Russian Roulette (10 page)

“This is me,” Dima said.

We’d come to a door marked with a number—83. Somebody had added
DIMA’S PLACE
in bright red letters that hadn’t dried properly. They had trickled down like blood. Perhaps the effect was deliberate. There was a hole where the lock should have been, but Dima used a padlock and a chain to keep the place secure. At the moment, it was hanging open. His friends had arrived ahead of us.

“Welcome home!” he said to me. “This is my place. Come in and meet my mates . . .”

He pushed the door open. We went in.

The apartment was tiny. Most of it was contained in a single room, which he shared with the two boys who had robbed me. They slept on the floor. There were three mattresses and some filthy pillows on top of a carpet that was moldy and colorless. The place was lit by candles and my first thought was that if one of them toppled over in the night, we would all burn to death. A single table and four chairs stood on one side. Otherwise there was no furniture of any description. A few bits of the kitchen were still in place, but I could tell at a glance that the sink hadn’t been used for years—there was no water—and without electricity the fridge was no more than a oversized cupboard. The smell in the room was unpleasant, a mixture of human sweat, unwashed clothes, dirt, and decay.

Dima waved me over to the table. “This is Yasha,” he announced. “He’s going to be staying with us for a while.” His two friends were already sitting there playing Snap with a deck that was so worn that the cards hung limp in their hands. They didn’t look pleased as I joined them. “He’s going to pay,” Dima added. “Two rubles a week.”

He opened the fridge and took out a bottle of vodka and some black bread. He found some dirty glasses in the sink and poured drinks for us all. He lit a cigarette for himself, then offered me one, which I accepted gratefully. It wasn’t that I wanted to smoke. It was a gesture of friendship and a way of fitting in. I needed them to trust me.

Dima introduced his friends. “This is Roman. That’s Grigory.” Roman was tall and thin. He looked as if he had been deliberately stretched. Grigory was round faced, pockmarked, with oily black hair. All three of them looked not just adult but old, as if they had forgotten their true age . . . which was about seventeen. Roman collected the cards and put them away. It was obvious who was the leader here. So long as Dima said I could stay, they weren’t going to argue.

“Tell us about yourself, soldier,” Dima said. “I’d like to know what brought you to Moscow.” He winked at me. “And I’d particularly like to know why the police are so interested in you.”

“What?”

So that was the difference I had noticed at the station. The police had been there, looking for me.

“That’s right. Tell him, Grig.” Grigory said nothing, so Dima went on. “They’re looking for someone new to town. Someone who might have come into Kazanskiy station, dressed up like a Young Pioneer. They’ve been asking everyone.” He tapped ash. “They’re offering a reward for information.”

My heart sank. I wondered if I had walked into another trap. Had Dima invited me here to have me arrested? But there was no sound coming from outside, no footsteps in the corridor, no sirens in the street.

“Don’t worry, soldier! No one’s going to turn you in. Not even for the money. They never pay up anyway.”

“I hate the p . . . p . . . p . . . police.” Roman had a stutter. I watched his face contort as he tried to spit out the last word.

“What do they want with you?” Grigory asked. He sounded hostile. Maybe he was afraid that I was bringing more trouble into his life. He probably had enough already.

I wasn’t sure how to answer. I didn’t want to lie, but I was afraid of telling the truth. In the end, I kept it as short as I could. “They killed my parents,” I said. “My dad knew something he wasn’t meant to know. They wanted to kill me too. I escaped.”

“What about your friend at the university?” Dima asked.

“He wasn’t my friend.” I was on safer ground here. I told them everything that had happened in Misha Dementyev’s office. When I described how I had beaten Dementyev off using the arm of the skeleton, Dima laughed out loud. “I wish I’d seen that,” he said. “You certainly gave him the elbow!”

It was a weak joke, but we all laughed. Dima refilled our glasses and once again we drank the Russian way, throwing the liquid back in a single gulp. It didn’t take us long to finish the bottle and about an hour later we all went to bed . . . if you can call a square of carpet with a pile of old clothes as a pillow a bed. I was just glad to have a roof over my head, and helped by the vodka, I was asleep almost at once.

• • •

The next morning, Dima took me to the pawnbroker he had mentioned. It was a tiny shop with a cracked front window and an old, half-shaven man sitting behind a counter that was stacked with watches and jewelry. I handed across my mother’s earrings and stood there, watching him examine them briefly through an eyeglass that he screwed into his face as if it were part of him. Right then, a little part of me died. It had been a pawnbroker that the hero had murdered in
Crime and Punishment.
I could almost have done the same.

He wanted to give me nine rubles for the earrings, but Dima talked him up to fifteen. The two of them knew each other well.

“You’re a crook, Reznik.” Dima scowled.

“And you’re a thief, Dima,” Reznik replied.

“One day someone will stick a knife in you.”

“I don’t mind. So long as they buy it from me first.”

Dima took the money and we went back out into the sunlight. He gave me three rubles, keeping six for himself, and when I looked down reproachfully at the crumpled notes, he clapped me on the back. “That’s three weeks’ rent, soldier,” he said.

“What about the other three rubles?”

“That’s my commission. If you hadn’t had me with you, that old crook would have ripped you off.”

I’d been ripped off anyway, but I didn’t complain. Dima had said I could stay with him for three weeks. It was exactly what I wanted to hear.

“Let’s get some breakfast!” he said.

We ate breakfast in the smallest, grimiest restaurant it would be possible to imagine. Somehow, I ended up paying for that too.

So began my stay in Moscow. I adapted very quickly to the way of life. The truth is that nobody did anything very much. They stole, they ate, they survived. I spent long hours outside the station with Dima, Roman, and Grigory. The two boys didn’t warm to me very much, but gradually they began to accept that I was there. At the same time, Dima had made me his special project. I wondered if he might have had a younger brother at some time. He never spoke about his past life, but that was how he treated me. When I write about him now, I still see him with the sleeves of his precious leather jacket falling over his hands, his smile, the way he swaggered along the street, and I wonder if he is alive or dead. Dead most probably. Homeless kids in Moscow never survive long.

Dima taught me how to beg. You had to be careful because if the police saw you, they would pick you up and throw you into jail. But my fair hair, and the fact that I looked so young, helped. If I stood outside the Bolshoi Ballet at night, I could earn as much as five rubles from the rich people coming out. There were tourists in Red Square and I would position myself outside St. Basil’s Cathedral with its towers and twisting, multicolored domes. I didn’t even have to speak. Once, an American gave me five dollars, which I passed on to Dima. He gave me fifty kopecks back, but that was his own special exchange rate. In truth, it was worth a lot more.

I got used to the city. Streets that had seemed huge and threatening became familiar. I could find my way around on the metro. I visited Lenin, lying dead in his tomb, although Dima told me that most of the body was made of wax. I also saw the grave of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. Not that he meant anything to me now. I went to the big stores—GUM and Yeliseev’s Food Hall—and stared at all the amazing food I would never be able to afford. Just once, I visited a bathhouse near the Bolshoi and enjoyed the total luxury of sitting in the steam, breathing in the scent of eucalyptus leaves, and feeling warm and clean.

And I stole.

We needed to buy food, cigarettes, and—most important—vodka. It sometimes seemed that it was impossible to live in Tverskaya without alcohol, and every night there were terrible arguments when somebody’s bottle was finished. We would hear the screams and the knife fights, and the next day there would often be fresh blood on the stairs. Those who couldn’t afford vodka got high on the fumes of shoe polish.

No matter how much time I spent begging, we never had enough money, and I wasn’t surprised to find myself back at Reznik, the pawnbroker. With Dima’s help, I got fifteen rubles for my mother’s necklace, more than the earrings but less than I’d hoped. I was determined not to part with her ring. It was the only memory of her that I had left.

And so, inevitably, I turned to crime. One of Dima’s favorite tricks was to hang around outside an expensive shop, watching as the customers came out with their groceries. He would wait while they loaded up their car, then either Roman or Grigory would distract them while he snatched as much as he could out of the trunk and ran for it. I watched the operation a couple of times before Dima let me play the part of the decoy. Because I was so much younger than the other two boys, people were more sympathetic—and less suspicious. I would go up to them and pretend to be lost while Dima sneaked up to the back of their car.

The first three times, it worked perfectly and we found ourselves eating all sorts of things that we’d never tasted before. Roman and Grigory were getting used to me now. We’d begun playing cards together—a game that every Russian knows called
Durak,
or Fool. They’d even found a mattress for me. It wasn’t a lot softer than the floor and it was infested with insects, but I still appreciated the gesture.

The fourth time, however, was almost a disaster. And it changed everything.

It was the usual setup. We were outside a shop on a quiet street. It was an area we hadn’t been to before. Our target was a chauffeur, obviously working for some big businessman who could afford to entertain. His car was a Daimler and there was enough food in the back to keep us going for a month. As usual, I went up to the man and, looking as innocent as possible, tried to engage him in conversation.

“Can you help me? I’m looking for Pushkin Square.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dima scurry up the sidewalk and disappear behind the raised hood of the trunk.

The chauffeur glared at me. “Get lost!”

“I am lost! I need to get to Pushkin Square . . .”

All I had to do was keep up the conversation for about thirty seconds. By the end of that time, Dima would have gone and two or three bags would have gone with him. But suddenly I heard him cry out and I saw, with complete horror, that a policeman had appeared out of nowhere. To this day I don’t know where he had come from because we always checked the immediate area first, but I can only assume that he’d been expecting us, that the police must have decided to crack down on this sort of street theft, and that he had been lying in wait all along. He was a huge man with the neck and the shoulders of a professional weight lifter. Dima was squirming in his jacket like a fish caught in a net.

I saw the chauffeur making a grab for me, but I ducked under his arms and ran around the back of the car. There was nothing I could do for Dima. The only sensible thing was to run away and leave him and just be grateful I’d had a lucky escape. But I couldn’t do it. Despite everything, I was grateful to him. I had been with him for six weeks now and he had protected me. I couldn’t have survived without him. I owed him something.

I threw myself at the policeman, who reacted in astonishment. I was honestly less than half his size and I barely even knocked him off balance. He didn’t let go of Dima—if anything, he tightened his grip, bellowing at the chauffeur to come and join in. Dima lashed out with a fist but the policeman didn’t feel it. With his spare hand, he grabbed hold of my shirt so that we were both held captive, and seeing us unarmed and helpless, the chauffeur lumbered forward to help.

We would certainly have been taken prisoner and that would have been the end of my Moscow adventure. Indeed, if I was recognized, it might be the end of my life. But as I struggled, I saw that one of the shopping bags had fallen over, spilling out its contents. There was a plastic bag of red powder on the top. I snatched it up, split it open, and hurled it into the policeman’s face, all in a single movement.

It was chili powder. The policeman was instantly blinded and howled in pain, both hands rushing to his face, covering his eyes. Dima was forgotten. In fact everything was forgotten. The policeman’s head was covered in red powder. He was spinning around on his feet. I grabbed Dima and the two of us began to run. At the same moment, a police car appeared at the far end of the street, speeding toward us, its lights blazing. We ran across the pavement and down a narrow alleyway between two shops. It was a cul-de-sac, blocked at the far end by a wall. We didn’t let it stop us, not for a second. We simply sprinted up the brickwork and over the top, crashing down onto an assortment of trash cans and cardboard boxes on the other side. Dima rolled over, then got back to his feet. We could hear the siren behind us and knew that the police were only seconds away. We kept running—down another alleyway and across a main road with six lanes of traffic and cars, trucks, motorbikes, and buses bearing down on us from every direction. It’s a miracle we weren’t killed. As it was, one car swerved out of our way and there was a screech and a crumpling of metal as a second car crashed into it. We didn’t stop. We didn’t look back. In fact we must have run three-quarters of a kilometer across Moscow, ducking into side roads, chasing behind buildings, doing everything we could to keep out of sight. Eventually we came to a metro entrance and dived into it, disappearing underground. There was a train waiting at the platform. We didn’t care where it was going. We dived in and sank, exhausted, into two seats.