"Tuz, Tuz!" Kolya the Gypsy runs up to Tuzik. "There's some dressed-up dude up there with two girls. What the fuck does he need two of them for, eh, Tuz? Let's take one of them for ourselves!"
"All right, let's," Tuzik drunkenly agrees. "Dymok!" he yells, although Dymok is right next to him. "Dymok, go over and politely ask that dude to give us one."
Dymok slips out from under the hetman's arm and runs off with Kolya the Gypsy.
Kolya the Gypsy has been Eddie-baby's enemy for a long time. Several summers ago, when Eddie was swimming in Tyurenka Pond, Kolya grabbed Eddie's new navy blue T-shirt, put it on, and never gave it back. Even though Eddie by that time was hardly an exemplary boy anymore, he was still afraid to demand his T-shirt back. But now Kolya the Gypsy is acting like he's Eddie-baby's best friend. The hetman doesn't entrust himself to just anyone, and he doesn't put his arm around just anybody's shoulder. Despite the drunken apprehension the intuitive Eddie is feeling, he has to admit to himself that he likes playing the role of the hetman's friend, his pal, and enjoys walking along with him at the head of a multitude of cutthroats, at least half of whom are prepared to follow Tuzik through fire and water. Eddie looks back. Armed with whatever they've happened to pick up, the gang surges along… "Now, that's power!" Eddie thinks delightedly.
At that moment Tuzik lurches forward and just about falls over Eddie and himself.
Ahead of them, by the gate of one of the houses, Dymok and Kolya the Gypsy are talking to a man and two girls. Not shouting. Just quietly talking.
"Am I really not going to kill anybody today?" Tuzik groans in an intentionally loud voice as they walk over to the group.
"He doesn't want to give one of them to us, Tuz. He says he needs them both. He says one of them's his sister…," Kolya the Gypsy affectionately informs Tuzik, and then comments almost indifferently, "He's lying, of course."
Tuzik frees himself from Eddie's support and seems to sober up some. "You don't want to give us one?" he asks the man.
The man doesn't say anything.
Walking up behind Tuzik to the group, Eddie finally takes a good look at the man and the girls. The man is large, large and adult, which is why he didn't hide in an alley like a normal pedestrian – he was relying on his strength. He's about thirty years old, and judging from his clothes, he has just come from downtown. He's wearing a short beige cloth coat, he has dark hair, and he's bareheaded. He's standing there with a blank look on his face as the approaching punks gradually close him in tighter and tighter.
The girls are huddled next to the fence in terror. They're adults too. Probably they live in a Saltovka dormitory. Girlfriends. And as usually happens in such cases, one of them is ugly and fat, while the other you might even call pretty. She is, in any case, tall, and her blond hair is brushed up off her temples, and you can see traces of violet lipstick on her lips. The man probably met them at the Victory and is walking them home. "Asshole," thinks Eddie contemptuously. "What would it have cost him to hide in an alley and wait for the gang to pass by? No, the fucker decided to play the hero for the girls. And now he'll pay for it… The idiot!"
Tuzik suddenly smiles in a friendly way. "Scared?" he asks the man.
"I'm not scared, not of you jackals!" the man snarls. "Why should I be?"
"What are you talking about?" Tuzik says, playfully surprised. "What's wrong with you, my dear fellow?" he adds in a still friendlier tone, and even puts his arm around the man's shoulders.
Eddie-baby knows this dirty Asian Tyurenkan trick – pretend to be friendly, get the victim on your side, and when he's completely convinced of your good intentions, hit him all of a sudden with a knife, or a crowbar to the head, or a chain. Kolya the Gypsy, for example, wears a chain on his pants instead of a belt…
The man tries to break free, but Tuzik's no weakling, even when he's drunk. He pulls the man close and, leading him slightly away from the girls, whispers, "My friend! Let's be friends! Why should we fight, eh?…"
The man doesn't trust Tuzik, but he's alone in a crowd of drunken punks and he doesn't have much of a chance. The only possibility would be if five militia cars immediately came rushing in (just one wouldn't be enough), but that's pretty much out of the question. And so the man goes with Tuzik, who has his arm around him and is continuing to whisper something to him affectionately – Eddie can't hear what anymore, since they're now twenty or more meters away.
"Guys, let the girls go!" Tuzik's calm voice suddenly rings out.
It's a signal. Dymok whistles deafeningly and hurls himself under the legs of the blonde.
"Don't," she screams. "Boys! Don't!"
Kolya the Gypsy flings open her coat and grabs at her breasts. Tearing off the buttons, he rips open her blouse and with one movement pulls off her bra…
"O-o-oh!" the mob roars in delight at her now exposed breasts. Lower down, Dymok is at work under her skirt. You can hear material being ripped as the blonde wails, "Boys, dear boys, don't! Oh!…" She falls onto Dymok. Dymok always grabs girls by the twat, so that it's pointless for them to struggle. Kolya the Gypsy and Dymok are professionals.
The other girl is also being attacked, and the first thing they tear off is her watch. "Gold," rings out a satisfied voice. Dozens of hands grab at the two girls and rip off their clothes. Within a few minutes several minors are hanging on the fat ugly girl all at once. They removed her coat long ago, and tore the sleeves and the whole front of her blouse, so that her large breasts with their dark brown nipples are helplessly swinging from side to side. The girl is using her hands to defend the most important thing – her twat. She's forgotten about her breasts. Everything that's taken place so far is a lot like the "feeling up" that Eddie and his friends used to engage in at school (Eddie has outgrown that now, and the boys in his year have even become a little shy around the girls), although it's much more serious and rough.
To one side, closer to the trolley line, you can hear thuds and screams. Obviously Tuzik and the other kids are beating the man up.
"A-a-a-ah!" A piercing howl of pain suddenly rings out. And once more blows and swearing. "Take that, you whore! Take that! You wanted it?! Now you're going to get it! You wanted it?! How about this!"
"Are they using a knife on him, or what?" Eddie wonders, not understanding. All the older punks have disappeared somewhere. The only kids around Eddie now are younger punks. "Where did the others go?" Eddie wonders.
One of the younger punks suddenly hits the fat girl in the mouth with all his strength. "You bitch!" he screams. "She bit me!"
Blood is flowing from the fat girl's smashed lips and nose, and it gradually spatters her huge, ugly cabbagelike breasts.
The young kids have completely stripped the fat one. Only a few shreds of her dress are still hanging from her waist. Looking at her big belly, which she is still trying to hide with her hands, Eddie suddenly wants very much to grab it. He has seen that kind of belly, soft and protruding, so many times in his sleep. Right now is the most appropriate time to find out just what kind of belly they have anyway. "When if not now?" Eddie thinks. "Anyway, no one will ever find out. There are so many kids, they can't possibly arrest them all," Eddie convinces himself, still wavering. "No one will ever find out," he repeats cravenly to himself, and then finally making up his mind, he leaps at the girl.
The girl's belly turns out to be warm. The girl is no longer resisting. She has closed her eyes and is slowly sinking down. If it weren't for Timur holding her from behind, the girl would have tumbled onto the cold November asphalt long ago. The other members of the gang are grabbing her thighs, laughing as they squeeze and pinch them like pieces of meat and, stick their hands in her twat from time to time. Breathing heavily, Eddie too drops to his knees and, still holding the girl's belly with one hand, puts the other into her pubic hair, which is stiff like wire, and when one of the gang members takes his hand out of her twat, pinching her with all his might as he does so, which makes her moan in pain – "O-o-o-oh!" – Eddie sticks his own hand into that female orifice concealed by hair. It's wet and cold in the girl even though it's supposed to be warm. Eddie pulls back his hand and looks at it. There's mucus and blood on it.