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Ivan tried to grab the rascal by the sleeve, but missed and caught hold of nothing. The choirmaster seemed to have vanished into the ground.
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Ivan groaned, looked off into the distance and saw the hateful stranger. He was already at the exit to Patriarch's Lane, and he wasn't alone. The more than dubious choirmaster had managed to catch up with him. And that wasn't all: the third member of the company, who had appeared out of nowhere, turned out to be a cat, big as a hog and pitch-black, like a crow, or like soot, and sporting a mustache like a reckless cavalryman's. The threesome set off down Patriarch's Lane, with the cat walking on his hind legs.
Ivan rushed off in pursuit of the villains and soon realized that catching up with them was going to be very difficult.
The threesome tore down the lane in a flash and were on Spiridonovka. No matter how much Ivan quickened his pace, the distance between pursuer and pursued never shortened. Before the poet could realize what was happening, he had left the peaceful Spiridonovka behind, and found himself at Nikitsky Gates where his plight worsened. Here there was a huge crowd, and when Ivan ran into one of the passersby, he was showered with curses. It was here, moreover, that the villainous gang resorted to that favorite outlaw strategy—they split up and went in different directions.
With great agility the choirmaster corkscrewed himself into a mov-
The Chose 41
ing bus going to Arbat Square, and disappeared. After losing one of the pack, Ivan focused all his attention on the cat He saw the bizarre feline walk over to the steps of an " A" streetcar that was standing at the stop, rudely push aside a woman who let out a shriek, grab onto the handrail, and even try to thrust a ten-kopeck piece at the conductress through the window, open because of the heat.
The cat's behavior so amazed Ivan that he froze in his tracks next to a grocery store on the corner, only then to become even more amazed by the behavior of the conductress. As soon as she saw the cat climbing onto the streetcar, she began shouting with such fury that she shook all over, " Cats aren't allowed! No passengers with cats! Shoo! Get off, or I'll call the police! "
But neither the conductress nor the passengers were amazed by the most important thing of all, namely, that a cat was not merely getting on a streetcar, which wasn't so bad, but that he intended to pay his fare!
The cat turned out to be not only a fare-paying beast, but a disciplined one as well. At the first yell from the conductress, he stopped in his tracks, got off the streetcar, and sat down at the stop, stroking his whiskers with his ten-kopeck piece. But no sooner did the conductress pull the cord and the streetcar start to move, than the cat did just what anyone who has been kicked off a streetcar and still has somewhere to go would do. He let all three cars go by, then jumped onto the coupler in back of the last one, grabbed on to a piece of tubing that stuck out of the back with his paw and sailed off, saving himself ten kopecks in the bargain.
Preoccupied with the revolting cat, Ivan almost lost track of the most important one of the three, the professor. But, fortunately, he had not managed to slip away. Ivan caught sight of his gray beret in the midst of the crowd swarming into Bolshaya Nikitskaya or Herzen Street In the flash of an eye Ivan himself was there, but to no avail. Although he quickened his pace and began running at jogging speed, jostling pedestrians in the process, he never managed to get any closer to the professor.
However distraught he was, Ivan Nikolayevich could not help but be struck by the supernatural speed of the chase. Twenty seconds after leaving Nikitsky Gates, he was blinded by the lights on Arbat Square, and a few seconds after that, he was on a dark side street with sloping sidewalks, where he fell with a crash and hit his knee. Again a brightly lit thoroughfare—Kropotkin Street, then a side-street, then Ostozhenka and yet another side street, bleak, nasty, and poorly lit. It was here that Ivan Nikolayevich finally lost the man who was so important to him. The professor had vanished.