had some special kind of crooks there, grabbers, they were called, or so people said. And these grabbers caught young boys who had no one to look out for them and sold them for five roubles apiece to the Yids and the Tartars for depraved lechery in their secret houses.
But as it turned out that was all horseshit. Well, everything about the flophouses and the drunken riff-raff was true, but there weren’t any grabbers in Khitrovka. When Senka let slip about the grabbers to his new mates, they laughed him down something rotten. Prokha said that if someone wanted to grab a bit of easy money off kids, that was fine, but forcing youngsters into doing filthy things – that just wasn’t on. The Council wouldn’t stand for anything like that. Slitting a throat or two in the middle of the night wasn’t a problem, if some gull showed up because he was drunk or just plain stupid. They’d found someone in Podkopaevsky Lane just recently, head smashed in like a soft-boiled egg, fingers cut off to get the rings, and his eyes gouged out. It was his own fault. You shouldn’t go sticking your nose in where you aren’t invited. The mice shouldn’t play where the cats are waiting.
‘Only why put his eyes out?’ Senka asked in fright.
But Mikheika the Night-Owl just laughed and said: ‘Go and ask them as put them out.’
But that conversation came later, when Senka was already a Khitrovkan.
It all happened very quickly and simply – before he even had time to sneeze, you might say.
There was Senka walking along the row of spiced tea stalls, sizing up what there was to filch and plucking up his courage, and suddenly this almighty ruckus started up, with people shouting on all sides, and this woman was yelling. ‘Help! I’ve been robbed, they’ve took me purse, stop thief!’ And two young lads, about the same age as Senka, came dashing along the line of stalls, kicking up the bowls and mugs as they ran. A woman selling spiced tea grabbed one of them by the belt with a great ham of a hand and pulled him down on to the ground. ‘Gotcha,’ she shouted, ‘you vicious little brute! Now you’re for it!’ But the other young thief, with a sharp pointy nose, leapt off a hawker’s stand and thumped the woman on the ear. She went all limp and slipped over on her side (Prokha always carried a lead bar with him, Senka learnt that later). The lad with the pointy nose jerked the other one up by the arm to get him to keep on running, but people had already closed in from all sides. They’d probably have beaten the two of them to death for hurting the woman, if it wasn’t for Senka.
He roared at the top of his voice:
‘Good Orthodox people! Who dropped a silver rouble?’
Well, they all went dashing over to him: ‘I did, I did!’ But he squeezed through between their outstretched hands and shouted to the young thieves:
‘Don’t stand there gawping! Leg it!’
They sprinted after him, and when Senka hesitated at a gateway, they overtook him and waved for him to follow.
After they stopped at a quiet spot to get their breath back and shook hands. Mikheika the Night-Owl (the one who was shorter, with fat cheeks) asked him: ‘Who are you? Where are you from?’
And Senka answered: ‘Sukharevka.’
The other one, who was called Prokha, bared his teeth and grinned, as if he’d heard something funny. ‘So what made you leave Sukharevka in such a hurry?’
Senka spat through the gap in his teeth – he hadn’t had time to get used to the novelty of it yet, but he still spat a good six feet.
And all he said was: ‘Can’t stay there. They’ll put me in jail.’
The two lads gave Senka a respectful kind of look. Prokha slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Come and live with us, then. No need to be shy. No one gets turned in from Khitrovka.’
HOW SENKA SETTLED IN AT
THE NEW PLACE
So this was the way he and the lads lived.
During the day they went ‘snitching’, and at night they went ‘bombing’.
They did most of their thieving round that same Old Square where the market was, or on Maroseika Street, where all the shops were, or on Varvarka Street, from the people walking by, and sometimes on Ilinka Street, where the rich merchants and stockbrokers were, but definitely no farther than that, oh no. Prokha – he