The golden calf will take care of everything.”
And the grand strategist shook his bag.
However, the club Under the Moonlight was gone.
To Ostap’s surprise, even the street where those cymbals and tambourines once played was gone, too.
Instead, there was a straight, European-style avenue, with new construction running along its entire length.
Fences lined the street, alabaster dust hung in the scorched air. Trucks baked it even further.
Ostap glanced briefly at the gray-brick facades with long horizontal windows, gave Koreiko an elbow, and, saying
“There’s another place, a guy from Baku owns it,” took him to the opposite side of town.
But the sheikhs didn’t find the sign with the poem, that the proprietor from Baku had composed himself:
Instead, there was a cardboard poster in Arabic and Russian:
“Let’s go in,” said Ostap forlornly, “at least it’s cool in there.
Besides, the public health physicians’ itinerary includes a visit to a museum.”
They entered a large room with whitewashed walls, put their millions on the floor, and took their time wiping their hot foreheads with their sleeves.
The museum had only eight objects on display: a mammoth’s tooth, which had been presented to the brand new museum by the city of Tashkent; an oil painting, entitled A Skirmish With the Basmachs; two emir’s cloaks; a goldfish in an aquarium; a glass case filled with dried-up locusts; a porcelain statuette from the Kuznetsov Factory; and a model of the obelisk that the city was planning to erect on the main square.
Right next to the model lay a large tin wreath with ribbons.
A special delegation from a neighboring republic had recently delivered it, but since the obelisk did not exist yet—the funds had been diverted to the construction of a bathhouse, a far more pressing need—the delegation had made the appropriate speeches and placed the wreath at the foot of the model.
A young man, wearing a thick Bukhara skull cap on his shaved head, approached the visitors promptly and asked them, like a nervous author:
“Your impressions, comrades?”
“Passable,” said Ostap.
Without missing a beat, the young man—who was the museum’s director—launched into a litany of problems that his baby had to overcome.
Funding was insufficient.
Tashkent had gotten off the hook with a single tooth, and there wasn’t anybody to collect the local treasures, artistic or historic.
And they still hadn’t sent him a trained expert.
“If only I had three hundred rubles!” exclaimed the director. “I would have made it into a Louvre!”
“Tell me, do you know the town well?” asked Ostap, winking at Alexander Ivanovich. “Would you mind showing us a few places of interest?
I used to know this town well, but now it seems different somehow.”
The director was thrilled.
Shouting that he would show them everything, he locked up the museum and lead the millionaires to the very street where they had been looking for Under the Moonlight just thirty minutes earlier.
“The Avenue of Socialism!” he announced, eagerly inhaling the alabaster dust. “Oh!
What lovely air!
You won’t believe what it’ll look like a year from now!
Asphalt!
Buses!
The Irrigation Research Institute!
The Tropical Institute!
And if Tashkent won’t provide research personnel even then . . .
You know, they have all kinds of mammoth bones, yet they sent me just one tooth—despite the strong interest in the natural sciences in our republic.”
“Really?” remarked Koreiko, looking at Ostap with reproach.
“And you know,” the enthusiast whispered, “I suspect it’s not even a mammoth tooth.
They slipped me an elephant tooth!”
“And what about those places . . . in the Asian style, you know, with timbrels and flutes?” asked the grand strategist impatiently.
“We got rid of them,” replied the young man dismissively, “should have eradicated that blight a long time ago. A hotbed for epidemics.
Just this past spring, we stamped out the last of those dens.
It was called Under the Moonlight.”
“Stamped out?” gasped Koreiko.
“You bet!
Instead, we opened a mass-dining establishment.
European cuisine.
The plates are washed and dried with electricity.
The number of cases of gastrointestinal disease have plummeted.”