Russian Roulette (11 page)

We didn’t speak again until we got back to our own station and climbed back to our familiar streets. We didn’t go to the apartment straightaway. Dima took me to a coffee house and we bought a couple of glasses of
kvass,
a sweet, watery drink that was actually made out of bread.

We sat next to the window. We were both still out of breath. I could hear Dima’s lungs rattling. Climbing the stairs was enough exercise for him and he had just run a marathon.

“Thank you, soldier,” he said eventually.

“We were unlucky,” I said.

“I was lucky you were there. You could have just left me.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I hate this stupid city,” Dima said. “I never wanted to come here.”

“Why did you?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged, then pointed to his broken nose. “My dad did this to me when I was six years old. He never wanted me. He threw me out when I was seven. I ended up in an orphanage in Yaroslav, and that was a horrible place . . . horrible. You don’t want to know.” He took out a cigarette and lit it. “They used to tie the kids down to the beds, the troublemakers. They left them there until they were covered in their own dirt. And the noise! The screaming, the crying . . . It never stopped. I think half of them were mad.”

“Were you adopted?” I asked.

“Nobody wanted me. Not the way I looked. I ran away. Got out of Yaroslav and ended up on a train to Moscow . . . just like you.”

He fell silent.

“There’s something I want you to know,” he said. “That first day we met, at Kazanskiy station.” He took a drag on his cigarette and exhaled blue smoke. “We took your money. It was Roman, Grig, and me. We set you up.”

“I knew,” I said.

He looked at me. “I thought you must have. But now I’m admitting it . . . okay?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I went on. “I’d have done the same.”

“I don’t think so, soldier. You’re not the same as us.”

“I like being with you,” I said. “But there’s something I want to ask.”

“Go ahead.”

“Do you mind not calling me ‘soldier’?”

He nodded. “Whatever you say, Yasha.”

He patted me on the shoulder. We finished our drinks, stood up, and went home. And it seemed to me that I’d actually done what I’d set out to do. The two of us were friends.

F
OR THE NEXT FEW
days, we barely left the apartment. Dima was worried the police would be looking for us and I also had my concerns. Forget Estrov. I was now wanted for theft and assaulting a police officer. It was better for us not to show our faces in the street and so we ate, we drank, we played cards . . . and we were bored. We were also running out of cash. I never asked Dima what he had done with the rubles he had taken from me, and it wasn’t as if we were spending a lot of money, but somehow there was never enough for our basic needs. Roman and Grigory brought in a few rubles now and then, but the truth is that they were too unattractive to have much success begging and Roman’s stutter made it hard for him to ask for money.

Even so, it was Roman who suggested it one night. “We should try b . . . b . . . b . . . burglary.”

We were sitting around the table with vodka and cards. All we had eaten that day was a couple of slices of black bread. All four of us were looking ill. We needed proper food and sunlight. I had gotten used to the smell in the room by now—in fact I was part of it. But the place was looking grimier than ever and we all longed to be out.

“Who are we going to b . . . b . . . burgle?” Dima asked.

Roman shrugged.

“It’s a good idea,” Grigory said. He slapped down an attack card—we were having another bout of
Durak.
“Yasha is small enough. He could be our
fortochnik.
”

“What’s a
fortochnik
?” I asked.

Dima rolled his eyes. “It’s someone who breaks in through a
fortochka,
” he explained.

That, at least, I understood. A
fortochka
was a type of window. Many apartments in Moscow had them before air-conditioning took over. There would be a large window and then a much smaller one, set inside it, a bit like a cat flap. Even in the last months of autumn, people would open the
fortochkas
to let in the breeze, which of course was an invitation for thieves . . . provided they were small enough. Grigory was right. He was too fat and Roman was too ungainly to crawl through, but I could make it easily. I’d always been small for my age—and I’d lost even more weight in the past few weeks.

“It’s a good idea,” Dima agreed. “But we need an address. There’s no point just breaking in anywhere, and anyway, it’s too dangerous.” His eyes brightened. “We can talk to Fagin!”

Fagin was an old soldier who lived three floors down in a room on his own. He had been a soldier in Afghanistan and had lost one eye and half his left arm—he claimed in action, although there was a rumor he had been run over be a trolleybus while he was home on leave. Fagin wasn’t his real name, of course, but everyone called him that after a character in an English book,
Oliver Twist.
And the thing about Fagin was that he knew everything about everything. I never found out how he got his information, but if a bank was about to move a load of money or a diamond merchant was about to visit a smart hotel, somehow Fagin would catch wind of it and he would pass the information on—at a price. Everyone in the block respected him. I had seen him a couple of times, a short, plump man, shuffling along the corridors in a dirty coat with a huge beard bristling around his chin, and I had thought he looked more like a tramp than a master criminal.

But now that Dima had thought of him, the decision had been made, and the following day we gathered in his apartment, which was the same size as ours but furnished at least with a sofa and a few pictures on the wall. He had electricity too. Fagin himself was a disgusting old man. The way he looked at us, you didn’t really want to think what was going on in his head. If Santa Claus had taken a dive into a sewer he would have come up looking much the same.

“You want to be
fortochniks
?” he asked, smiling to himself. “Then you want to do it soon before the winter comes and all the windows are closed! But you need an address. That’s what you need, my boys. Somewhere worth the pickings!” He produced a leather notebook with old bus tickets and receipts sticking out of the pages. He opened it and began to thumb through.

“How much is your take?” Dima asked.

“Always straight to the point, Dimitry. That’s what I like about you.” Fagin smiled. “Whatever you take, you bring to me. No lying! I know a lie when I hear one, and believe me, I’ll cut out your tongue.” He leered at us, showing the yellow slabs that were his teeth. “Sixty percent for me, forty for you. Please don’t argue with me, Dimitry, dear boy. You won’t get better anywhere else. And I have the addresses. I know all the places where you won’t have any difficulty. Nice, slim boys, slipping in at night . . .”

“Fifty fifty,” Dima said.

“Fagin doesn’t negotiate.” He found a page in his notebook. “Now here’s an address off Lubyanka Square. Ground-floor apartment.” He looked up. “Shall I go on?”

Dima nodded. He had accepted the deal. “Where is it?”

“Mashkova Street. Number seven. It’s owned by a rich banker. He collects stamps. Many of them valuable.” He flicked the page over. “Maybe you’d prefer a house in Old Arbat. Lots of antiques. Mind you, it was done over last spring, and I’d say it was a bit early for a return visit.” Another page. “Ah yes. I’ve had my eye on this place for a while. It’s near Gorky Park . . . fourth floor and quite an easy climb. Mind you, it’s owned by Vladimir Sharkovsky. Might be too much of a risk. How about Ilinka Street? Ah yes! That’s perfect. Nice and easy. Number sixteen. Plenty of cash, jewelry . . .”

“Tell me about the apartment in Gorky Park,” I said.

Dima turned to me, surprised. But it was the name that had done it. Sharkovsky. I had heard it before. I remembered the moment when I entered Dementyev’s office at Moscow University. I had heard him talking on the telephone.

“Yes, of course, Mr. Sharkovsky. Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“Who is Sharkovsky?” I asked.

“He’s a businessman,” Fagin said. “But rich. Very, very rich. And quite dangerous, so I’m told. Not the sort of man you’d want to meet on a dark night and certainly not if you were stealing from him.”

“I want to go there,” I said.

“Why?” Dima asked.

“Because I know him. At least . . . I heard his name.”

At that moment, it seemed almost like a gift. Misha Dementyev was my enemy. He had tried to hand me over to the police. He had lied to my parents. And it sounded as if he was working for this man, Sharkovsky—assuming it was the same Sharkovsky. So robbing his apartment made perfect sense. It was like a miniature revenge.

Fagin snapped the notebook shut. We had made our decision and it didn’t matter which address we chose. “It won’t be so difficult,” he muttered. “Fourth floor. Quiet street. Sharkovsky doesn’t actually live there. He keeps the place for a friend, an actress.” He leered at us in a way that suggested she was much more than a friend. “She’s away a lot. It could be empty. I’ll check.”

Fagin was as good as his word. The following day he provided us with the information we needed. The actress was performing in a play called
The Cherry Orchard
and wouldn’t be back in Moscow until the end of the month. The apartment was deserted but the
fortochka
was open.

“Go for the things you can carry,” he suggested. “Jewelry. Furs. Mink and sable are easy to shift. TVs and stuff like that . . . leave them behind.”

We set off that same night, skirting around the walls of the Kremlin and crossing the river on the Krimskiy Bridge. I thought I would be nervous. This was my first real crime—very different from the antics that Leo and I had got up to during the summer, setting off bombs outside the police station or pinching cigarettes. Even stealing from the back of parked cars wasn’t in the same league. But the strange thing was that I was completely calm. It struck me that I might have found my destiny. If I could learn to survive in Moscow by being a thief, that was the way it would have to be.

Gorky Park is a huge area on the edge of the Moscow River. It’s always been a favorite place for the people in the city, with a fairground, boating lakes, and even an open-air theater. Anyone who had an apartment here would have to be rich. The air was cleaner, and if you were high enough you’d get views across the trees and over to the river, with barges and pleasure boats cruising slowly past and the Foreign Ministry, another Stalin skyscraper, in the far distance. The apartment that Fagin had identified was right next to the park on a quiet street that hardly seemed to belong to the city at all. It was too elegant. Too expensive.

We got there just before midnight, but all the lamps were lit and I was able to make out a very attractive building made from some sort of cream-colored stone, with arched doorways and windows and lots of decoration over the walls. It was smaller and neater than our apartment block, just four stories high, with a slanting roof made of orange tiles.

“That’s the window—up there.” Dima pointed.

The apartment was on the fourth floor, just as Fagin had said, and sure enough I could make out the
fortochka
, which was actually slightly ajar. The woman who lived there might have thought she was safe, being so high up, but I saw at once that it would be possible to climb in using the building’s decorations as footholds. There were ledges, windowsills, carved pillars, and even a drainpipe that would act as one side of a ladder. It wouldn’t be easy for me, but once I was inside, I would go back down and open the front door. I’d let the others in and the whole place would be ours.

There were no lights on inside the building. The other residents must have been asleep. Nor was there anyone in the street. We crossed as quickly as we could and grouped ourselves in the shadows, right up against the wall.

“What do you think, Yasha?” Dima asked.

I looked up and nodded. “I can do it.” But still I hesitated. “Are you sure she’s away?”

“Everyone says Fagin is reliable.”

“Okay.”

“We’ll be waiting for you at the door. Make sure you don’t make any noise coming down the stairs.”

“Right. Good luck.”

Dima cupped his hands to help me climb up to the first level, and as I raised my foot, our eyes met and he smiled at me. But at that moment I suddenly felt troubled. This might be my destiny, but what would my parents have said if they could have seen me now? They were honest people. That was the way I’d been brought up. I was amazed how quickly I’d become a burglar, a thief. And if I stayed in Moscow much longer? I wondered what I might become next.

I began the climb. The three boys scattered. We’d agreed that if a policeman happened to come along on patrol, Grigory would warn me by hooting like an owl. But right now we were alone, and at first it was easy. I had the drainpipe on one side and there were plenty of bricks and swirling plasterwork to give me a foothold. The architect or the artist who had built this place might have had plenty of ideas about style and elegance, but he had been less brilliant when it came to security.

Even so, the higher I went, the more dangerous it became. The pipe was quite loose. If I put too much weight onto it, I risked tearing it out of the wall. Some of the decorations were damp and had begun to deteriorate. I rested my foot briefly on a diamond-shaped brick, part of a running pattern, and to my horror it crumbled away. The sound of loose plaster hitting the pavement echoed ominously. I scrabbled against the face of the building, desperately trying to stop myself from plunging down. If I’d fallen from the first floor, I’d have broken an ankle. From this height it was more likely to be my neck. Somehow I managed to steady myself. I looked down and saw Dima standing underneath one of the streetlamps. He had seen what had happened and waved a hand—either spurring me on or warning me to be more careful.

I took a deep breath to steady my nerves, then continued up—past the third floor and up to the fourth. At one stage I was right next to a window, and peeping in, I saw the vague shape of two people lying under a fur cover, in bed. I was lucky they were heavy sleepers. I pulled myself up as quickly as possible and finally reached the ledge that ran along the whole building just below the top floor. It was no more than fifteen centimeters wide and I had to squeeze myself flat against the wall, shuffling along with my toes touching the brickwork and my heels hanging in the air. If I had leaned back even slightly, I would have lost my balance and fallen. But I had come this far without killing myself. I was determined to see it through.

I got to the window with the smaller window set inside it and now I saw that I had two more problems. It was going to be an even tighter fit than I had imagined. And it was going to be awkward too. Somehow I had to lever myself up and in, but that would mean putting all my weight on the main sheet of glass. The windows were only separated by a narrow frame, and unless I was careful, there was a real chance they would shatter beneath me and I would end up cutting myself in half. Once again I looked for Dima, but this time there was no sign of him.

I reached out and held on to the edge with one hand. The
fortochka
was definitely unlocked. The room on the other side was dark but seemed to be a lounge with a dining area and a kitchen attached. I swung around and grabbed the glass with my other hand. I saw now that I was going to have to go in headfirst. It just wasn’t possible to lever up my leg. Using my forehead, I pushed the little window open. I leaned forward, pushing my head inside. Now the glass was resting against the back of my neck, making me think of a prisoner in the old days, about to be decapitated by guillotine. Trying to keep as much of my weight off the glass as I could, I arched forward and in. The fit was very tight. The opening was barely more than forty centimeters square . . . a cat flap indeed. My shoulders only just passed through and I felt the loose end of the glass scraping against my back. I pushed harder and found myself wedged with the lower rim of the
fortochka
pressing into my back just above my buttocks. Suddenly I was trapped! I couldn’t move in either direction and I had a nightmare vision of being stuck there all night, waiting for someone to discover me and call the police in the morning. The glass was creaking underneath me. I was sure it was going to break. I pushed again. It was like giving birth to myself. The edge cut into me but then, somehow, gravity took over. I plunged forward into the darkness and hit the floor. I was in!