“Go find . . . ,”
“And the per diem?” The man in gauze stared at the engineer in exasperation.
The lecturer had already finished his oration, concluding with a demonstration of how to use a gas mask; the doors of the gas shelter had already opened; the Pique Vests, holding onto each other, had already trotted back to the Florida; and Talmudovsky had already fought off his pursuer and escaped, calling out for a cab at the top of his lungs; but the grand strategist was still chatting with Zosya.
“What a femina!” said Panikovsky jealously, as he and Balaganov were leaving the shelter. “Ah, if only the weights were made of gold!
I would have married her, I swear I would have!”
Hearing about the ill-fated weights again, Balaganov gave Panikovsky a painful jab with his elbow.
It came just in time.
Ostap appeared in the doorway of the shelter with the femina on his arm.
He lingered over his goodbyes to Zosya, staring directly at her with yearning eyes.
Zosya smiled for the last time and left.
“What were you talking about?” asked Panikovsky suspiciously.
“Oh, nothing much, this and that,” replied Ostap.
“Well, golden boys, back to work!
We have to find the defendant.”
Panikovsky was sent to the Hercules, Balaganov to Koreiko’s place.
Ostap himself rushed to the train stations.
But the millionaire clerk had vanished.
At the Hercules, his time card was still on the board. He never went home, and eight long-distance trains had left the stations during the gas attack.
But Ostap didn’t expect anything different.
“Well, it’s not the end of the world,” he said cheerlessly.
“In China, for example, it would be hard to find a person: they have a population of 400,000,000.
Here, it’s a piece of cake: we only have 160,000,000. Three times as easy as in China.
All you need is money.
And we have it.”
But he came out of the bank with only thirty-four rubles in his hand.
“This is what’s left of the ten thousand,” he said with unspeakable sadness. “And I thought we still had six or seven thousand in our account . . .
How did that happen?
We were having fun, we collected horns and hoofs, life was exhilarating, the Earth rotated just for us—and suddenly . . .
Oh, I get it!
The overhead!
The organization consumed all the money.”
And he looked at the half-brothers with reproach.
Panikovsky shrugged his shoulders, as if to say:
“You know, Bender, how much I respect you!
I’ve always said you were an ass!” The stunned Balaganov stroked his locks and asked:
“So what are we going to do?”
“What do you mean?” exclaimed Ostap. “What about the Bureau for the Collection of Horns and Hoofs?
The office equipment?
Any organization would be happy to shell out a hundred rubles just for the Face the Country set alone!
And the typewriter!
The hole punch, the deer antlers, the desks, the barrier, the samovar!
All this can be sold off. On top of that, we have Panikovsky’s gold tooth in reserve.
Of course, it’s not as substantial as the weights, but nevertheless, it’s a molecule of gold, a noble metal.”
The companions stopped outside the office.
Through the open door, they could hear the youthful leonine voices of the agriculture students, who had returned from their trip, the drowsy mumblings of Funt, and some unfamiliar basses and baritones that clearly came from cattle-raising stock.
“This is an actionable offense!” roared the interns.
“We were wondering from the start.
In all this time, they’ve only collected twenty-five pounds of substandard horns!”
“You will be prosecuted!” thundered the basses and the baritones. “Where’s the Branch President?
Where’s the Vice President for Hoofs?”