Read Online He Lover of Death by Boris Akunin - Free Book Online

it to the Reverend Mother Manefa. Take it, I said, a present from the Prince to the orphans.’
    Here the fat-faced man, the tenner, cleared his throat and interrupted the Prince’s story:
    ‘Uhu, a right royal present it was, we remember.’
    The Prince hissed at him. ‘Lardy,’ he said, ‘don’t you go barging in and spoiling the story. Well, what happens? I go breezing round to Death’s place to see if she’ll treat me any different. She opens the door, only it would have been better if she hadn’t. She comes out, eyes blazing. Clear out and don’t come back, she shouts. Don’t you dare come anywhere near me, and all sorts of other stuff like that. She prods and pokes me out the door, after everything I’d done . . . I took offence real bad, that time. Started drinking –I was wandering round in a haze for a week. And while I was drunk the memory that really stung was the way I’d bought that lousy chocolate with my hard-earned money and even felt the cloth in the shop – to check the quality.’
    ‘Well, I still say they gave you that cloth for nothing,’ Lardy put in again.
    But the Prince said: ‘That’s not the point. I’d tried so hard, my feelings were hurt. Right, I think, you’re too flighty altogether. This isn’t going right. Damn you for that cloth and chocolate. That night I climbed over the orphanage wall, took the window out, broke down the door of their storeroom and started hacking away. I tipped the chocolate out on the floor and stamped on it. I slashed the cloth to shreds – now let’s see you wear that! I cut all the calico to pieces. And I smashed up everything else they had in there. The watchman came to see what all the noise was about. “What are you doing, you bastard,” he yells, “you’re depriving the poor orphans!” Well, I stuck my blade straight in his heart, the blood splashed out all over my arm. I came out of the storeroom all covered in blood, threads hanging off me and my face as black as an Arab’s with chocolate. And there’s Mother Manefa coming straight at me, with a candle. Well, I did her in too. It’s all the same to me, I think, I’ve damned my soul anyway. So screw my soul and the life eternal. I didn’t want any kind of life at all without Death . . .’
    ‘Yes,’ said Lardy with a nod. ‘That set Moscow on its ear. You might have been drunk, but you didn’t leave any tracks or witnesses. In the end they realised it was you running wild, of course, but there was no way to prove it.’
    The Prince laughed. ‘The important thing was that our lot found out about it straight away, and they told Death. When I got back from the orphanage I slept for two days straight, didn’t wake up once. And when I came round, they gave me a note from her, from Death. “Come to me, you’ll be mine” – that was what it said. So that’s what she’s like, Death. Just try to understand her.’
    Senka listened eagerly to the story, and afterwards he racked his brains trying to make sense of it, but he just couldn’t.
    But that day, he didn’t have time to rack his brains, so many different things happened.
    After the Prince announced his decision and treated his deck to vodka and cognac, Sprat took the new boy back to his place (he had a little room behind a chintz curtain near the way in).
    He turned out to be a mighty fine lad, with no side to him at all, even though he had a number in the gang, and Senka had just turned up out of nowhere. He didn’t put on airs, he spoke simply and told Senka lots of useful things, as if he was one of them, almost a card in the deck.
    ‘It’s OK, Speedy,’ he said, ‘if Death herself asked for you, you’ll be in the deck, there’s no way round it. Maybe one of us will get put away or done in, and then they’ll take you as sixer and I’ll move up to sevener. You stick with me, and you’ll be all right. And you can live right here. It’s more fun snoring together.’
    (They never did get to snore together, but