"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."