He waited for about twenty minutes.
Berlaga was the first to return.
He squatted, took a handkerchief from his pocket, and said, wiping his face:
“Our Sardinevich confessed.
Confronting a witness did him in.”
“The creep has squealed?” asked Shura good-naturedly.
He took the cigarette butt out of his mouth with his thumb and index finger and tut-tutted.
Spit shot out of his mouth, swift and long, like a torpedo.
Hopping on one foot and aiming the second into his pant leg, Berlaga offered a cryptic explanation:
“I did it not in the interest of veracity but in the interest of truth.”
Next to arrive was the grand strategist.
He dropped on his stomach and, with his cheek on the hot sand and a meaningful look on his face, watched the blue Sardinevich get out of the water.
Then he took the folder from Balaganov’s hands and, wetting the pencil with his tongue, started recording the new information that he worked so hard to obtain.
The transformation of Yegor Sardinevich was amazing.
Just thirty minutes earlier, the sea had embraced a most exemplary activist, a man of whom even Comrade Netherlandov, chairman of the local union, always said:
“Of all people, Sardinevich would never fail us.”
But Sardinevich had failed them this time.
And how!
Instead of a lovely female body with the head of a shaving Englishman, the gentle summertime waves carried to shore a shapeless sack filled with mustard and horseradish.
While the grand strategist plundered the waves, Heinrich Maria Sause finally ambushed Polykhaev and had a very serious talk with him. He left the Hercules totally bewildered.
With a strange smile on his face, he went to the post office and, standing at a tall desk with a glass top, wrote a letter to his fiancee in Aachen:
“My dear girl, I have some exciting news.
My boss Polykhaev is finally sending me to a factory.
But what I find incredible, dear Tillie, is that here at the Hercules Corporation this is called ‘to stuff one into a bottle’ (sagnat w butilku)!
My new friend Bomze told me that I’m being sent to the factory as a punishment.
Can you imagine?
And our good friend Dr. Bernhard Gerngross—will he ever be able to understand it?”
CHAPTER 19 THE UNIVERSAL STAMP
By noon the following day, the Hercules started filling with rumors that the director had locked himself up in his palm-filled gallery with a visitor, and that for the last three hours he hadn’t been responding to Impala Mikhailovna’s knocking or to internal telephone calls. The Herculeans didn’t know what to make of it.
They were used to Polykhaev being promenaded up and down the hallways, or seated on window sills, or lured into nooks under the stairs; those were the places where all the decisions were made.
Somebody even suggested that the boss had quit the ranks of those who “had just left” and joined the influential category of “the hermits.” People like this usually sneak into their offices early in the morning, lock the door, unplug the phone, and, with the rest of the world effectively blocked off, start putting together all kinds of reports.
Meanwhile, work had to go on: documents urgently needed signatures, responses, and resolutions.
An edgy Impala Mikhailovna repeatedly approached Polykhaev’s door and listened carefully.
Small round pearls swayed in her large ears.
“This is without precedent,” the secretary said gravely.
“But who, who is in there with him?” asked Bomze, giving off a strong odor of both cologne and meat patties.
“An inspector, maybe?”
“No, I’m telling you, it’s just an ordinary visitor.”
“And Polykhaev has already spent three hours with him?”
“This is without precedent,” repeated Impala Mikhailovna.
“So how are we going to overcome this outcome?” Bomze became agitated.
“I urgently need Polykhaev’s signature.
Here’s the full report on the reasons why the premises of the former Tin and Bacon Co. do not meet our needs.
I have to have a signature.”
The staff besieged Impala Mikhailovna.
They all held documents of varying degrees of importance in their hands.
After another hour during which the rumble of voices continued behind the door, Impala Mikhailovna sat down at her desk and said softly:
“All right, comrades.
Let’s see your papers.”
She reached into a cabinet and took out a long wooden stand. Thirty-six rubber stamps with thick polished handles were hanging on it. Expertly picking the proper stamps from their nests, she started applying them to the papers that just couldn’t wait any longer.