Филип Керр - Dead Meat

‘I’ll take that, Dr Sobchak,’ he said, advancing into the laboratory. ‘If you don’t mind.’

She squealed with fright and dropped the package. It sounded like a rock dropping on the linoleum floor. Recovering her composure she stared malevolently at Grushko.

‘What the hell do you mean by following me like this?’ she snarled.

He had to hand it to her. She had plenty of nerve.

‘Don’t make it worse than it already is,’ he said and picked up the cold package from the floor.

Dr Sobchak sighed and then sat down heavily on a laboratory stool. She lit a cigarette and tried to steady her nerves.

‘Well, what is it?’ Nikolai said impatiently.

Grushko sniffed the package and then laid it down on the work bench.

‘It’s a piece of meat,’ he said and went over to the sink where he started to wash his hands carefully. ‘It’s the material Mikhail Milyukin wanted analysed by a radio-biologist.’

Nikolai moved forward to pick it up and inspect it more closely.

‘No, don’t touch it,’ said Grushko. He shook his hands free of water and dried them on a towel that was hanging beside the sink.

‘Just how radioactive is it, Doctor?’ he asked.

She blew a column of smoke at the ceiling and then looked for a handkerchief. Wiping her eyes, she said, ‘It has a tissue burden of plutonium that’s approximately one thousand times higher than a control sample.’

Grushko lit a cigarette and flicked a match at the piece of frozen meat.

‘And if I were to eat this...?’

‘Assuming you were able to consume 150 grams of that meat every day for a month — imagine, meat every day for a month, in Russia—’ She laughed out loud at the very idea of such a thing.

‘Just the figures please,’ said Grushko. ‘There’s a good doctor.’

‘Why, then you’d ingest about twice your annual maximum safe dose of radiation.’ She shrugged. ‘You add that to your normal background levels of radiation and it starts to get really serious.’

‘Where did Milyukin get this?’

‘I’ve really no idea. He didn’t say and I didn’t ask. By the time I’d completed the analysis, he was dead.’

‘So why didn’t you come forward, Dr Sobchak? And why all the lies now?’

She pursed her lips and shook her head sadly.

‘I didn’t want to get involved, I guess. On the TV they said that the Mafia was probably behind Milyukin’s death: that he’d been killed for speaking out against them. I got scared. So I decided to go away for a while. And then when you turned up and said that someone else was dead as well, I suppose I must have panicked. I thought I had better get rid of the meat, before someone found out I had it, and they got rid of me too.’

‘What were you going to do with it?’

‘Put it in the hospital incinerator. With all the human tissue.’ She took a halting drag of her cigarette and shrugged. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It was stupid of me. I don’t know what I could have been thinking of.’ She paused and then added: ‘Will I go to prison?’

‘That all depends,’ said Grushko, ‘on whether or not you help us now. You can start by explaining how meat becomes as radioactive as this.’

‘I’ve been asking myself the same question,’ she said. ‘My own conclusion was that there must have been some sort of accident at the Sosnovy Bor Reactor.’

‘Well, we’ve just had one,’ said Grushko. There was that escape of radioactive iodine gas only a few weeks ago.’

Doctor Sobchak shook her head.

‘No, to get into the food chain like this, the leak would have to have been some time ago. At least six months.’

‘Is that possible?’ said Nikolai. ‘Without anyone having been informed?’

‘There were two major accidents at Sosnovy Bor during the mid-seventies,’ she said. ‘Nobody heard about either of those for years.’

‘You’re suggesting that there’s been some sort of cover-up?’ said Grushko. ‘Like at Chernobyl?’ He shook his head slowly. ‘No, I don’t buy that. Things are different now that we’ve got rid of the Party. Not only that but we’re trying to put our nuclear house in order. Another cover-up might jeopardise our chances of screwing some money out of the Western atomic-energy people.’

‘You seem to know more about this than I do,’ said Dr Sobchak.

‘Besides,’ he continued, ‘where’s the percentage for the Mafia in a cover-up? Unless... Doctor, do you have a Geiger counter?’

‘I have a radiometer,’ she said, unlocking a cupboard and removing a device that resembled a photographer’s light meter. ‘It’s more sensitive than a Geiger counter.’

She held the device over the sample of frozen meat and drew Grushko’s attention to the dial.

‘On the highest range setting the needle picks up hardly anything at all.’ She turned the setting knob through 180 degrees. ‘But on the lower range you can easily see that this material is registering significantly. About 500 milliroentgens per hour.’

Grushko held the radiometer and tried it himself. Then he looked at the underside of the instrument.

‘Astron,’ he said, reading the name of the manufacturer. ‘Well, what do you know? Made in the USSR, and it works.’

Twenty minutes later the two detectives stood outside the Pushkin Restaurant on Fontanka and rang the doorbell.

A glazier was replacing the window that had been broken when the restaurant was firebombed. It was only now that he had been able to obtain a sheet of glass to size.

Chazov’s face fell when he saw Nikolai and Grushko.

‘What is this?’ he whined. ‘I’ve spent all week answering your questions. Can’t you people just leave us alone?’

Nikolai placed a large hand against Chazov’s chest and moved him gently out of the way.

‘This is harassment. That’s what I call it. I’m going to write to the city council about this.’

‘You do that, Comrade,’ said Grushko, and made his way through the restaurant and into the kitchens. A cockroach scuttled quickly out of his path and Grushko looked at it as he might have looked on an old friend.

‘Is this some kind of pet?’ he said. ‘I’m sure that roach was here the last time we came.’

The chef was a big man, almost as big as Nikolai, with large, Cossack-style moustaches and a dirty, blood-stained apron. He was busy chopping cucumbers with a butcher’s knife, but when he saw the two detectives he stopped and regarded them with deliberate menace.

‘And where do you think you’re going?’ he said, pointing the large knife at Grushko’s chest.

‘It’s the militia, Yeroshka,’ said Chazov. ‘Best put the knife down, eh? We don’t want any trouble.’

‘That’s right, sir,’ said Grushko. ‘Do as he says.’

The chef wiped the sweat from his broad face with the sleeve of what had once been a white jacket.

‘Nobody comes into my kitchens without my permission,’ he growled belligerently. ‘Militia or not.’

Grushko noted the bottle of vodka that stood open beside the basin of cucumbers. You had to be careful how you handled a man of Yeroshka’s size when he’d been drinking heavily. He could have done with a drink himself.

‘I don’t think you were here the last time we came,’ he said, and put down the radiometer.

‘Lucky for you I wasn’t,’ said Yeroshka. ‘Otherwise I might have trimmed your ears for you and given them to you in a bag.’ He picked up the bottle and took an enormous swig.

This was Grushko’s cue. He grabbed Yeroshka’s elbow and pressed the hand holding the knife against the joint and towards the shoulder. Done expertly it was an effective and immensely painful method of dealing with a man who was armed with what the militia called a cold weapon. Yeroshka bellowed with pain and dropped both knife and bottle on to the floor. In the same instant Nikolai sprang forward and quickly handcuffed the man.