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Minutes later, all that was left on the top of the hill were those two bodies and three empty posts. The water beat down on the bodies and turned them over.
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By that time both Levi and Yeshua's body had vanished from the top of the hill.
XVII
An Upsetting Day
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N Friday morning, that is, the day after the accursed performance, the entire staff of the Variety Theater—the bookkeeper Vasily Stepanovich Lastochkin, two clerks, three typists, both cashiers, the messenger boys, ushers, and cleaning women—in short, everyone at the theater, were not at their posts. Instead, they were all sitting on the sills of the windows above Sadovaya Street, looking down at what was happening outside the theater. Stretched along the wall in a double line that reached as far as Kudrinsky Square were thousands of people. At the front of the line stood twenty or more of the most prominent scalpers in the Moscow theatrical world.
The people in line were very agitated and kept attracting the attention of passersby with their inflammatory stories of the previous day's extraordinary performance of black magic. These stories had particularly distressed the bookkeeper, Vasily Stepanovich, who had not attended the performance. The ushers were saying all sorts of preposterous things, for example, that after the performance some ladies ran down the street indecently clad and other things of that sort. The modest and quiet Vasily Stepanovich merely blinked his eyes as he listened to all their wondrous tales. He had no idea what he should do, even though something did have to be done, and by him in particular, since he was now first in command at the Variety Theater.
By ten in the morning the line of ticket seekers had swelled to such proportions that the police had gotten wind of it. Mounted and on foot they descended on the scene with astonishing speed and managed to restore some order. However, even an orderly line a mile long was a source of distraction and amazement for the people on Sadovaya Street. That was the situation outside the theater, and inside things weren't going very well either. The phones in the offices of Likhodeyev, Rimsky, and Varenukha, as well as those in the ticket office and the bookkeeping department, had been ringing nonstop since early morning. At first Vasily Stepanovich had made some sort of response to
An Upsetting Day 155
callers, as had the cashier and the ushers, who mumbled something into the phone, but after a while they stopped answering altogether because they had absolutely no answer to give to questions about the whereabouts of Likhodeyev, Varenukha, or Rimsky. At first they had tried to get off with lines like, " Likhodeyev is in his apartment, " but this only made the callers say that they had called there and been told that he was at the Variety.
An agitated lady had called, demanding to speak with Rimsky. After she had been advised to call his wife, the receiver burst into tears, saying that she was his wife and that Rimsky was nowhere to be found. It was the beginning of a kind of nonsensical farce. The cleaning woman had already told everyone that when she came to clean the financial director's office, she found the door wide open, the lights on, the window overlooking the garden smashed, the chair overturned on the floor, and no one there.
Just after ten Madame Rimsky charged into the Variety, wringing her hands and sobbing. Vasily Stepanovich was totally at a loss and had no idea what to advise her. Then at ten-thirty the police showed up. Their first, completely reasonable, question was, " What's going on here, citizens? What's this all about? "
The theater staff pushed a pale and flustered Vasily Stepanovich forward and then stepped back. He had no choice but to call a spade a spade and admit that the administration of the Variety Theater, to wit, the director, financial director, and manager, had vanished and their whereabouts were unknown, that after last night's performance the emcee had been removed to a psychiatric hospital, and that, briefly put, last night's show had been nothing short of scandalous.
After consoling the sobbing Madame Rimsky as much as they could and sending her home, they seemed most interested in the cleaning woman's account of the state of the financial director's office. The staff was asked to get back to work, and a short time later an investigative unit arrived, accompanied by a muscular dog the color of cigarette ash, with highly intelligent eyes and pointed ears. The theater staff was immediately abuzz with the rumor that the dog was none other than the famous Ace of Diamonds. And, it was, in fact, he. His behavior astounded everyone. As soon as Ace of Diamonds ran into the financial director's office, he started to growl and bared his monstrous yellow fangs, then he lay down on his belly, his expression a blend of anguish and fury, and started to crawl over to the broken window. Having overcome his fear, he suddenly jumped up on the windowsill, stuck his pointed muzzle up in the air, and let out a wild and vicious howl. Not wanting to come down from the window, he growled and trembled and tried to jump out.
The dog was led out of the office and let go in the lobby, and from there he went out the front entrance into the street, leading those who were following him over to the taxi stand. There he lost the scent. After