He Lover of Death (7 page)

The Prince’s lodgings in the Kazan were right at the end of the collidor that Senka had been led along the day before. From the room with the desecrated icons, where Deadeye flung his knives about, you just had to go a little bit farther and turn a corner, and there was a big room, with a separate bedroom. Senka saw the bedroom only through the half-open door (well, it was just an ordinary bedroom: a bed covered with a coloured counterpane, a flail – a spiked steel ball on a chain – lying on the floor, and that was all he could make out), but the Prince’s sitting room was really grand. The Persian carpet covering the whole floor, so incredibly fluffy it was like walking on moss in a forest; carved wooden chests along the walls (oh, there must be some fine stuff in there!); bottles of vodka and cognac in a row on the huge table, with silver goblets, a well-hacked ham and a jar of pickled cucumbers. Every now and then the Prince stuck his hand into this jar, fished out the cucumbers with the most pimples and crunched on them with relish, making Senka’s mouth water. The big boss’s face was handsome all right, but it looked a bit puffy and creased. He’d obviously done some hard drinking, and a fair bit of sleeping too.

The Prince wiped his mouth with the hem of his silk shirt. He picked up the note again.

‘Has she gone crazy, or what? As if she didn’t know I’ve got a full deck. I’m the King, right?’

He bent down one finger, and Deadeye said:

‘Soon you’ll have as many titles as His Majesty the Emperor. Prince by name and king by nature, and soon you’ll be an ace too. By the grace of God, Ace of all Moscow, King of Khitrovka and Prince of Piss-ups.’

Senka thought the bit about ‘piss-ups’ was too brazen by half, but the Prince liked the joke and roared with laughter. All the others chuckled along. Senka didn’t really get what was so amusing, but just to be on the safe side, he smiled too.

‘When I’m Ace, there’ll be no more banter like that,’ said the Prince, putting down the note and bending his fingers down as he carried on counting. ‘Death’s my Queen, right? You, Deadeye, are the Jack. Lardy’s the tenner, Bosun’s the niner. Maybe’s the eighter, Surely’s the sevener. This ragamuffin’s a sixer at best, and I’ve already got one of those. Right, Sprat?’

‘Yes,’ said the lad from the day before.

Now Senka realised what the Prince was on about. The lads had told him that real businessmen, the ones who lived by bandit laws, had gangs called ‘decks’, and every deck had its own set. A set was made up of eight bandits, and they all had their own position. The top brass was the ‘King’, who had a moll or ‘Queen’; then there was the ‘Jack’, a kind of deputy; and then came the gang members from tenner to sixer. And no one had more than eight in their gang, it had been that way ever since the old days. That must be where the name ‘Jack’ came from, because he often used a black jack.

Senka gave Deadeye a look of special respect:
so you’re the Jack.
On top of being the King’s right-hand man, the Jack was usually responsible for ‘wet jobs’ – killings, that is.

‘There are no vacancies available presently,’ said Deadeye, using fancy words as usual, but Senka understood what he meant, that there were no free places in the gang.

But strangely enough, the Prince didn’t throw the little squirt out. He just stood there, scratching his head.

‘Two sixers – what kind of deck’s that? Whatever will the Council say to that?’ The Prince sighed. ‘Oh, Death, my little darling, the things you do to me . . .’

And from the way he sighed, Senka twigged that though the Prince might grouse and grumble, he didn’t have the nerve not to do Death’s bidding, even though he was such a big hero. Senka cheered up, stopped feeling wary, straightened his shoulders and looked round at the bandits. He stood proud, as though to say:
You can sort this little snag out yourselves, I’ve done my bit. It’s Death’s fault, anyway.

‘All right,’ said the Prince. ‘What’s your name? Speedy? You stay put for the time being, Speedy, without any number. We’ll work out where to put you later.’

Senka squeezed his eyes shut, he was so happy.

Maybe he didn’t have a number, but now he was a real bandit, and more than that, he was in the number-one top gang in all of Moscow! Now then, Prokha, now then, Mikheika, let’s see you choke on that! And as soon as he started getting his share of the swag, he could take Tashka as his moll, so she wouldn’t go lying with anyone and everyone. She could sit at home and lay out her flowers.

The Prince waved his hand towards the table, and everyone but Deadeye poured himself a glass of vodka or cognac and started drinking. Senka took a nip of the brown booze too, just to try it (it was horrible, far worse than any homebrew). Even though he was hungry, he didn’t take a single piece of the ham – he had to fit in right: play a lad who knew the rules, not a starving kid they picked up off the rubbish heap. He kept out of the way tactfully, watched and listened, didn’t butt into conversations – oh God forbid. And the businessmen didn’t even look at him – what would they want with a youngster like him? Only Sprat glanced at him a couple of times. Once he just looked, but the second time he winked. That was something to be grateful for, at least.

The Prince started telling the twins, the sevener and the eighter, about Death. ‘You haven’t been here long, Maybe and Surely, you still don’t know what the mamselle’s like. Sure, you’ve seen her, all right, but there’s more to her than that. When I tell you what I did to get her, you’ll understand. When her old fancy man, Yashka from Kostroma, took a dose of lead poisoning and she was free, I started to make a move. I’d had my eye set on her for a long time, but while Yashka was still alive, I didn’t dare do anything about it. Had great respect from the Council, he did, and back then I was just a simple robber. No deck, no decent den, I didn’t deal in wet jobs, or do any big-time stuff. Sure, I wasn’t exactly the lowest of the low in Khitrovka, but how could I compare with Yashka from Kostroma? But I still thought, come hell or high water, that doll’s got to be mine. That was the first time I did a pawnshop and clouted the watchman with my flail. People started talking about me, and the big loot started rolling in. I start sending her presents: gold, and all sorts of fancy china, and Japanese silk. She sends it all back. If I show up, she throws me out, doesn’t even want to talk to me.

‘But I’m patient, I understand I ’m not big enough for Death yet.

‘Okay, so then I held up this post wagon, beat two men to death. Took forty thousand.

‘I showed up at her place with a gypsy choir, at night. Forked out five hundred roubles to the coppers at the Myasnitsky station so they wouldn’t interfere. I left a satin box outside her door, and there was a diamond brooch in the box, this big it was.

‘And what came of it? The gypsies and their women sang themselves hoarse, and she didn’t open the door, didn’t even look out the window.

‘Well, I think, what the hell else do you want? It’s not money, it’s not presents, that much is clear. But what, then?

‘So I got the idea of trying a different approach. I knew Death was soft on kids. She sent money and clothes and all sorts of sweets to the Mariinsky Home, where the Khitrovka orphans go. Yashka the horse thief once gave her a hundred gold imperials in a basket of violets, and the crazy bint kept the flowers and gave the money to the nuns at the orphanage, so they could build a bathhouse.

‘Aha, I think to myself. If I can’t get you by hook, then I’ll get you by crook.

‘I bought thirty pounds of the very finest Swiss chocolate and three bolts of Holland cloth, and some calico for underclothes. I took it there in person and gave it to the Reverend Mother Manefa. Take it, I said, a present from the Prince to the orphans.’

Here the fat-faced man, the tenner, cleared his throat and interrupted the Prince’s story:

‘Uhu, a right royal present it was, we remember.’

The Prince hissed at him. ‘Lardy,’ he said, ‘don’t you go barging in and spoiling the story. Well, what happens? I go breezing round to Death’s place to see if she’ll treat me any different. She opens the door, only it would have been better if she hadn’t. She comes out, eyes blazing. Clear out and don’t come back, she shouts. Don’t you dare come anywhere near me, and all sorts of other stuff like that. She prods and pokes me out the door, after everything I’d done . . . I took offence real bad, that time. Started drinking –I was wandering round in a haze for a week. And while I was drunk the memory that really stung was the way I’d bought that lousy chocolate with my hard-earned money and even felt the cloth in the shop – to check the quality.’

‘Well, I still say they gave you that cloth for nothing,’ Lardy put in again.

But the Prince said: ‘That’s not the point. I’d tried so hard, my feelings were hurt. Right, I think, you’re too flighty altogether. This isn’t going right. Damn you for that cloth and chocolate. That night I climbed over the orphanage wall, took the window out, broke down the door of their storeroom and started hacking away. I tipped the chocolate out on the floor and stamped on it. I slashed the cloth to shreds – now let’s see you wear that! I cut all the calico to pieces. And I smashed up everything else they had in there. The watchman came to see what all the noise was about. “What are you doing, you bastard,” he yells, “you’re depriving the poor orphans!” Well, I stuck my blade straight in his heart, the blood splashed out all over my arm. I came out of the storeroom all covered in blood, threads hanging off me and my face as black as an Arab’s with chocolate. And there’s Mother Manefa coming straight at me, with a candle. Well, I did her in too. It’s all the same to me, I think, I’ve damned my soul anyway. So screw my soul and the life eternal. I didn’t want any kind of life at all without Death . . .’

‘Yes,’ said Lardy with a nod. ‘That set Moscow on its ear. You might have been drunk, but you didn’t leave any tracks or witnesses. In the end they realised it was you running wild, of course, but there was no way to prove it.’

The Prince laughed. ‘The important thing was that our lot found out about it straight away, and they told Death. When I got back from the orphanage I slept for two days straight, didn’t wake up once. And when I came round, they gave me a note from her, from Death. “Come to me, you’ll be mine” – that was what it said. So that’s what she’s like, Death. Just try to understand her.’

Senka listened eagerly to the story, and afterwards he racked his brains trying to make sense of it, but he just couldn’t.

But that day, he didn’t have time to rack his brains, so many different things happened.

After the Prince announced his decision and treated his deck to vodka and cognac, Sprat took the new boy back to his place (he had a little room behind a chintz curtain near the way in).

He turned out to be a mighty fine lad, with no side to him at all, even though he had a number in the gang, and Senka had just turned up out of nowhere. He didn’t put on airs, he spoke simply and told Senka lots of useful things, as if he was one of them, almost a card in the deck.

‘It’s OK, Speedy,’ he said, ‘if Death herself asked for you, you’ll be in the deck, there’s no way round it. Maybe one of us will get put away or done in, and then they’ll take you as sixer and I’ll move up to sevener. You stick with me, and you’ll be all right. And you can live right here. It’s more fun snoring together.’

(They never did get to snore together, but we’ll come to that later.)

Because everyone knew about the Prince, and Senka knew as much about Death as Sprat did, he started asking about the others.

‘Everyone’s afraid of our Jack,’ said Sprat, ‘even the Prince is wary of him, because Deadeye has these fits. Most of the time, he’s calm and quiet, though he’s always using strange words and talking in poetry, but sometimes he just goes berserk, and then he gets really scary, like a devil, he is. He’s a gent from a good family, used to be a student, but he stabbed someone to death over some candy cane and got hard labour for life. You keep clear of him,’ Sprat advised. ‘The Prince can smack you in the kisser, even beat you to death, but at least you’ll know why and what for, but that Deadeye’s a crazy man.’

The next one in the deck, Lardy, was Ukrainian, that was how he got his moniker, because they eat lard there. He was a key man, with big connections among the fences in other cities – all the swag passed through his hands and came back as ‘crunch’, that is, money.

Sprat told Senka that the legless Bosun had really been a bosun in the fleet, a hero proper, known all over the Black Sea. When he started to tell you about the Turks or the high seas, he was absolutely fascinating. His legs were crushed by a steam boiler on board ship. He had crosses and medals and a hero’s pension, but he wasn’t the sort to spend his old age in peace and quiet. What he wanted was something to test his luck, a bit of gusto and excitement. He almost never took his share of the swag, either, and a niner’s share was a fair size, not like Sprat’s.

The sevener and eighter were twin brothers from the Yakimanka District. A smart, dashing pair of lads. The Prince had been advised to take them on by a constable he knew at the First Yakimanka Station. He said the lads were real desperadoes, it would be a shame if they didn’t make the big time, a real waste. And they were nicknamed Maybe and Surely because they had more daring than brains. Maybe wasn’t that bad, that was why he had a higher number, but Surely was a total loon. If the Prince told him to steal the double-headed eagle off the Saviour’s Tower at the Kremlin, he’d start climbing without a second thought.

Then at the end Sprat sighed, rubbed his hands together and said: ‘Anyway, you’ll see us all in action on the job tonight.’

‘What’s the job?’ Senka’s heart stood still – how about that, straight into a job on the very first day! ‘Are we going bombing?’

‘Nah, bombing’s nothing. This is a really wild job. The Prince and the Ghoul have a meet today.’

Senka remembered that Deadeye had asked about the meet too.

‘Is that the one at seven o’clock? What’s it about? This Ghoul, that’s Kotelnichesky, right?’

‘That’s the one. The Prince and him are going up for Ace of Moscow, if you get my drift.’