“What are you gawping at me like that for?” Fritz inquired with benign curiosity. “Still can’t pull yourself together after the shellacking? Never mind, old buddy, a shellacking from the boss is a subordinate’s holiday of the heart!”
“Hey, listen,” said Andrei. “What did you act out that little operetta for? Himmler, the Gestapo… What sort of innovative investigative practice is that?”
“Operetta?” said Fritz, jerking up his right eyebrow. “That, my old buddy, works like a shot from a gun!” He slammed shut an open case file and got up from the desk. “I’m surprised you haven’t figured that out for yourself. I assure you, if you’d told him you used to work in the Cheka or the GPU and clicked a pair of manicure scissors under his nose, you’d have had him kissing your boots… You know, I’ve picked out a few of your cases—with the heap you have here, you’ll never plow through them in a year… So I’ll take them off your hands, and we can settle up somehow later.”
Andrei gave him a grateful look and Fritz gave him a friendly wink in reply. A helpful kind of guy, Fritz. And a sound comrade. So maybe that was the way the work should be done? Why the hell bother using kid gloves on this garbage? And it was true, everyone over there in the West had been frightened half to death with talk of the Cheka’s basement rooms, and when it came to filthy carrion like that Tailbone, any means were good.
“Well, any questions?” asked Fritz. “No? Then I’ll be going.”
He tucked the case files under his arm and stepped out from behind the desk. “Oh yes!” said Andrei, suddenly remembering. “You haven’t taken the Building case, by any chance, have you? Leave that one!”
“The Building case? My dear man, my altruism doesn’t extend that far. You can figure out the Building case yourself somehow.”
“Uh-huh,” Andrei said with morose determination. “Myself… By the way,” he said, remembering something else. “Falling Stars—what sort of case is that? I know the name all right, but what it’s all about, what sort of stars they are, I don’t recall…”
Fritz wrinkled up his forehead and gave Andrei a curious glance. “There is a case by that name,” he said. “They haven’t really handed it off to you, have they? Then you’re a goner. Chachua’s got it. A desperate case, absolutely hopeless.”
“No,” Andrei said with a sigh. “No one’s handed it to me. It’s just that the boss suggested I should familiarize myself with it. A series of some kind of ritual killings, isn’t it? Or is it?”
“No, it’s not exactly that. Although maybe it is that. That case, my friend, has been dragging on for years. Every now and then they find people smashed to smithereens at the foot of the Wall. They’ve obviously fallen off the Wall, from a great height…”
“What do you mean, off the Wall?” Andrei asked in amazement. “Is it really possible to climb up it? It’s smooth… And what for? You can’t even see the top of it.”
“That’s the point! At first some thought there was a city like ours up there too, on top, and they were throwing these people down to us over their Cliff, you know, the way we can throw things into our Abyss. But then they managed to identify a couple of the bodies: they were ours, all right, local residents… No one has the slightest idea how they managed to clamber up there. So far we can only assume that they’re some kind of desperado rock climbers who were trying to get out of the City by the upward route… But on the other hand… Anyway, it’s a pretty dismal case. A dead case, if you want my opinion. Well, OK, time I was going.”
“Thanks. Cheers,” Andrei said, and Fritz left.
Andrei moved across into his own chair, put away all the files except the Building case in the safe, and sat there for a while with his head propped on his hands. Then he picked up the phone, dialed a number, and started waiting. As usual, no one answered the phone for a long time, then someone picked up the receiver and a low male voice, clearly not sober, inquired, “Heeello?” Andrei said nothing, pressing the receiver hard against his ear: “Hello! Hellooo?” the drunken voice growled, then fell silent, and all that could be heard was heavy breathing and Selma’s voice in the distance, crooning a heartrending song that Uncle Yura had brought to the City:
Andrei hung up, croaked and grunted, rubbing his cheeks, then muttered bitterly, “Lousy tramp, she’s irredeemable…” and opened the case file.
The Building case had been opened during the time when Andrei was still a garbage collector and knew nothing at all about the murky backstage life of the City. In the sixteenth, eighteenth, and thirty-second districts, people had suddenly started disappearing on a regular basis. They disappeared absolutely without a trace, and there was absolutely no system, no sense, and no logic to the disappearances. Ole Svensson, forty-three years of age, a laborer at the paper mill, went out one evening to get bread and didn’t come back, and he never showed up at the bread shop. Stepan Cibulski, twenty-five years of age, a policeman, disappeared at night from his post, his shoulder belt was found on the corner of Main Street and Diamond Avenue—and that was all; there were no other traces. Monica Lehrer, fifty-five years of age, a seamstress, took her spitz out for walk before bed; the spitz returned home cheerful and in good health, but the seamstress had disappeared. And so on, and so on—more than forty disappearances in all.
Fairly soon witnesses turned up who claimed that shortly before the missing people disappeared, they had entered a certain Building—from the descriptions it seemed like the same one, but the strange thing was that different witnesses provided different locations for the Building. Josef Humboldt, sixty-three years of age, a hairdresser, walked into a three-story redbrick building on the corner of Second Right Street and Graystone Lane in full view of Leo Paltus, who knew him personally, and since that time no one had seen Josef Humboldt again. A certain Theodore Buch testified that Semyon Zahodko, thirty-two years of age, a farmer, who subsequently disappeared, had entered a building of precisely the same description, but this time on Third Left Street, not far from the Catholic church. David Mkrtchan related how he had met an old acquaintance from work, Ray Dodd, forty-one years of age, a cesspool cleaner, in Wattle and Daub Lane—they stood there for a while, chatting about the harvest, family matters, and other neutral subjects, and then Ray Dodd said, “Hang on a moment, I’ve just got to drop into this place, I’ll try to make it quick, but if I’m not back out in five minutes, you go on, it means I’ve been delayed.” He went into some kind of redbrick building with windows that were whitewashed over. Mkrtchan waited a quarter of an hour for him, then gave up and went on his way, and as for Ray Dodd, he disappeared without a trace forever.
The redbrick building figured in the testimony of all the witnesses. Some asserted that it was three stories high, others said it had four floors. Some noticed windows that were whitewashed over, others mentioned windows that were covered with metal gratings. And no two witnesses gave exactly the same spot as its location.