The Doomed City

“Where was the Red Building when you entered it?”

  “Today? Today it was there beside the synagogue.”

  “Did you see me in the Building?”

  Izya grinned again. “I see you every time I go in there.”

  “Including today?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was I doing?”

  “Engaging in lewd behavior,” Izya said with relish.

  “Specifically?”

  “You were copulating, Citizen Voronin. Copulating with numerous girls at the same time and simultaneously preaching high principles to eunuchs. Impressing on them that you were not engaging in this activity for your own pleasure but for the good of all mankind.”

  Andrei gritted his teeth. “And what were you doing?” he asked after a brief pause.

  “I won’t tell you that. That’s my right.”

  “You’re lying,” Andrei said. “You didn’t see me there. Here are your own words: ‘From the look of you, you’ve been in the Red Building . . .’ Consequently, you did not see me there. Why are you lying?”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Izya replied breezily. “It’s just that I felt ashamed for you and decided to make you think I hadn’t seen you there. But now, of course, things have changed. Now I am obliged to tell the truth.”

  Andrei leaned back and flung the pen behind his chair. “You say it’s a kind of dream. Then what difference does it make if you saw me or didn’t see me in a dream? Why try to make me think anything?”

  “That’s not it,” said Izya. “I was simply embarrassed to let you know what I really think of you sometimes. But I shouldn’t have been.”

  Andrei shook his head dubiously. “Well, all right. Did you bring the document file out of the Red Building too? From out of your own dream, so to say?”

  Izya’s face froze. “What file?” he asked nervously. “What is this file you keep asking about all the time? I didn’t have any file.”

  “Drop it, Katzman,” said Andrei, closing his eyes wearily. “I saw the file, the police officer saw the file, that old man saw the file . . . Pan Stupalski. You’ll have to provide an explanation at the trial in any case . . . Don’t exacerbate matters!”

  Izya’s eyes wandered across the wall. He sat there stony-faced and said nothing.

  “Let’s assume the file wasn’t from the Red House,” Andrei continued. “Then did you obtain it outside the city limits? Who from? Who gave it to you, Katzman?”

  Izya said nothing.

  “What was in that file?” Andrei got up and walked around the office with his hands clasped behind his back. “An individual has a file in his hands. The individual is arrested. On the way to the Prosecutor’s Office the individual disposes of the file. Secretly. Why? The file evidently contains documents that are compromising for this individual . . . Do you follow the train of my logic, Katzman? The file was obtained outside city limits. What kind of documents, obtained outside city limits, can compromise an inhabitant of our City? What kind, tell me, Katzman?”

  Izya looked up at the ceiling, worrying away relentlessly at his wart.

  “Only don’t try to worm your way out of it, Katzman,” Andrei warned him. “Don’t try to sell me another of your cock-and-bull stories. I can see right through you. What was in the file? Lists? Addresses? Instructions?”

  Izya suddenly slapped himself on the knee. “Listen, you idiot!” he roared. “What sort of garbage are you spouting here? Who put all this into your head, you poor simpleton? What lists, what addresses? You crummy, pathetic Major Pronin! You’ve known me for three years—you know that I rummage around in the ruins, that I study the history of the City. Why the hell do you keep trying to pin some idiotic charge of spying on me? Think about it: Who can do any spying here? What for? Who for?”

  “What was in the file?” Andrei barked out at the top of his lungs. “Stop prevaricating and give me a straight answer: What was in the file?”

  At that Izya snapped. His eyes bulged out, suffused with blood. “You can just . . . go to hell with your files!” he squealed in a falsetto voice. “I’m not going to tell you anything. You’re a fool, an idiot, a gendarme scumbag!”

  He squealed, sprayed, swore, and gestured obscenely, and then Andrei took a clean sheet of paper and wrote at the top of it, “Testimony of the suspect I. Katzman concerning the document file that was seen in his possession and subsequently disappeared without a trace.” He waited until Izya quieted down and said good-naturedly, “Let me tell you this, Izya. Unofficially. Your case is petty trash. I know you got tangled up in this business without even thinking, thanks to that idiotic curiosity of yours. If you’d like to know, we’ve had you in our sights for six months already. And my advice to you is to sit over here and write down everything just the way it is. I can’t promise you much, but I’ll do everything that lies in my power for you. Sit down and write. I’ll come back in half an hour.”

  Trying not to look at Izya, who had fallen quiet out of sheer exhaustion, and feeling disgusted by his own hypocrisy but consoling himself with the thought that in this instance the goal quite definitely justified the means, he locked the drawers of his desk, got up, and walked out.

  In the corridor he beckoned to the assistant duty guard, stood him at the door, and went off to the cafeteria. He had an ugly feeling in his heart and a foul, sticky taste in his mouth, as if he had gorged himself on shit. The interrogation had turned out skewed and unconvincing somehow. He’d screwed up the Red Building connection totally and absolutely; he shouldn’t even have gotten into it at this stage. And the way he’d lost the file was a real blunder—the file was the only real clue, and he had ignominiously let it slip through his fingers. For gaffes like that he ought to be thrown out of the Public Prosecutor’s Office in disgrace . . . Fritz probably wouldn’t have let it slip away from him. Fritz would immediately have realized what the real goods were. Damned sentimentality. Of course it was—they’d drunk together, shot the breeze together; he was Andrei’s buddy, a Soviet guy . . .

  But what a chance it was, he thought, to rake them all in at once! And the boss goofed too: rumors, gossip . . . There’s an entire network of them working away right under his nose, and I’m supposed to search for the source of the rumors . . .

  Andrei walked up to the counter, took a shot glass of vodka, and tossed it down with a feeling of revulsion. Where had Izya put that damned file after all? Had he really just thrown it out on the road? Probably—he hadn’t eaten it, had he? Maybe Andrei should send someone to look for it? Too late. Loonies, baboons, caretakers . . . No, the way our work’s organized is all wrong, it’s all wrong. Why is such important information as the existence of the Anticity kept secret even from employees of the Investigation Department? Why, they ought to write about it every day in the newspapers and put up posters in the streets! We need show trials! I’d have had this Katzman pegged ages ago . . . On the other hand, of course, you have to know how to think for yourself too. Since such a grandiose undertaking as the Experiment exists, and since people of the most various classes and political persuasions have been roped into it, it means that a certain stratification will inevitably arise . . . contradictions . . . dynamic contradictions, if you like . . .an antagonistic struggle . . . The opponents of the Experiment must be exposed sooner or later, those people who disagree with it in class terms and also those who try to warp it to suit their own interests—the déclassé element, those who lack moral fiber, and corrupted individuals, like Katzman . . . all sorts of cosmopolitans . . . a natural process. I could have figured out for myself the way all this ought to develop—

  A small, firm hand was laid on his shoulder, and he swung around. It was the crime reporter from the City Gazette, Kensi Ubukata. “What are you musing about, investigator?” he asked. “Untangling a knotty case? Share your thoughts with the public. The public loves knotty cases. Eh?”

  “Hi, Kensi,” Andrei said in a tired voice. “Have a glass of vodka?

  “Yes, if there’s information to g
o with it.”

  “I’ve got nothing for you except vodka.”

  “OK, I’ll take the vodka without the information.”

  They drank a shot each and snacked on limp pickles.

  “I’ve just come from your boss,” said Kensi, spitting out the tail of a pickle. “He’s a very flexible sort of individual. One trend is rising and another is falling, the process of equipping solitary cells with washbasins is almost complete—and not a single word about the question that I’m interested in.”

  “And what are you interested in?” Andrei asked absentmindedly.

  “Right now I’m interested in disappearances. In the last fifteen days eleven people have disappeared without a trace in the City. Maybe you know something about that?”

  “I know they disappeared. I know they haven’t been found.”

  “Who’s handling the case?”

  “It’s not likely to be just one case,” said Andrei. “You should ask the boss that.”

  Kensi shook his head. “Somehow just recently the gentlemen investigators have been referring me to their boss, or to Heiger, a bit too often . . . There’s been a sudden proliferation of mysteries in our little democratic community. You wouldn’t happen to have metamorphosed into a secret police at some odd moment, would you?” He glanced into his empty shot glass and complained, “What’s the use of having friends among the investigators if you can never find out anything?”

  “Duty before friendship.”

  Neither of them spoke for a while.

  “By the way, you know, Wang’s been arrested,” said Kensi. “I warned him all right, but he wouldn’t listen—he’s as stubborn as a mule.”

  “It’s OK, I fixed everything already,” said Andrei.

  “How so?”

  Andrei enthusiastically told Kensi how deftly and quickly he had fixed everything. Set everything straight. Restored justice. He got a kick out of telling the story of this single successful incident in such a long, ludicrously disastrous day.

  “Hmm,” said Kensi after he heard Andrei out. “Interesting . . . ‘When I arrive in a foreign country,’” he said, quoting, “‘I never ask if the laws there are good or bad. I only ask if they are enforced . . .’”

  “What do you mean by that?” Andrei asked him with a frown.

  “What I mean is that as far as I’m aware the law on the right to diversified labor does not specify any exceptions.”

  “So you think that Wang should have been shipped out to the swamps?”

  “If that’s what the law requires—yes.”

  “But that’s plain stupid!” Andrei said, getting annoyed. “Why the hell would the Experiment want a bad production plant director instead of a good caretaker?”

  “The law on the right to diversified labor—”

  “That law,” Andrei broke in, “was devised for the good of the Experiment, not to harm it. A law can’t anticipate everything. We enforcers of the law have to know how to think for ourselves.”

  “My view of the enforcement of the law is somewhat different,” Kensi said drily. “In any case, you don’t decide such matters, the court does.”

  “The court would have shipped him off to the swamps,” said Andrei. “But he has a wife and a child.”

  “Dura lex, sed lex,” said Kensi.

  “That adage was invented by bureaucrats.”

  “That adage,” Kensi said gravely, “was invented by people who wished to preserve a unified legal basis for the social coexistence of a disparate mass of free human beings.”

  “That’s exactly it, disparate!” said Andrei, seizing on the word. “There simply cannot be a single law for all. There is no single law for the exploiter and the exploited. Now, if Wang had refused to move from being a director to being a caretaker . . .”

  “It’s not your job to interpret the law,” Kensi said coldly. “The court exists to do that.”

  “But the court doesn’t know Wang like I do, and it never can!”

  Kensi shook his head with a crooked smile. “God almighty, what great experts you have here in the Prosecutor’s Office!”

  “OK, OK,” Andrei growled. “So why not write an article about it? Idiot investigator releases criminal caretaker.”

  “I would, too. Only I’d feel sorry for Wang. I wouldn’t feel sorry for you at all, you fool.”

  “Well, I feel sorry for Wang too, don’t I?” said Andrei.

  “But you’re an investigator,” Kensi retorted. “And I’m not. I’m not bound by the laws.”

  “You know what,” said Andrei. “Just stop hassling me, for Christ’s sake. My head’s spinning already without you lending a hand.”

  Kensi looked up and chuckled. “Yes, I can see that. It’s written on your forehead. Was there a raid?”

  “No,” said Andrei. “I just tripped over something.” He looked at his watch. “Another shot?”

  “Thanks, but no more,” said Kensi, getting up. “I can’t drink so much with every investigator. I only drink with the ones who give me information.”

  “Well, screw you then,” said Andrei. “Chachua’s just shown up over there. Go ask him about the Falling Stars. He’s been making really great progress—he was boasting about it today . . . Only don’t forget that he’s a very modest guy: he’ll deny everything, just don’t let him off the hook, pump him really hard, and you’ll end up with a real gem!”

  Moving chairs aside, Kensi set off toward Chachua, who was dejectedly hunched over a skinny little meat rissole, and Andrei gently strolled over to the door, smirking vengefully. I’d just love to wait and watch Chachua bellow, he thought. Too bad there’s no time for that . . . Right, then. Citizen Katzman, how have you been getting on? And God help you, Citizen Katzman, if you feed me any more of that hogwash. I won’t stand for it, Citizen Katzman . . .

  In room 36 every possible light had been turned on. Citizen Katzman was standing there, leaning his shoulder against the open safe, avidly leafing through some case or other, fiddling with his wart in his usual fashion, and grinning like a Cheshire cat at something.

  “What the hell!” said Andrei, caught off-guard. “Who gave you permission? What sort of behavior is this, dammit?”

  Izya looked up at him with a mindless expression in his eyes, grinned even wider, and said, “I never realized what a huge, tangled mess you’d made of the Red Building.”

  Andrei tore the file out of Izya’s hands, slammed the metal door shut with a clang, grabbed him by the shoulder, and shoved him toward the stool. “Sit down, Katzman,” he said, straining every nerve to control himself. Fury blurred everything in front of his eyes. “Have you written that statement?”

  “Listen,” said Izya, “this place is simply full of idiots . . . There’s 150 of you cretins sitting here and you still can’t understand . . .”

  But Andrei wasn’t looking at him any longer. He was looking at the sheet of paper with the title “Testimony of the suspect I. Katzman . . .” There wasn’t any testimony, but there was a pen drawing instead: a male sex organ, life size.

  “You bastard,” Andrei exclaimed, and choked. “You scumbag.” He tore the phone off the hook and dialed a number with a trembling finger. “Fritz? It’s Voronin here . . .” With his free hand he ripped open his collar. “I really need your help here. Please, come over to my room right now.”

  “What’s the problem?” Heiger asked in annoyance. “I’m about to go home.”

  “Please, please!” said Andrei, raising his voice. “Just come over here!”

  He hung up and looked at Izya, and immediately discovered he couldn’t look at him, so he started looking through him instead. Izya burbled and giggled on his stool, rubbing his hands together and talking nonstop, pontificating about something with a repulsive, self-righteous sort of glibness, something about the Red Building, about conscience, about idiotic witnesses . . . Andrei didn’t listen; he didn’t hear anything. The decision he had taken filled him with fear and a sort of diabolical merriment. Everything ins
ide him was jigging about in excitement—he simply couldn’t wait for that moment, any time now, when the door would open and somber, angry Fritz would stride into the room, and then he would see that repulsively smug face change, contorting in horror and ignominious fear . . . Especially if Fritz showed up with Ruhmer. The mere sight of Ruhmer would be enough—those bestial, hairy features of his, with the flattened nose. Andrei suddenly felt a chilly sensation on his back. He was completely covered in perspiration. He could still change his move after all, couldn’t he? He could still say, “Everything’s OK, Fritz, it’s all been squared away, sorry I bothered you . . .”

  The door swung open and in walked Fritz Heiger, sullen and irascible. “Well, what’s the problem?” he inquired, and then he spotted Izya. “Ah, hi!” he said, breaking into a smile. “What are you two up to in the middle of the night? It’s time to sleep; it’s almost morning.”

  “Listen, Fritz!” Izya howled joyfully. “Explain to this blockhead, will you? You’re a big boss around here—”

  “Silence, suspect!” Andrei bellowed, slamming his fist onto the desk.

  Izya fell silent and Fritz instantly gathered himself, giving Izya a different kind of look.

  “This bastard is treating the investigation with contempt,” Andrei said through his teeth, trying to calm down and stop trembling all over. “This bastard is refusing to talk. Take him, Fritz, make him answer the questions he’s asked.”

  Fritz’s transparent Nordic eyes opened wide.

  “And just what questions is he being asked?” he inquired with brisk glee.

  “That’s not important,” said Andrei. “Give him a piece of paper, he’ll write it himself. And I want him to say what was in the file.”

  “Got it,” said Fritz, and turned toward Izya.

  Izya still didn’t understand anything. Or he didn’t believe it. He slowly rubbed his hands together and grinned uncertainly.

  “Right, then, my Jewish friend, shall we go?” Fitz inquired affectionately. His grim sullenness had disappeared without a trace. “Move it, bucko!”

  Izya carried on dragging his feet, and Fritz took hold of his collar, swung him around, and shoved him toward the door. Izya lost his balance and grabbed hold of the doorpost. His face turned white. Now he understood.