"Vladimir Belayev - The Old Fortress 3 -The Town By The Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (Belayev Vladimir)

When he got inside the attic, Polevoi noticed a faint gleam of light far away in the darkness. It was a
gap in the wall and a man was struggling to get through it. Polevoi fired twice. The unknown man
groaned, but struggled through the gap and crashed over the roof of the next-door house.
Polevoi ordered the two guards who had followed him to chase the stranger over the roofs. He
himself jumped down into the yard, checked my post and sent another three guards to inspect all the
yards round headquarters, and the side-road that ran into Kishinev Street. But the bandit managed to slip
away before our patrol reached the side-road. After squeezing through the gap on to the roof of the
house next door, which was a hostel for chemistry students, the stranger leapt unhesitatingly into a big
heap of dung in the hostel garden and slipped out through a hole in the fence into the side-road. Here the
trail broke off.
He must have cut across the side-road and made his way through the yards to the Market Square. It
was a difficult route, specially for a wounded man; he would have had to climb several fences and get
through the barbed wire between the yards, and, after all that, run out on to the well-lighted Market
Square. There was a watchman on the square. He sat by the co-operative grocer's wrapped in a
sheepskin, with a shot-gun in his hands. Perhaps the watchman had been asleep? Not very likely. At any
rate he swore he hadn't slept a wink. Only ten minutes before the incident his wife had brought him a
bowl of meat and buckwheat porridge for supper. The meal was still warm when the guards ran up and
asked him if he had seen anything. It was hard to imagine how the wounded man could have slipped
across the Market Square without the watchmanтАФan old, experienced soldierтАФnoticing him.
Nevertheless the trail did lead to Market Square. The barbed wire round the red-brick house on the
other side of the street had been pulled apart. On one of its spikes there was a scrap of cloth that must
have been torn from the clothing of a man crawling through in a hurry. Apart from the scrap of cloth on
the barbed wire there were no other traces of the stranger.
Farther away, on the steps of the large building where the staff of the district education department
lived, a drop of dried blood was discovered.
One of the few lucky ones who were allowed to leave the guard-room and take part in the pursuit of
the bandit was Furman, once a juvenile delinquent and now a pupil at the factory-training school. At the
sight of the blood on the steps Furman was overjoyed. He thought it was the bandit's blood. But the wife
of the director of district education who lived in the house said it came from a chicken she had killed the
previous Friday. Bitterly disappointed, the unlucky sleuth wandered away.
It could only be supposed that the bandit had got out on to the lighted square, slipped past under the
very nose of the sleepy watchman and crossed the bridge into the old part of the town. From there he
could make either for the Polish or the Rumanian frontier.
In the attic of the shed at headquarters, the bandit had dropped a bundle of fuse wire and a
detonator. Apparently he had intended first to do away with the sentry, then make his way to the
ammunition cellar and blow it up, headquarters and all. When he came out on the balcony and saw no
one in the yard, he must have concluded that the sentry was asleep. Sasha would have had a bad time if
he hadn't come out of his nook and looked round. As it turned out, Sasha had been quite unarmed while
he was on guard.




PEELING THE SPUDS

Relieved from his post, Sasha lay down on the couch in the guard-room and pretended to be asleep.
No one in the guard-room was sleeping after the excitement of the night. We kept telling each other over
and over again what had happened and making all kinds of wild guesses. Furman, a little, thin fellow,
insisted that the bandit had dressed himself up as a woman while he was in the garden, and slipped
across the Market Square in disguise. Only Sasha took no part in the discussion.