فصل 27

XXVII

The End of Apartment No. 50

WHEN Margarita got to the final words of the chapter—“… Thus the dawn of the fifteenth day of Nisan was greeted by the fifth procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate,”—morning had arrived.

From the yard came the cheerful, excited, morning sounds of sparrows conversing in the branches of the white willow and the linden tree.

Margarita got up from her chair, stretched, and only then realized how worn out her body was and how much she craved sleep. It is interesting to note that Margarita’s soul was in perfect shape. Her thoughts were not in disarray, and she was not at all unnerved by having spent the previous night supernaturally. Memories of her time at Satan’s ball did not disturb her, nor did the fact that the Master had been returned to her by a kind of miracle, that his novel had risen from the ashes, and that everything was back in place in the basement apartment, from which the informer Aloisy Mogarych had been expelled. In short, her encounter with Woland had caused her no psychic distress. Everything was seemingly as it should have been.

She went into the adjoining room, assured herself that the Master was sleeping deeply and peacefully, turned off the desk lamp, which was no longer necessary, stretched out on the small couch along the opposite wall, and covered herself with an old, torn sheet. A minute later she was asleep, and that morning she had no dreams. All the rooms in the basement were silent, the private home builder’s entire small house was silent, and silence also reigned in the deserted lane outside.

Meanwhile, at the same time, that is, at dawn on Saturday, an entire floor of one of Moscow’s official buildings was wide awake, and its windows, which looked out on a large, asphalt-covered square being cleaned by the whirring brushes of special, slow-moving machines, were all lit up with a stark light that outshone the rising sun.

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

Strictly speaking, the rudiments of the case had been clear since the previous day, Friday, when the Variety Theater had to be closed due to the disappearance of its entire administrative staff and the disruptive events surrounding the notorious performance of black magic. But the fact of the matter was that new material kept pouring in to the sleepless floor.

Now it was the task of those investigating this strange case, which blended elements of utterly obvious deviltry with hypnotic trickery and blatant criminality, to take all the various and muddled incidents that had occurred all over Moscow and mold them into some kind of coherent whole.

The first to be summoned to the electric glare of the sleepless floor was Arkady Apollonovich Sempleyarov, the chairman of the Acoustics Commission.

After dinner on Friday, the telephone rang in his apartment on Kamenny Bridge, and a man’s voice asked for Arkady Apollonovich. His wife, who answered the phone, replied sullenly that Arkady Apollonovich was unwell and resting, and could not come to the phone. But Arkady Apollonovich had had to come to the phone. When asked who it was that was calling Arkady Apollonovich, the voice at the other end of the line had said who in no uncertain terms.

“This second … right away … just a minute …” babbled the customarily arrogant wife of the chairman of the Acoustics Commission, and she flew into the bedroom like an arrow to rouse Arkady Apollonovich from his bed, where he lay suffering the torments of hell whenever he recalled last night’s performance and the ensuing scandal, when his niece from Saratov had been expelled from the apartment.

To tell the truth, it took Arkady Apollonovich not a second, not a minute, but a quarter of a minute to get to the phone. Wearing only underwear and a slipper on his left foot, he babbled into the receiver, “Yes, it’s me … I will, I will …” His wife, forgetting for the moment the many disgusting crimes of infidelity in which the unfortunate Arkady Apollonovich had been implicated, stuck her frightened face through the hall door and, waving a slipper in the air, whispered, “Your slipper, put on your slipper … Your feet will catch cold.” Waving his wife away with his bare foot and giving her a ferocious look, Arkady Apollonovich mumbled into the phone, “Yes, yes, yes, of course I understand … I’m leaving now …” Arkady Apollonovich spent the entire evening on that floor where the investigation was being conducted. His conversation with the investigators was painful and extremely unpleasant because it necessitated his talking frankly not only about the vile performance and the fight in the loge, but also, among other things, about Militsa Andreyevna Pokobatko from Yelokhovskaya Street, his niece from Saratov, and much else besides, which caused Arkady Apollonovich inexpressible misery.

It goes without saying that the testimony provided by Arkady Apollonovich—an intelligent and cultured man, an eyewitness to the disgraceful performance, and experienced and articulate witness, who gave an excellent description of the mysterious masked magician himself and his two knavish assistants, whose splendid memory had retained the magician’s name, Woland—contributed significantly to the advance of the investigation. When Arkady Apollonovich’s testimony was collated with that of others, including those women who had been casualties of the performance (the one in the violet underwear who had astounded Rimsky and, alas, many others), and Karpov, the messenger who had been sent to apartment No. 50 on Sadovaya Street—it became immediately apparent where the perpetrator of all these misadventures should be sought.

Apartment No. 50 was visited, and more than once, and not only did it receive a thorough search, but its walls were tapped and its chimney flues inspected, in an attempt to locate secret hiding places. However, none of these measures yielded any results, and no one was ever found in the apartment during any of the visits, although it was patently clear that someone was living there, despite the fact that everyone whose job it was to be informed of the whereabouts of foreign stage performers while in Moscow stated flatly and categorically that no black magician named Woland was in Moscow, nor could he be.

He had certainly never registered anywhere upon his arrival, or showed anyone his passport, or any other documents, contracts, or agreements, and no one had heard anything about him! Kitaitsev, the head of the program department of the Entertainment Commission, swore by everything holy that the missing Styopa Likhodeyev had never sent him the program of any Woland for approval, nor had he ever called to inform Kitaitsev of the arrival of any such person. Thus he, Kitaitsev, did not know and could not understand how Styopa could have allowed such a performance to take place at the Variety. When he was told that Arkady Apollonovich had seen the magician in performance with his own eyes, Kitaitsev merely spread his hands and raised his eyes to heaven. And one could see and safely say from Kitaitsev’s eyes alone that he was as pure as crystal.

Prokhor Petrovich, the chairman of the Entertainment Commission …

Incidentally, he had returned to his suit right after the police entered his office, to the ecstatic joy of Anna Richardovna and to the great consternation of the police who had been called for no reason. Again incidentally, when Prokhor Petrovich was back inside his gray striped suit, he gave his full approval to all the memos drafted by his suit during his brief absence … and so, Prokhor Petrovich, had absolutely no knowledge of any Woland.

The outcome, say what you will, was preposterous: thousands of spectators, the entire staff of the Variety Theater, and, finally, Arkady Apollonovich Sempleyarov, a highly cultured man, had all seen the magician, along with his thrice-cursed assistants, and yet it was impossible to find him anywhere. What, then, if one may ask: had he fallen through the earth after his disgusting performance, or, as some people claimed, had he never come to Moscow at all? To accept the first explanation meant that he had taken the entire top management of the Variety with him when he vanished, whereas the implication of the second explanation was that the managers of the ill-starred theater had themselves disappeared from Moscow without a trace, after first performing some dirty trick (recall, if nothing else, the smashed window in the office and the behavior of Ace of Diamonds).

Credit should be given to the person in charge of the investigation. The missing Rimsky was found with astonishing speed. All that had to be done was to juxtapose Ace of Diamond’s behavior at the taxi-stand near the movie theater with certain time data, such as when the performance ended and when Rimsky could have disappeared, in order to dispatch a telegram to Leningrad. The answer came an hour later (on Friday evening) that Rimsky had been located on the fourth floor of the Astoria Hotel in Room 412, which was next door to the room occupied by the repertory director of one of the Moscow theaters then on tour in Leningrad, a room which was known for its gilded, gray-blue furniture and its magnificent bath.

Found hiding in the wardrobe of Room 412 at the Astoria, Rimsky was arrested immediately and interrogated there in Leningrad. Following which, a telegram reached Moscow stating that the Variety’s financial director was not responsible for his actions, that he either could not or would not answer questions coherently, and that he kept asking to be put away in an armored room under armed guard. Moscow telegrammed a reply, ordering that Rimsky be transported back to Moscow under guard, as a result of which, Rimsky did leave Leningrad under guard on the Friday evening train.

By Friday evening they were on Likhodeyev’s trail as well. Telegrams had been sent to all cities, inquiring about Likhodeyev’s whereabouts, and Yalta had sent a reply saying that he had been there, but had left by plane for Moscow.

The only trail that was cold was Varenukha’s. The illustrious theater manager, known to all of Moscow, seemed to have dropped into the sea.

In the meantime, they had to deal with what had happened in other parts of Moscow, beyond the confines of the Variety Theater. Explanations had to be found for the strange case of the singing office clerks (incidentally, Professor Stravinsky cured them in two hours with the help of subcutaneous injections), for the individuals who had passed off the devil-knows-what as money to other individuals or institutions, and finally, for the people who had been victimized as a result.

Needless to say, the most distasteful, the most scandalous, the most baffling incident of all was the theft in broad daylight, of the late writer Berlioz’s head, right out of the coffin on display in the Griboyedov hall.

A twelve-man team conducted the investigation, trying to pick up, with a knitting needle, as it were, all the infernal stitches spread all over Moscow, of this complicated case.

One of the investigators went to Professor Stravinsky’s clinic and asked, first of all, for a list of all those who had been admitted to the clinic in the last three days. This led them to Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoi and the unfortunate emcee whose head had been wrenched off. The two of them, however, took up little of their time, since it had been easy to establish that they had both been victims of the mysterious magician and his gang. Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny, on the other hand, was of great interest to the investigators.

Early on Friday evening the door of Ivanushka’s room, No. 117, opened and in walked a young man with a round face, who was calm, gentle-mannered, and who looked nothing like an investigator even though he was one of the best in Moscow. He saw a pale, drawn-looking young man lying on the bed, whose eyes were indifferent to what was going on around him, whose eyes turned outward, to some spot far above and beyond the room, or inward, into the young man himself.

The investigator introduced himself amiably and said he had come to see Ivan Nikolayevich to discuss the events of two days before at Patriarch’s Ponds.

Oh, how triumphant Ivan would have felt, if only the investigator had come to see him a little earlier, say, late Wednesday night, when Ivan had been trying so frantically and passionately to get someone to listen to his story about Patriarch’s Ponds. Now his dream of helping catch the foreign consultant had come true, and he did not have to run after anyone any more since they had come to see him themselves, to hear his tale about what happened Wednesday evening.

But, alas, in the time that had elapsed since Berlioz’s death Ivan had undergone a complete change. He was ready and willing to answer all the investigator’s questions politely, but his indifference was evident in his eyes and in the way he spoke. The poet was no longer moved by Berlioz’s fate.

Ivanushka had been lying in a daze before the investigator’s arrival, and a number of visions had passed before him. He had seen a strange, incomprehensible, nonexistent city with blocks of marble, worn-down colonnades, and roofs sparkling in the sun, with the somber and pitiless black Antonia Tower, the palace on the western hill, sunk almost to the roof in the tropical greenery of a garden, with bronze statues towering above that greenery and burning in the setting sun, and he had seen armor-clad, Roman centurions marching beneath the walls of the ancient city.

A man had appeared before Ivan in his sleep, a man sitting motionless in a chair, clean-shaven, with a yellow, troubled-looking face, wearing a white mantle with a red lining, and gazing hatefully at the lush and alien garden. Ivan had also seen a yellow, treeless hill with empty cross-beamed posts standing on top of it.

And what had happened at Patriarch’s Ponds no longer interested the poet Ivan Bezdomny.

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

An apathetic, almost imperceptible smile flickered over Ivan’s lips, and he replied, “I was far away.”

“Was the man in checked trousers close to the turnstile?”

“No, he was sitting on a bench nearby.”

“Are you sure he didn’t go over to the turnstile just as Berlioz fell?”

“Yes, I’m sure. He didn’t go anywhere. He was sprawled on the bench.”

These were the investigator’s final questions. When he was finished, he stood up, gave Ivanushka his hand, wished him a speedy recovery, and expressed hope that he would soon be reading more of his poems.

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

The investigator smiled politely and took the liberty of assuring the poet that although he was in a slight depression at the moment, it would soon pass.

“No,” countered Ivan, looking not at the investigator, but at a point in the distance on the darkening horizon, “it will never pass. The poems I wrote were bad poems, and I realize that now.” The investigator left Ivanushka after having received very important information. By tracing the thread of events backward, from finish to start, he finally succeeded in reaching the source of all the events that followed. The investigator was certain that everything started with the murder at Patriarch’s Ponds. Of course, neither Ivanushka nor the fellow in checks had pushed the unfortunate chairman of MASSOLIT under the streetcar. Physically speaking, no one had facilitated his fall under the wheels. But the investigator was convinced that Berlioz had thrown himself under the streetcar (or fallen under it) while in a hypnotic trance.

Yes, there was a great deal of information, and they already knew who should be apprehended and where. But the hitch was that it had proved impossible to apprehend him by any means whatsoever. Admittedly, there was no question that someone was, indeed, living in the thrice-cursed apartment No. 50. Phone calls to the apartment would at times be answered by a nasal voice, or by a cracked voice, windows would be opened, and a phonograph would be heard playing, But every time they went over to investigate, they found no one there. And they had been there many times, at all hours of the day and night. Not only that, they had combed the apartment and looked in every corner. The apartment had been under suspicion for a long time. Guards had been posted along the route that led through the gateway into the courtyard, and at the back entrance as well; not only that, guards had been posted up on the roof, next to the chimney pipes. Yes, apartment No. 50 was up to no good, but there was nothing anyone could do about it.

Thus the case dragged on until after midnight Friday when Baron Maigel, wearing evening dress and patent leather shoes, made his grand entrance into apartment No. 50 as a guest. The baron was heard being admitted to the apartment. Precisely ten minutes after that they entered the apartment without any advance warning, but not only did they find no residents, there was not even a trace, which was already utterly bizarre, of Baron Maigel.

And so, as has been said, the case dragged on this way until dawn on Saturday. Some new and very interesting facts then emerged. A six-seater passenger plane landed at Moscow airfield from the Crimea. One of the passengers who got off was rather strange. He was a young man, his face overgrown with stubble, who had not washed for three days, had inflamed and frightened eyes, no luggage, and was rather queerly dressed. He was wearing a Caucasian-style fur cap, a felt cloak over a nightshirt, and brand-new, just purchased, blue leather bedroom slippers. They approached him as he stepped off the gangway. They had been expecting him, and shortly after that, the unforgettable director of the Variety Theater, Stepan Bogdanovich Likhodeyev, appeared before the investigators. He added some new information. It now became clear that Woland had gotten into the Variety disguised as a performer, by hypnotizing Styopa Likhodeyev, and had then contrived to spirit the aforementioned Styopa out of Moscow, God knows how many kilometers away. This added to the mounting evidence, but things did not become any easier as a result, and, may in fact have become even more difficult, since it was becoming obvious that it was not going to be easy to capture someone capable of pulling that kind of stunt on Stepan Bogdanovich. In the meantime, Likhodeyev was locked up in a strong room at his own request, and appearing before the investigators was Varenukha, who had just been arrested at his apartment, where he had returned after an unaccountable absence of almost two days.

Despite the theater manager’s promise to Azazello never to lie again, he began with a lie. Although one should not judge him too harshly for that. After all, Azazello had forbidden him to tell lies and be rude over the telephone, but in the given instance the manager was speaking without the aid of such an instrument. His eyes wandering, Ivan Savelyevich declared that on Thursday afternoon he had gotten drunk alone in his office at the Variety, after which he had gone somewhere—but where he couldn’t recall, had drunk some more Starka vodka, flopped down under a fence somewhere, but where—he again couldn’t recall. It was only after the manager had been advised that his stupid and ill-considered conduct was impeding the investigation of an important case and that, naturally, he would have to take the consequences, that Varenukha broke into sobs and, with a trembling voice, his eyes darting all around, he whispered that he was lying out of fear alone, that he was petrified of the vengeance of Woland’s gang, into whose clutches he had already fallen, and that he begged, pleaded, and prayed to be locked up in an armored room.

“What the devil! They’ve all got armored rooms on the brain!” growled one of the chief investigators.

“Those villains scared them out of their wits,” said the investigator who had visited Ivanushka.

They calmed Varenukha as best they could, said they could insure his safety without recourse to an armored room, and at this point it came out that he had not been drinking Starka under any fence, but had been beaten up by two men, one with red hair and a fang, the other—fat … “Who looked like a cat?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” whispered the manager, faint with fear and looking around at every second, and he gave more details of how he had spent two days in apartment No. 50, serving as a vampire-bait, and how he had almost caused the death of financial director Rimsky … At this time they brought in Rimsky, who had been transported from Leningrad by train. However, this terror-stricken, psychologically unbalanced, gray-haired old man, who bore little resemblance to the former financial director, had no desire to tell the truth and was very stubborn in this regard. Rimsky maintained that he had not seen any Hella in his office window that night, just as he had not seen Varenukha, but that he had simply felt unwell and gone to Leningrad in a daze. It need hardly be said that the ailing financial director concluded his testimony by pleading to be locked up in an armored room.

Annushka was arrested just as she was attempting to hand a ten-dollar bill to a cashier at a department store on the Arbat. They listened attentively to Annushka’s story about people flying out the window of the building on Sadovaya Street, and about the horseshoe which, according to her, she picked up in order to take it to the police.

“Was the horseshoe really gold with diamonds?” Annushka was asked.

“As if I don’t know diamonds when I see them,” she replied.

“But did he give you, as you claim, ten-ruble bills?”

“As if I don’t know what they are,” replied Annushka.

“So when did they turn into dollars?”

“I don’t know anything about any dollars, and I never saw any,” Annushka replied shrilly. “I was in my rights! I got the money as a reward and was using it to buy some chintz cloth …” She then went off on a tangent about how it wasn’t her fault that the house management had let an evil power take over the fifth floor and make life there impossible.

Here the investigator waved Annushka away with his pen, since by then they were all heartily sick of her, and wrote her an exit pass on a green chit of paper, following which, to everyone’s relief, she disappeared from the building.

After this came a whole string of people, including Nikolai Ivanovich, arrested solely because of the stupidity of his jealous wife, who at daybreak had reported him missing to the police. The investigators were not particularly surprised when Nikolai Ivanovich produced the prank certificate stating that he had spent the night at Satan’s ball. Nikolai Ivanovich strayed from the truth somewhat in his account of how he had flown through the air with Margarita Nikolayevna’s naked maid on his back, transporting her to some devils’ den on the river for a swim, and how, prior to that, Margarita Nikolayevna had appeared naked in the window. For example, he did not deem it necessary to mention his appearance in the bedroom, holding Margarita’s discarded chemise in his hands, nor did he say he had called Natasha Venus. His version of the story was that Natasha had flown out the window, climbed on his back, and lured him out of Moscow … “I was forced to do it, I had to obey,” said Nikolai Ivanovich, and he concluded his tale with a plea that not one word of it be told to his wife. He was promised that it would not.

Nikolai Ivanovich’s testimony made it possible to establish that Margarita Nikolayevna and her maid Natasha had disappeared without a trace. Measures were taken to try to locate them.

Thus the round-the-clock investigation extended into Saturday morning. Meanwhile, utterly preposterous rumors sprang up which had a tiny grain of truth buried beneath layers of plush fabrication and they spread around the city. The rumors said that following a performance at the Variety, an audience of two thousand had rushed out on the street as naked as babes, that a printer’s shop which made magic counterfeit bills had been uncovered on Sadovaya Street, that a gang had kidnapped the five directors of the entertainment sector, but that they had been found immediately by the police, and much else besides which I don’t wish to repeat.

It was getting on toward dinner time when the phone rang in the investigation room. The call came from Sadovaya Street to report that there were again signs of life in the accursed apartment. The windows had been opened and sounds of a piano playing and voices singing were heard coming from the apartment, and a black cat could be seen sunning himself on the windowsill.

Around four in the afternoon of that same hot day a large party of men, dressed in civilian clothes, emerged from three cars that had stopped a short distance from 302B Sadovaya Street. They then broke up into two smaller groups, one of which went through the motor entrance and across the courtyard directly to main entrance No. 6, the other of which opened a small door that was normally boarded up and led to the back entrance. Using separate stairways, the two groups began their ascent to apartment No. 50.

In the meantime, Azazello and Korovyov, the latter no longer in evening dress but wearing his usual attire, were sitting in the dining room of the apartment, finishing breakfast. As was his habit, Woland was in the bedroom, and the cat’s whereabouts were unknown. Judging, however, from the crash of pots and pans coming from the kitchen, it could be deduced that Behemoth was there, playing the fool, as was his habit.

“What are those footsteps I hear on the stairs?” asked Korovyov, jiggling the spoon in his cup of black coffee.

“Oh, that’s them coming to arrest us,” replied Azazello as he downed a shot of brandy.

“Ah yes, well, well,” was Korovyov’s reply.

By then, those ascending the front staircase had already reached the third-floor landing. There, what looked like two plumbers were fiddling with the radiator. The men on the staircase exchanged meaningful glances with the plumbers.

“They’re all at home,” whispered one of the plumbers, tapping the pipe with his hammer.

Then, the man in front proceeded to pull a black Mauser from under his coat, and the one beside him produced a skeleton key. All those entering apartment No. 50 were suitably armed. Two of them had easily-deployable, fine silk nets in their pockets. Another had a lasso, and yet another had gauze masks and ampules of chloroform.

In a second the front door to apartment No. 50 was opened, and those who entered found themselves in the hall. The door that banged in the kitchen at that moment signaled the timely arrival of those who had come up the back stairs.

This time, at least, they met with some limited success. The men immediately spread out over all the rooms, finding no one anywhere, but they did find the remains of an apparently interrupted breakfast in the dining room, and in the living room a huge black cat was sitting on the mantelpiece next to a glass pitcher. He was holding a primus stove in his paws.

The men contemplated the cat for some length of time in total silence.

“Mmm, yes … he really is impressive,” whispered one of them.

“I’m not doing any mischief, I’m not bothering anyone, I’m just fixing the primus,” said the cat with a hostile scowl, “and I consider it my duty to warn you that a cat is an ancient and inviolable creature.” “Exceptionally fine work,” whispered one of the men, and another said loudly and distinctly, “Well, then, inviolable ventriloquist cat, come over here!”

A silk net was unfurled and tossed in the air, but to everyone’s utter surprise, the man who threw it missed his target and ensnared only the pitcher, which crashed into jangling pieces.

“Forfeit!” howled the cat. “Hurrah!” Here he put the primus aside, and pulled a Browning from behind his back. In a flash he had it trained on the man nearest to him, but before the cat could shoot, there was a flash in the man’s hand, and when the Mauser went off, the cat fell head-first off the mantel onto the floor, dropping his Browning and tossing away his primus.

“It’s all over,” said the cat in a weak voice, as he stretched out languidly in a pool of blood. “Leave me be for a second, let me bid the earth farewell. O Azazello, my friend!” groaned the cat, his blood streaming out. “Where are you?” The cat turned his dimming eyes toward the dining room door. “I was outmatched and you did not come to help me. You abandoned poor Behemoth, forsaking him for a glass of admittedly very fine brandy! Ah, well, may my death be on your conscience, but I bequeath you my Browning …” “The net, the net, the net,” whispered the men anxiously who were standing around the cat. But the net, the devil knows why, got caught 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 kerosene …” And, taking advantage of the general confusion, he pressed his lips to the round opening in the primus and drank his fill of kerosene. The blood streaming out from under his left front paw stopped immediately. The cat jumped up, alive and well, tucked the primus under his foreleg, and leapt back onto the mantel. Then, he began crawling up the wall, ripping the wallpaper with his claws, and in two seconds he was high overhead, sitting on the metal curtain rod.

In a flash hands grabbed at the curtain and tore it down together with the rod, letting the sunlight burst into the darkened room. But neither the fraudulently revived cat nor the primus fell down. The cat, still holding on to his primus, managed to swing through the air and land on the chandelier that was hanging in the center of the room.

“Get a ladder!” voices shouted from below.

“I challenge you to a duel!” bellowed the cat, soaring over their heads on the swaying chandelier, the Browning appearing in his paws again, and he set the primus down between the arms of the chandelier. The cat took aim, and, swinging like a pendulum over the heads of the men, opened fire on them. Thunder shook the apartment. Shards of crystal rained down from the chandelier on the floor, the mirror over the fireplace cracked into stars, clouds of plaster dust billowed, empty cartridges bounced over the floor, windowpanes broke, the bullet-ridden primus began to spurt kerosene. Taking the cat alive was now out of the question, and the men shot back at him furiously and accurately, aiming their Mausers at his head, stomach, chest, and back. The shooting caused a panic in the courtyard down below.

But it lasted for only a short time and began to subside of its own accord. The fact was that the shots harmed neither the cat, nor the men who had come to catch him. Not only was no one killed, no one was even wounded; everyone, including the cat, remained completely unhurt To verify this once and for all, one of the men fired five rounds into the accursed head of the beast, whereupon the cat shot back a vigorous reply. And the same thing happened—no one felt the slightest effect. The cat swung back and forth on the chandelier in ever-diminishing arcs, blowing into the muzzle of his Browning for some reason, and spitting on his paw. An expression of complete befuddlement spread over the faces of the men standing in silence below. It was the only instance, or one of the only instances, when shooting had no effect whatsoever. It was possible, of course, to conclude that the cat’s Browning was a toy of some sort, but that would certainly not have applied to the Mausers. The cat’s first wound, and of that there could not be the slightest doubt, had been nothing other than a trick and a swinish bit of playacting, as was his drinking of the kerosene.

One last attempt was made to catch the cat. A lasso was thrown, it caught on one of the candles, and the chandelier fell down. The crash it made seemed to shake the whole building, but again with no effect. Shards of glass hailed down on those present, and the cat sailed through the air and settled high under the ceiling, atop the gilded frame of the mirror over the mantel. He showed no signs of wanting to make a getaway. On the contrary, he went so far as to address them once again from the relative safety of his perch.

“I simply cannot understand,” he said from on high, “why you are treating me so harshly …”

Just as he began his speech, it was interrupted by a low, heavy voice coming from no one knew where, “What’s going on in this apartment? It’s disturbing my work.” An unpleasant, nasal voice replied, “Naturally, it’s Behemoth, the devil take him!”

A third, quavering voice said, “Messire! It’s Saturday. The sun is setting. It’s time for us to go.”

“Excuse me, but I can’t talk any longer,” said the cat from atop the mirror. “We have to go.” He threw his Browning and shattered both window-panes. Then he splashed down the kerosene, which ignited of itself and sent a wave of flame shooting up to the ceiling.

The blaze broke out with a speed and intensity unusual even for kerosene fires. The wallpaper began smoking immediately, the curtain heaped up on the floor ignited, and the frames of the broken windows began smoldering. The cat curled himself up to spring, meowed, jumped from the mirror to the windowsill, and then disappeared out the window with his primus. Shots came from outside. The man sitting on the iron fire escape that ran alongside the apartment windows sprayed the cat with bullets as the latter flew from windowsill to windowsill, heading for the drainpipe at the corner of the building, which, as already noted, was built in the shape of the cyrillic letter “II.” The cat then climbed up the pipe to the roof. There the men guarding the chimney pipes sprayed him with additional bullets, again with no effect, and the cat disappeared in the setting sun that was flooding the city.

Meanwhile, back in the apartment the parquet floor caught fire under the men’s feet, and in the flames, on the spot where the cat had sprawled with his phony wound, there gradually materialized the body of the former Baron Maigel with protruding chin and glassy eyes. It was no longer possible to pull him out.

Those in the living room jumped over the burning squares of parquet, slapping their smoking chests and shoulders with their palms, and retreated into the study and the front hall. Those in the dining room and the bedroom ran out through the hallway. Those in the kitchen also rushed out into the front hall. The living room was already smoking and in flames. On his way out someone managed to dial the number of the fire department and shout tersely into the receiver, “Sadovaya Street! 302B!” They could not delay any longer. The flames swept out into the hall. It became hard to breathe.

As soon as the first streams of smoke sifted through the broken windows of the bewitched apartment, cries were heard out in the courtyard, “Fire! Fire! We’re on fire!” People in various apartments of the building began screaming into their phones, “Sadovaya Street! Sadovaya, 302B!”

As the sound of bloodcurdling sirens filled Sadovaya Street, and long red engines descended upon it from all parts of the city, the people milling about in the courtyard saw smoke coming out of a fifth floor window and flying out with it, three dark, apparently male silhouettes and one of a naked woman.