kept ripping Yoshka’s ear with his teeth.
He couldn’t have held on for long, of course. But then Deadeye snatched his cane up off the ground and shook it, the wooden stick went flying off, and something long and steely glittered in the Jack’s hand.
Deadeye bounded towards Yoshka, bent one leg and stretched out the other, straightened out like a spring, and elongated himself, like a viper attacking. He snagged Yoshka with his blade – right in the heart – and Yoshka stopped waving his arms and tumbled over, with Senka underneath him. Senka escaped, and looked round to see what would happen next.
He was just in time to see the Prince tear himself out of Cudgel’s great mitts, take a run at Manka and smash his forehead into her chin – the enormous woman went down on her backside, sat there for a moment then collapsed. But the Prince had already taken the Ghoul by the throat and they went tumbling over and over, off the well-trodden path and into the grass, setting the dry stalks swaying furiously.
Cudgel was about to go and lend his King a hand, but Deadeye came flying up from behind, his left hand tucked behind his back and his right hand holding that pen – it was more than two feet long – swish-swish, backwards and forwards through the air, and there were red drops dripping off the steel.
‘Oh, do not leave me,’ he recited, ‘stay a while. I have loved you for so long. Let my fiery caresses scorch you . . .’
Senka knew those lines – they were from this song, a real tear-jerker it was.
Cudgel turned towards Deadeye, fluttered his eyelids and staggered backwards. Beak was quicker off the mark, he’d scarpered straight off. And then the Prince and the Ghoul came tumbling back on to the bald patch, only now you could see who was getting the best of it. The Prince twisted his enemy round, grabbed hold of his face and started hammering his head against the ground.
The Ghoul wheezed: ‘Enough, enough. You win! I’m a punk.’
That was a special kind of word. When anyone said that at a meet, you weren’t supposed to hit him any more. That was the law.
The Prince thumped him another couple of times, just to round things off, or maybe it was more than a couple – Senka didn’t watch the end. He was squatting down next to Sprat, watching crimson blood streaming out of the black hole in the side of his head. Sprat was as dead as a doornail – Yoshka had smashed his head in with his shooter.
*
After that the grandfathers spent four days trying to decide whether a meet like that could decide anything. They ruled that it couldn’t. Of course the Ghoul had cheated, but the Prince had blotted his copybook too: his Jack had come with a blade, and there were the two lads hiding in the barn. The Prince wasn’t fit to be ace yet, that was the verdict. Moscow would have to manage a bit longer without a thieves’ tsar.
The Prince went about in a fury, drinking all the time and threatening to put the Ghoul in the ground. There was no sign of the Ghoul, he was holed up somewhere, recovering from the treatment the Prince had doled out.
All Khitrovka was buzzing with sensational talk about the meet in Luzhniki.
And as for Speedy Senka, you could say these were golden days.
He was the Prince’s sixer now, all fully legit. For his heroism the deck gave him a handsome ration and total respect–you can imagine how the lads in Khitrovka treated him now.
Senka went round there about three times a day, as if he had important secret business, but really just to cut a dash. All of Sprat’s clothes went to him: the English cloth trousers with a crease in them, and the box calf boots, and the boulanger pea-jacket, and the captain’s cap with the lacquered peak, and the silver watch on a chain with the little silver skull. The lads came running from all over to shake hands with the hero or gape from a distance as he told his story.
Prokha, who used to teach Senka what was good sense and put on airs around him, looked into Senka’s eyes now and asked him in a quiet voice, so the others wouldn’t hear, to fix him up as a sixer somewhere, even with a really feeble deck. Senka listened condescendingly and promised to think