“Please, who's joking?” Onisimov gestured broadly with his hands. “The day before yesterday your body was found in a laboratory — I saw it with my own eyes — I mean not your body, since you are in good health, but someone who looked very much like you. It was identified as being you.” “Damn it!” Krivoshein hunched over and rubbed his cheeks. “Can you let me see the body?”
“Well, you know that we can't, Valentin Vasilyevich. It turned into a skeleton, you know. This mischief isn't a very good idea. It could be misinterpreted.”
“Into a skeleton?!” Krivoshein looked up and confusion showed in his brown — flecked green eyes. “How? Where?”
“It happened there, at the scene, as if you needed any information on the matter from me,” Onisimov stressed. “Maybe you'd like to explain?”
“There was a body which became a skeleton,” Krivoshein muttered, frowning. “Then… oh, then it's not so bad. He wasn't wasting time; it looks as if something went wrong. Damn it, look at me!” He cheered up and carefully looked at the detective. “You're mixing me up, comrade, and I don't know why. Bodies just don't turn into skeletons like that. I know a little about it. And then, how can you prove that it's my… I mean, the body of a man who looks like me, if you have no body? Something's wrong here.”
“Perhaps. That's why I want you to shed light on this yourself. Since all this happened in the laboratory you run.”
“That I run? Hm….” Krivoshein laughed, and shook his head. “I'm afraid nothing will come of this light shedding. I need someone to explain it all to me.”
“And this one is going to go mum, too!” Matvei Apollonovich sighed glumly, took a sheet of paper, and unscrewed his pen.
“Let's do this in order. Your name is Valentin Vasilyevich Krivoshein?”
“Yes.”
“Age thirty — five? Russian? Bachelor?”
“Exactly.”
“You live in Dneprovsk and head the New Systems Laboratory at the Systemology Institute?”
“No, that's the part that's wrong. I live in Moscow, and study in the graduate biology department at Moscow State University. Here!” Krivoshein handed him his passport and documents across the desk.
The papers had a realistically weather — beaten look. Everything in them — including the three — year residence permit for Moscow — corresponded with his story.
“I see.” Onisimov put them in his desk. “These things are done quickly in Moscow, in one day!”
“What are you trying to say?!” Krivoshein stared at him, one eyebrow arched aggressively.
“Your documents are phony, that's what. Just as phony as your confederate's, to whom you were trying to pass money at the airport. Were you trying to guarantee an alibi? You needn't have bothered. We'll check it, and then what?”
“Go ahead and check!”
“We will. Whom do you work under at MSU? Who's your advisor?”
“Professor Vano Aleksandrovich Androsiashvili, department chairman in general physiology, corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences.”
“I see.” The investigator dialed the phone. “Operator? This is Onisimov. Quickly connect me with Moscow. I want this man on the videophone as soon as possible. Write it down, Vano Aleksandrovich Androsiashvili, professor, head of the physiology department at the university. Hurry!” He stared at Krivoshein triumphantly.
“The videophone! Marvelous!” he chuckled. “I see that detective work is approaching science fiction. Will this be soon?”
“It'll happen when it happens. We have things to discuss, you and I.” Krivoshein's confidence, however, made an impression on Onisimov. He thought: “And what if this is some kind of crazy coincidence? Let me check.”
“Tell me, do you know Elena Ivanovna Kolomiets?”
Krivoshein's face lost its calm expression. He sat up and looked at Onisimov angrily and questioningly.
“Yes. So what?”
“Very well?”
“So?”
“Why did you break up?”
“This, my dear investigator, if you will excuse me, is absolutely none of your business!” Krivoshein was getting very angry. “I do not permit anyone to meddle in my private life — not God, not the devil, not the police!”
“I see,” Onisimov said calmly. And the thought: “It's him! No way out of it — it's him. Why is he covering up? What could he possibly be hoping for?” He continued the questioning. “All right, here's an easier question: who's Adam?”
“Adam? The first man on earth. Why?”
“He called the institute… the first man. He wanted to know how you were, wanted to see you.”
Krivoshein shrugged.
“And who is that man who met you at the airport?”
“Whom you so cleverly branded as my confederate? That man….” Krivoshein raised and dropped his eyebrows meditatively.
“I'm afraid he's not the person I took him for.”
“I don't think he is, either. Not at all.” Onisimov perked up. “But then who is he?”
“I don't know.”
“The same nonsense all over again!” Onisimov wailed, throwing down his pen. “Enough of this baloney, citizen Krivoshein. It's unbecoming! You were giving him money, forty rubles in tens. You mean you didn't know to whom you were giving money?”
At that moment a young man in a white lab coat came in to the office, put a form on the table, and left, after giving Krivoshein a sharp, curious look. Onisimov looked at the form — it was a report on the analysis of the suspect's fingerprints. When he looked up at Krivoshein, his eyes had a sympathetically triumphant smile.
“Well, that's it. We don't have to wait for the Moscow professor to give a visual ID — and he probably wouldn't anyway. Your fingerprints, citizen Krivoshein, correspond completely to the prints that I took at the scene of the crime. Here, see for yourself!” He handed the form and a magnifying glass to Krivoshein. “So let's drop the game. And remember that your flight to Moscow and the fake papers only make things worse. The court adds three to eight years to a sentence for premeditation and the attempt to confound the police.”
Krivoshein, his lip extended, was studying the form.
“Tell me,” he said, raising his eyes to the detective, “why can't you allow for the fact that there are two men with the same fingerprints?”
“Why?! Because in a hundred years of using this method in criminology, such a thing has never happened once.”
“Lots of things have never happened before, like Sputnik, hydrogen bombs, and computers, but they exist now.”
“What do sputniks have to do with this?” Matvei Apollonovich shrugged. “Sputniks are sputniks, and fingerprints are fingerprints, incontestable evidence. So are you going to talk?”
Krivoshein gazed deeply and thoughtfully at the detective and smiled gently.
“What's your name, comrade investigator?”
“Matvei Apollonovich Onisimov, why?”
“You know what, Matvei Apollonovich? Drop this case.”
“What do you mean, drop it?”
“Just like that, the usual way, cover it up. How do you phrase it: 'for insufficient evidence' or 'lack of proof of a crime. You know, 'turned over to the archives on such and such a date…. “
Matvei Apollonovich was speechless. He had never encountered such brass in all his years on the force.
“You see, Matvei Apollonovich, you'll continue with the varied and, in usual cases, certainly useful activity of questioning, detaining, interrogating, comparing fingerprints, bothering busy people with your videophone.” Krivoshein developed his thought gesturing with his right hand. “And all the time you'll keep thinking that any second now you'll have the truth by the tail. Contradictions will smooth out into facts, the facts into evidence; good will triumph, and evil will get a sentence plus time for premeditation.” He sighed sympathetically. “The hell these contradictions will smooth out! Not in this case. And you will never hit on the truth for the simple reason that you are not ready to accept it at your level of reasoning.”