"Stepan's right, Sanya," Cat says. "And it wouldn't be such a bad idea for Lyova and me to show ourselves at the station either. We still have suspended three-year sentences."
"All right, let's go to the station," Sanya agrees, although reluctantly.
Stepan informs his own and the other militia officers that they first have to take the arrested sergeant to be identified by the raped girl at the Stakhanovite Club, where there's an official Fifteenth Militia Precinct substation, and only then to the main station.
The trashes have no objection, so Stepan takes one of the arrested soldiers (as if also for identification, but in fact so that everything will look more businesslike) and quickly forms a small procession. Stepan and Cat go in front, each holding on to an arm of the arrested Uzbek soldier. His tunic is torn at the shoulder and soaked in blood. He looks scared. The effect of the hashish is obviously beginning to wear off, and he now realizes that something not very pleasant is taking place. After the Uzbek come Sanya and Lyova, leading the still snarling sergeant, who from time to time tries to stop. The curious Eddie-baby goes with them, first running a little ahead and then dropping behind…
This main group is accompanied by a dozen or so civilian bystanders, mostly thrill-seeking drunks from the two trolleys.
22
They don't go into the Stakhanovite Club, of course. Outstripping his rivals, the satisfied careerist Stepan walks with long, quick strides down Materialist Street, hurrying to reach the militia station as quickly as possible and there present himself to Major Aleshinsky as the conqueror who has captured the mutineers' ringleader.
Eddie-baby can tell from the behavior of his older comrades that they don't really want to rush anywhere or even walk quickly, and that further developments are of little interest to them, despite the temptation of making an appearance before the commanding officer of the Fifteenth Militia Precinct not in their customary role as hoodlums and criminals but as conscientious auxiliary forces aiding the militia in its struggle against lawbreaking soldiers and gangsters.
Cat is the first to leave. Eddie-baby sees him turn the arm of the Uzbek he is holding (the Uzbek's other arm is being pulled along by Stepan Dubnyak himself) over to a zealous little man in a white cap and a shabby raincoat with raglan sleeves. The little man grabs the arm with ferocious eagerness. Now free, and glad of it, as is clear from his face, Cat drops behind a little way and for a time walks beside Sanya and Lyova, whispering something to Lyova, obviously trying to get him to detach himself from the procession too.
And in fact Lyova does need to take a leak, as he loudly announced a few minutes ago, so he now hands over his post as escort to yet another bystander eager to take part in the affair – a Georgian of criminal appearance who delightedly seizes hold of the sergeants rocklike biceps.
"Well, you guys go ahead and piss," Stepan says, turning around to Cat and Lyova, "then catch up with us!"
They are now passing Grocery Store No.7, which is still open. The crowd by the store cries out to them in greeting – in the same way, probably, that the Romans hailed their men when they returned from a campaign against a neighboring tribe. The crowd's information, however, is obviously the reverse of the facts, since some of its members are maliciously yelling in Stepan's direction:
"Hey, trash, what did you grab the soldiers for? Let 'em go!"
"It's not militia business. Soldiers are the MPs' responsibility," somebody else says in a bass voice.
"What, aren't they allowed to celebrate the holiday too?" says somebody else in the crowd.
"Move along!" Stepan yells, without explaining anything to the crowd or even stopping.
Eddie-baby grins. The people have decided that anybody arrested by the authorities is necessarily a victim – even if before being arrested the victim has shot at people with a submachine gun, as was the case, or so they say, with a soldier at Kursk Station in Moscow. His girlfriend had cheated on him, and so he walked into the train station and started shooting into the crowd with an AK-47. He went berserk. "What idiots they are!" Eddie-baby thinks contemptuously.
Eddie-baby's thoughts are interrupted by Sanya, who says to him in an undertone so that neither the giant sergeant nor the Georgian will hear,
"Ed, take my place and lead this stallion to the militia station, but whatever you do, don't go inside, all right? I'm going to… take a leak too."
Sanya gives Eddie a meaningful look, winks, and disappears into the crowd without even telling Stepan.
Eddie-baby doesn't understand why they have to forgo the triumphant entrance they have all earned. How come the other guys are refusing to go to the militia station and present themselves to the dreaded major for the first time as heroes instead of criminals and hooligans involved in one scrape or another? "It's stupid!" Eddie thinks. "Stupid. The next time one of us was brought in on a minor charge, the major might have let him off. After all, they always let their auxiliaries off…"
Eddie-baby soon realizes, however, that if the older kids have decided to refuse the pleasure of the triumph, then it's because they have a good reason. He has no idea what that reason might be, but he's used to trusting Sanya. And he therefore continues to hold on to the sergeant's biceps and obediently follow the procession on its way to the militia station.
But several minutes later, after reaching the Fifteenth Militia Precinct station, constructed of the same white brick as almost all the other buildings in Saltovka, Eddie remains outside, as if lingering there, and allows the proud Georgian to squeeze through the doorway with their prisoner, the granitelike sergeant. The onlookers all crowd into the lobby of the station too. Eddie stands for a moment by the doorway, then calmly walks away. Like an experienced old hand.
A few minutes later Eddie-baby is walking down Materialist Street, going over his accounts with the militia. One evening right here by the station as he was innocently strolling by – he was thirteen at the time and still had long hair – two trashes called him over, and when he went up to them like an unsuspecting asshole, they dragged him inside and put him in a lineup along with a dozen other people who had been detained for some pale girl to identify. As Eddie-baby subsequently learned from his colleagues in misfortune, the girl had been raped by a gang of youths. The girl didn't identify Eddie-baby, although she did stare at him for a pretty long time. She didn't identify anybody. The disappointed militia officers, swearing the whole time (Eddie-baby knew they were drunk, he could smell it on their breath), cut off all the hair on the back of his head with a rusty pair of scissors and tossed him out onto the street after presenting him with several punches in the stomach, thereby creating for themselves and the whole race of militia officers one more implacable foe. To the grave.
Eddie-baby is quite certain that the whole human race can be divided into two categories – those you can beat up and those you can't. He, Eddie-baby, belongs to those you can't. When his father, trembling with rage and his own weakness, struck the eleven-year-old Eddie-baby for the first time in his life after his flight to Brazil with the Plague, Eddie-baby turned as white as the wall he was standing next to and, trembling with rage as well, shouted at his father, "Go ahead and hit me again! Go ahead and hit me!" As his mother later told him, his eyes were wild and his face had gone from white to green.
His father didn't touch him again after that. Eddie-baby told himself at the time that if his father ever struck him again, he would cut him in the middle of the night. Eddie-baby's father probably read his thoughts and was frightened by them. There was hatred in Eddie-baby's face. His father understood.