Dozens of rats were wandering around the shed. Squeaking, long-tailed, and disgusting, they poked in the corners and scurried around some boards, pattered on the old suitcases and baby carriages belonging to the large Zolotarenko family, and jumped up onto the Zolotarenkos' coal pile. Eddie-baby felt that the whole horde of rats was quite capable of climbing up the barrels to his door, or of dropping down on him from the ceiling, which was full of chinks and did not at all inspire confidence, and he therefore decided to take drastic measures. Picking up his notebook of poems, Eddie started tearing out the blank pages, setting fire to them, and throwing them at the rats. The rats were in no hurry to get away, although it was obvious the fire did frighten them. They moved away deliberately, and not all at once. They merely gathered in the corners of the shed, as far as possible from Eddie and his burning missiles, and there in the corners they squeaked invisibly.
When the blank sheets finally came to an end, Eddie, after thinking it over for several seconds, decisively tore out the first sheet with a poem on it and lit it. The lines of "Natasha" curled and writhed in the fire: "In a white dress on a sunny day / You've come out to take a walk…"
"In a white dress," Eddie whispered bitterly, and hurled "Natasha" at the rats. "In a dirty dress… In a greasy dress… In a dress covered with lard…," he whispered maliciously. "In a Ukrainian peasant dress, in a dress covered with lard!" he said out loud, and then resolutely climbed off the door.
Standing in the corner for who the fuck knows how long, obviously from some previous holiday, was a Christmas tree, or rather the skeleton of one, with a few reddish-brown needles still attached to it here and there. Eddie-baby dragged the tree into the center of the shed and set fire to it, using one of his poems. The tree burst into flames, and for a brief instant the flames almost shot up to the ceiling of the shed.
"I'll burn up!" Eddie thought, but for some reason he remained wistfully calm. "So what the fuck if I do," he thought, "I'm already burned up anyway."
Frightened by the bright flames, the last rats withdrew into their holes, pulling their tails in behind them.
Eddie-baby sat by his improvised bonfire and passed what was left of the night, setting fire to whatever wood was in the shed. He sat and thought and waited for the dawn.
And finally the dawn arrived…
31
Swinging his arms as he walks and doing exercises in order to warm up, Eddie-baby moves in the direction of the trolley stop, in the direction of the "circle" line. From the circle, the trolley goes into the city. Eddie-baby is on his way to the train station. And from the station, he's going to Vladivostok, because here in Saltovka there's nothing left for him to do.
Only a few people are sitting at the trolley stop under the shelter, all hunched over with their noses wrapped in scarves as they finish their dreams through half-shut eyes. Even the earliest workers are not yet on their way to work, although Eddie knows that in half an hour the trolley will be crammed full. The holiday is over.
Only after he has taken a seat on the cold bench does Eddie realize that his friend and hetman Kostya is sitting on the same corner, hunched over like everybody else. And that he has a knapsack on his back.
Eddie-baby stands up and goes over to Kostya. Kostya's eyes are closed. It's possible he's asleep.
"Cat!" Eddie calls out.
Kostya shudders, but seeing Eddie, he smiles in wonder. "What are you doing here so early in the morning?" he asks, astonished.
"That's what I was going to ask you – what the fuck are you doing here so early?" Eddie says.
"I'm on my way to the station," Kostya says, becoming serious.
"That's where I'm going too!" Eddie exclaims. "I intend to get the fuck out of here and go to Vladivostok."
"Without taking anything?" Kostya asks in amazement. "Just as you are?"
"What do I need things for?" Eddie says sadly. "I can steal whatever I need," he adds, surprising himself. "Where are you going?" he asks Cat.
"To Novorossisk," the serious Cat answers. "Novorossisk is the biggest port on the Black Sea. I plan to buy some chewing gum and foreign cigarettes from the foreign sailors," he says. "You can get them for just kopecks there."
"How will you understand each other?" Eddie-baby asks, puzzled. "You don't know any foreign languages. How will you explain to them what you want?"
"It's easy," Kostya says. "Yura Gi-Gi wrote down in a notebook what I need to say and how to haggle with them. He's been to Novorossisk several times. It's warm there now, and the kids all wait until the sailors come ashore, and then they sneak up to them."
The trolley arrives with a ringing of bells, and the conductor jumps off to take a leak. Kostya and Eddie-baby, sitting as far as they can from the door, where it's warmest, continue their conversation.
"What made you decide to go all of a sudden?" Eddie asks. "And without even telling anybody. After all, I could have come with you."
"Well, why don't you come?" Kostya says. "What sort of business do you have in Vladivostok?"
"I don't have any fucking business there," Eddie says, making a clean breast of it. "I don't even know anybody there, not even one person. I just want to get away from Saltovka. I can't stay here any longer…" He turns away from Kostya and is gloomily silent for a while, and then he adds, "I've had a fight with Svetka. It's all over between us…"
Kostya remains silent for a while out of sympathy, and then he says, "Well then, come to Novorossisk with me. It'll be more fun together. And it's a lot warmer there than it is in Vladivostok. The Caucasus is right nearby. If we want, we can get there from Novorossisk. The only thing is, we don't have passports…"
32
An hour later they are sitting, or rather standing, between two passenger cars belonging to the Moscow-Tbilisi train, Kostya a little higher on the ladder that goes up to the roof, and Eddie a little lower down, almost next to the buffers. Kostya finally breaks down and tells Eddie-baby his story. It turns out that Cat isn't going to Novorossisk merely to buy gum and cigarettes.
"I'll kill him," Cat says. "Not now, but I'll kill him… He's not a true criminal; he's a bastard. Real gangsters don't act like that. The filthy bastard!" Kostya says. "I'll get him, even if it's the last thing I do, I'll get him…"
The gang leader Zhora punched Kostya in the mouth in front of all the other thieves and pickpockets. Eddie has seen Zhora and can easily imagine what an animal he is. The gang leader Zhora just got out of prison a little while ago after serving a long sentence, and now he's at large and greedily taking advantage of his freedom. He's a huge gorilla, and it was a low thing for him to punch Kostya for no reason at all except as a display of drunken bravado, since even though Kostya's broad-shouldered, he's still pretty small.
"I should have done it right then, right by the store, I should have cut him then," Kostya says gloomily from up on the ladder.
"Yes…," Eddie says, at a loss for words. "But didn't he serve time for armed robbery?"
"He did," Kostya reluctantly confirms, "but he's still not a true gangster. A true criminal would never raise his hand against a minor, against a brother thief," Kostya says.
But he's not as confident now as he used to be when he extolled the virtues of serious criminals to Eddie. In Kostya's descriptions of them, they had seemed elegant, generous, and heroic. But now it turns out that they're worse even than the petty thieves that populate Saltovka's criminal world. Eddie isn't at all sure how he would act in Kostya's place. Would he kill Zhora?