funds in my account exceeded two hundred thousand and produced in the bank employee enthusiasm and a surge of vital energy.
The señor started hammering the computer keys like Anka the machine-gunner. Ratatat-tat… Debiting twenty bucks from the account, apparently, the first month’s rent. Then with youthful nimbleness he extracted a ledger from a cabinet, opened it and entered something with one long flourish. Then he flew off his chair and, with the ledger under his arm – kindly follow me, mister! – led me at a brisk pace into the vault.
The vault was located directly behind the wall of the banking hall.
It was a room four meters by ten with a low vaulted ceiling and artificial lighting. There were no windows. Along the walls stood twenty racks of fifteen standard boxes each, and eight racks of nonstandard ones. Two little locks on every box. Working with a crowbar, you could manage it in four hours… Then again, a crowbar wouldn’t get purchase, you’d need picks, that would take longer… Halt! And what if the racks were carried out unnoticed? Nonsense!…
I decisively drove off the swarm of little thoughts that had flown in out of a past two years old. I had no intention of touching anything here for the time being.
The señor meanwhile exchanged a couple of words with the attendant sitting at a desk by the entrance and received some small piece of ironmongery from him. Then he went deeper into the room, over to the racks by the far wall. There he glanced into his ledger, ran his eyes about and pointed inquiringly at a box level with his own belt. Did the location of the box suit the mister? It suited me. Couldn’t be better. The señor hitched up his impressive little belly and poked the piece of iron he’d taken from the guard into the box’s right-hand keyhole. “Master key,” he explained. “The box opens with two keys. One will be kept by you. With the second key the guard will open the box in your presence. Clients have no access to the master key. Those are the rules.”
Understood. I had no objection.
The señor drew the box out of the rack, took the key from inside it and handed it to me. In exchange he received my autograph in the ledger and – Always at your service! – withdrew. I, thoroughly dumbfounded, remained standing where I was. The key in my hand was the blood brother of the one Anyuta had kept in her handbag.
One riddle fewer. Anechka had a personal box in the vault. What could she have kept in it? Money? Contraceptives? Love letters? Or, after all, the seal the villains were hunting for? As they say, guess in four tries.
I fell to thinking again. By my reckoning there were more than four hundred boxes in the vault. How to find the one I wanted? By simple trial and error, shoving Anechka’s key into every keyhole in a row? It seems to me the bank staff would start objecting within the hour, and probably sooner. Other measures were needed, more intellectual ones. A raid, for instance.
My hands began to itch in the familiar way. And how! A deserted square in the middle of a little town. At the entrance a guard loafing with a rusty «Beretta» in his holster. Half a dozen clerks peaceably wearing out their trousers in the banking hall. And the most peaceable man in the whole bank quietly dozing six meters away from me, sitting at a little desk with his head drooping, snuffling. And nobody else! Nobody!!!
As you were!
We shall act in a civilized manner, without bloodsheddings and face-beatings, as Romanych would say if he were an elderly Negro who had gone and learned Russian after all. All the more so since the fellow guarding the bank entrance was an old friend of Ted’s. The friend of my friend is my friend.
I put the box back in place without putting anything into it, and locked it. Then I glanced around. The attendant went on snuffling. I stuck my key into the keyhole of a box picked at random and pushed it back and forth. No result: nothing creaked or clanked in the lock. The box, naturally, did not open. I pulled out the key and reckoned it had taken six or seven seconds. Rather a lot. Dropping the key into my pocket, I went over to the attendant and gave him a light shove on the shoulder. He started up:
– What is it?
– Buenos dias, amigo, – I held out my broad palm to him.
– Hi.
In short, we got acquainted in a moment. We had seen each other before from a distance, on the beach. It seemed the time had come to communicate more closely. I introduced myself as Cowboy from the «Sunny Club» and invited him to the disco where the DJ is Mark, meaning Ted the auto mechanic. «Everybody knows him, a mug six by nine,» I reminded him, spreading my arms wide. The attendant, whose name turned out to be Miguel, remembered mighty Ted at once and started nodding: «I know him, I know him.»
Building on my success, I reminded him that their bank’s guard was Ted’s closest buddy.
– Know him too, – the knowledgeable Miguel went on nodding.
– There you go, the two of you crawl over to the dance together, we’ll have a proper time of it! We’ll be waiting!
And on that we parted.