Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories eBook

XXV

Kuzma Vassilyevitch immediately informed the authorities of the misfortune that had happened to him; he stated all the circumstances of the case verbally and in writing and gave the address of Madame Fritsche.  The police raided the house but they found no one there; the birds had flown.  They got hold of the owner of the house.  But they could not get much sense out of the latter, a very old and deaf workman.  He lived in a different part of the town and all he knew was that four months before he had let his house to a Jewess with a passport, whose name was Schmul or Schmulke, which he had immediately registered at the police station.  She had been joined by another woman, so he stated, who also had a passport, but what was their calling did not know; and whether they had other people living with them had not heard and did not know; the lad whom he used to keep as porter or watchman in the house had gone away to Odessa or Petersburg, and the new porter had only lately come, on the 1st of July.

Inquiries were made at the police station and in the neighbourhood; it appeared that Madame Schmulke, together with her companion, whose real name was Frederika Bengel, had left Nikolaev about the 20th of June, but where they had gone was unknown.  The mysterious man with a gipsy face and three buttons on his cuff and the dark-skinned foreign girl with an immense mass of hair, no one had seen.  As soon as Kuzma Vassilyevitch was discharged from the hospital, he visited the house that had been so fateful for him.  In the little room where he had talked to Colibri and where there was still a smell of musk, there was a second secret door; the sofa had been moved in front of it on his second visit and through it no doubt the murderer had come and seized him from behind.  Kuzma Vassilyevitch lodged a formal complaint; proceedings were taken.  Several numbered reports and instructions were dispatched in various directions; the appropriate acknowledgments and replies followed in due course....  There the incident closed.  The suspicious characters had disappeared completely and with them the stolen government money had vanished, too, one thousand, nine hundred and seventeen roubles and some kopecks, in paper and gold.  Not an inconsiderable sum in those days!  Kuzma Vassilyevitch was paying back instalments for ten years, when, fortunately for him, an act of clemency from the Throne cancelled the debt.

XXVI

He was himself at first firmly convinced that Emilie, his treacherous Zuckerpuppchen, was to blame for all his trouble and had originated the plot.  He remembered how on the last day he had seen her he had incautiously dropped asleep on the sofa and how when he woke he had found her on her knees beside him and how confused she had been, and how he had found a hole in his belt that evening—­a hole evidently made by her