Rumors started rippling through the City. In the lines to buy milk, in the hairdressing salons, in the restaurants, it was passed on by word of mouth in an ominous whisper—the bright, shiny, brand-new legend of the appalling Red Building that wandered around the City of its own volition, settling in somewhere between the ordinary buildings, opening the ghastly jaws of its doors and lying in wait there for the incautious. Then people appeared claiming to be friends of relatives of acquaintances who had managed to escape, tearing themselves out of the grip of that insatiable brick maw. These acquaintances had told terrifying stories, presenting by way of proof scars and fractures earned by jumping from the second, third, and even fourth floor. According to all these rumors and legends, the building was empty inside—there were no robbers or sadistic maniacs waiting for you in there, no shaggy-haired, bloodsucking beasts. But the stone bowels of the corridors suddenly contracted, straining to squash their victim; the black chasms of manholes gaped open underfoot, breathing out an icy graveyard stench; mysterious forces drove men along the black, constantly narrowing passages and tunnels until they got stuck, trying to force their way through the final stony crack—and in the empty rooms with tattered wallpaper, among slabs of plaster that had fallen from the ceilings, the crushed bones decayed, projecting ghoulishly from rags that were crusted hard with blood…
At first Andrei had actually taken an interest in this case. He marked the places where the Building had been seen with little crosses on a map of the City, tried to find some consistent principle in the locations of these little crosses, and drove out to investigate those places a good dozen times—and every time at the location of the Building he discovered either an abandoned garden or a gap between buildings, or even an ordinary apartment building that had nothing to do with any mysteries or riddles.
He was bemused by the circumstance that the Red Building had never been seen by the light of the sun; he was bemused by the circumstance that at least half the witnesses had seen the Building while in a state of greater or lesser alcoholic intoxication; he was bemused by the petty but seemingly compulsory inconsistencies in virtually every testimony; and he was especially bemused by the total senselessness and absurdity of what was happening.
Izya Katzman had once remarked concerning this business that a city of a million people, deprived of any systematic ideology, would inevitably acquire its own myths. That sounded convincing enough, but people were actually disappearing for real! Of course, it wasn’t all that hard for someone to disappear in the City. They only had to be thrown over the Cliff and no one would ever be any wiser. But who would want to cast assorted hairdressers, old seamstresses, and petty shopkeepers into the Abyss? People with no money, with no reputation, and practically no enemies? Kensi had once voiced the perfectly sensible supposition that the Red Building, if it really existed, was evidently an integral part of the Experiment, so seeking an explanation for it was pointless—the Experiment is the Experiment. In the end Andrei had also settled for this point of view. There was a whole heap of work to be done, the Building case already ran to more than a thousand pages, and Andrei had stuck the file right down at the bottom of his safe, only occasionally extracting it in order to insert the latest witness testimony.
Today’s talk with the boss, however, had opened up entirely new prospects. If there really were people in the City who had set themselves the task (or for whom someone else had set the task) of creating an atmosphere of panic and terror among the general population, that lent many aspects of the Building case some comprehensibility. And then the inconsistency of the testimony from the so-called witnesses could be explained by the distortion of rumors as they were passed on, and the disappearances were transformed into ordinary murders, intended to intensify the atmosphere of terror. The constantly active sources, the distribution centers of this murky, sinister haze, now had to be sought out among the welter of idle gossip, fearful whispers, and lies…
Andrei took a clean sheet of paper and began slowly drafting out a plan, word by word and point by point. A little while later he had come up with the following:
Primary goaclass="underline" Identify sources of rumors, arrest said sources, and identify control center. Basic methods: Repeat questioning of all witnesses who have previously provided testimony in a sober condition; pursue links in the chain to identify and question individuals who claim they have been inside the Building; identify possible links between these individuals and the witnesses… Take into account: a) Information provided by agents b) Inconsistencies in the testimony…
Andrei chewed on his pencil for a moment, squinted at the lamp, and remembered another thing: contact Petrov. At one time this Petrov had really gotten Andrei’s goat. His wife had disappeared, and for some reason he decided that the Red Building had swallowed her. Since then he had abandoned all his other business and devoted himself to searching for the Building: he wrote countless notes to the Prosecutor’s Office—which were promptly forwarded to the Investigation Department and ended up with Andrei—he wandered around the City at night, was taken into the police station several times on suspicion of criminal intent, and raised Cain there, which got him locked up for ten days, and when he got out he carried on with his search.
Andrei wrote out summonses for him and two other witnesses, handed the summonses to the duty guard with orders to see they were delivered immediately, and went to see Chachua.
Chachua, an immense Caucasian who had run to fat, with almost no forehead but a gigantic nose, was reclining on the sofa in his office, surrounded by swollen case files, and sleeping. Andrei shook him.
“Eh!” Chachua said hoarsely as he woke up. “What happened?”
“Nothing happened,” Andrei said angrily. He couldn’t stand this kind of lax behavior in people. “Give me the Falling Stars case.”
Chachua sat up, his face beaming with joy. “Are you taking it?” he asked with a predatory twitch of his phenomenal nose.
“Don’t go getting all happy. It’s only to take a look.”
“Listen, what do you want to just look at it for?” Chachua exclaimed passionately. “Take the case off my hands completely. You’re handsome, young, and full of energy; the boss holds you up as an example to everyone. You’ll soon have this case unraveled—you’ll just clamber up that Yellow Wall and unravel it, quick as a flash! It’s a piece of cake for you!”
Andrei gazed at Chachua’s nose. Immense and hooked, with a web of crimson veinlets covering its bridge and bunches of coarse black hairs protruding from its nostrils, this nose lived a life of its own, apart from Chachua. It obviously just didn’t want to know about the concerns of Investigator Chachua. It wanted everyone around it to quaff ice-cold Kakhetian wine out of large glasses, following it down with juicy kebabs and moist, crunchy green herbs and salads; it wanted everyone to dance, clutching the hems of their sleeves in their fingers, with passionate cries of “Ássa!” It wanted to bury itself in fragrant blonde hair and hover above sumptuous naked breasts… Oh, it wanted many things, that magnificent, life-loving hedonist of a nose, and its multitudinous desires were all candidly expressed in its various independent movements and changes of color, and the range of sounds that it emitted!
“And if you can close this case,” said Chachua, rolling the olives of his eyes back up under his low forehead, “oh my God! What fame that will earn you! What honor! Do you think Chachua would offer you this case if he could climb up the Yellow Wall himself? Not for anything would Chachua offer you this case! It’s a gold mine! And I’m only offering it to you. Lots of people have come to me and asked for it. No, I thought, none of you can handle it. Voronin’s the only one who can handle it, I thought—”