This time I barely even noticed the stations, no matter how superbly they were decorated. I was utterly miserable. My parents had believed in Misha Dementyev and they had sent me to him, even though it had cost them their lives. But the moment I had walked into his office, he had thought only of saving his own skin. It seemed to me that there was nobody in the world I could trust. Even Dima, the boy I had met when I got off the train, had only been interested in robbing me.
But perhaps Dima was the answer.
The more I thought about it, the more I decided he might not be all bad. Certainly, when we had met, he had been pleasant enough, smiling and friendly, even if he was simply setting me up for his friends. But maybe I was partly to blame for what had happened, coming off the train and flashing my money around all the different stalls. Dima was living on the street. He had to survive. I’d made myself an obvious target and he’d done what he had to.
At the same time, I remembered what he’d said to me. It’s good to have a friend. We all need friends. Could it be possible that he actually meant it? He was, after all, only a few years older than me and we were both in the same situation. Part of me knew that I was fooling myself. Dima was probably miles away by now, laughing at me for being such a fool. But at the end of the day, he was the only person in the city I actually knew. If I could find him again, perhaps I could persuade him to help me.
And there was something else. I still had my mother’s jewels.
Half an hour later, I climbed up to street level and found myself back where I had begun. The women were still there at their food stalls but they almost seemed to be taunting me. Before, they had been welcoming. Now, all their pies and ice creams were beyond my reach. I found a bench and sat down, watching the crowds around me. Stations are strange places. When you pass through them, travelling somewhere, you barely notice them. They simply help you on your way. But stand outside with nowhere to go and they make you feel worthless. You should not be here, they shout at you. If you are not a passenger, you do not belong here.
To start with, I did nothing at all. I just sat there, staring at the traffic, letting people stream past me on all sides. The children I had seen were still dotted around and I wondered what they would do with themselves when night fell. That could only be a few hours away. The light was barely changing, the sun trapped behind unbroken cloud, but there were already commuters arriving at the station, on their way home. There was no sign of Dima. In the end, I went over to a couple of boys, the ten-year-olds that I had seen before.
“Excuse me,” I said.
Two pairs of very sly and malevolent eyes turned on me. One of the children had snot running out of his nose. Both of them looked worn out, unhealthy.
“I’m looking for someone I was talking to earlier,” I went on. “He was wearing a black leather jacket. His name is Dima.”
The boys glanced at each other. “You got any money?” one of them asked.
“No.”
“Then get lost!” Those weren’t his actual words. This little boy, whose voice hadn’t even broken, used the filthiest language I’d ever heard. I saw that he had terrible teeth with gaps where half of them had fallen out. His friend hissed at me like an animal and at that moment the two of them weren’t children at all. They were like horrible old men, not even human. I was glad to leave them on their own.
I tried to ask some of the other street kids the same question but as I approached them, they moved away. It was as if they all knew that I was from out of town, that I wasn’t one of them, and for that reason they would have nothing to do with me. And now the light really was beginning to disappear. I was starting to feel the threat of nightfall and knew that I couldn’t stay here for much longer. I would have to find a doorway – or perhaps I could sleep in one of the subways beneath the streets. I had four kopecks left in my pocket. Barely enough for a cup of hot tea.
And then, quite unexpectedly, I saw him. Dima – with his oversized leather jacket and his half-handsome, half-ugly face – had turned the corner, smoking a cigarette, flicking away the match. There was another boy with him and I recognized him too. He had been one of the two who had robbed me. Dima said something and they laughed. It looked as if they were heading for the Metro, presumably on their way home.
I didn’t hesitate. It was now or never. I crossed the concourse in front of the station and stood in their path.
Dima saw me first and stopped with the cigarette halfway to his lips. I had taken him by surprise and he thought I was going to make trouble. I could see it at once. He was tense, wary. But I was completely relaxed. I’d already worked it out. He’d tricked me. He’d robbed me. But I had to treat him as my friend.
“Hi, Dima.” I greeted him as if the three of us had arranged to meet here for coffee.
He smiled a little but he was still suspicious. And there was something else. I wasn’t quite sure what it was but he was looking at me almost as if he had expected me to come back, as if there was something he knew that I didn’t. “Soldier!” he exclaimed. “How are you doing? What happened to your hair?”
“I got it cut.”
“Did you meet your friend?”
“No. He wasn’t there. It seems he’s left Moscow.”
“That’s too bad.”
I nodded. “In fact, I’ve got a real problem. He was going to put me up but now I don’t have anywhere to go.”
I was hoping he might offer to help. That was the idea, anyway. Why not? He was seventy rubles richer than me. Thanks to him, I had nothing. He could at least have offered me a bed for the night. But he didn’t speak and I realized I was wasting my time. He was street-hardened, the sort of person who would have never helped anyone in his life. His friend muttered something and pushed past me, disappearing into the Metro, but I stood my ground. “Can you help me?” I said. “I just need somewhere to stay for a few nights.” And then – my last chance. “I can pay you.”
“You’ve got money?” That surprised him. He thought he’d taken it all already.
“Not any more,” I said. I shrugged as if to let him know that it didn’t matter, that I’d already forgotten about it. “But I’ve got this.” I went on. I took out the black velvet bag that my mother had given me and that I’d used to trick Dementyev. I opened it and poured the contents – the necklace, the ring and the earrings – into my hand. “There must be a pawnshop somewhere. I’ll sell them and then I can pay you for a room.”
Dima examined the jewellery, the brightly coloured stones in their silver and gold settings, and I could already see the light stirring in his eyes as he made the calculations. How much were they worth and how was he going to separate them from me? He dropped his cigarette and reached out, picking up one of the earrings. He let it hang from his finger and thumb. “This won’t get you much,” he said. “It’s cheap.”
Right then, I thought of my mother and I could feel the anger rising in my blood. I wanted to punch him but still I forced myself to stay calm. “I was told they were valuable,” I said. “That’s gold. And those stones are emeralds. Take me to a pawnshop and we can find out.”
“I don’t know…” He was pretending otherwise but he knew that the jewels were worth more than the money he had already stolen. “Give me the stuff and I’ll take it to a pawnbroker for you. But I don’t think you’ll get more than five rubles.”
He’d get fifty. I’d get five … if I was lucky. I could see how his mind worked. I held out my hand and, reluctantly, he gave me the earring back. “I can find a pawnbroker on my own,” I said.
“There’s no need to be like that, soldier! I’m only trying to help.” He gave me a crooked smile, made all the more crooked by his broken nose. “Listen, I’ve got a room and you’re welcome to stay with me. You know … we’re all friends, here in Moscow, right? But you’ll have to pay rent.”
“How much rent?”
“Two rubles a week.”
I pretended to consider. “I’ll have to see it first.”
&n
bsp; “Whatever you say. We can go there now if you like.”
“Sure. Why not?”
He took me back down into the Metro. He even paid my fare again. I knew I was taking a risk. He could lead me to some faraway corner of the city, take me into an alleyway, put a knife into me and steal the jewels. But I had a feeling that wasn’t the way he worked. Dima was a hustler, a thief – but at the end of the day, he just didn’t have the look of someone who was ready to kill. He would get the jewellery in the end anyway. I would pay it to him as rent or he would steal it from me while I slept. My plan was simply to make myself useful to him, to become part of his gang. If I could do this quickly enough, he might let me stay with him, even when I had nothing more to give. That was my hope.
He took me to a place just off Tverskaya Street, one of the main thoroughfares in Moscow, which leads all the way down to the Kremlin and Red Square. Today, there is a hotel on that same corner – the nine-storey Marriott Grand, where American tourists stay in total luxury. But when I came there, following Dima and still wondering if I wasn’t making another bad mistake, it was very different. Moscow has changed so much, so quickly. It was another world back then.
Dima lived in what had once been a block of flats but which had long been abandoned and left to rot. All the colour had faded from the brickwork, which was damp and mouldy, and covered with graffiti – not artwork but political slogans, swear words, and the names of city football teams. The windows were so dirty that they looked more like rusting metal than glass. The building rose up twelve floors, three more than the hotel that would one day replace it, and whole thing seemed to be sagging in on itself, hardly bothering to stay upright. It was surrounded by other blocks that were similar … they looked like old men standing out in the cold, having a last cigarette together before they died. The streets here were very narrow; more like alleyways, twisting together in the darkness, covered with rubbish and mud. The block of flats had shops on the ground floor – an empty grocery store, a chemist and a massage parlour – but the further up you went, the more desolate it became. It had no lifts, of course. Just a concrete staircase that had been used as a toilet so many times that it stank. By the time you got to the top, there was no electricity, no proper heating. The only water came dribbling, cold, out of the taps.
We climbed up together. I noticed that Dima was wheezing when we got to the top and I wondered if he was ill – although it could just have been all those cigarettes. On the way, we passed a couple of people, a man and a woman, lying on top of each other, unconscious. I couldn’t even be sure they were actually alive. Dima just stepped over them and I did the same, wondering what I was getting myself into. My village had been a place of poverty and hardship but it was somehow more shocking here, in the middle of a city.
Dima’s room was on the eighth floor. Since there was no lighting, he had taken out a torch and used it to find the way. We went down a corridor that was missing its carpet with gaping holes showing the pipework and wiring. There were doors on either side, most of them locked, one or two reinforced with metal plating. Somewhere, I could hear a baby crying. A man shouted out a swear word. Another laughed. The sounds that echoed around me only added to the nightmare, the sense that I was being sucked into a dark and alien world.
“This is me,” Dima said.
We’d come to a door marked with a number 83. Somebody had added DIMA’S PLACE in bright red letters but the paint hadn’t been allowed to dry and it had trickled down like blood. Perhaps the effect was deliberate. There was a hole where the lock should have been but Dima used a padlock and a chain to keep the place secure. At the moment, it was hanging open. His friends had arrived ahead of us.
“Welcome home!” he said to me. “This is my place. Come in and meet my mates…”
He pushed the door open. We went in.
The flat was tiny. Most of it was in a single room, which he shared with the two boys who had robbed me. On the floor were three mattresses and some filthy pillows on a carpet which was mouldy and colourless. The place was lit by candles and my first thought was that if one of them toppled over in the night, we would all burn to death. A single table and four chairs stood on one side. Otherwise there was no furniture of any description. A few bits of the kitchen were still in place but I could tell at a glance that the sink hadn’t been used for years and without electricity the fridge was no more than an oversized cupboard. The smell in the room was unpleasant; a mixture of human sweat, unwashed clothes, dirt and decay.
Dima waved me over to the table. “This is Yasha,” he announced. “He’s going to be staying with us for a while.” His two friends were already sitting there playing Snap with a deck that was so worn that the cards hung limp in their hands. They didn’t look pleased as I joined them. “He’s going to pay,” Dima added. “Two rubles a week.”
Dima opened the fridge and took out a bottle of vodka and some black bread. He found some dirty glasses in the sink and poured drinks for us all. He lit a cigarette for himself, then offered me one, which I accepted gratefully. It wasn’t just that I wanted to smoke. It was a gesture of friendship and that was what I most needed.
Dima introduced the two boys. “This is Roman. That’s Grigory.” Roman was tall and thin. He looked as if he had been deliberately stretched. Grigory was round-faced, pock-marked with oily, black hair. All three of them looked not just adult but old, as if they had forgotten their true age … which was about seventeen. Roman collected the cards and put them away. It was obvious who was the leader here. So long as Dima said I could stay, they weren’t going to argue.
“Tell us about yourself, soldier,” Dima said. “I’d like to know what brought you to Moscow.” He winked at me. “And I’d particularly like to know why the police are so interested in you.”
“What?”
So I’d been right. When I’d got back to the station I’d thought the children had been behaving strangely and now I knew why. The police had been there, looking for me.
“That’s right. Tell him, Grig.” Grigory said nothing so Dima went on. “They’re looking for someone new to town. Someone who might have come into Kazansky Station, dressed up like a Young Pioneer. They’ve been asking everyone.” He tapped ash. “They’re offering a reward for information.”
My heart sank. I wondered if I had walked into another trap. Had Dima invited me here to have me arrested? But there was no sound coming from outside; no footsteps in the corridor, no sirens in the street.
“Don’t worry, soldier! No one’s going to turn you in. Not even for the money. They never pay up anyway.
“I hate the p–p–p–police.” Roman had a stutter. I watched his face contort as he tried to spit out the last word.
“What do they want with you?” Grigory asked. He sounded hostile. Maybe he was afraid that I was bringing more trouble into his life. He probably had enough already.
I wasn’t sure how to answer. I didn’t want to lie but I was afraid of telling the truth. In the end, I kept it as short as I could. “They killed my parents,” I said. “My dad knew something he wasn’t meant to know. They wanted to kill me too. I escaped.”
“What about your friend at the university?” Dima asked.
“He wasn’t my friend.” I was on safer ground here. I told them everything that had happened in Misha Dementyev’s office. When I described how I had beaten Dementyev off using the arm of the skeleton, Dima laughed out loud. “I wish I’d seen that,” he said. “You certainly gave him the elbow!”
It was a weak joke but we all laughed. Dima refilled our glasses and once again we drank the Russian way, throwing the liquid back in a single gulp. It didn’t take us long to finish the bottle and about an hour later we all went to bed … if you can call bed a square of carpet with a pile of old clothes as a pillow. I was just glad to have a roof over my head and, helped by the vodka, I was asleep almost at once.
The next morning, Dima took me to the pawnbroker he had mentioned. It was a tiny shop with a cracked f
ront window and an old, half-shaven man sitting behind a counter that was stacked with watches and jewellery. I handed across my mother’s earrings and stood there, watching him examine them briefly through an eyeglass which he screwed into his face as if it was part of him. Right then, a little part of me died. It had been a pawnbroker that the hero had murdered in Crime and Punishment, the book I had been forced to read at school. I could almost have done the same.
He wanted to give me eight rubles for the earrings but Dima talked him up to twelve. The two of them knew each other well.
“You’re a crook, Reznik,” Dima scowled.
“And you’re a thief, Dima,” Reznik replied.
“One day someone will stick a knife in you.”
“I don’t mind. So long as they buy it from me first.”
Dima took the money and we went back out into the sunlight. He gave me three rubles, keeping nine for himself, and when I looked down reproachfully at the crumpled notes he clapped me on the back. “That’s three weeks’ rent, soldier,” he said.
“What about the other three rubles?”
“That’s my commission. If you hadn’t had me with you, that old crook would have ripped you off.”
I’d been ripped off anyway but I didn’t complain. Dima had said I could stay with him for three weeks. It was exactly what I wanted to hear.
“Let’s get some breakfast!” he said.
We ate breakfast in the smallest, grimiest restaurant it would be possible to imagine. Somehow, I ended up paying for that too.
So began my stay in Moscow. I adapted very quickly to the way of life. The truth is that nobody did anything very much. They stole, they ate, they survived. I spent long hours outside the station with Dima, Roman and Grigory. The two boys didn’t warm to me but gradually they began to accept that I was there. At the same time, Dima had made me his special project. I wondered if he might have had a younger brother at some time. He never spoke about his past life but that was how he treated me. When I write about him now, I still see him with the sleeves of his precious leather jacket falling over his hands, his smile, the way he swaggered along the street, and I wonder if he is alive or dead. Dead most probably. Homeless kids in Moscow never survived long.

Russian Roulette: The Story of an Assassin by Anthony Horowitz / Young Adult / Actions & Adventure have rating

What was I expecting the university to be like? In my mind, I had seen a single building like my school, only bigger. But instead, when I came out of the station, I found a city within the city, an entire neighbourhood devoted to learning. It was much more spacious and elegant than anything I had so far seen of Moscow. There were boulevards and parks, special buses to carry the students in and out, lawns and fountains, and not one building but dozens of them, evenly spaced, each one in its own domain. It was all dominated by one of Stalin’s skyscrapers, and as I stood in front of it I saw how it had been designed to make you feel tiny, to remind you of the power and the majesty of the state. Standing in front of the steps that led to the front doors – hidden behind a row of columns – I felt like the world’s worst sinner about to enter a church. But at the same time, the building had a magnetic attraction. I had no idea where the biology department was. But this was the heart of the university. I would find Misha Dementyev here. I climbed the steps and went in.
The inside of the building didn’t seem to fit what I had seen outside. It was like stepping into a submarine or a ship with no windows, no views. The ceilings were low. It was too warm. Corridors led to more corridors. Doors opened onto other doors. Staircases sprouted in every direction. Students marched past me on all sides, carrying their books and their backpacks, and I forced myself to keep moving, knowing that if I stopped and looked lost it would be a sure way to get noticed. It seemed to me that if there was an administrative area, an office with the names of all the people working at the university, it would be somewhere close to the entrance. Surely the university wouldn’t want casual visitors to plunge too far into the building or to take one of the lifts up to the fortieth or fiftieth floor? I tried a door. It was locked. The next one opened into a toilet. Next to it there was a bare room, occupied by a cleaner with a mop and a cigarette.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“The administration office.”
She looked at me balefully. “That way. On the left. Room 1117.”
The corridor went on for about a hundred metres but the door marked 1117 was only halfway down. I knocked and went in.
There were two more women sitting at desks which were far too small for the typewriters, piles of paper, files and ashtrays that covered them. One of the women was plugged into an old-fashioned telephone system, the sort with wires looping everywhere, but she glanced up as I came in.
“Yes?” she demanded.
“Can you help me?” I asked. “I’m looking for someone.”
“You need the student office. That’s room 1301.”
“I’m not looking for a student. I need to speak to a professor. His name is Misha Dementyev.”
“Room 2425 – the twenty-fourth floor. Take the lift at the end of the corridor.”
I felt a surge of relief. He was here! He was in his office! At that moment, I saw the end of my journey and the start of a new life. This man had known my parents. Now he would help me.
I took the lift to the twenty-fourth floor, sharing it with different groups of students who all looked purposefully grubby and dishevelled. I had been in a lift before and this old-fashioned steel box, which shuddered and stopped at least a dozen times, had none of the wonders of the escalator on the Metro. Finally I arrived at the floor I wanted. I stepped out and followed a cream-coloured corridor that, like the ground floor, had no windows. At least the offices were clearly labelled and I found the one I wanted right at the corner. The door was open as I approached and I heard a man speaking on the telephone.
“Yes, of course, Mr Sharkovsky,” he was saying. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
I knocked on the door.
“Come in!”
I entered a small, cluttered room with a single, square window looking out over the main avenue and the steps that had first brought me into the building. There must have been five or six hundred books there, not just lined up along the shelves but stacked up on the floor and every available surface. They were fighting for space with a whole range of laboratory equipment, different-sized flasks, two microscopes, scales, Bunsen burners, and boxes that looked like miniature ovens or fridges. Most unnerving of all, a complete human skeleton stood in a frame in one corner as if it were here to guard all this paraphernalia while its owner was away.
The man was sitting at his desk. He had just put down the phone as I came in. My first impression was that he was about the same age as my father, with thick black hair that only emphasized the round bald patch in the middle of his head. The skin here was stretched tight and polished, reflecting the ceiling light. He had a heavy beard and moustache, and as he examined me from behind a pair of glasses, I saw small, anxious eyes blinking at me as if he had never seen a boy before – or had certainly never allowed one into his office.
Actually, I was wrong about this. He was nervous because he knew who I was. He spoke my name immediately. “Yasha?”
“Are you Mr Dementyev?” I asked.
“Professor Dementyev,” he replied. “Please, come in. Close the door. Does anyone know you’re here?”
“I asked in the administration room downstairs,” I said.
“You spoke to Anna?” I had no idea what the woman’s name was. He didn’t let me reply. “That’s a great pity. It would have been much better if you had telephoned me before you came. How did you get here?”
“I came by train. My parents—”
“I know what has happened in Estrov.” He was agitated. Suddenly there were beads of sweat on the crown of his head. I could see them glistening. “You cannot stay here, Yasha,” he said. “It’s too dangerous.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “My parents said you’d look after me!”
“And I will! Of course I will!” He tried to smile at me but he was full of nervous energy and he was allowing his different thought processes to tumble over each other. “Sit down, Yasha, please!” He pointed to a chair. “I’m sorry but you’ve taken me completely by surprise. Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? Can I get you something?” Before I could answer, he snatched up the telephone again. “There’s somebody I know,” he explained to me. “He’s a friend. He can help you. I’m going to ask him to come.”
He dialled a number and as I sat down facing him, uncomfortably close to the skeleton, he spoke quickly into the receiver.
“It’s Dementyev. The boy is here. Yes … here at the university.” He paused while the person at the other end spoke to him. “We haven’t had a chance to speak yet. I thought I should let you know at once.” He was answering a question I hadn’t heard. “He seems all right. Unharmed, yes. We’ll wait for you here.”
He put the phone down and it seemed to me that he was suddenly less agitated than he had been when I had arrived – as if he had done what was expected of him. For some reason, I was feeling uneasy. By the look of it, Professor Dementyev wasn’t pleased to see me. I was a danger to him. This was my parents’ closest friend but I was beginning to wonder how much that friendship was worth.
“How did you know who I was?” I asked.
“I’ve been expecting you, ever since I heard about what happened. And I recognized you, Yasha. You look very much like your mother. I saw the two of you together a few times when you were very young. You won’t remember me. It was before your parents left Moscow.”
“Why did they leave? What happened? You worked with them.”
“I worked with your father. Yes.”
“Do you know that he’s dead?”
“I didn’t know for certain. I’m sorry to hear it. He and I were friends.”
“So tell me—”
“Are you sure I can’t get you something?”
I had eaten and drunk everything I needed at Kazansky Station. What I really wanted was to be away from here. I have to say that I was disappointed by Misha Dementyev. I’m not sure what I’d been expecting, but maybe he could have been more affectionate, like a long-lost uncle or something? He hadn’t even come ou
t from behind his desk.
“What happened?” I asked again. “Why was my father sent to work in Estrov?”
“I can’t go through all that now.” He was flustered again. “Later…”
“Please, Professor Dementyev!”
“All right. All right.” He looked at me as if he was wondering if he could trust me. Then he began. “Your father was a genius. He and I worked here together in this department. We were young students; idealists, excited. We were researching endospores … and one in particular. Anthrax. I don’t suppose you know very much about that.”
“I know about anthrax,” I said.
“We thought we could change the world … your father especially. He was looking at ways to prevent the infection of sheep and cattle. But there was an accident. Working in the laboratory together, we created a form of anthrax that was much faster and deadlier than anything anyone had ever known. It had no cure. Antibiotics were useless against it.”
“It was a weapon?”
“That wasn’t our intention. That wasn’t what we wanted. But – yes. It was the perfect biological weapon. And of course the government found out about it. Everything that happens in this place they know about. It was true then. It’s true now. They heard about our work here and they came to us and ordered us to develop it for military use.” Dementyev took out a handkerchief and used it to polish the lenses of his glasses. He put them back on. “Your father refused. It was the last thing he wanted. So they started to put the pressure on. They threatened him. And that was when he did something incredibly brave … or incredibly stupid. He went to a journalist and tried to get the story into the newspapers.
“He was arrested at once. I was here, in the laboratory, when they marched him away. They arrested your mother too.”
“How old was I?” I asked.
“You were two. And – I’m sorry, Yasha – they used you to get at your parents. That was how they worked. It was very simple. If your parents didn’t do what they were told, they would never see you again. What choice did they have? They were sent to Estrov, to work in the factory. They were forced to produce the new anthrax. That was the deal. Stay silent. And live.”
So everything – my parents’ life or their non-life as prisoners in a remote village, the little house, the boredom and the poverty – had been for me. I wasn’t sure how that made me feel. Was I to blame for everything that had happened? Was I the one who had destroyed their lives?
“Yasha…” Dementyev stood up and came over to me. He was much taller than I had expected now that he was on his feet. He loomed over me. “Were you inoculated?” he asked.
I nodded. “My parents were shot at when they escaped. But they stole a syringe. They injected me.”
“I knew your father had been working on an antidote. Thank God! But I guessed it the moment I saw you. Otherwise you would have been dead a long time ago.”
“My best friend died,” I said.
“I’m so sorry. Anton and Eva – your parents – were my friends too.”
We fell silent. He was still standing there, one hand on the back of my chair.
“What will happen to me?” I asked.
“You don’t need to worry any more, Yasha. You’ll be well looked after.”
“Who was that you called?”
“It was a friend. Someone we can trust. He’ll be here very soon.”
There was something wrong. Things that he’d told me just didn’t add up. I was about to speak when I heard the sound of sirens, police cars approaching, still far away but drawing nearer. And I knew instantly that there was no friend, that Dementyev had called them. It wasn’t detective work. I could have asked him why my parents had been sent to live in Estrov while he had been allowed to stay here. I could have played back the conversation he’d had on the telephone, how he had referred to me simply as “the boy”. Not Yasha. Not Anton’s son. The people at the other end knew who I was because they’d been expecting me to show up, waiting for me. I could have worked it out but I didn’t need to. I saw it all in his eyes.
“Why?” I asked.
He didn’t even try to deny it. “I’m sorry, Yasha,” he said. “But nobody can know. We have to keep it secret.”
We. The factory managers. The helicopter pilots. The militia. The government. And Dementyev. They were all in it together.
I scrabbled to my feet – or tried to. But Dementyev was ahead of me. He pounced down, his hands on my shoulders, using his weight to pin me to the seat. For a moment his face was close to mine, the eyes staring at me through the thick lenses.
“There’s nowhere you can go!” he hissed. “I promise you … they won’t treat you badly.”
“They’ll kill me!” I shouted back. “They killed everyone!”
“I’ll talk to them. They’ll take you somewhere safe…”
Yes. I saw it already. A prison or a mental asylum, somewhere I’d never be seen again.
I couldn’t move. Dementyev was too strong for me. And the police cars were getting closer. We were twenty-four floors up but I could hear the sirens cutting through the air. And then I had an idea. I forced myself to relax.
“You can’t do this!” I exclaimed. “My father gave me something for you. He said it was very valuable. He said if I gave it to you, you’d have to help me.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. It’s in a bag. It’s in my pocket!”
“Show me.”
He let go of one of my shoulders … but only one of them. I still couldn’t wrench myself free. I was sitting down. He was standing over me and he was twice my size.
“Take it out,” he said.
The police must have turned into the main university drive. I heard car doors slam shut.
Using my one free arm, I drew out the black bag that my mother had given me. At least Dima and his friends hadn’t stolen it when they took my money. I placed it on the desk. And it worked just as I’d hoped. Dementyev still didn’t let go of me but his grip loosened as he reached out and opened the bag. I saw his face change as he tipped out the contents.
“What…?” he began.
I jerked myself free, throwing the chair backwards. As it toppled over, I managed to get to my feet. Dementyev swung round but he was too late to stop me lashing out with my fist. I knocked the glasses off his face. He fell back against the desk but then recovered and seized hold of me again. I needed a weapon and there was only one that I could see. I reached out and grabbed the arm of the skeleton, wrenching it free from the shoulder. The hand and the wrist dangled down but I hung onto the upper bone – the humerus – and used it as a club, smashing it against Dementyev’s head again and again until, with a howl, he fell back. I twisted away. Dementyev had crumpled over the desk. There was blood streaming down his face.
“It’s too late…” he stammered. “You won’t get away.”
I snatched back the jewellery and tumbled out of the office. There was nobody outside. Surely someone must have heard what had happened? I didn’t want to know. I ran to the lift. It was already on the way up and it took me a few seconds to work out that the police were almost certainly inside, travelling towards me. And I might have been caught standing there, waiting for them! I continued down the corridor and found a fire exit – leading to twenty-four flights of stairs. I didn’t stop until I reached the bottom and it was only then that I realized I was still carrying the skeleton’s arm. I found a dustbin, picked up some loose papers and dropped the arm in.
As I walked down the steps at the front door, I saw three police cars parked there with their lights flashing. I pretended to be immersed in the papers I had taken. If there were any policemen outside, I would look like one more of the countless students coming in and out.
But nobody stopped me. I hurried back to the station with just one thought in my head. I was alone in Moscow with no money.
ТВЕРСКАЯ
TVERSKAYA
I went back to Kazansky Station.
&nb
sp; In a way, it was a mad decision. The police knew I was in Moscow and they would certainly be watching all the major stations – just as they had in Rosna and Kirsk. But I wasn’t leaving. The truth was that in the whole of Russia, I had nowhere to go and no one to look after me. I couldn’t go back to Estrov, obviously, and although I remembered my mother once telling me that she had relations in a city called Kazan, I had no idea where it was or how to get there.
No, it was much better to stay in Moscow, but first of all I would need to change my appearance. That was easy enough. I stripped off my Pioneer uniform and dumped it in a bin. Then I got my hair cut short. Although the bulk of my money had gone, I had managed to find eighteen kopecks scattered through my pockets and I used nine of them at a barber’s shop, a dank little place in a backstreet with old hair strewn over the floor. As I stepped out again, feeling the unfamiliar cool of the breeze on my head and the back of my neck, a police car rushed past – but I wasn’t worried. Even today, I am aware of how little you need to change to lose yourself in a city. A haircut, different clothes, perhaps a pair of sunglasses … it is enough.
I still had enough kopecks for the return journey and as I sat once again in the Metro, I tried to work out some sort of plan. The most immediate problem was accommodation. Where would I sleep when night came? If I stayed out on the street, I would be at my most vulnerable. And then there was the question of food. Without money, I couldn’t eat. Of course, I could steal but the one thing I most dreaded was falling back into the hands of the police. If they recognized me, I was finished. And even if they didn’t, I had heard enough stories about the prison camps all over Russia, built specially for children. Did I want to end up with the rest of my hair shaved off, stuck behind barbed wire in the middle of nowhere? There were thousands of Russian boys whose lives were exactly that.

Russian Roulette: The Story of an Assassin by Anthony Horowitz / Young Adult / Actions & Adventure have rating