“Hello, Otto,” said Andrei. “This is Voronin, from the Public Prosecutor’s Office.”
“The Public Prosecutor’s Office? What can I do for you?”
“What is this, aren’t you awake yet?” Andrei asked angrily. “Has Elsa worn you out, then? This is Andrei here! Voronin!”
“Ah, Andrei?” Otto said in a completely different voice. “What are you doing, calling in the middle of the night like this? My heart’s pounding, dammit . . . What do you want?”
Andrei explained the situation. As he expected, everything went through without a hitch. Yes, Otto had always thought that Wang was in the right place. Yes, he definitely did think that Wang would never make a director of an industrial plant. He quite openly and unambiguously admired Wang’s desire to remain in such an unenviable job (“We could do with more people like that here—everyone’s trying to climb upward, like a bunch of mountain rangers”), he indignantly rejected the very idea of sending Wang to the swamps, and as far as the law was concerned, he was filled with pious outrage at the idiots and bureaucratic cretins who had replaced the living spirit of the law with its dead letter. After all, the law existed to hinder the efforts of various tricksters to worm their way up, and it shouldn’t affect people who wanted to stay at the bottom in any way. The director of the labor exchange clearly understood all this. “Yes!” he repeated. “Oh, yes, of course!”
Andrei was left, however, with the vague, ludicrous, and annoying impression that Otto would have agreed to any proposal that he, Andrei Voronin, made—for instance, to appoint Wang as mayor or, on the contrary, lock him away in a cell. Otto had always felt a certain morbid gratitude to Andrei, probably because Andrei was the only person in their set (and perhaps in the entire City) who treated Otto like a human being . . . But, after all, the point at hand was really the most important thing, wasn’t it?
“I’ll see that it’s done,” Otto repeated for the tenth time. “You can stop worrying, Andrei. I’ll issue the instructions, and no one will bother Wang again.”
They left it at that. Andrei put down the phone and started writing out an exit pass for Wang. “Will you go right now?” he asked, still writing. “Or will you wait for the sun? Think about it, the streets are dangerous at this hour.”
“Thank you,” Wang murmured. “Thank you.”
Andrei looked up in amazement. Wang was standing in front of him, repeatedly bowing rapidly and shallowly, with his hands folded together in front of his chest.
“Ah, drop all the Chinese ceremony,” Andrei growled in embarrassed annoyance. “As if I’d done you some kind of good deed!” He handed Wang the pass. “I asked if you were going to go right now.”
Wang accepted the pass with yet another bow. “I think I had better go immediately,” he said, as if apologizing. “Right away. The garbage collectors have probably arrived already.”
“The garbage collectors . . .” Andrei repeated. He looked at the plate of sandwiches. Large, fresh sandwiches, with excellent ham. “Hang on,” he said, taking an old newspaper out of a drawer and starting to wrap the sandwiches in it. “You can take them home, for Mei-lin.”
Wang resisted feebly, murmuring something about it being an excessive inconvenience, but Andrei stuffed the bundle inside Wang’s jacket, put one arm around his shoulders, and led him to the door. Andrei felt terribly awkward somehow. Both Otto and Wang had reacted strangely to his actions. After all, he’d only tried to be just, to do everything correctly and rationally, and it had turned out like the damnedest sort of thing—some kind of charity work or string-pulling or cronyism . . . He hastily tried to find the right words—dry and matter-of-fact words—that would emphasize the official nature and legality of the situation . . . And suddenly he thought he’d found them. He stopped, raised his chin, looked Wang over from head to foot and said coolly, “Citizen Wang, on behalf of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, I offer you our profound apologies for your illegal detention. I assure you that it will never happen again.”
And after that he felt totally embarrassed. What kind of nonsense was that? In the first place, Wang’s detention had not, strictly speaking, been illegal. And second, the investigator Voronin couldn’t give any assurances about anything; he didn’t have that right . . . And at that point he saw Wang’s eyes—that strange look, so familiar in its strangeness, and he suddenly remembered and the memory was like a wave of scalding heat.
“Wang,” he said, his voice suddenly hoarse. “I want to ask you something, Wang.”
He stopped. It was stupid to ask, pointless. And already too late not to ask. Wang looked up at him, expectant.
“Wang,” said Andrei, and cleared his throat. “Where were you at two o’clock this morning?”
Wang wasn’t surprised. “They came for me at two,” he said. “I was washing down the stairs.”
“And before that?”
“Before that I collected the trash. Mei-lin helped me, then she went to bed and I went to wash down the stairs.”
“Yes,” said Andrei, “that’s what I thought. OK, good-bye, Wang. Sorry things turned out like this . . . No, hang on, I’ll see you out . . .”
4
Before he summoned Izya, Andrei thought the whole thing through again.
First, he forbade himself to take a biased approach to Izya. The fact that Izya was a cynic, a know-it-all, and a blabbermouth, that he was prepared to ridicule—and he did ridicule—everything in the world, that he was slovenly and sprayed saliva when he spoke, giggled repulsively, and lived with a widow like a kept man and nobody had any idea how he earned a living . . . in this instance all of that must be absolutely irrelevant.
Andrei also had to discard root and branch the primitive idea that Katzman was a simple disseminator of panicky rumors about the Red Building and other mystical phenomena. The Red Building was a reality—a mysterious, fantastic reality; it wasn’t clear what it was for and who needed it—but it was a reality. (At this point Andrei checked in the first aid kit and spread disinfectant on his oozing bump, looking in a little mirror.) In this plan Katzman was primarily a witness. What was he doing in the Red House? How often did he visit it? What could he tell Andrei about it? What file had he brought out of it? Or was the file really not from there after all? Was it really from the old City Hall?
Stop, stop! Katzman had repeatedly let slip . . . well, not let slip, of course, but simply told them about his journeys to the north. What was he doing there? The Anticity lay somewhere to the north too.
Yes, I was right to detain Katzman, even if it was done in haste. That’s the way it always goes. It all starts with simple curiosity—someone sticks his curious nose in where it doesn’t belong, and before he can say boo, he’s been recruited . . . Why did he refuse point-blank to give me that document file? The file is obviously from there. And the Red Building is from there! The boss obviously failed to put two and two together somewhere. No, it’s understandable—he didn’t have the facts. And he hasn’t been in there. Yes, spreading rumors is a terrible thing, but the Red Building is more terrible than any rumor. And the really terrible thing is not even that people disappear inside it forever; the terrible thing is that sometimes they come back out! They come back out, they return to live among us, like Katzman . . .
Andrei felt that now he had a tight grasp of the most important thread, but he didn’t have the courage to follow the analysis all the way through to the end. He knew only that the Andrei Voronin who went in through that door with the brass handle was not entirely the same Andrei Voronin who came out of that door. Something had snapped inside him in there, something had been irretrievably lost . . . He gritted his teeth. Oh no, you’ve miscalculated this time, my fine gentlemen. You shouldn’t have let me out. We’re not so easily broken . . . or bought . . . or moved to pity.
Grinning crookedly, he took a clean sheet of paper and wrote on it in large letters, “RED BUILDING—KATZMAN. RED BUILDING—ANTICITY. ANTICITY—KATZMAN.” That was the way it all panned out. No, boss,
he thought, it’s not the rumor-spreaders we have to search for. We need to search for the people who have emerged from the Red Building alive and well—search for them, catch them, isolate them . . . or place them under rigorous observation . . . He wrote down, “People who have been in the Building—the Anticity.” So Pani Husáková would have to tell them all she knew about her František after all. The flute player could probably be released, though. But then, it wasn’t really about them . . . Maybe I should call the boss? Ask his blessing for the change of direction? No, it’s probably a bit too soon for that. No, if I can get Katzman to talk . . . He picked up the phone.
“Duty guard? Bring detainee Katzman to me in 36.”
And not only did he need to get Katzman to talk, he could. The file. There was no way Katzman could worm his way out of that . . . It flashed through Andrei’s mind that it wasn’t entirely ethical for him to handle Katzman’s case; he had drunk with the man on numerous occasion, and in general . . . But he pulled himself up short there.
The door opened and detainee Katzman, with a huge grin on his face and his hands stuck in his greasy pockets, entered the room with a slack, jaunty stride.
“Sit down,” Andrei said coolly, jerking his chin in the direction of the stool.
“Thank you,” said the detainee, grinning even more widely. “I see you haven’t snapped out of it yet.”
It was all water off a duck’s back to him, the creep. Katzman sat down, tugged at the wart on his neck, and glanced curiously around the office.
And then a cold shiver ran down Andrei’s spine. The detainee didn’t have the file with him.
“Where’s the file?” Andrei asked, trying to speak calmly.
“What file?” Katzman inquired brazenly.
Andrei grabbed up the phone. “Duty guard! Where is detainee Katzman’s document file?”
“What file?” the duty guard asked obtusely. “I’ll just take a look . . . Katzman . . . Aha . . . The following items were confiscated from detainee Katzman: handkerchiefs, 2; wallet, 1, empty, worn . . .”
“Is there a document file in the inventory?” Andrei barked.
“There isn’t any file,” the duty guard answered in a sinking voice.
“Bring me the inventory,” Andrei said hoarsely, and hung up. Then he glowered briefly at Katzman. His hatred for the man was buzzing in his ears. “Jewish pranks . . .” he said, restraining himself. “Where did you put the file, you bastard?”
Katzman responded immediately, in melodramatic literary style: “She grabbed hold of his hand and asked him over and over again: ‘Where did you put the file?’”
“All right,” said Andrei, breathing heavily through his nose. “It won’t do you any good, you lousy, spying scum.”
A look of astonishment flashed across Izya’s face. But a second later he already had that repulsive, taunting grin stuck on it again. “Why, of course, of course!” he said. “Iosif Katzman, chairman of the ‘Joint’ organization, at your service. Don’t beat me, I’ll tell you everything anyway. The machine guns are hidden in Berdichev, the landing site is marked by campfires . . .”
The frightened duty guard walked in, holding the sheet of paper with the inventory on it out in front of him. “There isn’t any file here,” he muttered, putting the inventory down on the edge of the desk in front of Andrei and retreating. “I rang the front desk, and they don’t—”
“All right, go,” Andrei said through his teeth. He took a blank interrogation form and asked, without looking up: “Full name with patronymic?”
“Iosif Mikhailovich Katzman.”
“Year of birth?”
“Thirty-six.”
“Nationality?”
“Yes,” Katzman said, and giggled.
Andrei raised his head. “Yes what?”
“Listen, Andrei,” said Izya. “I don’t understand what’s going on with you today, but bear in mind that you’ll destroy your entire career with me like this. I’m warning you as an old friend—”
“Answer the questions!” Andrei said in a strangled voice. “Nationality?”
“Just don’t you forget how they took Dr. Timashuk’s medal away from her,” said Izya.
But Andrei didn’t know who Dr. Timashuk was. “Nationality!”
“Jewish,” Izya said with loathing.
“Citizenship?”
“U! S! S! R!”
“Religious affiliation?”
“None.”
“Political affiliation?”
“None.”
“Education?”
“Higher. Herzen Pedagogical Institute, Leningrad.”
“Criminal record?”
“None.”
“Earthly year of departure?”
“Nineteen sixty-eight.”
“Point of departure?
“Leningrad.”
“Reason for departure?”
“Curiosity.”
“Period of residence in the City?”
“Four years.”
“Present profession?”
“Statistician at the Department of Municipal Services.”
“List previous professions.”
“General laborer, senior municipal archivist, office clerk at the municipal slaughterhouse, garbage collector, blacksmith. I think that’s all.”
“Family status.”
“Adulterer,” Izya replied, smirking.
Andrei put down the pen, lit up, and studied the detainee through the blue smoke for a while. Izya was grinning, Izya was unkempt and shock-headed, Izya was sardonic, but Andrei knew this man well, and he could see that Izya was nervous. He obviously had something to be nervous about, even though he had managed to ditch the file—and very deftly, it must be said. He obviously realized now that he was being dealt with in earnest; that was why his eyes were narrowed nervously and the corners of his grinning mouth were trembling.
“Well then, suspect Katzman,” Andrei said in a tried and tested chilly tone of voice. “I seriously recommend you adopt a respectful attitude toward the investigation if you don’t wish to make your own situation any worse.”
Izya stopped smiling. “All right,” he said. “Then I demand to be informed of the charge against me and also the article under which I have been detained. Furthermore, I demand a lawyer. From this moment on I won’t say another word without a lawyer.”
Andrei chuckled to himself. “You have been detained under article 12 of the Criminal Procedural Code concerning the preventive detention of individuals whose continued presence at liberty could constitute a public danger. You are accused of illegal contacts with hostile elements, concealing or destroying material evidence at the time of arrest . . . and also of violating the municipal ordinance that forbids travel beyond the city limits for public health reasons. You have violated this ordinance on a regular basis . . . And as for a lawyer, the Public Prosecutor’s Office cannot provide you with a lawyer until three days have elapsed following the time of arrest. In accordance with the aforementioned article 12 of the Criminal Procedural Code . . . In addition, let me clarify: you may formally protest, register complaints, and enter appeals only after you have satisfactorily replied to the questions of the initial interrogation. All in accordance with the said article 12. Is all that clear?”
He had been studying Izya’s face and he could see that everything was clear to him. It was also absolutely clear that Izya would answer the questions and wait until the three days were over. At the mention of the three-day period Izya had unmistakably caught his breath.
“Now that you have received this clarification,” Andrei said, picking up the pen again, “let us proceed. Your family status.”
“Unmarried,” said Izya.
“Home address?”
“What?” asked Izya. He had clearly been thinking about something else.
“Your home address? Where do you live?”
“Nineteen Second Left Street, apartment 7.”
“Do you have anything to tell me regar
ding the charges brought against you?”
“By all means,” said Izya. “Concerning the hostile elements: delirious drivel. This is the first time I’ve even heard that there are any hostile elements. I regard it as a deliberately provocative invention on the part of the investigation. Material evidence . . . I did not have and could not have had any material evidence with me, because I have not committed any crimes. Therefore I can neither conceal nor destroy anything. And as for the municipal ordinance—I am a former employee of the municipal archive, where I continue to work on a voluntary basis; I have access to all archival materials, and therefore also to those that lie outside the city limits. That’s all.”
“What were you doing in the Red Building?’
“That is my own personal business. You have no right to intrude into my personal affairs. First prove that they are relevant to the substance of the charges. Article 14 of the Criminal Procedural Code.”
“Have you been in the Red Building on more than one occasion?”
“Yes.”
“Can you name the people whom you met there?”
Izya gave a ghastly grin. “I can. Only that will not assist the investigation.”
“Name these people.”
“By all means. From modern times: Pétain, Quisling, Wang Ching-wei, Vasil Bilak—”
Andrei raised his hand. “I request that above all else you name individuals who are citizens of our City.”
“And why would the investigation require that?” Izya inquired aggressively.
“I am not obliged to account for anything to you. Answer the questions.”
“I don’t wish to answer your idiotic questions. You don’t understand a damn thing. You imagine that if I met someone in there, it means he really was there. But that’s not so.”
“I don’t understand. Please explain.”
“I don’t understand it myself,” said Izya. “It’s something like a dream. The delirious ravings of an agitated conscience.”
“I see. Like a dream. Were you in the Red Building today?”
“Yes, I was.”