It's damp and dirty in the recess and smells a little of urine, but Eddie-baby pays no attention to such unimportant details. Taking a knife from his pocket, he at once sets to work removing the putty in the right corner of the lower windowpane. On the basis of some strange, idiotic logic, the pane has been installed from the outside rather than the inside, which makes Eddie's work much easier. His delight is premature, however. The putty turns out to be as hard as cement, obviously made that way by the rain or the frost or all of the elements combined. It doesn't want to be removed, and Eddie's knife slips off it, taking just a few tiny fragments from its rock-hard surface.
Eddie realizes there's no choice but to break the window. In a situation like this, the professional Kostya would have brought a towel with him and, squeezing a tube of BF-2 glue onto it, would have placed the towel against the windowpane and popped it out easily and noiselessly. Eddie, however, is unprepared and poorly equipped, and he therefore decides to break the glass and then pull out whatever pieces remain.
Taking off his jacket, Eddie places it over a corner of the window and strikes through his jacket at the windowpane with the haft of his heavy knife. The glass doesn't break at first, and despite the jacket there is still too much noise when it does. Eddie-baby freezes and listens to see if anything is happening on the street. Nothing, apparently.
He wants to stick his head up out of his hole to look, but he waits before doing so. Just then he distinctly hears the bootsteps of a trash – a unique sound impossible to confuse with the light steps of a civilian. A heavy, proprietary tread: Eddie-baby crouches in his hole without moving, pressing against its cold wall.
The steps come closer. Eddie-baby's stomach churns. As always in moments of danger, he suddenly feels an overwhelming urge to defecate.
The steps come to a halt at the front door of the cafeteria, and for a while no sound is heard, and then the steps suddenly begin again, this time moving away. Eddie-baby breathes a sigh of relief. His stomach is no longer churning. The trash has tried the door and continued on his beat. He obviously heard something when the glass was being broken, or something else in the cafeteria seemed suspicious to him, and he decided to investigate. If it had occurred to him to take a look in the hole, Eddie-baby would have been done for.
"I've got to hurry," Eddie-baby thinks. Eddie knows that the trash has just come on duty, and he is familiar with his beat. The trash will go up First Cross Street and check several stores and kiosks in the vicinity of the vehicle maintenance lot, and then he'll turn in the direction of the hospital. Next to the hospital is a large grocery store that has just recently been built and has already been burgled several times by the punks, since it's so far from the streetlights of civilization and the trolley stops. Eddie-baby doesn't have a lot of time, but he has enough. He quickly sets to work removing the pieces of glass from the window frame, using his jacket to grab hold of them. What he really should have brought with him is a pair of gloves.
A couple of minutes later Eddie-baby is inside the cafeteria. It's stuffy there, and the stoves visible in the kitchen are still hot, since the cafeteria has only been closed for a few hours. Losing no time, Eddie gets to work on the hardest part. He goes to the wooden cashier's cage, which is in the middle of the dining room and is brightly lit and can therefore be seen through the window by any passerby, and tries the door.
It won't open. For some reason Eddie imagined that it would be held by a lightweight bolt, but instead there is an extremely heavy Moscow-type padlock hanging from it. Eddie-baby knows from experience that opening or breaking such a lock is no easy matter, especially if you don't even have a crowbar with you. But looking up, Eddie-baby realizes that there's no need to remove the lock at all, since there's at least half a meter between the top of the open cage and the very high ceiling. Eddie-baby quickly moves a couple of chairs over and climbs up onto them, taking hold of the cage's top edge. He then pulls himself up, throws his leg over, and slides down inside.
This is the most dangerous moment. Because the cage is so well lit and is in the center of the dining room, anyone passing by on the street will be able to see the pyramid of chairs. Eddie-baby is in a hurry and pulls at the drawer of the cash register. It's locked, but he forces his knife into the crack above the drawer and tears away its thin sheet-iron covering and the lock along with it. The drawer slides out. Squinting nearsightedly, he bends over its compartments and swears to himself in disappointment: "Cocksuckers!" There's nothing in the compartments but some small change and a thin packet of fresh new rubles. About twenty in all. Or maybe thirty.
Eddie-baby quickly rummages through the drawers of the cashier's desk, which aren't even locked, but all he finds in them are bundles of invoices and some other worthless papers stuck on spindles, as well as several rubber stamps, some paper clips, a dried-up leftover sandwich, a couple of forks and knives from the cafeteria, a green comb with a few of the cashier's gray hairs stuck in it, a mirror, and some pomade in a crumpled bronze tube. There isn't any more money.
Eddie-baby looks around the primitive structure. The only things in it are a chair and the desk with the cash register on it, and above the register a price list pinned to the wall. That's all the cage contains. Not much.
Eddie rakes the change into his pockets and puts the thin packet of rubles in the same place. And then, without hesitating, he climbs up onto the desk, stands on the cash register, and in a single leap vaults over the side of the cage, hangs from his hands, and drops down to the floor. Eddie is always annoyed by movie heroes who stop to think in perilous situations or take too long to part with their brides, which lack of haste ultimately lands them either in prison or on the gallows. "Get out of there, you asshole!" Eddie always whispers in the darkness of the movie theater on such occasions. Once back on the floor, Eddie himself immediately grabs the two chairs and returns them to the little table where he found them, and then, without even looking out the window to make sure that nobody has seen him, he hides in the kitchen.
The kitchen is even hotter and reeks of overcooked soup or borsch. Eddie-baby feels like something to eat and lifts the lids of a couple of saucepans, but either they're empty or they don't contain anything interesting – the brown leftovers of borsch or soup that the cook's helper will pour down the drain the next morning without regret.
Eddie-baby looks around. There can't be any money in the kitchen, of course, but he soon notices another door next to the entrance to the dining room. He rushes over to it, opens it, and finds himself in a small, cool, somewhat dank little corridor with two other doors opening off it. Affixed to one of the doors is a small sign with the word "Manager" on it.
It is in fact the manager's office that Eddie-baby wants. To his relief, it isn't locked. Eddie turns the black light switch by the doorway and goes into the office.
A glance at the large gray safe in the corner immediately tells him that the game is over. That all is lost. "You went through all this for nothing, you feeble asshole – just so you could stand gaping at a steel box." It isn't the first time that something like this has happened to him. Only recently he and Kostya spent a long time trying to drill out the lock of a safe in a shoe store that by their calculations should have contained from 150,000 to 200,000 rubles! It just wasn't working, and there was nothing to do but give up the whole thing and get out of there. Kostya is trying to learn how to crack safes, but where can he learn and who is there to teach him? The only safecrackers, or "bear hunters," left are those in the novels of Sheinin, the real ones having long ago been liquidated as a class. There's nobody to apprentice with, and Kostya isn't a good enough locksmith and mechanic to figure out for himself how it's done.