It must be said that Varenukha’s response was marked by a slight oddity which at once needled the findirector, who could compete in sensitivity with the seismograph of any of the world’s best stations. How could it be? Why did Varenukha come to the findirector’s office if he thought he was not there? He had his own office, first of all. And second, whichever entrance to the building Varenukha had used, he would inevitably have met one of the night- watchmen, to all of whom it had been announced that Grigory Danilovich was staying late in his office. But the findirector did not spend long pondering this oddity - he had other problems.
‘Why didn’t you call? What are all these shenanigans about Yalta?’
‘Well, it’s as I was saying,’ the administrator replied, sucking as if he were troubled by a bad tooth. ‘He was found in the tavern in Pushkino.’
‘In Pushkino?! You mean just outside Moscow?! What about the telegrams from Yalta?!’
‘The devil they’re from Yalta! He got a telegrapher drunk in Pushkino, and the two of them started acting up, sending telegrams marked “Yalta”, among other things.’
‘Aha ... aha ... Well, all right, all right...’ Rimsky did not say but sang out. His eyes lit up with a yellow light. In his head there formed the festive picture of Styopa’s shameful dismissal from his job. Deliverance ! The findirector’s long-awaited deliverance from this disaster in the person of Likhodeev! And maybe Stepan Bogdanovich would achieve something worse than dismissal... ‘The details!’ said Rimsky, banging the paperweight on the desk.
And Varenukha began giving the details. As soon as he arrived where the findirector had sent him, he was received at once and given a most attentive hearing. No one, of course, even entertained the thought that Styopa could be in Yalta. Everyone agreed at once with Varenukha’s suggestion that Likhodeev was, of course, at the Yalta in Pushkino.
‘Then where is he now?’ the agitated findirector interrupted the administrator.
‘Well, where else could he be?’ the administrator replied, grinning crookedly. ‘In a sobering-up cell, naturally!’
‘Well, well. How nice!’
Varenukha went on with his story, and the more he told, the more vividly there unfolded before the findirector the long chain of Likhodeev’s boorish and outrageous acts, and every link in this chain was worse than the one before. The drunken dancing in the arms of the telegrapher on the lawn in front of the Pushkino telegraph office to the sounds of some itinerant barrel-organ was worth something! The chase after some female citizens shrieking with terror! The attempt at a fight with the barman in the Yalta itself! Scattering green onions all over the floor of the same Yalta. Smashing eight bottles of dry white Ai-Danil. Breaking the meter when the taxi-driver refused to take Styopa in his cab. Threatening to arrest the citizens who attempted to stop Styopa’s obnoxiousness ... In short, black horror!
Styopa was well known in Moscow theatre circles, and everyone knew that the man was no gift. But all the same, what the administrator was telling about him was too much even for Styopa. Yes, too much. Even much too much ...
Rimsky’s needle-sharp glance pierced the administrator’s face from across the desk, and the longer the man spoke, the grimmer those eyes became. The more lifelike and colourful the vile details with which the administrator furnished his story, the less the findirector believed the storyteller. And when Varenukha told how Styopa had let himself go so far as to try to resist those who came to bring him back to Moscow, the findirector already knew firmly that everything the administrator who had returned at midnight was telling him, everything, was a lie! A lie from first word to last!
Varenukha never went to Pushkino, and there was no Styopa in Pushkino. There was no drunken telegrapher, there was no broken glass in the tavern, Styopa did not get tied up with ropes ... none of it happened.
As soon as the findirector became firmly convinced that the administrator was lying to him, fear crept over his body, starting from the legs, and twice again the findirector fancied that a putrid malarial dankness was wafting across the floor. Never for a moment taking his eyes off the administrator — who squirmed somehow strangely in his armchair, trying not to get out of the blue shade of the desk lamp, and screening himself with a newspaper in some remarkable fashion from the bothersome light - the findirector was thinking of only one thing: what did it all mean? Why was he being lied to so brazenly, in the silent and deserted building, by the administrator who was so late in coming back to him? And the awareness of danger, an unknown but menacing danger, began to gnaw at Rimsky’s soul. Pretending to ignore Varenukha’s dodges and tricks with the newspaper, the findirector studied his face, now almost without listening to the yarn Varenukha was spinning. There was something that seemed still more inexplicable than the calumny invented, God knows why, about adventures in Pushkino, and that something was the change in the administrator’s appearance and manners.
No matter how the man pulled the duck-like visor of his cap over his eyes, so as to throw a shadow on his face, no matter how he fidgeted with the newspaper, the findirector managed to make out an enormous bruise on the right side of his face just by the nose. Besides that, the normally full-blooded administrator was now pale with a chalk-like, unhealthy pallor, and on this stifling night his neck was for some reason wrapped in an old striped scarf. Add to that the repulsive manner the administrator had acquired during the time of his absence of sucking and smacking, the sharp change in his voice, which had become hollow and coarse, and the furtiveness and cowardliness in his eyes, and one could boldly say that Ivan Savelyevich Varenukha had become unrecognizable.
Something else burningly troubled the findirector, but he was unable to grasp precisely what it was, however much he strained his feverish mind, however hard he peered at Varenukha. One thing he could affirm, that there was something unprecedented, unnatural in this combination of the administrator and the familiar armchair.
‘Well, we finally overpowered him, loaded him into the car,’ Varenukha boomed, peeking from behind the paper and covering the bruise with his hand.
Rimsky suddenly reached out and, as if mechanically, tapping his fingers on the table at the same time, pushed the electric-bell button with his palm and went numb. The sharp signal ought to have been heard without fail in the empty building. But no signal came, and the button sank lifelessly into the wood of the desk. The button was dead, the bell broken.
The findirector’s stratagem did not escape the notice of Varenukha, who asked, twitching, with a clearly malicious fire flickering in his eyes:
‘What are you ringing for?’
‘Mechanically,’ the findirector replied hollowly, jerking his hand back, and asked in turn, in an unsteady voice: ‘What’s that on your face?’
‘The car skidded, I bumped against the door-handle,’ Varenukha said, looking away.
