The first day of reconnaissance turned out dull and slushy. It began with an inspection of the theater of operations. There were no questions of «What is there to inspect?» or «Where are we going to obtain the seal and the password?» The answer lay on the surface. In a settlement known to me in the quiet environs of Kushchino. Two years ago, as I recall, Mikha had reported that Mamon never went a step away from his dacha. «He’s a local, – my informant explained. – Every dog in Kushchino knows him, and he does all his business only here. They don’t let him out of the district. The mafia.»
Maybe so.
At noon I drove up onto the memorable little rise and from there surveyed the environs of the dacha settlement. Nothing noteworthy turned up. I did not catch sight of a single pole with wires on it. This surprised and distressed me. It looked as though the settlement had been telephoned up the European way, by means of underground cable. The task had become noticeably more complicated. I had to spend all the time remaining until evening on solving it.
A thousand times I ran the rowdy “Ubangi Stomp” on the car stereo, spat lustily out the window, shrieked loudly along with the music and, in the intervals between shrieks, swore just as loudly. And with all that I was weaving about the countryside in Fedya. Settlements, little villages, farms and silo towers floated past, and between them forests, copses, fields, garden plots and so on and so on and so on. The details of the simple landscape outside Moscow gladdened no eye and warmed no soul. I was looking for something else. Only the spidery pylons of a power line could gladden me, and only an ordinary electrical substation could arouse my rapture.
Before long that is exactly what happened. A fountain of joy went through me. I found what I was looking for. The substation, toward which wires humming with strain ran, was of a size to suggest that it served the whole district. I braked, examined the pallid horizons and reckoned in which direction Mamon’s mansion lay. Then I wheeled about the surroundings again and discovered no traces of nearby electricity along the way. My head came to a boil with the question: «Where the devil is one to look for the thing?»
My hands went on turning the wheel and throwing the car from one country road to another. My foot leapt from accelerator to brake pedal and back. My body shook this way and that, up and down, forward and back. The squeal of the tires scraped at my ears through the roar of the speakers. Oh dear, oh dear. The roads in the environs of Kushchino snaked about so intricately that at times I saw my own automobile ahead of me…
This could not go on for long. When I had burned through nearly all the gasoline, it dawned on me. I braked and got out of the car. Standing on the shoulder, I studied the patchwork of the surrounding fields and mentally sketched a plan of the terrain I had examined up and down: the dacha settlement over there, three concrete roads here, here and here, plowed fields between them, the substation over yonder. Along what trajectory would they have laid the cable? Along an intricate one, apparently, and the idea behind it was this: «Do not lay cable under arable land!»
I set off on foot across the field toward the strip of distant little trees that from a distance looked like an old comb. It was a long walk, but my expectations did not deceive me. There, under the shelter of the bare thin thicket, I found a rusty marker with an inscription hard to read but easy to guess: «Caution, cable! Do not conduct excavation work.»
I took a fifty-kopeck piece out of my wallet and made a wish: «If it comes up tails, they laid a telephone cable along with the electrical one.» It came up heads. I sighed and went back to Fedya.
I did not feel like leaving empty-handed. I sighed a little more and climbed into the trunk for tools. The thought that flickered up of not carrying them on my back but driving them over in Fedya was expelled in disgrace. Fyodor was no jeep and could easily perish in impassable mud, as in the Bermuda Triangle. So I had to lug on my own back a shovel, metal shears, a tire iron, cutters, tape, a knife and a coil of wire. And all the while it itched in my head that I was engaged in monkey labor. The fifty-kopeck piece could not deceive me. Then again, the little disk had been issued by the Central Bank, an outfit by all accounts unreliable, one that cancels its own banknotes ten times a day… Also, on the way to the marker, I kept recalling the intricate technical term “last mile” and reckoning what relation it might bear to the dacha settlement I needed. It turned out to bear a direct one. True, in order to establish this I had to sink a shaft with a ferocity that came from God knows where – more simply put, to dig a hole. I dug it long, hard, exhaustingly, with bloody blisters on my hands. I puffed, growled, swore, strained my muscles into numbness, and – Hurrah! Got it! At a depth of three spade-blades I made out a characteristic dull knock. An asbestos-cement pipe! And a telephone cable in it! That was its depth! Electrical cables are laid half a meter deeper.
Well now, well now!
I quickly smashed up the pipe with the tire iron, tore open the sheathing and – just so! – the cable turned out to be multi-pair, twenty or thirty lines by the look of it. That was the one! The joyful trembling in my hands gave way to fatigue. I caught my breath and, under the dull light of a flashlight, began working my magic on the thin little strands of the telephone network. With the knife I stripped the insulation off the wires, about a centimeter of it, and pasted the bared little wire over with a self-adhesive slip of paper. Painstaking, unhurried work. As soon as it was finished, I straightened my swollen back with difficulty and got rid of the marker. Prized it out of the ground and threw it away. I did not fill in the shaft. It would come in handy tomorrow.
I carried the tools back to Fedya and drove home.
The second day, just as dreary and slushy as the first, went by more calmly. All the time from morning to evening I spent tuning the listening equipment. The telephone cable I had tapped into served exactly twenty numbers, and finding the one I wanted was difficult. I clipped the alligator clips onto wires, made notes in my notebook and listened to conversations one after another. Toward evening I stumbled on a voice that seemed familiar to me. Mamon? Not Mamon? Doubt did not leave me until I heard:
– Come by tomorrow morning at ten. Be…
On the third day, at nine thirty, I was sticking up on the observation rise. Studying the surroundings, getting acquainted with the habits of Mamon’s security, its numbers, reckoning from which point to begin the assault. Also meditating, remembering and marveling. Last December, two years ago, my balls rang with the frost, I recall, I nearly died. Now the acacias were ready to come into leaf. Warm as Tashkent. Truly, Russia cannot be grasped by the mind. And what is that?
A «Cherokee Laredo» drove onto the grounds of Mamon’s dacha. Ten minutes later the jeep drove away. I said to myself «Yes! Ja-ja! Das ist fantastisch!», clapped my hands together and rubbed them joyfully. There was nothing more to do on the rise.
I drove out to my multicolored little wires and set up a bivouac by the shaft – a folding chair, a tent, a couple of thermoses, sandwiches. Clipped the alligator clips onto the pair marked yesterday, put on the headphones and immersed myself in the study of assorted trifles: the client’s habits, working hours, amusements and the rest. It was precisely the insignificant details that as a rule gave significant food for thought.
…
The fourth day was devoted to the same.
…
The fifth as well.
…
There was nothing noteworthy in Mamon’s telephone verbiage. It consisted of empty prattle with Moosies, Poosies, Kitties and other representatives of the fauna. Now and then there were business conversations, short and incomprehensible. The one detail that struck me as interesting was the following: every morning, after purring with one or two little tarts, Mamon would call a certain place and report that he would be coming by at such and such a time. I would run to Fyodor, quickly cover the two kilometers to the observation rise and from there watch a black «Yukon» depart from the grounds of Mamon’s dacha. Evidently Mamon had changed his habits and moved his place of work somewhere into… Where?
I grasped that the planned assault on the dacha was canceled. The search had to begin at the office which, in the light of the newly revealed circumstances, the client presumably had. The seals ought to be at his place of work, among the paper clips, folders, hole punches and the rest. And lying about there, too, ought to be a sheet with an intricate set of digits, presumably…