Филип Керр - Dead Meat

I shook my head and smiled. ‘I’m not sure I understand that either,’ I said.

‘Never mind,’ she said and smiled back.

By the time we reached the TV station I realised that I simply had to see her again.

‘Look,’ I said, remembering the Michael Jackson tape I had brought for Andrei. ‘I have a friend who’s offered me two tickets for the Kirov. I was wondering—?’

‘I don’t think I’d be very good company,’ she said, getting out of the car. ‘Besides, I’m not sure your Colonel Grushko would approve.’

‘I can’t imagine why he would object.’

‘No, perhaps not. Even so, there are some things which he might find it hard to understand.’

She closed the door and leaned in through the window.

‘You’re very kind,’ she said. ‘Please don’t think me proud or ungrateful. I’m just not ready yet.’

‘Of course. I understand. It was stupid of me.’

‘Look, when you know all there is to know about what happened, when all this is over, if you still want to ask me, then give me a ring.’

‘All right.’

‘Promise?’

‘Yes.’

But things didn’t work out that way. Nothing ever works out as it should. Not these days. Not in the New Commonwealth of Independent States.

Grushko was in a sombre mood when I saw him again. He had spent the morning attending the execution of Gerassim ‘the Butcher’, a notorious Mafioso who had killed four members of a rival gang with a meat cleaver and then fed their dismembered limbs to his pet dogs. It’s always a problem, feeding pets in Russia.

All the same it is not very often that a murderer actually faces a firing squad. There are perhaps no more than fifteen to twenty executions a year and a death sentence is frequently commuted to fifteen years’ ‘strict regime’. Only the most bestial murderers, such as serial killers and child murderers, are shot. But the courts have a special abhorrence of cases that have some anthropophagous aspect, such as the Black Sea Widow case or the infamous Chakatilo who liked to eat his victims’ genitals. Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that real meat is such a valuable commodity. Or maybe it is because people want to forget that cannibalism had actually taken place during the famines that Stalin had inflicted on the Ukraine during the 1930s. Whatever the reason, feeding a man to your dogs is considered almost as terrible as eating him yourself, and Gerassim had found himself subject to the full force of the law.

Grushko nodded grimly as he recalled the circumstances of the man’s execution. I knew that he approved of the death sentence and although it was not the first time he had been obliged to attend an execution it was clear that he had been deeply affected by his morning’s experience. But I had no doubt that it would not have altered his opinion about capital punishment.

‘He died like a man,’ Grushko said with some admiration. With a careless shrug he added: ‘I had to have a word with him first, mind you: to tell him to hold his head up. But he died OK. You know what he said when they tied him to the post? He said, “You can’t shoot us all.”’ He uttered a short laugh. ‘How about that, eh? “You can’t shoot us all.”’

‘Supposing we did,’ I said. ‘You and I would be out of a job.’

Grushko shrugged. ‘Might be worth it at that.’

There was something in the way he said this that made me think he might almost be serious, and I was reminded of what Nina Milyukin had said about him: that he was the kind of man for whom there was only right and wrong and nothing in between.

I told him that I had seen her, although I said nothing about my having invited her to the ballet. I hoped he might say something to confound the opinion she held of him but instead he just shook his head, as if somehow he remained disappointed in her.

‘She thinks you don’t much like her,’ I said.

He raised his eyebrows with surprise.

‘Do you think it’s that obvious?’

I shrugged. ‘Is it true?’

‘As a matter of fact, I don’t like her at all,’ he said flatly.

‘Why on earth not?’

‘I have my reasons.’

He regarded my obvious exasperation closely and seemed somehow to guess at what I had left unsaid. His eyes narrowed.

‘Let me give you some advice, my friend,’ he said darkly. ‘If you are thinking of seeing — that woman—’

He paused as if it had occurred to him that he might have overstepped the mark.

‘Not that I could stop you, mind. She’s a good-looking woman and what you do is your own affair. But you and I, we ought to be friends as well as colleagues. And as someone who wishes to be your friend I should tell you that you would be best advised to leave Nina Milyukin alone.’

‘Is she under any kind of suspicion?’

‘No. She’s done nothing illegal.’

Then what?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you. There’s a matter of some confidentiality here. A matter that I have to speak to her about. It would be unfair if I were to discuss it with you first. But trust me when I ask you to keep away from her.’

For a moment he held my perplexed stare.

‘It was just a thought,’ I said. ‘Something that came into my mind. You’re right. I do find her attractive.’ I nodded with slow acquiescence and then shrugged. ‘All right. I’ll leave her alone. On one condition.’

‘What’s that?’

‘That you’ll explain when you think you’re able.’

‘Very well,’ said Grushko. ‘When this case is closed, perhaps. Ask me then.’

‘You know, it’s funny,’ I remarked, ‘but that’s exactly what she said.’

For a little while after this I sat in my office and tried to guess what Grushko had been alluding to. But before I had time to think of anything we had a call from the governor of Kresti Prison, to say that Pyotr Mogilnikov had changed his mind. It seemed that he now wished to cooperate with our investigation after all.

Remand Centre IZ 45/1 at Kresti, also known as ‘Crosses’, was just across the Neva from the Big House and a stone’s throw from the famous Aurora cruiser, which fired the shot that signalled the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917. It was the loudest shot in history.

Built in the time of Catherine the Great, Crosses takes its name from the red-brick Byzantine cross that adorns the front of the panopticon shape. Once it had been a model of Russian penology, holding up to 800 inmates. Two hundred years after Catherine, Crosses holds 7,000 men and is an example of everything that is verminous and dehumanising about the Russian prison system.

We collected our visiting numbers at the main door and then, escorted by a prison wardress of Olympic shot-putting proportions, we made our way, one at a time, through the arrangement of locked doors and turnstiles until we reached the interview-room. Beside this was a concrete isolation cell that was the size and proportions of a safe in a large bank. The wardress selected a key from the bunch on her enormous leather belt, opened the isolation cell’s massive steel door and barked an order at the man who was seated inside.

Pyotr Mogilnikov rose unsteadily to his feet and then followed us into the interview-room, which was itself not much bigger than a sauna bath.

The wardress left the three of us alone and we sat down on opposite sides of a table that had been screwed very firmly to the floor. Grushko tossed his cigarettes across the table and sniffed the air suspiciously.

‘What is that smell?’ he said.

Mogilnikov grimaced. ‘One of the guys in the cell,’ he explained unhappily; ‘his pet cat pissed on me.’

‘Is that what persuaded you to talk to us?’ Grushko chuckled.