Филип Керр - Dead Meat

He sighed profoundly and placed the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. With the leather jacket he looked quite like James Dean. But if there had been any cool bravado, it was long gone.

‘Go on,’ said Grushko.

‘I was watching to see what happened. You see, it was quite dark on the stairs, so they didn’t know I was watching them. Anyway, I suppose they were in there for ten or fifteen minutes, and when they came out again they had a few papers as well as some stuff in a carrier bag...’

‘What stuff?’ said Grushko.

‘I don’t know. Probably more papers. One of them said something funny — something about “going back to the seagull”.’

‘The seagull?’ Grushko looked at Nikolai. ‘Fans of Chekhov, were they?’

‘I’m sure that was it,’ said Bogomolov. ‘Even though it didn’t make any sense to me.’

‘“Seagull” is army slang for a car, sir,’ explained Nikolai.

‘That’s interesting,’ murmured Grushko. ‘But it’s also one of those old copies of American cars that Zim or Zil used to turn out. A Seagull was a Buick copy, I think. We’d better check it out.’ Grushko glanced down at Bogomolov and frowned.

‘Well? What happened next?’

‘They cleared off, leaving the front door open. Well, that was my chance. I thought I’d just duck in and see if there was anything valuable lying around. There was some money on the table — about fifty roubles — and that golden cow thing. I had that and the money and ran out.’

He clutched at Grushko’s sleeve with a hand that was covered with eczema. Grushko’s nose wrinkled with distaste.

‘That’s the honest truth, sir, I swear. I was going to sell the cow to buy some wheels, but I don’t know anything about a murder, sir. Please, sir, please tell her that, will you?’ He nodded fearfully at Lieutenant Khodyrev. ‘She’s been saying all kinds of things, but they’re not true, sir.’

Grushko nodded and detached the youth’s scrofulous hand from his sleeve. He pushed himself off the desk and walked through the doorway where I was standing. Nikolai followed.

‘Think he’s telling the truth?’ said Grushko.

‘After the stick Olga waved at him, I’m sure of it.’

‘Olga?’ Grushko smiled.

‘Lieutenant Khodyrev. She’s a first-class cop, sir. Threatened the kid with the whole bunch of flowers. Murder, theft of state property—’

‘What state property is that?’ I asked.

‘The Golden Calf,’ said Nikolai. ‘It is an important literary award. You see, at first he claimed he’d just found it lying on the road, but Lieutenant Khodyrev, she...’

‘We get the picture, Nikolai,’ said Grushko. ‘You don’t have to give her the Order of Lenin.’ He looked back into the room.

‘Keep him here for a minute,’ he said, and then went back into his own office. He picked up the phone and asked the Big House operator to put him through to the Criminal Records Department.

‘Is this one of the men you saw?’

Bogomolov stared at the photograph Grushko had removed from the file and placed in front of him.

‘It was dark,’ he said, ‘but I think he was the one who had the keys: the one who stayed outside and kept a lookout for the other two.’

‘The one who looked like a thief, you said.’

Bogomolov nodded and Grushko smiled.

‘Good boy,’ he said. ‘Now then, how do you feel about seeing if you can identify these two other men you saw? I’m talking about an identity parade.’

Bogomolov shrugged. ‘S’fine by me,’ he said. ‘But look, what’s going to happen to me when all this is over?’

Grushko looked over at Lieutenant Khodyrev.

‘Have the papers gone to an investigator yet?’ he asked.

‘No, sir,’ she said, ‘not yet.’

‘Then what do you think?’

‘You mean if he’s helping us with our inquiry, sir? Under the circumstances, I should be inclined not to press charges.’

‘You hear that?’ Grushko said to Bogomolov. ‘You can go home after you’ve had a look at these men. But take a good look at them, mind. And don’t say it’s them just because you want to be helpful. Understand?’

Bogomolov nodded.

We returned to Grushko’s office.

‘We’ll see if he recognises any of our handsome Georgian friends,’ explained Grushko.

‘Want me to organise the protocol?’ I offered.

‘Please.’

Nikolai took a look at the man in the photograph whom Bogomolov had positively identified.

‘Who’s the face, sir?’

‘Fellow called Pyotr Mogilnikov,’ said Grushko. ‘A pickpocket. Georgi Rodionov saw him hanging around outside Milyukin’s apartment building on the day of the burglary. He was with two men in a black Volga. My guess is that these two characters paid him to lift Milyukin’s keys from his pocket. Probably bumped into him on the street or something like that. And while he was out they simply let themselves in through the front door.’ He glanced over Bogomolov’s statement once more.

‘I reckon one of these characters was our careful Winston smoker,’ suggested Nikolai. ‘You know, the one who takes his chalks from the wrong end of the packet.’

‘Rodionov did say that one of the two men in the Volga was smoking American cigarettes,’ I said.

Grushko’s forefinger tapped the photograph in Nikolai’s hand.

‘Then you’d better get that circulated,’ he said. ‘I don’t want this zek going the same way as Sultan Khadziyev. We have to burn him out, and soon.’ He smacked his fist into his palm. ‘Right then. Let’s sort these Dzhugashvilis.’

Georgian men enjoy a not undeserved reputation with women, being hot-blooded, passionate characters and having a cynical eye for the main chance. Any joke or story involving sexual excess usually has a Georgian as its hero. There are two other things that most people know about Georgia, One is that the region produces an excellent cognac. The other is that it was the birthplace of Josef Stalin. Only then he called himself Josef Dzhugashvili. It used to be people also knew Georgia to be a nice place to go for a holiday. But since the collapse of the Soviet Union it is only the mercenaries who are much inclined to go there.

Once, many years ago, when I was a small boy, my parents took me to Georgia for a holiday by the Black Sea. I remember how hot it had been and the kindness of the people with whom we had stayed. Now, as I looked at the truculent faces of the men who had been brought to the Big House, it seemed almost impossible to associate them with the warm and distant land that I remembered from my childhood; and all too easy to associate them with the violent struggle for power in Georgia that followed the end of Communism. But for all their black looks and weary yawns, the Georgian Mafiosi conducted themselves with dignity; and treating Grushko’s men with courtesy they found that their courtesy was returned.

It was, I realised, a relationship born of mutual respect. The Georgians knew that the men of the Central Board were not the kind of militia that people were inclined to make jokes about — the kind that you could see strutting on the streets, blowing whistles, waggling batons and extracting fines for fictitious offences in order to supplement their wages. At the same time, the men of the Central Board knew that these Mafiosi were hard men, many of them having spent time in the labour-camp system that, despite the provisions of the Corrective Labour Code, treated men little better than animals. Having survived that dehumanising experience, most Mafiosi were sufficiently resourceful to make them hard to convict.

There were seven Georgians in custody and since the police rules regarding identity parades only required that a suspect be placed in a line with two other persons, this meant that fourteen members of the public were now required. Grushko explained that in order to make what was an admittedly crude procedure as fair as possible they had often gone to the blackmarkets at Autovo and Deviatkino in order to recruit suitably swarthy citizens; there was among these, however, an understandable lack of enthusiasm to go anywhere near the Big House and, as a result, all of the men who now volunteered to take part in Central Board identity parades were cadets from the local army barracks.