Филип Керр - Dead Meat

I thought of what the poet Anna Akhmatova had said about how it loves blood, the Russian earth, and for a brief moment I was tempted to offer some intellectual credentials of my own. Instead I said something more banal, about there being crime everywhere these days.

‘Ah, but not like here,’ he said, opening the car door for me.

I had the impression that he was reminding me of the purpose of my visit. After all, I had been sent from Moscow to learn how they dealt with the Mafia in St Petersburg. But what he said next seemed to contradict this thought.

‘Not like in Peter. After all, this is where crime got started. There aren’t many places where there are as many gloomy, harsh and strange influences on the soul of man as there are in St Petersburg. Here, I’ll show you. It’s only a little out of our way.’

He climbed in beside me and started the engine. We drove west along Nevsky for a short distance. The pavements were crammed with people who seemed rather scruffier than their Moscow counterparts, but perhaps that was only because the buildings were more beautiful. We turned north along one of the city’s canals and then he stopped and pointed at the top floors of a yellowing tenement.

‘Up there,’ he said. ‘On the fourth floor. That’s where the student Raskolnikov killed the old woman and her sister.’

He spoke as if this were one of the more celebrated cases of the day. I looked at the building and found to my surprise that it was too easy to recall the scene from Dostoevsky’s novel as something that had actually taken place. An axe-murder. There was nothing Russians loved to read about in their newspapers more than a good axe-murder. Especially if the murderer happened also to dismember his victims and eat them. It just wasn’t a proper murder without blood. Lots of it.

‘Looks like it might have happened yesterday,’ I observed.

‘Things are a bit like that in Peter. Nothing much has changed since Dostoevsky’s day. The Mafia have taken over from the nihilists. They believe in nothing except themselves and their ability to inflict pain and hardship on others in the name of one false god or another.’

‘There’s only one false god today that commands any real devotion,’ I said. ‘And that’s money.’

‘Not that the students have been entirely forgotten,’ Grushko added. ‘Believe it or not we arrested a student just the other day. A medical student from the Pavlov. You know how he’s putting himself through med. school? As a hired assassin for the Mob. He got himself interested in guns while he was doing his national service in Afghanistan. Became a marksman. We reckon he’s murdered at least ten people.’ He shook his head. ‘Compared to the likes of him, Raskolnikov was a puppy.’

A babushka emerged from the courtyard at the back of the tenement building. A small, dried-up woman of about sixty wearing a threadbare raincoat. To my surprise she was carrying a small strong-box under her arm. Her sharp eyes fixed on our car and she stared at us with hostile suspicion. She might have been the actual moneylender whom Raskolnikov had killed. Grushko noticed her too and nodded.

‘A ghost,’ he said quietly. ‘Peter’s full of them.’

He glanced in the mirror and quickly ran a comb through his well-oiled hair. When he had finished it looked exactly the same. I noticed a strong smell of mothballs on the sleeve of his dark grey jacket.

‘Before we go to the Big House,’ he said, ‘I wanted to get something clear between us.’

I shrugged. ‘Go ahead,’ I said.

He fixed me with a penetrating stare.

‘I’ve been told you’re here because Moscow thinks we have a good record against the Mafia: that you want to look at the way we do things in Peter.’

‘That’s right. It’s an intercity liaison thing. An exchange of ideas, if you like.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I read General Kornilov’s memo explaining your visit. Sounded like bureaucratic shit to me.’

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.

‘What’s wrong with exchanging a few ideas?’

‘Peter’s a smaller place than Moscow. Rather more provincial, too. Everyone knows everyone else. It’s harder to lose yourself here than it is in Moscow. What would you say if I told you it was as simple as that?’

‘Well, I, er... I’d suggest you were being modest. Look, I’m not here to patronise you. We can learn from each other, surely.’

Grushko nodded, measuring his next remark.

‘Let me be frank with you,’ he said. ‘If you’re here to investigate me and my men, you won’t find anything. I can’t speak for the rest, but there’s no corruption in my department. We’re clean. Have you got that?’

‘I’m not here to investigate you,’ I said coolly.

‘I don’t like spies any more than I like policemen who are getting their paws stroked.’

‘That leaves me out then.’

‘Give me your hand.’

I held out my hand thinking that he wanted to shake it. Instead he turned it over and stared closely at my palm as if intending to read it.

‘You’re not serious,’ I said.

‘Be quiet,’ he growled.

I shook my head and smiled. Grushko scrutinised my hand for almost a minute and then he nodded sagely.

‘Can you really read palms?’

‘Of course.’

‘So what do you see?’

‘It’s not a bad hand,’ he said. ‘All the same, your head line seems to be nearly split in two parallel lines.’

‘And what does that tell you?’

‘This reading is for my benefit, not yours.’

I drew my hand away and grinned uncomfortably.

‘That’s some forensic method you have there. Does it work with the Mafiosi?’

‘Sometimes. Most of them are pretty superstitious.’ He took a last drag at his cigarette and grinned. ‘You wanted to find out how we do things in Peter. Well, now you know.’

‘Great. Now I can get back on the train and go straight back to Moscow to make my report. Grushko’s a great detective because he can read palms. They’ll love that. What do you do for an encore: a little levitation, maybe? Hows about I ask you to find some water round here?’

‘That’s easy.’

Grushko wound down the window and threw his cigarette into the canal. I was soon to learn this particular waterway was called the Griboyedev Canal. Maybe he could sense something in the future at that. How else can one explain the fact that in only a few hours we would be back at that same tenement to investigate the murder of one of Russia’s best-known journalists?

I am a lawyer by training. This is common enough among investigators. The job requires a knowledge of criminal evidence and procedure that distinguishes it from that of the detective. It may sound typically pedantic, but as a lawyer I think that in order to understand this story you must have some understanding of the background — the Big House, the Department of Internal Affairs and its various departments and, of course, the Mafia.

Most of what I now know about the Mafia I know from Yevgeni Ivanovich Grushko. Perhaps the origins and modus operandi of the Mafia as described by him were not quite so dry as they appear here, but I have had to paraphrase the contents of many separate conversations that took place over a period of several weeks. Most of what I know about the departments that are included in Internal Affairs is written from an investigator’s perspective and it is perhaps worth noting that a detective could and probably would explain things rather differently.

Every Commonwealth city has its Big House — a building the sight of which encourages people to quicken their step, for it is here that the militia and the KGB have their headquarters. But since this story began almost as soon as I arrived in St Petersburg it seems only right that I should describe this particular Big House as I first saw it, on the morning that Grushko collected me from the railway station.