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  Malianov rushed to the foyer and looked for Irina’s note. No, it was just his imagination. Everything was in order. It was obviously Irina’s handwriting and her style—and anyway, why would a killer stay around to do the dishes?

  Excerpt 8.… Val’s phone was busy. Malianov hung up and stretched out on the sofa, his nose in the itchy blanket. Something was wrong at Val’s house, too. Some kind of hysteria. It’s happened before. A fight with Svetlana, or with his mother-in-law. What was that he asked me, something strange? Ah, Val, I should have your troubles! No, let him come over. He’s hysterical; I’m hysterical—maybe the two of us can come up with a solution. Malianov dialed again, and it was still busy. Damn, what a waste of time! I should be working, but there’s all this mess.

  Suddenly he heard someone cough behind him in the foyer. Malianov flew off the sofa. For nothing, of course. There was no one in the foyer. Or in the bathroom. He checked the lock and came back to the sofa, whereupon he realized that his knees were wobbly. Hell, my nerves are shot. And that creep kept telling me that he was like the Invisible Man. You look like a tapeworm with glasses, you creep, not the Invisible Man! Bastard. He dialed Val’s number again, hung up, and began pulling on his socks with determination. I’ll call from Vecherovsky’s. It’s my own fault that I’m wasting time. He put on a fresh shirt, checked that his keys were in his pocket, locked the door, and ran up the stairs.

  On the sixth floor a couple was making out by the incinerator chute. The guy was wearing sunglasses, but Malianov knew the punk—he was an aspiring do-nothing from Apartment 17. He was in his second year of unemployment and steadily not looking for work. He didn’t run into anyone else on his way to the eighth floor. But all the while he had the feeling that he would bump into someone. They would grab his arm and say softly: “Just a second, citizen.”

  Thank God, Phil was home. And as usual he was dressed as if ready to leave for the Dutch Embassy for a reception for her Royal Highness, the car would be picking him up in five minutes. He was wearing a phenomenally gorgeous cream-colored suit, loafers beyond mere mortal dreams, and a tie. That tie always depressed Malianov. He just couldn’t understand how anyone could work at home in a tie.

  “Are you working?” Malianov asked.

  “As usual.”

  “I won’t stay long.”

  “Of course. Some coffee?”

  “Wait. No, why not. Please.”

  They went to the kitchen. Malianov took a chair, and Vecherovsky began the ritual with the coffee-making equipment.

  “I’ll make Viennese coffee,” he said without turning.

  “Fine,” Malianov said. “Do you have whipped cream?”

  Vecherovsky did not reply. Malianov watched his protruding shoulder blades work under the creamy fabric.

  “Did the criminal investigator come to see you?” Malianov asked.

  The shoulder blades stopped for a second, and then the long, freckled face with the droopy nose and red eyebrows, raised high over the tortoiseshell eyeglasses, appeared slowly over his round, stooped shoulder.

  “Sorry. What did you say?”

  “I said: Did the criminal investigator come to see you today?”

  “Why a criminal investigator?”

  “Because Snegovoi shot himself. They’ve already talked to me.”

  “Who’s Snegovoi?”

  “You know, the guy who lives across the hall from me. The rocketry guy.”

  “Oh.”

  Vecherovsky turned away and his shoulder blades started up again.

  “Didn’t you know him? I thought I had introduced you.”

  “No,” said Vecherovsky. “Not as far as I can remember.”

  A marvelous coffee aroma filled the kitchen. Malianov settled comfortably into the chair. Should he tell him or not? In that aromatic kitchen, cool despite the blinding sun, where everything was in its place and everything was of top quality—the best in the world or even better—the events of the last day seemed particularly crazy and improbable, even unhealthy, somehow.

  “Do you know the joke about the two roosters?” Malianov asked.

  “Two roosters? I know one about three roosters. A terrible joke.”

  “No, no. It’s about two roosters,” Malianov said. “You don’t know it?”

  And he told the joke about the two roosters. Vecherovsky did not react at all. One would have thought that he was faced with a serious problem instead of a joke—he was so serious and thoughtful when he set the cup of coffee and the creamer in front of Malianov. Then he poured himself a cup and sat down across the table, holding the cup in the air, taking a sip, and finally pronouncing:

  “Excellent. Not your joke. I mean the coffee.”

  “I got it,” Malianov said glumly.

  They silently enjoyed the Viennese coffee. Then Vecherovsky broke the silence.

  “I thought about your problem some yesterday. Have you tried Hartwig’s function?”

  “I know, I know. I figured that out for myself.”

  Malianov pushed away the empty cup.

  “Listen, Phil. I can’t think about the damn function! My brain is in a muddle, and you …”

  Excerpt 9.… nothing for a minute, rubbing his smooth-shaved cheek with two fingers, and then declaimed:

  “We could not look death in the face, they bound our eyes and brought us to her.” Then he added, “Poor guy.”

  It wasn’t clear who he had in mind.

  “I mean, I can understand everything,” Malianov said. “But that investigator …”

  “Want some more coffee?” Vecherovsky interrupted.

  Malianov shook his head, and Vecherovsky stood up.

  “Then let’s go into my room,” he said.

  They moved to his studio. Vecherovsky sat down at his desk, completely bare except for one single piece of paper right in the middle, took a mechanical phone directory from the drawer, pushed a button, read down the page, and dialed the phone number.

  “Senior Investigator Zykin, please,” he said in a dry, businesslike voice. “I mean, Zykov, Igor Petrovich. Out on operations? Thank you.” He hung up. “Senior Investigator Zykov is out on operations,” he told Malianov.

  “He’s out drinking my cognac with some girls, that’s what he’s out doing,” grumbled Malianov.

  Vecherovsky bit his lip.

  “That doesn’t matter. The point is he exists!”

  “Of course he exists! He showed me his papers. Why, did you think they were crooks?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “That’s what I thought. To do that whole story just for a bottle of cognac, and right next door to a sealed apartment.”

  Vecherovsky nodded.

  “And you say—Hartwig’s function! How can I work at a time like this? There’s enough going on.”

  Vecherovsky looked at him intently.

  “Dmitri,” he said. “Didn’t it surprise you that Snegovoi took an interest in your work?”

  “And how! We’d never talked about work before.”

  “And what did you tell him?”

  “Well, in very general terms—in fact, he didn’t insist on details.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “Nothing. I think he was disappointed. He said, ‘There’s the estate, and there’s the water.’ ”

  “What?”

  “ ‘There’s the estate, and there’s the water.’ ”

  “And what is that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s a literary reference. You know, that you ask about the rope, and you get an answer about the sky.”

  “Aha.” Vecherovsky blinked with his bovine lashes, then took a pristine, sparkling ashtray from the windowsill and a pipe and tobacco pouch and began filling the pipe. “Aha … ‘there’s the estate, and there’s the water.’ … I like that. I’ll have to remember it.”

  Malianov waited impatiently. He had great faith in him. Vecherovsky had a totally inhuman brain. Malianov knew no one else who could come up with such completely unex
pected conclusions.

  “Well?” he finally demanded.

  Vecherovsky had filled his pipe and was now slowly smoking and savoring it. The pipe made little wheezing sounds. Inhaling, Vecherovsky said:

  “Dmitri … pf-pf-pf … how much have you moved along since Thursday? I think Thursday … pf-pf … was the last time we talked.”

  “What difference does it make?” Malianov asked, annoyed. “I don’t have time for that now.”

  Vecherovsky let those words go right by him. He kept looking at Malianov with his reddish eyes and puffed on his pipe. That was Vecherovsky. He had asked a question, and now he was waiting for an answer. Malianov gave up. He believed that Vecherovsky knew better than he what was important and what wasn’t.

  “I’ve moved along considerably,” he said, and began describing how he reformulated the problem and reduced it to an equation in vector form and then to an integral-differential equation, how he began getting a physical picture of it, how he figured out the M cavities, and how last night he finally figured out that he should use Hartwig’s transformation.

  Vecherovsky listened attentively, without interrupting or asking questions, and only once, when Malianov got carried away, grabbed the solitary piece of paper, and tried to write on the back of it, he stopped him and said, “In words, in words.”

  “But I didn’t have time to act on any of it,” Malianov wound up sadly. “Because first the crazy phone calls began, and then the guy from the store came over.”

  “You didn’t tell me about any of this,” Vecherovsky interrupted.

  “Well, it has nothing to do with it,” Malianov replied. “I could still get some work done with all the telephone calls, but then that Lidochka showed up, and it all went to hell …”

  Vecherovsky was completely enveloped in puffs and plumes of honeyed smoke.

  “Not bad, not bad,” his soft voice said. “But you stopped, I see, at the most interesting spot.”

  “I didn’t stop, I was stopped!”

  “Yes,” said Vecherovsky.

  Malianov struck his knees with his fists. “Damn, I could be doing so much work right now! But I can’t think! Every rustle in my own apartment makes me jump like a psycho … and then there’s that lovely prospect—fifteen years in a prison camp …”

  He brought up the fifteen years yet again, always waiting for Vecherovsky to say “Stop imagining things, that won’t happen, don’t even think about it …” But this time, too, Vecherovsky said nothing of the kind. Instead, he started questioning Malianov at length and in detail about the phone calls: when did they start (exactly), where were they calling (well, just a few concrete examples), who called (man? woman? child?)? When Malianov told him about the calls from Weingarten, he seemed surprised and kept silent for a while, and then went back to his questions. What did Malianov say when he picked up? Did he always pick up? What did they tell him at the telephone repair service? By the way, it was only then that Malianov recalled that after his second call to the repair service that the wrong numbers stopped … But he didn’t have time to tell Vecherovsky about it because he remembered something else.

  “Listen,” he said, becoming excited. “I completely forgot. Weingarten, when he called yesterday, wanted to know if I knew Snegovoi.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. I said that I did.”

  “And he said?”

  “And he said that he didn’t know him. But that’s not the point. What do you think, is it a coincidence? Or what? It’s a strange coincidence.”

  Vecherovsky said nothing, puffing on his pipe. Then he went back to his questions. What was the story with the delivery? More detail. What did the guy look like? What did he say? What did he bring? What’s left of the delivery? The monotonous questioning depressed Malianov completely because he couldn’t understand what any of it had to do with his bad luck. Then Vecherovsky finally shut up and poked around in his pipe. Malianov waited and then began imagining how four men would come for him, all in black sunglasses, and how they would search the apartment, pulling off the wallpaper and demanding to know if he’d had relations with Lidochka, and not believing him, and then taking him away.

  “What’s going to happen to me?”

  Vecherovsky answered.

  “Who knows what’s in store for us? Who knows what will be? The strong will be, and the blackguards will be. And death will come and sentence you to death. Do not pursue the future …”

  Malianov realized this was poetry only because Vecherovsky lapsed into muffled guffaws that passed for satisfied laughter. That’s probably the sound H. G. Wells’s Martians made when they drank human blood; Vecherovsky guffawed like that because he liked the poem he had just read. One would think that the pleasure he derived from poetry was purely physical.

  “Go to hell,” Malianov said.

  And that prompted a second tirade—a prose one this time.

  “When I feel bad, I work,” Vecherovsky said. “When I have problems, when I’m depressed, when I’m bored with life, I sit down to my work. There are probably other prescriptions, but I don’t know them. Or they don’t work for me. You want my advice—here it is: Go and work. Thank God that people like you and me need only paper and pencil to work.”

  Say that Malianov knew all that without him. From books. But it wasn’t that simple for Malianov. He could work only when he felt lighthearted and there was nothing hanging over him.

  “Some help you are,” he said. “Let me call Weingarten. I’m still puzzled why he asked about Snegovoi.”

  “Sure,” said Vecherovsky. “But if you don’t mind, move the phone into the other room.”

  Malianov took the phone and dragged the wire into the next room.

  “If you want, stay here,” Vecherovsky called after him. “I have paper and I’ll give you a pencil.”

  “All right, we’ll see.”

  Now Weingarten didn’t answer. Malianov let it ring ten times, then dialed again and let it ring ten more. What should he do now? Of course, he could stay here. It was cool and quiet. All the rooms were air-conditioned. He couldn’t hear the trucks and squealing brakes because the apartment faced the courtyard. And then he realized that that wasn’t the issue. He was simply afraid to go back to his own apartment. That does it! I love my home more than anything else in the world, and now I’m afraid to go back there? Oh, no. You won’t get me to do that. Sorry, but no way.

  Malianov picked up the phone firmly and brought it back. Vecherovsky was sitting staring into the one piece of paper, quietly drumming on it with his expensive pen. The page was half covered with symbols that Malianov couldn’t understand.

  “I’m going, Phil,” Malianov said.

  Vecherovsky looked up at him.

  “Of course. I have to administer an exam tomorrow, but I’ll be home all day today. Call me or drop by.”

  “All right.”

  He went downstairs slowly; there was no rush. I’ll brew up a cup of strong tea, sit in the kitchen; Kaliam will climb up into my lap; I’ll pet him, sip my tea, and try to sort this out calmly and soberly. Too bad we don’t have a TV; it would be nice to spend the evening in front of the box watching something mindless, like a comedy or some soccer. I’ll play solitaire; I haven’t done that in ages.

  He came down to his landing, found his keys, turned the corner, and stopped. His heart had sunk somewhere into the vicinity of his stomach and was beating slowly and rhythmically, like a pile driver. The door to his apartment was open.

  He tiptoed up to the door and listened. There was someone in the apartment. He could hear an unfamiliar man’s voice and a response in an unfamiliar child’s voice …

  CHAPTER 5

  Excerpt 10.… strange man was crouching on the floor and picking up the pieces of a broken glass. There was also a boy of five or so in the kitchen. He was sitting on the stool, his hands under his thighs, swinging his legs and watching the man pick up the pieces.

  “Listen, buddy,” Weingarten shouted when he saw Ma
lianov, “where did you disappear to?”

  His huge cheeks were ablaze with a purple glow, his olive-black eyes were shining, and his thick tar-black hair was disheveled. It was apparent that he had had quite a few already. A half-empty bottle of export Stolichnaya stood on the table amid all kinds of goodies from the delivery crate.

  “Relax and take it easy,” Weingarten continued. “We didn’t touch the caviar. We were waiting for you.”

  The man picking up the pieces stood. He was a tall, handsome man with a Viking beard and the beginnings of a potbelly. He smiled in embarrassment.

  “Well, well, well!” Malianov said, entering the kitchen and feeling his heart rise from his stomach and return to its proper place. “I believe the expression is ‘my home is my castle’?”

  “Taken by storm, old buddy, taken by storm!” Weingarten shouted. “Listen, where did you get such good vodka? And those eats?”

  Malianov extended his hand to the handsome stranger, and he extended his, but it was full of broken glass. There was a small, pleasant moment of discomfort.

  “We’ve been helping ourselves here,” he said with embarrassment. “I’m afraid it’s all my fault.”

  “Nonsense, here, throw that in the garbage.”

  “Mister is a coward,” the boy said clearly.

  Malianov shuddered. And it looked as if the others did too.

  “Sh, sh,” the handsome man said, and waved his finger at the boy in warning.

  “Child!” Weingarten said. “You were given some chocolate, I believe. Well, sit there quietly and chomp on it. And do not add your two cents’ worth.”

  “Why do you say I’m a coward?” said Malianov, sitting down. “Why do you insult me?”

  “I’m not insulting you,” the boy said, observing him as though he were a rare specimen in the wild. “I was just describing you.”