The Master and Margarita. gician, along with his thrice-cursed assistants, and yet it was impossible to find him anywhere

gician, along with his thrice-cursed assistants, and yet it was impossible to find him anywhere. What, then, if one may ask: had he fallen through the earth after his disgusting performance, or, as some people claimed, had he never come to Moscow at all? To accept the first explanation meant that he had taken the entire top management of the Variety with him when he vanished, whereas the implication of the second explanation was that the managers of the ill-starred theater had themselves disappeared from Moscow without a trace, after first performing some dirty trick (recall, if nothing else, the smashed window in the office and the behavior of Ace of Diamonds).

Credit should be given to the person in charge of the investigation. The missing Rimsky was found with astonishing speed. All that had to be done was to juxtapose Ace of Diamond's behavior at the taxi-stand near the movie theater with certain time data, such as when the performance ended and when Rimsky could have disappeared, in order to dispatch a telegram to Leningrad. The answer came an hour later (on Friday evening) that Rimsky had been located on the fourth floor of the Astoria Hotel in Room 412, which was next door to the room occupied by the repertory director of one of the Moscow theaters then on tour in Leningrad, a room which was known for its gilded, gray-blue furniture and its magnificent bath.

Found hiding in the wardrobe of Room 412 at the Astoria, Rimsky was arrested immediately and interrogated there in Leningrad. Following which, a telegram reached Moscow stating that the Variety's financial director was not responsible for his actions, that he either could not or would not answer questions coherently, and that he kept asking to be put away in an armored room under armed guard. Moscow telegrammed a reply, ordering that Rimsky be transported back to Moscow under guard, as a result of which, Rimsky did leave Leningrad under guard on the Friday evening train.

By Friday evening they were on Likhodeyev's trail as well. Telegrams had been sent to all cities, inquiring about Likhodeyev's whereabouts, and Yalta had sent a reply saying that he had been there, but had left by plane for Moscow.

The only trail that was cold was Varenukha's. The illustrious theater manager, known to all of Moscow, seemed to have dropped into the sea.

In the meantime, they had to deal with what had happened in other parts of Moscow, beyond the confines of the Variety Theater. Explanations had to be found for the strange case of the singing office clerks (incidentally, Professor Stravinsky cured them in two hours with the help of subcutaneous injections), for the individuals who had passed off the-devil-knows-what as money to other individuals or institutions, and finally, for the people who had been victimized as a result.