“Oh, I get it,” I said, starting to put on my shoes.
“Never mind, Sasha, you’ll know all about everything soon,” said Roman reassuringly.
I raised my head. “Meaning?”
“We need a programmer,” said Roman with feeling.
“I need a programmer very badly,” said Korneev, perking up a bit.
“Everybody needs a programmer,” I said, going back to my shoes. “And please don’t try hypnosis or any of those enchanted places of yours.”
“He’s beginning to catch on,” said Roman.
Korneev was about to say something when we heard loud voices outside the window.
“It’s not our five-kopeck piece!” yelled Modest.
“Then whose five-kopeck piece is it?”
“I don’t know whose five-kopeck piece it is! It’s none of my business! Catching counterfeiters is your job, comrade Sergeant!”
“The five-kopeck piece was confiscated from a certain Privalov, residing here in your museum at the Lohuchil!”
“Ah, from Privalov. I knew he was a thief the moment I laid eyes on him!”
The voice of A-Janus protested reproachfully, “Come now, Modest Matveevich!”
“I’m sorry, Janus Polyeuctovich, but something has to be done! Come with me, comrade Sergeant! He’s in the house… Janus Polyeuctovich, you stand by the window so he can’t escape that way! I’ll prove it! I won’t have aspersions like this cast on comrade Gorynych’s reputation!”
I turned cold inside. But Roman had already worked out what to do. He grabbed a grubby peaked cap off one of the clothes hooks and pulled it down over my ears.
I disappeared.
It was a very strange feeling. Everything stayed where it was, except for me. But Roman didn’t give me any chance to relish the new experience.
“It’s a cap of darkness,” he hissed. “Just move out of the way and keep quiet.”
I tiptoed rapidly across into the corner and sat down in front of the mirror. That very moment Modest came bursting excitedly into the room, dragging the youthful Sergeant Kovalyov along by the arm.
“Where?” Modest howled in confusion, gazing around.
“There,” said Roman, pointing to the sofa.
“No need to get excited, it’s right where it supposed to be,” added Korneev.
“I meant, where’s that… programmer?”
“What programmer?” Roman asked in surprise.
“That’s enough of that,” said Modest. “There was a programmer here. Wearing trousers with no shoes.”
“Oh, that’s what you meant,” said Roman. “We were just playing a joke, Modest Matveevich. There wasn’t any programmer here. It was simply…” He made a strange movement with his hands and a man wearing jeans and a T-shirt appeared in the center of the room.
I only saw him from the back, so I can’t say what he looked like, but the youthful Kovalyov shook his head and said, “No, that’s not him.”
Modest walked around the apparition, muttering, “T-shirt… trousers… no shoes! That’s him!” The apparition disappeared.
“No it’s not, that’s not him,” said Sergeant Kovalyov. “He was younger and he didn’t have a beard…”
“He didn’t have a beard?” Modest echoed. He was totally confused now.
“He didn’t,” Kovalyov confirmed.
“Mmm…” said Modest. “I think he did have a beard…”
“Here, then, I’ll give you the notice,” said the youthful Kovalyov, handing Modest an official-looking sheet of paper. “And you can sort this business out with your Privalov and your Gorynych…”
“But I tell you, the five-kopeck piece isn’t ours!” roared Modest. “I can’t say anything about this Privalov. Perhaps there isn’t any real Privalov at all… But comrade Gorynych is our employee!”
The youthful Kovalyov pressed his hands to his breast as he tried to say something.
“I insist that you get to the bottom of this immediately!” roared Modest. “I won’t take any more of this, comrade Sergeant! This notice is a slur on the reputation of the entire collective! I insist that you check for yourself!”
“I have my orders—” Kovalyov began, but Modest threw himself on him with a cry of “That’s enough of that! I insist!” and dragged him out of the room.
“He’s taken him off to the museum,” said Roman. “Sasha, where are you? Take the cap off. Let’s go and watch.”
“Maybe I ought to keep it on,” I said.
“Take it off, take it off,” said Roman. “You’re a phantom now. Nobody believes in you—not the administration or the militia.”
Korneev said, “All right, I’m off to get some sleep. Sasha, come over after lunch. You can have a look at our computers and what have you.”
I took the cap off. “Now that’s enough of that,” I said. “I’m on vacation.”
“Come on, let’s go,” said Roman.
In the hallway Modest was holding on to the sergeant with one hand while he opened a massive padlock with the other. “I’ll show you our five-kopeck piece!” he shouted. “Everything’s properly registered… Everything’s in its proper place.”
“That’s not what I was saying,” Kovalyov protested feebly. “All I meant was that there could be more than one five-kopeck piece…”
Modest opened the door and we all went into a large hall.
It was a perfectly respectable museum, with stands, diagrams, display cases, models, and plaster casts. The general impression was similar to a museum of crime detection, with lots of photographs and rather off-putting exhibits. Modest immediately dragged the sergeant off somewhere behind the stands, where the two of them started droning away: “There’s our five-kopeck piece…”
“I’m not saying anything about that…”
“Comrade Gorynych…”
“But I’ve got my orders!”
“Now that’s enough of that!”
“Take a poke around, Sasha,” said Roman with a sweeping gesture, and sat down in an armchair by the door.
I began walking along the wall. I wasn’t surprised by anything, I just found it all very interesting. “Living water. Efficiency 52%. Permissible sedimentation 0.3” (an old square bottle containing water, the cork sealed with colored wax). “A diagram of the process of industrial extraction of living water.” “A model of a living water still.” “Veshkovsky-Traubenbach love potion” (a small chemist’s jar containing a poisonous-yellow ointment). “Ordinary bad blood” (a sealed ampoule containing a black liquid)… Hanging above this stand was a plaque that read, “Active chemical substances. 12th–17th centuries.” There were a lot more bottles, jars, retorts, ampoules, flasks, and working and nonworking models of apparatuses for sublimation, distillation, and condensation, but I moved on.
“Magic Sword” (a very rusty two-handed sword with a wavy blade, attached with a chain to an iron pillar inside a tightly sealed display case). “The right canine (working) tooth of Count Dracula of Transylvania” (I am no Cuvier, but to judge from this tooth, Count Dracula of Transylvania was a very unusual and unpleasant individual). “A mortar on its launching pad. 9th century” (a massive assemblage of gray, porous cast iron)… “Gorynych Wyrm, skeleton. 1/25 natural size” (it looked like the skeleton of a diplodocus with three necks)… “Diagram of the operation of the fire-breathing gland of the middle head”… “Seven-league boots, gravitational, working model” (very large rubber boots)… “Flying carpet, antigravitational. Working model” (a carpet about one and a half meters square, showing a Circassian man embracing a young Circassian woman against a background of mountains, also Circassian)…
I got as far as the stand “Development of the Idea of the Philosopher’s Stone” when Sergeant Kovalyov and Modest Matveevich came back into the hall. As far as I could tell, they hadn’t made any progress at all.