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Needless to say, the most distasteful, the most scandalous, the most baffling incident of all was the theft in broad daylight, of the late writer







The End of Apartment Ho. 50 285

Berlioz's head, right out of the coffin on display in the Griboyedov hall.

A twelve-man team conducted the investigation, trying to pick up, with a knitting needle, as it were, all the infernal stitches spread all over Moscow, of this complicated case.

One of the investigators went to Professor Stravinsky's clinic and asked, first of all, for a list of all those who had been admitted to the clinic in the last three days. This led them to Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoi and the unfortunate emcee whose head had been wrenched off. The two of them, however, took up little of their time, since it had been easy to establish that they had both been victims of the mysterious magician and his gang. Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny, on the other hand, was of great interest to the investigators.

Early on Friday evening the door of Ivanushka's room, No. 117, opened and in walked a young man with a round face, who was calm, gentle-mannered, and who looked nothing like an investigator even though he was one of the best in Moscow. He saw a pale, drawn-looking young man lying on the bed, whose eyes were indifferent to what was going on around him, whose eyes turned outward, to some spot far above and beyond the room, or inward, into the young man himself.

The investigator introduced himself amiably and said he had come to see Ivan Nikolayevich to discuss the events of two days before at Patriarch's Ponds.

Oh, how triumphant Ivan would have felt, if only the investigator had come to see him a little earlier, say, late Wednesday night, when Ivan had been trying so frantically and passionately to get someone to listen to his story about Patriarch s Ponds. Now his dream of helping catch the foreign consultant had come true, and he did not have to run after anyone any more since they had come to see him themselves, to hear his tale about what happened Wednesday evening.

But, alas, in the time that had elapsed since Berlioz's death Ivan had undergone a complete change. He was ready and willing to answer all the investigator's questions politely, but his indifference was evident in his eyes and in the way he spoke. The poet was no longer moved by Berlioz's fate.

Ivanushka had been lying in a doze before the investigator's arrival, and a number of visions had passed before him. He had seen a strange, incomprehensible, non-existent city with blocks of marble, worn-down colonnades, and roofs sparkling in the sun, with the somber and pitiless black Antonia Tower, the palace on the western hill, sunk almost to the roof in the tropical greenery of a garden, with bronze statues towering above that greenery and burning in the setting sun, and he had seen armor-clad, Roman centurions marching beneath the walls of the ancient city.


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