It was a simple story, as simple as life itself in Saltovka, Tyurenka, or Plekhanovka. Such stories usually landed the kids from Saltovka, Tyurenka, Plekhanovka, or Zhuravlyovka in jail or reform school or a prison camp. Gorkun liked the big redhead standing with her girlfriends and some guys in a secluded corner of the dancing area. To his indescribable astonishment, however, she boldly and provocatively refused to dance with him, and the kids around her even permitted themselves to smile as they gazed at the very drunk and nearly bald Gorkun. Gorkun had brought the baldness back from Kolyma along with his stomach ulcer.
It was then that Eddie-baby appeared on the scene, dressed in a white shirt unbuttoned over his chest and armed with Gorkun's hunting knife. It is no easy matter now to establish the details of what took place, but in all probability Eddie-baby was offended on behalf of his older comrade, who was not good enough for the redheaded girl and her friends. Most likely, Eddie-baby also took the redheaded girl's refusal to dance with Gorkun as a personal insult.
Not wasting any time, Eddie-baby walked up to the girl with the mechanical stride of a maniac and took the knife out of his pocket. According to evidence later provided by Slavka, who was the least drunk of them, Eddie-baby didn't seem drunk; on the contrary, he was very calm and precise in his movements. Pulling out the hunting knife, he stuck it against one of the redheaded girl's breasts and pressed lightly. The redheaded girl was standing by the railing of the dance area, and she moved back against it, trying to avoid the knife point, but the implacable Eddie followed her to the railing, grabbed her by the belt of her dress – the redheaded girl was wearing a plastic belt – once more placed the point of the knife under her left breast (which was opposite his right hand), and pressed. The girls who go to the dances at Krasnozavodsk Park all have big breasts. Looking the girl in the eye, Eddie-baby said, "I'll count to three. If by three you don't start dancing with my friend…"
Looking back into the dull green and absolutely wild eyes of the minor, the grown-up girl (she was twenty-five) realized it would be best not to wait until three.
"I'm going, I'm going," she said. And she went. And soon afterward she was dancing with Gorkun.
Eddie-baby stood contentedly by and watched his handiwork. Maybe he was thinking that Gorkun and the girl would make a nice couple. Who knows? Nobody asked him what he was thinking. The kids who had been with the girl up to that point disappeared somewhere, and everybody who witnessed the scene decided for one reason or another not to interfere. Experienced people know that there's nothing worse than a drunken minor with a hunting knife who's no longer conscious of what he's doing. There's no worse adversary.
It was only at the exit, after everybody in the dancing area had left (it closed at twelve), that Eddie-baby and his friends ran into the friends of the redheaded girl and a force of militia auxiliaries. Eddie was the only one of their drunken company who had a weapon. Or maybe the others did have weapons, but Eddie didn't know about it. And so he pulled out the knife and rushed forward. His four companions ran after him with a loud cry – nobody wanted to spend the night in a cell at the local militia station.
Krasnozavodsk Park is a real park, thickly overgrown with bushes and trees and intersected here and there by small ravines and gullies, so that Eddie-baby and his friends managed to get away without too much difficulty. It seemed to Eddie that he had caught one of the militia auxiliaries with the knife – he had heard a cry of pain, and he remembered lunging – but it no longer made any difference since they had escaped.
Or they would have, if it hadn't been for that asshole Slavka. Ivan and Vovka Dneprovsky parted with the others at the park fence and took off on their own, while Eddie, Gorkun, and Slavka, still drunk, climbed over the fence, intending to go off in another direction. Just beyond the fence, however, the fool Slavka for some reason struck his heavily booted foot against one of the struts holding up a wooden signboard with the painted entreaty "Let's Make Our Park the Greenest in the City! Don't Litter!" As a result, the signboard fell over with a crack, whereupon two previously invisible figures in militia uniforms stepped away from the fence and arrested Eddie-baby and Gorkun. The incredibly unfair part was that the culprit – Slavka – got away by climbing back over the fence into the park and running for it.
When they had been brought to the Krasnozavodsk district militia substation and were being taken out of the car, Eddie-baby at once realized, drunk as he was, how extremely unlucky he had been. They were met by the very same faces of the very same militia auxiliaries they had succeeded in getting past only half an hour before. Except that one of the auxiliaries was missing.
Eddie-baby broke free and ran for it. Both the militia and the auxiliaries took off after him. Eddie-baby didn't get very far – an unfortunate consequence of being very drunk. They knocked him down without too much trouble, kicked him several times with their boots, picked him up, dragged him back to the substation, and then realized that he was the same minor who had stuck a hunting knife into their comrade, their comrade who had been taken away in an ambulance and about whom the doctors had said that the wound wasn't dangerous, that he "would live," even though his lung was punctured. When they realized who Eddie was, they started to beat him in earnest, seriously and methodically, obviously intent on beating him to death. Just as they had done to other people on other occasions. It was Eddie-baby's very bad luck to fall into their clutches only half an hour after the business with the knife.
After several good blows, Eddie-baby fell down on the flagstone substation floor, where the only thing he could do was to cover his head with his arms to protect it and hope for the best. If Eddie-baby had believed in God, he probably would have prayed, but the only place God could be found in Saltovka, in Tyurenka, or in Krasnozavodsk Park and its environs was in the heads of addle-brained old women. Neither the militia nor Eddie-baby and his friends needed God in their lives or in the exercise of their uncomplicated mutual hostilities. "The main thing is to keep them from hitting my head," Eddie-baby thought while lying on the stone floor and taking the blows from the heavy militia boots. With that thought about his precious head he lost consciousness.
24
Eddie-baby came to in a militia cell and could barely manage to get to the toilet, even though accompanied by the duty officer. Subsequent events followed the routine of obligatory tedium that is the same for militia and police departments the world over; namely, one after another the civilian employees of the militia arrived, usually gray-faced blonds conspicuously worn by life, while the hoodlums and criminals arrested the night before asked to go to the toilet or wanted something to drink. The duty officers' first cigarettes of the morning stank disgustingly, the prisoners in the cells groaned, blew their noses, stamped their feet, and swore at each other, although lazily for the time being. An ordinary, typically monstrous, dirty gray militia Monday morning had begun.
There could have been a lot more jail mornings like that in Eddie-baby's life, but if you're lucky, you're lucky. Eddie-baby was sitting stupidly on the bench in his cell, on his right the fat Uncle Fedya, a jerk who'd been arrested the night before for going after his wife with an ax, and on his left some guy who had been arrested "for no reason at all." Eddie-baby knew that ninety percent of the people who find themselves in militia cells on Monday morning will tell you that they've been arrested for no reason at all. Eddie-baby sat there while fate in the person of Major Ivan Sakharov, just back from vacation and still rested and fresh, was already drawing near, accompanied by an obsequious duty officer carrying the arrest log. After his vacation, Major Sakharov was full of determination to bring order to his precinct once and for all. Normally, he lowered himself to the dirty business of checking on the prisoners no more than once a month.