reconnaissance plane brought down by Soviet airmen; pistols fitted with
silencers; walkie-talkies. There was also the equipment carried by an
Italian subversive agent who died in a Caspian port in 1942. His remains had
been accidentally discovered in an underground passage not long ago. The
agent had apparently belonged to the Society of Jesus, for around his neck
he wore a small flat box on which was engraved A M D G.
What was this? Nikolai leaned forward and fixed his eyes on the printed
lines.
AMDG. The initial letters of the Jesuit motto.
The leather coat said irritably: "I intensely dislike having someone
breathing down my neck, young man."
"I beg your pardon," Nikolai muttered in confusion. He hurried over to
the newsstand and bought a paper, which he began to read at once.
All of a sudden he felt someone staring fixedly at him. He glanced in
annoyance at the lady in black standing beside him, and then flung his head
back as though he had been hit on the jaw. The lady was Rita.
"Are-are you in Moscow?" he stammered.
"It's obvious I am, isn't it?"
"Yes. So am I. I'm on a business trip." Nikolai coughed and started
folding his paper.
"Are you returning home soon?"
"Yes, I'm getting a ticket for Wednesday. What about you?"
"I'm leaving tomorrow."
Nikolai thrust his paper into his pocket. Rita turned to the woman
behind the counter of the newsstand. "I'll take these picture postcards,"
she said.
She chose half a dozen cards with colour reproductions on them. Nikolai
glanced absently at them. One was a winter landscape, another Levi-tan's
"March", then a picture in the Bilibin style, of a ship with a taut,
wind-filled sail, bearing a drawing of the sun, approaching a landing stage
where bearded men in long robes stood beside cannon wreathed in clouds of
smoke.
Nikolai said the first thing that came into his head. "'Guns firing
from the wharf, ordering the ship to tie up.' I used to copy that picture
when I was a child."
Rita swung round to face him. "Did you ever give that drawing to
anyone?"
Nikolai caught his breath. He stared intently into that pleasant,
mobile, questioning face and suddenly saw long familiar features-a perky
freckled nose, a mischievous smile, and glossy yellow braids jutting out at
a belligerent angle
"Yellow Lynx?" he whispered.
What had Rita been doing in Moscow?
Her friend met her at the railway station on arrival and took her home.
That same day Rita went to a hospital in Pirogov Street and made an
appointment to see a famous neuropathologist. He listened attentively to her
story.
"Only a special course of treatment can help your husband," he told
her. "The cure takes time and patience-but it is the only way. You must
persuade your husband to undergo this course of treatment. I can arrange for
him to enter the hospital where a pupil of mine, Dr. Khalilov, is doing very
good work in this field. The sooner he does this, the better it will be for
him. I'll give you a letter to Dr. Khalilov."
Now Rita was more upset than ever. She was determined to leave for home
at once, before the end of the winter school vacation. However, her friend
persuaded her to spend at least a week in Moscow.
During that week Opratin came to see her three times.
It so happened that Rita and Opratin had travelled to Moscow on the
same train. They had discovered this when the train halted at Mineralniye
Vody and both had stepped out onto the platform for a breath of fresh air.
At Kharkov, Opratin had again approached her on the platform and chatted
with her for a few minutes. Rita had given him her friend's telephone
number, at which she could be reached in Moscow.
There was something threatening and alarming about Opratin's visits to
Rita in Moscow. His presence made her uncomfortable; she felt as though the
shadow of her husband were standing behind him.
Opratin talked to her in a gentle, friendly tone. He agreed with the
doctor, he said, that Anatole should undergo treatment. He himself would
help to arrange a leave of any duration for Anatole. Rita was not to worry;
there were no particularly alarming symptoms as yet. Anatole was cheerful
and enthusiastic about his work.
"That backbreaking, endless, senseless work of Anatole's is what has
estranged him from me," Rita thought.
"We're on the right track now," said Opratin. "But I want you to bear
in mind that it depends to a great extent on you how much longer the job
will take."
Opratin came to see her for the third time on a cold, snowy morning. It
was warm inside the flat, but tense, disturbing music poured from the radio.
"That's a waltz from Masquerade" Rita remarked in a low voice to
Opratin, who was seated on the sofa, his legs crossed, tapping one foot in
time to the music.
"Look here, Rita," he said as the violins soared and then fell silent.
"I know I'm making a nuisance of myself but I really must speak to you again
about Fedor Matveyev's knife."
"This is becoming intolerable," Rita said coldly. "I've told you twenty
times that the knife fell into the sea and was lost."
"No, the knife is in your possession," Opratin declared. "I can't
understand why you are being so stubborn. Now follow me carefully. Anatole
and I have invented a remarkable machine. If we exclude that accidental
phenomenon which your ancestor Fedor Matveyev witnessed in India, no one has
ever come so close to solving the problem of the mutual penetrability of
matter as we have. This will be a major breakthrough. Your husband's name
will stand side by side with those of the most brilliant scientists of our
age."
"But I don't want that!" Rita burst out.
She turned away, biting her lip to keep from crying, and walked to the
farther end of the room.
"He doesn't need fame," she continued in a calmer voice. "He needs to
forget about that damned knife, cure himself and return home. That's all I
want. That and nothing more. Please leave me alone."
Opratin rose. "Very well. I'll leave you alone. But Anatole will never
return to you. Well, goodbye."
He moved to the door.
"Wait!" Rita shrieked. "Why-why won't he return?"
Opratin turned round abruptly. "Because he is slowly but surely killing
himself. Because the doses he is now taking would kill an elephant. Because
he will not be able to endure it if we don't succeed. And success depends
only on the knife. The knife guarantees solution of the problem and, at the
same time, your husband's recovery."
Rita pressed the palms of her hands to her temples. Her eyes were those
of a sick, hunted animal.
Opratin waited. The wind whipped flurries of snow against the windows,
making the panes tremble.
Rita walked with wooden steps into the next room. Opratin heard the
click of a lock.
She returned and flung a knife on the table.
It fell with a strangely light tap.
Opratin walked unhurriedly over to the table. He picked up the knife by
the handle and fixed his eyes on the narrow blade with the wavy design.
Suddenly he plunged it into the table. The blade entered the thick, polished
wood almost up to the hill. Opratin's eyes blazed with triumph.
"Rita, allow me to-"
"Don't. Just go."
She stood by the window for a long lime, looking out from the ninth
floor at a Moscow wrapped in clouds of snow.
Then she threw on her coat, dashed out of the flat, and took a taxi to
the railway station.
"Yes, Yellow Lynx. That was what they called me when we were kids." She
took Nikolai by the arm. Her eyes shone as though a film had been stripped
from them. "I still have that drawing you made."
"I kept thinking there was something familiar about your face," said
Nikolai in a constrained whisper.
"I kept wondering too. When you and your friend came to my house I was
on the verge of recognizing you."
"You know who my friend was? It was Yura." "Yura?" Rita laughed. "Dear
me, he used lo be such a little boy. But so brave, with those feathers stuck
in his hair."
"But we told you our names. Didn't you-" "Do you know my last name?"
"No."
"Well, I didn't know yours either. Children are never interested in
last names. If we'd attended the same school it would have been a different
matter."
Nikolai studied Rita's face. "Can it really be Yellow Lynx?" he thought
in amazement. "You've changed a lot," he said.
Rita's face grew sober. She gave him a long, inquiring glance. Nikolai
had the feeling that she was about to tell him something important. But she
only said, "Do you still live in the same place?"
"Yes, in Cooper Lane."
"Cooper Lane," Rita mused. "It seems like a hundred years ago."
"Why not take a ticket for Wednesday?" Nikolai suggested hesitatingly.
"Then we could travel together."
Rita was silent. Did she want to spend another whole day in Moscow? No,
definitely not. She wanted lo leave tomorrow. There was nothing more for her
to do in Moscow. But she suddenly heard herself saying, "Yes, Wednesday
would suit me fine."
Afterwards they walked along the Sadovoye Ring. Rita, her gloved hand
raised to protect her face from the snow, told Nikolai how her family had
moved lo Leningrad and then the war had come and her father had been killed
when Tallinn was evacuated. He had been in command of a big Troop Transport.
She and her mother had survived the siege of Leningrad. After the war they
had moved back to the town on the Caspian Sea because her mother was very
ill and the doctors had ordered a warmer climate for her.
Rita said nothing about her marriage.
"Why didn't you ever pay a visit to Cooper Lane?"
"I did, soon after we came back. I stopped in to look at the flat where
we used to live. I saw a fat woman sitting on the balcony, knitting. The
place called up painful memories. Everything reminded me of Father. If only
Father had lived-" Rita stopped. "Everything would have turned out
differently."
She shivered. Nikolai screwed up his courage and took her by the arm.
"I remember now," he said. "There used to be two small bars of iron,
with some kind of mysterious letters engraved on them, on your father's
desk. Lately I've been wondering where I saw them before. Do you remember?
We pledged to do everything we could to discover their secret." "Do you know
that my maiden name was Matveyev?" Rita suddenly asked.
"Matveyev?" Nikolai repeated in confusion. "That means you're-"
"That's right, I'm-" Rita's face grew longer. "Rut we won't talk about
that now. Please don't. There's been too much for one day."
She gave Nikolai a searching look, studying his frank face and
attentive grey eyes. His ears were a bright red. Imagine going about in such
a frost with just a spring hat on one's head!
"I'm so glad I met you." she said in a low voice. "I have such a lot to
tell you. No, not now. On the train."
It was nearly five o'clock by the time Nikolai returned to the hotel.
"Boris, you simply won't believe your eyes!" he called out exuberantly
from the doorway. "Read this." He drew the newspaper from his pocket.
Privalov pushed his spectacles up to his forehead and skimmed through
the item about the displays at the exhibition.
"A small metal box with the inscription A M D G." Privalov leaned back
in his chair and his glasses dropped onto his nose of themselves. "You think
this has some relation to-"
"Yes, definitely. It's the same engraving as on our box. What if this
is 'The Key to the Mystery'?"
"In the hands of an Italian subversive agent? Hm-m. Sounds doubtful to
me."
"De Maistre came from Italy too," Nikolai protested. "And there are
Jesuits there to this day, of course. We ought to go to the museum and take
a look, Boris. If the size of the box coincides with the measurements in the
drawing-"
There were not too many visitors at the exhibition. Several youngsters
were arguing heatedly in front of the walkie-talkie display. Two airmen were
examining the wreckage of a foreign plane brought down on Soviet territory.
It did not take Privalov and Nikolai long to find, in the next room, a
tall glass showcase in which stood a life-size dummy dressed in a tattered
outfit, with a parachute on its back. A small golden crucifix gleamed at the
throat, visible through the open collar. Bars of blasting charges, an
aqualung, a frogman's suit, a pistol, a radio transmitter and receiver, a
ball of nylon cord and other articles were laid out at the dummy's feet.
Rut there was no sign of a small metal box with the inscription A M D
G.
"How odd!" Nikolai slowly ran his eyes again over the things in the
showcase. "Very odd indeed. The paper clearly slated-"
"Let's speak to the person in charge," said Privalov.
The director of the exhibition, a short, balding man, raised his
eyebrows in surprise when Privalov told him there was no metal box in the
showcase.
"That can't be," he said. "You simply failed to notice it."
But the director himself was unable to find the box with the initials
of the Jesuit motto. It had vanished.
"It was here last night," he said, looking worried. "I remember showing
it to a group of visitors." At this point he noticed that the tiny lock on
the showcase had been forced open.
The director gave Privalov a questioning look and asked him to explain
his interest in the little box.
Privalov briefly recounted the history of the iron boxes. He did not
say anything about their contents but merely mentioned that the Academy of
Sciences was interested in them.
"No doubt you have an inventory of the Italian agent's things,"
Privalov said when he had finished. "We should like to see the description
of the stolen box."
The director showed them the inventory. They could hardly believe their
eyes when they read that the body of the Italian agent and his equipment had
been found by a person named Nikolai Opratin, a Candidate of Technical
Sciences, in the environs of Derbent the previous August.
"At every turn we come up against Opratin," Nikolai said in a low
voice.
"I now recall having heard about some sort of adventure he had at
Derbent," said Privalov. "Let's read further." A flat metal box with the
letters A M D G, and below them the letters J d M engraved on it was listed
as No. 14 in the inventory. It weighed 430 grammes. Its size was-
"The very same measurements!" Nikolai exclaimed. "I remember them well.
This is 'The Key to the Mystery'. There's no doubt about it."
An hour or so later they had to repeat the story of the boxes to a
black-eyed young investigator, who wrote it all down in a notebook.
It was fairly late by the time Privalov and Nikolai emerged into the
street. A raw wind whirled the snow into their faces. The frost pinched
their ears.
"'The Key to the Mystery'," Privalov mused. "What could it be? Probably
some very important paper."
"Perhaps it's a description of the machine."
They walked along a narrow path in the snow leading to the hotel.
Fences stretched on one side of them and stalls and booths on the other.
Somewhere in the distance a dog howled. The lighted windows of the hotel
sparkled in front of them.
"What a day!" Nikolai thought. He recalled he had not had any dinner.
"I'll drop into the cafeteria, Boris," he said.
As he walked past the hotel across the street from his own, Nikolai
stopped at the entrance.
"Why not?" he thought. "I'll draw Uncle Vova out of the room-without
Opratin knowing about it, of course-and put the question to him straight.
Drive him into a corner. Something tells me he's the one who stole it."
Nikolai entered the lobby and asked the desk clerk to summon a man
named Bugrov from room 130.
"Bugrov?" The clerk looked into the register. "He checked out this
afternoon. Opratin and Bugrov. They called a taxi and drove off to the
airport."
THE READER'S ATTENTION
"Get in quick!" the plump conductress said to Nikolai.
Nikolai waved to Privalov for the last time and hurriedly followed Rita
up the steps and into the carriage.
The early winter twilight thickened fast. The houses of a small town
appeared in sight and vanished, to be followed by a frozen stream and three
motionless figures standing with fishing lines beside holes in the ice.
Nikolai was the first to speak. "There's something you wanted to tell
me, Rita, isn't there?"
"Yes, there is."
The wheels clicked rhythmically on the rail joints.
Nikolai stared out into the darkness with unseeing eyes as he waited
for Rita to begin.
"I don't know how to start," Rita finally said. "It's all so
complicated-and I've never told anyone about it before." She sighed softly.
"All right, listen. You remember those two small bars of iron that used to
lie on Father's desk when we were children, don't you? I'll tell you
everything I know about them."
The authors will now take the liberty of relating the story of the
boxes since they have every reason to believe that they now know it better
than Rita did.
The Story of the Three Boxes
Stories about strange doings in the Matveyev family had long been
circulating in St. Petersburg. To begin with, way back during the reign of
Peter the Great a Matveyev, a naval lieutenant, had returned from India with
a bewitchingly beautiful dark-eyed girl. The "taint" in the Matveyev family
had probably started with her. Her sons and grandsons did not rise high in
the government service. They cut short their careers by resigning and
burying themselves on their estate in the Tver Province. There they lived in
seclusion, rarely entertaining any visitors.
From the few outsiders who did enter the house it was learned that
rustling, grinding and crackling sounds would come from a forbidden chamber
long past midnight. These sounds were accompanied by infernal sparks; the
kind of freshness in the air that follows a thunderstorm would spread
through the house.
Moreover, it was whispered that the Matveyevs had a magic knife, the
Indian girl's dowry. No one really knew what kind of a magic knife it was
until it came the turn of Arseny Matveyev, great-grandson of Fedor Matveyev
and his Indian wife, to graduate from the naval school in St. Petersburg.
The young warrant officers hired a room in a tavern on the Moika for a
bachelor supper party to celebrate their graduation. They made a great many
fiery speeches over the wine. They recalled adventures from their cruises,
for all of them had sailed in seas near and far as naval cadets.
At the height of the party Arseny Matveyev placed his swarthy hand on
the table, palm downwards, snatched a knife from a scabbard inside his
shirt, and plunged it into his hand right up to the hilt. Then he quickly
returned the knife to its hiding place and held up his hand. It bore no
trace of a scratch, no sign of blood. Afterwards, the young revelry-makers
could not say for sure whether they had actually seen this or whether it was
a product of their wine-heated imaginations.
However that may be, Arseny Matveyev and his knife were soon forgotten.
Napoleon's army invaded Russia. The years that followed were wreathed in the
gunpowder smoke of danger and martial glory.
But there was one person in St. Petersburg, a man always dressed only
in black, who thought constantly about the miraculous knife. From trusted
men he received periodic reports about Arseny Matveyev, wherever the latter
happened to be.
The man in black was Count Joseph Marie de Maistre, Ambassador of the
King of Sardinia (a king who had been deprived of his realm) and an
important personage in the Society of Jesus.
Before the War of 1812 there had been a Jesuit school in St. Petersburg
where, for a high fee, quite a number of young men from distinguished
families learned Latin prayers and Bible history, plus obedience and
humility. When graduates of the school entered the government service they
did not forgot their spiritual fathers.
Young Prince Kurasov visited Count de Maistre perhaps more often than
others. He was the one who told the Sardinian Ambassador about the
miraculous knife. The prince had been one of the few non-naval men invited
to the supper party and had seen Arseny Matveyev plunge the knife into his
hand.
The prince's story gave Count de Maistre much food for thought. A knife
that passed harmlessly through a hand? The elderly Jesuit believed as firmly
in divine signs as he did in the glorious predestination of the Society of
Jesus, vigilant guardian of the faith and thrones. This was certainly a sign
from on high. Just as the knife had passed through human flesh, Jesuits
would pass without hindrance into the palaces of monarchs and into the
chambers of high officials to persuade them to stamp out free thinking. The
time had come to put a stop to the anti-religious sciences that had so
multiplied. These Devil's instruments advocated the Jacobinism that
destroyed thrones. The time had come to make men's hearts humble before
divine Providence. The time had come to elevate the Society, despite the
persecution to which it was subjected, despite the blindness of some rulers.
The great honour of bringing this sign to the attention of the Society had
fallen on him, Count Joseph Marie de Maistre.
The Count resolved not to let Arseny Matveyev disappear from view.
Through scraps of information brought him by other graduates of the school
he followed the young man's fortunes in the war. He knew that Arseny had
been wounded, had convalesced at his estate at Tver, had been recalled to
the Baltic Fleet, promoted to the rank of lieutenant, and was now stationed
at Kronstadt, near St. Petersburg.
One day in March 1815 a carriage drew up to the Sardinian Ambassador's
residence, and a tall, thin-faced man stepped out of it. Fastidiously
skirting a large puddle of melting snow, he mounted the steps leading to the
front entrance. The Count received him at once. The thin-faced man bowed
respectfully as he entered the Count's study.
The Count was sitting in a deep armchair before the fireplace. He
turned his lined, parchment-yellow face to the newcomer and indicated a
chair with a wave of his hand.
"What is the news, mon prince?" he asked in a weary voice.
Young Prince Kurasov seated himself on the edge of a chair.
"The news is fairly good, Your Excellency," he said wanly. "I have
learned that Arseny Matveyev does not carry the knife about with him but has
left it at Zakharino, the family estate. He has been appointed senior
officer on the brig Askold, now being outfitted at Kronstadt preparatory to
cruising in the Pacific Ocean in search of new lands."
The Count lowered his eyelids. "Is that all?"
"No. Now comes the most important news. Three days ago, in the company
of philosophers and atheists like himself, Arseny Matveyev made seditious
speeches. He spoke in favour of the convocation of a general assembly in
Russia."
Count de Maistre sat up straight and struck the arm of his chair with
his frail fist. The eyes in the yellow face glowed with an evil and
unexpectedly youthful sparkle.
"It seems to me, Your Excellency," Prince Kurasov said cautiously,
"that it would be well to set things in motion-"
The Count stopped him with a gesture and became lost in thought.
"No, mon prince,'" he said after a long interval, "we'll take a
different course. When does the lieutenant depart on the brig?"
"In June."
"Splendid! We've waited a long time, and we can wait a little longer,
until June. The matter must be arranged without undue fuss. Do not disturb
Arseny Matveyev."
A little over two and a half years later, on a hot day in February, the
brig Askold, badly battered by severe storms, dropped anchor at Rio de
Janeiro. There the Russian Consul handed Arseny a letter from his father
that had arrived nearly two years before.
"I shall briefly set forth the misfortunes which have befallen our
house, not through God's will but because of the evil designs of wretched
creatures," his father wrote. "You of course remember Prince Kurasov. He
used to be a friend of yours. Fawning and deference have enabled this man
Kurasov to rise to the higher ranks and, some say, to involvement with the
secret police. Out of spite, or for some other reason, Kurasov has informed
against you, repeating everything that you said in your youthful hastiness
and naming the books you read. This denunciation brought officials to
Zakharino. They searched the house from top to bottom, turning everything
upside down, under the pretence of looking for seditious papers.
"But it seems to me that they were looking for something else. Since
they did not find any papers of that kind some of those hounds ransacked our
special chamber most painstakingly. They examined the electricity machines
from all sides. Furthermore, they confiscated the manuscript in which Fedor
Matveyev, my grandfather and your great-grandfather, described his Indian
travels. They also confiscated that wonderful knife of his."
At the beginning of June 1818, after an absence of nearly three years,
the Askold sailed into the roadstead near St. Petersburg.
Early next morning Prince Kurasov's valet announced that Lieutenant
Matveyev wished to see him. The Prince, in his dressing-gown, was being
shaved by his barber.
"Tell him I'm not at home," he ordered.
A few minutes later there was a commotion downstairs, and the valet's
raised voice could be heard. Then the door was flung open. Arseny Matveyev,
his cheeks tanned a deep brown, stood on the threshold. He was in uniform,
with a sword at his side. Prince Kurasov pushed aside the barber's hand and
slowly rose to his feet, wiping the lather from his cheek. Arseny looked at
him with burning eyes.
"Is this how you welcome old friends, Prince?"
"Please leave the room, sir," the Prince said coldly. "You should thank
the Almighty you got off so easily."
Arseny put his hand on his sword-hilt. "I give you exactly one minute
to hand back the souvenirs you took from my father's estate," he said with
restrained fury.
The Prince's narrow face turned whiter than his lace cuffs. He took
several slow steps backwards, towards his canopied bed, and stretched out
his hand to tug at the bell-rope. In two bounds Arseny, his sword drawn, was
at the Prince's side.
Meanwhile the barber had fled, whimpering, from the room.
The Prince, frightened out of his wits, stammered that the things
confiscated during the search had been turned over to Count Joseph de
Maistre, the former Sardinian Ambassador.
"Where does that Jesuit reside now? Tell me, quick!"
"The Count left Russia last year," Prince Kurasov replied sullenly. "I
do not know where he is now."
Arseny spent only a short time in St. Petersburg. He tendered his
resignation arid left for Zakharino.
The warm September day was drawing to a close. Candles had been lighted
in the small snow-white Villa standing in a garden on the edge of a town in
northern Italy. Their flickering glow was reflected in the mahogany panels
that lined the walls of the study. A spare old man in black stood leaning
against an elegant table, examining a sheet of parchment which he held close
to his eyes. Another man, portly and somewhat younger, stood to one side,
waiting.
"My friends were not mistaken in recommending you and your erudition to
me," the old man said, laying the sheet of parchment on the table.
The scholar bowed.
"You have done the Society of Jesus a great service," said the old man,
taking a purse out of a drawer in the table.
"Ad majorem Dei gloriam" the scholar said, accepting the purse. "I wish
Your Excellency a good night."
After seeing his visitor out of the room the old man summoned a servant
and told him to close all the shutters in the house and kindle a fire in the
fireplace. In his old age Count de Maistre suffered greatly from the cold.
He sat down at the table and again examined the parchment. He was
pleased. The old riddle brought back from cold Russia had been given an
excellent interpretation. He could already foresee the great day when the
glory of the Society of Jesus would shine as never before. He, Count Joseph
de Maistre, had not toiled in vain these many years.
The clatter of horses' hooves on the stony road not far away came to
his ears for a minute or so.
Opening a carved casket, the Count removed from it a rolled-up
manuscript tied with a ribbon, and a knife with an ivory handle. Then, one
after another, he took out three small iron boxes and gazed admiringly at
their gleaming sides. A master craftsman in Turin had fashioned them
according to his design, and on each box had engraved the initial letters of
the great motto: A M D G
Below it he had engraved Count Joseph de Maistre's crown and his
initials:
J d M
The Count placed the rolled manuscript in one of the boxes, muttering:
"The Source".
Then he cautiously took the knife by its handle and laid it in the
second box: "The Evidence," he said.
"And this-" he neatly folded the parchment which the scholar had
brought- and this will be 'The Key to the Mystery'."
All of a sudden he glanced with a start at the dark window. He thought
he had heard the crunching of pebbles. But no, all was quiet.
The Count placed "The Key to the Mystery" in the third box. Now he had
only to close the covers and have them sealed.
He heard a rustle outside the window. Was it the porter making his
rounds?
The Count went up to the window and flung it open, but instantly
started back with a cry. A man in a cloak and a wide-brimmed hat was staring
at him from the shadow of an old hornbeam. He was young and swarthy, and his
dark eyes gleamed fiercely at the Count.
"You have vigilant guards, Count," he said in French. "I was forced to
climb over the wall. Do not be afraid. I am not a robber."
The Count had recovered somewhat from his fright. "Who are you, sir?
What do you want in my house?"
"My name is Arseny Matveyev. Now you know what I want."
Fear distorted the Count's yellow face. Suddenly, with an energy
unexpected in such an old body, he dashed to the table, on which his pistol
case lay.
By this time Arseny was in the room.
"Stop where you are, Count!"
The unbidden guest whipped out a pistol from under his cloak and aimed
it at the Count, who took a step backwards. Realizing that the game was up,
the old Jesuit said in a gentle voice:
"It is not becoming, my son, to threaten an old man with a pistol.
Someone has evidently misled you."
"Silence!" Arseny Matveyev barked. "I didn't travel the length and
breadth of France and Italy searching for you just to listen to your
miserable evasions. Put the knife and the manuscript on that table. I'll
count to three."
"There is no need," the Count said dispiritedly. "They are lying on the
table."
Arseny strode over to the table. His eyes sparkled with joy at sight of
the knife.
"The manuscript is in that little box," said Count de Maistre. "Don't
touch the third box. It is mine."
"I am not a Jesuit. I do not covet what belongs to others," Arseny
snapped, this time in Russian. "Take this for your iron boxes."
He tossed a gold coin on the table. Then he closed the covers of the
two boxes, one containing the knife and the other the manuscript, and thrust
them into his pockets.
"Don't you dare to raise the alarm, you old fox," he said as he turned
to leave. "If you do, you'll get a dose of lead."
With those words Arseny Matveyev jumped down from the window. Soon
after, the sound of horse's hooves on the stony road faded into the
distance.
On returning to Russia, Arseny Matveyev was unable to get down to a
thorough study of the secret which his great-grandfather had brought from
India. Other affairs absorbed him. After his father's death he freed the few
serfs the family owned and turned over the estate to his younger brother. He
had the two small iron boxes reliably sealed. Then he moved to St.
Petersburg, where he joined a secret society of revolutionaries.
On December 14, 1825, after the failure of the December uprising in St.
Petersburg, Arseny came galloping into Zakharino in the night. The next
morning gendarmes broke into the house. As they led Arseny out of the house,
under arrest, he only had time to whisper to his brother: "Guard those two
little iron boxes like the apple of your eye. Farewell."
Arseny Matveyev was exiled to salt mines in Siberia. He never returned
from there.
"All I know," said Rita, "is that Arseny brought home two small iron
boxes from abroad, and they were in the possession of the Matveyev family
ever since. No one knew that anything was inside them. When my husband and I
started packing our things before moving to our present flat, the knife
suddenly dropped out of one of the boxes. Mother threw the other box away
along with a lot of old junk. It was dirty and rusty and had been used to
prop up an old wardrobe with a broken leg. Who could have guessed there
would be a manuscript inside?"
"Did you ever hear anything about a third box?" Nikolai asked.
"No. That's why I was so surprised when you and Yura came to ask me
about it. What do you know?"
"Only that it exists."
Nikolai then told Rita about the Italian subversive agent and the theft
in the museum.
"There was something very important in that third little box," he said
in conclusion. "De Maistre called it 'The Key to the Mystery'."
The other passengers in the carriage had gone to bed. The plump
conductress was sweeping the corridor. They continued to stand by the
window, watching the snowbound night fly past, marked off by telegraph
poles.
Nikolai reflected in amazement that here was Rita standing by his side,
elbow to elbow, no longer an infinitely distant stranger but Yellow Lynx, an
old friend from his childhood. Yet still in all a stranger.
"Look here, Nikolai," Rita said suddenly, pressing her forehead to the
glass and closing her eyes. "Can I trust you?"
He wanted to say that he was ready to jump off the train into the
darkness then and there if she asked him to.
"Yes," he said.
Rita was silent for a while. Then she threw back her head. "I feel as
though I'll burst into tears in a moment if I don't tell someone-"
She then proceeded to tell him, without holding anything back, about
the misfortune that had befallen her. She told him how Anatole had started
to study the knife and how she had encouraged his ambition. How, desiring to
increase his working capacity, he had become a drug addict. How she had
jumped overboard after the knife, caught it in the clear water, hidden it
under her dress and told her husband it was lost because-so she had
thought-without the knife he would not be able to continue his
investigations. How she had urged Anatole to give up those accursed
experiments, but instead he had joined up with Opratin and was wearing
himself out with work and with drugs. How he had walked out of the house.
And finally, she told Nikolai how she had given Opratin the knife the
previous day in the hope that this would help them to complete the project
sooner, after which Anatole would return to her.
"You gave the knife to Opratin!" Nikolai exclaimed.
Rita measured him with a long look.
"Promise me you won't tell a soul about any of this. Not a single soul.
Not even Yura."
"But why, Rita? Why keep silent? On the contrary, something has to be
done. We must convince your husband that such single-handed experiments
aren't fruitful. We must persuade him to switch to our Institute."
"No," she said. "He wouldn't pay any attention to that kind of talk. It
would only make him still angrier."
"He wouldn't listen to me, of course. But he would to Privalov and
Professor Bagbanly."
"No, you don't know him," Rita repeated insistently. "You must promise
to say nothing. I demand it."
"Very well," said Nikolai in a downcast voice, "I promise."
"They unfurled their canvas sails
And sped across the Caspian Sea."
-From the Russian epic poem
Vassily Buslayevich
IN WHICH PRIVALOV'S LABORATORY IS BLOWN UP
Valery Gorbachevsky felt, on that lovely day in June, that his
bottle-green sun-glasses were rose-coloured. His leave of absence to take
his correspondence college exams was over, and everything had gone well, if
you closed your eyes to a mediocre mark in English.
He was now on his way to work after an interval of twenty days. He was
walking fast because he had had to stop at the library, which opened at
eight o'clock, to return some textbooks, and he was afraid he would be
reprimanded by Nikolai Potapkin for being late.
Valery skirted the bed of gladioli near the entrance and flew into the
lobby. He dashed past the cloakroom, with its thickets of nickel-plated
racks, and past the time-board, now closed, hoping that speed would enable
him to avoid the timekeeper.
It did not work out that way. The timekeeper, pleasant-faced Ella, was
at her place. Strangely enough, Yura Kostyukov, incredibly handsome in
cream-coloured flannels and a new green-and-yellow checked shirt, was
sitting beside her. Still under the influence of Fedor Matveyev's
manuscript, Yura was amusing himself by paying the girl courtly compliments
in eighteenth century fashion. Ella did not understand half of what Yura
said but she was flattered and could not stop giggling.
When Yura caught sight of Valery he turned with great dignity to glance
at the clock. "Please note, Ella," he drawled, "that this man, returning
from a leave of absence, has arrived eleven minutes late but does not look
the least repentant."
"What the hell are you doing here?" Valery wondered disrespectfully.
Out loud he said the first thing that came into his head. "The trolleybus-"
"Ah, to be sure, to be sure." Yura nodded understandingly. "I hadn't
thought of that. But fate is always merciful to the lazy ones." He drew a
folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket. "Here you are. This is for
you."
"My annual vacation?" Valery said, reading the paper. "But I don't want
it just now."
"There are times when the management has the right to insist that the
personnel go on vacation even if they don't want to," Yura said in a tone of
mock authority. "I didn't ask for my vacation either. Neither did any of the
others".
"All of us? The whole laboratory?"
"At nine o'clock you'll be able to draw your vacation pay. And don't
ask idle questions."
"I'll step into the laboratory meanwhile."
"Follow my example, young man, and restrain your zeal."
Yura was right. Managements do have the right, when circumstances arise
that prevent the normal functioning of a factory shop, office or the like,
to insist that members of the staff take their annual vacation regardless of
any schedules that may have been drawn up previously.
In this case the circumstances had been the following:
After Privalov and Nikolai returned from Moscow the development of a
pipeless oil pipeline had been included in their Institute's research
programme. Since the main research was being done at the Institute of
Surfaces in Moscow, cautious Pavel Koltukhov forbade experiments in this
field.
"The devil take the lot of you!" he exclaimed in reply to Privalov's
arguments. "I'm fed up with your delightful habit of sticking your finger in
other people's pies. First thing I know your lab technician will be putting
his head in an inductor, and I'll have to answer for it."
When a thick envelope arrived from Moscow towards the end of April the
Institute director summoned Koltukhov and Privalov to a conference. When
Professor Bagbanly arrived shortly afterwards he was also shown through the
massive leather-covered door of the director's office. The conference lasted
for hours. First glasses of tea were carried in, then bottles of mineral
water.
Yura appeared in the reception room after lunch. "Smells like something
burning," he remarked with a glance at the closed door, wrinkling up his
nose.
The secretary did not pause in her typing. "Run along now, Yura," she
said. "They'll manage without you."
Yura went back to the laboratory.
"Something's cooking in the director's office, Nikolai," he whispered
to his friend. "They've been at it since morning. Boris forgot all about his
yoghurt during the lunch break. It's probably news from Moscow. Listen,
can't you tear yourself away from your slide rule? What's the matter with
you, anyway?"
Nikolai said nothing. He studied his unfinished drawing with
exaggerated attention. The curve he had just plotted reminded him of a
wind-filled sail. This association brought back a picture of the high white
side of the Uzbekistan, and a slender figure in a red sun-dress diving into
the sea. Also, a picture of melancholy dark eyes.
Nikolai drew his hand across his forehead.
Rita had once been simply a stranger, gradually to be forgotten, driven
from his mind. But now- now everything was all confused. No matter how he
tried he could not forget her. She was no longer a stranger. She was Yellow
Lynx, a childhood playmate.
Nikolai had hardly seen her since their return from Moscow. She had
phoned him several times at work. He had asked her, in a wooden voice, how
life was treating her. She had told him that Anatole had returned home and
had promised her to go into hospital for treatment as soon as he finished
the job. Anatole's work was going along well. Rita spoke about it in a gay,
animated voice. Nikolai was glad for her sake. But every time she rang up he
experienced pain.
One day Rita invited Nikolai and Yura to drop in for tea. She wanted to
introduce them, her childhood friends, to her husband.
Nikolai had never seen Anatole before. He was struck by Anatole's
unhealthy colouring, the bags under his eyes, and his dull glance.
Anatole picked languidly at the cake on his plate. He took no part in
the conversation. Nikolai was dying to ask him about Fedor Matveyev's knife,
but that question and many others on the tip of his tongue could not be
asked because of the promise he had given Rita.
Anatole turned his lacklustre eyes on Nikolai. "Has your apparatus
produced any sort of long-term penetrability?" he asked.
Nikolai almost choked in surprise. He hurriedly chewed the piece of
cake in his mouth. "I don't really know," he replied. "We turned everything
over to the Academy of Sciences."
"How are your experiments coming along?" Yura politely asked
Benedictov. "When will we be able to offer you our congratulations?"
"How can we compete with the Academy?" Anatole asked glumly.
Yura twitched his blond eyebrows. "Why compete? Join us. The days of
ivory-tower scholars are over. Modern scientific problems are so-"
Anatole interrupted him. "You're too young, far too young, in fact, to
tell me which days are over and which aren't." He frowned. No one said
anything. Rita hurriedly changed the topic. "You boys are going to
tomorrow's concert at Philharmony Hall, aren't you?"
But this did not help. The afternoon was ruined. Soon after, Anatole
rose, complaining of a headache, and left the room.
Yura could see what was troubling Nikolai, but for the first time in
their many years together he could think of no way to help his friend. He
even went so far as to ask Val's advice, but she viewed the matter rather
disdainfully. She did not seem to like this newly-found playmate of their
childhood.
The envelope that had come from the Institute of Surfaces in Moscow
really did contain interesting news. The frequencies which had influenced
the Cooper Lane installation had been ascertained. What had been vaguely
hinted at in the clumsy experiment mounted by the young engineers had been
translated into the language of formulas and figures. The workers at the
Moscow Institute had obtained their initial result: the rods pressed
together in the field of the Mobius band had penetrated each other, although
silencers; walkie-talkies. There was also the equipment carried by an
Italian subversive agent who died in a Caspian port in 1942. His remains had
been accidentally discovered in an underground passage not long ago. The
agent had apparently belonged to the Society of Jesus, for around his neck
he wore a small flat box on which was engraved A M D G.
What was this? Nikolai leaned forward and fixed his eyes on the printed
lines.
AMDG. The initial letters of the Jesuit motto.
The leather coat said irritably: "I intensely dislike having someone
breathing down my neck, young man."
"I beg your pardon," Nikolai muttered in confusion. He hurried over to
the newsstand and bought a paper, which he began to read at once.
All of a sudden he felt someone staring fixedly at him. He glanced in
annoyance at the lady in black standing beside him, and then flung his head
back as though he had been hit on the jaw. The lady was Rita.
"Are-are you in Moscow?" he stammered.
"It's obvious I am, isn't it?"
"Yes. So am I. I'm on a business trip." Nikolai coughed and started
folding his paper.
"Are you returning home soon?"
"Yes, I'm getting a ticket for Wednesday. What about you?"
"I'm leaving tomorrow."
Nikolai thrust his paper into his pocket. Rita turned to the woman
behind the counter of the newsstand. "I'll take these picture postcards,"
she said.
She chose half a dozen cards with colour reproductions on them. Nikolai
glanced absently at them. One was a winter landscape, another Levi-tan's
"March", then a picture in the Bilibin style, of a ship with a taut,
wind-filled sail, bearing a drawing of the sun, approaching a landing stage
where bearded men in long robes stood beside cannon wreathed in clouds of
smoke.
Nikolai said the first thing that came into his head. "'Guns firing
from the wharf, ordering the ship to tie up.' I used to copy that picture
when I was a child."
Rita swung round to face him. "Did you ever give that drawing to
anyone?"
Nikolai caught his breath. He stared intently into that pleasant,
mobile, questioning face and suddenly saw long familiar features-a perky
freckled nose, a mischievous smile, and glossy yellow braids jutting out at
a belligerent angle
"Yellow Lynx?" he whispered.
What had Rita been doing in Moscow?
Her friend met her at the railway station on arrival and took her home.
That same day Rita went to a hospital in Pirogov Street and made an
appointment to see a famous neuropathologist. He listened attentively to her
story.
"Only a special course of treatment can help your husband," he told
her. "The cure takes time and patience-but it is the only way. You must
persuade your husband to undergo this course of treatment. I can arrange for
him to enter the hospital where a pupil of mine, Dr. Khalilov, is doing very
good work in this field. The sooner he does this, the better it will be for
him. I'll give you a letter to Dr. Khalilov."
Now Rita was more upset than ever. She was determined to leave for home
at once, before the end of the winter school vacation. However, her friend
persuaded her to spend at least a week in Moscow.
During that week Opratin came to see her three times.
It so happened that Rita and Opratin had travelled to Moscow on the
same train. They had discovered this when the train halted at Mineralniye
Vody and both had stepped out onto the platform for a breath of fresh air.
At Kharkov, Opratin had again approached her on the platform and chatted
with her for a few minutes. Rita had given him her friend's telephone
number, at which she could be reached in Moscow.
There was something threatening and alarming about Opratin's visits to
Rita in Moscow. His presence made her uncomfortable; she felt as though the
shadow of her husband were standing behind him.
Opratin talked to her in a gentle, friendly tone. He agreed with the
doctor, he said, that Anatole should undergo treatment. He himself would
help to arrange a leave of any duration for Anatole. Rita was not to worry;
there were no particularly alarming symptoms as yet. Anatole was cheerful
and enthusiastic about his work.
"That backbreaking, endless, senseless work of Anatole's is what has
estranged him from me," Rita thought.
"We're on the right track now," said Opratin. "But I want you to bear
in mind that it depends to a great extent on you how much longer the job
will take."
Opratin came to see her for the third time on a cold, snowy morning. It
was warm inside the flat, but tense, disturbing music poured from the radio.
"That's a waltz from Masquerade" Rita remarked in a low voice to
Opratin, who was seated on the sofa, his legs crossed, tapping one foot in
time to the music.
"Look here, Rita," he said as the violins soared and then fell silent.
"I know I'm making a nuisance of myself but I really must speak to you again
about Fedor Matveyev's knife."
"This is becoming intolerable," Rita said coldly. "I've told you twenty
times that the knife fell into the sea and was lost."
"No, the knife is in your possession," Opratin declared. "I can't
understand why you are being so stubborn. Now follow me carefully. Anatole
and I have invented a remarkable machine. If we exclude that accidental
phenomenon which your ancestor Fedor Matveyev witnessed in India, no one has
ever come so close to solving the problem of the mutual penetrability of
matter as we have. This will be a major breakthrough. Your husband's name
will stand side by side with those of the most brilliant scientists of our
age."
"But I don't want that!" Rita burst out.
She turned away, biting her lip to keep from crying, and walked to the
farther end of the room.
"He doesn't need fame," she continued in a calmer voice. "He needs to
forget about that damned knife, cure himself and return home. That's all I
want. That and nothing more. Please leave me alone."
Opratin rose. "Very well. I'll leave you alone. But Anatole will never
return to you. Well, goodbye."
He moved to the door.
"Wait!" Rita shrieked. "Why-why won't he return?"
Opratin turned round abruptly. "Because he is slowly but surely killing
himself. Because the doses he is now taking would kill an elephant. Because
he will not be able to endure it if we don't succeed. And success depends
only on the knife. The knife guarantees solution of the problem and, at the
same time, your husband's recovery."
Rita pressed the palms of her hands to her temples. Her eyes were those
of a sick, hunted animal.
Opratin waited. The wind whipped flurries of snow against the windows,
making the panes tremble.
Rita walked with wooden steps into the next room. Opratin heard the
click of a lock.
She returned and flung a knife on the table.
It fell with a strangely light tap.
Opratin walked unhurriedly over to the table. He picked up the knife by
the handle and fixed his eyes on the narrow blade with the wavy design.
Suddenly he plunged it into the table. The blade entered the thick, polished
wood almost up to the hill. Opratin's eyes blazed with triumph.
"Rita, allow me to-"
"Don't. Just go."
She stood by the window for a long lime, looking out from the ninth
floor at a Moscow wrapped in clouds of snow.
Then she threw on her coat, dashed out of the flat, and took a taxi to
the railway station.
"Yes, Yellow Lynx. That was what they called me when we were kids." She
took Nikolai by the arm. Her eyes shone as though a film had been stripped
from them. "I still have that drawing you made."
"I kept thinking there was something familiar about your face," said
Nikolai in a constrained whisper.
"I kept wondering too. When you and your friend came to my house I was
on the verge of recognizing you."
"You know who my friend was? It was Yura." "Yura?" Rita laughed. "Dear
me, he used lo be such a little boy. But so brave, with those feathers stuck
in his hair."
"But we told you our names. Didn't you-" "Do you know my last name?"
"No."
"Well, I didn't know yours either. Children are never interested in
last names. If we'd attended the same school it would have been a different
matter."
Nikolai studied Rita's face. "Can it really be Yellow Lynx?" he thought
in amazement. "You've changed a lot," he said.
Rita's face grew sober. She gave him a long, inquiring glance. Nikolai
had the feeling that she was about to tell him something important. But she
only said, "Do you still live in the same place?"
"Yes, in Cooper Lane."
"Cooper Lane," Rita mused. "It seems like a hundred years ago."
"Why not take a ticket for Wednesday?" Nikolai suggested hesitatingly.
"Then we could travel together."
Rita was silent. Did she want to spend another whole day in Moscow? No,
definitely not. She wanted lo leave tomorrow. There was nothing more for her
to do in Moscow. But she suddenly heard herself saying, "Yes, Wednesday
would suit me fine."
Afterwards they walked along the Sadovoye Ring. Rita, her gloved hand
raised to protect her face from the snow, told Nikolai how her family had
moved lo Leningrad and then the war had come and her father had been killed
when Tallinn was evacuated. He had been in command of a big Troop Transport.
She and her mother had survived the siege of Leningrad. After the war they
had moved back to the town on the Caspian Sea because her mother was very
ill and the doctors had ordered a warmer climate for her.
Rita said nothing about her marriage.
"Why didn't you ever pay a visit to Cooper Lane?"
"I did, soon after we came back. I stopped in to look at the flat where
we used to live. I saw a fat woman sitting on the balcony, knitting. The
place called up painful memories. Everything reminded me of Father. If only
Father had lived-" Rita stopped. "Everything would have turned out
differently."
She shivered. Nikolai screwed up his courage and took her by the arm.
"I remember now," he said. "There used to be two small bars of iron,
with some kind of mysterious letters engraved on them, on your father's
desk. Lately I've been wondering where I saw them before. Do you remember?
We pledged to do everything we could to discover their secret." "Do you know
that my maiden name was Matveyev?" Rita suddenly asked.
"Matveyev?" Nikolai repeated in confusion. "That means you're-"
"That's right, I'm-" Rita's face grew longer. "Rut we won't talk about
that now. Please don't. There's been too much for one day."
She gave Nikolai a searching look, studying his frank face and
attentive grey eyes. His ears were a bright red. Imagine going about in such
a frost with just a spring hat on one's head!
"I'm so glad I met you." she said in a low voice. "I have such a lot to
tell you. No, not now. On the train."
It was nearly five o'clock by the time Nikolai returned to the hotel.
"Boris, you simply won't believe your eyes!" he called out exuberantly
from the doorway. "Read this." He drew the newspaper from his pocket.
Privalov pushed his spectacles up to his forehead and skimmed through
the item about the displays at the exhibition.
"A small metal box with the inscription A M D G." Privalov leaned back
in his chair and his glasses dropped onto his nose of themselves. "You think
this has some relation to-"
"Yes, definitely. It's the same engraving as on our box. What if this
is 'The Key to the Mystery'?"
"In the hands of an Italian subversive agent? Hm-m. Sounds doubtful to
me."
"De Maistre came from Italy too," Nikolai protested. "And there are
Jesuits there to this day, of course. We ought to go to the museum and take
a look, Boris. If the size of the box coincides with the measurements in the
drawing-"
There were not too many visitors at the exhibition. Several youngsters
were arguing heatedly in front of the walkie-talkie display. Two airmen were
examining the wreckage of a foreign plane brought down on Soviet territory.
It did not take Privalov and Nikolai long to find, in the next room, a
tall glass showcase in which stood a life-size dummy dressed in a tattered
outfit, with a parachute on its back. A small golden crucifix gleamed at the
throat, visible through the open collar. Bars of blasting charges, an
aqualung, a frogman's suit, a pistol, a radio transmitter and receiver, a
ball of nylon cord and other articles were laid out at the dummy's feet.
Rut there was no sign of a small metal box with the inscription A M D
G.
"How odd!" Nikolai slowly ran his eyes again over the things in the
showcase. "Very odd indeed. The paper clearly slated-"
"Let's speak to the person in charge," said Privalov.
The director of the exhibition, a short, balding man, raised his
eyebrows in surprise when Privalov told him there was no metal box in the
showcase.
"That can't be," he said. "You simply failed to notice it."
But the director himself was unable to find the box with the initials
of the Jesuit motto. It had vanished.
"It was here last night," he said, looking worried. "I remember showing
it to a group of visitors." At this point he noticed that the tiny lock on
the showcase had been forced open.
The director gave Privalov a questioning look and asked him to explain
his interest in the little box.
Privalov briefly recounted the history of the iron boxes. He did not
say anything about their contents but merely mentioned that the Academy of
Sciences was interested in them.
"No doubt you have an inventory of the Italian agent's things,"
Privalov said when he had finished. "We should like to see the description
of the stolen box."
The director showed them the inventory. They could hardly believe their
eyes when they read that the body of the Italian agent and his equipment had
been found by a person named Nikolai Opratin, a Candidate of Technical
Sciences, in the environs of Derbent the previous August.
"At every turn we come up against Opratin," Nikolai said in a low
voice.
"I now recall having heard about some sort of adventure he had at
Derbent," said Privalov. "Let's read further." A flat metal box with the
letters A M D G, and below them the letters J d M engraved on it was listed
as No. 14 in the inventory. It weighed 430 grammes. Its size was-
"The very same measurements!" Nikolai exclaimed. "I remember them well.
This is 'The Key to the Mystery'. There's no doubt about it."
An hour or so later they had to repeat the story of the boxes to a
black-eyed young investigator, who wrote it all down in a notebook.
It was fairly late by the time Privalov and Nikolai emerged into the
street. A raw wind whirled the snow into their faces. The frost pinched
their ears.
"'The Key to the Mystery'," Privalov mused. "What could it be? Probably
some very important paper."
"Perhaps it's a description of the machine."
They walked along a narrow path in the snow leading to the hotel.
Fences stretched on one side of them and stalls and booths on the other.
Somewhere in the distance a dog howled. The lighted windows of the hotel
sparkled in front of them.
"What a day!" Nikolai thought. He recalled he had not had any dinner.
"I'll drop into the cafeteria, Boris," he said.
As he walked past the hotel across the street from his own, Nikolai
stopped at the entrance.
"Why not?" he thought. "I'll draw Uncle Vova out of the room-without
Opratin knowing about it, of course-and put the question to him straight.
Drive him into a corner. Something tells me he's the one who stole it."
Nikolai entered the lobby and asked the desk clerk to summon a man
named Bugrov from room 130.
"Bugrov?" The clerk looked into the register. "He checked out this
afternoon. Opratin and Bugrov. They called a taxi and drove off to the
airport."
THE READER'S ATTENTION
"Get in quick!" the plump conductress said to Nikolai.
Nikolai waved to Privalov for the last time and hurriedly followed Rita
up the steps and into the carriage.
The early winter twilight thickened fast. The houses of a small town
appeared in sight and vanished, to be followed by a frozen stream and three
motionless figures standing with fishing lines beside holes in the ice.
Nikolai was the first to speak. "There's something you wanted to tell
me, Rita, isn't there?"
"Yes, there is."
The wheels clicked rhythmically on the rail joints.
Nikolai stared out into the darkness with unseeing eyes as he waited
for Rita to begin.
"I don't know how to start," Rita finally said. "It's all so
complicated-and I've never told anyone about it before." She sighed softly.
"All right, listen. You remember those two small bars of iron that used to
lie on Father's desk when we were children, don't you? I'll tell you
everything I know about them."
The authors will now take the liberty of relating the story of the
boxes since they have every reason to believe that they now know it better
than Rita did.
The Story of the Three Boxes
Stories about strange doings in the Matveyev family had long been
circulating in St. Petersburg. To begin with, way back during the reign of
Peter the Great a Matveyev, a naval lieutenant, had returned from India with
a bewitchingly beautiful dark-eyed girl. The "taint" in the Matveyev family
had probably started with her. Her sons and grandsons did not rise high in
the government service. They cut short their careers by resigning and
burying themselves on their estate in the Tver Province. There they lived in
seclusion, rarely entertaining any visitors.
From the few outsiders who did enter the house it was learned that
rustling, grinding and crackling sounds would come from a forbidden chamber
long past midnight. These sounds were accompanied by infernal sparks; the
kind of freshness in the air that follows a thunderstorm would spread
through the house.
Moreover, it was whispered that the Matveyevs had a magic knife, the
Indian girl's dowry. No one really knew what kind of a magic knife it was
until it came the turn of Arseny Matveyev, great-grandson of Fedor Matveyev
and his Indian wife, to graduate from the naval school in St. Petersburg.
The young warrant officers hired a room in a tavern on the Moika for a
bachelor supper party to celebrate their graduation. They made a great many
fiery speeches over the wine. They recalled adventures from their cruises,
for all of them had sailed in seas near and far as naval cadets.
At the height of the party Arseny Matveyev placed his swarthy hand on
the table, palm downwards, snatched a knife from a scabbard inside his
shirt, and plunged it into his hand right up to the hilt. Then he quickly
returned the knife to its hiding place and held up his hand. It bore no
trace of a scratch, no sign of blood. Afterwards, the young revelry-makers
could not say for sure whether they had actually seen this or whether it was
a product of their wine-heated imaginations.
However that may be, Arseny Matveyev and his knife were soon forgotten.
Napoleon's army invaded Russia. The years that followed were wreathed in the
gunpowder smoke of danger and martial glory.
But there was one person in St. Petersburg, a man always dressed only
in black, who thought constantly about the miraculous knife. From trusted
men he received periodic reports about Arseny Matveyev, wherever the latter
happened to be.
The man in black was Count Joseph Marie de Maistre, Ambassador of the
King of Sardinia (a king who had been deprived of his realm) and an
important personage in the Society of Jesus.
Before the War of 1812 there had been a Jesuit school in St. Petersburg
where, for a high fee, quite a number of young men from distinguished
families learned Latin prayers and Bible history, plus obedience and
humility. When graduates of the school entered the government service they
did not forgot their spiritual fathers.
Young Prince Kurasov visited Count de Maistre perhaps more often than
others. He was the one who told the Sardinian Ambassador about the
miraculous knife. The prince had been one of the few non-naval men invited
to the supper party and had seen Arseny Matveyev plunge the knife into his
hand.
The prince's story gave Count de Maistre much food for thought. A knife
that passed harmlessly through a hand? The elderly Jesuit believed as firmly
in divine signs as he did in the glorious predestination of the Society of
Jesus, vigilant guardian of the faith and thrones. This was certainly a sign
from on high. Just as the knife had passed through human flesh, Jesuits
would pass without hindrance into the palaces of monarchs and into the
chambers of high officials to persuade them to stamp out free thinking. The
time had come to put a stop to the anti-religious sciences that had so
multiplied. These Devil's instruments advocated the Jacobinism that
destroyed thrones. The time had come to make men's hearts humble before
divine Providence. The time had come to elevate the Society, despite the
persecution to which it was subjected, despite the blindness of some rulers.
The great honour of bringing this sign to the attention of the Society had
fallen on him, Count Joseph Marie de Maistre.
The Count resolved not to let Arseny Matveyev disappear from view.
Through scraps of information brought him by other graduates of the school
he followed the young man's fortunes in the war. He knew that Arseny had
been wounded, had convalesced at his estate at Tver, had been recalled to
the Baltic Fleet, promoted to the rank of lieutenant, and was now stationed
at Kronstadt, near St. Petersburg.
One day in March 1815 a carriage drew up to the Sardinian Ambassador's
residence, and a tall, thin-faced man stepped out of it. Fastidiously
skirting a large puddle of melting snow, he mounted the steps leading to the
front entrance. The Count received him at once. The thin-faced man bowed
respectfully as he entered the Count's study.
The Count was sitting in a deep armchair before the fireplace. He
turned his lined, parchment-yellow face to the newcomer and indicated a
chair with a wave of his hand.
"What is the news, mon prince?" he asked in a weary voice.
Young Prince Kurasov seated himself on the edge of a chair.
"The news is fairly good, Your Excellency," he said wanly. "I have
learned that Arseny Matveyev does not carry the knife about with him but has
left it at Zakharino, the family estate. He has been appointed senior
officer on the brig Askold, now being outfitted at Kronstadt preparatory to
cruising in the Pacific Ocean in search of new lands."
The Count lowered his eyelids. "Is that all?"
"No. Now comes the most important news. Three days ago, in the company
of philosophers and atheists like himself, Arseny Matveyev made seditious
speeches. He spoke in favour of the convocation of a general assembly in
Russia."
Count de Maistre sat up straight and struck the arm of his chair with
his frail fist. The eyes in the yellow face glowed with an evil and
unexpectedly youthful sparkle.
"It seems to me, Your Excellency," Prince Kurasov said cautiously,
"that it would be well to set things in motion-"
The Count stopped him with a gesture and became lost in thought.
"No, mon prince,'" he said after a long interval, "we'll take a
different course. When does the lieutenant depart on the brig?"
"In June."
"Splendid! We've waited a long time, and we can wait a little longer,
until June. The matter must be arranged without undue fuss. Do not disturb
Arseny Matveyev."
A little over two and a half years later, on a hot day in February, the
brig Askold, badly battered by severe storms, dropped anchor at Rio de
Janeiro. There the Russian Consul handed Arseny a letter from his father
that had arrived nearly two years before.
"I shall briefly set forth the misfortunes which have befallen our
house, not through God's will but because of the evil designs of wretched
creatures," his father wrote. "You of course remember Prince Kurasov. He
used to be a friend of yours. Fawning and deference have enabled this man
Kurasov to rise to the higher ranks and, some say, to involvement with the
secret police. Out of spite, or for some other reason, Kurasov has informed
against you, repeating everything that you said in your youthful hastiness
and naming the books you read. This denunciation brought officials to
Zakharino. They searched the house from top to bottom, turning everything
upside down, under the pretence of looking for seditious papers.
"But it seems to me that they were looking for something else. Since
they did not find any papers of that kind some of those hounds ransacked our
special chamber most painstakingly. They examined the electricity machines
from all sides. Furthermore, they confiscated the manuscript in which Fedor
Matveyev, my grandfather and your great-grandfather, described his Indian
travels. They also confiscated that wonderful knife of his."
At the beginning of June 1818, after an absence of nearly three years,
the Askold sailed into the roadstead near St. Petersburg.
Early next morning Prince Kurasov's valet announced that Lieutenant
Matveyev wished to see him. The Prince, in his dressing-gown, was being
shaved by his barber.
"Tell him I'm not at home," he ordered.
A few minutes later there was a commotion downstairs, and the valet's
raised voice could be heard. Then the door was flung open. Arseny Matveyev,
his cheeks tanned a deep brown, stood on the threshold. He was in uniform,
with a sword at his side. Prince Kurasov pushed aside the barber's hand and
slowly rose to his feet, wiping the lather from his cheek. Arseny looked at
him with burning eyes.
"Is this how you welcome old friends, Prince?"
"Please leave the room, sir," the Prince said coldly. "You should thank
the Almighty you got off so easily."
Arseny put his hand on his sword-hilt. "I give you exactly one minute
to hand back the souvenirs you took from my father's estate," he said with
restrained fury.
The Prince's narrow face turned whiter than his lace cuffs. He took
several slow steps backwards, towards his canopied bed, and stretched out
his hand to tug at the bell-rope. In two bounds Arseny, his sword drawn, was
at the Prince's side.
Meanwhile the barber had fled, whimpering, from the room.
The Prince, frightened out of his wits, stammered that the things
confiscated during the search had been turned over to Count Joseph de
Maistre, the former Sardinian Ambassador.
"Where does that Jesuit reside now? Tell me, quick!"
"The Count left Russia last year," Prince Kurasov replied sullenly. "I
do not know where he is now."
Arseny spent only a short time in St. Petersburg. He tendered his
resignation arid left for Zakharino.
The warm September day was drawing to a close. Candles had been lighted
in the small snow-white Villa standing in a garden on the edge of a town in
northern Italy. Their flickering glow was reflected in the mahogany panels
that lined the walls of the study. A spare old man in black stood leaning
against an elegant table, examining a sheet of parchment which he held close
to his eyes. Another man, portly and somewhat younger, stood to one side,
waiting.
"My friends were not mistaken in recommending you and your erudition to
me," the old man said, laying the sheet of parchment on the table.
The scholar bowed.
"You have done the Society of Jesus a great service," said the old man,
taking a purse out of a drawer in the table.
"Ad majorem Dei gloriam" the scholar said, accepting the purse. "I wish
Your Excellency a good night."
After seeing his visitor out of the room the old man summoned a servant
and told him to close all the shutters in the house and kindle a fire in the
fireplace. In his old age Count de Maistre suffered greatly from the cold.
He sat down at the table and again examined the parchment. He was
pleased. The old riddle brought back from cold Russia had been given an
excellent interpretation. He could already foresee the great day when the
glory of the Society of Jesus would shine as never before. He, Count Joseph
de Maistre, had not toiled in vain these many years.
The clatter of horses' hooves on the stony road not far away came to
his ears for a minute or so.
Opening a carved casket, the Count removed from it a rolled-up
manuscript tied with a ribbon, and a knife with an ivory handle. Then, one
after another, he took out three small iron boxes and gazed admiringly at
their gleaming sides. A master craftsman in Turin had fashioned them
according to his design, and on each box had engraved the initial letters of
the great motto: A M D G
Below it he had engraved Count Joseph de Maistre's crown and his
initials:
J d M
The Count placed the rolled manuscript in one of the boxes, muttering:
"The Source".
Then he cautiously took the knife by its handle and laid it in the
second box: "The Evidence," he said.
"And this-" he neatly folded the parchment which the scholar had
brought- and this will be 'The Key to the Mystery'."
All of a sudden he glanced with a start at the dark window. He thought
he had heard the crunching of pebbles. But no, all was quiet.
The Count placed "The Key to the Mystery" in the third box. Now he had
only to close the covers and have them sealed.
He heard a rustle outside the window. Was it the porter making his
rounds?
The Count went up to the window and flung it open, but instantly
started back with a cry. A man in a cloak and a wide-brimmed hat was staring
at him from the shadow of an old hornbeam. He was young and swarthy, and his
dark eyes gleamed fiercely at the Count.
"You have vigilant guards, Count," he said in French. "I was forced to
climb over the wall. Do not be afraid. I am not a robber."
The Count had recovered somewhat from his fright. "Who are you, sir?
What do you want in my house?"
"My name is Arseny Matveyev. Now you know what I want."
Fear distorted the Count's yellow face. Suddenly, with an energy
unexpected in such an old body, he dashed to the table, on which his pistol
case lay.
By this time Arseny was in the room.
"Stop where you are, Count!"
The unbidden guest whipped out a pistol from under his cloak and aimed
it at the Count, who took a step backwards. Realizing that the game was up,
the old Jesuit said in a gentle voice:
"It is not becoming, my son, to threaten an old man with a pistol.
Someone has evidently misled you."
"Silence!" Arseny Matveyev barked. "I didn't travel the length and
breadth of France and Italy searching for you just to listen to your
miserable evasions. Put the knife and the manuscript on that table. I'll
count to three."
"There is no need," the Count said dispiritedly. "They are lying on the
table."
Arseny strode over to the table. His eyes sparkled with joy at sight of
the knife.
"The manuscript is in that little box," said Count de Maistre. "Don't
touch the third box. It is mine."
"I am not a Jesuit. I do not covet what belongs to others," Arseny
snapped, this time in Russian. "Take this for your iron boxes."
He tossed a gold coin on the table. Then he closed the covers of the
two boxes, one containing the knife and the other the manuscript, and thrust
them into his pockets.
"Don't you dare to raise the alarm, you old fox," he said as he turned
to leave. "If you do, you'll get a dose of lead."
With those words Arseny Matveyev jumped down from the window. Soon
after, the sound of horse's hooves on the stony road faded into the
distance.
On returning to Russia, Arseny Matveyev was unable to get down to a
thorough study of the secret which his great-grandfather had brought from
India. Other affairs absorbed him. After his father's death he freed the few
serfs the family owned and turned over the estate to his younger brother. He
had the two small iron boxes reliably sealed. Then he moved to St.
Petersburg, where he joined a secret society of revolutionaries.
On December 14, 1825, after the failure of the December uprising in St.
Petersburg, Arseny came galloping into Zakharino in the night. The next
morning gendarmes broke into the house. As they led Arseny out of the house,
under arrest, he only had time to whisper to his brother: "Guard those two
little iron boxes like the apple of your eye. Farewell."
Arseny Matveyev was exiled to salt mines in Siberia. He never returned
from there.
"All I know," said Rita, "is that Arseny brought home two small iron
boxes from abroad, and they were in the possession of the Matveyev family
ever since. No one knew that anything was inside them. When my husband and I
started packing our things before moving to our present flat, the knife
suddenly dropped out of one of the boxes. Mother threw the other box away
along with a lot of old junk. It was dirty and rusty and had been used to
prop up an old wardrobe with a broken leg. Who could have guessed there
would be a manuscript inside?"
"Did you ever hear anything about a third box?" Nikolai asked.
"No. That's why I was so surprised when you and Yura came to ask me
about it. What do you know?"
"Only that it exists."
Nikolai then told Rita about the Italian subversive agent and the theft
in the museum.
"There was something very important in that third little box," he said
in conclusion. "De Maistre called it 'The Key to the Mystery'."
The other passengers in the carriage had gone to bed. The plump
conductress was sweeping the corridor. They continued to stand by the
window, watching the snowbound night fly past, marked off by telegraph
poles.
Nikolai reflected in amazement that here was Rita standing by his side,
elbow to elbow, no longer an infinitely distant stranger but Yellow Lynx, an
old friend from his childhood. Yet still in all a stranger.
"Look here, Nikolai," Rita said suddenly, pressing her forehead to the
glass and closing her eyes. "Can I trust you?"
He wanted to say that he was ready to jump off the train into the
darkness then and there if she asked him to.
"Yes," he said.
Rita was silent for a while. Then she threw back her head. "I feel as
though I'll burst into tears in a moment if I don't tell someone-"
She then proceeded to tell him, without holding anything back, about
the misfortune that had befallen her. She told him how Anatole had started
to study the knife and how she had encouraged his ambition. How, desiring to
increase his working capacity, he had become a drug addict. How she had
jumped overboard after the knife, caught it in the clear water, hidden it
under her dress and told her husband it was lost because-so she had
thought-without the knife he would not be able to continue his
investigations. How she had urged Anatole to give up those accursed
experiments, but instead he had joined up with Opratin and was wearing
himself out with work and with drugs. How he had walked out of the house.
And finally, she told Nikolai how she had given Opratin the knife the
previous day in the hope that this would help them to complete the project
sooner, after which Anatole would return to her.
"You gave the knife to Opratin!" Nikolai exclaimed.
Rita measured him with a long look.
"Promise me you won't tell a soul about any of this. Not a single soul.
Not even Yura."
"But why, Rita? Why keep silent? On the contrary, something has to be
done. We must convince your husband that such single-handed experiments
aren't fruitful. We must persuade him to switch to our Institute."
"No," she said. "He wouldn't pay any attention to that kind of talk. It
would only make him still angrier."
"He wouldn't listen to me, of course. But he would to Privalov and
Professor Bagbanly."
"No, you don't know him," Rita repeated insistently. "You must promise
to say nothing. I demand it."
"Very well," said Nikolai in a downcast voice, "I promise."
"They unfurled their canvas sails
And sped across the Caspian Sea."
-From the Russian epic poem
Vassily Buslayevich
IN WHICH PRIVALOV'S LABORATORY IS BLOWN UP
Valery Gorbachevsky felt, on that lovely day in June, that his
bottle-green sun-glasses were rose-coloured. His leave of absence to take
his correspondence college exams was over, and everything had gone well, if
you closed your eyes to a mediocre mark in English.
He was now on his way to work after an interval of twenty days. He was
walking fast because he had had to stop at the library, which opened at
eight o'clock, to return some textbooks, and he was afraid he would be
reprimanded by Nikolai Potapkin for being late.
Valery skirted the bed of gladioli near the entrance and flew into the
lobby. He dashed past the cloakroom, with its thickets of nickel-plated
racks, and past the time-board, now closed, hoping that speed would enable
him to avoid the timekeeper.
It did not work out that way. The timekeeper, pleasant-faced Ella, was
at her place. Strangely enough, Yura Kostyukov, incredibly handsome in
cream-coloured flannels and a new green-and-yellow checked shirt, was
sitting beside her. Still under the influence of Fedor Matveyev's
manuscript, Yura was amusing himself by paying the girl courtly compliments
in eighteenth century fashion. Ella did not understand half of what Yura
said but she was flattered and could not stop giggling.
When Yura caught sight of Valery he turned with great dignity to glance
at the clock. "Please note, Ella," he drawled, "that this man, returning
from a leave of absence, has arrived eleven minutes late but does not look
the least repentant."
"What the hell are you doing here?" Valery wondered disrespectfully.
Out loud he said the first thing that came into his head. "The trolleybus-"
"Ah, to be sure, to be sure." Yura nodded understandingly. "I hadn't
thought of that. But fate is always merciful to the lazy ones." He drew a
folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket. "Here you are. This is for
you."
"My annual vacation?" Valery said, reading the paper. "But I don't want
it just now."
"There are times when the management has the right to insist that the
personnel go on vacation even if they don't want to," Yura said in a tone of
mock authority. "I didn't ask for my vacation either. Neither did any of the
others".
"All of us? The whole laboratory?"
"At nine o'clock you'll be able to draw your vacation pay. And don't
ask idle questions."
"I'll step into the laboratory meanwhile."
"Follow my example, young man, and restrain your zeal."
Yura was right. Managements do have the right, when circumstances arise
that prevent the normal functioning of a factory shop, office or the like,
to insist that members of the staff take their annual vacation regardless of
any schedules that may have been drawn up previously.
In this case the circumstances had been the following:
After Privalov and Nikolai returned from Moscow the development of a
pipeless oil pipeline had been included in their Institute's research
programme. Since the main research was being done at the Institute of
Surfaces in Moscow, cautious Pavel Koltukhov forbade experiments in this
field.
"The devil take the lot of you!" he exclaimed in reply to Privalov's
arguments. "I'm fed up with your delightful habit of sticking your finger in
other people's pies. First thing I know your lab technician will be putting
his head in an inductor, and I'll have to answer for it."
When a thick envelope arrived from Moscow towards the end of April the
Institute director summoned Koltukhov and Privalov to a conference. When
Professor Bagbanly arrived shortly afterwards he was also shown through the
massive leather-covered door of the director's office. The conference lasted
for hours. First glasses of tea were carried in, then bottles of mineral
water.
Yura appeared in the reception room after lunch. "Smells like something
burning," he remarked with a glance at the closed door, wrinkling up his
nose.
The secretary did not pause in her typing. "Run along now, Yura," she
said. "They'll manage without you."
Yura went back to the laboratory.
"Something's cooking in the director's office, Nikolai," he whispered
to his friend. "They've been at it since morning. Boris forgot all about his
yoghurt during the lunch break. It's probably news from Moscow. Listen,
can't you tear yourself away from your slide rule? What's the matter with
you, anyway?"
Nikolai said nothing. He studied his unfinished drawing with
exaggerated attention. The curve he had just plotted reminded him of a
wind-filled sail. This association brought back a picture of the high white
side of the Uzbekistan, and a slender figure in a red sun-dress diving into
the sea. Also, a picture of melancholy dark eyes.
Nikolai drew his hand across his forehead.
Rita had once been simply a stranger, gradually to be forgotten, driven
from his mind. But now- now everything was all confused. No matter how he
tried he could not forget her. She was no longer a stranger. She was Yellow
Lynx, a childhood playmate.
Nikolai had hardly seen her since their return from Moscow. She had
phoned him several times at work. He had asked her, in a wooden voice, how
life was treating her. She had told him that Anatole had returned home and
had promised her to go into hospital for treatment as soon as he finished
the job. Anatole's work was going along well. Rita spoke about it in a gay,
animated voice. Nikolai was glad for her sake. But every time she rang up he
experienced pain.
One day Rita invited Nikolai and Yura to drop in for tea. She wanted to
introduce them, her childhood friends, to her husband.
Nikolai had never seen Anatole before. He was struck by Anatole's
unhealthy colouring, the bags under his eyes, and his dull glance.
Anatole picked languidly at the cake on his plate. He took no part in
the conversation. Nikolai was dying to ask him about Fedor Matveyev's knife,
but that question and many others on the tip of his tongue could not be
asked because of the promise he had given Rita.
Anatole turned his lacklustre eyes on Nikolai. "Has your apparatus
produced any sort of long-term penetrability?" he asked.
Nikolai almost choked in surprise. He hurriedly chewed the piece of
cake in his mouth. "I don't really know," he replied. "We turned everything
over to the Academy of Sciences."
"How are your experiments coming along?" Yura politely asked
Benedictov. "When will we be able to offer you our congratulations?"
"How can we compete with the Academy?" Anatole asked glumly.
Yura twitched his blond eyebrows. "Why compete? Join us. The days of
ivory-tower scholars are over. Modern scientific problems are so-"
Anatole interrupted him. "You're too young, far too young, in fact, to
tell me which days are over and which aren't." He frowned. No one said
anything. Rita hurriedly changed the topic. "You boys are going to
tomorrow's concert at Philharmony Hall, aren't you?"
But this did not help. The afternoon was ruined. Soon after, Anatole
rose, complaining of a headache, and left the room.
Yura could see what was troubling Nikolai, but for the first time in
their many years together he could think of no way to help his friend. He
even went so far as to ask Val's advice, but she viewed the matter rather
disdainfully. She did not seem to like this newly-found playmate of their
childhood.
The envelope that had come from the Institute of Surfaces in Moscow
really did contain interesting news. The frequencies which had influenced
the Cooper Lane installation had been ascertained. What had been vaguely
hinted at in the clumsy experiment mounted by the young engineers had been
translated into the language of formulas and figures. The workers at the
Moscow Institute had obtained their initial result: the rods pressed
together in the field of the Mobius band had penetrated each other, although