Boris Akunin - He Lover of Death

The Prince took a step towards the horse-trader and smashed a fist into his cheekbone. The Kalmyk’s head bobbed about, but he didn’t shout out or start crying – he was a tough one.

‘I got the whole deck out for three hundred. It’s a flaming disgrace. Why, you squint-eyed snake!’

‘All right,’ said the Prince, tugging the watch out of the horsetrader’s pocket – it was gold, good stuff. ‘You can thank your Kalmyk god for keeping your fat purse safe. Let’s go, Deadeye.’

He was already on his way to the door when Senka stuck his head in and said, all modest like:

‘Uncle Prince, can I say something, please?’

‘What are you doing here?’ the Prince said with a scowl. ‘A scram?’

And Senka said: ‘Nah, no scram, but wouldn’t it be a good idea to check over there, under the floor, eh?’

And he pointed to the floorboard.

The horse-trader jerked on his chair and wheezed something Senka couldn’t understand – it must have been a curse in his own language. The Prince looked at Senka, then at the floor. He thumped the foreman in the ear – the blow hadn’t looked very hard, but the foreman tumbled over, taking his chair with him, and started snivelling.

The Prince bent down, hooked one finger under the edge of the floorboard and lifted it out – there was a hole in the floor underneath it. He put his hand in.

‘Ah-ha.’

He took out a big leather wallet, and it was stuffed chock-full with crunch.

The Prince counted the swag. ‘Why, there’s three thousand here!’ he said. ‘Good for you, Sixer.’

Senka was flattered, of course. He looked at Deadeye to see whether he was admiring him too.

But Deadeye wasn’t admiring Senka, and he wasn’t looking at the wallet. Something strange was happening to him. He’d stopped smiling, and his eyes weren’t gleaming now, they looked drowsy.

‘I believed them . . .’ Deadeye said slowly, and his whole face quivered, as if waves were running across it. ‘I believed the Judases. They looked me in the eye! And they lied! They lied – to me!’

‘Enough, enough, don’t go kicking up the dust,’ the Prince said –he was rather pleased with the find. ‘They have to mind their own interests

Deadeye started moving, muttering: ‘Goodbye, my darling Kalmyk girl. . . Your eyes are very narrow, true, your nose is flat, your forehead broad, you do not lisp in fluent French .. .’ [2] Pushkin, 1830. He chuckled: ‘Narrow, very narrow . . .’

Then suddenly he leapt forward – exactly the same way he had when he spiked Yoshka – and stuck his foil straight down into the foreman’s eye. Senka heard a crunch (that was the steel running through the skull and sticking in the floor) and he gasped and closed his eyes. When he opened them, Deadeye had already pulled the foil out and was watching curiously as something white, like cream cheese, dripped off the blade.

The foreman hammered his heels on the floor and opened his mouth wide, but no shout came out. Senka was afraid to look him in the face.

‘What the . . . Are you crazy?’ the Prince snarled.

Deadeye answered back in a hoarse, strained voice: ‘I’m not crazy. It just sickens me that there’s no truth in this world.’

He gave a flick of his wrist, there was a whistling sound, and the sharp point of the foil slit the horse-trader’s throat. A tuft of beard that was sliced off went flying through the air, then the blood came spurting out in a thick jet – like water out of a fire hose.

Senka gasped again, but this time he forgot to close his eyes. He saw the horse-trader jerk up off the chair so hard that the ropes holding his hands broke. He jumped up, but he couldn’t walk, his legs were still tied to the chair.

The life was gushing out of the horse trader in spurts of cherry red, and he kept trying to hold it back with his hands, to stuff it back in, but it was no good – the blood flowed through his fingers, the Kalmyk’s face went blank and it was so terrifying that Senka screamed and went dashing out of that hideous room.

He began to recover his wits only on Arbat Street, when he was completely winded from running. He didn’t remember flying out of the Slavyanskaya Hotel, or running across the bridge, and then right across the empty Smolensky market.

And even on Arbat Street he still wasn’t himself. He couldn’t run any longer, but he didn’t think to sit down and take a rest. He staggered along the dark street like an old man, croaking and gasping. And he kept looking round, all the time; he still thought he could see the Kalmyk behind him, with his torn-open throat.

The way things had turned out, he was the one who killed the horse-trader and his man. It was all his fault. If he hadn’t wanted to impress the Prince, if he hadn’t pointed out the hiding place, the Kalmyks would still be alive. But he had to go and blab, didn’t he? He was Speedy the Bandit, was he not?

But by Theatre Square, Senka was asking himself another question: what kind of damn bandit are you? A lousy worm of a bandit, that’s what you are. Oh, Semyon Spidorov, you haven’t got the stomach for real man’s work now, do you?

He felt so ashamed for running away, he couldn’t bear it. As he walked along Maroseika Street, he called himself every name he could think of, abused himself something rotten, but as soon as he remembered the Kalmyks, it was clear as day: there was no way back into the deck now. The Prince and his gang might forgive him –he could lie and say his stomach was turned or make up something else, but he couldn’t lie to himself. If Senka was a businessman, a cow was a thoroughbred.

Oh, the shame of it.

Senka’s legs carried him to the Yauza Boulevard before he had any idea where he was heading.

He sat on a bench for a while and got frozen right through. Then he paced up and down for a while. It started to get light. And it wasn’t until he realised he was walking past Death’s house for the third time that he understood what pain was gnawing hardest at his heart. He stopped in front of the door and suddenly his hand reached out of its own accord, so it did, and knocked. Loudly.

He felt scared and wanted to turn and run. He decided he would just hear the sound of her footsteps, her voice. When she asked ‘Who’s there?’ he would scarper.

The door opened without a sound and without any warning. There were no footsteps, no questions.

Death appeared in the doorway. The loose hair flowing down over her shoulders was black, but all the rest of her was white: the nightshirt, the lacy shawl on her shoulders. And her feet – Senka was looking down at them – they were white too, the tips were peeping out from under the hem of her nightshirt.

Well, well, she never even asked who was knocking at that time in the morning. She was fearless, all right. Or was it all the same to her?

She was surprised to see Senka. ‘You? Did the Prince send you? Has something happened?’

He shook his hanging head.

Then she got angry: ‘What are you doing here at this unearthly hour? Why are you hiding your eyes, you little beast?’

All right, so he looked up. And then he couldn’t look down again –he was lost in wonder. Of course, the dawn played a little trick of its own, peeping out from behind the roofs with its pink glow, lighting up the top of the doorway and Death’s face and shoulders.

‘Well, aren’t you going to say something?’ she said, frowning. ‘You look like a ghost. And your shirt’s torn.’

That was when Senka noticed that his shirt really was torn from the collar to the sleeve and it was hanging all askew. He must have snagged it on something when he was running out from the hotel.