Филип Керр - Dead Meat

‘Which one?’

He picked up one of two enormous black Bakelites. ‘Internal,’ he said. ‘Six lines apiece.’ He dropped the ancient telephone back on to its bunk-sized cradle and selected one of the more modern phones. ‘The ones that look like toys are your outside lines.’ Grushko glanced at his watch.

‘Come to my office just before four,’ he said. ‘I’m seeing Kornilov then. I’ll introduce you.’ He walked to the door. ‘One more thing. The canteen here is disgusting. If you must eat, bring something. That is, always supposing you can find something. By the way, where are you staying?’

‘With my brother-in-law Porfiry. Or rather, my ex-brother-in-law. I’d better give him a ring and let him know I’ve arrived.’

‘Well, there’s always a sofa at my place if he’s forgotten about you.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘but Porfiry’s not the kind to extend an invitation lightly. Especially since he’s charging me fifty roubles a week.’

The sentimental sort, eh?’

That’s right.’

‘All happy families are the same,’ he chuckled on his way out of the door.

When Grushko had gone I called Porfiry at his office and told him I was in St Petersburg.

‘Whereabouts?’ he asked.

‘At the Big House. On Liteiny Prospekt.’

‘Jesus,’ he laughed, ‘what did you do? Want me to pick you up on my way home tonight?’

That’d be nice, except that I’m not sure what time I’ll be through here.’

‘Got you working on a case already, have they?’

‘Two, as a matter of fact. I might even be late.’

‘Don’t worry. It’s not like Katerina’s cooking anything special.’ He chuckled. ‘Same as any other night, really. Have you got the address?’

‘Yes. I picked it out of the Good Hotel Guide.’

‘You and the rats, I guess. See you tonight.’

I sat down at my desk and lit a cigarette. It’s surprising the amount of nourishment you can find in a cigarette these days. This one filled me up nicely. Then I went through my drawers checking that I had a good supply of the protocols that constitute an important part of the investigator’s job: search protocols, identity protocols, arrest protocols, interrogation protocols, confiscation protocols and advocate protocols. There was an ample supply of all relevant paperwork as well as a few little luxury items like desk-fluff, a broken rubber band, a plastic clothes-peg, an empty box of matches, a handful of paper-clips and a solitary diarrhoea tablet.

After eating the diarrhoea tablet, which tasted better than I had expected, I set about preparing my ‘chessboard’ — a large sheet of paper squared off into sections that was supposed to help me keep track of progress in the many cases I would be investigating. In the first square of the first column I wrote ‘Chazov: firebomb’ and then underneath this ‘Milyukin &c Ordzhonikidze: Murders’. After that, I called the State Prosecutor’s Office to introduce myself and made an appointment there for nine o’clock the following morning.

By now I was ready for a drink of something and a brief search of the filing-cabinet turned up a heating element and an earthenware jug. I had brought my own tin of coffee. I went to the lavatory to get some water and found it as unpleasant a place as I could have expected, being several millimetres deep in water and urine. I filled the jug from the one dripping tap and walked gingerly back to my office, leaving a trail of wet footprints behind me.

While the water for my coffee boiled I set about clearing my walls of newspaper cuttings and pin-ups. With more than a little self-consciousness I removed the large portrait of Lenin that hung behind my chair and placed it behind my filing-cabinet. The Party might have been outlawed but there were still plenty of people who looked on Vladimir Ilyich as a national hero. At the same time as I was busy doing all of this, I learned something of the previous occupant of my office. He had left the Central Board to join the State Prosecutor’s Office, a not uncommon career path. The photograph of the underground artist Kirill Miller pointed to a man with a sense of humour at least, while a communication from something called the Gulliver Club seemed to indicate someone who was very tall. But I still wondered how he could have afforded 80 roubles for the empty packet of German chocolate biscuits I found in the wastepaper bin. A present from some foreigner, perhaps. I took out my notebook and made a note of that.

At ten minutes to four I returned to the Big House, where I found Nikolai and Sasha typing up their reports, and they told me what had happened when they visited the dead Georgian’s apartment.

Vaja Ordzhonikidze had lived on the seventeenth floor of a block of flats in an enormous housing estate across the Neva, to the north-west of Peter, on Vasilyevsky Island. Seen from the sea, these high-rise buildings presented an unbroken line of grey stone that resembled nothing so much as a range of sheer and unscalable cliffs. This impression of inaccessibility was uncomfortably reinforced for the two detectives by a creaking laundry-basket of a lift that broke down while they were in it, leaving them in complete darkness between the ninth and tenth floors. Or they thought it had broken down until, two or three minutes after coming to an almost complete halt — there was some movement on the cable that supported the platform — the doors opened a crack and a small boy’s face appeared near the lift cabin’s ceiling.

‘Hoi, mister,’ he said, ‘how much to switch the power back on?’

Nikolai Vladimirivich, uncomfortable in confined spaces at the best of times, spoke angrily: ‘You’ll be in trouble if you don’t,’ he barked.

Being rather more pragmatic than his larger colleague, Sasha took out his wallet and thumbed out a small bank note.

‘How about five roubles?’ he said holding the money up to the urchin’s face.

‘Ain’t you got no hard currency?’ the boy asked disappointedly. ‘No dollars, no deutschmarks?’

‘I’ll give you hard currency,’ snarled Nikolai. ‘You don’t know how hard. When I’ve paid you, you won’t sit down for a week.’

Sasha took out his cigarettes and added two to the offered ransom.

‘Five woods and a couple of chalks, you little—’

‘Done,’ said the boy. ‘Shove ’em through.’

The doors closed behind the price extorted, returning the lift cabin once again to darkness.

‘Didn’t they teach you anything at the Pushkin Police Academy?’ said Nikolai. ‘You should never give in to blackmail.’

At which point the light flickered on and the lift assumed its rusty, shuddering ascent.

When they rang the Georgian’s bell the door was answered by a heavily made-up girl of about twenty wearing a black silk dressing-gown and an equally dark scowl. She looked like the sort who could have smelled hard currency inside a bottle of aniseed. A whore who knew these men were militia from nothing more than the squeak of their shoe-rubber.

‘He’s not here,’ she said, gathering the gown over her generous chest and chewing her gum defiantly.

‘That much we know already,’ said Nikolai and pushing her aside he ambled into the apartment.

The furnishings were expensively gaudy, with an abundance of electrical equipment, some of it still in the boxes.

‘Oh yes,’ said Nikolai with obvious admiration, ‘very comfortable indeed.’

Sasha went over to the window. A large telescope mounted on a wooden tripod was pointed out to sea.

‘Check the view,’ he said and ducked down to try the telescope. Nikolai joined him at the window. ‘Panoramic, or what?’

The girl finished lighting her cigarette and snatched it angrily from her crimson-coloured mouth.