Филип Керр - Dead Meat

Not that there was even much of a parade: the suspect waited in a room with two of the volunteers and several militiamen; all three were asked to stand; the witness was brought into the room; and then he was asked if he recognised any of the three men standing before him. It was as simple as that.

Valentin Bogomolov looked at all seven Georgians in this way. He took his time and there was no pressure exerted on him to pick out a face. And seven times he shook his head. With the last of the Georgians, their boss Dzhumber Gankrelidze, Grushko asked Bogomolov if he was absolutely sure and Bogomolov said that he was.

‘All right,’ said Grushko and Nikolai ushered Bogomolov out of the room.

When both of the army cadets taking part in the parade had left, Dzhumber lit a cigarette and smiled.

‘So, what’s this all about, officer?’ he asked.

With nothing to connect the Georgians with the burglary of Mikhail Milyukin’s apartment Grushko decided to return to an earlier line of inquiry.

‘You told my men that on the night Vaja Ordzhonikidze was killed, you spent the whole evening at the Pribaltskaya Hotel.’

Dzhumber shrugged. ‘Did I? I don’t remember.’

‘But you were at the Pushkin Restaurant.’

Dzhumber pointed at the door that had closed behind Valentin Bogomolov.

‘Not according to Elvis,’ he said.

Grushko did not bother to correct the Georgian’s misapprehension of the identity parade’s purpose.

‘You didn’t get to the Pribaltskaya until well after you said,’ he said. ‘Your car was seen driving along Nevsky just a few minutes before eleven.’

‘You had your Kodak at Vaja’s funeral, didn’t you?’ sighed Dzhumber. ‘You saw the send-off we gave him. Now why should we do that if we killed him, eh?’ He was keeping away from the subject of the Pushkin Restaurant and the firebomb.

‘I don’t know,’ said Grushko. ‘Not yet, anyway. But say one thing, do another, that’s the Georgian way, isn’t it? Stalin, Beria, they were both from your part of the world.’

Dzhumber smiled his expensive gold smile and shook his head.

‘You sound just like the newspapers,’ he said. ‘Knocking Stalin is just another way you Russians have of knocking Georgia.’

‘You’re a naturally contrary lot,’ persisted Grushko. ‘Everyone knows that. Even your word “mama” means father. Double-talk and deceit are part of the Georgian psychology.’

‘So who are you: the police psychiatrist?’

‘You know what I think?’

‘Go ahead. Surprise me.’

‘I think this whole thing has been cooked up as a pretext for you to settle a turf war with the Chechens. You kill Vaja and then go after them for it.’

I didn’t think much of this theory. I wasn’t sure that Grushko thought much of it himself: he seemed to want to provoke Dzhumber somehow. Perhaps that was part of his whole strategy of interrogation. But Dzhumber didn’t think much more of Grushko’s idea than I did.

‘You’ve got an active imagination,’ he said. ‘For a Russian.’

‘We had the same thought ourselves for a while. About the Chechens. Sultan Khadziyev looked like a pretty good suspect. Only he couldn’t possibly have murdered Vaja. He spent the night of the murder in an LTP after a two-day bender.’

‘So now you’ve come back to us, is that it?’ Dzhumber gazed wearily out of the window and then back at Grushko.

‘Hey, Sultan Khadziyev wasn’t the only Chechen in St Petersburg, you know. Maybe you’re right: maybe he wasn’t the one who shot Vaja. Maybe it was one of the others. Those stinking caftans don’t need much of an excuse to come after Georgians. Ever since the Central Board cleared out the Armenians, those Muslim bastards have been looking to fill the vacuum.’

‘Our success brings its own problems,’ shrugged Grushko.

‘So you miss one Muhammad, I say look for another. Sultan couldn’t have done it you say? Fine. Then it was another Chechen.’

‘I’ll bear it in mind.’

‘You do that.’

‘Maybe we’re wrong about this firebombing, too,’ said Grushko. ‘I don’t know. The owner, a Mr Chazov, he’s not helping us very much, so it’s hard to know what to think.’

‘Go ahead. Tell me your problems.’

‘You had nothing to do with that either, right?’

‘Right. We were nowhere near the Pushkin Restaurant.’

‘Who said anything about the Pushkin Restaurant?’

‘You did,’ said Dzhumber, frowning. ‘Just now.’

‘No, I was talking about a firebombing.’ He shook his head. ‘I didn’t say that had anything to do with the Pushkin Restaurant. It was you who connected the Pushkin with Mr Chazov, not me.’

Dzhumber’s jaw shifted uncomfortably. He wasn’t sure if Grushko had trapped him into saying something incriminating or not.

‘I want to see my lawyer,’ he said.

‘Maybe in the morning,’ said Grushko. ‘But tonight — you’re our guests.’

Katerina was watching television by herself when finally I returned home to the apartment on Ochtinsky Prospekt. I found the tinned meat and spaghetti she had left out for me and then joined her sitting on the sofa, although I was ready to unfold the thing and go straight to sleep. She noticed my stifled yawn. ‘Tired?’

‘Like I’ve been listening to Gorbachev. What’s this you’re watching?’

‘Hamlet.’

Hamlet was making a good job of ravishing Ophelia, or his mother, I wasn’t exactly sure which. Either way it was Pasternak’s translation, the famous Moscow Arts Theatre version and just the sort of thing that Katerina, who worked for Lenfilm on Kirovsky Prospekt, was only able to watch when Porfiry was away on one of his frequent business trips abroad. Porfiry preferred to watch videos of the kind that were also enjoyed by the OMON squad.

‘When’s he back?’ I asked.

‘Sometime tomorrow.’ She shrugged and I had a fine view of her plunging cleavage.

‘I have to go back to Moscow tomorrow evening,’ I said. ‘To pick up my car. They’ve sent the part I was waiting for. I’m catching the overnight train.’

‘When you’re there, maybe you can find some aspirin,’ she said. ‘There’s none in any of the local pharmacies.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Well, we could always use some lightbulbs, live or dead. Even the duds are getting hard to find.’

It was an old dodge: people would swap the duds with functioning bulbs at their place of work.

‘I’m not so sure about that,’ I joked. ‘They used to call that “wrecking” under Article 69.’

‘What it is to have a cop around the house,’ she laughed. ‘All right. I’ll watch breakfast television and see what the latest shortages are. But really, with Porfiry away so much, it is nice to have you here. There are so many robberies around here these days.’

‘Maybe if the corridors weren’t so dark,’ I said pointedly, ‘muggers would get less of a chance. But with people taking the lightbulbs...’

We talked for a while longer until finally Katerina said goodnight and I was at last able to unfold the sofa bed. This wasn’t particularly comfortable but I slept well enough, which was more than Grushko could have said. The next morning, on my return to the Big House, I could see that he hadn’t been to bed at all. Not long after returning home Grushko had received a call from Sasha informing him that a militiaman on duty at the Moskow Hotel had spotted Pyotr Mogilnikov in the lobby.

Two stops on the metro west of the city centre and overlooking the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, the Moskow Hotel has the shape and character of a communal-sized nuclear bomb-shelter. With nothing to distinguish the place architecturally, it is chiefly remarkable for the number of hard-currency prostitutes hanging around the doorway and the lobby, as well as for the Finnish drinking parties that arrive on the ferry from Helsinki every weekend. The prostitutes and the drunken Finns often end up together and it is commonly held that they deserve each other.