“Well, where?” Prokhor Ivanovich comes to a stop for a minute.
“And here’s where: nailed over there, on the fifth shelf with old hats, where we keep all dead cats.”
“Scat! You darn fool!”
Niura laughs shrilly over all Yama, and throws herself down on the sill, kicking her legs in high black stockings. Afterward, having ceased laughing, she all of a sudden makes round astonished eyes and says in a whisper:
“But do you know, girlie—why, he cut a woman’s throat the year before last—that same Prokhor. Honest to God!”
“Is that so? Did she die?”
“No, she didn’t. She got by,” says Niura, as though with regret. “But just the same she lay for two months in the Alexandrovskaya Hospital. The doctors said, that if it were only this teen-weeny bit higher—then it would have been all over. Bye-bye!”
“Well, what did he do that to her for?”
“How should I know? Maybe she hid money from him or wasn’t true to him. He was her lover—her pimp.”
“Well, and what did he get for it?”