14. Praise Be to the Cockerel!

His nerves couldn’t take it, as they say, and Rimsky did not wait for the compilation of the report to be finished to escape to his office. He sat at the desk and gazed with bloodshot eyes at the magical ten-rouble notes that lay in front of him. The Financial Director was at his wits’ end. From outside there came a steady hum. The audience was streaming out of the building of the Variety onto the street. To the Financial Director’s extremely sharpened hearing there suddenly came the distinct trilling of the police. In itself it never ever promises anything pleasant. And when it was repeated, and another trill, more imperious and prolonged, stepped in to assist it, and then clearly audible cackling joined in with it too, and even some sort of whooping, the Financial Director immediately realized that something else scandalous and foul had happened in the street. And that no matter how much one might want to brush it aside, it had the closest connection with the disgusting performance put on by the black magician and his assistants. The sensitive Financial Director was not in the least mistaken.

As soon as he glanced out of a window that looked out onto Sadovaya, his face twisted and he did not so much whisper as hiss:

“I knew it!”

In the bright light of the very powerful street lights he saw on the pavement down below him a lady wearing just a violetcoloured camisole and knickers. On the lady’s head there was, true, a hat, and in her hands an umbrella.

Around this lady, who was in a state of utter confusion, now squatting down, now bursting to run off somewhere, there was a restless crowd letting out that same raucous laughter that had sent a shiver down the Financial Director’s spine. Some citizen was throwing himself around beside the lady, tearing off his summer coat and, in his agitation, failing entirely to cope with the sleeve in which his arm had got caught.

Cries and roars of laughter could be heard from another spot too – namely, from the left doorway and, turning his head in that direction, Grigory Danilovich saw another lady wearing pink underwear. She jumped from the road onto the pavement, seeking to hide in the doorway, but the people flowing out were blocking her path, and the poor victim of her own frivolity and passion for fancy clothes, tricked by the vile Fagot’s crew, dreamt of only one thing – being swallowed up by the ground. A policeman was heading towards the unfortunate woman, drilling the air with his whistling, and hurrying along behind the policeman were some extremely cheerful young men wearing caps. It was they who were emitting that raucous laughter and the whoops.

A thin, moustachioed cab driver flew up to the first undressed woman and reined in his bony, worn-out horse with a flourish. The face of the man with the moustache was grinning joyfully.

Rimsky hit himself on the head with his fist, spat and leapt back from the window.

He sat by the desk for a little while, listening intently to the street. The whistling reached a crescendo in various spots and then began to die away. The scandal, to Rimsky’s surprise, was wound up unexpectedly quickly.

The time was coming to act: the bitter cup of responsibility had to be drunk. The telephones had been repaired during the third part of the show, and he had to ring and report what had happened, ask for help, lie his way out of it, blame everything on Likhodeyev, shield himself and so on. Hell and damnation!

Two times the distressed Director put his hand on the receiver, and twice he took it off again. And suddenly, in the deathly hush of the office, the telephone itself burst out ringing, right in the Financial Director’s face, and he flinched and turned cold. “My nerves are well and truly shot, though,” he thought, and picked up the receiver. Immediately he recoiled from it and went whiter than paper. A quiet and at the same time insinuating and depraved female voice had whispered into the receiver:

“Don’t phone anyone, Rimsky, or there’ll be trouble…”

At once the receiver went dead. Feeling gooseflesh on his back, the Financial Director put the receiver down and for some reason looked around at the window behind his back. Through the branches of a maple, sparse and still barely covered in greenery, he saw the moon flying in a transparent little cloud. Riveted for some reason by the branches, Rimsky looked at them, and the more he looked, the more and more powerfully was he gripped by terror.

Making an effort with himself, the Financial Director finally turned away from the moonlit window and got up. There could not possibly be any more talk of ringing, and now the Financial Director thought of only one thing – how he could leave the theatre quickly.

He listened intently: the theatre building was silent. Rimsky realized that he had long been alone on the entire first floor, and at that thought the insuperable terror of a child took hold of him. He could not think without a shudder of the fact that he would now have to walk alone along the empty corridors and go down the staircases. He feverishly grabbed the hypnotist’s ten-rouble notes from the desk, put them away in his briefcase and coughed, to give himself just a little bit of encouragement. The cough came out rather hoarse and weak.

And here it seemed to him that from under the office door there was a sudden breath of rather putrid dampness. A shiver ran down the Financial Director’s back. And at that point a clock struck unexpectedly too, and began chiming midnight. And even the chimes elicited a shiver from the Financial Director. But his heart sank completely when he heard a Yale key turning gently in the lock of the door. Clutching on to his briefcase with moist, cold hands, the Financial Director felt that if this rustling in the keyhole continued any longer, he would be unable to contain himself and would emit a piercing cry.

Finally the door yielded to someone’s efforts, opened up, and noiselessly into the office came Varenukha. Rimsky sat down in an armchair exactly as he had been standing, because his legs buckled. Filling his chest with air, he smiled an ingratiating sort of smile and said quietly:

“God, how you frightened me…”

Yes, that sudden appearance might have frightened absolutely anyone, and nonetheless at the same time it was a great joy: one end, at least, had emerged in this tangled business.

“Well, hurry up and talk, then! Well! Well!” croaked Rimsky, clutching at that end. “What does it all mean?!”

“Forgive me, please,” the man who had entered responded in a muffled voice, closing the door, “I thought you’d already left.”

And without taking off his cap, Varenukha went over to an armchair and sat down on the other side of the desk.

It must be said that a slight oddity was evident in Varenukha’s reply, and it immediately stung the Financial Director, capable in his sensitivity of competing with any of the world’s best seismographic stations. How could that be? Whatever was Varenukha on his way into the Financial Director’s office for, if he assumed he was not there? He has his own office, after all. That’s the first thing. And the second thing is: no matter which entrance Varenukha had used to enter the building, he must unavoidably have encountered one of the night-time duty staff, and all of them had been informed that Grigory Danilovich would be detained in his office for a certain time.

But the Financial Director did not bother pondering long on the subject of this oddity. There were other things to worry about.

“Why on earth didn’t you ring? What’s the meaning of all this foolishness about Yalta?”

“Well, just what I said,” replied the manager, smacking his lips as though he were suffering from toothache, “he’s been found in a tavern in Pushkino.”

“What do you mean, in Pushkino?! Isn’t that just outside Moscow? But the telegrams are from Yalta?!”

“Yalta’s got damn all to do with it! He plied the Pushkino telegraphist with drink, and the two of them started getting up to no good, including sending telegrams marked ‘Yalta’.”

“Aha… Aha… Well, all right, all right…” Rimsky did not so much say as sort of sing. His eyes lit up with a nice yellow light. There took shape in his head the festive picture of Styopa’s ignominious dismissal. Liberation! The Financial Director’s long-awaited liberation from that disaster in the person of Likhodeyev! And perhaps Stepan Bogdanovich would get something even rather worse than dismissal. “The details!” said Rimsky, banging a blotter on the desk.

And Varenukha began recounting the details. As soon as he had arrived where he had been sent by the Financial Director, they had seen him immediately and heard him out in the most attentive fashion. Of course, nobody had even entertained the thought that Styopa might be in Yalta. Everyone had agreed straight away with Varenukha’s assumption that Likhodeyev was, of course, in the ‘Yalta’ at Pushkino.

“And where is he now?” the agitated Financial Director interrupted the manager.

“Well, where else would he be?” replied the manager with a crooked grin. “Naturally, at the sobering-up station.”

“Right, right! Ah, thank you!”

But Varenukha continued his narrative. And the more he narrated, the more vividly there opened up before the Financial Director the great long chain of Likhodeyev’s loutish and disgraceful actions, and each succeeding link in that chain was worse than the one preceding it. What about, say, the drunken dancing, when he was locked in an embrace with the telegraphist on the patch of grass in front of the Pushkino telegraph office to the sounds of some idle accordion. The racing after some citizenesses, who squealed in horror? The attempt to have a fight with the barman at the ‘Yalta’ itself? The strewing of spring onions all over the floor of that same ‘Yalta’… The smashing of eight bottles of dry white Ai-Danil… The breaking of the meter of the taxi driver who didn’t want to let Styopa into his vehicle. The threat to arrest the citizens who tried to put a stop to Styopa’s foul behaviour. In short, a horror story!

Styopa was well known in Moscow’s theatrical circles, and everyone was aware that the man was no bowl of cherries. But nevertheless, what was being related by the manager about him was too much, even for Styopa. Yes, too much. Far too much even.

Rimsky’s sharp eyes cut into the face of the manager across the desk, and the more the latter spoke, the gloomier those eyes became. The more lifelike and colourful became the foul details with which the manager adorned his tale, the less the Financial Director believed the narrator. And when Varenukha reported that Styopa had thrown restraint aside to such an extent that he had tried to offer resistance to those who had come for him in order to return him to Moscow, the Financial Director already knew for sure that everything he was being told by the manager who had returned at midnight – everything – was a lie! A lie from the first word to the last.

Varenukha had not been to Pushkino, and Styopa himself had not been in Pushkino either. There had been no drunken telegraphist, there had been no broken glass in the tavern; Styopa had not been bound with ropes… there had been none of it.

As soon as the Financial Director became firmly convinced that the manager was lying to him, terror began to spread through his entire body, starting at his feet, and twice more the Financial Director imagined a breath of putrid malarial dampness blowing across the floor. Without for an instant taking his eyes off the manager, who was going into strange sorts of contortions in the armchair as he continually strove not to emerge from out of the blue shadow of the table lamp, and, in a surprising way somehow, shielded himself with a newspaper from the light of the bulb that was ostensibly bothering him, the Financial Director thought about only one thing: what on earth did it all mean? Why was the manager, who had come back to him far too late, lying to him so brazenly in the deserted and silent building? And the awareness of danger, unknown but terrible danger, began racking the Financial Director’s soul. Pretending not to notice the manager’s wiles and his tricks with the newspaper, the Financial Director examined his face, hardly listening any longer to the yarn Varenukha was spinning. There was something that was still more inexplicable than the slanderous story, invented for an unknown reason, about the escapades in Pushkino, and that something was the change in the appearance and in the manners of the manager.

No matter how the latter drew the duck’s peak of his cap down over his eyes to throw a shadow on his face, no matter how he twisted the sheet of newspaper around, the Financial Director managed to make out a huge bruise on the right side of his face just beside his nose. Apart from that, the normally full-blooded manager was now pale, with a chalky, unhealthy pallor, while – on a stifling night – an old striped muffler was for some reason wound around his neck. And if to this were to be added the disgusting manner of sucking in and smacking his lips that had appeared in the manager during the period of his absence, the abrupt change of voice, which had become muffled and coarse, the furtiveness and cowardliness in the eyes, it could boldly have been said that Ivan Savelyevich Varenukha had become unrecognizable.

Something else was causing the Financial Director burning disquiet, but what precisely he could not understand, no matter how he strained his inflamed brain, no matter how much he peered at Varenukha. One thing he could assert: that there was something unprecedented, unnatural in this combination of the manager and the very familiar armchair.

“Well, they finally overcame him, loaded him into a vehicle,” Varenukha was droning, glancing out from behind the sheet and covering up the bruise with his palm.

Rimsky suddenly reached out his hand and, as if without thinking, and at the same time playing on the desk with his fingers, he pressed the button of the electric bell with his palm, then froze. In the empty building the sharp signal would be bound to be heard. But that signal did not ensue, and the button sank lifelessly into the wood of the desk. The button was dead, the bell not working.

The Financial Director’s cunning had not escaped Varenukha, who asked, wincing, and with a flash of obviously malicious fire in his eyes:

“What are you ringing for?”

“I did it without thinking,” the Financial Director replied in a muffled voice, then jerked his hand back and, in his turn, asked shakily: “What" s that on your face?”

“The car swerved, I hit myself on the door handle,” replied Varenukha, averting his eyes.

“He’s lying!” the Financial Director exclaimed inwardly. And at this point his eyes suddenly became rounded and quite mad, and he fixed them on the back of the armchair.

Behind the armchair, on the floor, lay two intersecting shadows, one weak and grey, the other rather denser and blacker. Distinctly visible on the floor was the shadow of the back of the armchair and its tapering legs, but above the chair back there was no shadow on the floor from Varenukha’s head – and equally, the manager’s legs were not there under the legs.

“He’s not casting a shadow!” Rimsky gave a mental cry of despair. He was struck by the shivers.

Varenukha glanced round furtively behind the back of the armchair, following Rimsky’s mad gaze, and realized he had been found out.

He rose from the armchair (and the Financial Director did the same) and took a step away from the desk, squeezing his briefcase in his arms.

“Guessed, damn you! Always were bright,” Varenukha said, smirking maliciously right in the Financial Director’s face, and he leapt back unexpectedly from the armchair to the door and quickly pushed down the button on the Yale lock. The Financial Director glanced round despairingly, retreating towards the window that looked into the garden, and in that window, flooded with moonlight, he saw the face of a naked girl pressed up against the glass and her bare arm thrust in through the transom and trying to undo the lower catch. The upper one was already undone.

It seemed to Rimsky that the light in the table lamp was going out and the desk was leaning over. An icy wave poured over Rimsky, but, fortunately for him, he mastered himself and did not fall. What remained of his powers was sufficient for him not to shout, but to whisper:

“Help».”

Varenukha, guarding the door, was jumping about beside it, hanging in the air and rocking aboutin it for long periods of time. He waved bent fingers in Rimsky’s direction, hissed and smacked his lips, winking at the girl in the window.

The latter began to hurry, thrust her red-haired head through the transom, stretched her arm out as far as she could, started scratching with her nails at the lower latch and shaking the frame. Her arm began to lengthen as if it were elastic, and became covered in the green colour of a corpse. Finally the green fingers of the dead woman clasped the head of the latch, turned it, and the frame started to open. Rimsky gave a feeble cry, leant up against the wall and put his briefcase out in front of him like a shield. He understood that his end had come.

The frame flew wide open, but instead of the freshness of the night and the scent of the limes, into the room burst the smell of the cellar. The deceased woman stepped onto the window sill. Rimsky could distinctly see patches of putrefaction on her breast.

And at that moment the joyful, unexpected cry of a cockerel reached the garden from the low building behind the shooting range where the birds that took part in the acts were kept. The strident trained cockerel was blaring out its proclamation that the dawn was rolling towards Moscow from the east.

Wild fury distorted the girl’s face; she emitted a hoarse curse, and by the doors Varenukha shrieked and collapsed out of the air onto the floor.

The cockerel’s cry was repeated, the girl snapped her teeth together, and her red hair stood up on end. With the cockerel’s third cry she turned and flew out. And in her wake, jumping up and stretching out horizontally in the air, Varenukha, reminiscent of a flying cupid, floated slowly over the desk and out of the window.

White as snow, without a single black hair, the old man who had just recently been Rimsky ran up to the door, released the latch, opened the door and rushed off down the dark corridor. At the turn onto the staircase, moaning in terror, he fumbled for the light switch and the staircase was lit up. On the stairs the shaking, trembling old man fell down, imagining that Varenukha had collapsed on him gently from above.

When he had run down, Rimsky saw the man on duty asleep on a chair by the box office in the vestibule. Rimsky stole past him on tiptoe and slipped out through the main door. Outside he felt a little better. He came to his senses to the extent that, taking his head in his hands, he managed to grasp that his hat had remained in the office.

It stands to reason that he did not return for it, but, gasping for breath, started running across the wide road to the opposite corner by the cinema, beside which a dim little reddish light could just be made out. A minute later he was already beside it. No one had managed to beat him to the vehicle.

“Make the express train to Leningrad and I’ll give you a tip,” said the old man, breathing heavily and with a hand on his heart.

“I’m going to the garage,” the driver replied with hatred, and turned away.

Then Rimsky undid his briefcase, pulled fifty roubles out of it and held them out to the driver through the open front window.

A few moments later the jangling vehicle was flying like a whirlwind along the ring road of Sadovaya. The fare was being tossed about on his seat, and in the sliver of mirror hanging in front of the driver Rimsky could see now the driver’s joyful eyes, now his own mad ones.

Leaping from the vehicle in front of the station building, Rimsky shouted to the first person he came across wearing a white apron and with a badge:

"First category, one, I’ll give you thirty” – he was crumpling up ten-rouble notes as he took them out of his briefcase – "if there’s no first, then second – if there’s none, get a hard seat.”

The man with the badge, glancing round at the illuminated clock, tore the notes from Rimsky’s hands.

Five minutes later, the express train disappeared from beneath the station’s glass dome and vanished completely in the darkness. Along with it vanished Rimsky too.