I don’t know if he did avenge himself, but he was constantly killing policemen. He had a huge collection of badges of the police officers and members of the security forces he had killed during his career. He kept them on a large dresser in the red corner of his house, under the icons, where there was also a photograph of his family with a candle always burning in front of it.
I saw the collection with my own eyes. It was staggering. Dozens of badges of all periods, from the Fifties to the mid-Eighties – some blood-stained, others with bullet-holes in them. They were all there: policemen from the forces of towns all over Russia, members of special units formed to combat organized crime, KGB agents, prison guards, agents of the Public Prosecutor’s office.
Plum said there were more than twelve thousand of them, but that he hadn’t been able to recover the badges in every case. He remembered everything about each man with total precision: how and when he’d killed him. As I gazed at them, he kept repeating to me:
‘Take a good look at them, son, these murderers’ faces… Human tears never fall on the ground: the Lord catches them first.’
He said he had told his daughters to send those badges after his death to the Ministry of the Interior in Moscow, accompanied by a letter which he had been writing and rewriting all his life.
He showed me the letter. It wasn’t so much a letter as an entire notebook in which he explained almost everything: the story of his life, the reasons for his anger, his view of the world. At the end he revealed the places where he had hidden the bodies of some policemen, and wrote that he was performing a generous act, because this would make it possible for the dead to have their graves, and even though many years had passed their families would know where to go and mourn them, whereas he had not been given the chance to weep on the graves of his father, his mother and his sister.
One section of that notebook contained his poems, which were very simple, naive, even coarse, in a sense, if you didn’t consider the story that lay behind them. I remember one addressed to his little sister Lesya, perhaps the longest of all. He called her ‘innocent angel of Our sweet Lord’, and said that she smiled as ‘the sky smiles after the rain’, that her hair ‘shone like the sun’ and had the colour of ‘a field of wheat that asks to be harvested’. He told her in simple and affectionate words, with no attempt at rhyme, how much he loved her; and he asked her to forgive him for not being able to hold out when the policemen were breaking his fingers, because he was ‘small, only a child who was afraid of pain, like all children’. He told her that their mother’s action, in dashing her head against the wall, had been ‘the generous gesture of an affectionate mother who is driven to desperation; I know that you understand her and that now the two of you are together in Heaven with Our Lord’.
You could tell from the poem how simple and in many respects primitive, and yet how beautiful and generous Plum’s soul was.
Now that he was old and his wife was dead, Plum was lonely. He always sought the company of the others in the bar, telling them stories about his life and showing them the life-size portrait of his family that he kept there.
I enjoyed talking to him; he was always ready to share his wisdom and teach me something.
It was thanks to him that I had learned to fire a pistol properly; my father, my uncle and my grandfather had taught me before, but I was too weak, and my hands were small and delicate, so when I fired I couldn’t control the weapon very well – I gripped it too tightly. He took me down to the river, where you could shoot freely into the water without having to worry about hurting anyone, and said to me:
‘Relax your hand, lad.’
We used the Tokarev 7.62, a quite large and powerful but well-balanced gun which didn’t have much kick in the hand. Later he also taught me to shoot with the two-handed Macedonian method, so called because the ancient Macedonians fought with a sword in each hand.
So I often went to see him. Apart from anything else, one of his granddaughters was a good friend of mine, and made the best apple cakes in the whole town.
When we reached Plum’s bar our friends hadn’t arrived yet. He was at his table, as usual; he was having tea with cake and reading a book of poems. As soon as he saw me he put it down, came to meet me and gave me a hug:
‘How are you, son? Have you caught him yet?’
He knew everything already, and I was relieved about that: at least I wouldn’t have to retell that story, which I found very painful to put into words.
I told him we were still looking for the culprit, and he immediately offered me help, money and weapons.
I replied that we had already collected more than enough money, and probably more than enough guns. But, as they say in Siberia, ‘so as not to offend the deaf old tiger, you must make a bit of noise when you walk’, so I added:
‘However, if you spread the word round among your customers and keep your ears open, it might be useful. And some of your granddaughter’s cake with a cup of tea would be a great comfort.’
Soon afterwards we were all sitting round a table eating cake and drinking tea with lemon, which was just what we needed after Uncle Fedya’s chifir. And that cake – as soon as you bit it, it melted in your mouth.
We discussed the advice that Uncle Fedya had given us. We all agreed with his words, and we realized that if we’d gone to see him earlier we would have saved ourselves a lot of time.
In the meantime the others arrived: they seemed tired – exhausted, in fact; Grave seemed even deader than usual, and when I looked at him I noticed that he had a faint bruise under his left eye. They were clearly excited.
‘What’s happened?’ I asked.
Gagarin told us that while they were doing the rounds of the bars they had walked straight into the louts Mino had told us about. There were seven of them, in a black four-by-four with a Ukrainian numberplate. ‘We asked them if we could speak to them,’ he said, ‘but instead of replying they started shooting at us. And one them hit Grave in the face with a Japanese thing.’
‘With a what?’ asked Besa.
‘A kind of combat stick. You know, those things you see in martial arts films, the ones they whirl around really fast in their hands… When they drove off we tried to stop them – we fired at their car – but it was no good…’
‘I hit one of them in the head, though, I could swear it,’ added Gigit.
‘The Wheel arrived with the car, but it was too late – the four-by-four had already gone,’ said Gagarin. ‘So I stopped at a phone box and called home to ask our elders to have road-blocks set up in all districts, to stop the car before it leaves town.’
As I looked at Grave’s sad face, battered by a weapon straight out of a Japanese–American action film, and listened to that tale of gun fights and car chases, for a moment I thought we were all going mad. Then suddenly I felt an urge to do something, to move, to act. But, as my late uncle used to say, ‘the mother cat doesn’t give birth when she wants to, but when her time comes’.
I told Gagarin what Uncle Fedya had said.
‘When I was talking to those two I did have my suspicions,’ he said. ‘They seemed to be hiding something. They wanted to get rid of us; they needed to gain time so they could do something… But what?’