The old puzzle-maker kept trembling on the couch and complaining about the omnipresent Soviet ideology.
“All that drama again!” exclaimed Zosya.
She put her hat on and headed for the door.
Alexander Ivanovich followed her, even though he knew it wasn’t a good idea.
Outside, Zosya took Koreiko by the arm.
“We’ll still be friends, right?”
“I’d much rather you married me,” grumbled Koreiko candidly.
Bare-headed young men in white shirts, their sleeves rolled up above their elbows, were crowding the wide open soda bars.
Dark-blue siphons with metal faucets stood on the shelves.
Tall glass cylinders on rotating stands, filled with syrup, cast out glimmering drugstore light.
Sad-looking Persians roasted chestnuts on open grills, enticing the strollers with pungent fumes.
“I want to go to the movies,” said Zosya capriciously.
“I want some nuts, I want some soda.”
For Zosya, Koreiko was prepared to do anything.
He was even prepared to lift his disguise a bit and splurge to the tune of five rubles or so.
He happened to have a flat metal Caucasus cigarette box in his pocket.
The box contained ten thousand rubles in 250-ruble bills.
But even if he had lost his mind and was bold enough to produce a single bill, no movie theater would have been able to break it anyway.
“Wages are delayed again,” he said in complete despair, “they pay very irregularly.”
Then, a young man wearing very nice sandals on his bare feet stepped out from the crowd.
He raised his hand to greet Zosya.
“Hi there,” he said, “I’ve got two free passes to the movies.
Wanna come?
But it has to be right now.”
And then the young man in fabulous sandals led Zosya under the dim sign of the Whither Goest movie theater, formerly the Quo Vadis.
The millionaire bookkeeper didn’t spend the night asleep in his bed.
He wandered aimlessly through the city, stared blankly at the photos of naked babies in photographers’ display windows, kicked up the gravel on the boulevard with his feet, and gazed into the dark hollow of the port.
There, invisible steamers exchanged greetings, policemen whistled, and the lighthouse flashed its red flare.
“What a wretched country!” grumbled Koreiko.
“A country where a millionaire can’t even take his fiancee to the movies.”
Somehow he already thought of Zosya as his fiancee.
By dawn, Alexander Ivanovich, pale from lack of sleep, found himself on the outskirts of the city.
As he was walking down Bessarabian Street, he heard the sound of the maxixe.
Surprised, he stopped.
A yellow car was coming down the hill towards him.
The driver, in a leather jacket, crouched over the wheel, looking tired.
Next to him dozed a broad-shouldered fellow in a Stetson hat with vent holes, his head hanging to one side.
Two more passengers slouched in the back seat: a fireman in full dress uniform and an athletic-looking man wearing a white-topped seaman’s cap.
“Greetings to our first Chernomorskian!” hollered Ostap as the car drove past Koreiko, rumbling like a tractor. “Are the warm seawater baths still open?
Is the theater functioning?
Has Chernomorsk been declared a free city?”
Ostap didn’t get any answers.
Kozlevich opened the choke, and the Antelope drowned the first Chernomorskian in a cloud of blue smoke.
“Well,” said Ostap to the awakened Balaganov, “our deliberations continue.
Just bring me your underground Rockefeller.
I’m going to peel his skins off.
Those princes and paupers, let me tell you!”
PART 2 THE TWO STRATEGISTS
CHAPTER 10 A TELEGRAM FROM THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
At some point, the underground millionaire began to feel that he was the subject of someone’s unflagging attention.