He Lover of Death (10 page)

The Prince was striding to and fro between the two men, waving his flail through the air.

Senka opened the door a bit wider – so where was Deadeye, then?

He was doing something really strange: he’d taken that pen of his (a foil, it was called) out of the cane, and was shredding the feather mattress on the bed with it, scattering fluff and feathers in the air.

‘Can’t think where else,’ said Deadeye. ‘Where could our friends from the steppe have concealed their
porte-monnaie
?’

The Prince sneezed – the fluff must have got up his nose.

‘All right, Deadeye, don’t get in a sweat.’ He stopped in front of the foreman and grabbed hold of his hair with one hand. ‘They’ll spill the beans. Right, Yellow-face, are you going to blab? Or would you like to chew on this iron apple here?’

And he swung the flail in front of the foreman’s face (which wasn’t yellow at all, it was as white as chalk, as if it had been dusted with the stuff).

Deadeye stopped lashing his blade about and sprinkled some powder on his fingernail (candy cane, Senka guessed). As he threw his head back, Senka winced – now he’d start sneezing even worse than the Prince! But Deadeye wasn’t bothered, he just squeezed his eyes shut, and when he opened them again, they’d turned all wet and shiny.

The Kalmyk foreman licked his lips – they were as white as his mug – and said: ‘I don’t know . . . Badmai Kekteevich doesn’t tell me.’

‘Right, then,’ said the Prince with a nod. He let go of the foreman’s hair and turned to the horse-trader. ‘Well, Goat-beard? Shall I chop you into little pieces, or are you going to talk?’

The horse-trader seemed like a tough old nut to crack. He spoke calmly and his voice didn’t shake: ‘I’m not so stupid as to keep my money here. I went to the market office today and put it in the safe. Take what there is and leave. This watch is gold. And there’s money in the wallet. Enough for you.’

The Prince looked round at Deadeye, who was standing there, smiling at something. He confirmed the story.

‘That’s right. There is a safe at the horse market and the traders put their money in it for safe-keeping, so it won’t get stolen and they can’t binge it all away.’

Senka saw the trader and his man glance at each other, and Badmai fixed his eyes on something on the floor. Ah-ha! One leg of the foreman’s chair was pressing down on a floorboard, and its edge was sticking up. The foreman shifted a bit and the floorboard fell back into place.

The trader’s wallet was lying open on the table. The Prince took out the banknotes and rustled them.

The Prince took a step towards the horse-trader and smashed a fist into his cheekbone. The Kalmyk’s head bobbed about, but he didn’t shout out or start crying – he was a tough one.

‘I got the whole deck out for three hundred. It’s a flaming disgrace. Why, you squint-eyed snake!’

‘All right,’ said the Prince, tugging the watch out of the horsetrader’s pocket – it was gold, good stuff. ‘You can thank your Kalmyk god for keeping your fat purse safe. Let’s go, Deadeye.’

He was already on his way to the door when Senka stuck his head in and said, all modest like:

‘Uncle Prince, can I say something, please?’

‘What are you doing here?’ the Prince said with a scowl. ‘A scram?’

And Senka said: ‘Nah, no scram, but wouldn’t it be a good idea to check over there, under the floor, eh?’

And he pointed to the floorboard.

The horse-trader jerked on his chair and wheezed something Senka couldn’t understand – it must have been a curse in his own language. The Prince looked at Senka, then at the floor. He thumped the foreman in the ear – the blow hadn’t looked very hard, but the foreman tumbled over, taking his chair with him, and started snivelling.

The Prince bent down, hooked one finger under the edge of the floorboard and lifted it out – there was a hole in the floor underneath it. He put his hand in.

‘Ah-ha.’

He took out a big leather wallet, and it was stuffed chock-full with crunch.

The Prince counted the swag. ‘Why, there’s three thousand here!’ he said. ‘Good for you, Sixer.’

Senka was flattered, of course. He looked at Deadeye to see whether he was admiring him too.

But Deadeye wasn’t admiring Senka, and he wasn’t looking at the wallet. Something strange was happening to him. He’d stopped smiling, and his eyes weren’t gleaming now, they looked drowsy.

‘I believed them . . .’ Deadeye said slowly, and his whole face quivered, as if waves were running across it. ‘I believed the Judases. They looked me in the eye! And they lied! They lied – to me!’

‘Enough, enough, don’t go kicking up the dust,’ the Prince said –he was rather pleased with the find. ‘They have to mind their own interests

Deadeye started moving, muttering: ‘Goodbye, my darling Kalmyk girl. . . Your eyes are very narrow, true, your nose is flat, your forehead broad, you do not lisp in fluent French .. .’
²
He chuckled: ‘Narrow, very narrow . . .’

Then suddenly he leapt forward – exactly the same way he had when he spiked Yoshka – and stuck his foil straight down into the foreman’s eye. Senka heard a crunch (that was the steel running through the skull and sticking in the floor) and he gasped and closed his eyes. When he opened them, Deadeye had already pulled the foil out and was watching curiously as something white, like cream cheese, dripped off the blade.

The foreman hammered his heels on the floor and opened his mouth wide, but no shout came out. Senka was afraid to look him in the face.

‘What the . . . Are you crazy?’ the Prince snarled.

Deadeye answered back in a hoarse, strained voice: ‘I’m not crazy. It just sickens me that there’s no truth in this world.’

He gave a flick of his wrist, there was a whistling sound, and the sharp point of the foil slit the horse-trader’s throat. A tuft of beard that was sliced off went flying through the air, then the blood came spurting out in a thick jet – like water out of a fire hose.

Senka gasped again, but this time he forgot to close his eyes. He saw the horse-trader jerk up off the chair so hard that the ropes holding his hands broke. He jumped up, but he couldn’t walk, his legs were still tied to the chair.

The life was gushing out of the horse trader in spurts of cherry red, and he kept trying to hold it back with his hands, to stuff it back in, but it was no good – the blood flowed through his fingers, the Kalmyk’s face went blank and it was so terrifying that Senka screamed and went dashing out of that hideous room.

HOW SENKA SAT IN THE
PRIVY CUPBOARD

He began to recover his wits only on Arbat Street, when he was completely winded from running. He didn’t remember flying out of the Slavyanskaya Hotel, or running across the bridge, and then right across the empty Smolensky market.

And even on Arbat Street he still wasn’t himself. He couldn’t run any longer, but he didn’t think to sit down and take a rest. He staggered along the dark street like an old man, croaking and gasping. And he kept looking round, all the time; he still thought he could see the Kalmyk behind him, with his torn-open throat.

The way things had turned out, he was the one who killed the horse-trader and his man. It was all his fault. If he hadn’t wanted to impress the Prince, if he hadn’t pointed out the hiding place, the Kalmyks would still be alive. But he had to go and blab, didn’t he? He was Speedy the Bandit, was he not?

But by Theatre Square, Senka was asking himself another question:
what kind of damn bandit are you?
A lousy worm of a bandit, that’s what you are. Oh, Semyon Spidorov, you haven’t got the stomach for real man’s work now, do you?

He felt so ashamed for running away, he couldn’t bear it. As he walked along Maroseika Street, he called himself every name he could think of, abused himself something rotten, but as soon as he remembered the Kalmyks, it was clear as day: there was no way back into the deck now. The Prince and his gang might forgive him –he could lie and say his stomach was turned or make up something else, but he couldn’t lie to himself. If Senka was a businessman, a cow was a thoroughbred.

Oh, the shame of it.

Senka’s legs carried him to the Yauza Boulevard before he had any idea where he was heading.

He sat on a bench for a while and got frozen right through. Then he paced up and down for a while. It started to get light. And it wasn’t until he realised he was walking past Death’s house for the third time that he understood what pain was gnawing hardest at his heart. He stopped in front of the door and suddenly his hand reached out of its own accord, so it did, and knocked. Loudly.

He felt scared and wanted to turn and run. He decided he would just hear the sound of her footsteps, her voice. When she asked ‘Who’s there?’ he would scarper.

The door opened without a sound and without any warning. There were no footsteps, no questions.

Death appeared in the doorway. The loose hair flowing down over her shoulders was black, but all the rest of her was white: the nightshirt, the lacy shawl on her shoulders. And her feet – Senka was looking down at them – they were white too, the tips were peeping out from under the hem of her nightshirt.

Well, well, she never even asked who was knocking at that time in the morning. She was fearless, all right. Or was it all the same to her?

She was surprised to see Senka. ‘You? Did the Prince send you? Has something happened?’

He shook his hanging head.

Then she got angry: ‘What are you doing here at this unearthly hour? Why are you hiding your eyes, you little beast?’

All right, so he looked up. And then he couldn’t look down again –he was lost in wonder. Of course, the dawn played a little trick of its own, peeping out from behind the roofs with its pink glow, lighting up the top of the doorway and Death’s face and shoulders.

‘Well, aren’t you going to say something?’ she said, frowning. ‘You look like a ghost. And your shirt’s torn.’

That was when Senka noticed that his shirt really was torn from the collar to the sleeve and it was hanging all askew. He must have snagged it on something when he was running out from the hotel.

‘What’s this, are you hurt?’ asked Death. ‘You’ve got blood on you.’

She reached out a hand and rubbed the spot of dried blood on his cheek. Senka guessed some of the spray must have hit him when the horse-trader’s blood came spurting out.

But Death’s finger was hot, and her touch came as such a surprise that Senka suddenly burst into tears.

He stood there, blubbing away, the tears streaming down his face. He felt terribly ashamed, but he simply couldn’t stop. He tried hard to force them back, but they kept breaking through – it was so pitiful, just like a little puppy whimpering! Then Senka started cursing like he’d never cursed before, with the most obscene words he knew. But the tears kept on flowing.

Death took his hand: ‘What’s wrong, what is it? Come with me . . .’

She bolted the door shut and dragged him into the house after her. He tried to dig his heels in, but Death was strong. She sat him down at the table and took hold of his shoulders. He wasn’t crying now, just sobbing and rubbing his eyes furiously.

She put a glass of brown stuff down in front of him. ‘Go on, get that down you. It’s Jamaican rum.’

He drank it. It made his chest feel hot, but otherwise it was all right.

‘Now lie down on the sofa.’

‘I’m not lying down!’ Senka snarled, and he looked away again.

But he did lie down, because his head was spinning. And the instant his head touched the cushions, everything went blank.

When Senka woke up it was day, and not early in the day either –the sun was shining from the other side, not from where the street was but from the yard. Lying under a blanket – which was light and fluffy with a blue-and-green check – he felt free and easy.

Death was sitting at the table, sideways on to Senka sewing something, or maybe doing her embroidery. She looked incredibly beautiful from the side, only she seemed sadder than when you saw her from the front. He didn’t open his eyes wide, just peeked out at her for a long time. He had to figure out how to behave after what had just happened. Why, for instance, was he lying there naked? Not completely naked, that is, he had his pants on, but no shirt and no boots. That had to mean she undressed him while he was asleep, and he didn’t remember a thing.

Just then Death turned her head and Senka shut his eyelids quickly, but even so she realised he wasn’t sleeping any more.

‘Are you awake?’ she said. ‘Are you hungry? Sit at the table. Here’s a fresh roll. And here’s some milk.’

‘I don’t want it,’ Senka muttered, offended by the milk. Why couldn’t she offer him a man’s drink – tea or coffee? But then, of course, what respect could he hope for after snivelling like a little kid?

She stood up, took the cup and bread roll off the table and sat down beside him. Senka was afraid Death would start feeding him by hand, like a baby, and he sat up.

Suddenly he felt so desperately hungry he started trembling all over. And he started gobbling down the bread and washing it down with milk. Death watched and waited. She didn’t have to wait for long, Senka guzzled it all in a minute.

‘Now tell me what the matter is.’

There was nothing else for it. He hung his head, scowled, and told her – briefly, but honestly, without keeping anything back. And this is how he finished: ‘So I’m sorry, I’ve let you down. You vouched for me to the Prince, and I turned out too weak, you see. What kind of bandit would I make? I thought I was a falcon, and I’m nothing but a mangy little sparrow.’

And as soon as he finished, he looked up at her. She seemed so angry that Senka felt really terrible.

They didn’t say anything for a little while. Then she spoke: ‘I’m the one who owes you an apology, Speedy, for letting you get anywhere near the Prince. I wasn’t myself at the time.’ Then she shook her head and said to herself, not to Senka: ‘Oh, Prince, Prince . . .’

‘It wasn’t the Prince, it was Deadeye,’ he said. ‘Deadeye killed the Kalmyks. I told you . . .’