He Lover of Death (9 page)

The words were peaceable, but the voice was jeering – you could see he was riling the Prince, trying to wind him up.

The Prince said: ‘I soar like an eagle, but you scrounge like a jackal, you feed on carrion! You’re a fine talker but Moscow isn’t big enough for the two of us! You’ve got to be under me, or . . .’ And he slashed a finger across his throat.

The Ghoul licked his lips, cocked his head and said slowly, almost gently: ‘Or what, my little Prince? Be under you . . . or death, is that it? And what if that Death of yours has already been under me? She’s a handsome girl. Soft to lie on, springy, like a duck-down bed . . .’

Manka laughed again, and the Prince turned crimson – he knew what the Ghoul meant. And the Ghoul got what he wanted – he’d driven his enemy wild with fury.

The Prince lowered his head, howled like a wolf and went for the man who had insulted him.

But Manka and the Ghoul obviously had everything arranged. He jumped to the left and she jumped to the right, stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled.

Down below the hay rustled, a door banged and Yoshka flew from the barn, though the other two stayed put. He had a shooter in his hand – black, with a long barrel.

‘Stop right there!’ he cried. ‘Look this way. You know me, old friend, I never miss.’

The Prince froze on the spot.

‘So that’s how you operate, is it, Ghoul?’ he asked. ‘No respect for the rules?’

‘Quite correct, little my Princeling, quite correct. I’ve got brains, and the rules aren’t made for people like me. Now both of you get down on the ground. Get down, or Yoshka will shoot you.’

The Prince grinned, as if he thought that was funny. ‘You don’t have brains, Ghoul, you’re a fool. You’re no match for the Council. You’re done for now. I don’t have to do a thing, the grandfathers will do it all for me. Let’s lie down, Deadeye, and take a rest. The Ghoul’s condemned himself.’

And he lay down on his back, crossed one leg over the other and took out a
papyrosa.

Deadeye looked at him, and trailed the toe of his low boot across the ground – he must have been feeling bad about his suit – and lay down too, on his side, his head propped on his hand and his cane by his side.

‘Well, now what?’ the Prince asked. Then, turning to Yoshka: ‘Fire away, my little sharpshooter. Do you know what our traditionalists do with rule-breakers like you? For a trick like this they’ll dig you out from wherever you hide, then stick you straight back in the ground again.’

The way this meet was turning out was weird. What with two men lying on the ground smiling, and three people standing there, just watching them.

Sprat whispered: ‘They don’t dare fire. They bury you alive for that, it’s the law.’

The Ghoul’s moll whistled again. Then Cudgel and Beak came dashing from the barn and pounced on the men on the ground: Cudgel dropped the entire weight of his carcass on the Prince, Beak turned Deadeye face down and neatly twisted his arms behind his back.

‘There you go, little Prince’ The Ghoul laughed. ‘Now Cudgel’s going to beat your brains out with his great big fist. And Beak’s going to smash your Jack’s ribs. And no one will ever know about the shooter. Simple as that. We’ll tell the Council we beat you up. Shame you couldn’t handle the Ghoul and his woman. Right, lads, smash ’em now!’

Suddenly there was this fierce yell – ‘A-a-a-a-gh!’ – right beside Senka’s ear.

Sprat launched himself up with his elbows, got to his knees and leapt straight down on to Yoshka’s shoulders, screeching as he went. He couldn’t hold on and went flying to the ground. Yoshka swung the handle of his gun and smashed it into Sprat’s temple – but that brief moment, when Cudgel and Beak turned towards the noise, was enough for the Prince and Deadeye. They pushed off their enemies and jumped to their feet.

‘I’ll let them have it, Ghoul!’ Yoshka shouted. ‘It didn’t work out like you planned! We can dig the bullets out afterwards! Maybe that’ll work.’

And then Senka surprised himself by screeching even louder than Sprat and jumping on to Yoshka’s back. He clung on for grim death, sinking his teeth into Yoshka’s ear. He felt a salty taste in his mouth.

Yoshka swung round, trying to shake the kid off, but he couldn’t. Senka bellowed, and kept ripping Yoshka’s ear with his teeth.

He couldn’t have held on for long, of course. But then Deadeye snatched his cane up off the ground and shook it, the wooden stick went flying off, and something long and steely glittered in the Jack’s hand.

Deadeye bounded towards Yoshka, bent one leg and stretched out the other, straightened out like a spring, and elongated himself, like a viper attacking. He snagged Yoshka with his blade – right in the heart – and Yoshka stopped waving his arms and tumbled over, with Senka underneath him. Senka escaped, and looked round to see what would happen next.

He was just in time to see the Prince tear himself out of Cudgel’s great mitts, take a run at Manka and smash his forehead into her chin – the enormous woman went down on her backside, sat there for a moment then collapsed. But the Prince had already taken the Ghoul by the throat and they went tumbling over and over, off the well-trodden path and into the grass, setting the dry stalks swaying furiously.

Cudgel was about to go and lend his King a hand, but Deadeye came flying up from behind, his left hand tucked behind his back and his right hand holding that pen – it was more than two feet long – swish-swish, backwards and forwards through the air, and there were red drops dripping off the steel.

‘Oh, do not leave me,’ he recited, ‘stay a while. I have loved you for so long. Let my fiery caresses scorch you . . .’

Senka knew those lines – they were from this song, a real tear-jerker it was.

Cudgel turned towards Deadeye, fluttered his eyelids and staggered backwards. Beak was quicker off the mark, he’d scarpered straight off. And then the Prince and the Ghoul came tumbling back on to the bald patch, only now you could see who was getting the best of it. The Prince twisted his enemy round, grabbed hold of his face and started hammering his head against the ground.

The Ghoul wheezed: ‘Enough, enough. You win! I’m a punk.’

That was a special kind of word. When anyone said that at a meet, you weren’t supposed to hit him any more. That was the law.

The Prince thumped him another couple of times, just to round things off, or maybe it was more than a couple – Senka didn’t watch the end. He was squatting down next to Sprat, watching crimson blood streaming out of the black hole in the side of his head. Sprat was as dead as a doornail – Yoshka had smashed his head in with his shooter.

*

After that the grandfathers spent four days trying to decide whether a meet like that could decide anything. They ruled that it couldn’t. Of course the Ghoul had cheated, but the Prince had blotted his copybook too: his Jack had come with a blade, and there were the two lads hiding in the barn. The Prince wasn’t fit to be ace yet, that was the verdict. Moscow would have to manage a bit longer without a thieves’ tsar.

The Prince went about in a fury, drinking all the time and threatening to put the Ghoul in the ground. There was no sign of the Ghoul, he was holed up somewhere, recovering from the treatment the Prince had doled out.

All Khitrovka was buzzing with sensational talk about the meet in Luzhniki.

And as for Speedy Senka, you could say these were golden days.

He was the Prince’s sixer now, all fully legit. For his heroism the deck gave him a handsome ration and total respect–you can imagine how the lads in Khitrovka treated him now.

Senka went round there about three times a day, as if he had important secret business, but really just to cut a dash. All of Sprat’s clothes went to him: the English cloth trousers with a crease in them, and the box calf boots, and the boulanger pea-jacket, and the captain’s cap with the lacquered peak, and the silver watch on a chain with the little silver skull. The lads came running from all over to shake hands with the hero or gape from a distance as he told his story.

Prokha, who used to teach Senka what was good sense and put on airs around him, looked into Senka’s eyes now and asked him in a quiet voice, so the others wouldn’t hear, to fix him up as a sixer somewhere, even with a really feeble deck. Senka listened condescendingly and promised to think about it.

Oh, but it felt good.

True enough, his pockets were as empty as before, but surely that would all change when the first job came along.

It came along soon, and a real hotshot job it was too.

HOW SENKA WENT ON
A REAL JOB

The Prince got this tip-off from a reliable man, a waiter at the Slavyanskaya hotel where merchants stayed, over in Berezhki. He said a rich Kalmyk horse-trader and his right-hand man had arrived from the town of Khvalynsk to buy stud horses for a herd. This Kalmyk had a fat wad of crunch on him, and it had to be lifted quick, because tomorrow, on Sunday, he was going to the horse auction, and he could spend the whole lot there.

Late in the evening the whole deck got into three two-seaters and set off. The Prince rode up front with Deadeye, then came Lardy and the twins, with the Bosun and Senka at the rear. Their job was to stand lookout and make sure the horses could be started at a gallop if they had to scram.

As they flew across Red Square, down Vozdvizhenka Street and along Arbat Street, Senka’s belly kept rumbling so bad he could have gone running to the lav. But later, after they clattered across the bridge, the sickening fear suddenly turned to jauntiness, like when Senka was a kid and his father took him to the Shrovetide Carnival that first time, to ride down the icy wooden slides.

The Bosun was merry right from the off and kept cracking jokes. Ah,’ he said, ‘Sebastopol, I’ll meet my moll.’ And again: ‘Ah, Poltava, what a palaver.’ Or else: –Ah, Samara, we’ll be there tomorra.’

He knew lots of different towns, some of them Senka hadn’t even heard of.

The hotel was a drab-looking place, like a workers’ bunkhouse. The lights were all out before ten – trading folk went to bed early, and it was market day tomorrow.

They drove through to the railway depot and jumped out. They didn’t talk, they didn’t need words now – everything had been talked through in advance.

Senka took the reins and steered the three carriages side by side, wheel to wheel, with the Bosun’s rig in the middle. Then he handed the Bosun all three reins. The horses wouldn’t play up with him, they were smart. When they sensed strength, they stood still and didn’t stir. And the Prince’s horses were special, miraculous – nothing could catch horses like that.

So there was the Bosun, sitting on the box, puffing on his long pipe, and Senka didn’t know what to do with himself; he paced down the street, then back up the other side. He wasn’t scared any more, just limp and fed up. He felt pretty useless.

He ran to one corner, then another, to check whether there was any need to scram. Not a thing, it was all quiet.

‘Uncle Bosun, what’s taking them so long?’

The Bosun took pity on the sixer. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘why should a healthy young lad like you be hanging about back here? Run and see how the job’s going. Take a look, then come back and tell me how they finish off the Kalmyks.’

Senka was surprised. ‘Can’t they just take the money? Do they have to finish them off?’

‘That depends how much there is,’ the Bosun explained. ‘If there’s not a lot of crunch, only a few hundred, you don’t need to finish them off, the coppers won’t look too hard. But if there’s thousands, it’s best to do them in. A merchant will offer the coppers a big reward for his thousands, to make sure they sweat real hard. Off you run, Speedy, don’t you worry none. I’ll manage here on my own. Ah, I’d go myself, like a shot, if I had any legs.’

Senka didn’t need to be told twice. He was so tired of just hanging around, he didn’t even go in through the gate, just climbed straight over the wall.

When he walked into the big hallway he saw a man in a long coat lying there on the counter, squealing in fear. He had his hands over his head, and his shoulders were shaking. Lardy was standing beside him, yawning, with his fiddle in his hand (that was what bandits called a devolvert: a fiddle, a bludgeon or a chanter).

The man on the counter said in this feeble voice: ‘Don’t kill me, gentlemen. I didn’t look at you, I closed my eyes straight away. Go easy on me . . . please? Don’t take my life – I’m a family man, a good Orthodox Christian, eh?’

Senka answered, playing the big man: ‘Don’t you worry. You won’t twitch much – we’ll take pity on you.’

Then the man said to Senka. ‘Curious? Go on, then, have a gander. They’re taking their time over it.’

There was a collidor. Long it was, with doors in a row on both sides. Maybe was standing at the near end, and Surely at the far end (or the other way round, Senka still found it hard to tell the brothers apart). They had fiddles too.

‘I came to have a look,’ Senka said. ‘Just a quick peep.’

‘Be my guest,’ said Maybe (or it could have been Surely), flashing his white teeth in a smile.

Just then, one of the doors started to open. He slammed it shut with his foot and barked: ‘Come out here and you’re for it!’

Someone wailed behind the door: ‘What are you doing, you fooligan? I have to get to the lav.’

Maybe hooted with laughter: ‘Puddle in your pants. But you kick up a racket, and I’ll shoot through the door.’

‘Holy God,’ gasped the voice behind the door. ‘Is it a hold-up, then? I won’t bother you, lads, I’ll be quiet.’

And the bolt rasped shut.

Maybe started giggling again (it was probably Surely after all – he was always grinning from ear to ear). He pointed with his devolvert to a half-open door halfway down the collidor:
That’s where it is.

Senka walked over and glanced inside.

He saw two men tied to chairs – they had swarthy skin and narrow eyes. One was really old, about fifty, with a little goatee beard, a pair of good plaid trousers, and a silk waistcoat with a gold chain dangling out of the pocket. He had to be the horse-trader. The other one was young, without any beard or moustache, with a calico shirt hanging over his trousers – he was definitely the right-hand man.