The Fatal Eggs (5 page)

The guest vanished so quickly that after a
moment Persikov, who was shaking with rage, was not sure whether he had been a
hallucination or not.

"His galoshes?"
Persikov yelled a moment later in the hall.

"The gentleman forgot them, sir,"
replied a quaking Maria Stepanovna.

"Throw them out!"

"How can I? The gentleman's bound to come
back for them."

"Hand them over to the house committee.
And get a receipt. Don't let me ever set eyes on them again! Take them to the
committee! Let them have that spy's galoshes!"

Maria Stepanovna crossed herself, picked up
the splendid leather galoshes and took them out of the back door. She stood
outside for a while,
then
hid the galoshes in the
pantry.

"Handed them over?" growled
Persikov.

"Yes, sir."

"Give me the receipt."

"But the Chairman can't write, Vladimir
Ipatych!"

"Get.
Me.
A. Receipt.
At.
Once.
Let some literate rascal sign it for him."

Maria Stepanovna just shook her head, went off
and returned a quarter of an hour later with a note which said: "Rcvd for
storage from Prof. Persikov I (one) pr. ga's.
Kolesov."

"And what might that be?"

"It's a baggage check, sir."

Persikov trampled on the check, but put the
receipt under the blotter.

Then a sudden thought made his high
forehead darken. He rushed to the telephone, rang Pankrat at the Institute and
asked him if everything was alright there. Pankrat snarled something into the
receiver, which could be interpreted as meaning that, as far as he could see,
everything there was fine. But Persikov did not calm down for long. A moment
later he grabbed the phone and boomed into the receiver:

"Give me the, what's it called, Lubyanka.
Merci... Which of you should I report this to ... there are some
suspicious-looking characters in galoshes round here, and... Professor Persikov
of the Fourth University..."

The receiver suddenly cut the conversation
short, and Persikov walked away, cursing under his breath.

"Would you like some tea, Vladimir
Ipatych?" Maria Stepanovna enquired timidly, peeping into the study.

"No, I would not ... and the
devil take
the lot of them... What's got into
them!
"

Exactly ten minutes later the Professor
received some new visitors in his study. One of them was pleasant, rotund and
very polite, in an ordinary khaki service jacket and breeches. A pince-nez
perched on his nose, like a crystal butterfly. In fact he looked like a cherub
in patent leather boots.

The second, short and extremely grim,
wore civilian clothes, but they seemed to constrict him. The third visitor
behaved in a most peculiar fashion. He did not enter the Professor's study, but
stayed outside in the dark corridor. The brightly lit study wreathed in clouds
of tobacco smoke was entirely visible to him. The face of this third man, also
in civilian clothes, was adorned by a tinted pince-nez.

The two inside the study wore Persikov out
completely,
examining the visiting card, asking him about
the five thousand and making him describe what the man looked like.

"The devil only knows," Persikov
muttered. "Well, he had a loathsome face.
A
degenerate."

"Did he have a glass eye?" the small
man croaked.

"The devil only knows. But no, he didn't.
His eyes darted about all the time."

"Rubinstein?" the cherub asked the
small man quietly. But the small man shook his head gloomily.

"Rubinstein would never give cash without
a receipt, that's for sure,"

he
muttered.
"This isn't Rubinstein's work. It's someone bigger."

The story about the galoshes evoked the
liveliest interest from the visitors. The cherub rapped a few words down the
receiver: "The State Political Board orders house committee secretary Kolesov
to come to Professor Persikov's apartment I at once with the galoshes." In
a flash Kolesov turned up in thes study, pale-faced and clutching the pair of
galoshes.

"Vasenka!" the cherub called quietly
to the man sitting in the hall,
who
got up lethargically
and slouched into the study. The tinted lenses had swallowed up his eyes
completely.

"Yeh?" he asked briefly and
sleepily.

"The galoshes."

The tinted lenses slid over the galoshes, and
Persikov thought he saw a pair of very sharp eyes, not at all sleepy, flash out
from under the lenses for a second. But they disappeared almost at once.

"Well, Vasenka?"

The man called Vasenka replied in a flat
voice: "Well what? They're Polenzhkovsky's galoshes."

The house committee was immediately deprived
of Professor Persikov's present. The galoshes disappeared in a newspaper.
Highly delighted, the cherub in the service jacket rose to his feet and began
to pump the Professor's hand, even delivering a small speech, the gist of which
was as follows: it did the Professor honour ... the Professor could rest
assured ... he would not be disturbed any more, either at the Institute or at
home ... steps would be taken, his chambers were perfectly safe...

"But couldn't you shoot the
reporters?" asked Persikov, looking over his spectacles.

His question cheered the visitors up no end.
Not only the small gloomy one, but even the tinted one in the hall gave a big
smile. Beaming and sparkling, the cherub explained that that was impossible.

"But who was that scoundrel who came
here?"

The smiles disappeared at once, and the cherub
replied evasively that it was just some petty speculator not worth worrying
about. All the same he trusted that the Professor would treat the events of
this evening in complete confidence, and the visitors left.

Persikov returned to his study and the
diagrams, but he was not destined to study them. The telephone's red light went
on, and a female voice suggested that the Professor might like to marry an
attractive and amorous widow with a seven-roomed apartment. Persikov howled
down the receiver:

"I advise you to get treatment from
Professor Rossolimo..." and then the phone rang again.

This time Persikov softened somewhat, because
the person, quite a famous one, who was ringing from the Kremlin enquired at
length with great concern about Persikov's work and expressed the desire to
visit his laboratory. Stepping back from the telephone, Persikov wiped his
forehead and took off the receiver. Then trumpets began blaring and the shrieks
of the Valkyrie rang in the apartment upstairs. The cloth mill director's radio
had tuned in to the Wagner concert at the Bolshoi. To the accompaniment of
howls and rumbles descending from the ceiling, Persikov declared to Maria
Stepanovna that he would take the director to court, smash his radio to bits,
and get the blazes out of Moscow, because somebody was clearly trying to drive
him out. He broke his magnifying glass, spent the night on the divan in the
study and was lulled to sleep by the sweet trills of a famous pianist wafted
from the Bolshoi Theatre.

The following day was also full of surprises.
After taking the tram to the Institute, Persikov found a stranger in a
fashionable green bowler hat standing on the porch. He scrutinised Persikov
carefully, but did not address any questions to him, so Persikov put up with
him. But in the Institute hall, apart from the dismayed Pankrat, a second
bowler hat stood up as Persikov came in and greeted him courteously: "Good
morning, Citizen Professor."

"What do you want?" asked Persikov
furiously, tearing off his coat with Pankrat's help. But the bowler hat quickly
pacified Persikov by whispering in the gentlest of voices that there was no
need at all for the Professor to be upset. He, the bowler hat, was there
precisely in order to protect the Professor from all sorts of importunate
visitors. The Professor could rest assured not only about the laboratory doors,
but also about the windows. So saying the stranger turned back the lapel of his
jacket for a moment and showed the Professor a badge.

"Hm ... you work pretty efficiently, I
must say," Persikov growled, adding naively: "What will you have to
eat?"

Whereupon the bowler hat smiled and explained
that someone would come to relieve him.

The next three days were splendid. The
Professor had two visits from the Kremlin and one from the students whom he was
to examine. The students all failed to a man, and you could see from their
faces that Persikov now filled them with a superstitious dread.

"Go and be bus conductors! You're not fit
to study zoology,"
came
the shouts from his
laboratory.

"Strict, is he?" the bowler hat
asked Pankrat.

"I should say so," Pankrat replied.
"If any of 'em stick it to the end, they come staggerin' out, sweatin'
like pigs, and make straight for the boozer."

With all this going on the Professor did not
notice the time pass, but on the fourth day he was again brought back to
reality, thanks to a thin, shrill voice from the street.

"Vladimir Ipatych!" the voice
shouted through the open window from Herzen Street. The voice was in luck.
Persikov had driven himself too hard in the last few days. And at that moment
he was sitting in an armchair having a rest and a smoke, with a vacant stare in
his red-rimmed eyes. He was exhausted. So it was even with a certain curiosity
that he looked out of the window and saw Alfred Bronsky on the pavement. The
Professor recognised the titled owner of the visiting card from his pointed hat
and note-pad.

Bronsky gave a tender and courteous
bow to the window.

"Oh, it's you, is it?" asked the
Professor. He did not have the strength to be angry and was even curious to
know what would happen next.

Protected by the window he felt safe
from Alfred. The ever-vigilant
bowler hat
outside
immediately turned an ear to Bronsky. The latter's face blossomed into the
smarmiest of smiles.

"Just a sec or two, dear Professor,"
said Bronsky, raising his voice to make himself heard. "I have one
question only and it concerns zoology. May I put it to you?"

"You may," Persikov replied in a
laconic, ironical tone, thinking to himself: "There's something American
about that rascal, you know."

"What have you to say re the fowls,
Professor?" shouted Bronsky, cupping his hands round his mouth.

Persikov was taken aback. He sat on the
window-sill, then got down, pressed a knob and shouted, pointing at the window:
"Let that fellow on the pavement in, Pankrat!"

When Bronsky walked into the room, Persikov
extended his bonhomie to the point of barking "Sit down!" to him.

Smiling ecstatically, Bronsky sat down on the
revolving stool "Kindly explain something to me," Persikov began.
"You write for those newspapers of yours, don't you?"

"That is so," Alfred replied
respectfully.

"Well, what I can't understand is how you
can write if you can't even speak Russian properly. What do you mean by 'a sec
or two'
and 're
the fowls'?"

Bronsky gave a thin, respectful laugh.

"Valentin Petrovich corrects it."

"And who might Valentin Petrovich
be?"

"The head of the
literary section."

"Oh, well. I'm not a philologist anyway.
Now, leaving aside that Petrovich of yours, what exactly do you wish to know
about fowls?"

"Everything you can tell me,
Professor."

At this point Bronsky armed himself with a
pencil.
Sparks of triumph flashed in Persikov's eyes.

"You shouldn't have come to me, I don't
specialise in our feathered friends. You should have gone to Yemelian
Ivano-vich Portugalov, at the First University. I personally know very little..."

Bronsky smiled ecstatically to indicate that
he had got the Professor's joke.
"Joke-very
little!" he scribbled in his pad.

"But if it interests you, of course.
Hens,
or cristates are a variety of bird from the fowl
species. From the pheasant family," Persikov began in a loud voice,
looking not at Bronsky, but into the far distance where he could see an
audience of thousands.
"From the pheasant family
...phasianus.

They are birds with a fleshy skin
crown and two gills under the lower jaw...

Hm, although some
have only one in the middle under the beak.
Now, what
else.
Their wings are short and rounded. The tail is of medium length,
somewhat stepped and even, I would say, roof-shaped. The middle feathers are
bent in the form of a sickle... Pankrat... bring me model No. 705 from the
model room, the cross-section of the domestic cock. You don't need it? Don't
bring the model, Pankrat. I repeat
,
I am not a
specialist. Go to Portugalov.

Now let me see, I personally know of
six types of wild fowl... Hm, Portugalov knows more...
In
India
and on
the Malaysian archipelago.
For example, the Bankiva
fowl, or Callus bankiva.
It is found in the foothills of the Himalayas,
throughout India, in Assam and Burma... The Java
fowl,
or Gallus varius on Lombok, Sumbawa and
Flores
.
And on the island of Java there is the splendid Gallus eneus fowl. In
south-east India I can recommend the very beautiful Sonneratii. I'll show you a
drawing of it later. As for Ceylon, here we have the Stanley fowl, which is not
found anywhere else."

Bronsky sat there, eyes popping, and scribbled
madly.

"Anything else I can tell you?"

"I'd like to hear something about fowl
diseases," Alfred whispered quietly.