At first, it wasn’t anything in particular.
It was just that his familiar and comfortable feeling of privacy had somehow disappeared.
Then came far more sinister signs.
One day, when Koreiko was walking to work with his usual measured gait, a pushy street bum with a golden tooth accosted him right in front of the Hercules.
Stepping on the underwear straps he was dragging behind him, the bum grabbed Alexander Ivanovich by the hand and muttered:
“Gimme a million, gimme a million, gimme a million!”
Then the bum stuck out his fat dirty tongue and began blurting out complete nonsense.
It was just a half-crazy bum, a common sight in southern cities.
Nevertheless, Koreiko went up to his desk in Finance and Accounting with a heavy heart.
After that encounter, all hell broke loose.
Alexander Ivanovich was awakened at three o’clock in the morning.
A telegram arrived.
His teeth chattering from the morning chill, the millionaire tore the seal and read:
“COUNTESS WITH STRICKEN FACE RUNS TO POND.”
“What countess?” whispered the baffled Koreiko, standing barefoot in the hallway.
There was no answer.
The postman was gone.
Pigeons cooed passionately in the courtyard.
The neighbors were all asleep.
Alexander Ivanovich looked at the gray sheet of paper again.
The address was correct.
His name was, too.
“LESSER TANGENTIAL 16 ALEXANDER KOREIKO COUNTESS WITH STRICKEN FACE RUNS TO POND.”
Alexander Ivanovich didn’t understand a thing, but he was so distressed that he burned the telegram with a candle.
At 5:35 P.M. on the same day, another telegram arrived:
“DELIBERATIONS CONTINUE COMMA MILLION KISSES.”
Alexander Ivanovich went pale with fury and tore the telegram into small pieces.
But the very next night, two more urgent cables arrived.
The first read:
“LOAD ORANGES BARRELS BROTHERS KARAMAZOV.”
The second read:
“ICE HAS BROKEN STOP I AM COMMANDING PARADE.”
After that, Alexander Ivanovich had an unsettling accident at work.
While multiplying 985 by thirteen, at Chevazhevskaya’s request, he made a mistake and gave her the wrong answer. This had never happened before.
But he was incapable of focusing on mathematical problems.
He just couldn’t get the crazy telegrams out of his mind.
“Barrels,” he whispered, staring at the old Kukushkind. “Brothers Karamazov.
That’s shameless, plain and simple.”
He tried to calm himself down with the thought that these telegrams were a cutesy joke being played by some friends of his, but this theory had to be rejected on the spot: he had no friends.
As for his co-workers, they were serious people and joked only once a year, on April Fools’ Day.
And even on this day of cheerful merriment and joyful pranks, they invariably played the same depressing trick: they used the typewriter to concoct a fake pink slip for Kukushkind and put it on his desk.
And each time, seven years in a row, the old man would gasp in horror, which entertained everybody to no end.
Besides, they weren’t wealthy enough to waste money on telegrams.
After the telegram in which a mysterious person announced that he, rather than anybody else, was commanding the parade, things quieted down.
No one bothered Alexander Ivanovich for three days.
He had already started getting used to the idea that these strange occurrences had nothing to do with him when a thick registered letter arrived.
It contained a book The Capitalist Sharks: Biographies of American Millionaires.
Under different circumstances, Koreiko would have bought such a curious little book himself, but he literally squirmed in horror.
The first sentence, underlined in blue pencil, read:
“All large modern-day fortunes were amassed through the most dishonest means.”