I paid off the taxi driver and looked at my watch. Seventeen hundred and change. I walked up to the armored door of the other day and pressed the bell.
– Who are you here for? – the door asked in its nasty electric voice.
– Okunsky. My surname is Markin. I should be on the list.
– One moment.
The door swung open and I came nose to nose with yesterday’s guard, the third one, who had sat at the desk without stirring. In accordance with my fine calculation, he did not recognize me. He let me in and asked:
– Do you know the way?
I nodded silently and headed straight for the third floor. The facilities manager’s office, and the man himself, who darted past me, were of no interest to me. The room with the male profile on the door – that was where I was making for. Having reached my goal, unrecognized by anyone, attracting nobody’s attention, I looked around. The stalls, standing wide open, demonstrated the absence of undesirable persons.
I took off my glasses, went over to the window and examined it. Nothing outstanding. A primitive combination of a cracked wooden frame, two latches and a pane painted over with oil paint. Antiquated. The window had single frames, not double ones, and opened outward. Making grateful mention once more of Mamon’s stinginess, I threw the window open, leaned out and turned my head this way and that. Nothing. Emptiness and quiet. A few individual citizens wandered the courtyard below and did not tip their heads up. Nobody was standing at the windows of the building opposite.
That was good. The way to the roof was clear. Everything was going according to the plan cobbled together in haste. I had cobbled it out of observations made the day before. The observations were as follows. The guards admitted visitors to the mansion by checking the entries in the visitors’ log. If the visitor’s surname had not been entered in the log, the guards used the internal telephone to summon an employee, who came down and sorted the visitor out on the spot. But the guards let everyone out indiscriminately, without proper accounting, so to speak. At the end of the working day, around six, one of the guards made a round of the building, looked into all the offices, corners and so on, rounding up the visitors who had lingered – isn’t it time you were off, gentlemen. Accordingly, my task was simple: not to catch a guard’s eye before evening. Otherwise there would be no luck for me.
I stood up on the windowsill and, leaning out, tipped my head back. The cornice overhung directly above me. I swung the bag and threw it onto the nearby roof. Then I straightened up, gripped the edge of the roofing with my hands and performed the acrobatic study «Shut the Window with Your Foot». Somehow I managed it. After that it was a matter of technique: a pull-up and a muscle-up. I climbed onto the roof and lay down on my back.
A-ah!
My native Moscow sky! Long time no see. Hello there!
…
I lay motionless on the roof by the drainpipe, sticking my gaze into the sickly shaggy blue that was quietly dying, turning into the night blanket of a December evening. With lips gone stiff with cold I whispered:
Summer, ah, summer… Starry summer, be with me…
I imagined a distant sweltering island that I wanted to call my homeland. It, and not the gray city around me, was what I considered my fatherland… There, on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean, I felt myself to be in my proper place. My inner state on the beaches of San Marco resembled foam in a bathtub: a light, clean, weightless substance sparkling with myriads of glints. A dream, a fairy tale, a song… One long song in the reggae style… So why was I lying on a roof under distant cold stars, wearing myself out? What was I doing in this vast, severe city, without thoughts, without feelings, alone as a finger?
A bad mood squeezed me in its embrace and dissolved into my subconscious a pinch of something dreary and hopeless. A slight ache in my chest oppressed me. Blues music moaned in my soul. My numbing body craved alcohol, my cold-ridden brains demanded a clouding over, and my cold heart begged for torment and suffering.
Not good.
Who am I? A hoochie coochie man or Crossbow? What was pressing on my chest, stamping me into the roofing, turning me into a man sentenced to eternal melancholy? What?
There was still no winter. Late autumn.
The dismal season tempted me, made me want to drop everything, climb down off the roof and go back to summer, to a paradise island. The dank, slushy December sobered me up, opened my eyes about myself. From the outside I saw a fool seized by an inarticulate desire to obtain forty times more money than he already had. «What for? – I asked myself, and answered myself: – I don’t know. Buying the car of my dreams would be an empty waste of money. On San Marco all the paved roads are limited to the route «Town – Airport», three kilometers in total. And there’s nothing else to spend money on. Four hundred dollars a month was quite enough for my happiness. Funny.»
An hour went by.
Then a second went by.
And a third went by too.
A dog’s cold crept up on me and started gnawing at my legs. I shifted a little, looked at my watch and was upset at how early it was – only twenty fifteen.
Truly, what did I need eight million for? Where and on what could I spend it? The possibility of clearing off somewhere like New York and blowing it all quickly presumably existed. New York is a big city, it will digest eight melons without choking. It would spit me out trouserless like a plum pit. Hm… I was not lying on this roof in order to turn afterward into a dried fruit. Another reason had set me out under the gusts of cold wind. And it is naive to think that this reason was a desire to become rich. Little ideas of that sort I had cast aside since my Octobrist-and-Pioneer childhood as unworthy of the title of Man, which has a proud ring to it. Probably it was on account of that same pride that at every possible opportunity I dodged all forms of physical and mental labor, preferring to meditate idly and loaf… Idleness… The supposition that I had come after the seal on account of idleness is also incorrect. I had spent a year and a half twiddling my thumbs on San Marco and was not in the least burdened by that fact. I considered my way of life exemplary. So what was the matter?
Apparently, when I was taking the decision to go to Moscow, my brains were subjected to a fit of mild insanity. That very same insanity that turns the heads of most people. If you think about it, all of us were happy in the past. And, if you recall, we wrecked that happiness with our own hands. We assured ourselves: «Better to strain a bit, to make a little effort, to do such and such and get a bit more money, buy a few more pleasures, and everything will be really fine.» Was there such a thing? With me there was.
With everyone there was. And not just was. Practically everyone lives under the devil’s poisonous whisper: «Strain a little, push a little, break yourself a little, make yourself happy…» That whisper has nothing in common with happiness. In actual fact nothing needs to be done. If you are happy, simply feel it, relax and float downstream with the current of life, pleased with yourself and with the banks floating past. Turn into a little paper boat, defenseless and free of malice, carried by fate toward the sea of eternity… To become happy, I had verified, a little money is enough, and a bit more cynicism mixed in with general good health. That’s all.
Knowing this, having this, I lay on a cold roof in dank Moscow.
December. Damp. Filth. Fool…
At nine in the evening I finally went numb through and decided: «To hell with all this philosophizing! Carry on like that and you’ll be off to a hermit’s cell.»
I took the rope out of the bag and fixed one end of it to the nearest bit of ironwork. With the second end I had to fuss a little. With frozen fingers I fashioned a loop around my hips and tightened it with a bowline. Then on the loop I knocked together a set of “rabbit ears”. To the ears I clipped a carabiner and, working my magic a little on the rope, wound it around the carabiner in the shape of an “S”. Properly belayed, I stuck the cutters in my pocket, gripped the edge of the drainpipe and, lowering my torso, planted my feet against the wall. Carefully paying out the rope, I descended to the lavatory window and stood on the ledge. The ledge turned out to be slippery. Either somebody drunk had pissed on it or moisture had condensed. I needed to act more carefully; there was no point in flailing my feet about. I hooked my fingers into a recess in the transom and tugged at the window frame. As expected, it was locked. I pulled the cutters out of my pocket and quickly relieved the beading around the glass of its little nails. Then I dropped the beading down so it wouldn’t get in the way and, breaking my fingernails, carefully lifted out the pane, the painted one, the antique. Through the resulting opening it would have been easy to get inside the lavatory, if not for the belay rope reliably holding my hundred kilos above ten meters of abyss… Maybe not an abyss, but you could smack down very painfully… I carefully gripped the pane between my legs, hooked onto the window transom with my right hand and with the other unclipped the carabiner. The weight of my body came off the belay rope and onto my right arm. I was pulled downward, my feet started sliding… I instantly took the glass in my left hand and squeezed through the open window opening with a jerk.
Oof! It worked.
I lowered myself to the floor, propped the pane against the wall and leaned out the window again. Left on the roof cornice was a very necessary item – the bag with the tools. I climbed onto the sill, pulled up the dangling end of the belay and, holding onto it, groped along the cornice with my hand. There. Here. There. Where? Here it is. I felt out the bag’s handle and yanked it.
The tools were in place. The redeployment had gone off successfully.
Covering my tracks, I put the pane back in place. In doing so I very much regretted having thrown away the beading. I had to fix the glass with the little nails that came to hand. It turned out that I, a beetling sort of character, had not thrown those away, unlike the beading, but had put them in my pocket. A German habit that came in handy back in the homeland.
I screwed the silencer onto the pistol barrel. Then I took the crowbar and three pairs of handcuffs out of the bag – enough for everybody – and went out into the dark, unlit corridor.
Somewhere out there the accounting office had been the other day. By feel I made my way to the nearest door, stood a while listening to the silence, sniffing at the emptiness, peering into the darkness. Nothing and nobody. I slipped the crowbar into the gap between jamb and door and heaved.
Crack!
The door flew open. I slipped inside the room and pulled the door to behind me. I did not risk turning on the light, but clicked the switch of my flashlight and shone it around. In the large room, forty meters or so, there loomed cabinets with papers, desks with papers, pedestals with papers and nothing else. Some sort of State Statistics Committee. I leafed through the papers on the nearest desk. Then rummaged in a cabinet. I found nothing of interest. Nothing but mutual settlements with clients and goods-and-transport waybills. Bah.
I went out into the corridor and in exactly the same way – listening, sniffing, peering – found myself, with the aid of that same crowbar, in the chief accountant’s office.
The first thing to attract my attention was a fireproof box of outrageously simple construction in the corner of the room. I dealt with it in a couple of minutes. It was enough to lever the door with the crowbar and lean on it with all my brute force, meaning a hundredweight of my own body. The door clanged. The little lock clicked. The flashlight beam snatched six seals out of the darkness on the top shelf. In a moment I had stamped a clean sheet of paper with all of them, but did not find the impression I was after. The seals I had come across were inking stamps; they left behind them blue circles and letters. What I was looking for was a seal that pressed a raised, colorless impression into the paper.
Reasoning soundly that the item I needed was kept in Mamon’s office, I set about going through the papers in the chief accountant’s charge. My reserve of time allowed me to give free rein to my curiosity.