Филип Керр - Dead Meat

We got out and walked down a gentle slope towards a small clearing in the trees. The vans were parked around a black Volga that was the subject of attention for ten or fifteen experts and militiamen. A stout, red-haired woman wearing the uniform of a colonel of militia and who seemed to be in charge walked towards us. Grushko quickened his pace to greet her.

‘It’s Iron Lenya,’ Nikolai murmured. ‘And I’m not wearing a tie.’

‘You don’t even have a uniform, if I remember right,’ said Sasha. ‘You sold it to a Japanese tourist for 200 roubles.’ Sasha chuckled and found a cigarette from his jacket pocket. He tossed it expertly into his mouth and lit a match with the flick of a thumbnail.

The head of the Department of Scientific Experts, Colonel Lenya Shelaeva, greeted Grushko coolly and ignored the rest of us altogether. In the weeks that followed I got to know her well enough to respect and even to like her. But she was particular about smartness among her own staff and while she and Grushko exchanged a few preliminary remarks, Sasha told me that Lenya had once sent a man home because he wasn’t wearing a tie. Having had little sleep on the overnight train I wasn’t exactly looking my best and I was glad that Grushko didn’t bother to introduce us.

We followed her to the passenger door of the Volga. Inside the car a man lay slumped forward in his seat, his forehead resting on the blood-encrusted dashboard. There wasn’t much that would have detained the average teleologist, assuming that there were still people who placed much credence in this kind of Marxist working method. The copeck-sized hole in the back of his head indicated the way in which he had met his end clearly enough. He stared at us with grey-green eyes out of a waxy, pale and overweight face. He was dead as mutton but the more I looked at him, the more I had the impression that with a decent-sized sticking-plaster to cover the bullet’s exit wound, the man would have sat up and offered me a cigarette from the packet of Risk he still held in his podgy hand.

Grushko crossed himself and then sighed.

‘Mikhail Mikhailovich,’ he said sadly. ‘That’s too bad.’

‘Did you know him?’ Shelaeva sounded surprised.

Grushko nodded and for a moment I thought he was going to cry. His upper lip inflated as he struggled to bring himself under control. He cleared his throat several times before answering her.

‘Ever since the Openness,’ he said, ‘when Mikhail first started writing about the Mafia. That was when the government still denied that such a thing as a Soviet Mafia even existed. You could say that my own department owes its very existence to Mikhail Milyukin.’ He sniffed loudly and then lit a cigarette with clumsy fingers. ‘He helped us with a number of cases. Got us started with a few of them, too.’

Shelaeva turned her own mouth into a tight, thin slit of disapproval.

‘I always thought him a bit of a troublemaker myself,’ she said crisply. ‘Well, then, here you are: he’s got you started on another case, hasn’t he? All you have to do is find out who sat behind him in this car, sometime between twelve and two this morning, and blew his brains out. But let’s not forget our small friend in the boot, shall we?’

She moved round to the back of the car, brushing past me as she came. Her tone had been so harsh and unsympathetic that I wasn’t at all surprised to discover that she was wearing the same scent as my ex-wife. Shelaeva elbowed the militia photographer out of the way and presented the contents of the car boot with an indifferent wave of her rubber-gloved hand.

By contrast with the man in the passenger seat, the occupant of the Volga’s boot could not have looked more dead. Bound hand and foot, and doubled up like the occupant of some ancient burial pit, it was difficult to say much about him save that he had been shot several times through a length of sticking plaster that covered his mouth.

Grushko sucked his cigarette as if reminding himself that he still had a mouth, tipped his head to one side the better to see the dead man’s face and then uttered what sounded like a grunt of affirmation. But it was Nikolai who offered the explanation.

‘Looks like Mafia morse code, sir,’ he said.

‘That is what it looks like,’ agreed Grushko. ‘Maintain radio silence.’

Sasha detached himself from our group and went over to speak to one of the militiamen. Having no particular taste for cadavers myself I was half inclined to join him, but then I was supposed to be gathering in these same small nuggets of Grushko’s esoteric knowledge, so stayed put.

‘Well,’ said Shelaeva, ‘I guess it’s details like that which made the State Prosecutor think this might be your case, Yevgeni Ivanovich.’

Grushko gave her a quizzical glance, no doubt wondering, as I was, if she had meant to be sarcastic or merely pedantic. I decided it was the latter.

She took up the position of an imaginary gunman, her arms extended in front of her as if she had been addressing a golf ball. It wasn’t a bad stance. And she had the build to be a hard-hitter.

‘Your gunman stood here when he fired his shots,’ she said. ‘I guess only his mother could have missed him.’

She dropped down on to her haunches and pointed out several cartridges that were lying on the ground and which were indicated by small paper flags.

‘He used an automatic, I’d say. Something heavy: 10 millimetre, or .45 calibre. And with a high-magazine capacity too, judging from the amount of brass he left behind him. It looks as if he was enjoying himself when he pulled the trigger.’

Grushko bent forward to inspect them. At the same time he picked up a small flat stone that he used to stub out his cigarette before carefully putting it away in his pocket so as not to litter the scene of the crime. Then he placed the stone back where he had found it.

‘That’s quite a lot of noise,’ he said and looked speculatively about him as if searching for a sign that someone might have heard the shots above the sound of the sea lapping on the shingle beach and the wind coursing through the fir trees.

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘But I don’t think he was in much of a hurry. He was smoking when he pulled the trigger. There was a cigarette end among all those empty cartridges.’

Shelaeva led us a short distance from the car, to where a trestle-table had been erected. The various pieces of evidence that were collected on it looked like a secondhand stall on the Arbat. She selected something in a plastic bag.

‘And it looks like he prefers American,’ she said.

‘Don’t we all,’ murmured Nikolai, regarding his own choice of smoke with distaste.

‘We found this on the back seat.’

Shelaeva handed Grushko the plastic bag containing the empty packet of Winston. He was about to return it to the table when Nikolai checked him.

‘Let’s see that,’ he said, taking the evidence bag from Grushko. ‘It’s been opened upside down.’

‘He’s a careless bastard,’ said Grushko. ‘What does that prove?’

‘Well, it could mean that he’s an ex-soldier.’

‘And how do you work that out?’

‘It’s an old army trick I learned in Afghanistan,’ he said, and glanced uncomfortably at Colonel Shelaeva.

‘So, what’s the trick?’ Grushko sighed impatiently.

‘If you open the cigarette packet the wrong way up, your dirty fingers don’t touch the filters — you know, the end you put in your mouth.’

‘You know, for the last twenty years, I’ve been wondering what those things were,’ said Grushko.

‘I never knew soldiers were so fastidious,’ said Shelaeva with raised eyebrows.

‘You do tend to be when there’s no lavatory paper about,’ said Nikolai, colouring.