was their leader – called it ‘a dash from Khitrovka’. Meaning that if anything went wrong, you could hightail it to the Khitrovka gateways and side alleys, where there was no way anyone could catch a thief.
Senka learned how to go snitching quickly enough. It was easy work, good fun.
Mikheika the Night-Owl picked out a ‘gull’ – some clueless passerby – and checked to make sure he had money on him. That was his job. He moved in close, rubbed up against the gull and then gave them the nod: yeah he’s got a wallet on him, over to you. He never pinched anything himself – his fingers weren’t quick enough for that.
Then it was Senka’s turn. His job was to surprise the gull so his jaw dropped open and he forgot all about his pockets. There were several ways of going about it. He could start a fight with Night-Owl – people loved to gawp at that. He could suddenly start walking down the middle of the road on his hands, jerking his legs about comically (Senka had been able to do that ever since he was a little kid). But the simplest thing of all was just to collapse at the gull’s feet, as if he was having a fit, and start yelling: ‘I feel real bad, mister (or missus, depending on the circumstances). I’m dying!’ If it was someone soft-hearted, they were bound to stop and watch the young lad writhing about; and even if you’d picked a real cold fish, he’d still look round, out of sheer curiosity, like. And that was all Prokha needed. In and out like a knife, and the job was done. It used to be your money, but now it’s ours.
Senka didn’t like bombing so much. In fact, you could say he didn’t like it at all. In the evening, somewhere not far from Khitrovka, they picked out a ‘beaver’ who was all on his own (a beaver was like a gull, only drunk). Prokha did the important work here too. He ran up from behind and smashed his fist against the side of the beaver’s head – only he was holding a lead bar in that fist. When the beaver collapsed, Speedy and Night-Owl came dashing in from both sides: they took the money, the watch and a few other things, and tugged off the jacket and the low boots, if they looked pricey. If the beaver was some kind of strongman who wasn’t felled by the lead bar, they didn’t mess with him: Prokha legged it straight away, and Skorik and Filin never stuck their noses out of the gateway.
So bombing wasn’t exactly complicated, either. But it was disgusting. At first, Senka was terrified Prokha would hit someone so hard he’d kill them, but then he got used to that. For starters, it was only a lead bar, not knuckledusters or a blackjack. And anyway, everyone knew that God himself looked after drunks. And they had thick heads.
The lads sold their loot out of Bunin’s flophouse. Sometimes they only made a rouble between them, but on a good day it could be as much as fifty. If it was just a rouble, they ate ‘dog’s delight’ – cheap sausage – with black rye bread. But if the takings were good, they went to drink wine at the Hard Labour or the Siberia. And after that the thing to do was visit the tarts (‘mamselles’ they were called in Khitrovka), and horse around.
Prokha and Filin had their own regular mamselles. Not molls, of course, like proper thieves had – they didn’t earn enough to keep a moll just for themselves – but at least not streetwalkers. Sometimes the mamselles might even feed them, or lend them some money.
Senka soon acquired a little lady-friend of his own too. Tashka, her name was.
That morning Senka woke up late. He couldn’t remember anything that had happened the day before, he had been too drunk. But when he looked, he saw he was in a small room, with just one window, curtained over. There were plants in pots on the windowsill, with flowers – yellow, red and blue. In the corner, lying on the floor, was a withered old woman, a bag of bones, tearing herself apart with this rasping cough and spitting blood into a rag – she had consumption, for sure. Senka was lying on an iron bedstead, naked, and there was a girl about thirteen years old, sitting at the far