27. The End of Apartment No. 50

When Margarita reached the last words of the chapter “… thus the fifth Procurator of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, greeted the dawn of the fifteenth of Nisan”, morning had arrived.

Sparrows could be heard conducting a cheerful, excited morning conversation in the branches of the white willow and lime in the little yard.

Margarita rose from the armchair, stretched, and only now did she sense how battered her body was and how she wanted to sleep. It is interesting to note that Margarita’s spirit was in perfect order. Her thoughts were not in disarray; she was not at all shaken by having spent a supernatural night. She was not disturbed by memories of having been at Satan’s Ball, of the Master having by some miracle been returned to her, of the novel having risen from the ashes, of everything having proved to be in its place again in the basement in the lane,whence the informer Aloizy Mogarych had been expelled. In short, her acquaintance with Woland had not caused her any psychological damage at all. Everything was as if that was the way it should be.

She went into the next room, checked that the Master was sleeping soundly and peacefully, turned off the unnecessary table lamp and stretched herself out on the little divan, covered with an old, torn sheet, beneath the opposite wall. A minute later she was asleep, and that morning she had no dreams. The rooms in the basement were silent; the whole of the private landlord’s little house was silent, and it was quiet in the secluded lane.

But at that time – at dawn on Saturday, that is – an entire floor was awake in one of Moscow’s organizations, and its windows – which looked out onto a large asphalt-covered square that special vehicles were cleaning with brushes, driving around slowly and hooting – had all their lights shining, and they cut through the light of the rising sun.

The whole floor was busy with the investigation into the case of Woland, and the lamps had been burning all night in ten offices.

As a matter of fact, the case had been clear ever since the previous day, Friday, when the Variety had had to be closed owing to the disappearance of its administrative staff and the various outrages that had occurred during the celebrated black-magic show the evening before. But the fact is that, all the time and uninterrupted, ever more new material was coming through to the sleepless floor.

Now the team investigating this strange case that smacked of utterly blatant devilry – with an admixture, what’s more, of some sort of hypnotic trickery and utterly clear-cut criminality – was required to mould together all the multifaceted and confused events that had taken place in various parts of Moscow into a single lump.

The first person who was obliged to visit the sleepless floor, shining with electric light, was Arkady Apollonovich Sempleyarov, the Chairman of the Acoustics Commission.

After lunch on Friday a ringing had resounded in his apartment, located in the building by the Kamenny Bridge, and a man’s voice had asked to speak to Arkady Apollonovich. Arkady Apollonovich’s wife, who had gone to the telephone, replied gloomily that Arkady Apollonovich was unwell, had lain down for a sleep and could not come to the telephone. However, Arkady Apollonovich had to come to the telephone all the same. To the question of who was asking for Arkady Apollonovich, the voice in the telephone replied very briefly who it was.

"This second… right away… this minute…" babbled the usually very haughty wife of the Chairman of the Acoustics Commission, and like an arrow she flew into the bedroom to get Arkady Apollonovich up from the couch on which he was lying, going through hellish torment at the memory of the previous evening’s show and the nocturnal row which had accompanied the expulsion of his niece, the one from Saratov, from the apartment.

True, it was not a second later, yet it was not even a minute, but rather a quarter of a minute later that Arkady Apollonovich, wearing only one slipper on his left foot, and in only his underwear, was already at the telephone, babbling into it:

"Yes, it’s me. Very well, very well."

His wife, who for these moments had forgotten all the loathsome crimes against fidelity of which the wretched Arkady Apollonovich had been found guilty, was leaning out through the door into the corridor with a frightened face, jabbing a slipper in the air and whispering:

“Put the slipper on, the slipper… You’ll get a chill in your feet,” at which Arkady Apollonovich, waving his wife away with his bare foot and making bestial eyes at her, mumbled into the telephone:

“Yes, yes, yes, of course, I understand. I’m setting out right away.”

Arkady Apollonovich spent the whole evening on that same floor where the investigation was being conducted. The conversation was painful – most unpleasant was the conversation – for he was obliged to tell with the most complete frankness not only about that foul show and the fight in the box, but while he was about it, as really was essential, about both Militsa Andreyevna Pokobatko from Yelokhovskaya Street – and about his niece from Saratov, and about much else, the telling of which caused Arkady Apollonovich inexpressible torment.

It goes without saying that the testimony of Arkady Apollonovich, an intellectual and cultured man who had been a witness of the disgraceful show, a sensible and qualified witness who gave an excellent description of both the mysterious magician in the mask himself and his two villainous assistants, and who had an excellent recollection that the magician’s name was definitely Woland, moved the investigation forward significantly. And a comparison of Arkady Apollonovich’s testimony with the testimony of others – among whom were several ladies who had suffered after the show (the one in the violet underwear who had shocked Rimsky and, alas, many others) and the messenger, Karpov, who had been sent to apartment No. 50 on Sadovaya Street – to all intents and purposes immediately established the place where the culprit in all these adventures needed to be sought.

Apartment No. 50 was visited, and more than once, and not only was it examined extremely thoroughly, but its walls were tapped over, the fireplace flues were examined and hiding places were sought. However, all these measures produced no result, and on not a single one of the visits to the apartment was it possible to discover anyone in it, although it was perfectly clear that someone had been in the apartment, despite the fact that all the people who were required one way or another to be in charge of questions concerning foreign artistes arriving in Moscow asserted definitively and categorically that there was no black magician Woland in Moscow and neither could there be.

He had registered absolutely nowhere on arrival, had not presented his passport, nor any other documents, contracts or agreements to anyone, and nobody had heard anything about him! The head of the Programming Department of the Spectacles Commission, Kitaitsev, vowed and swore that the vanished Styopa Likhodeyev had not sent to him for approval any performance schedule for any Woland and had not telephoned Kitaitsev with anything about the arrival of this Woland. So that for him, Kitaitsev, it was completely incomprehensible and unknown how Styopa could have permitted such a show at the Variety. And when it was said that Arkady Apollonovich had seen this magician in the show with his own eyes, Kitaitsev only spread his hands and raised his eyes to the sky. And from Kitaitsev’s eyes alone it could be seen and boldly stated that he was as pure as crystal.

That Prokhor Petrovich, the Chairman of the Main Spectacles Commission… Incidentally: he returned to his suit immediately after the police entered his office, to the frenzied joy of Anna Richardovna and to the great bewilderment of the police who had been disturbed without reason. Incidentally too: returning to his place, to his grey, striped suit, Prokhor Petrovich gave his full approval to all the resolutions that the suit had endorsed during his brief absence.

… So then, that Prokhor Petrovich most definitely did not know anything about any Woland.

What was emerging was, say what you like, something unfathomable: thousands of theatre-goers, the entire staff of the Variety and, finally, Arkady Apollonovich Sempleyarov, a most highly educated man, had seen this magician, as well as his accursed assistants, yet at the same time there was no chance whatsoever of finding him anywhere. Well, allow me to ask you: had the earth swallowed him up, or something, immediately after his repulsive show, or, as some assert, had he not come to Moscow at all? But if the first view is accepted, there can be no doubt that, when being swallowed up, he took with him the entire top level of the Variety’s administration; and if the second, then does it not emerge that the administration of the ill-starred theatre, having played some sort of dirty trick beforehand (you only have to remember the broken window in the office and the behaviour of Ace of Diamonds!), had itself disappeared from Moscow without trace?

You have to give credit to the man who was heading the investigation. Rimsky had disappeared and was found with astonishing speed. He only had to set the behaviour of Ace of Diamonds at the taxi rank beside the cinematograph alongside certain time points, such as when the show had ended and when precisely Rimsky could have disappeared, to be able to send a telegram at once to Leningrad. An hour later the reply came (towards Friday evening) that Rimsky had been found in room 412 in the Astoria Hotel, on the third floor, next to the room where the man in charge of the repertoire of one of Moscow’s theatres, on tour at the time in Leningrad, was staying, in the very room which, as is well known, has grey-blue and gold furniture and a splendid bathroom.

Discovered hiding in the wardrobe of room 412 of the Astoria, Rimsky was immediately arrested and interrogated in that same Leningrad, after which a telegram arrived in Moscow notifying that the Financial Director of the Variety was of unsound mind, that he was not giving sensible answers to questions, or did not wish to give them, and was requesting just one thing, that he be hidden away in a reinforced cell and have an armed guard set on him. From Moscow the order was given by telegram to deliver Rimsky under guard to Moscow, in consequence of which on Friday evening Rimsky duly left with the evening train under such a guard.

Towards the Friday evening they were also on Likhodeyev’s trail. Telegrams with enquiries about Likhodeyev were sent out to every town, and from Yalta a reply was received that Likhodeyev had been in Yalta but had flown out by aeroplane for Moscow.

The only trail that could not be picked up was Varenukha’s. The renowned theatre manager, known to absolutely the whole of Moscow, had disappeared without trace.

Meanwhile it was necessary to spend time on incidents in other parts of Moscow too, beyond the Variety Theatre. It was necessary to clear up the extraordinary occurrence with the office workers singing ‘The Glorious Sea’ (incidentally: Professor Stravinsky managed to set them to rights in the course of two hours by means of subcutaneous injections of some sort), with persons who had been presenting the devil knows what to other persons or organizations in the guise of money, and also with persons who had suffered from such presentations.

As is perfectly understandable, the most unpleasant, the most scandalous and insoluble of all these incidents was the one of the theft, carried out in broad daylight, of the deceased writer Berlioz’s head directly from the coffin in the Griboyedov hall.

Twelve men were conducting the investigation, gathering up, as though onto a knitting needle, the accursed stitches of this complicated case, which were scattered all over Moscow.

One of the investigators arrived at Professor Stravinsky’s clinic and first and foremost asked for a list to be presented to him of the persons who had entered the clinic in the course of the last three days. Discovered in this way were Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoi and the unfortunate compère whose head had been torn off. Little attention was paid to them, however. It was already easy to establish now that these two were victims of one and the same gang, headed by this mysterious magician. But then Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny interested the investigator greatly.

Towards evening on Friday the door of Ivanushka’s room, No. 117, opened, and into the room walked a young, round-faced, calm and softly spoken man, not at all like an investigator, but nonetheless one of Moscow’s best investigators. Lying on the bed he saw a pale and pinched-looking young man with eyes in which could be read an absence of interest in what was happening around him, with eyes that were turned at times to some place in the distance above his surroundings, at times inwards, inside himself.

The investigator introduced himself amicably and said he had dropped in on Ivan Nikolayevich to have a little chat about the events of two days before at Patriarch’s Ponds.

Oh, how exultant Ivan would have been if the investigator had come to see him a little earlier – if only, shall we say, in the nighttime early on Thursday, when Ivan had been violently and passionately trying to get people to listen to his story about Patriarch’s Ponds! Now his dream of helping to catch the consultant had been realized, no longer did he need to run around chasing anyone; they had come to him himself with the specific aim of listening to his tale about what had happened on Wednesday evening.

But, alas, Ivanushka had changed completely in the time that had passed since the moment of Berlioz’s death. He was prepared to answer all the investigator’s questions willingly and politely, but indifference could be sensed both in Ivan’s gaze and in his intonations. The poet was no longer concerned by the fate of Berlioz.

Before the investigator’s arrival Ivanushka had been lying drowsing, and certain visions had passed before him. Thus he had seen a city – strange, incomprehensible, nonexistent – with blocks of marble, chiselled colonnades, with roofs gleaming in the sun, with the black, gloomy and pitiless Tower of Antonia, with a palace on the western hill sunk almost to its roofs into the tropical greenery of its garden, with bronze statues burning in the sunset above that greenery, and he had seen Roman centuries, bound in armour, walking beneath the walls of the ancient city.

Before Ivan in his drowsiness there appeared a man, motionless in his armchair, shaved, with a harassed, yellow face, a man in a white mantle with a red lining, gazing with hatred at the luxuriant and alien garden. Ivan also saw a treeless hill with deserted poles with crosspieces.

But what had happened at Patriarch’s Ponds interested the poet Ivan Bezdomny no more.

“Tell me, Ivan Nikolayevich, how far were you yourself from the turnstile when Berlioz fell down under the tram?”

A scarcely noticeable smile of indifference touched Ivan’s lips for some reason, and he replied:

“I was a long way off.”

“And this one in checks was right beside the turnstile?”

“No, he was sitting on a bench not far away.”

“Do you remember clearly that he didn’t approach the turnstile at the moment when Berlioz fell?”

“I do. He didn’t. He sat sprawling.”

These questions were the investigator’s last questions. After them he stood up, reached out a hand to Ivanushka, wished him a speedy recovery and expressed the hope that he would be reading his poetry again in the near future.

“No,” Ivan replied quietly, “I won’t be writing any more poetry.”

The investigator smiled politely and permitted himself to express his certainty that the poet was now in a state of some depression, but that it would soon pass.

“No,” responded Ivan, looking not at the investigator, but into the distance, at the fading horizon, “it will never pass. The poetry I used to write was bad poetry, and now I’ve realized it.”

The investigator left Ivanushka, having got some very important material. Following the thread of events from the end to the beginning, he had finally succeeded in reaching the source from which all the events had started out. The investigator was in no doubt that these events had started with the murder at Patriarch’s. Of course, neither Ivanushka, nor this man in checks had pushed the unfortunate Chairman of MASSOLIT under the tram – physically, so to speak, his fall under the wheels had been facilitated by no one. But the investigator was certain that Berlioz had thrown himself under the tram (or had fallen under it) while under hypnosis.

Yes, there was already a lot of material, and it was already known whom to catch and where. But the thing was that there was no possible way of catching them. Someone, it must be repeated, had doubtless been in the thrice-accursed apartment No. 50. At times this apartment had answered telephone calls, now in a jabbering voice, now in a nasal one; sometimes a window had been opened in the apartment; what’s more, the sounds of a gramophone had been heard from it. But at the same time, on every occasion when they had made for it, absolutely no one had been found inside it. And they had been there more than once already, and at different times of the day. And moreover, they had gone through the apartment with a net checking every corner. The apartment had already been under suspicion for a long time. Not only had the path that led into the courtyard through the gateway been guarded, but so had the rear entrance; moreover a guard had been set on the roof by the chimneys. Yes, apartment No. 50 had been playing up, but it had not been possible to do anything about it.

Thus had the matter dragged on until midnight between Friday and Saturday, when Baron Maigel, wearing evening dress and patent-leather shoes, had proceeded grandly into apartment No. 50 in the capacity of a guest. The Baron could be heard being let into the apartment. Exactly ten minutes after that, without any bells being rung, a visit was made to the apartment, yet not only were the hosts not found in it, but – and this really was altogether weird – not a trace of Baron Maigel was to be discovered in it either.

And so, as has been said, the matter dragged on in this way until dawn on Saturday. At that point some new and very interesting data was added. At the Moscow aerodrome a six-seater passenger plane that had flown in from the Crimea made its landing. Among other passengers, there alighted from it one strange one. He was a young citizen with a wild growth of stubble who had not washed for about three days, with inflamed and frightened eyes, without luggage, and dressed somewhat oddly. The citizen was wearing a Caucasian fur hat, a Caucasian felt cloak on top of a nightshirt, and nice, new, only-just-purchased, blue leather bedroom slippers. As soon as he moved away from the steps down which they had come from the aircraft cabin, he was approached. This citizen was already awaited, and a little while later the unforgettable Director of the Variety, Stepan Bogdanovich Likhodeyev, appeared before the investigating team. He added some more data. Now it became clear that Woland had penetrated the Variety in the guise of an artiste after hypnotizing Styopa Likhodeyev, and had then contrived to throw that same Styopa God knows how many kilometres out of Moscow. Material was thus added, yet things did not become any easier as a result, but rather became perhaps even a tiny bit more difficult, for it was becoming obvious that apprehending the sort of character that performs tricks like the one Stepan Bogdanovich had been the victim of would not be so easy. Likhodeyev, by the way, was confined at his own request in a safe cell, and before the investigating team appeared Varenukha, who had just been arrested in his apartment, to which he had returned after an unexplained absence of a period of almost forty-eight hours.

Despite the promise made to Azazello not to lie any more, it was precisely with a lie that the manager began. Although he should not actually be judged too severely for it. After all, Azazello had forbidden him to lie and be rude on the telephone, and in the given instance the manager was conversing without the assistance of that apparatus. With his eyes shifting back and forth, Ivan Savelyevich declared that on Thursday afternoon, in his office at the Variety, he had got drunk on his own, after which he had gone off somewhere – but where, he didn’t remember; somewhere else he had drunk some starka – but where, he didn’t remember; he had lain about under a fence somewhere – but where, again he didn’t remember. Only after the manager was told that by his stupid and foolhardy behaviour he was hindering the investigation of an important case and that he would, of course, answer for it, did Varenukha break into sobs and start to whisper, in a quavering voice and gazing around, that he was lying solely out of terror, fearing the revenge of Woland’s gang, in whose hands he had already spent time – and that he asked, prayed, thirsted to be locked up in a reinforced cell.

“What the devil! They’re obsessed with this reinforced cell!” growled one of those conducting the investigation.

“These villains have really scared them,” said the investigator who had visited Ivanushka.

They calmed Varenukha as best they could, said they would guard him even without any cell, and now at this point it emerged that he had not drunk any starka under any fence, but had been beaten by two of them, one with a fang and red hair, and the other one fat…

“Ah, looking like a cat?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” the manager whispered, frozen in terror and looking round every second, and he revealed further details of how he had existed for about two days in apartment No. 50 in the capacity of a vampire-cum-spy, and had almost been the cause of the Financial Director Rimsky’s death…

At this time, Rimsky, who had been brought on the train from Leningrad, was being led in. However, this mentally disturbed, grey-haired old man, shaking with terror, in whom it was very hard to recognize the former Financial Director, did not want to tell the truth for anything and proved very stubborn in this respect. Rimsky asserted that he had seen no Hella at the window in his office during the night, and no Varenukha either, simply he had been taken ill, and in his delirium he had left for Leningrad. It goes without saying that the sick Financial Director ended his testimony with a request for his confinement in a reinforced cell.

Annushka was arrested at the moment when she was making an attempt to pass a ten-dollar bill to a cashier in a department store on the Arbat. Annushka’s story of people flying out of a window of the building on Sadovaya and of the horseshoe that, according to her, Annushka had picked up to hand in to the police was heard out attentively.

“Was the horseshoe really made of gold and diamonds?” Annushka was asked.

“Do you think I don’t know diamonds?” replied Annushka.

“But did he give you ten-rouble notes, as you say?”

“Do you think I don’t know ten-rouble notes?” replied Annushka.

“Well, and when was it they turned into dollars?”

“I don’t know anything about any dollars, and I’ve not seen any dollars,” replied Annushka shrilly, “we’re within our rights! We were given a reward, we’re buying cotton material with it…” and at this point she started spouting drivel about how she didn’t answer for the House Committee which had brought unclean spirits in on the fourth floor who made life impossible.

At that point the investigator began waving his pen at Annushka, because everyone was thoroughly sick of her, and he signed a release form for her on green paper, after which, to general satisfaction, Annushka disappeared from the building.

Then there came a whole series of people, one after another, and among them Nikolai Ivanovich, just arrested solely because of the stupidity of his jealous wife, who had let the police know towards morning that her husband had disappeared. Nikolai Ivanovich did not much surprise the investigating team when he laid out on the table the joke certificate about his having spent the time at Satan’s Ball. In his stories of how he had borne Margarita Nikolayevna’s bare maid the devil knows how far through the air to bathe in the river, and of the appearance at the window of the naked Margarita Nikolayevna that preceded this, Nikolai Ivanovich departed somewhat from the truth. Thus, for example, he did not consider it necessary to mention the fact that he had gone to the bedroom with the discarded nightshirt in his hands and had called Natasha "Venus”. The way it was, according to him, Natasha flew out of the window, straddled him and dragged him away out of Moscow.

"Yielding to force, I was compelled to submit,” Nikolai Ivanovich recounted, and ended his cock-and-bull story with a request that his wife should not be told a word about it. Which he was indeed promised.

Nikolai Ivanovich’s testimony made it possible to establish that Margarita Nikolayevna, as well as her maid Natasha too, had disappeared quite without trace. Measures were taken with a view to finding them.

Thus was the morning of the Saturday marked by the investigation, which did not cease for one second. At this time there arose and spread around in the city completely impossible rumours, in which a tiny grain of truth was embellished with the most extravagant lies. It was said that there had been a show at the Variety, after which the whole audience of two thousand had leapt out into the street in their birthday suits, that the printers of a magical kind of fake banknote on Sadovaya Street had been caught, that some gang had kidnapped five managers in the entertainment sector, but that the police had found them all straight away, and much else that one doesn’t even want to repeat.

Meanwhile, as it was getting towards lunchtime, the ringing of a telephone resounded in the place where the investigation was being conducted. It was information from Sadovaya that the cursed apartment had again shown signs of life inside it. It was said that its windows had been opened from within, that the sounds of a piano and singing had been carrying from it, and that a black cat had been seen at the window, sitting on the sill and basking in the sun.

At about four o’clock in the hot afternoon, a large group of men in civilian clothes alighted from three cars a little before reaching building No. 302 bis on Sadovaya Street. Here the large group that had arrived split up into two small ones, whereupon one went through the gateway of the building and across the courtyard straight into entrance No. 6, and the other opened a little door that was usually boarded up, leading to the rear entrance, and both began going up different staircases to apartment No. 50.

At this time Korovyev and Azazello, with Korovyev in his usual costume and not at all in festive tails, were sitting in the apartment’s dining room, finishing breakfast. Woland was, as usual, in the bedroom, and the cat’s whereabouts were unknown. But judging by the clatter of saucepans coming from the kitchen, it could be assumed that that was where Behemoth was, acting the fool as usual.

"Now what are those footsteps on the stairs?” asked Korovyev, playing with a teaspoon in a cup of black coffee.

"It’s them coming to arrest us,” Azazello replied, and downed a shot of brandy.

"Ah-ah, well, well,” was Korovyev’s reply to that.

Those coming up the main staircase were meanwhile already on the second-floor landing. There two plumbers of some sort were fiddling with the central-heating radiator. The walking men exchanged an expressive glance with the plumbers.

"Everyone’s in,” whispered one of the plumbers, tapping away on the pipe with a hammer.

Then the man walking at the front openly took out from under his overcoat a black Mauser, and another, next to him, lock-picks. In general, the men going to apartment No. 50 were properly equipped. Two of them had in their pockets fine, easily unfolded silk nets. Another one had a lasso, another one had gauze masks and ampoules of chloroform.

In one instant the front door into apartment No. 50 was open, and all those who had come found themselves in the entrance hall, and the door that slammed in the kitchen at this time showed that the second group from the rear entrance had arrived opportunely too.

This time there was success of some sort – if not complete. The men instantly scattered through all the rooms and found nobody anywhere, but on the other hand in the dining room they did discover the remains of an evidently just abandoned breakfast, while on the mantelpiece in the living room, alongside a crystal jug, sat a huge black cat. He held in his paws a Primus stove.

The men who had entered the living room contemplated this cat in complete silence over quite a long time.

"Ye-es… that really is something…” whispered one of the visitors.

"I’m not misbehaving, I’m not bothering anyone, I’m mending the Primus,” said the cat with an unfriendly frown, "and I also consider it my duty to warn you that the cat is an ancient and inviolable animal.”

"Exceptionally skilled work,” whispered one of the men who had come in, but another said loudly and distinctly:

"Well now, you inviolable ventriloquous cat, you step this way, please!”

A silk net unfolded and whirled up, but, to the utter surprise of all, the man throwing it missed and caught with it only the jug which, with a clang, immediately smashed.

"Forfeit!” the cat started yelling. "Hoorah!” And at this point, setting the Primus aside, he pulled a Browning out from behind his back. He instantly aimed it at the man standing nearest to him, but before the cat had had time to shoot, there was a flash of fire in the man’s hand, and along with the shot from the Mauser the cat fell head first with a thump from the mantelpiece onto the floor, dropping the Browning and letting go of the Primus.

“It’s all over,” said the cat in a weak voice, and he stretched out languidly in a pool of blood, “step back away from me for a second, let me say goodbye to the earth. O my friend, Azazello!” the cat groaned, pouring out his lifeblood. “Where are you?” The cat turned his failing eyes in the direction of the door into the dining room. “You didn’t come to my aid in the hour of unequal battle. You abandoned poor Behemoth, giving him up for a glass of – very good, it’s true – brandy! Well then, may my death lie upon your conscience, but I bequeath my Browning to you…”

“The net, the net, the net,” an anxious whispering began around the cat. But the net, the devil knows why, had got caught up in someone’s pocket and would not come out.

“The only thing that can save a mortally wounded cat,” said the cat, “is a swig of petrol…” And, exploiting the confusion, he put his mouth to the round opening in the Primus and had a good drink of petrol. Straight away the blood stopped streaming from under his upper-left leg. The cat leapt up alive and well and, clasping the Primus under his arm, he hopped back onto the fireplace with it, and from there, ripping the wallpaper to bits, he climbed up the wall, and a couple of seconds later he was sitting on a metal curtain rail, high above the men who had come in.

In a moment hands had grabbed hold of the curtain and torn it down together with the rail, and as a result the sunlight gushed into the darkened room. But neither the roguishly recovered cat nor the Primus fell down. Without parting with the Primus, the cat had contrived to leap through the air and jump up onto the chandelier hanging in the centre of the room.

“A stepladder!” came the cry from below.

“I challenge you to a duel!” yelled the cat, flying over their heads on the swinging chandelier, and at this point the Browning proved to be in his paws again, while he had found a place for the Primus between the branches of the chandelier. The cat took aim and, flying like a pendulum over the heads of the visitors, he opened fire on them. Thunder shook the apartment. Fragments of cut glass from the chandelier scattered onto the floor, the mirror on the fireplace cracked into stars, plaster dust began flying, spent cartridge cases jumped over the floor, the panes in the windows broke, petrol began splashing from the bullet-riddled Primus. There could be no question of taking the cat alive now, and in reply the visitors fired accurately and frenziedly from Mausers at his head, his stomach, his chest and his back. The shooting caused panic on the asphalt in the courtyard.

But this shooting lasted a very short time and began dying away on its own. The thing is that it did no harm either to the cat or to the visitors. Not only did nobody prove to be dead, nobody was even wounded; all, including the cat, remained completely unharmed. One of the visitors, in order to prove it definitively, discharged a handful of shots to the head of the accursed animal, and the cat replied smartly with a whole clip. And it was just the same – it made no impression on anyone. The cat rocked in the chandelier, whose swings kept on decreasing, blowing into the barrel of the Browning for some reason and spitting on his paw. On the faces of those standing in silence below there appeared an expression of total bewilderment. This was the only instance, or one of the only ones, when shooting proved utterly ineffective. It could be assumed, of course, that the cat s Browning was some sort of toy, but that could not possibly have been said of the visitors’ Mausers. Even the cat’s first wound, of which there had clearly been not the slightest doubt, had been nothing other than a trick and a swinish pretence, just like the drinking of the petrol too.

One more attempt was made to get hold of the cat. The lasso was thrown, it caught on one of the candles and the chandelier broke loose. Its crash seemed to shake the entire frame of the building, yet nothing positive came of it. Those present were showered in splinters, but the cat flew through the air and settled high up, just below the ceiling, on the upper part of the gilt frame of the mirror above the fireplace. He did not intend to try and clear off: on the contrary, sitting in relative safety, he started on another speech.

"I’m at a loss to understand,” he said from above, "the reasons for my being treated so harshly…”

And here this speech was interrupted at the very outset by a heavy, low voice, coming from no one knew where:

"What’s going on in the apartment? I’m being prevented from working.”

Another voice, unpleasant and nasal, responded:

"Why, it’s Behemoth, of course, the devil take him!”

A third, jangling voice said:

"Messire! It’s Saturday. The sun’s declining. It’s time for us to go.”

"I’m sorry, I can’t chat any more,” said the cat from the mirror, "it’s time for us to go.” He flung his Browning and knocked out both panes of glass in the window. Then he splashed some petrol down, and that petrol caught fire all by itself, throwing out a wave of flame right up to the ceiling.

The fire started extraordinarily quickly and fiercely somehow, in a way that never happens, even with petrol. Straight away the wallpaper began giving off smoke, the torn-down curtain on the floor began burning, and the frames in the broken windows started to smoulder. The cat tensed like a spring, miaowed, leapt from the mirror over to the window and disappeared through it together with his Primus. Outside, shots rang out. A man sitting on the iron fire escape on the level of the jeweller’s wife’s windows fired at the cat as he flew from window ledge to window ledge, heading for the drainpipe at the corner of the building which was built, as has been said, in the shape of the letter pokoi. The cat clambered up this pipe onto the roof. There he was fired at – also, unfortunately, without success – by the guards keeping watch over the chimneys, and the cat slipped away in the light of the setting sun that was flooding the city.

In the apartment at this time the parquet burst into flames beneath the feet of the visitors, and in the fire, in the place where the cat had lain with the feigned wound, there appeared, growing ever more dense, the corpse of the former Baron Maigel, with its chin jerked upwards and glassy eyes. There was no chance of pulling it out now.

Jumping over the burning blocks of the parquet, slapping their smoking shoulders and chests with the palms of their hands, those in the living room retreated into the study and the entrance hall. Those who were in the dining room and the bedroom ran out across the corridor. Those who had been in the kitchen came running too and dashed into the hall. The living room was now full of fire and smoke. Someone managed to dial the telephone number of the fire station as he went, and shouted briefly into the receiver:

“Sadovaya, 302 bis!"

Further delay was not possible. Flame flicked out into the hall. Breathing became difficult.

As soon as the first ribbons of smoke burst out of the broken windows of the enchanted apartment, people’s desperate cries were heard in the courtyard:

“Fire! Fire! Fire!”

In different apartments in the building people began shouting into telephones:

“Sadovaya, Sadovaya, 302 bis!"

At the same time as the heart-rending ringing of bells on long, red vehicles, racing from all parts of the city, was heard on Sadovaya, the people rushing around in the courtyard saw how, together with the smoke, out from a fourth-floor window there flew three dark, seemingly male silhouettes, and one of a naked woman.