“I see,” said Andrei, folding the letter and putting it back in the envelope. He didn’t know where to begin.
Then the junior adjutor began. “Are these your colleagues, Citizen Voronin?” he inquired briskly, with a brief side-to-side gesture.
“Yes,” said Andrei.
“Hmm,” Citizen Raymond Cvirik declared dubiously, looking point-blank at Izya.
But at that moment Kensi abruptly asked him, “And who exactly might you be?”
Citizen Raymond Cvirik glanced at him, and then turned in amazement to Andrei. Andrei cleared his throat. “Gentlemen,” he announced. “Allow me to introduce to you Junior Coadjutor Citizen Cvirik—”
“Adjutor!” Cvirik corrected him indignantly.
“What? Ah yes, adjutor. Not coadjutor, but simply adjutor…” (For no reason at all Selma gave a sudden splutter of laughter and put her hand over her mouth.) “Junior adjutor and political representative at our newspaper. From now on.”
“Representative of what?” Kensi asked intransigently.
Andrei was about to look in the envelope again, but Cvirik declared in an even more indignant tone of voice, “Political representative of the Department of Information!”
“Your credentials!” Kensi said brusquely.
“What?” Citizen Cvirik’s sour little eyes started blinking indignantly.
“Your credentials, your authorization—do you have anything, apart from that idiotic holster of yours?”
“Who is this?” Citizen Cvirik exclaimed in a piercing shriek, turning back toward Andrei. “Who is this man?”
“This is Citizen Kensi Ubukata,” Andrei said hastily. “The deputy editor… Kensi, no credentials are required. He delivered a letter to me from Fritz.”
“What Fritz?” Kensi said disdainfully. “What has some Fritz or other got to do with anything?”
“Sudden movements!” Izya appealed. “I implore you, don’t make any sudden movements!”
Cvirik swung his head to and fro from Izya to Kensi and back. His face wasn’t gleaming any longer; it was slowly flooding with crimson. “Citizen Voronin,” he eventually enunciated, “I see that your colleagues do not have a very clear idea of exactly what has happened today! Or perhaps on the contrary!” He kept raising his voice. “They have some strange, distorted idea of it! I see burnt paper here, I see gloomy faces, and I do not see any readiness to set to work. At an hour when the entire City, our entire people—”
“And who are they?” Kensi interrupted, pointing to the characters with carbines. “Are they the new staff?”
“Believe it or not, they are! Citizen Former Deputy Editor! They are the new staff. I cannot promise you that they—”
“We’ll see about that,” Kensi declared in an unfamiliar, squeaky voice, taking a step toward Cvirik. “By what authority—”
“Kensi!” Andrei said helplessly.
“By what authority are you haranguing us here?” Kensi went on, taking no notice of Andrei. “Who are you? How dare you behave like this! Why don’t you present your credentials? You’re nothing but a bunch of armed bandits who have broken in to pillage the place!”
“Shut your mouth, you yellow asshole!” Cvirik suddenly howled out savagely, reaching for his holster.
Andrei swayed forward to stand between them, but at that moment someone shoved him hard on the shoulder, and Selma was suddenly standing in front of Cvirik.
“How dare you swear like that in the presence of women, you bastard!” she yelled. “You fat-assed scumbag! You ugly thug!”
Andrei was completely dazed. Cvirik and Kensi and Selma all screamed hideously at the same time. Out of the corner of his eye, Andrei noticed the characters in the doorway glancing uncertainly at each other and moving to hold their carbines at the ready, and Denny Lee suddenly appeared beside them, holding a heavy editor’s stool with a metal seat by one leg, but the most frightening and unbelievable sight of all was the little floozy Amalia, hunched over in a strange, predatory pose and baring long, white teeth that looked spine-chilling on her haggard, corpse-like face, stealthily creeping toward Cvirik, raising the smoking poker over her right shoulder, as if it were a golf club…
“I remember you, you son of a bitch!” Kensi shouted furiously. “You embezzled the money for schools, you sleazeball, and now you’ve risen to be a coadjutor!”
“I’ll trample you all into shit! I’ll make you eat shit! You enemies of mankind!”
“Shut it, you piece of scum. Shut it, while you’re still in one piece!”
“No sharp movements! I implore you!”
Like a man under a spell, Andrei followed the movement of the smoking poker, unable to stir a muscle. He could sense, he knew, that something terrible and irrevocable was about to happen, and it was already too late to prevent this terrible thing.
“We’ll string you up on a streetlamp!” the junior adjutor howled wildly, waving a huge automatic pistol around in the air. In all this hubbub and uproar he had somehow managed to pull out his pistol, and now he was brandishing it mindlessly and yelling continuously in his piercing voice, and then Kensi bounded up to him, and grabbed him by the lapels of his coat, and Cvirik started pushing him off with both hands, and suddenly a shot rang out, followed immediately by a second and a third. The poker flashed through the air without a sound, and everyone froze.
Cvirik was standing alone in the center of the office, with his crimson face rapidly turning gray. He was rubbing the shoulder bruised by the poker with one hand, and his other hand was shaking, still held out in front of him. The pistol was lying on the floor. The characters in the doorway stood there with their mouths all hanging open in the same way and their carbines lowered.
“I didn’t mean to…” Cvirik said in a trembling voice.
The stool fell out of Denny’s hand and crashed heavily against the floor, and that was when Andrei realized where everyone was looking. They were all looking at Kensi, who was tumbling backward with a strange, extremely slow movement, pressing both hands to the lower part of his chest.
“I didn’t mean to…” Cvirik repeated in a tearful voice. “As God’s my witness, I didn’t mean to!”
Kensi’s legs buckled and he collapsed gently, almost without a sound, into the heap of ash beside the fireplace, uttering an inarticulate, painful sound as he strained to pull his knees up to his stomach.
And then, with a terrible shriek, Selma sank her nails into Cvirik’s fat, gleaming, dirty-white face, and everyone else went dashing to the man lying on the floor, tramping loudly, and screened him off, piling up over him, and then Izya straightened up, turned to look at Andrei with his face strangely contorted and his eyebrows raised in astonishment, and mumbled, “He’s dead. They killed him…”
The telephone rang thunderously. Not understanding a thing, Andrei held out his hand as if this were a dream and picked up the receiver.
“Andrei? Andrei!” It was Otto Friese. “Are you alive and well? Thank God, I was so worried about you! Well, everything will be fine now. Fritz will look out for us now if need be…” He said something else—about sausage, about butter. Andrei wasn’t listening to him any longer.
Selma was squatting down on her haunches with her arms wrapped around her head and weeping uncontrollably, and Junior Adjutor Raymond Cvirik was smearing the blood from the deep, oozing scratches across his gray cheeks and repeating over and over again, like a broken piece of clockwork, “I didn’t mean to… I swear to God, I didn’t mean to…”