The Spy

"Lost? Look out! You might get it in the neck for that. Listen. Three doors away from here is the Zemstvo Board building. A man will soon leave the place who works there. His name is Dmitry Ilyich Kurnosov. Remember. You are to follow him. You understand? Come, and I will show him to you."

Several minutes later Klimkov like a little dog was quickly following a man in a worn overcoat and a crumpled black hat. The man was large and strong. He walked rapidly, swung a cane, and rapped it on the asphalt vigorously. Black hair with a sprinkling of grey fell from under his hat on his ears and the back of his neck.

Yevsey was suddenly overcome by a feeling of pity, which was a rare thing with him. It imperiously demanded action. Perspiring from agitation he darted across the street in short steps, ran forward, recrossed the street, and met the man breast to breast. Before him flashed a dark-bearded face, with meeting brows, a smile reflected in blue eyes, and a broad forehead seamed with wrinkles. The man's lips moved. He was evidently singing or speaking to himself.

Klimkov stopped and wiped the perspiration from his face with his hands. Then he followed the man with bent head and eyes cast to the ground, raising them only now and then in order not to lose the object of his observation from sight.

"Not young," he thought. "A poor man apparently. It all comes from poverty and from fear, too."

He remembered the Smokestack, and trembled.

"He'll kill me," he thought. Then he grew sorry for the Smokestack.

The buildings looked down upon him with dim, tired eyes. The noise of the street crept into his ears insistently, the cold liquid mud squirted and splashed. Klimkov was overcome by a sense of gloomy monotony. He recalled Rayisa, and was drawn to move aside, away from the street.

The man he was tracking stopped at the steps of a house, pushed the bell button, raised his hat, fanned his face with it, and flung it back on his head, leaving bare part of a bald skull. Yevsey stationed himself five steps away at the curb. He looked pityingly into the man's face, and felt the need to tell him something. The man observed him, frowned, and turned away. Yevsey, disconcerted, dropped his head, and sat down on the curb.

"If he only had insulted me," he thought. "But this way, without any provocation, it's not good, it's not good."

"From the Department of Safety?" he heard a low hissing voice. The question was asked by a tall reddish muzhik with a dirty apron and a broom in his hands.

"Yes," responded Yevsey, and the very same instant thought, "I ought not to have told him."

"A new one again?" remarked the janitor. "You are all after Kurnosov?"

"Yes."

"So? Tell the officers that this morning a guest came to him from the railroad station with trunks, three trunks. He hasn't registered yet with the police. He has twenty-four hours' time. A little sort of a pretty fellow with a small mustache. He wears clean clothes." The dvornik ran the broom over the pavement several times, and sprinkled Yevsey's shoes and trousers with mud. Presently he stopped to remark, "You can be seen here. They aren't fools either, they notice your kind. You ought to stand at the gates."

Yevsey obediently stepped to the gates. Suddenly he noticed Yakov Zarubin on the other side of the street wearing a new overcoat and gloves and carrying a cane. The black derby hat was tilted on his head, and as he walked along the pavement he smiled and ogled like a street girl confident of her beauty.

"Good morning," he said, looking around. "I came to replace you. Go to Somov's café on Lebed Street, ask for Nikolay Pavlov there."

"Are you in the Department of Safety, too?" asked Yevsey.

"I got there ten days before you. Why?"

Yevsey looked at him, at his beaming swart countenance.

"Was it you who told about me?"

"And didn't you betray the Smokestack?"

After thinking a while Yevsey answered glumly:

"I did it after you had betrayed me. You were the only one I told."

"And you were the only one the Smokestack told. Ugh!" Yakov laughed, and gave Yevsey a poke on the shoulder. "Go quick, you crooked chicken!" He walked by Yevsey's side swinging his cane. "This is a good position. I understand so much. You can live like a lord, walk about, and look at everything. You see this suit? Now the girls show me especial attention."

Soon he took leave of Yevsey, and turned back quickly. Klimkov following him with an inimical glance fell to thinking. He considered Yakov a dissolute, empty fellow, whom he placed lower than himself, and it was offensive to see him so well satisfied and so elegantly dressed.

"He informed against me. If I told about the Smokestack it was out of fear. But why did he do it?" He made mental threats against Yakov. "Wait, we will see who's the better man."

When he asked at the café for Nikolay Pavlov, he was shown a stairway, which he ascended. At the top he heard Piotr's voice on the other side of a door.

"There are fifty-two cards to a pack. In the city in my district there are thousands of people, and I know a few hundred of them maybe. I know who lives with whom, and what and where each of them works. People change, but cards remain one and the same."

Besides Sasha there was another man in the room with Piotr, a tall, well-built person, who stood at the window reading a paper, and did not move when Yevsey entered.

"What a stupid mug!" were the words with which Sasha met Yevsey, fixing an evil look upon his face. "It must be made over. Do you hear, Maklakov?"

The man reading the paper turned his head, and looked at Yevsey with large bright eyes.

"Yes," he said.

Piotr, who seemed to be excited and had dishevelled hair, asked Yevsey what he had seen. The remnants of dinner stood on the table; the odor of grease and sauer-kraut titillated Yevsey's nostrils, and gave him a keen appetite. He stood before Piotr, who was cleaning his teeth with a goose-quill, and in a dispassionate voice repeated the information the janitor had given him. At the first words of the account Maklakov put his hands and the paper behind his back, and inclined his head. He listened attentively twirling his mustache, which like the hair on his head was a peculiar light shade, a sort of silver with a tinge of yellow. The clean, serious face with the knit brows and the calm eyes, the confident pose of his powerful body clad in a close-fitting, well made, sober suit, the strong bass voice – all this distinguished Maklakov advantageously from Piotr and Sasha.

"Did the janitor himself carry the trunks in?" he asked Yevsey.

"He didn't say."

"That means he did not carry them in. He would have told you whether they were heavy or light. They carried them in themselves. Evidently that's the way it was."

"The printing office?" asked Sasha.

"Literature, the current number."

"Well, we must have a search made," said Sasha gruffly, and uttered an ugly oath, shaking his fist.

"I must find the printing-press. Get me type, boys, and I'll fix up a printing-press myself. I'll find the donkeys. We'll give them all that's necessary. Then we'll arrest them, and we'll have lots of money."

"Not a bad scheme!" exclaimed Piotr.

Maklakov looked at Yevsey, and asked:

"Have you had your dinner yet?"

"No."

"Take your dinner," said Piotr with a nod toward the table. "Be quick about it."

"Why treat him to remnants?" asked Maklakov calmly. Then he stepped to the door, opened it, and called out, "Dinner, please."

"You try," Sasha snuffled to Piotr, "to persuade that idiot Afanasov to give us the printing-press they seized last year."

"Very well, I'll try," Piotr assented meditatively.

Maklakov did not look at them, but silently twisted his mustache. Dinner was served. A round pock-marked modest-looking man made his appearance in the room at the same time as the waiter. He smiled at everyone benevolently, and shook Yevsey's hand vigorously.