The Loss

Having received from the editorial office an assignment to write about the work of the criminal investigation department, I decided: first of all, no questions! Just listen, watch, get into it. No—there’s even a better word: to immerse yourself!

And it turns out that a day of aimless sitting in my corner didn’t move me even a step forward along the path to understanding the mysterious police work. There was no trace of the exotic, no hint of the specific flavor. Everything here felt most like an utterly ordinary institution: a typewriter clacks, some people come in and go out carrying papers. The chief of the office, Major Nikita Epifanov (with his size and solid appearance—more like a major-general), loomed over his desk like a mountain. A telephone receiver, a fountain pen, a lighter—everything seemed like toys in his huge and soft, as if belonging to Old Man Frost, hands. The office desk, the safe in the far corner from me (which I eyed with restrained curiosity), and even Captain Zurab Golba—a small, slender Abkhaz man with big lush mustaches—felt like toys too. He kept dropping by his boss with some tiny, toy-like problems: sign a request, fill in another box in another report.

In short, compared to the seriousness of the tasks that had been set for me when they sent me on a business trip, everything looked unreal. Probably, out of boredom and doing nothing, a memory suddenly surfaced of my first encounter with the police. Remembering that old story, I first found myself amused—and then, unexpectedly, the thought came: maybe it wasn’t an accident that Mrs. Mnemosyne had slipped me this shamefully forgotten episode from my biography? After all, back then it also began—with my, so to speak, mistaken ideas about how the police work actually is.