Russian Roulette (9 page)

As I walked down the steps at the front door, I saw three police cars parked there with their lights flashing. I pretended to be immersed in the papers I had taken. If there were any policemen outside, I would look like just one more of the dozens of students coming in and out.

But nobody stopped me. I hurried back to the station with just one thought in my head: I was alone in Moscow. My money had been stolen and I had nowhere to go.

I
WENT BACK TO
Kazanskiy station.

In a way, it was a mad decision. The police knew I was in Moscow and they would certainly be watching all the major stations—just as they had in Rosna and Kirsk. But I had no intention of leaving. The truth was that in the whole of Russia I had nowhere to go and no one to look after me. I couldn’t go back to Estrov, obviously, and although I remembered my mother once telling me that she had relations in a city called Kazan, I had no idea where it was or how to get there.

No, it was much better to stay in Moscow, but first of all I would need to change my appearance. That was easy enough. I stripped off my Pioneer uniform and dumped it in a trash can. Then I got my hair cut short. Although the bulk of my money was gone, I had managed to find eighteen kopecks scattered through my pockets and I used nine of them at a barber’s shop, a dank little place close to Universitet station with old hair strewn over the floor. As I stepped out again, feeling the unfamiliar cool of the breeze on my head and the back of my neck, a police car rushed past—but I wasn’t worried. Even today, I am aware of how little you need to change to lose yourself in a city. A hair cut, different clothes, perhaps a pair of sunglasses . . . it is enough.

I still had enough kopecks for the return journey, and as I sat once again in the metro, I tried to work out some sort of plan. The most immediate problem was accommodation. Where would I sleep when night came? If I stayed out on the street, I would be at my most vulnerable. And then there was the question of food. Without money, I couldn’t eat. Of course, I could steal, but the one thing I most dreaded was falling back into the hands of the police. If they recognized me, I was finished. And even if they didn’t, I had heard enough stories about the prison camps all over Russia, built specially for children. Did I want to end up with the rest of my hair shaved off, stuck behind barbed wire in the middle of nowhere? There were thousands of Russian boys whose life was exactly that.

This time I barely even noticed the stations, no matter how superbly they were decorated. I was utterly miserable. My parents had believed in Misha Dementyev and they had sent me to him even though it had cost them their lives. But from the moment I had walked into his office, he had thought only of saving his own skin. It seemed to me that there was nobody in the world I could trust. Even Dima, the boy I had met when I got off the train, had only been interested in robbing me.

But perhaps Dima was the answer.

The more I thought about it, the more I decided he might not be all bad. Certainly, when we had met, he had been pleasant enough, smiling and friendly, even if he was simply setting me up for his friends. But maybe I was partly to blame for what had happened, coming off the train and flashing my money around all the different stalls. Dima was living on the street. He had to survive. I’d made myself an obvious target and he’d done what he had to.

At the same time, I remembered what he’d said to me.
It’s good to have a friend. We all need friends.
Could it be possible that he actually meant it? He was, after all, only a few years older than me and we were both in the same situation. Part of me knew that I was fooling myself. Dima was probably kilometers away by now, laughing at me for being such a fool. But the truth was that he was the only person in the city I actually knew. If I could find him again, perhaps I could persuade him to help me.

And there was something else. I still had my mother’s jewels.

Half an hour later, I climbed up to street level and found myself back where I had begun. The women were still there at their food stalls, but they almost seemed to be taunting me. Before, they had been my friends. Now, all their pies and ice creams were beyond my reach. I found a bench and sat down, watching the crowds around me. Stations are strange places. When you pass through them, traveling somewhere, you barely notice them. They simply help you on your way. But stand outside with nowhere to go and they make you feel worthless. You should not be here, they shout at you. If you are not a passenger, you do not belong here.

To start with, I did nothing at all. I just sat there, staring at the traffic, letting people stream past me on all sides. The children I had seen were still dotted around and I wondered what they would do with themselves when night fell. That could be only a few hours away. The light was barely changing, the sun trapped behind unbroken cloud, but there were already commuters arriving at the station, on their way home, and I could feel the darkness pressing in. There was no sign of Dima. In the end, I went over to a couple of boys, the ten-year-olds that I had seen before.

“Excuse me,” I said.

Two pairs of very sly and malevolent eyes turned on me. One of the children had snot running out of his nose. Both of them looked worn out, unhealthy.

“I’m looking for someone I was talking to earlier,” I went on. “He was wearing a black leather jacket. His name is Dima.”

The boys glanced at each other. “You got any money?” one of them asked.

“No.”

“Then get lost!” Those weren’t the words he used. This little boy, whose voice hadn’t even broken, used the filthiest language I’d ever heard. I saw that he had terrible teeth with gaps where half of them had fallen out. His friend hissed at me like an animal and at that moment the two of them weren’t children at all. They were like horrible old men, not even human. I was glad to leave them on their own.

I tried to ask some of the other street kids the same question, but as I approached them, they moved away. It was as if they all knew that I was from out of town, that I wasn’t one of them, and for that reason they would have nothing to do with me. And now the sun really was beginning to disappear. The light was hardening. I was beginning to feel the threat of nightfall and knew that I couldn’t stay here very much longer. I would have to find a doorway—or perhaps I could sleep in one of the crossings beneath the streets. I had four kopecks left in my pocket. Barely enough for a cup of hot tea.

And then, quite unexpectedly, I saw him. Dima—with his oversized leather jacket and his half-handsome, half-ugly face—had turned the corner, smoking a cigarette, flicking away the match. There was another boy with him and I recognized him too. He had been one of the two who had robbed me. Dima said something and they laughed. It looked as if they were heading for the metro, presumably on their way home.

I didn’t hesitate. It was now or never. I crossed the concourse in front of the station and stood in their path.

Dima saw me first and stopped with the cigarette halfway to his lips. I had taken him by surprise and he thought I was going to make trouble. I could see it at once. He was tense, wary. But I was completely relaxed. I’d already worked it out. He’d tricked me. He’d robbed me. But I had to treat him as my friend.

“Hi, Dima.” I greeted him as if the three of us had arranged to meet here for coffee.

He smiled a little but he was still suspicious. And there was something else. I wasn’t quite sure what it was, but he was looking at me almost as if he had expected me to come back, as if there was something he knew that I didn’t. “Soldier!” he exclaimed. “How are you doing? What happened to your hair?”

“I got it cut.”

“Did you meet your friend?”

“No. He wasn’t there. It seems he’s left Moscow.”

“That’s too bad.”

I nodded. “In fact, I’ve got a real problem. He was going to put me up, but now I don’t have anywhere to go.”

I was hoping he might offer to help. That was the idea, anyway. Why not? He was seventy rubles richer than me. Thanks to him, I had nothing. He could at least have offered me a bed for the night. But he didn’t speak and I realized I was wasting my time. He was street hardened, the sort of person who had never helped anyone in his life. His friend muttered something and pushed past me, disappearing into the metro, but I stood my ground. “Can you help me?” I said. “I just need somewhere to stay for a few nights.” And then—my last chance. “I can pay you.”

“You’ve got money?” That surprised him. He thought he’d taken it all already.

“Not anymore,” I said. I shrugged as if it didn’t matter and I’d already forgotten about it. “But I’ve got this,” I went on. I took out the black velvet bag that my parents had given me and which I’d used to trick Dementyev. I opened it and poured the contents—the necklace, the ring, and the earrings—into my hand. “There must be a pawnshop somewhere. I’ll sell them and then I can pay you for a room.”

Dima examined the jewelry, the brightly colored stones in their silver and gold settings, and I could already see the light stirring in his eyes as he made the calculations. How much were they worth and how was he going to separate them from me? He dropped his cigarette and reached out, picking up one of the earrings. He let it hang from his finger and thumb. “This won’t get you much,” he said. “It’s cheap.”

Right then, I thought of my mother and I could feel the anger rising in my blood. I wanted to punch him, but still I forced myself to stay calm. “I was told they were valuable,” I said. “That’s gold. And those stones are emeralds. Take me to a pawnshop and we can find out.”

“I don’t know . . .” He was pretending otherwise, but he knew that the jewels were worth as much as he had already stolen. “Give me the stuff and I’ll take it to a pawnbroker for you. But I don’t think you’ll get more than five rubles.”

He’d get fifty. I’d get five . . . if I was lucky. I could see how his mind worked. I held out my hand and, reluctantly, he gave me the earring back. “I can find a pawnbroker on my own,” I said.

“There’s no need to be like that, soldier! I’m only trying to help.” He gave me a crooked smile, made all the more crooked by his broken nose. “Listen. I’ve got a room and you’re welcome to stay with me if you like. You know . . . we’re all friends here in Moscow, right? But you’ll have to pay rent.”

“How much rent?”

“Two rubles a week.”

I pretended to consider. “I’ll have to see it first.”

“Whatever you say. We can go there now, if you like.”

“Sure. Why not?”

He took me back down onto the metro. He even paid the fare for me again. I knew I was taking a risk. He could lead me to some faraway corner of the city, take me into an alleyway, put a knife into me, and steal the jewels. But I had a feeling that wasn’t the way he worked. Dima was a hustler, a thief—but he just didn’t have the look of someone who was ready to kill. He would get the jewelry in the end anyway. I would pay it to him as rent or he would steal it from me while I slept. My plan was simply to make myself useful to him, to become part of his gang. If I could do this quickly enough, he might let me stay with him even when I had nothing more to give. That was my hope.

He took me to a place just off Tverskaya Street, one of the main thoroughfares in Moscow, which leads all the way down to the Kremlin and Red Square. Today, there is a hotel on that same corner—the seven-story Marriott Grand, where American tourists stay in total luxury. But when I came there, following Dima and still wondering if I wasn’t making another bad mistake, it was very different. Moscow has changed so much, so quickly. It was another world then.

Dima lived in what had once been a block of apartments but which had long been abandoned and left to rot. All the color had faded out of the brickwork, which was damp, moldy, and covered with graffiti—not artwork but political slogans, swearwords, the names of city football teams. The windows were so dirty that they looked more like rusting metal than glass. The building rose up ten stories, three more than the hotel that would one day replace it, and the whole thing seemed to be sagging in on itself, hardly bothering to stay upright. It was surrounded by other blocks that were similar; they were all like old men standing out in the cold, having a last cigarette together before they died. The streets here were so narrow that they were more like alleyways, twisting together in the darkness, covered with rubbish and mud. There were shops on the ground floor—an empty grocery store, a pharmacy, and a massage parlor—but the farther up you went, the more desolate it became. There were no elevators, of course. Just a concrete staircase that had been used as a toilet so many times that it stank. By the time you got to the top, there was no electricity, no proper heating. The only water came dribbling, cold, out of the taps.

We climbed up together. I noticed that Dima was wheezing by the time we got to the top and I wondered if he was ill—although it could just have been all those cigarettes. On the way, we passed a couple of people, a man and a woman, lying one on top of the other, unconscious. I couldn’t even be sure they were actually alive. Dima just stepped over them and I did the same, wondering what I was getting myself into. My village had been a place full of poverty and hardship, but it was somehow more shocking here, in the middle of a city.

Dima’s room was on the eighth floor. There was no lighting. He had taken out a flashlight and used it to find the way. We went down a corridor that was missing its carpet, with gaping holes showing the pipework and wiring. There were doors on either side, most of them locked, some of them reinforced with metal plating. Somewhere, I could hear a baby crying. A man shouted out a swearword. Somebody laughed. The sounds that echoed around me only added to the nightmare, the sense that I was being sucked into a dark and alien world.