Anthony Horowitz - Russian Roulette

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 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 Kazansky 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 know,” I said.

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

“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.

For the next few days, we barely left the flat. 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 for assaulting a police officer. It was better for us not to show our faces in the street and so we ate, drank, 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. The four of us were looking ill. We needed proper food and sunlight. I had got 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 longed to be outside.

“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. In the summer months, people would open the fortochkas to let in the breeze and, of course, they were 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 was small for my age – and I’d lost so much weight that I was stick-thin.

“It is 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 in Afghanistan and had lost one eye and half his left arm – in action, he claimed, although there was a rumour he had been run over by 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 with a huge beard bristling around his chin, shuffling along the corridors in a dirty coat, 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 flat, which was the same size as ours but at least furnished 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 about 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 share?” 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 per cent 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 flat.” 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 the 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, jewellery…”

“Tell me about the flat 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 time when I entered Dementyev’s office at Moscow State University. I had heard him talking on the telephone.