Meanwhile the stranger got rid of the glass, wiped his hand with his handkerchief, and extended his hand.
“Zakhar,” he introduced himself.
They shook hands ceremoniously.
“To business!” Weingarten bustled, rubbing his hands together. “Get two more glasses.”
“Listen, fellows, I’m not drinking any vodka,” Malianov said.
“Then we’ll drink some wine,” Weingarten concurred. “You still have two bottles of white left.”
“No, I think I’ll have some cognac. Zakhar, would you be so kind as to get the caviar and butter from the refrigerator … and everything else. I’m starving.”
Malianov went over to the bar, got the cognac and glasses, stuck his tongue out at the chair that had been occupied by the Tonton Macoute, and came back to the table. The table was groaning under the spread. I’ll eat my fill and get drunk, thought Malianov. I’m glad the guys came over.
But nothing went the way he had planned. No sooner had he finished his drink and settled down to eating a piece of bread spread thick with caviar than Weingarten said in a completely sober voice:
“And now, buddy, tell us what happened to you.”
Malianov choked.
“What are you talking about?”
“Look,” Weingarten said. “There are three of us here, and each of us has had a run-in. So don’t be embarrassed. What did the red-haired guy say to you?”
“Vecherovsky?”
“No, no, what does Vecherovsky have to do with it? You were visited by a tiny man with flaming red hair, wearing a deathly black outfit. What did he tell you?”
Malianov bit off a piece that filled up his whole mouth and chewed without tasting it. All three stared at him. Zakhar looked at him in embarrassment, smiling meekly, even glancing away from time to time. Weingarten’s eyes were bulging and he looked ready to start shouting at the drop of a pin. And the boy, hanging on to his melting chocolate, was staring intently at Malianov.
“Fellows,” Malianov finally said. “What red-haired man are you talking about? Nobody like that came to visit me. My visitors were a lot worse.”
“Well, tell us,” Weingarten said impatiently.
“Why should I tell you?” Malianov was incensed. “I’m not making a secret out of it, but what are you trying to pull here? Tell me first! And by the way, I’d like to know how you found out that anything had happened to me in the first place!”
“You tell me and then I’ll tell you,” Weingarten insisted stubbornly. “And Zakhar will tell his.”
“You both tell first,” Malianov said nervously, making himself another sandwich. “There’s two of you against one of me.”
“You tell,” the boy commanded, pointing at Malianov.
“Sh, sh,” Zakhar whispered, completely embarrassed.
Weingarten laughed sadly.
“Is he yours?” Malianov asked Zakhar.
“Sort of,” Zakhar answered strangely, looking away.
“His, he’s his,” Weingarten said impatiently. “By the way, that’s part of his story. Well, Dmitri, come on, don’t be shy.”
They confused Malianov utterly. He put his sandwich aside and started talking. From the very beginning, from the phone calls. When you tell the same horrible story twice in the space of two hours, you begin to find its amusing side. Malianov hadn’t even noticed how he was going at it. Weingarten began giggling, revealing his powerful, yellowish eyeteeth, and Malianov seemed to have made it his life’s work to get a laugh from Zakhar, but he never did manage it. Zakhar smiled distractedly and almost pityingly. But when Malianov got to the part about Snegovoi’s suicide, it wasn’t a laughing matter anymore.
“You’re lying!” Weingarten said hoarsely.
Malianov shrugged. “If you want to think so, that’s your prerogative,” he said. “But his door has been sealed, you can go and see for yourself.”
Weingarten sat in silence for some time, drumming his fingers on the table, his cheeks quivering in rhythm, and then he got up noisily, looking at no one, squeezed between Zakhar and the boy, and stomped away. They could hear the lock smack open; the smell of cabbage soup wafted into the apartment.
“Oho, ho-ho-ho,” Zakhar muttered glumly.
The boy immediately offered him the messy chocolate bar, demanding:
“Take a bite!”
Zakhar obediently took a bite and chewed it. The door slammed and Weingarten, still avoiding looking at any of them, squeezed back to his chair, gulped down a shot of vodka, and said hoarsely:
“And then?”
“There’s no more. Then I went up to Vecherovsky’s. The creeps left, and I went up there. I just got back.”
“And the redhead?” Weingarten asked impatiently.
“I told you, you blockhead! There was no redhead!”
Weingarten and Zakhar looked at each other.
“All right, we’ll assume that’s the truth,” said Weingarten. “That girl, Lidochka. Did she make any offers?”
“Well, I mean,” Malianov laughed nervously, “I mean, if I had wanted to, I could have.”
“Jeez, you jerk! I don’t mean that. All right, what about the investigator?”
“You know, Val, I’ve told you everything, just as it happened. Go to hell! I swear, a third grilling in one day!”
“Val,” said Zakhar indecisively, “maybe this really was something different?”
“Don’t be a fool! How could it be something else? He has work; they don’t let him do it. What else could it be? And besides, his name was mentioned.”
“Who mentioned my name?” Malianov asked, with a sense of foreboding.
“I have to pee,” the boy announced in clear bell-like tones.
They all looked at him. He examined them one by one, climbed off the stool, and said to Zakhar:
“Let’s go.”
Zakhar smiled sheepishly, said, “Well, let’s go,” and they disappeared behind the bathroom door. They chased Kaliam off the toilet seat.
“Who mentioned my name?” Malianov asked Weingarten. “What’s all this about?”
Weingarten, head bent, was listening to what went on in the toilet.
“Hell, Gubar’s really gotten stuck,” he said with some sort of sad satisfaction. “Really stuck!”
Something churned slowly in Malianov’s brain.
“Gubar?”
“Yeah. Zakhar Gubar. You know, even twisting someone around your finger …”
Malianov remembered. “Is he in rocketry?”
“Who? Zakhar?” Weingarten was surprised. “No, I doubt it. He’s a master craftsman. Though he does work in some closed place.”
“He’s not military?”
“Well, you know, all those places are to some degree …”
“I’m asking about Gubar.”
“No. He’s a techie, with magic hands. Makes computerized fleas. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that he is a man who approaches his desires with care and thoroughness. Those are his very words. And, buddy, it’s the truth.”
The boy returned to the kitchen and climbed back onto the stool. Zakhar walked in after him.
“Zakhar, you know, I just remembered. Snegovoi asked about you.”
And Malianov saw for the first time in his life just how a person turns white before your very eyes. Turns as white as a sheet.
“About me?” Zakhar mouthed.
“Yes. Last night.” Malianov hadn’t expected a reaction like that.
“Did you know him?” Weingarten asked Zakhar softly.
Zakhar shook his head silently, fished for a cigarette, spilled half the pack on the floor, and hurriedly started picking them up. Weingarten croaked: “Well, buddies, this is something that needs …” and poured some more vodka. And the boy spoke.
“Big deal! That doesn’t mean anything in itself.”
Malianov shuddered again, and Zakhar sat up and looked at the boy with something like hope.
“It’s just a coincid
ence,” the boy went on. “Look in the phone book, there’s at least eight Gubars in there.”
Excerpt 11.… Malianov had known him since sixth grade. They became pals in the seventh grade and shared a desk all through school. Weingarten didn’t change over the years, he just got bigger. He was always jolly, fat, carnivorous, and always collecting something or other—stamps, coins, postmarks, bottle labels. Once, this was when he was already a biologist, he decided to collect excrement because Zhenka Sidortsev brought him whale excrement from the Antarctic and Sanya Zhitniuk brought back some human excrement from Penjekent, not regular of course, but fossilized, from the ninth century. He was always bugging his friends to show him their change—looking for a special copper coin. And he was always grabbing your mail or begging for your postmarked envelopes.
And with all that, he knew his business. He had been a department head in his institute for a long time, was a member of twenty various commissions, both Soviet and international, was always traveling abroad to all kinds of congresses, and was just around the corner from a full professorship. He held Vecherovsky in the highest esteem of all his friends, because Vecherovsky was a state prize laureate, and Val dreamed of becoming one himself. He must have told Malianov a hundred times how he would put on the medal and wear it on a date. He was always a blowhard. He was a brilliant raconteur, and the dullest common events became dramas from Graham Greene or Le Carré in his retelling. But, strange as it seems, he lied very rarely and was horribly embarrassed when caught in one. For some unknown reason Irina did not like him. Malianov suspected that in their early years, before Bobchik was born, Weingarten made a pass at Irina, and she rejected him. Weingarten was a master at making out, not that he was a sex fiend or a degenerate—no, he was joyful, energetic, and as prepared for defeat as for victory. Every date was an adventure, no matter what its outcome. His wife, Sveta, an unbelievably beautiful woman, but subject to depression, had accepted his womanizing a long time ago, particularly since he doted upon her and was always getting into fights over her in public places. He liked brawling in general—it was a masochistic act to enter a restaurant in his company. In short, he had lived a smooth, happy, and successful life without any major upheavals.
Strange things began happening to him, it turned out, some two weeks before, when the series of experiments begun the previous year suddenly started yielding completely unexpected, and even sensational, results. (“You, old buddies, wouldn’t be able to understand, it has to do with reverse transcriptase—it is an RNA-dependent DNA polymerase, that’s an enzyme in the makeup of oncornaviruses, and that, I can tell you right off, buddies, smells like the Nobel Prize to me.”) In his labs no one other than Weingarten himself appreciated the results. Most of them, the way it usually is, didn’t give a damn, and other creative individuals simply decided that the series of tests was a failure. Since it was summer, everyone was impatient to go on vacation. Weingarten wouldn’t sign anyone’s leave papers. There was an uproar—hurt feelings, local grievance committee, the Party bureau meeting. And in the heat of the battle, at one of the hearings, Weingarten was semiofficially informed that there was a plan afoot to name Comrade Valentin Andreevich Weingarten as director of the newest, supermodern biological center then under construction in Dobroliubov.
This information made Comrade Weingarten’s head spin, but he nevertheless realized that the directorship was, first of all, just a bird in the bush, and if and when it became a bird in the hand it would, secondly, get V. A. Weingarten out of creative lab work for at least a year and a half, maybe two. And meanwhile the Nobel Prize was the Nobel Prize, buddies.
Therefore Weingarten simply promised to think it over and went back to his lab and the mysterious reverse transcriptase and the unending brouhaha. Just two days later he was called into the chief academician’s office and quizzed about his current project. (“I kept a tight lock on my lips, buddies, I was extremely controlled.”) It was suggested that he drop this questionable nonsense and take up the problem of such and such, which was of great economic significance, and therefore promising great material and spiritual rewards, which the chief academician was willing to bet his own head on.
Flabbergasted by all these vistas suddenly yawning before him for no reason at all, Weingarten made the mistake of bragging about them at home, and not simply at home, but in front of his mother-in-law, whom he calls Cap because she really was a captain second class retired. And the sky darkened above his head. (“Buddies, from that evening on, my house turned into a sawmill. They sawed at me night and day, demanding that I accept immediately, and accept both offers at that.”)
Meanwhile, the lab, despite the occasional turmoil, continued to produce a heap of results, one more amazing than the next. Then his aunt died, a distant relative on his father’s side, and while clearing up the estate, Weingarten discovered a chest in the attic of her house in Kavgolova stuffed with Soviet coins out of circulation since 1961. You have to know Weingarten to believe this, but as soon as he found the chest, he lost all interest in everything else, up to and including his languishing Nobel Prize. He holed up at home and spent four days poring over the contents of the chest, deaf to the phone calls from the institute and to his mother-in-law’s nagging speeches. He found fantastic specimens in that chest. Oh, luxury! But that was not the point.
When he was through with this chest and came back to work, he saw that the discovery was, so to speak, discovered. Of course, there was much that was unclear and it all had to be formulated—no mean feat, by the way—but there could be no more doubt: He had made his discovery. Weingarten started working like a squirrel on a wheel. He put an end to the squabbles at the lab (“Buddies, I threw them all out to go to hell on their vacations!”), moved Cap and the girls out to the country in twenty-four hours, canceled all his appointments, and had just got settled down at home to do the finishing strokes, when came the day before yesterday.
The day before yesterday, just as Weingarten started to work, that redhead showed up at the apartment—a short, coppery fellow with a very pale face, encased in a buttoned-up black coat of ancient cut and style. He came out of the children’s room and, while Val just gaped at him in silence, sat on the edge of the desk and started talking. Without any preamble he announced that a certain extraterrestrial civilization had been watching him, V. A. Weingarten, for quite some time, following his scientific work with attention and anxiety. That the latest work of the aforementioned Weingarten was making them very anxious. That he, the redhead, was empowered to ask V. A. Weingarten to immediately drop the project and destroy all his papers relating to it.
There is absolutely no need for you to know why and wherefore we demand this, the red-haired man said. You should be told that we have tried other means, to make it seem completely natural. You should not be under the impression that the offered directorship, the new project, the discovery of the coins, or even the vacation incident in the labs were in any way purely accidental. We tried to stop you. However, since we were only able to hold you up, and not for long, we were forced to embark on an extreme measure, such as my visit to you. You should also know that all the offers made to you were and are valid and that you may still take them up if our demands are met. And, in case you do agree, we are willing to help satisfy your petty, and completely understandable, desires that arise from your human nature. As a token of the promise, allow me to give you this small gift.
And with those words, the redhead pulled a package out of thin air and tossed it on the desk in front of Weingarten. It turned out to contain marvelous stamps, whose value could not even be imagined by someone who was not a professional philatelist.
Weingarten, continued the red-haired man, should in no way think that he was the only earthling being watched by the supercivilization. There were at least three people among Weingarten’s friends whose work was about to be nipped in the bud. He, the redhead, could name such names as Dmitri Alekseevich Malianov, astronomer; Zakhar Zakharovich Gubar, engineer; and Arnold
Pavlovich Snegovoi, physicist. They were giving V. A. Weingarten three days, starting right now, to think it over, after which the supercivilization would feel that it had the right to employ the rather harsh “measures of the third degree.”
“While he was telling me all of this,” Weingarten said, “buddies, all I was thinking about was how he had gotten into the apartment without a key. Especially since I had the door bolted. Could he be some thief who had gotten in a long time ago and got bored hiding under the couch? Well, I’ll show him, I thought. But while I was thinking all of that, the redhead finished up his little speech.” Weingarten paused for effect.
“And flew out the window,” Malianov said, gritting his teeth.
“That’s for your flying out the window!” Weingarten, unembarrassed by the child, made an eloquent gesture. “He simply vanished!”
“Val,” said Malianov.
“I’m telling you, buddy! He was sitting right in front of me on the desk. I was just about to give it to him on the kisser, without even standing up … when he was gone! Like in the movies, you know?”
Weingarten grabbed the last piece of sturgeon and shoved it into his mouth.
“Moam?” he said. “Moam mooam?” He swallowed with difficulty and, blinking his tear-filled eyes, went on: “I’m a little calmer now, buddies, but back then, let me tell you, I leaned back in the chair, closed my eyes, and remembered his words; everything in me was quivering and shaking, like a pig’s tail. I thought I was going to die right then and there. Nothing like that had ever happened to me. I somehow made it to my mother-in-law’s room, grabbed her valerian drops—didn’t help. Then I saw she had bromides, and I took those, too.”
“Wait,” Malianov said irritably. “Drop the clowning. I’m in no mood … What really happened? But please, without the red-haired aliens!”
“Chum,” Weingarten said, eyes bulging to the limit. “I’ll cross myself, on my Pioneer’s honor!” He made the sign of the cross, clumsily, with a Catholic accent. “I wasn’t in any mood for joking myself …”
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