The Town By The Sea tof-3 Read online

  Soon he got an answer.

  "Is that the commandant's office, Vitovtov Brod?" the chief shouted into the telephone. "What's become of you down there! ... Yes, what happened?... Yes... Yes... Steady, Bogdanov, not so fast, let me get it down." The chief picked up a sharp pencil and, pressing the receiver even harder to his ear with his left hand, jotted notes on a pad with his right. "Who led the group?. . . What? That bandit again? Yes, gone to the right place! Less work for the revolutionary tribunal... Who stopped him?... I see... Yes... Splendid! Thank him officially on my behalf... What?... Of course... To headquarters at once!...

  What?.

  Listening involuntarily to this one-sided conversation, I glanced round the big room and, I must admit, began to feel rather timid. It was the first time I had seen the security chief at such close quarters.

  I had seen him before, from a distance, when he rode round the ranks of frontier guards and convoy troops on his white horse. His face reminded you of ;Kotovsky, who had been murdered only a short

  time ago. Lean and erect, a born horseman, pistol belt strapped tight across his body, he would bring his hand up to the shiny peak of his green frontier guards cap and greet the troops in a cheerful ringing voice, and the troops of the garrison would answer with a shout that drowned the chiming of the clock on the old town hall.

  And now he sat before us without his cap, dressed in a well-cut field tunic of good cloth. His fair hair was combed back from a high, slightly bulging forehead.

  When he had finished speaking, the chief put down the receiver, surveyed Nikita and me with a quick glance and said cheerfully to Vukovich:

  "Another attempt to cross the border, at Zhbinets. Nine smugglers. And not one of them got through. The commander of that post, Gusev, is a good man. Dealt with them with his own forces without calling up the emergency group. Got the ringleader with a grenade."

  "What were they bringing over?" Vukovich asked. "Saccharine again?"

  The chief looked at his pad and said slowly: "Not much saccharine. Only—thirty pounds. A lot of other trash— scarves, stockings, gloves, razors, ties, and even a whole bale of Hungarian furs."

  "Who wants Hungarian fur when the winter's nearly over?" Vukovich said smiling.

  "Oh, perhaps some profiteer's wife wanted it for her bottom drawer," the chief said. "But something else was found, more important. In a walking stick that the leader of the gang threw away as soon as the shooting started, Gusev discovered seventy hundred-dollar notes."

  "Seven thousand dollars?" Vukovich replied, making a quick calculation. "Not a bad salary for someone... "

  "We'll get to the bottom of it," said the chief and, abandoning the subject, looked inquiringly in our direction. "These comrades from the factory-training school," Vukovich reported, "have some important information about Pecheritsa... Go ahead, Mandzhura." The chief nodded.

  I told my story quietly, without hurrying. The chief watched my face keenly with his light penetrating eyes. Suddenly he raised his hand and stopped me:

  "And Pecheritsa spoke Russian to you all the time?" "All the time. That's the funny thing! After kicking our instructor Nazarov out of school just because he spoke Russian!"

  "And he spoke it well, fluently, without an accent?" the chief asked.

  "Yes, just like a Russian. If I hadn't known he was a Ukrainian, I'd never have guessed it from the way he talked."

  "We shall have to bear that in mind," the chief said to Vukovich. "That means he may be anywhere in the Soviet Union by now. Go on, young man."

  I related how I had discovered Pecheritsa's disappearance, and the chief said to Vukovich: "There, you see? Dzhendzhuristy's theory that he made a break for the border turns out to be wrong. He's not the kind of enemy that puts his head in the noose straightaway. Perhaps he has three or four other tasks to carry out. He thinks he'll lie doggo for a bit and let us forget about him..."

  A bell rang sharply outside the door. Shemetova appeared.

  "Moscow on the line, Comrade Chief!"

  "Now then, look sharp with those latest reports on anti-contraband work!" the chief ordered and picked up the receiver.

  A minute of silence.

  "District chief of frontier security speaking," the chief said in a loud clear voice. "Hullo, Felix

  Edmundovich..." And he signed to Vukovich for us to leave the room.

  ... Long ago the marchers had returned to their homes. Long ago their torches had cooled in the club store-rooms. Silence reigned over the steep white streets of our little town. Cocks were crowing far away across the river.

  "You know who that was on the telephone?" Nikita said impressively, stopping in the middle of the road. "Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky! Do you realize that, Vasil? Dzerzhinsky himself! The top security man of the Revolution! ... On a night like this you don't want to sleep at all... Are you very tired after your journey, Vasil? If you aren't, let's go for a walk round town."

  ... I shall never forget that calm spring night on the cliff near the Catholic church.

  Tired after walking all over the town, we sat down to rest on the oak rails of the old stairway that led steeply down the cliffs to the river. Here and there the moon was reflected in the little puddles on its worn steps.

  The dark silhouettes of the Catholic saints on the portals of the church rose up behind us. They seemed to be petrified for ever in some strange ecstasy that was incomprehensible to us. The sleepy crows cawed quietly on the bare branches already swelling with the sap of spring. A motor purred down at the power station. Far below, the river Smotrich glistened at the bottom of the cliff. A trembling bar of moonlight lay across it. Beyond the hamlet of Dolzhok a faint gleam on the horizon signified the approach of dawn.

  "That's how it is, Vasil..." said Nikita, as if thinking aloud. "All over the world a terrible, desperate struggle is being waged between the oppressed and the oppressors. And you and I are in that struggle. Our country has been the first in the world to show the oppressed the right path to a better life. We ought always to be proud of that. We've got cunning and clever enemies to fight. But we shall win, the working people will win. I am sure of that."

  The familiar chimes of the town hall clock came to us from behind the old houses of the town.

  "Three," said Nikita. "Three in the morning... Yes, Vasil, we're living at a very interesting time. Believe me, none of our descendants will see as much in their youth as you and I, because it's not only our youth, it's the youth of the whole Soviet land... And one day we'll be telling them about it, perhaps even about tonight. 'Yes,' you'll be saying, 'I used to live in a little town on the border. The Civil War had only just finished. There were still a lot of bandits about—the last remnants of the old order who were up in arms against us. There were quite a few people who hated Soviet power in those days, because it had trod on their corns pretty hard. Soviet power had said: "Enough! You've done enough grabbing to last your lifetime, enough squeezing of blood out of honest working folk, now come on, and get down to work yourselves." But they wouldn't have it, the snakes! They were all for back-sliding, for squirming off the path of labour and equality, and every day they longed for Soviet power to be overthrown... And once, you will say, 'a friend of mine and I went on important business to the headquarters of OGPU (you'll have to explain to them what OGPU was, you can be sure of that) and just when we were in the chief’s office, the chief had a telephone call from Moscow, from Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky. That same Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky who was a terror to all enemies of the Revolution and saved tens of thousands of homeless children from typhus and starvation, from lice and scab, to make them into healthy, happy people... ' "

  Taking advantage of Nikita's falling silent for a minute while he lit a cigarette, I asked him to tell me just why Pecheritsa had run away from our town. I had wanted to ask Vukovich, but I hadn't dared.

  Nikita explained to me that any idle talk could only hinder the search for Pecheritsa. I promised faithfully not to tell anyone anything abou
t it and said that if anyone should hear what he was about to tell me it would only be twenty years after this night.

  "Not until twenty years have passed? Do you give me your word?" Nikita asked.

  "I give you my word," I said in a trembling voice. "The word of a Komsomol member! You can be sure of that!"

  "Well, be careful," said Nikita and began his story, every detail of which I strove to remember.

  THE PRIEST'S SON FROM ROVNO

  It turned out that when Pecheritsa's wife told Furman she had killed a chicken on her front door-step she had been deceiving him. But she did not deceive Vukovich.

  When Polevoi said to Vukovich: "Why, think of that, we nearly mistook chicken's blood for human!" the security man had pretended to agree. And what was more, to cover his real opinion, he replied loudly, so that the tenants who had come out on to the porch should hear: "That bandit isn't fool enough to hang about here for long!"

  When he got to the square, Vukovich gave the watchman a sound dressing-down for letting such a dangerous criminal slip through his fingers. The watchman swore by all that was holy that no bandit had been anywhere near him, but Vukovich refused to believe his protestations and returned to headquarters. There he learnt that a big Petlura gang trying to cross the border that night had been routed by frontiermen in the region of Vitovtov Brod. "So that Galician refugee, a labourer from Okopy village, was right when he warned the frontier guards that bandits were assembling near Zbruch!" Vukovich thought to himself.

  While telephoning the frontier posts, Vukovich still did not forget about the woman who had chosen such an unsuitable place to kill her chicken. Who had ever heard of people killing chickens on their front door-step, and certainly not at the main entrance to a building where such cultured, educated people lived! Usually housewives killed their chickens, geese, turkies, and other livestock in woodsheds and out-of-the-way corners, where no one could see, but not in full view under their neighbours' windows.

  By the evening of the same day Vukovich knew the woman who said she had killed a chicken on her front doorstep as well as if he had been acquainted with her since childhood. One thing he learnt about her was that she was the daughter of the owner of a sugar refinery who had been condemned to death in 1922 for working with the Angel gang.

  Everyone knew that Doctor Pecheritsa and his wife lived in a three-room flat in the red-brick building in Trinity Street. It was a good flat, light and warm, but with one shortcoming—it had no kitchen. The reason was that before the Revolution the whole second floor of this large house had belonged to the lawyer Velikoshapko. Together with the Pilsudski men the lawyer had run away to Poland in 1920, and soon afterwards the town housing department had divided his seven-room apartment into two separate flats. The larger of them had the kitchen. The housing department had not had time to fit up a kitchen in the three-room flat that Pecheritsa had been given on his arrival.

  But Pecheritsa had not insisted that they should. "We're birds of passage," he had told the engineers who came to measure up his flat. "Here today and gone tomorrow. If they send me to Mogilyov, I shall go to Mogilyov, if they send me to Korsun, I shall go there. The People's Commissariat of Education plays about with you. I don't intend to build a home. What's the point of making kitchens when you're on the march, it's just wasting people's time! We'll manage as we are, without a kitchen!"

  Twice a day—afternoon and evening—Pecheritsa's wife Ksenia Antonovna, a tall, dark-haired woman, would carry her shining aluminium dinner-pans to the Venice Restaurant by the fortress gates. Martsynkevich himself, the head cook, served Pecheritsa's wife with dinners and suppers.

  She carried the food home in her little dinner-pans and warmed it up on a small spirit stove; and that was how she and her husband lived. They kept themselves to themselves and never had any guests. Even

  Pecheritsa's colleagues at the Education Department had never visited his flat.

  They had neither kerosene stove, nor primus—just a little spirit stove burning with a blue flame on which Ksenia Antonovna boiled her husband's black coffee in the mornings. Pecheritsa was very fond of that stimulating drink.

  On learning all this, Vukovich became even more surprised that Pecheritsa's wife had killed a chicken. Where had she roasted it? On the little spirit stove? But why should people who took their meals from a restaurant go to all that unnecessary bother?

  Vukovich also learnt that the day after the night alarm at headquarters, on Sunday, Pecheritsa's wife started taking three dinners and three suppers from the Venice Restaurant. She hadn't enough dinner-pans, so she brought earthenware pots in a string bag for the third, extra meal.

  "You must have some guests?" the extremely polite head cook asked sympathetically.

  "Oh, it's only my sister from Zhitomir..." Ksenia Antonovna replied, rather hastily.

  It was rather strange, however, that none of the neighbours ever saw this sister. Moreover, having investigated Ksenia Antonovna's past, Vukovich knew quite well that she was the only daughter of the sugar manufacturer.

  Vukovich also knew that Pecheritsa had no servants, but that every Monday the education department's messenger, Auntie Pasha, came to scrub the floors.

  When he arrived at work on Monday morning, Pecheritsa said to Auntie Pasha: "You needn't come to us today, Auntie. My wife's not very well. Come next Monday."

  After this instruction from her strict department chief, Auntie Pasha was very surprised when going home from work to meet the "sick" Ksenia Antonovna on New Bridge. Pecheritsa's wife was walking quickly across the bridge, on the other side, carrying her dinner-pans.

  'Ksenia Antonovna was in such a hurry to get home that she did not notice Auntie Pasha and did not answer her when the messenger bowed and said: "Good evening, Ma'am!"

  At exactly six thirty in the evening on the day when I left for Kharkov, Doctor Gutentag- burst agitatedly into the duty officer's room at district security headquarters.

  Gutentag said he must see the chief at once. The duty officer sent Gutentag up to Vukovich and the surgeon told him the following story.

  That morning, when Doctor Gutentag was still in bed, Pecheritsa's wife had rushed in to see him and said that her husband was seriously ill. Ksenia Antonovna said that Pecheritsa must have appendicitis and begged him to go with her to their flat.

  Gutentag knew Pecheritsa. A short time previously he had cut a tumour out of his neck. Besides, Gutentag was very fond of music and singing and enjoyed listening to the concerts that Pecheritsa conducted. And so, in spite of the early hour, Gutentag promptly got ready and set off for Trinity Street.

  What was his surprise when the sick man himself opened the door to him! Inviting the doctor into the empty dining-room, Pecheritsa said:

  "Listen to me, friend! I could, of course, play blind man's buff with you, I could invent some story about my poor relative who was accidentally shot during a hunting trip, but I have no desire or intention of doing anything of the kind. You and I are grown-up people and we're too old for fairy-tales. Besides,

  I know you are a man of the old school. You studied at the medical faculty in Warsaw, and I don't think you have any particular liking for Soviet power. To put it in a nutshell, behind that door lies a wounded man. He has a bullet in his leg. His condition is getting worse; the leg is swollen and he may have blood-poisoning already. That man is being searched for. No one must know that you have helped him.

  If you do your duty as a doctor and save my friend, it will be good for you and it won't be bad either for your chemist brother who lives in Poland, in Pilsudski Street in the town of Rovno."

  Even before Doctor Gutentag's story was over, Vukovich realized that he had done the right thing that day in issuing a warrant to search Pecheritsa's flat.

  About five minutes after the doctor had finished his story, two groups of mounted security men rode out of headquarters.

  One group led by Vukovich turned in the direction of the red-brick' building in Trinity Street.

&nbs
p; Auntie Pasha, whom the security men from the second group found at the Education Department office, said that Pecheritsa had run into his office about five minutes ago. He had brought a small suit-case, put some papers in it out of the office safe, asked Auntie Pasha for a towel and told her that he had been summoned urgently to the border village of Chemirovtsy. Before leaving the building he had slipped into the wash-room where he had remained for two or three minutes.

  Security Officer Dzhendzhuristy rang up at once from the education department and ordered a party of mounted security men to be sent after Pecheritsa to Chemirovtsy.

  The hands of the station clock pointed to past seven when the security men arrived at the station. By that time the train taking me to Kharkov had already passed the first little station of Balin.

  Meanwhile the group led by Vukovich surrounded the big house in Trinity Street.

  Vukovich knew that Pecheritsa's flat had no back door but he also knew that a fire escape reaching from the ground to the roof passed near one of the bed-room windows. At the very moment when one of the security men walked up to the front door with a metal plate bearing the name "'Doctor Zenon Pecheritsa" and pulled the brass bell handle, Vukovich was cautiously climbing this narrow, slippery ladder.

  As he had expected, no one opened the door. The security men knocked louder. Still no answer. There was a faint sound as someone tip-toed up to the door, moved the brass cover of the spy-hole and, having made sure who was knocking, went back into the flat. Then the security men decided to break the door down.

  As he climbed the rickety ladder, Vukovich heard a man's angry voice coming from the open window:

  "I tell you we must fight, Ksenia Antonovna!"

  "Everything's finished!" the woman said.

  "Ksenia Antonovna, you must believe me!" the man shouted.

  "It's too late!" Pecheritsa's wife replied and a shot rang out in the room.

  "Hysterical fool!" Pecheritsa's guest muttered, crawling to the window, but at that moment Vukovich leapt to him from the window-sill like a whirlwind.