Boris Akunin - He Lover of Death

‘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.’

Senka whistled. So that was it.

The ace was like the tsar of bandits, there was just one for all of Moscow. The ace used to be Kondrat Semyonich, a really big man, everyone in Moscow was afraid of him. They used to say all sorts of things about Kondrat Semyonich, though. That he’d got old and rusty, he didn’t give the young men a chance. Some condemned him for living a life of luxury, not in Khitrovka, like the ace was supposed to do, but in a house on the Yauza. And he didn’t die like a bandit, from a knife or a bullet, or in jail. He drew his last breath on a soft feather bed, like some merchant.