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chair, gave a frightened look at its gilded armrests and sat down on the
floor beside it.
'Why didn't you sit in the chair? ' asked Pilate.
'I'm dirty, I would make it dirty too,' said the Levite staring at the
floor.
'You will be given something to eat shortly.'
'I don't want to eat.'
'Why tell lies? ' Pilate asked quietly. ' You haven't eaten all day
and probably longer. All right, don't eat. I called you here to show me your
knife.'
'The soldiers took it away from me when they brought me here,' replied
the Levite and added dismally: ' You must give it back to me, because I have
to return it to its owner. I stole it.'
Why?'
'To cut the ropes.'
'Mark!' shouted the Procurator and the centurion stepped into the
arcade. ' Give me his knife.'
The centurion pulled a dirty breadknife out of one of the two leather
sheaths on his belt, handed it to the Procurator and withdrew.
'Where did you steal the knife? '
'In a baker's shop just inside the Hcbron gate, on the left.'
Pilate inspected the wide blade and tested the edge with his finger.
Then he said :
'Don't worry about the knife, it will be returned to the shop. Now I
want something else--show me the parchment you carry with you on which you
have written what Yeshua has said.'
The Levite looked at Pilate with hatred and smiled a smile of such
ill-will that his face was completely distorted.
'Are you going to take it away from me? The last thing I possess? '
'I didn't say " give it ",' answered Pilate. ' I said " show it to
me".'
The Levite fumbled in his shirt-front and pulled out a roll of
parchment. Pilate took it, unrolled it, spread it out in the light of two
candles and with a frown began to study the barely decipherable script. The
uneven strokes were hard to understand and Pilate frowned and bent over the
parchment, tracing the lines with his finger. He nevertheless managed to
discern that the writings were a disjointed sequence of sayings, dates,
household notes and snatches of poetry. Pilate managed to read:
'there is no death . . . yesterday we ate sweet cakes . . .'
Grimacing with strain, Pilate squinted and read: '... we shall see a
pure river of the water of life . . . mankind will look at the sun through
transparent crystal. . .'
Pilate shuddered. In the last few lines of the parchment he deciphered
the words: '. . . greatest sin ... cowardice . . .'
Pilate rolled up the parchment and with a brusque movement handed it
back to the Levite.
'There, take it,' he said, and after a short silence he added:
'I see you are a man of learning and there is no need for you, living
alone, to walk around in such wretched clothes and without a home. I have a
large library at Caesarea, I am very rich and I would like you to come and
work for me. You would catalogue and look after the papyruses, you would be
fed and clothed.'
The Levite stood up and replied :
'No, I don't want to.'
'Why not? ' asked the Procurator, his expression darkening. ' You
don't like me ...are you afraid of me? '
The same evil smile twisted Matthew's face and he said :
'No, because you would be afraid of me. You would not find it very
easy to look me in the face after having killed him.'
'Silence,' Pilate cut him off. ' Take this money.'
The Levite shook his head and the Procurator went on :
'You, I know, consider yourself a disciple of Yeshua, but I tell you
that you have acquired nothing of what he taught you. For if you had, you
would have certainly accepted something from me. Remember--before he died he
said that he blamed no one--' Pilate raised his finger significantly and his
face twitched --' and I know that he would have accepted something. You are
hard. He was not a hard man. Where will you go? '
Matthew suddenly walked over to Pilate's table, leaned on it with both
hands and staring at the Procurator with burning eyes he whispered to him :
'Know, hegemon, that there is one man in Jerusalem whom I shall kill.
I want to tell you this so that you are warned-- there will be more blood.'
'I know that there will be more blood,' answered Pilate. ' What you
have said does not surprise me. You want to murder me,I suppose?'
'I shall not be able to murder you,' replied the Levite, baring his
teeth in a smile. ' I am not so stupid as to count on that. But I shall kill
Judas of Karioth if it takes the rest of my life.'
At this the Procurator's eyes gleamed with pleasure. Beckoning Matthew
the Levite closer he said :
'You will not succeed, but it will not be necessary. Judas was
murdered tonight.'
The Levite jumped back from the table, stared wildly round and cried:
'Who did it? '
Pilate a.nswered him :
I did it.
'You must not be jealous,' said Pilate, baring his teeth mirthlessly
and rubbing his hands, ' but I'm afraid he had other admirers Ibeside
yourself.'
'Who did it? ' repeated the Levite in a whisper.
Matthew opened his mouth and stared at the Procurator, who said
quietly:
'It is mot much, but I did it.' And he added : ' Now will you accept
something? '
The Levite thought for a moment, relented and finally said :
'Order them to give me a clean piece of parchment.'
An hour had passed since the Levite had left the palace. The dawn
silence was only disturbed by the quiet tread of the sentries in the garden.
The moon was fading and on the other edge of heaven there appeared the
whitish speck of the morning star. The candles had long been put out. The
Procurator lay on his couch. He was sleeping with his hand under his cheek
and breathing noiselessly. Beside him slept Banga.
Thus Pontius Pilate, fifth Procurator of Judaea, met the dawn of the
fifteenth of Nisan.
Day was breaking as Margarita read the last words of the chapter '. . .
Thus Pontius Pilate, fifth Procurator of Judaea, met the dawn of the
fifteenth of Nisan.'
From the yard she could hear the lively, cheerful early morning chatter
of sparrows in the branches of the willow and the lime tree.
Margarita got up from her chair, stretched and only then realised how
physically exhausted she felt and how much she wanted to sleep. Mentally,
though, Margarita was in perfect form. Her mind was clear and she was
completely unmoved by the fact that she had spent a night in the
supernatural. It caused her no distress to think that she had been at
Satan's ball, that by some miracle the master had been restored to her, that
the novel had risen from the ashes, that everything was back in its place in
the basement flat after the expulsion of the wretched Aloysius Mogarych. In
a word, her encounter with Woland had done her no psychological harm.
Everything was as it should be.
She went into the next room, made sure that the master was sound
asleep, put out the unnecessary light on the bedside table and stretched out
on the other little divan, covering herself with an old, torn blanket. A
minute later she was in a dreamless sleep. Silence reigned in the basement
rooms and in the whole house, silence filled the little street.
But on that early Saturday morning there was no sleep for a whole floor
of a certain Moscow office which was busy investigating the Woland case ; in
nine offices the lamps had been burning all night. Their windows, looking
out on to a large asphalted square which was being cleaned by slow, whirring
vehicles with revolving brushes, competed with the rising sun in brightness.
Although the outlines of the case had been quite clear since the day
before, when they had closed the Variety as a result of the disappearance of
its management and the scandalous performance of black magic, everything was
complicated by the incessant flow of new evidence.
The department in charge of this strange case now had the task of
drawing together all the strands of the varied and confusing events,
occurring all over Moscow, which included an apparent mixture of sheer
devilry, hypnotic conjuring tricks and barefaced crime.
The first person summoned to the glaring electric light of that
unsleeping floor was Arkady Apollonich Sempleyarov, the chairman of the
Acoustics Commission.
On Friday evening after dinner, the telephone rang in his flat on
Kamenny Most and a man's voice asked to speak to Arkady Apollonich. His
wife, who had answered the call, announced grimly that Arkady Apollonich was
unwell, had gone to lie down and could not come to the telephone.
Nevertheless Arkady Apollonich was obliged to come when the voice said who
was calling.
'Of course ... at once . . . right away,' stammered Arkady's usually
arrogant spouse and she flew like an arrow to rouse Arkady Appollonich from
the couch where he had lain down to recover from the horrific scenes caused
by the theatre incident and the stormy expulsion from their flat of his
young cousin from Saratov. In a quarter of a minute, in underclothes and one
slipper, Arkady Apollonich was babbling into the telephone :
'Yes, it's me. Yes, I will. . .'
His wife, all thought of Arkady Apollonich's infidelity instantly
forgotten, put her terrified face round the door, waving a slipper in the
air and whispering :
'Put your other slipper on ... you'll catch cold . . .' At this Arkady
Apollonich, waving his wife away with a bare leg and rolling his eyes at
her, muttered into the receiver :
'Yes, yes, yes, of course ... I understand . . . I'll come at once . .
.'
Arkady Apollonich spent the rest of the evening with the investigators.
The ensuing conversation was painful and unpleasant in the extreme ; he
was not only made to give a completely frank account of that odious show and
the fight in the box, but was obliged to tell everything about Militsa
Andreyevna Pokobatko from Yelokhovskaya Street, as well as all about his
cousin from Saratov and much more besides, the telling of which caused
Arkady Apollonich inexpressible pain.
Naturally the evidence given by Arkady Apollonich--an intelligent and
cultured man who had been an eyewitness of the show and who as an articulate
and informed observer was not only able to give an excellent description of
the mysterious masked magician and his two rascally assistants but who
actually remembered that the magician's name was Woland--helped considerably
to advance the enquiry. When Arkady Apollonich's evidence was compared with
the evidence of the others, among them several of the ladies who had
suffered such embarrassment after the show (including the woman in violet
knickers who had so shocked Rimsky) and Karpov the usher who had been sent
to Flat No. 50 at 302a, Sadovaya Street--it became immediately obvious where
the culprit was to be found.
They went to No. 50 more than once and not only searched it with
extreme thoroughness but tapped on the walls, examined the chimney-flues and
looked for secret doors. None of this, however, produced any results and
nothing was found during the visits to the flat. Yet someone was living in
the flat, despite the fact that every official body in Moscow concerned with
visiting foreigners stated firmly and categorically that there was not and
could not be a magician called Woland in Moscow. He had definitely not
registered on entry, he had shown no one his passport or any other
documents, contracts or agreements and no one had so much as heard of him.
Kitaitsev, the director of the programmes department of the Theatrical
Commission, swore by all the saints that the missing Stepa Likhodeyev had
never sent him a programme schedule for anyone called Woland for
confirmation and had never telephoned Kitaitsev a word about Woland's
arrival. Therefore he, Kitaitsev, failed completely to understand how Stepa
could have allowed a show of this sort to be put on at the Variety. When he
was told that Arkady Apollonich had seen the performance with his own eyes,
Kitaitsev could only spread his hands and raise his eyes to heaven. From
those eyes alone it was obvious that Kitaitsev was as pure as crystal.
Prokhor Petrovich, the chairman of the Entertainments Commission . . .
He, incidentally, had re-entered his suit as soon as the police reached
his office, to the ecstatic joy of Anna Richardovna and to the great
annoyance of the police, who had been alerted for nothing. As soon as he was
back at his post and wearing his striped grey suit, Prokhor Petrovich fully
approved all the minutes that his suit had drafted during his short absence.
So Prokhor Petrovich obviously knew nothing about Woland either.
The sum total of their enquiries amounted to a conclusion which was
little short of farcical: thousands of spectators, plus the Variety Theatre
staff plus, finally, Arkady Apollonich, that highly intelligent man, had
seen this magician and his thrice-cursed assistants, yet in the meantime all
four had completely vanished. What could it mean? Had Woland been swallowed
up by the earth or had he, as some claimed, never come to Moscow at all? If
one accepted the first alternative, then he had apparently spirited away the
entire Variety management with him; if you believed the second alternative,
it meant that the theatre management itself, having first indulged in a
minor orgy of destruction had decamped from Moscow leaving no trace.
The officer in charge of the case was, to give him his due, a man who
knew his job. Rimsky, for instance, was tracked down with astounding speed.
Merely by linking the Ace of Diamonds' behaviour at the taxi-rank near the
cinema with certain timings, such as the time of the end of the show and the
time at which Rimsky could have vanished, they were able to send an
immediate telegram to Leningrad. An hour later (on Friday evening) the reply
came back that Rimsky had been found in room 412 at the Astoria Hotel, on
the fourth floor next to the room containing the repertory manager of one of
the Moscow theatres then on tour in Leningrad, in that famous room with the
blue-grey furniture and the luxurious bathroom.
Rimsky, found hiding in the wardrobe of his room at the Astoria, was
immediately arrested and interrogated in Leningrad, after which a telegram
reached Moscow stating that treasurer Rimsky was an irresponsible witness
who had proved unwilling or incapable of replying coherently to questions
and had done nothing but beg to be put into an armourplated strong-room
under armed guard. An order was telegraphed to Leningrad for Rimsky to be
escorted back to Moscow, and he returned under guard by the Friday evening
train.
By Friday evening, too, they were on the track of Likhodeyev. Telegrams
asking for information on Likhodeyev had been sent to every town and a reply
came from Yalta that Likhodeyev was there but about to leave for Moscow by
aeroplane.
The only person whose trail they failed to pick up was Varenukha. This
man, known to the entire theatrical world of Moscow, seemed to have vanished
without trace.
Meanwhile investigations were in hand on related incidents in other
parts of Moscow. An explanation was needed, for instance, of the baffling
case of the office staff who had sung the ' Volga Boatmen ' song
(Stravinsky, incidentally, cured them all within two hours by subcutaneous
injections) and of other cases of people (and their victims) who had
proffered various pieces of rubbish under the illusion that they were
banknotes. The nastiest, the most scandalous and the most insoluble of all
these episodes was, of course, the theft, in broad daylight, of Berlioz's
head from the open coffin at Griboyedov.
The job of the team of twelve men assigned to the case was rather like
that of someone with a knitting-needle trying to pick up stitches dropped
all over Moscow.
One of the detectives called on Profes sor Stravinsky's clinic and
began by asking for a list of all patients admitted during the past three
days. By this means they discovered Nikanor Ivano-vich Bosoi and the
unfortunate compere whose head had been wrenched off, although they were not
greatly interested in these two. It was obvious now that they had both
merely been victimised by the gang headed by this weird magician. In Ivan
Nikolayich Bezdomny, however, the detective showed the very greatest
interest.
Early on Friday evening the door of Ivan's room opened to admit a
polite, fresh-faced young man- He looked quite unlike a detective, yet he
was one of the best in the Moscow force. He saw lying in bed a pale,
pinched-looking young man with lack-lustre, wandering eyes. The detective, a
man of considerable charm and tact, said that he had come to see Ivan for a
talk about the incident at Patriarch's Ponds two days previously.
The poet would have been triumphant if the detective had called
earlier, on Thursday for instance when Ivan had been trying so loudly and
passionately to induce someone to listen to his story about Patriarch's
Ponds. Now people were at last coming to hear his version of the
affair--just when his urge to help capture Professor Woland had completely
evaporated.
For Ivan, alas, had altogether changed since the night of Berlioz's
death. He was quite prepared to answer the detective's questions politely,
but his voice and his expression betrayed his utter disinterest. The poet no
longer cared about Berlioz's fate.
While Ivan had been dozing before the detective's arrival, a succession
of images had passed before his mind's eye. He saw a strange, unreal,
vanished city with great arcaded marble piles ;
with roofs that flashed in the sunlight; with the grim, black and
pitiless tower of Antonia ; with a palace on the western hill plunged almost
to roof-level in a garden of tropical greenery, and above the garden bronze
statues that glowed in the setting sun ; with Roman legionaries clad in
armour marching beneath the city walls.
In his half-waking dream Ivan saw a man sitting motionless in a chair,
a clean-shaven man with taut, yellowing skin who wore a white cloak lined
with red, who sat and stared with loathing at this alien, luxuriant garden.
Ivan saw, too, a treeless ochre-coloured hill with three empty cross-barred
gibbets.
The events at Patriarch's Ponds no longer interested Ivan Bezdomny the
poet.
'Tell me, Ivan Nikolayich, how far were you from the turnstile when
Berlioz fell under the tram? '
A barely detectable smile of irony crossed Ivan's Ups as he replied:
'I was far away.'
'And was the man in checks standing beside the turnstile? '
'No, he was on a bench nearby.'
'You distinctly remember, do you, that he did not approach the
turnstile at the moment when Berlioz fell? '
'I do remember. He didn't move. He was on the bench and he stayed
there.'
These were the detective's last questions. He got up, shook hands with
Ivan, wished him a speedy recovery and said that he soon hoped to read some
new poetry of his.
'No,' said Ivan quietly. ' I shall not write any more poetry.'
The detective smiled politely and assured the poet that although he
might be in a slight state of depression at the moment, it would soon pass.
'No,' said Ivan, staring not at the detective but at the distant
twilit horizon, ' it will never pass. The poetry I wrote was bad p.oetry. I
see that now.'
The detective left Ivan, having gathered some extremely important
evidence. Following the thread of events backwards from end to beginning,
they could now pinpoint the source of the whole episode. The detective had
no doubt that the events in question had all begun with the murder at
Patriarch's Ponds. Neither Ivan, of course, nor the man in the check suit
had pushed the unfortunate chairman of massolit under the tramcar;
n"o one had physically caused him to fall under the wheels, but the
detective was convinced that Berlioz had thrown himself (or had fallen)
beneath the tram while under hypnosis.
Although there was plenty of evidence and it was obvious whom they
should arrest and where, it proved impossible to lay hands on them. There
was no doubt that someone was in flat Nib. 50. Occasionally the telephone
was answered by a quavering or a nasal voice, occasionally someone in the
flat opened a window and the sound of a gramophone could be heard floating
out. Yet whenever they went there the place was completely empty. They
searched it at various hours of the day, each time going over it with a
fine-tooth comb. The flat had been under suspicion for some time and a watch
had been placed on both the main stairs and the back stairs ; men were even
posted on the roof among the chimney pots. The flat was playing tricks and
there was nothing that anyone could do about it.
The case dragged on in this way until midnight on Friday, wlien Baron
Maigel, wearing evening dress and patent-leather pumps, entered flat No. 50
as a guest. He was heard being let in. Exactly ten minutes later the
authorities entered the flat without a sound. It was not only empty of
tenants, but worse, there was not even a trace of Baron Maigel.
There things rested until dawn on Saturday, when some new anid valuable
information came to light as a six-seater passenger aeroplane landed at
Moscow airport having flown from the Crimea. Among its passengers was one
extremely odd young man. He had heavy stubble on his face, had not washed
for three days, his eyes were red with exhaustion and fright, he had no
luggage and was somewhat eccentrically dressed. He wore a sheepskin hat, a
felt cloak over a nightshirt and brand-new blue leather bedroom slippers. As
he stepped off the gangway from the aircraft cabin, a group of expectant men
approached him. A short while later the one and only manager of the Variety
Theatre, Stepan Bogdanovich Likhodeyev, was facing the detectives. He added
some new information. They were now able to establish that Woland had
tricked his way into the Variety after hypnotising Stepa Likhodeyev and had
then spirited Stepa God knows how many kilometres away from Moscow. This
gave the authorities more evidence, but far from making their job any easier
it made it if anything rather harder, because it was obviously not going to
be so simple to arrest a person capable of the kind of sleight-of-hand to
which Stepan Bogdanovich had fallen victim. Likhodeyev, at his own request,
was locked up in a strong-room.
The next witness was Varenukha, arrested at home where he had returned
after an unexplained absence lasting nearly forty-eight hours. In spite of
his promise to Azazello, the house manager began by lying. He should not,
however, be judged too harshly for this--Azazello had, after all, only
forbidden him to lie on the telephone and in this instance Varenukha was
talking without the help of a telephone. With a shifty look Ivan Savye-lich
announced that on Thursday he had shut himself up in his office and had got
drunk, after which he had gone somewhere-- he couldn't remember where; then
somewhere else and drunk some loo-proof vodka ; had collapsed under a
hedge--again he couldn't remember where. He was then told that his stupid
and irrational behaviour was prejudicial to the course of justice and that
he would be held responsible for it. At this Varenukha broke down, sobbing,
and whispered in a trembling voice, glancing round fearfully, that he was
only telling lies out of fear of Woland's gang, who had already roughed him
up once and that he begged, prayed, longed to be locked up in an armoured
cell.
'There soon won't be room for them all in that strong-room! ' growled
one of the investigators.
'These villains have certainly put the fear of God into them,' said
the detective who had questioned Ivan.
They calmed Varenukha as well as they could, assuring him that he would
be given protection without having to resort to a strong-room. He then
admitted that he had never drunk any loo-proof vodka but had been beaten up
by two characters, one with a wall eye and the other a stout man . . .
'Looking like a cat? '
'Yes, yes,' whispered Varenukha, almost swooning with fear and
glancing round every moment, adding further details of how he had spent
nearly two days in flat No. 50 as a vampire's decoy and had nearly caused
Rimsky's death . . .
Just then Rimsky himself was brought in from the Leningrad train, but
this grey-haired, terror-stricken, psychologically disturbed old man,
scarcely recognisable as the treasurer of the Variety Theatre, stubbornly
refused to speak the truth. Rimsky claimed that he had never seen Hella at
his office window that night, nor had he seen Varenukha; he had simply felt
ill and had taken the train to Leningrad in a fit of amnesia. Needless to
say the ailing treasurer concluded his evidence by begging to be locked up
in a strong-room.
Anna was arrested while trying to pay a store cashier with a ten-dollar
bill. Her story about people flying out of the landing window and the
horseshoe, which she claimed to have picked up in order to hand it over to
the police, was listened to attentively.
'Was the horseshoe really gold and studded with diamonds? ' they asked
Anna.
'Think I don't know diamonds when I see them? ' replied Anna.
'And did he really give you ten-rouble notes? '
'Think I don't know a tenner when I see one? '
'When did they turn into dollars? '
'I don't know what dollars are and I never saw any! ' whined Anna. ' I
know my rights! I was given the money as a reward and went to buy some
material with it.' Then she started raving about the whole thing being the
fault of the house management committee which had allowed evil forces to
move in on the fifth floor and made life impossible for everybody else.
Mere a detective waved a pen at Anna to shut up because she was boring
them, and signed her release on a green form with which, to the general
satisfaction, she left the building.
There followed a succession of others, among them Nikolai Ivanovich,
who had been arrested thanks to the stupidity of his jealous wife in telling
the police that her husband was missing. The detectives were not
particularly surprised when Nikolai Ivanovich produced the joke certificate
testifying that he had spent his time at Satan's ball. Nikolai Ivanovich
departed slightly from the truth, however, when he described how he had
carried Margarita Nikolayevna's naked maid through the air to bathe in the
river at some unknown spot and how Margarita Nikolay-evna herself had
appeared naked at the window. He thought it unnecessary to recall, for
instance, that he had appeared in the bedroom carrying Margarita's abandoned
slip or that he had called Natasha ' Venus.' According to him, Natasha had
flown out of the window, mounted him and made him fly away from Moscow . . .
'I was forced to obey under duress,' said Nikolai Ivanovich, finishing
his tale with a request not to tell a word of it to his wife, which was
granted.
Nikolai Ivanovich's evidence established the fact that both Margarita
Nikolayevna and her maid Natasha had vanished without trace. Steps were
taken to find them.
So the investigation progressed without a moment's break until Saturday
morning. Meanwhile the city was seething with the most incredible rumours,
in which a tiny grain of truth was embellished with a luxuriant growth of
fantasy. People were saying that after the show at the Variety all two
thousand spectators had rushed out into the street as naked as the day they
were born ; that the police had uncovered a magic printing-press for
counterfeiting money on Sadovaya Street; that a gang had kidnapped the five
leading impresarios in Moscow but that the police had found them all again,
and much more that was unrepeatable.
As it grew near lunchtime a telephone bell rang in the investigators'
office. It was a report from Sadovaya Street that the haunted flat was
showing signs of life again. Someone inside had apparently opened the
windows, sounds of piano music and singing had been heard coming from it,
and a black cat had been observed sunning itself on a windowsill.
At about four o'clock on that warm afternoon a large squad of men in
plain clothes climbed out of three cars that had stopped a little way short
of No. 302a, Sadovaya Street. Here the large squad divided into two smaller
ones, one of which entered the courtyard through the main gateway and headed
straight for staircase 6, while the other opened a small door, normally
locked, leading to the back staircase and both began converging on flat No.
50 by different stairways.
While this was going on Koroviev and Azazello, in their normal clothes
instead of festive tailcoats, were sitting in the dining-room finishing
their lunch. Woland, as was his habit, was in the bedroom and no one knew
where the cat was, but to judge from the clatter of saucepans coming from
the kitchen Behemoth was presumably there, playing the fool as usual.
'What are those footsteps on the staircase? ' asked Koroviev, twirling
his spoon in a cup of black coffee.
'They're coming to arrest us,' replied Azazello and drained a glass of
brandy.
'Well, well . . .' was Koroviev's answer.
The men coming up the front staircase had by then reached the
third-floor landing, where a couple of plumbers were fiddling with the
radiator. The party exchanged meaning looks with the plumbers.
'They're all at home,' whispered one of the plumbers, tapping the pipe
with his hammer.
At this the leader of the squad drew a black Mauser from under his
overcoat and the man beside him produced, a skeleton key. All the men were
suitably armed. Two of them had thin, easily unfurled silk nets in their
pockets, another had. a lasso and the sixth man was equipped with gauze
masks and an ampoule of chloroform.
In a second the front door of No. 50 swung open and the party was in
the hall, whilst the knocking on the door from the kitchen to the back
staircase showed that the second squad had also arrived on time.
This time at least partial success seemed to be in their grasp. Men at
once fanned out to all the rooms and found no one, but on the dining-room
table were the remains of an obviously recently finished meal and in the
drawing-room, alongside a crystal jug, a huge black cat was perched on the
mantelpiece, holding a Primus in its front paws.
There was a long pause as the men gazed at the cat.
'H'm, yes ... that's him . . .' whispered one 'of them.
'I'm doing no harm--I'm not playing games, I'm mending the Primus,'
said the cat with a hostile scowl, ' and I'd better warn you that a cat is
an ancient and inviolable animal.'
'Brilliant performance,' whispered a man and another said loudly and
firmly:
'All right, you inviolable ventriloquist's dummy, come here! '
The net whistled across the room but the man missed his target and only
caught the crystal jug, which broke with a loud crash.
'Missed!' howled the cat. ' Hurrah! ' Putting aside the Primus the cat
whipped a Browning automatic from behind its back. In a flash it took aim at
the nearest man, but the detective beat the cat to the draw and fired first.
The cat flopped head first from the mantelpiece, dropping the Browning and
upsetting the Primus.
'It's all over,' said the cat in a weak voice, stretched out in a pool
of blood. ' Leave me for a moment, let me say goodbye. Oh my friend
Azazello,' groaned the cat, streaming blood, ' where are you? ' The animal
turned its expiring gaze towards the door into the dining-room. ' You didn't
come to my help when I was outnumbered . . . you left poor Behemoth,
betraying him for a glass of brandy--though it was very good brandy! Well,
my death will be on your conscience but I'll bequeath you my Browning . . .'
'The net, the net,' whispered the men urgently round the cat. But the
net somehow got tangled up in the man's pocket and would not come out.
'The only thing that can save a mortally wounded cat,' said Behemoth,
' is a drink of paraffin.' Taking advantage of the confusion it put its
mouth to the round filler-hole of the Primus and drank some paraffin. At
once the blood stopped pouring from above its left forepaw. The cat jumped
up bold and full of life, tucked the Primus under its foreleg, leaped back
with it on to the mantelpiece and from there, tearing the wallpaper, crawled
along the wall and in two seconds it was high above the invaders, sitting on
a metal pelmet.
In a moment hands were grabbing the curtains and pulling them down
together with the pelmet, bringing the sunlight flooding into the darkened
room. But neither the cat nor the Primus fell. Without dropping the Primus
the cat managed to leap through the air and jump on to the chandelier
hanging in the middle of the room.
'Step-ladder! ' came the cry from below. ' I challenge you to a duel!
' screamed the cat, sailing over their heads on the swinging chandelier. The
Browning appeared in its paw again and it lodged the Primus between the arms
of the chandelier. The cat took aim and, as it swung like a pendulum over
the detectives' heads, opened fire on them. The sound of gunfire rocked the
flat. Fragments of crystal strewed the floor, the mirror over the fireplace
was starred with bullet holes, plaster dust flew everywhere, ejected
cartridge cases pattered to the floor, window panes shattered and paraffin
began to spurt from the punctured tank of the Primus. There was now no
question of taking the cat alive and the men were aiming hard at its head,
stomach, breast and back. The sound of gunfire started panic in the
courtyard below.
But this fusillade did not last long and soon died down. It had not, in
fact, caused either the men or the cat any harm. There were no dead and no
wounded. No one, including the cat, had been hit. As a final test one man
fired five rounds into the beastly animal's stomach and the cat retaliated
with a whole volley that had the same result--not a scratch. As it swung on
the chandelier, whose motion was gradually shortening all the time, it blew
into the muzzle of the Browning and spat on its paw.
The faces of the silent men below showed total bewilderment. This was
the only case, or one of the only cases, in which gunfire had proved to be
completely ineffectual. Of course the cat's Browning might have been a toy,
but this was certainly not true of the detectives' Mausers. The cat's first
wound, which had undoubtedly occurred, had been nothing but a trick and a
villainous piece of deception, as was its paraffin-drinking act.
One more attempt was made to seize the cat. The lasso was thrown, it
looped itself round one of the candles and the whole chandelier crashed to
the floor. Its fall shook the whole building, but it did not help matters.
The men were showered with splinters while the cat flew through the air and
landed high up under the ceiling on the gilded frame of the mirror over the
mantelpiece. It made no attempt to bolt but from its relatively safe perch
announced:
'I completely fail to understand the reason for this rough treatment .
. .'
Here the cat's speech was interrupted by a low rumbling voice that
seemed to come from nowhere :
'What's happening in this flat? It's disturbing my work . . .'
Another voice, ugly and nasal, cried :
'It's Behemoth, of course, damn him!'
A third, quavering voice said :
'Messire! Saturday. The sun is setting. We must go.'
'Excuse me, I've no more time to spare talking,' said the cat from the
mirror. ' We must go.' It threw away its Browning, smashing two window
panes, then poured the paraffin on to the floor where it burst spontaneously
into a great flame as high as the ceiling.
It burned fast and hard, with even more violence than is usual with
paraffin. At once the wallpaper started to smoke, the torn curtain caught
alight and the frames of the broken windowpanes began to smoulder. The cat
crouched, gave a miaow, jumped from the mirror to the windowsill and
disappeared, clutching the Primus. Shots were heard from outside. A man
sitting on an iron fire-escape on the level of No. 50's windows fired at the
cat as it sprang from windowsill to windowsill heading for the drainpipe on
the corner of the building. The cat scrambled up the drainpipe to the roof.
There it came under equally ineffective fire from the men covering the
chimney-pots and the cat faded into the westering sunlight that flooded the
city.
Inside the flat the parquet was already crackling under the men's feet
and in the fireplace, where the cat had shammed dead, there gradually
materialised the corpse of Baron Maigel, his little beard jutting upwards,
his eyes glassy. The body was impossible to move.
Hopping across the burning blocks of parquet, beating out their
smouldering clothes, the men in the drawing-room retreated to the study and
the hall. The men who had been in the dining-room and the bedroom ran out
into the passage. The drawing-room was already full of smoke and fire.
Someone managed to dial the fire brigade and barked into the receiver :
'Sadovaya, 302a! '
They could stay no longer. Flame was lashing into the hallway and it
was becoming difficult to breathe.
As soon as the first wisps of smoke appeared through the shattered
windows of the haunted flat, desperate cries were heard from the courtyard :
'Fire! Fire! Help! We're on fire!'
In several flats people were shouting into the telephone :
'Sadovaya! Sadovaya, 302a! '
Just as the heart-stopping sound of bells was heard from the long red
fire-engines racing towards Sadovaya Street from all over the city, the
crowd in the courtyard saw three dark figures, apparently men, and one naked
woman, float out of the smoking windows on the fifth floor.
No one, of course, can say for certain whether those figures were real
or merely imagined by the frightened inhabitants of that ill-fated block on
Sadovaya Street. If they were real, no one knows exactly where they were
going; but we do know that about a quarter of an hour after the outbreak of
fire on Sadovaya Street, a tall man in a check suit and a large black cat
appeared outside the glass doors of the Torgsin Store in Smolensk Market.
Slipping dexterously between the passers-by, the man opened the outer
door of the store only to be met by a small, bony and extremely hostile
porter who barred his way and said disagreeably :
'No cats allowed!'
'I beg your pardon,' quavered the tall man, cupping his knotty hand to
his ear as though hard of hearing,' no cats, did you say? What cats?'
The porter's eyes bulged, and with reason: there was no cat by the
man's side, but instead a large fat man in a tattered cap, with vaguely
feline looks and holding a Primus, was pushing his way into the shop.
For some reason the misanthropic porter did not care for the look of
this couple.
'You can only buy with foreign currency here,' he croaked, glaring at
them from beneath ragged, moth-eaten eyebrows.
'My dear fellow,' warbled the tall man, one eye glinting through his
broken pince-nez,' how do you know that I haven't got any? Are you judging
by my suit? Never do that, my good man. You may make a terrible mistake.
Read the story of the famous caliph Haroun-al-Rashid and you'll see what I
mean. But for the present, leaving history aside for a moment, I warn you I
shall complain to the manager and I shall tell him such tales about you that
you'll wish you had never opened your mouth!'
'This Primus of mine may be full of foreign currency for all you
know,' said the stout cat-like figure. An angry crowd was forming behind
them. With a look of hatred and suspicion at the dubious pair, the porter
stepped aside and our friends Koroviev and Behemoth found themselves in the
store. First they looked around and then Koroviev announced in a penetrating
voice, audible everywhere :
'What a splendid store! A very, very good. store indeed! '
The customers turned round from the counters to stare at Koroviev in
amazement, although there was every reason to praise the store. Hundreds of
different bolts of richly coloured poplins stood in holders on the floor,
whilst behind them the shelves were piled with calico, chiffon amd worsted.
Racks full of shoes stretched into the distance where several women were
sitting on low chairs, a worn old shoe on their right foot, a gleaming new
one on their left. From somewhere out of sight came the sound of song and
gramophone music.
Spurning all these delights Koroviev and Behemoth went straight to the
delicatessen and confectionery departments. These were spaciously laid out
and full of women in headscarves and berets. A short, completely square,
blue-jowled little man wearing horn-rims, a pristine hat with unstained
ribbon, dressed in a fawn overcoat and tan kid gloves, was standing at a
counter and booming away in an authoritative voice at: an assistant in a
clean white overall and blue cap. With a long sharp knife, very like the
knife Matthew the Levite stole, he was easing the snake-like skin away from
the fat, juicy flesh of a pink salmon.
'This department is excellent, too,' Koroviev solemnly pronounced '
and that foreigner looks a nice man.' He pointed approvingly at the fawn
coat.
'No, Faggot, no' answered Behemoth thoughtfully. ' You're
wrong. I think there is something missing in that gentleman's face.'
The fawn back quivered, but it was probably coincidence, because he was
after all a foreigner and could not have understood what Koroviev and his
companion had been saying in Russian.
'Is goot? ' enquired the fawn customer in a stern voice.
'First class! ' replied the assistant, showing off his blade-work with
a flourish that lifted a whole side of skin from the salmon.
'Is goot--I like, is bad--I not like,' added the foreigner.
'But of course! ' rejoined the salesman.
At this point our friends left the foreigner to his salmon and moved
over to the cakes and pastries.
'Hot today,' said Koroviev to a pretty, red-cheeked young salesgirl,
to which he got no reply.
'How much are the tangerines? ' Koroviev then asked her.
'Thirty kopeks the kilo,' replied the salesgirl.
'They look delicious,' said Koroviev with a sigh, ' Oh, dear ' . . .
He thought for a while longer, then turned to his friend. ' Try one.
Behemoth.'
The stout cat-person tucked his Primus under his arm, took the
uppermost tangerine off the pyramid, ate it whole, skin and all, and took
another.
The salesgirl was appalled.
'Hey--are you crazy? ' she screamed, the colour vanishing from her
cheeks. ' Where are your travellers' cheques or foreign currency? ' She
threw down her pastry-tongs.
'My dear, sweet girl,' cooed Koroviev, leaning right across the
counter and winking at the assistant,' I can't help it but we're just out of
currency today. I promise you I'll pay you it all cash down next time,
definitely not later than Monday! We live nearby on Sadovaya, where the
house caught fire . . .'
Having demolished a third tangerine. Behemoth thrust his paw into an
ingenious structure built of chocolate bars, pulled out the bottom one,
which brought the whole thing down with a crash, and swallowed the chocolate
complete with its gold wrapper.
The assistant at the fish counter stood petrified, knife in hand, the
fawn-coated foreigner turned round towards the looters, revealing that
Behemoth was wrong: far from his face lacking something it was if anything
over-endowed--huge pendulous cheeks and bright, shifty eyes.
The salesgirl, now pale yellow, wailed miserably.
'Palosich! Palosich!'
The sound brought customers running from the drapery department.
Meanwhile Behemoth had wandered away from the temptations of the
confectionery counter and thrust his paw into a barrel labelled ' Selected
Kerch Salted Herrings,' pulled out a couple of herrings, gulped them both
down and spat out the tails.
'Palosich! ' came another despairing shriek from the confectionery
counter and the man at the fish counter, his goatee wagging in fury, barked
:
'Hey, you--what d'you think you're doing!'
Pavel Yosifovich (reduced to ' Palosich' in the excitement) was already
hurrying to the scene of action. He was an imposing man in a clean white
floor beside it.
'Why didn't you sit in the chair? ' asked Pilate.
'I'm dirty, I would make it dirty too,' said the Levite staring at the
floor.
'You will be given something to eat shortly.'
'I don't want to eat.'
'Why tell lies? ' Pilate asked quietly. ' You haven't eaten all day
and probably longer. All right, don't eat. I called you here to show me your
knife.'
'The soldiers took it away from me when they brought me here,' replied
the Levite and added dismally: ' You must give it back to me, because I have
to return it to its owner. I stole it.'
Why?'
'To cut the ropes.'
'Mark!' shouted the Procurator and the centurion stepped into the
arcade. ' Give me his knife.'
The centurion pulled a dirty breadknife out of one of the two leather
sheaths on his belt, handed it to the Procurator and withdrew.
'Where did you steal the knife? '
'In a baker's shop just inside the Hcbron gate, on the left.'
Pilate inspected the wide blade and tested the edge with his finger.
Then he said :
'Don't worry about the knife, it will be returned to the shop. Now I
want something else--show me the parchment you carry with you on which you
have written what Yeshua has said.'
The Levite looked at Pilate with hatred and smiled a smile of such
ill-will that his face was completely distorted.
'Are you going to take it away from me? The last thing I possess? '
'I didn't say " give it ",' answered Pilate. ' I said " show it to
me".'
The Levite fumbled in his shirt-front and pulled out a roll of
parchment. Pilate took it, unrolled it, spread it out in the light of two
candles and with a frown began to study the barely decipherable script. The
uneven strokes were hard to understand and Pilate frowned and bent over the
parchment, tracing the lines with his finger. He nevertheless managed to
discern that the writings were a disjointed sequence of sayings, dates,
household notes and snatches of poetry. Pilate managed to read:
'there is no death . . . yesterday we ate sweet cakes . . .'
Grimacing with strain, Pilate squinted and read: '... we shall see a
pure river of the water of life . . . mankind will look at the sun through
transparent crystal. . .'
Pilate shuddered. In the last few lines of the parchment he deciphered
the words: '. . . greatest sin ... cowardice . . .'
Pilate rolled up the parchment and with a brusque movement handed it
back to the Levite.
'There, take it,' he said, and after a short silence he added:
'I see you are a man of learning and there is no need for you, living
alone, to walk around in such wretched clothes and without a home. I have a
large library at Caesarea, I am very rich and I would like you to come and
work for me. You would catalogue and look after the papyruses, you would be
fed and clothed.'
The Levite stood up and replied :
'No, I don't want to.'
'Why not? ' asked the Procurator, his expression darkening. ' You
don't like me ...are you afraid of me? '
The same evil smile twisted Matthew's face and he said :
'No, because you would be afraid of me. You would not find it very
easy to look me in the face after having killed him.'
'Silence,' Pilate cut him off. ' Take this money.'
The Levite shook his head and the Procurator went on :
'You, I know, consider yourself a disciple of Yeshua, but I tell you
that you have acquired nothing of what he taught you. For if you had, you
would have certainly accepted something from me. Remember--before he died he
said that he blamed no one--' Pilate raised his finger significantly and his
face twitched --' and I know that he would have accepted something. You are
hard. He was not a hard man. Where will you go? '
Matthew suddenly walked over to Pilate's table, leaned on it with both
hands and staring at the Procurator with burning eyes he whispered to him :
'Know, hegemon, that there is one man in Jerusalem whom I shall kill.
I want to tell you this so that you are warned-- there will be more blood.'
'I know that there will be more blood,' answered Pilate. ' What you
have said does not surprise me. You want to murder me,I suppose?'
'I shall not be able to murder you,' replied the Levite, baring his
teeth in a smile. ' I am not so stupid as to count on that. But I shall kill
Judas of Karioth if it takes the rest of my life.'
At this the Procurator's eyes gleamed with pleasure. Beckoning Matthew
the Levite closer he said :
'You will not succeed, but it will not be necessary. Judas was
murdered tonight.'
The Levite jumped back from the table, stared wildly round and cried:
'Who did it? '
Pilate a.nswered him :
I did it.
'You must not be jealous,' said Pilate, baring his teeth mirthlessly
and rubbing his hands, ' but I'm afraid he had other admirers Ibeside
yourself.'
'Who did it? ' repeated the Levite in a whisper.
Matthew opened his mouth and stared at the Procurator, who said
quietly:
'It is mot much, but I did it.' And he added : ' Now will you accept
something? '
The Levite thought for a moment, relented and finally said :
'Order them to give me a clean piece of parchment.'
An hour had passed since the Levite had left the palace. The dawn
silence was only disturbed by the quiet tread of the sentries in the garden.
The moon was fading and on the other edge of heaven there appeared the
whitish speck of the morning star. The candles had long been put out. The
Procurator lay on his couch. He was sleeping with his hand under his cheek
and breathing noiselessly. Beside him slept Banga.
Thus Pontius Pilate, fifth Procurator of Judaea, met the dawn of the
fifteenth of Nisan.
Day was breaking as Margarita read the last words of the chapter '. . .
Thus Pontius Pilate, fifth Procurator of Judaea, met the dawn of the
fifteenth of Nisan.'
From the yard she could hear the lively, cheerful early morning chatter
of sparrows in the branches of the willow and the lime tree.
Margarita got up from her chair, stretched and only then realised how
physically exhausted she felt and how much she wanted to sleep. Mentally,
though, Margarita was in perfect form. Her mind was clear and she was
completely unmoved by the fact that she had spent a night in the
supernatural. It caused her no distress to think that she had been at
Satan's ball, that by some miracle the master had been restored to her, that
the novel had risen from the ashes, that everything was back in its place in
the basement flat after the expulsion of the wretched Aloysius Mogarych. In
a word, her encounter with Woland had done her no psychological harm.
Everything was as it should be.
She went into the next room, made sure that the master was sound
asleep, put out the unnecessary light on the bedside table and stretched out
on the other little divan, covering herself with an old, torn blanket. A
minute later she was in a dreamless sleep. Silence reigned in the basement
rooms and in the whole house, silence filled the little street.
But on that early Saturday morning there was no sleep for a whole floor
of a certain Moscow office which was busy investigating the Woland case ; in
nine offices the lamps had been burning all night. Their windows, looking
out on to a large asphalted square which was being cleaned by slow, whirring
vehicles with revolving brushes, competed with the rising sun in brightness.
Although the outlines of the case had been quite clear since the day
before, when they had closed the Variety as a result of the disappearance of
its management and the scandalous performance of black magic, everything was
complicated by the incessant flow of new evidence.
The department in charge of this strange case now had the task of
drawing together all the strands of the varied and confusing events,
occurring all over Moscow, which included an apparent mixture of sheer
devilry, hypnotic conjuring tricks and barefaced crime.
The first person summoned to the glaring electric light of that
unsleeping floor was Arkady Apollonich Sempleyarov, the chairman of the
Acoustics Commission.
On Friday evening after dinner, the telephone rang in his flat on
Kamenny Most and a man's voice asked to speak to Arkady Apollonich. His
wife, who had answered the call, announced grimly that Arkady Apollonich was
unwell, had gone to lie down and could not come to the telephone.
Nevertheless Arkady Apollonich was obliged to come when the voice said who
was calling.
'Of course ... at once . . . right away,' stammered Arkady's usually
arrogant spouse and she flew like an arrow to rouse Arkady Appollonich from
the couch where he had lain down to recover from the horrific scenes caused
by the theatre incident and the stormy expulsion from their flat of his
young cousin from Saratov. In a quarter of a minute, in underclothes and one
slipper, Arkady Apollonich was babbling into the telephone :
'Yes, it's me. Yes, I will. . .'
His wife, all thought of Arkady Apollonich's infidelity instantly
forgotten, put her terrified face round the door, waving a slipper in the
air and whispering :
'Put your other slipper on ... you'll catch cold . . .' At this Arkady
Apollonich, waving his wife away with a bare leg and rolling his eyes at
her, muttered into the receiver :
'Yes, yes, yes, of course ... I understand . . . I'll come at once . .
.'
Arkady Apollonich spent the rest of the evening with the investigators.
The ensuing conversation was painful and unpleasant in the extreme ; he
was not only made to give a completely frank account of that odious show and
the fight in the box, but was obliged to tell everything about Militsa
Andreyevna Pokobatko from Yelokhovskaya Street, as well as all about his
cousin from Saratov and much more besides, the telling of which caused
Arkady Apollonich inexpressible pain.
Naturally the evidence given by Arkady Apollonich--an intelligent and
cultured man who had been an eyewitness of the show and who as an articulate
and informed observer was not only able to give an excellent description of
the mysterious masked magician and his two rascally assistants but who
actually remembered that the magician's name was Woland--helped considerably
to advance the enquiry. When Arkady Apollonich's evidence was compared with
the evidence of the others, among them several of the ladies who had
suffered such embarrassment after the show (including the woman in violet
knickers who had so shocked Rimsky) and Karpov the usher who had been sent
to Flat No. 50 at 302a, Sadovaya Street--it became immediately obvious where
the culprit was to be found.
They went to No. 50 more than once and not only searched it with
extreme thoroughness but tapped on the walls, examined the chimney-flues and
looked for secret doors. None of this, however, produced any results and
nothing was found during the visits to the flat. Yet someone was living in
the flat, despite the fact that every official body in Moscow concerned with
visiting foreigners stated firmly and categorically that there was not and
could not be a magician called Woland in Moscow. He had definitely not
registered on entry, he had shown no one his passport or any other
documents, contracts or agreements and no one had so much as heard of him.
Kitaitsev, the director of the programmes department of the Theatrical
Commission, swore by all the saints that the missing Stepa Likhodeyev had
never sent him a programme schedule for anyone called Woland for
confirmation and had never telephoned Kitaitsev a word about Woland's
arrival. Therefore he, Kitaitsev, failed completely to understand how Stepa
could have allowed a show of this sort to be put on at the Variety. When he
was told that Arkady Apollonich had seen the performance with his own eyes,
Kitaitsev could only spread his hands and raise his eyes to heaven. From
those eyes alone it was obvious that Kitaitsev was as pure as crystal.
Prokhor Petrovich, the chairman of the Entertainments Commission . . .
He, incidentally, had re-entered his suit as soon as the police reached
his office, to the ecstatic joy of Anna Richardovna and to the great
annoyance of the police, who had been alerted for nothing. As soon as he was
back at his post and wearing his striped grey suit, Prokhor Petrovich fully
approved all the minutes that his suit had drafted during his short absence.
So Prokhor Petrovich obviously knew nothing about Woland either.
The sum total of their enquiries amounted to a conclusion which was
little short of farcical: thousands of spectators, plus the Variety Theatre
staff plus, finally, Arkady Apollonich, that highly intelligent man, had
seen this magician and his thrice-cursed assistants, yet in the meantime all
four had completely vanished. What could it mean? Had Woland been swallowed
up by the earth or had he, as some claimed, never come to Moscow at all? If
one accepted the first alternative, then he had apparently spirited away the
entire Variety management with him; if you believed the second alternative,
it meant that the theatre management itself, having first indulged in a
minor orgy of destruction had decamped from Moscow leaving no trace.
The officer in charge of the case was, to give him his due, a man who
knew his job. Rimsky, for instance, was tracked down with astounding speed.
Merely by linking the Ace of Diamonds' behaviour at the taxi-rank near the
cinema with certain timings, such as the time of the end of the show and the
time at which Rimsky could have vanished, they were able to send an
immediate telegram to Leningrad. An hour later (on Friday evening) the reply
came back that Rimsky had been found in room 412 at the Astoria Hotel, on
the fourth floor next to the room containing the repertory manager of one of
the Moscow theatres then on tour in Leningrad, in that famous room with the
blue-grey furniture and the luxurious bathroom.
Rimsky, found hiding in the wardrobe of his room at the Astoria, was
immediately arrested and interrogated in Leningrad, after which a telegram
reached Moscow stating that treasurer Rimsky was an irresponsible witness
who had proved unwilling or incapable of replying coherently to questions
and had done nothing but beg to be put into an armourplated strong-room
under armed guard. An order was telegraphed to Leningrad for Rimsky to be
escorted back to Moscow, and he returned under guard by the Friday evening
train.
By Friday evening, too, they were on the track of Likhodeyev. Telegrams
asking for information on Likhodeyev had been sent to every town and a reply
came from Yalta that Likhodeyev was there but about to leave for Moscow by
aeroplane.
The only person whose trail they failed to pick up was Varenukha. This
man, known to the entire theatrical world of Moscow, seemed to have vanished
without trace.
Meanwhile investigations were in hand on related incidents in other
parts of Moscow. An explanation was needed, for instance, of the baffling
case of the office staff who had sung the ' Volga Boatmen ' song
(Stravinsky, incidentally, cured them all within two hours by subcutaneous
injections) and of other cases of people (and their victims) who had
proffered various pieces of rubbish under the illusion that they were
banknotes. The nastiest, the most scandalous and the most insoluble of all
these episodes was, of course, the theft, in broad daylight, of Berlioz's
head from the open coffin at Griboyedov.
The job of the team of twelve men assigned to the case was rather like
that of someone with a knitting-needle trying to pick up stitches dropped
all over Moscow.
One of the detectives called on Profes sor Stravinsky's clinic and
began by asking for a list of all patients admitted during the past three
days. By this means they discovered Nikanor Ivano-vich Bosoi and the
unfortunate compere whose head had been wrenched off, although they were not
greatly interested in these two. It was obvious now that they had both
merely been victimised by the gang headed by this weird magician. In Ivan
Nikolayich Bezdomny, however, the detective showed the very greatest
interest.
Early on Friday evening the door of Ivan's room opened to admit a
polite, fresh-faced young man- He looked quite unlike a detective, yet he
was one of the best in the Moscow force. He saw lying in bed a pale,
pinched-looking young man with lack-lustre, wandering eyes. The detective, a
man of considerable charm and tact, said that he had come to see Ivan for a
talk about the incident at Patriarch's Ponds two days previously.
The poet would have been triumphant if the detective had called
earlier, on Thursday for instance when Ivan had been trying so loudly and
passionately to induce someone to listen to his story about Patriarch's
Ponds. Now people were at last coming to hear his version of the
affair--just when his urge to help capture Professor Woland had completely
evaporated.
For Ivan, alas, had altogether changed since the night of Berlioz's
death. He was quite prepared to answer the detective's questions politely,
but his voice and his expression betrayed his utter disinterest. The poet no
longer cared about Berlioz's fate.
While Ivan had been dozing before the detective's arrival, a succession
of images had passed before his mind's eye. He saw a strange, unreal,
vanished city with great arcaded marble piles ;
with roofs that flashed in the sunlight; with the grim, black and
pitiless tower of Antonia ; with a palace on the western hill plunged almost
to roof-level in a garden of tropical greenery, and above the garden bronze
statues that glowed in the setting sun ; with Roman legionaries clad in
armour marching beneath the city walls.
In his half-waking dream Ivan saw a man sitting motionless in a chair,
a clean-shaven man with taut, yellowing skin who wore a white cloak lined
with red, who sat and stared with loathing at this alien, luxuriant garden.
Ivan saw, too, a treeless ochre-coloured hill with three empty cross-barred
gibbets.
The events at Patriarch's Ponds no longer interested Ivan Bezdomny the
poet.
'Tell me, Ivan Nikolayich, how far were you from the turnstile when
Berlioz fell under the tram? '
A barely detectable smile of irony crossed Ivan's Ups as he replied:
'I was far away.'
'And was the man in checks standing beside the turnstile? '
'No, he was on a bench nearby.'
'You distinctly remember, do you, that he did not approach the
turnstile at the moment when Berlioz fell? '
'I do remember. He didn't move. He was on the bench and he stayed
there.'
These were the detective's last questions. He got up, shook hands with
Ivan, wished him a speedy recovery and said that he soon hoped to read some
new poetry of his.
'No,' said Ivan quietly. ' I shall not write any more poetry.'
The detective smiled politely and assured the poet that although he
might be in a slight state of depression at the moment, it would soon pass.
'No,' said Ivan, staring not at the detective but at the distant
twilit horizon, ' it will never pass. The poetry I wrote was bad p.oetry. I
see that now.'
The detective left Ivan, having gathered some extremely important
evidence. Following the thread of events backwards from end to beginning,
they could now pinpoint the source of the whole episode. The detective had
no doubt that the events in question had all begun with the murder at
Patriarch's Ponds. Neither Ivan, of course, nor the man in the check suit
had pushed the unfortunate chairman of massolit under the tramcar;
n"o one had physically caused him to fall under the wheels, but the
detective was convinced that Berlioz had thrown himself (or had fallen)
beneath the tram while under hypnosis.
Although there was plenty of evidence and it was obvious whom they
should arrest and where, it proved impossible to lay hands on them. There
was no doubt that someone was in flat Nib. 50. Occasionally the telephone
was answered by a quavering or a nasal voice, occasionally someone in the
flat opened a window and the sound of a gramophone could be heard floating
out. Yet whenever they went there the place was completely empty. They
searched it at various hours of the day, each time going over it with a
fine-tooth comb. The flat had been under suspicion for some time and a watch
had been placed on both the main stairs and the back stairs ; men were even
posted on the roof among the chimney pots. The flat was playing tricks and
there was nothing that anyone could do about it.
The case dragged on in this way until midnight on Friday, wlien Baron
Maigel, wearing evening dress and patent-leather pumps, entered flat No. 50
as a guest. He was heard being let in. Exactly ten minutes later the
authorities entered the flat without a sound. It was not only empty of
tenants, but worse, there was not even a trace of Baron Maigel.
There things rested until dawn on Saturday, when some new anid valuable
information came to light as a six-seater passenger aeroplane landed at
Moscow airport having flown from the Crimea. Among its passengers was one
extremely odd young man. He had heavy stubble on his face, had not washed
for three days, his eyes were red with exhaustion and fright, he had no
luggage and was somewhat eccentrically dressed. He wore a sheepskin hat, a
felt cloak over a nightshirt and brand-new blue leather bedroom slippers. As
he stepped off the gangway from the aircraft cabin, a group of expectant men
approached him. A short while later the one and only manager of the Variety
Theatre, Stepan Bogdanovich Likhodeyev, was facing the detectives. He added
some new information. They were now able to establish that Woland had
tricked his way into the Variety after hypnotising Stepa Likhodeyev and had
then spirited Stepa God knows how many kilometres away from Moscow. This
gave the authorities more evidence, but far from making their job any easier
it made it if anything rather harder, because it was obviously not going to
be so simple to arrest a person capable of the kind of sleight-of-hand to
which Stepan Bogdanovich had fallen victim. Likhodeyev, at his own request,
was locked up in a strong-room.
The next witness was Varenukha, arrested at home where he had returned
after an unexplained absence lasting nearly forty-eight hours. In spite of
his promise to Azazello, the house manager began by lying. He should not,
however, be judged too harshly for this--Azazello had, after all, only
forbidden him to lie on the telephone and in this instance Varenukha was
talking without the help of a telephone. With a shifty look Ivan Savye-lich
announced that on Thursday he had shut himself up in his office and had got
drunk, after which he had gone somewhere-- he couldn't remember where; then
somewhere else and drunk some loo-proof vodka ; had collapsed under a
hedge--again he couldn't remember where. He was then told that his stupid
and irrational behaviour was prejudicial to the course of justice and that
he would be held responsible for it. At this Varenukha broke down, sobbing,
and whispered in a trembling voice, glancing round fearfully, that he was
only telling lies out of fear of Woland's gang, who had already roughed him
up once and that he begged, prayed, longed to be locked up in an armoured
cell.
'There soon won't be room for them all in that strong-room! ' growled
one of the investigators.
'These villains have certainly put the fear of God into them,' said
the detective who had questioned Ivan.
They calmed Varenukha as well as they could, assuring him that he would
be given protection without having to resort to a strong-room. He then
admitted that he had never drunk any loo-proof vodka but had been beaten up
by two characters, one with a wall eye and the other a stout man . . .
'Looking like a cat? '
'Yes, yes,' whispered Varenukha, almost swooning with fear and
glancing round every moment, adding further details of how he had spent
nearly two days in flat No. 50 as a vampire's decoy and had nearly caused
Rimsky's death . . .
Just then Rimsky himself was brought in from the Leningrad train, but
this grey-haired, terror-stricken, psychologically disturbed old man,
scarcely recognisable as the treasurer of the Variety Theatre, stubbornly
refused to speak the truth. Rimsky claimed that he had never seen Hella at
his office window that night, nor had he seen Varenukha; he had simply felt
ill and had taken the train to Leningrad in a fit of amnesia. Needless to
say the ailing treasurer concluded his evidence by begging to be locked up
in a strong-room.
Anna was arrested while trying to pay a store cashier with a ten-dollar
bill. Her story about people flying out of the landing window and the
horseshoe, which she claimed to have picked up in order to hand it over to
the police, was listened to attentively.
'Was the horseshoe really gold and studded with diamonds? ' they asked
Anna.
'Think I don't know diamonds when I see them? ' replied Anna.
'And did he really give you ten-rouble notes? '
'Think I don't know a tenner when I see one? '
'When did they turn into dollars? '
'I don't know what dollars are and I never saw any! ' whined Anna. ' I
know my rights! I was given the money as a reward and went to buy some
material with it.' Then she started raving about the whole thing being the
fault of the house management committee which had allowed evil forces to
move in on the fifth floor and made life impossible for everybody else.
Mere a detective waved a pen at Anna to shut up because she was boring
them, and signed her release on a green form with which, to the general
satisfaction, she left the building.
There followed a succession of others, among them Nikolai Ivanovich,
who had been arrested thanks to the stupidity of his jealous wife in telling
the police that her husband was missing. The detectives were not
particularly surprised when Nikolai Ivanovich produced the joke certificate
testifying that he had spent his time at Satan's ball. Nikolai Ivanovich
departed slightly from the truth, however, when he described how he had
carried Margarita Nikolayevna's naked maid through the air to bathe in the
river at some unknown spot and how Margarita Nikolay-evna herself had
appeared naked at the window. He thought it unnecessary to recall, for
instance, that he had appeared in the bedroom carrying Margarita's abandoned
slip or that he had called Natasha ' Venus.' According to him, Natasha had
flown out of the window, mounted him and made him fly away from Moscow . . .
'I was forced to obey under duress,' said Nikolai Ivanovich, finishing
his tale with a request not to tell a word of it to his wife, which was
granted.
Nikolai Ivanovich's evidence established the fact that both Margarita
Nikolayevna and her maid Natasha had vanished without trace. Steps were
taken to find them.
So the investigation progressed without a moment's break until Saturday
morning. Meanwhile the city was seething with the most incredible rumours,
in which a tiny grain of truth was embellished with a luxuriant growth of
fantasy. People were saying that after the show at the Variety all two
thousand spectators had rushed out into the street as naked as the day they
were born ; that the police had uncovered a magic printing-press for
counterfeiting money on Sadovaya Street; that a gang had kidnapped the five
leading impresarios in Moscow but that the police had found them all again,
and much more that was unrepeatable.
As it grew near lunchtime a telephone bell rang in the investigators'
office. It was a report from Sadovaya Street that the haunted flat was
showing signs of life again. Someone inside had apparently opened the
windows, sounds of piano music and singing had been heard coming from it,
and a black cat had been observed sunning itself on a windowsill.
At about four o'clock on that warm afternoon a large squad of men in
plain clothes climbed out of three cars that had stopped a little way short
of No. 302a, Sadovaya Street. Here the large squad divided into two smaller
ones, one of which entered the courtyard through the main gateway and headed
straight for staircase 6, while the other opened a small door, normally
locked, leading to the back staircase and both began converging on flat No.
50 by different stairways.
While this was going on Koroviev and Azazello, in their normal clothes
instead of festive tailcoats, were sitting in the dining-room finishing
their lunch. Woland, as was his habit, was in the bedroom and no one knew
where the cat was, but to judge from the clatter of saucepans coming from
the kitchen Behemoth was presumably there, playing the fool as usual.
'What are those footsteps on the staircase? ' asked Koroviev, twirling
his spoon in a cup of black coffee.
'They're coming to arrest us,' replied Azazello and drained a glass of
brandy.
'Well, well . . .' was Koroviev's answer.
The men coming up the front staircase had by then reached the
third-floor landing, where a couple of plumbers were fiddling with the
radiator. The party exchanged meaning looks with the plumbers.
'They're all at home,' whispered one of the plumbers, tapping the pipe
with his hammer.
At this the leader of the squad drew a black Mauser from under his
overcoat and the man beside him produced, a skeleton key. All the men were
suitably armed. Two of them had thin, easily unfurled silk nets in their
pockets, another had. a lasso and the sixth man was equipped with gauze
masks and an ampoule of chloroform.
In a second the front door of No. 50 swung open and the party was in
the hall, whilst the knocking on the door from the kitchen to the back
staircase showed that the second squad had also arrived on time.
This time at least partial success seemed to be in their grasp. Men at
once fanned out to all the rooms and found no one, but on the dining-room
table were the remains of an obviously recently finished meal and in the
drawing-room, alongside a crystal jug, a huge black cat was perched on the
mantelpiece, holding a Primus in its front paws.
There was a long pause as the men gazed at the cat.
'H'm, yes ... that's him . . .' whispered one 'of them.
'I'm doing no harm--I'm not playing games, I'm mending the Primus,'
said the cat with a hostile scowl, ' and I'd better warn you that a cat is
an ancient and inviolable animal.'
'Brilliant performance,' whispered a man and another said loudly and
firmly:
'All right, you inviolable ventriloquist's dummy, come here! '
The net whistled across the room but the man missed his target and only
caught the crystal jug, which broke with a loud crash.
'Missed!' howled the cat. ' Hurrah! ' Putting aside the Primus the cat
whipped a Browning automatic from behind its back. In a flash it took aim at
the nearest man, but the detective beat the cat to the draw and fired first.
The cat flopped head first from the mantelpiece, dropping the Browning and
upsetting the Primus.
'It's all over,' said the cat in a weak voice, stretched out in a pool
of blood. ' Leave me for a moment, let me say goodbye. Oh my friend
Azazello,' groaned the cat, streaming blood, ' where are you? ' The animal
turned its expiring gaze towards the door into the dining-room. ' You didn't
come to my help when I was outnumbered . . . you left poor Behemoth,
betraying him for a glass of brandy--though it was very good brandy! Well,
my death will be on your conscience but I'll bequeath you my Browning . . .'
'The net, the net,' whispered the men urgently round the cat. But the
net somehow got tangled up in the man's pocket and would not come out.
'The only thing that can save a mortally wounded cat,' said Behemoth,
' is a drink of paraffin.' Taking advantage of the confusion it put its
mouth to the round filler-hole of the Primus and drank some paraffin. At
once the blood stopped pouring from above its left forepaw. The cat jumped
up bold and full of life, tucked the Primus under its foreleg, leaped back
with it on to the mantelpiece and from there, tearing the wallpaper, crawled
along the wall and in two seconds it was high above the invaders, sitting on
a metal pelmet.
In a moment hands were grabbing the curtains and pulling them down
together with the pelmet, bringing the sunlight flooding into the darkened
room. But neither the cat nor the Primus fell. Without dropping the Primus
the cat managed to leap through the air and jump on to the chandelier
hanging in the middle of the room.
'Step-ladder! ' came the cry from below. ' I challenge you to a duel!
' screamed the cat, sailing over their heads on the swinging chandelier. The
Browning appeared in its paw again and it lodged the Primus between the arms
of the chandelier. The cat took aim and, as it swung like a pendulum over
the detectives' heads, opened fire on them. The sound of gunfire rocked the
flat. Fragments of crystal strewed the floor, the mirror over the fireplace
was starred with bullet holes, plaster dust flew everywhere, ejected
cartridge cases pattered to the floor, window panes shattered and paraffin
began to spurt from the punctured tank of the Primus. There was now no
question of taking the cat alive and the men were aiming hard at its head,
stomach, breast and back. The sound of gunfire started panic in the
courtyard below.
But this fusillade did not last long and soon died down. It had not, in
fact, caused either the men or the cat any harm. There were no dead and no
wounded. No one, including the cat, had been hit. As a final test one man
fired five rounds into the beastly animal's stomach and the cat retaliated
with a whole volley that had the same result--not a scratch. As it swung on
the chandelier, whose motion was gradually shortening all the time, it blew
into the muzzle of the Browning and spat on its paw.
The faces of the silent men below showed total bewilderment. This was
the only case, or one of the only cases, in which gunfire had proved to be
completely ineffectual. Of course the cat's Browning might have been a toy,
but this was certainly not true of the detectives' Mausers. The cat's first
wound, which had undoubtedly occurred, had been nothing but a trick and a
villainous piece of deception, as was its paraffin-drinking act.
One more attempt was made to seize the cat. The lasso was thrown, it
looped itself round one of the candles and the whole chandelier crashed to
the floor. Its fall shook the whole building, but it did not help matters.
The men were showered with splinters while the cat flew through the air and
landed high up under the ceiling on the gilded frame of the mirror over the
mantelpiece. It made no attempt to bolt but from its relatively safe perch
announced:
'I completely fail to understand the reason for this rough treatment .
. .'
Here the cat's speech was interrupted by a low rumbling voice that
seemed to come from nowhere :
'What's happening in this flat? It's disturbing my work . . .'
Another voice, ugly and nasal, cried :
'It's Behemoth, of course, damn him!'
A third, quavering voice said :
'Messire! Saturday. The sun is setting. We must go.'
'Excuse me, I've no more time to spare talking,' said the cat from the
mirror. ' We must go.' It threw away its Browning, smashing two window
panes, then poured the paraffin on to the floor where it burst spontaneously
into a great flame as high as the ceiling.
It burned fast and hard, with even more violence than is usual with
paraffin. At once the wallpaper started to smoke, the torn curtain caught
alight and the frames of the broken windowpanes began to smoulder. The cat
crouched, gave a miaow, jumped from the mirror to the windowsill and
disappeared, clutching the Primus. Shots were heard from outside. A man
sitting on an iron fire-escape on the level of No. 50's windows fired at the
cat as it sprang from windowsill to windowsill heading for the drainpipe on
the corner of the building. The cat scrambled up the drainpipe to the roof.
There it came under equally ineffective fire from the men covering the
chimney-pots and the cat faded into the westering sunlight that flooded the
city.
Inside the flat the parquet was already crackling under the men's feet
and in the fireplace, where the cat had shammed dead, there gradually
materialised the corpse of Baron Maigel, his little beard jutting upwards,
his eyes glassy. The body was impossible to move.
Hopping across the burning blocks of parquet, beating out their
smouldering clothes, the men in the drawing-room retreated to the study and
the hall. The men who had been in the dining-room and the bedroom ran out
into the passage. The drawing-room was already full of smoke and fire.
Someone managed to dial the fire brigade and barked into the receiver :
'Sadovaya, 302a! '
They could stay no longer. Flame was lashing into the hallway and it
was becoming difficult to breathe.
As soon as the first wisps of smoke appeared through the shattered
windows of the haunted flat, desperate cries were heard from the courtyard :
'Fire! Fire! Help! We're on fire!'
In several flats people were shouting into the telephone :
'Sadovaya! Sadovaya, 302a! '
Just as the heart-stopping sound of bells was heard from the long red
fire-engines racing towards Sadovaya Street from all over the city, the
crowd in the courtyard saw three dark figures, apparently men, and one naked
woman, float out of the smoking windows on the fifth floor.
No one, of course, can say for certain whether those figures were real
or merely imagined by the frightened inhabitants of that ill-fated block on
Sadovaya Street. If they were real, no one knows exactly where they were
going; but we do know that about a quarter of an hour after the outbreak of
fire on Sadovaya Street, a tall man in a check suit and a large black cat
appeared outside the glass doors of the Torgsin Store in Smolensk Market.
Slipping dexterously between the passers-by, the man opened the outer
door of the store only to be met by a small, bony and extremely hostile
porter who barred his way and said disagreeably :
'No cats allowed!'
'I beg your pardon,' quavered the tall man, cupping his knotty hand to
his ear as though hard of hearing,' no cats, did you say? What cats?'
The porter's eyes bulged, and with reason: there was no cat by the
man's side, but instead a large fat man in a tattered cap, with vaguely
feline looks and holding a Primus, was pushing his way into the shop.
For some reason the misanthropic porter did not care for the look of
this couple.
'You can only buy with foreign currency here,' he croaked, glaring at
them from beneath ragged, moth-eaten eyebrows.
'My dear fellow,' warbled the tall man, one eye glinting through his
broken pince-nez,' how do you know that I haven't got any? Are you judging
by my suit? Never do that, my good man. You may make a terrible mistake.
Read the story of the famous caliph Haroun-al-Rashid and you'll see what I
mean. But for the present, leaving history aside for a moment, I warn you I
shall complain to the manager and I shall tell him such tales about you that
you'll wish you had never opened your mouth!'
'This Primus of mine may be full of foreign currency for all you
know,' said the stout cat-like figure. An angry crowd was forming behind
them. With a look of hatred and suspicion at the dubious pair, the porter
stepped aside and our friends Koroviev and Behemoth found themselves in the
store. First they looked around and then Koroviev announced in a penetrating
voice, audible everywhere :
'What a splendid store! A very, very good. store indeed! '
The customers turned round from the counters to stare at Koroviev in
amazement, although there was every reason to praise the store. Hundreds of
different bolts of richly coloured poplins stood in holders on the floor,
whilst behind them the shelves were piled with calico, chiffon amd worsted.
Racks full of shoes stretched into the distance where several women were
sitting on low chairs, a worn old shoe on their right foot, a gleaming new
one on their left. From somewhere out of sight came the sound of song and
gramophone music.
Spurning all these delights Koroviev and Behemoth went straight to the
delicatessen and confectionery departments. These were spaciously laid out
and full of women in headscarves and berets. A short, completely square,
blue-jowled little man wearing horn-rims, a pristine hat with unstained
ribbon, dressed in a fawn overcoat and tan kid gloves, was standing at a
counter and booming away in an authoritative voice at: an assistant in a
clean white overall and blue cap. With a long sharp knife, very like the
knife Matthew the Levite stole, he was easing the snake-like skin away from
the fat, juicy flesh of a pink salmon.
'This department is excellent, too,' Koroviev solemnly pronounced '
and that foreigner looks a nice man.' He pointed approvingly at the fawn
coat.
'No, Faggot, no' answered Behemoth thoughtfully. ' You're
wrong. I think there is something missing in that gentleman's face.'
The fawn back quivered, but it was probably coincidence, because he was
after all a foreigner and could not have understood what Koroviev and his
companion had been saying in Russian.
'Is goot? ' enquired the fawn customer in a stern voice.
'First class! ' replied the assistant, showing off his blade-work with
a flourish that lifted a whole side of skin from the salmon.
'Is goot--I like, is bad--I not like,' added the foreigner.
'But of course! ' rejoined the salesman.
At this point our friends left the foreigner to his salmon and moved
over to the cakes and pastries.
'Hot today,' said Koroviev to a pretty, red-cheeked young salesgirl,
to which he got no reply.
'How much are the tangerines? ' Koroviev then asked her.
'Thirty kopeks the kilo,' replied the salesgirl.
'They look delicious,' said Koroviev with a sigh, ' Oh, dear ' . . .
He thought for a while longer, then turned to his friend. ' Try one.
Behemoth.'
The stout cat-person tucked his Primus under his arm, took the
uppermost tangerine off the pyramid, ate it whole, skin and all, and took
another.
The salesgirl was appalled.
'Hey--are you crazy? ' she screamed, the colour vanishing from her
cheeks. ' Where are your travellers' cheques or foreign currency? ' She
threw down her pastry-tongs.
'My dear, sweet girl,' cooed Koroviev, leaning right across the
counter and winking at the assistant,' I can't help it but we're just out of
currency today. I promise you I'll pay you it all cash down next time,
definitely not later than Monday! We live nearby on Sadovaya, where the
house caught fire . . .'
Having demolished a third tangerine. Behemoth thrust his paw into an
ingenious structure built of chocolate bars, pulled out the bottom one,
which brought the whole thing down with a crash, and swallowed the chocolate
complete with its gold wrapper.
The assistant at the fish counter stood petrified, knife in hand, the
fawn-coated foreigner turned round towards the looters, revealing that
Behemoth was wrong: far from his face lacking something it was if anything
over-endowed--huge pendulous cheeks and bright, shifty eyes.
The salesgirl, now pale yellow, wailed miserably.
'Palosich! Palosich!'
The sound brought customers running from the drapery department.
Meanwhile Behemoth had wandered away from the temptations of the
confectionery counter and thrust his paw into a barrel labelled ' Selected
Kerch Salted Herrings,' pulled out a couple of herrings, gulped them both
down and spat out the tails.
'Palosich! ' came another despairing shriek from the confectionery
counter and the man at the fish counter, his goatee wagging in fury, barked
:
'Hey, you--what d'you think you're doing!'
Pavel Yosifovich (reduced to ' Palosich' in the excitement) was already
hurrying to the scene of action. He was an imposing man in a clean white