At first Andrei had actually taken an interest in this case. He marked the places where the Building had been seen with little crosses on a map of the City, tried to find some consistent principle in the locations of these little crosses, and drove out to investigate those places a good dozen times—and every time at the location of the Building he discovered either an abandoned garden or a gap between buildings, or even an ordinary apartment building that had nothing to do with any mysteries or riddles.
He was bemused by the circumstance that the Red Building had never been seen by the light of the sun; he was bemused by the circumstance that at least half the witnesses had seen the Building while in a state of greater or lesser alcoholic intoxication; he was bemused by the petty but seemingly compulsory inconsistencies in virtually every testimony; and he was especially bemused by the total senselessness and absurdity of what was happening.
Izya Katzman had once remarked concerning this business that a city of a million people, deprived of any systematic ideology, would inevitably acquire its own myths. That sounded convincing enough, but people were actually disappearing for real! Of course, it wasn’t all that hard for someone to disappear in the City. They only had to be thrown over the Cliff and no one would ever be any wiser. But who would want to cast assorted hairdressers, old seamstresses, and petty shopkeepers into the Abyss? People with no money, with no reputation, and practically no enemies? Kensi had once voiced the perfectly sensible supposition that the Red Building, if it really existed, was evidently an integral part of the Experiment, so seeking an explanation for it was pointless—the Experiment is the Experiment. In the end Andrei had also settled for this point of view. There was a whole heap of work to be done, the Building case already ran to more than a thousand pages, and Andrei had stuck the file right down at the bottom of his safe, only occasionally extracting it in order to insert the latest witness testimony.
Today’s talk with the boss, however, had opened up entirely new prospects. If there really were people in the City who had set themselves the task (or for whom someone else had set the task) of creating an atmosphere of panic and terror among the general population, that lent many aspects of the Building case some comprehensibility. And then the inconsistency of the testimony from the so-called witnesses could be explained by the distortion of rumors as they were passed on, and the disappearances were transformed into ordinary murders, intended to intensify the atmosphere of terror. The constantly active sources, the distribution centers of this murky, sinister haze, now had to be sought out among the welter of idle gossip, fearful whispers, and lies . . .
Andrei took a clean sheet of paper and began slowly drafting out a plan, word by word and point by point. A little while later he had come up with the following:
Primary goal: Identify sources of rumors, arrest said sources, and identify control center. Basic methods: Repeat questioning of all witnesses who have previously provided testimony in a sober condition; pursue links in the chain to identify and question individuals who claim they have been inside the Building; identify possible links between these individuals and the witnesses . . . Take into account: a) Information provided by agents b) Inconsistencies in the testimony . . .
Andrei chewed on his pencil for a moment, squinted at the lamp, and remembered another thing: contact Petrov. At one time this Petrov had really gotten Andrei’s goat. His wife had disappeared, and for some reason he decided that the Red Building had swallowed her. Since then he had abandoned all his other business and devoted himself to searching for the Building: he wrote countless notes to the Prosecutor’s Office—which were promptly forwarded to the Investigation Department and ended up with Andrei—he wandered around the City at night, was taken into the police station several times on suspicion of criminal intent, and raised Cain there, which got him locked up for ten days, and when he got out he carried on with his search.
Andrei wrote out summonses for him and two other witnesses, handed the summonses to the duty guard with orders to see they were delivered immediately, and went to see Chachua.
Chachua, an immense Caucasian who had run to fat, with almost no forehead but a gigantic nose, was reclining on the sofa in his office, surrounded by swollen case files, and sleeping. Andrei shook him.
“Eh!” Chachua said hoarsely as he woke up. “What happened?”
“Nothing happened,” Andrei said angrily. He couldn’t stand this kind of lax behavior in people. “Give me the Falling Stars case.”
Chachua sat up, his face beaming with joy. “Are you taking it?” he asked with a predatory twitch of his phenomenal nose.
“Don’t go getting all happy. It’s only to take a look.”
“Listen, what do you want to just look at it for?” Chachua exclaimed passionately. “Take the case off my hands completely. You’re handsome, young, and full of energy; the boss holds you up as an example to everyone. You’ll soon have this case unraveled—you’ll just clamber up that Yellow Wall and unravel it, quick as a flash! It’s a piece of cake for you!”
Andrei gazed at Chachua’s nose. Immense and hooked, with a web of crimson veinlets covering its bridge and bunches of coarse black hairs protruding from its nostrils, this nose lived a life of its own, apart from Chachua. It obviously just didn’t want to know about the concerns of Investigator Chachua. It wanted everyone around it to quaff ice-cold Kakhetian wine out of large glasses, following it down with juicy kebabs and moist, crunchy green herbs and salads; it wanted everyone to dance, clutching the hems of their sleeves in their fingers, with passionate cries of “Ássa!” It wanted to bury itself in fragrant blonde hair and hover above sumptuous naked breasts . . . Oh, it wanted many things, that magnificent, life-loving hedonist of a nose, and its multitudinous desires were all candidly expressed in its various independent movements and changes of color, and the range of sounds that it emitted!
“And if you can close this case,” said Chachua, rolling the olives of his eyes back up under his low forehead, “oh my God! What fame that will earn you! What honor! Do you think Chachua would offer you this case if he could climb up the Yellow Wall himself? Not for anything would Chachua offer you this case! It’s a gold mine! And I’m only offering it to you. Lots of people have come to me and asked for it. No, I thought, none of you can handle it. Voronin’s the only one who can handle it, I thought—”
“OK, OK, that’s enough,” Andrei said in annoyance. “Just cut the gab, will you, and let me have the file. I haven’t got time to waste on singing along here with you.”
Still prattling, complaining, and boasting, Chachua lazily got up, shuffling his feet across the littered floor, walked over to the safe, and started rummaging around in it, while Andrei watched his massive, broad shoulders and thought that Chachua was probably one of the best investigators in the department—he was simply a brilliant investigator, he had the highest percentage of closed cases—but he hadn’t been able to get anywhere with this Falling Stars case. No one had been able to get anywhere with this case—not Chachua, not the investigator before him, and not the investigator before that . . .
Chachua took out a pile of plump, greasy files, and they leafed through the final pages together. Andrei carefully noted down on a separate piece of paper the names and addresses of the two individuals who had been identified, and also the small number of distinguishing characteristics that had been determined for some of the unidentified victims.
“What a case!” Chachua exclaimed, clicking his tongue. “Eleven bodies! And you’re turning it down. Oh yes, Voronin, you don’t know your own good luck when you see it. You Russians always were idiots—you were idiots in the other world, and you’re still idiots in this one! What do you want this for anyway?” he asked, suddenly curious.
Andrei explained what he intended to do as coherently as he could. Chachua grasped the essence quickly enough but didn’t evince any particular delight at the idea.
“Try it, try it . . .” he said lethargically. “I have my doubts, though. What’s
your Building, compared to my Wall? The Building’s a figment, but the Wall—there it is, just a kilometer away . . . Ah, no, Voronin, we’ll never get to the bottom of this case.” But then, when Andrei was already at the door, Chachua called after him, “Well, if something does come up—you get right back to me.”
“OK,” said Andrei. “Of course.”
“Listen,” said Chachua, wrinkling up his fat forehead in concentration and wiggling his nose. Andrei stopped and looked at him expectantly. “I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time . . .” Chachua’s face turned serious. “In 1917 you had a little bust-up in Petrograd. How did that turn out, ah?”
Andrei spat and walked out, slamming the door, to peals of laughter from the delighted Caucasian. Chachua had caught him out again with that idiotic joke. It would be better not to talk to him at all.
There was a surprise waiting for him in the corridor outside his office. A disheveled little character with drowsy eyes was sitting on the bench, huddling up in his coat to keep warm and looking frightened to death. The duty guard at the small desk with the telephone jumped to his feet and gallantly barked out, “Witness Eino Saari delivered in accordance with your summons, Mr. Investigator!”
Andrei gazed at him, dumbfounded. “In accordance with my summons?”
The duty guard was rather dumbfounded too. “You told me yourself,” he said resentfully. “Half an hour ago . . . You handed me the summonses and ordered me to deliver them immediately.”
“My God,” said Andrei. “The summonses! I ordered you to deliver the summonses immediately, damn you! For tomorrow, at ten in the morning!” He glanced at pale, smiling Eino Saari with the white ankle ties of his long johns dangling out from under his trousers, then looked at the duty officer again. “And are they going to bring the others right now?” he asked.
“Yes sir,” the duty officer replied morosely. “I did what I was told to do.”
“I’ll report you,” said Andrei, barely able to control himself. “You’ll be transferred to street duty—herding the crazies back home in the morning—then I’ll watch you in your misery . . . Well then,” he said, turning to Saari, “since this is the way things have turned out, come in.”
He pointed out the stool to the witness, sat down at the desk, and glanced at the clock. It was shortly after midnight. His hopes of getting a good night’s sleep before a heavy day tomorrow had miserably evaporated. “Right, then,” he said with a sigh, opened the Building case file, leafed through the immense pile of reports, statements, references, and forensic testimony, found the sheet with the previous testimony provided by Saari (forty-three years of age, a saxophone player in the Second Municipal Theater, divorced), and ran his eyes over it one more time. “Right, then,” he repeated. “Actually what I need to do is check a few things relating to the testimony you gave the police a month ago.”
“By all means, by all means,” said Saari, eagerly leaning forward and holding his coat closed across his chest in a womanish kind of gesture.
“You testified that at 2340 hours on September 8 of this year, your acquaintance Ella Stremberg entered the so-called Red Building as you watched, and at that time the building was located on Parrot Street, in the gap between delicatessen number 115 and Strem’s pharmacy. Do you confirm that testimony?”
“Yes, yes, I confirm it. That’s absolutely the way everything was. Only about the date . . . I don’t recall the precise date—after all, it was more than a month ago.”
“That’s not important,” said Andrei. “You remembered at the time, and it also happens to concur with other testimony . . . What I’m asking you to do now is to describe that so-called Red Building again, in greater detail.”
Saari leaned his head over to one side and pondered. “Well then, it was like this,” he said. “Three stories. Old brick, dark red, like a barracks, if you know what I mean. With sort of narrow, high windows. On the first floor they were all whitewashed over, and as I recall now, they weren’t lit up . . .” He thought again for a moment. “You know, as far as I recall, there wasn’t a single lit-up window. Well, and . . . the entrance. Stone steps, two or three . . . this heavy kind of door . . . an old-fashioned sort of brass handle . . . ornate. Ella grabbed hold of that handle and pulled the door toward her with a real effort, you know . . . I didn’t notice the number of the building, I don’t even remember if it had a number . . . Basically it looked like an old government building, something from late last century.”
“Right, then,” said Andrei. “So tell me, had you often been on this Parrot Street before?”
“It was the first time. And the last, actually. I live quite a long way from there, I’m never in that area, but this time it just happened that I decided to see Ella home. We’d had a party, and I . . . mmm . . . well, I flirted with her a bit, and I went to see her home. We had a very agreeable talk on the way, then she suddenly said, ‘Well, it’s time for us to part,’ and kissed me on the cheek, and before I realized what was happening, she’d already slipped into this building. At the time I honestly thought that she lived there . . .”
“I see,” said Andrei. “You were probably drinking at the party, right?”
Saari slapped himself on the knees regretfully with both hands. “No, Mr. Investigator,” he said. “Not a drop. I can’t drink—the doctors advise me not to.”
Andrei nodded sympathetically. “You don’t happen to remember if this building had chimneys, do you?”
“Yes, of course I remember. I really should tell you that the appearance of that building has an astounding impact on the imagination—it’s as if it were standing there in front of my eyes right now. It had this tiled roof and three fairly tall chimneys. I remember there was smoke coming out of one of them, and I thought at the time how many buildings we still have that are heated by stoves . . .”
The moment had come. Andrei carefully laid his pencil across the reports and statements, leaned forward slightly, and peered intently through narrowed eyes at Eino Saari, saxophonist. “There are discrepancies in your testimony. First, as forensic analysis has demonstrated, if you were on Parrot Street, there was no way you could have seen the roof or the chimneys of a three-story building.”
The jaw of Eino Saari, mendacious saxophonist, dropped open, and his eyes started darting about in confusion.
“To continue. The investigation has established that at nighttime Parrot Street is not lit at all, and therefore it is quite incomprehensible how, in the pitch darkness of night, three hundred meters from the nearest streetlamp, you could have made out such a host of details: the color of the building, the old brick, the brass door handle, the shape of the windows, and, finally, the smoke from the chimney. I would like to know how you account for these discrepancies.”
For a while Eino Saari merely opened and closed his mouth without a sound. Then he gulped convulsively and said, “I don’t understand a thing . . . You’ve completely flummoxed me . . . It never even dawned on me . . .”
Andrei waited expectantly.
“It’s true, why didn’t I think of it before . . . It was completely dark there on that Parrot Street! Never mind the buildings—I couldn’t even see the sidewalk under my feet . . . Or the roof . . . I was standing right beside the building, by the porch . . . but I absolutely, distinctly remember the roof and the bricks and the smoke from the chimney—that white, nighttime smoke, as if it were lit up by moonlight.”
“Yes, that is strange,” Andrei said in a wooden voice.
“And the handle on the door . . . Brass, and polished by the touch of so many hands . . . such a subtle pattern of flowers and little leaves . . . I could draw it now, if I knew how to draw . . . And at the same time it was absolutely dark—I couldn’t make out Ella’s face, I could only tell from her voice that she was smiling when—”
A new idea appeared in Eino Saari’s gaping eyes. He pressed his hands to his chest.
“Mr. Investigator!” he said in a despairing voice. “At this moment my head is fill
ed with confusion, but I realize quite clearly that I’m testifying against myself, leading you to suspect me. But I’m an honest man—my parents were absolutely honest, deeply religious people . . . Everything I’m telling you now is the absolute, honest truth! That’s exactly the way it was. It’s just that it never dawned on me before. It was pitch dark, I was standing right beside the building, and at the same time I remember every brick, and I can see the tiles of that roof as if it were right here, beside me . . . and the three chimneys . . . And the smoke.”
“Hmm . . .” said Andrei, and drummed his fingers on the desk. “And perhaps you didn’t see all this yourself? Perhaps someone else told you about it? Had you ever heard about the Red Building before the incident with Miss Stremberg?”
Eino Saari’s eyes started darting about again. “Nnnn . . . I don’t recall,” he said. “Afterward—yes. After Ella disappeared, when I went to the police, after she was declared missing . . . there was a lot of talk then. But before that . . . Mr. Investigator!” he declared solemnly. “I can’t swear that I didn’t hear anything about the Red Building before Ella disappeared, but I can swear that I don’t remember anything about it.”
Andrei picked up a pen and started writing the record of interrogation. At the same time he spoke in a deliberately monotonous, officious voice, intended to inspire in the suspect a state of dreary melancholy and a sense of implacable fate propelled by the impeccable mechanism of justice. “You must realize, Mr. Saari, that the investigation cannot be satisfied with your testimony. Ella Stremberg disappeared without a trace, and you, Mr. Saari, were the last person to see her. The Red Building that you have described in such detail here does not exist on Parrot Street. The description that you give of the Red Building is not credible, since it contradicts the elementary laws of physics. And finally, as the investigation is aware, Ella Stremberg lived in an entirely different district, a long way from Parrot Street. That in itself is not evidence against you, of course, but it does arouse additional suspicions. I am obliged to detain you from this moment until a number of circumstances have been clarified . . . Please read the report of the interrogation and sign it.”