Филип Керр - Dead Meat

‘Oh, one more thing,’ said Professor Derzhavin. He turned to one of his staff and called her over.

‘Anna, that liver, could you do the honours?’

The girl Anna was a small, red-haired creature who looked hardly old enough to vote, let alone dissect a human cadaver. She produced a bucket from underneath the table and removed a glutinous black-red hunk that she then lay on the slab by the dead man’s feet.

‘It’s pretty enlarged,’ said the professor, ‘so I thought he might be a heavy drinker. But I thought we’d wait for you before we made sure.’

The girl produced a scalpel and prepared to slice the liver in two.

‘When she cuts the liver open, I want you to get a sniff of it.’ We leant towards the liver. ‘All right, Anna.’

As the scalpel moved perfectly through the dead man’s organ, the air was filled with such a stench of stale alcohol that I thought I would choke. We reeled back from the table, coughing and laughing disgustedly.

‘Well I don’t think there can be any doubt about that,’ chuckled the professor. ‘But what is curious is that he seems to have been a vegetarian.’

‘Yes, that is unusual,’ agreed Grushko.

‘Oh I don’t know,’ said Nikolai. ‘Have you seen the price of meat lately?’

Sasha groaned as one of the staff working on the girl’s body opposite began to remove the top of her skull with an electric saw.

‘I don’t think I’ll ever eat meat again,’ he muttered weakly.

Nikolai had asked Chazov to come and see him at the Big House again, only on this occasion he had chosen a time more inconvenient to the restaurateur, in the early evening, when he would normally have been preparing to open for dinner.

I left the two of them arguing, to deal with the investigation of the Kazakh gang that had now been arrested for the robberies of the Jewish emigrants and, in particular, the Goose.

The Goose was a big man with a shaven head and a long, scrawny neck and it was easy to see how he had come by his nickname. Although he could speak Russian fluently I asked him if he wished to have the services of an interpreter. The man shrugged and shook his head. Then I read him the rules of his interrogation as laid down in Article 51.

‘You have the right to remain silent,’ I told him. ‘You have the right to an advocate. You have the right to appeal to the State Prosecutor and say why you have been wrongly arrested. You may add something to this protocol if you wish to do so.’

The Goose knew that the two arresting detectives had obtained plenty of evidence to convict him and he was an old enough hand at the game to exercise his right to silence. He signed the protocol and then they took him back to his cell. At some later date I would have to reacquaint him of the charges pending against him in the presence of his lawyer.

After this my wife telephoned to say that the gasket for my car had arrived and when would I be coming back to Moscow to repair it and drive it away? I told her, in a few days. I wanted to tell her I missed her, but something stopped the words in my mouth. Maybe because it wasn’t true. I missed my own bed, my television set, my fishing rods, my books and having my meals cooked for me, I even missed my daughter. But her? No way.

‘So how are things at home?’ I asked. ‘How’s my daughter?’

‘She’s fine. Sends her love.’

‘How’s Moscow?’

‘The prices are just ridiculous. Everything is so expensive.’

‘Yes, it is,’ I said.

‘How’s Leningrad?’ she asked.

‘St Petersburg. You get sent to the zone for calling the place the wrong name. Things are all right. I’m on a case already.’

She grunted. She never was much interested in my work as an investigator. She always wanted me to go into business for myself, as a lawyer. To make real money.

‘How’s Porfiry?’ she asked.

‘He’s much the same. Thinner.’

‘Everyone’s thinner.’

‘Are you feeding Misha?’

Misha was my dog.

‘He gets as much porridge as he can eat.’

‘Well, I guess his breath won’t smell so bad.’

‘When you do come back for your car—’

‘Yes?’

‘Could you bring some cheese perhaps?’

‘Cheese?’

‘I’ve heard that there’s plenty of cheese in Leningrad. I mean St Petersburg. There’s none in the whole of Moscow. Naturally I’ll pay you for it.’

‘I’ll see what I can do. Anything else?’

‘Not that I can think of.’

‘All right. I’ll ring you before I come.’ I laughed unpleasantly. ‘Nice doing business with you.’

A little later on I went round the corner to find Grushko.

He was in his office. There was a tape-recorder on his desk on which he had been listening to the tapes the KGB had made of Mikhail Milyukin’s telephone conversations. He seemed troubled by something and I was just about to ask him what it was when Sasha came into the office, his face eager with what he had to tell.

‘I’ve had a call from the drugs squad,’ he explained. ‘There’s a friend of mine who works there who told me that on the night of Milyukin’s murder they had some information that a suspect they were after was driving around in a green Mercedes. Well, they checked with the GAI and found that there are only three such cars in the whole of Peter. Anyway, in the process of eliminating these two other Mercs, they saw one of them driving down Nevsky at about eleven o’clock that night. It’s registered to Dzhumber Gankrelidze.’

‘That would put the Georgians a long way from where they claimed they were,’ said Grushko. ‘In the restaurant at the Pribaltskaya Hotel.’ He lit a cigarette and leaned forward in his chair.

After a moment or two I nodded at the tape machine.

‘Anything there for us?’

‘Listen to this a minute, will you? This was recorded a week before the murder.’

He switched the tape on.

‘ Mikhail Milyukin ,’ said the first voice, which was easily recognisable from Milyukin’s many television reports.

‘This is Tolya.’

‘Ah yes, Tolya. I was hoping you’d call.’

‘You got my letter?’

‘Yes, I did. And I’m very interested in what you wrote. But is it really true?’

‘Every word. And I can prove it.’

‘Then I think it could make quite a story.’

‘You know it would.’

‘Look, it’s best we don’t talk about this on the phone. Where can we meet?’

‘How about the Peter and Paul Fortress? Inside the cathedral at, say, three o’clock?’

‘All right then. I’ll be there.’

Grushko hit the stop button and looked expectantly at Sasha and myself.

‘This Tolya sounds like he could be a Ukrainian,’ I said. ‘Those slurred consonants.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Grushko. He glanced at his notebook and then fast-forwarded the tape to a position on the machine’s counter he had previously noted. ‘Now listen to this. The call was made on the morning of the same day that Milyukin reported his flat had been burgled.’

‘ Hello .’ It was a woman’s voice, and an educated one. The accent sounded local.

‘Hi. It’s Mikhail Milyukin .’

‘It’s been a long time, how are you?’

‘Good, thanks.’

‘What are you working on this time?’

‘Well, I’ve got a little job for you, if you’re interested?’

‘Anything to help the press, you know that.’

‘Good.’

‘What sort of material are we talking about?’

‘I’d rather not say on the telephone. Can I drop it round to you? How does later on this morning sound?’