knock all her teeth out, and the mamselle’s pimp had to accept the loss. Clean them with crushed chalk if you want to be posh, but stay clear of that powder, that was invented by the Germans.
There were two kinds of laws in Khitrovka: those from times gone by, the way things used to be in the olden days, and new ones – those were announced by the Council when they were needed. Say, for instance, a horse-tram sets off down the street. Who ought to work it – the ‘twitchers’, who dip their fingers in all the pockets, or the ‘slicers’, who cut them open with a sharpened coin? The Council deliberated, and decided it wasn’t a job for the slicers, because the same crowd rode the horse-tram all the time, and soon they wouldn’t have any pockets left.
The Council was made up of ‘grandfathers’, the most respected thieves and tricksters, those who had come back from doing hard labour, or were so old and feeble they didn’t work any more. The grandfathers could untangle any kind of tricky knot, and if anyone offended against the Council’s rules, they meted out the punishment.
If someone made everybody else’s life a misery, they threw him out of Khitrovka. If he really fouled things up, they could even take his life. Sometimes they might give someone up to the law, but not for what the Council really thought he was guilty of – they ordered him to take the rap for someone else’s crimes, one of the ‘businessmen’s’. That way things worked out fairer all round. If you tried to cheat Khitrovka, you had to answer for it: purge your crime, bleach yourself white and help the good people, and they’d put in a good word for you in the jailhouse or in Siberia.
And they didn’t hand over a rogue they’d convicted to just anyone in the police, only to their own man, Boxman, the senior constable in the Khitrovka precinct.
This Boxman had served more than twenty years around here; Khitrovka wouldn’t be Khitrovka without him. If Khitrovka was a world, then he was like the whale it rested on, because Boxman was authority, and people can’t live without any authority at all, otherwise they start forgetting who they are. There has to be a little bit of authority, a tiny little bit, and not according to some rules on a piece of paper, thought up by some outsider in some place no one had ever seen, but according to justice – so that every man could understood why his face was getting blacked.
Tough but fair, that was what everybody said about Boxman, and Boxman really was his surname. He wouldn’t deliberately do you wrong. Everyone called him ‘Ivan Fedotovich’ to his face, as a mark of respect. Only Senka couldn’t tell if it was just a nickname that he’d got from his surname, or if it was because in olden times, so they said, all the constables in Moscow were called ‘boxmen’, because of the kiosks they used to stand in. Or maybe it was because he lived in the official police box on the edge of the Khitrovka market. Any time when he wasn’t pounding his beat, he sat at home in front of an open window, keeping a watch on the square, reading books and newspapers and drinking tea from his famous silver samovar with medallions that were worth a thousand roubles. And there weren’t any locks on the box. What would Boxman want locks for? In the first place, what good were they, when the place was surrounded by top-class lock-pickers and window-men? They could open any lock, easy as falling off a log. And in the second place, no one would go trying to filch anything from Boxman – not unless he was tired of living, that is.
From his window the constable could hear everything and see everything, and what he couldn’t see or hear was whispered to him by his loyal informers. That was above board, it wasn’t forbidden by the Council, because Boxman was part of Khitrovka. If he’d lived by the written laws and not the laws of Khitrovka, they’d have knifed him ages back. No, when he took someone into the station, it was all done with the proper understanding: he had to do it, to show his bosse she was doing something. Only Boxman didn’t put anyone away very often – not unless he absolutely had to – mostly he taught people