Besa was a real tough guy. He was a year younger than me, but looked much older, because he already had a lot of white hairs. He wasn’t born in our area; he came from Siberia. His mother, Aunt Svetlana, was the leader of a small gang of robbers, with whom she carried out turne, literally ‘tours’, series of robberies carried out from town to town. They used to rob rich people – local politicians, but especially the so-called ‘hidden industrialists’, people involved in illegal production and trade, who had links with the managers of the big factories. The phenomenon of a woman leading a gang was quite common in Siberia: women with a criminal role are affectionately called ‘mama’, ‘mama cat’ or ‘mama thief’, and are always listened to; their opinion is considered to be a perfect solution, a kind of pure criminal wisdom.
Besa’s mother had been in prison several times, and he had been born in the special-regime women’s prison of Magadan, in Siberia. Born in jail, he had experienced freedom for the first time at the age of eight. His prison upbringing was very obvious, and had left an indelible mark: an immense anger, above all.
Besa had never known his father. His mother said she had spent one night, out of pity, with a man who had been condemned to death, after being moved by train to the prison of Kurgan. She was put in a special block, and as soon as she arrived in her cell she received a letter from the next celclass="underline" a young boy nicknamed ‘Besa’, which means ‘little devil’, asked her to spend the night with him. Out of compassion and a sort of criminal solidarity she agreed to the condemned man’s request, and after paying the guards she was taken to his cell. She became pregnant. A few months later she learned through the prisoners’ secret mail system that the biological father of the son she was carrying in her womb had been executed a week after their meeting. So she decided to give him his name. All she knew about the man was that he had been a killer of policemen, that he had been good-looking and that he’d had a lot of white hairs; and Besa must have inherited them, because, as his mother used to say, he was as close a likeness to his father as Adam was to God the creator.
Ever since I’d known him Besa had had an obsession. In the prison where he had grown up he had heard from another child the story of the Kremlin star, the one on top of the main tower, where the gigantic clock is. According to the story, the star weighed five hundred kilos and was made of solid gold, but had been covered with red paint out of prudence. Many similar stories circulate among the children of criminals, especially in the juvenile prisons: they always concern a fabulous treasure hidden in some well-known place in full view of everyone and yet very hard to steal; but if you succeed in stealing it, it will set you up for life. One such story concerns the diamonds that Tsarina Catherine II is said to have hidden in the Bridge of Hope in Moscow, together with the body of her housekeeper, whom she is supposed to have killed with her own hands for trying to steal them. Another concerns the golden armour of the knight Elya of Murom, which is reputed to be buried under the monument of Tsar Alexander III in a monastery near Moscow.
All these stories were told in order to pass the time and create a mystery, but the mystery was always connected with criminal activity, so no one could say when you got to the end of the story that it had been a waste of time. After two hours of intrigue among the bourgeoisie, of descriptions of life in the Tsar’s palace, of wars, heroes, knights, ghosts, mysterious thieves, and murders committed with sophisticated techniques, there was always a treasure to be stolen: a treasure that was just waiting for someone to go and get it.
After such a story, nine times out of ten the listeners would ask:
‘Well, since you know the secret, why don’t you make use of it? Why don’t you get your hands on that treasure?’
The most effective answer was usually:
‘I’m an honest criminal; all I ask is that you give me a little cigarette money for telling you this story.’
Everyone would give a contribution and then they would start planning how to recover the treasure by destroying the national monuments. Besa was no exception: he, too, had worked out a plan for getting the star down from the Kremlin tower. Periodically he would go back to the plan to improve on it a little: for example, at first he didn’t know you couldn’t just walk into the Kremlin, and when he did find this out (thanks to me), he decided to fake some guards’ identity papers, kidnap five of them on their way to work and then enter the Kremlin disguised as guards. Initially he thought of lifting the star down with a crane, which he intended to steal from a building site. Then he decided on a more risky course: he would saw it off manually, after first securing it with ropes, then drop it down to the ground (after all, we didn’t care about its condition – we were going to break it up into pieces afterwards anyway, to extract the gold), and finally pick it up and put it into a car to carry it out of the Kremlin. To prevent the star making too much noise when it hit the ground it would be necessary, according to Besa’s plan, to cover it with rags.
Besa never stopped planning this crime of the century, and we had the honour of being included in his plan as assistants. He talked about it seriously, and given the vagaries of his fiery personality none of us dared to contradict him.
Meanwhile we continued our humble criminal activities without carrying out any crimes of the century. For the moment we were happy to participate in some black marketeering and try to keep Besa in the creative phase of his plan, so that he never reached the decisive phase, let alone the executive one. But lately he had grown rather restive – I think because he was beginning to realize that we weren’t particularly interested in stealing the Kremlin star.
Outside the Blinnaya, our stomachs full, we decided to split up. Gagarin would drive around the bars with Grave, Cat and Gigit, talking to the criminals of the district, while Mel, Speechless, Besa and I would go and see an old friend of my father’s, Uncle Fedya, who owned a megadisco on the other side of town and knew everything about everybody, and could even recount events that hadn’t yet happened, using his criminal sensibility and his knowledge of human nature.
Uncle Fedya was what in the criminal community is called a ‘Saint’. This is a term of the highest respect. A Saint is a person who lives according to very strict rules of self-control and tries in every sphere of his life to be a perfect example of the criminal ideal. The Saint lives in isolation from everyone, like a kind of hermit, and like the old Authorities he possesses nothing of his own; even the clothes he wears are not his, but gifts from other criminals. But unlike the Authorities he has no real power over other criminals, simply living his life as an example to them.
The Saint sends all his earnings into prison. Often the administrator of the obshchak – the criminals’ common fund – finds it difficult to satisfy everyone, especially in large prisons, where there are more than thirty thousand people and the structure is divided into hundreds of blocks. And often the assistants cannot agree among themselves how to divide up the funds. At that point it is always the Saint who supports them, because with his earnings he can get round any kind of internal conflict.