The defendant brought it in his teeth.
He kept wagging his tail until I finally agreed to take it.
Now I’m commanding the parade!
I feel great.”
He uttered these last words without much conviction.
Truth be told, the parade wasn’t going smoothly, and the grand strategist was lying when he claimed that he felt great.
It would have been more honest to say that he felt somewhat awkward, which, however, he wasn’t willing to admit even to himself.
A month had passed since he had parted ways with Alexander Ivanovich outside the luggage room where the underground millionaire had stored his plain-looking suitcase.
Ostap entered the next city feeling like a conqueror, but he couldn’t get a room at the hotel.
“I’ll pay anything!” said the grand strategist smugly.
“You’re out of luck, citizen,” replied the receptionist, “the entire congress of soil scientists have come down for a tour of our experimental station.
Everything’s reserved for the scholars.”
The receptionist’s polite face expressed reverence for the congress.
Ostap wanted to cry out that he was the big shot, that he was to be respected and revered, that he had a million in his bag, but then he thought better of it and left in a state of utter frustration.
He spent the whole day riding around town in a horse cab.
In the city’s best restaurant, he had to bide his time for an hour and a half until the soil scientists, whose entire congress came to dinner, were finished with their meal.
In the evening, the theater was putting on a special performance for the soil scientists, so no tickets were available to the public.
Ostap wouldn’t have been allowed into the theater with a bag in his hands anyway, and he had nowhere to put it.
To avoid spending the night in the streets, in the name of science, the millionaire left that same evening and slept in a first-class car.
In the morning, Bender got off the train in a large city on the Volga.
Transparent yellow leaves flew off the trees, spinning like propellers.
The river was breathing the wind.
There wasn’t a single hotel with a vacancy.
“Maybe in a month or so,” the hotel managers—some wore goatees and some didn’t, some wore mustaches, and some were simply clean-shaven—offered vaguely. “Until they finish the third plant at the power station, you haven’t got a prayer.
Everything’s reserved for the technical personnel.
Plus, there’s the regional Young Communist League conference.
There’s nothing we can do.”
And while the grand strategist hung around the tall reception counters, the hotels’ stairwells teemed with engineers, technicians, foreign experts, and Young Communist Leaguers who were attending their conference.
Once again, Ostap spent the whole day in a horse cab, looking forward to the nighttime express where he could wash, rest, and sit back with a newspaper.
The grand strategist spent a total of fifteen nights on a variety of trains, traveling from city to city, because there weren’t any vacancies anywhere.
One town was building a blast furnace, another a refrigeration plant, the third a zinc smelter.
The cities were overflowing with people who had come there for work.
In the fourth town, Ostap was undercut by a gathering of Young Pioneers, and the hotel room where a millionaire could have spent a pleasant evening with a lady friend was filled with the racket of children.
While on the road, he acquired various creature comforts and obtained a suitcase for his million, along with other travel gear.
Ostap was already contemplating a long and comfortable journey to Vladivostok, which he figured would take three weeks, when suddenly he sensed that he’d die of some mysterious railroad malady if he didn’t settle down immediately.
So he did something he had always done when he was the happy owner of empty pockets.
He started pretending he was someone else, cabling ahead to announce the arrival of an engineer, or a public health physician, or a tenor, or an author.
To his surprise, there were always vacancies for people who were traveling on official business, and Ostap was able to recover a bit from the rocking of the trains.
Once, he even had to pretend he was the son of Lieutenant Schmidt in order to obtain a hotel room.
This episode plunged the grand strategist into unhappy thoughts.
“And this is the life of a millionaire?” he reflected in frustration. “Where’s the respect?
Where’s the reverence?
The fame?
The power?”
Even the Europe First Class that Ostap bragged about to Balaganov —the suit, the dress shoes, the fedora—came from a consignment store, and despite their superb quality, they had one defect: they weren’t his own, his original garb, they were second-hand.
Someone else had already worn them; maybe for just an hour, or even a minute, but still it was someone else’s.
He was also hurt that the government was ignoring the dire straits of the nation’s millionaires and distributed social benefits in accordance with a plan.
Nothing was going right.
The station chief didn’t salute him, like he would have any merchant worth a lousy fifty thousand in the old days; the city fathers didn’t come to his hotel to introduce themselves; the local paper didn’t rush to interview him; and instead of photos of the millionaire, it printed portraits of some God-forsaken exemplary workers who earned 120 rubles a month.
Ostap counted his million every day, and it was still pretty much a million.