Филип Керр - Dead Meat

‘But you were right,’ she said. ‘What you said about the need for people and militia to act together if the Mafia is to be defeated.’

‘You lose your temper, you lose the argument,’ opined Lena’s mother.

‘Don’t worry dear,’ said Lena. ‘Nobody likes that man these days. Not even mother. Do you mother?’

‘He looks like a churki ,’ said the old woman. ‘Either that or a Yid... One of those homeless cosmopolitans.’

‘Mother,’ said Lena smiling gently, ‘you mustn’t say such things.’

Grushko poured himself a glass of home-made whisky and sipped it gently. This was the smoothest stuff he had distilled so far, made from vegetables grown on the allotment he shared with a detective in the vice squad, and it had a deceptively sweet taste. He only wished he could have grown some maize to make a corn-based liquor, but the beetroot whisky and the cucumber wine now fermenting in bottles on top of the lavatory cistern were better than queuing for hours to buy vodka in the state shops — when they had any. What vodka he did manage to buy he usually kept for trade. So Grushko sipped his whisky, confident that it wasn’t the kind of stuff that included alcohol taken from glue or toothpaste, and counted himself lucky in that at least.

They heard the front door. It was Tanya, Grushko’s daughter. She came quickly into the tiny sitting-room.

‘Have we missed it?’ she said, looking at the television.

‘I wish I had,’ said Grushko.

‘How was it?’

‘Your father lost his temper,’ said Lena.

Tanya looked hardly surprised to hear this, any more than she was surprised to see the look of distaste on her father’s face when Boris, her boyfriend, followed her into the room.

‘Boris,’ said Lena warmly, ‘how nice to see you.’

Grushko merely grunted. He made no secret of his dislike of Boris. It was not that he objected to the young man’s manners or his appearance. Boris was as polite as he was well-dressed. He had a good job, too. As a broker on the St Petersburg Commodities and Raw Materials Exchange, buying and selling everything from ox-tongues to railway sleepers, Boris was making a lot of money. What bothered Grushko was the discovery that a seat on the Exchange that had once cost a staggering 50,000 roubles now cost an astronomical 6 million.

‘Just look what Boris gave me,’ said Tanya slipping the stopper out of a bottle of Christian Dior perfume and holding it under her mother’s nose.

‘Mmmm, that’s lovely,’ said Lena.

Grushko took his time sniffing the scent. A lot of what was sold as French or American perfume was no more the real thing than a bottle of his cucumber wine. But not this. He nodded appreciatively.

‘The real thing,’ he said. ‘Hard currency, was it, Boris? Must have cost a lot of money, anyway.’

Boris shrugged nervously. Tanya’s father made him nervous. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not that much really.’

‘You surprise me, Boris,’ said Grushko. ‘Tell me: how are things on the Exchange? Whose birthright were you selling today?’

‘Dad, please,’ said Tanya.

‘Well, I can’t complain...’

‘No, I wouldn’t have thought you could, Boris. Oh yes, you’ll be all right—’

‘Lay off, will you, Dad?’

‘—whatever happens to the rest of us.’

‘Yevgeni Ivanovich,’ Lena said sternly, ‘that’s enough.’

The phone started to ring. Grushko had a shrewd idea who it was. For a moment he was tempted not to answer it, but then he realised that everyone wanted him to, if only to get him out of the room for a few minutes. He walked into the hallway.

‘Saved by the bell,’ grinned Boris, and then glanced at his gold watch. ‘Well, I guess I’d better be going.’

‘I’m sorry about Yevgeni,’ Lena said. ‘Georgi Zverkov gave him a hard time.’

‘So he takes it out on the rest of us,’ said Tanya.

The telephone was by the front door and Tanya made a point of kissing Boris with an extra amount of passion before saying good-night, just for her father’s benefit. Then she went into the bedroom she shared with her grandmother and closed the door without another word. Grushko replaced the receiver and returned to the sitting-room, where he drained his glass.

‘Yevgeni Ivanovich, what comes over you sometimes?’

‘I’m sorry, love,’ he said. ‘I can’t bring myself to like the man. I can’t get it out of my head that a seat on the Exchange costs 6 million roubles — 6 million. Now where does he get that kind of money? Where does anyone get it?’

Lena glanced up at the little reproduction icon on the wall, as if the Madonna and Child might have provided her with an answer that could satisfy him. She was anxious that Grushko should like a man with Boris’s good prospects.

‘Perhaps he borrowed it,’ she suggested. ‘From Gosbank.’

‘Maybe I should go in and see them myself,’ he laughed, and poured himself another whisky.

‘Who was on the phone?’

‘General Kornilov. He just told me to report to his office first thing in the morning. Then he hung up.’ Grushko swallowed half of the whisky in his glass. ‘Which is probably what he means to do with me.

Kornilov was not a man to look or sound angry, even when he was furious. Grushko would have preferred it if he had been. At least you knew where you were with a man like that. But Kornilov was as inscrutable as a field of bison grass.

As Grushko came through the door the general nodded at the chairs in front of him and carried on with the protocol he was writing. Grushko sat down, reached for his cigarettes and then thought better of it. Perhaps it was best not to seem in any way relaxed about what had happened. Finally Kornilov put down his fountain-pen and clasped his hands on the blotter in front of him. Grushko’s eyes noted how the fingernails on Kornilov’s right hand were so badly stained with nicotine they looked as if they were made of wood; they seemed to underline Grushko’s impression of Kornilov as something hard and inhuman.

‘What the hell did you have to go and make that stupid remark about the city councillors for?’

Grushko shook his head and shifted uncomfortably under his senior officer’s scrutiny. It was said that Kornilov had once stared down Bobhov, formerly the first deputy chairman of the KGB. Grushko could easily believe it.

‘He was trying to provoke me,’ he said.

‘I’d say he damn well succeeded, wouldn’t you?’

Kornilov lit one of the Boyars he liked to smoke. Grushko watched the incriminating smoke curl round Kornilov’s fingertips. Not wood, he thought, but smoked fish. Kornilov was kippering his own fingers. He wondered what the man’s lungs looked like. For that matter, what did his own lungs look like?

‘I had Borzov from the mayor’s office on that phone for fifteen minutes this morning,’ grumbled Kornilov. ‘He made his feelings quite plain about your performance, Grushko.’

Grushko winced. It was always bad when Kornilov called him by his surname.

‘Did he, sir?’

‘He suggests that we need to solve this business with Milyukin as quickly as possible in order to demonstrate that we are winning the war against the Mafia. Otherwise—’

‘Borzov,’ sneered Grushko. ‘That idiot. It’s only a few years since Borzov was telling people, Mikhail Milyukin included, that there was no such thing as the Soviet Mafia.’

‘Otherwise,’ Kornilov repeated more loudly, ‘things might go badly for us when it comes to renewing our budgets. I need hardly remind you of the shortages we already have to cope with. Petrol, paper, handcuffs, photocopiers, to say nothing of proper leisure facilities for off-duty officers.’

‘No, sir.’

‘I want results, Grushko. And I want them soon. Is that quite clear?’