me you that. Here, what will you give me?’
And he plonked the coin down on the counter.
The jeweller stared at Senka’s wrists, but he didn’t say a word. Then he looked at the silver coin without any real interest.
‘Hmm, a yefimok.’
‘Come again?’ said Senka.
‘A yefimok, a silver thaler. Quite a common coin. They go for double weight. That is, the weight of the silver, multiplied by two. Your yefimok’s in good condition.’ He took the coin and put it on the balance. ‘In ideal condition, you could say. A perfect thaler, six and a half zolotniks in weight. One zolotnik of silver is . . . twenty-four kopecks now. That makes . . . hmm . . . three roubles twelve kopecks. Minus my commission, twenty per cent. In total, two roubles and fifty kopecks. No one’s likely to give you more than that.’
Two roubles fifty – well, that was something. Senka writhed around again, reached into his pocket for the scales, and tipped them on to the counter.
‘And what about this?’
He had exactly twenty of those scales, he’d counted them during the night. They were pretty battered kopecks, but if you added them to two roubles fifty, that would make two seventy.
The jeweller was more impressed by the kopecks than he was by the yefimok. He moved the lens off his forehead onto his eye and examined them one by one.
‘Silver kopecks? Oho, “YM” – Yauza Mint. And in enviable condition. Well, I can take these for three roubles apiece.’
‘How much?’ Senka gasped.
‘You have to understand, young man,’ said the jeweller, looking at Senka through the lens with a huge black eye. ‘Pre-rebellion kopecks, of course, are not thalers, and they go for a different rate. But they dug up another hoard from that time only recently, over in Zamoskvorechie, three thousand silver kopecks, including two hundred from the Yauza Mint, so their price has fallen greatly. How would you like three fifty? I can’t go higher than that.’
‘How much will that make altogether?’ Senka asked, still unable to believe his luck.
‘Altogether?’ Samshitov clicked the beads on his abacus and pointed: ‘There. Including the yefimok, seventy-two roubles and fifty kopecks.’
Senka could barely croak out his answer: ‘Fine, all right.’
And the parrot went off again: ‘All right! All right! All right!’
The jeweller raked the coins off the counter and jangled the lock of his cash box. There was the sound of banknotes rustling – pure music to Senka’s ears. Now was this really something, big money!
The woman’s voice sang out again from the back of the shop. ‘Ashotik-djan, are you going to take your tea?’
‘Just a moment, dear heart,’ said the jeweller, turning towards the voice. ‘I’ll just let this client out.’
The lady of the house appeared from behind the curtain, carrying a tray, with a glass of tea in a silver holder and a little dish of sweets –very neat it looked too. The woman was stout, a lot bigger than her little titch of a husband. She had a moustache under her nose and hands like sugar loaves.
Mystery solved! With a woman like that, you didn’t need an apprentice.
‘There’s this as well . . .’ Senka said, clearing his throat as he showed them his hands and the metal bar. ‘I’d like to get untangled . . . The lads played a joke . . .’
The woman took one look at his shackled hands then went back behind the curtain without saying a word.
But the jeweller took the bar in his skinny hands, and Senka was amazed when he straightened it out in a trice. Not all the way, but at least enough for him to pull his wrists out. Good old Ashotik!
While Senka was stuffing the banknotes and ten-kopeck pieces in his pockets, his hands nice and free, Samshitov was eyeing up the rod. He dropped something on it from a little bottle and scraped the surface. Then he pulled down his lens, put one end of the rod to his eye, and began to mop his bald patch with a handkerchief.
‘Where did you get this?’ he asked, and his voice was trembling.
As if Senka was going to tell him that! But he didn’t come out with, ‘Where from, where from? A stroke of luck. If you want to know more, you can get ****ed,’ because Ashot was a good man, he’d helped him out.
So Senka said politely: ‘From the right place.’ And then he turned to go. He had to think what to do with his