Филип Керр - Dead Meat

She shook her head firmly.

‘We were quite happy, thank you,’ she repeated coolly. For a moment she was silent, and then she added: ‘You must understand, Mikhail was a very traditional kind of man. Perhaps you know how the poem goes on: “When feeling dictates your lines, you step out like a slave, to pace the stage, and here art stops, and earth and fate breathe in your face.” Mikhail set great store by fate, Colonel.’

‘Fate comes to us all,’ he murmured and then waved vaguely at the boxes of letters. ‘I shall have to borrow these for a while,’ he said. ‘As well as any diaries, notebooks, address-books and videotapes he may have kept. I don’t doubt that this death will be connected with something he had written or said.’

‘I suppose it can’t harm him now,’ said Nina Milyukin. ‘Yes. Take anything you want.’ She bent down to retrieve an Aeroflot bag from behind the sofa bed and handed it to Grushko.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘You can use this to carry it all in.’

We left her sitting in an armchair on the verge of some serious crying. Grushko closed the door carefully behind us as we made our way into the dilapidated hallway that led to the kitchen and bathroom that the Milyukins shared with the other people who lived in the apartment. A couple of bicycles and several pairs of skis rested against a damp-stained wall and beside these articles were standing an old gentleman, tall and silver-haired, with glasses and a Trotsky-style beard and moustache, and a woman wearing a blue silk headscarf, whom I took to be his wife. The old gentleman cleared his throat and addressed us respectfully.

‘We were very sorry to hear about Mr Milyukin, Comrade Colonel,’ he said and, noticing the question that rose in Grushko’s eyes, he shrugged apologetically. ‘The walls in this place — they’re not much better than cardboard.’

Grushko nodded sternly. ‘Tell me, Mr—?’

‘Poliakov. Rodion Romanovich Poliakov. And this is my wife, Avdotya Iosefovna.’

‘Have you noticed any strangers hanging round this building recently?’

‘We’ve lived in this apartment since Stalin’s time,’ replied the old gentleman. ‘A long time ago we realised that life is a lot safer if one never sees anything. Oh, I know things are a lot different these days, Comrade Colonel—’

‘Just Colonel,’ said Grushko. ‘You can forget the Comrade now.’

Poliakov nodded politely.

‘There was nothing unusual you noticed lately, Mr Poliakov?’

Before her husband could answer, Mrs Poliakov had spoken: ‘Mikhail Milyukin was stealing food from our fridge,’ she said bitterly. That’s what we noticed, Colonel.’

Grushko raised his eyebrows and sighed wearily. This was trivial stuff. There was hardly anyone living in a communal apartment who did not sometimes have an argument about food with whomever they were sharing. I remembered once coming to blows with a fellow tenant about the ownership of a bottle of pickles.

‘Avdotya, please,’ scolded the old man. ‘What does that matter now? The man is dead. Try to show a little respect.’ His wife turned her head into his bony shoulder and began to weep. Poliakov took hold of his beard and, holding his chin close to his breast, he peered over the top of his glasses at Grushko.

‘I must apologise for my wife, Colonel,’ he said. ‘She’s not been well. If there’s anything I can do—?’

Grushko opened the heavily reinforced door.

‘Just keep an eye on Mrs Milyukin, will you?’

‘Yes, of course, Comrade Colonel.’

Grushko hesitated to correct him again.

‘If you do remember something,’ he said after a moment or two, ‘something important that is—’ he glanced meaningfully at Mrs Poliakov — ‘call me at the Big House on Liteiny Prospekt. That’s where you’ll usually find me. At least, that’s where my wife is sending my laundry these days.’

We went back down the evil-smelling stairs to the yard. Grushko tossed Milyukin’s Aeroflot bag into the car boot and shook his head with frustration.

‘You can’t teach these old dogs new tricks,’ I offered.

‘No, it’s not that,’ he said. ‘It’s Mrs Milyukin. How can she know so little about her husband’s affairs? Did she never hear him on the telephone? Did she never read something he left lying around their room?’

‘That’s not so hard to believe,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know that my wife was screwing my daughter’s music teacher. She’d been screwing him for two years and I hadn’t a clue. And me an investigator. You’d think I might have noticed something, wouldn’t you? But no. Not a bit of it. Bad enough to lose my wife. But it looked as if I’m not very good at my job, either. I mean, I ought to have been suspicious...’

‘So how did you find out?’

‘My daughter’s piano-playing,’ I said. ‘After two years of music lessons, you’d expect anyone to improve a little. But my daughter seemed to be playing as badly as when she started. Then I found out that she was having only one lesson a month and not the two I was paying for. The other lesson was for my wife. Imagine that. Paying someone to screw your wife.’ I allowed myself a smile. I was past being upset about it.

Grushko smiled back uncertainly.

‘Myself,’ he said, ‘I have absolutely no ear for music. But I can still recognise a false note when I hear one. And I tell you, there’s something about that woman.’

I recalled the picture on the pinboard, the large, almost flawless breasts, the curving belly and the squirrel’s tail of hair.

‘There certainly is.’

My own office was located in a building that adjoined the back of the Big House. To go from one to the other required that you walk along the street. Nothing to it in summer I thought, but I didn’t imagine that it would be much fun in the middle of winter. The entrance was on Kalayeva Street, where Grushko had parked his car. Kalayeva was one of those women who had helped to assassinate Tsar Alexander II in 1881. The Soviets called Kalayeva a heroine. These days we would have called her a terrorist.

Grushko led the way through an anonymous-looking door that gave on to a small seating area where, under the bored eye of a young militiaman, witnesses in a whole variety of cases waited to be examined on their statements by investigators. We showed our passes, easily recognisable in their cheap red plastic folders and went upstairs. The walls of the stairwell were being painted.

‘Why does it always have to be green?’ Grushko complained loudly. ‘Every public building I go in these days — someone’s painting it that awful bird-shit green. Why couldn’t we have something else, like red for instance?’

The painter took the cigarette out of her mouth slowly. Like most Russian workers she didn’t look as if she ever did anything quickly.

‘Red’s finished,’ she said. ‘Green is all there is.’

Grushko grunted and walked on.

‘If you’ve got a problem with that,’ she yelled after him, ‘then take it up with my supervisor. But don’t complain to me. I just work here.’

The curtains were drawn in the small shabby office that was to be mine, although they did little to hinder the passage of the sharp northern light. I took a look out of the window and decided to leave them the way they were. Weeks later I heard someone ascribe the drawn curtains to my sensitive eyes — a not unreasonable hypothesis since I already wore tinted glasses — but really it was only because I preferred not to have to stare out of a window that hadn’t been cleaned in ten years.

‘Mikoyan’s the chief of the State Investigating Agency in Peter,’ Grushko explained. ‘Only he won’t be here to welcome you.’ His short snout wrinkled with disapproval. ‘Right now he’s in Moscow, explaining his part in last summer’s coup. I could be wrong, but I don’t think he’ll be back. So until a new chief is appointed you should report straight to Kornilov. But if you need anything—’ he looked around the office and shrugged — ‘apart from anything that costs money that is, then just pick up the phone and speak to me.’ He waved his hand at the battery of telephones that sat on my desk like the keys of a typewriter.