stained-glass window, which depicted two gothic knights.
“You haven’t heard the most interesting bit about Berlaga yet,” he whispered. “Berlaga is healthy as a horse.”
“What? So he’s not in the nuthouse?”
“Oh yes, he is.”
Lapidus smiled knowingly.
“That’s the trick. He was simply afraid of the purge and decided to sit this dangerous period out. Faked mental illness. Right now, he’s probably growling and guffawing. What an operator! Frankly, I’m envious.”
“Is there a problem with his parents? Were they merchants? Undesirable elements?”
“Yes, his parents were problematic, and he himself, between you and me, used to own a pharmacy. Who knew the revolution was coming? People took care of themselves the best they could: some owned pharmacies, others even factories. Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with that. Who knew?”
“They should have known,” said Koreiko icily.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” agreed Lapidus quickly, “people like this do not belong in a Soviet organization.”
He gave Koreiko a wide-eyed look and returned to his desk.
The hall was filled with employees. Flexible metal rulers, shining and silvery like fish scales, abacuses with palm beads, heavy ledgers with pink and yellow stripes on their pages, and a multitude of other pieces of stationery great and small were pulled out of desk drawers. Tezoimenitsky tore yesterday’s page off the wall calendar, and the new day began. Somebody had already sunk his young teeth into a large chopped mutton sandwich.
Koreiko settled down at his desk as well. He firmly planted his suntanned elbows on the desk and started making entries in a current accounts ledger.
Alexander Ivanovich Koreiko, one of the lowest-ranking employees of the Hercules, was approaching the very end of his youth. He was thirty-eight. His brick-red face sported white eyes and blonde eyebrows that looked like ears of wheat. His thin English mustache was the color of ripe cereal, too. His face would have looked quite young had it not been for the rough drill-sergeant’s jowls that cut across his cheeks and neck. At work, Alexander Ivanovich carried himself like an army volunteer: he didn’t talk too much, he followed instructions, and he was diligent, deferential, and a bit slow.
“He’s too timid,” the head of Finance and Accounting said, “too servile, if you will, too dedicated. The moment a new bond campaign is announced, he’s right there, with his one-month salary pledge. The first to sign up. And his salary is a measly forty-six rubles a month. I would love to know how he manages to live on that . . .”
Alexander Ivanovich had one peculiar talent: he could instantly divide and multiply three- and four-digit numbers in his head. Despite this talent, they still thought Koreiko was somewhat slow.
“Listen, Alexander Ivanovich,” an office mate would ask, “how much is 836 times 423?”
“Three hundred and fifty-three thousand six hundred and twenty-eight,” Koreiko would answer after a moment’s hesitation.
The co-worker wouldn’t even bother to check the result because he knew that the slow Koreiko never made a mistake.
“Someone else would have made a career out of this,” Sakharkov, Dreyfus, Tezoimenitsky, Musicant, Chevazhevskaya, Borisokhlebsky, Lapidus Jr., the old fool Kukushkind, and even Berlaga, the one who escaped to the nuthouse, often repeated. “But this one is a loser. He’ll spend his whole life making forty-six rubles a month.”
Of course, his co-workers, or the head of Finance and Accounting, Comrade Arnikov himself, or even Impala Mikhailovna, the personal secretary to the director of the entire Hercules, Comrade Polykhaev—all of them would have been shocked had they found out what exactly Alexander Ivanovich Koreiko, the quietest of the clerks, had been up to just one hour earlier. For whatever reason, he dragged a particular suitcase from one train station to another. The suitcase contained not Odessa Centennial pants, nor a boiled chicken, and certainly not The Goals of the Young Communist League in the Countryside, but ten million rubles in Soviet and foreign currency.
In 1915, Alex Koreiko, twenty-three, the ne’er-do-well son of middle class parents, was one of those who are deservedly known as “retired high-schoolers.” He didn’t finish school, didn’t take up any trade, he just hung out on the boulevards and lived off his parents. His uncle, the manager of the regional military office, had shielded him from the draft, so he could listen to the cries of the half-witted paperboy without worrying:
“The latest cables! Our troops are advancing! Thank God! Multiple casualties! Thank God!”
Back then, Alex Koreiko pictured his future in the following way: he’s walking down the street and suddenly, near a downspout covered with zinc stars, right next to the wall, he sees a burgundy leather wallet that’s squeaky like a new saddle. There’s a lot of money in the wallet, 2,500 rubles . . . After that, everything would be swell.
He pictured finding the money so often that he knew exactly where it was going to happen—on Poltava Victory Street, in an asphalt corner formed by the jutting wall of a building, near the star-studded downspout. There it lies, his leather savior, dusted with dry acacia flowers, next to a flattened cigarette butt. Alex walked to Poltava Victory Street every day, but to his great surprise, the wallet was never there. He’d poke the garbage with a student’s walking stick and mindlessly stare at the glazed metal sign that hung by the front door: yu. m. soloveisky, tax assessor. Then he would wander home in a daze, throw himself on the red velvet couch and dream of riches, deafened by the ticking of his heart and pulse. His pulse was shallow, angry, and impatient.
The revolution of 1917 chased Koreiko off his velvet couch. He realized that he could become the lucky heir to some wealthy strangers. He felt in his guts that the country was awash in unclaimed gold, jewelry, expensive furniture, paintings and carpets, fur coats and dining sets. One just had to move fast and grab the riches, the sooner the better.
At the time, however, he was still young and foolish. He took over a large apartment—whose owner was smart enough to escape to Constantinople on a French ship—and started living there openly. Over the course of a week, he grew accustomed to the lavish lifestyle of the fugitive businessman: he drank the muscat wine he found in the cupboard with pickled herring from his food ration and sold knickknacks at the flea market. He was quite surprised when he was arrested.
He got out of prison five months later. He hadn’t given up the idea of becoming rich, but he came to realize that such an undertaking has to be secret, hidden, and gradual. First, he had to acquire some camouflage. In the case of Alexander Ivanovich, the camouflage came in the form of tall orange boots, huge dark-blue breeches, and the long military-style jacket of a food-supply official.
In those distressing times, everything that had been made by human hands wasn’t working as well as it had before: houses no longer gave any protection from the cold, food wasn’t filling, the electricity was only turned on to round up deserters and bandits, running water didn’t reach beyond the first floor, and streetcars did not run at all. At the same time, the elements became more ferocious and dangerous: the winters were colder than before, the winds were stronger, and the common cold, which used to put a person in bed for three days, killed him within the same three days. Groups of young men without any discernible occupation wandered the streets, singing a devil-may-care ditty about money that had lost its value:
I
