about it.
Oh, but it felt good.
True enough, his pockets were as empty as before, but surely that would all change when the first job came along.
It came along soon, and a real hotshot job it was too.
HOW SENKA WENT ON
A REAL JOB
The Prince got this tip-off from a reliable man, a waiter at the Slavyanskaya hotel where merchants stayed, over in Berezhki. He said a rich Kalmyk horse-trader and his right-hand man had arrived from the town of Khvalynsk to buy stud horses for a herd. This Kalmyk had a fat wad of crunch on him, and it had to be lifted quick, because tomorrow, on Sunday, he was going to the horse auction, and he could spend the whole lot there.
Late in the evening the whole deck got into three two-seaters and set off. The Prince rode up front with Deadeye, then came Lardy and the twins, with the Bosun and Senka at the rear. Their job was to stand lookout and make sure the horses could be started at a gallop if they had to scram.
As they flew across Red Square, down Vozdvizhenka Street and along Arbat Street, Senka’s belly kept rumbling so bad he could have gone running to the lav. But later, after they clattered across the bridge, the sickening fear suddenly turned to jauntiness, like when Senka was a kid and his father took him to the Shrovetide Carnival that first time, to ride down the icy wooden slides.
The Bosun was merry right from the off and kept cracking jokes. Ah,’ he said, ‘Sebastopol, I’ll meet my moll.’ And again: ‘Ah, Poltava, what a palaver.’ Or else: –Ah, Samara, we’ll be there tomorra.’
He knew lots of different towns, some of them Senka hadn’t even heard of.
The hotel was a drab-looking place, like a workers’ bunkhouse. The lights were all out before ten – trading folk went to bed early, and it was market day tomorrow.
They drove through to the railway depot and jumped out. They didn’t talk, they didn’t need words now – everything had been talked through in advance.
Senka took the reins and steered the three carriages side by side, wheel to wheel, with the Bosun’s rig in the middle. Then he handed the Bosun all three reins. The horses wouldn’t play up with him, they were smart. When they sensed strength, they stood still and didn’t stir. And the Prince’s horses were special, miraculous – nothing could catch horses like that.
So there was the Bosun, sitting on the box, puffing on his long pipe, and Senka didn’t know what to do with himself; he paced down the street, then back up the other side. He wasn’t scared any more, just limp and fed up. He felt pretty useless.
He ran to one corner, then another, to check whether there was any need to scram. Not a thing, it was all quiet.
‘Uncle Bosun, what’s taking them so long?’
The Bosun took pity on the sixer. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘why should a healthy young lad like you be hanging about back here? Run and see how the job’s going. Take a look, then come back and tell me how they finish off the Kalmyks.’
Senka was surprised. ‘Can’t they just take the money? Do they have to finish them off?’
‘That depends how much there is,’ the Bosun explained. ‘If there’s not a lot of crunch, only a few hundred, you don’t need to finish them off, the coppers won’t look too hard. But if there’s thousands, it’s best to do them in. A merchant will offer the coppers a big reward for his thousands, to make sure they sweat real hard. Off you run, Speedy, don’t you worry none. I’ll manage here on my own. Ah, I’d go myself, like a shot, if I had any legs.’
Senka didn’t need to be told twice. He was so tired of just hanging around, he didn’t even go in through the gate, just climbed straight over the wall.
When he walked into the big hallway he saw a man in a long coat lying there on the counter, squealing in fear. He had his hands over his head, and his shoulders were shaking. Lardy was standing beside him, yawning, with his fiddle in his hand (that was what bandits called a devolvert: a fiddle, a bludgeon or a chanter).
The man on the counter said in this feeble voice: ‘Don’t kill me, gentlemen. I didn’t look at you, I closed my eyes straight away. Go easy on me . . . please?