The time appointed for Grushko’s meeting came and went and still Sultan did not appear. With a hunter’s patience Grushko hardly moved on the bridge and only the occasional flare of a match lighting another cigarette signalled his continuing vigilance. It was past one o’clock when the car telephone rang. As I answered it I could see that Grushko had heard it too. He straightened stiffly and then walked slowly back towards the car.

  ‘Sultan won’t be coming,’ said Nikolai.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He’s been shot. Get across to the Titan Cinema on Nevsky. I’ll see you both outside.’

  When I relayed the message to Grushko he spat and took out his gun. For a brief second I thought that the death of his prime suspect was going to result in my own murder as well. However he merely removed the magazine and then worked the slide to eject the live round. He thumbed the bullet back into the magazine which he then replaced inside the grip. Grushko was quite fastidious where gun safety was concerned.

  He drove us silently back up Griboyedev and on to Nevsky, slowing as we came across the Anichkov Bridge with its distinctive rearing bronze horses, and saw the blue flashing lights ahead of us. We pulled up and as we walked through the police line holding back the small crowd of onlookers which had gathered, I spotted Georgi Zverkov and a film crew. He shouted something after Grushko and was ignored.

  Surrounding a red Zhiguli was a group of the Central Board’s scientific experts. Two of them were holding a tape-measure through the driver’s window and measuring the distance between two imaginary points: the gun which had been fired and the head it had been aimed at. This was Militia Section 59’s precinct and Lieutenant Khodyrev was on hand to provide a first report of what had happened.

  ‘Three shots in the face, point blank,’ she said, ‘fired from another stationary vehicle. We’ve got a witness who claims he saw the whole thing.’

  She turned and pointed to a small boy who was standing nervously between two militiamen.

  Grushko waited until the two officers were finished with their tape-measure and then ducked through the car’s open window. When he had seen all he wanted to see I took a look myself.

  Sultan Khadziyev lay across the gearstick, his face hardly distinguishable from the blood-soaked passenger seat. The passenger door was open and one of the experts was carefully searching the floor and door upholstery for stray bullets.

  I stood up, saw that Nikolai had arrived on the scene, and then looked around for Grushko. He was squatting down in front of the boy.

  ‘What’s your name, son?’ I heard him ask.

  The boy looked across Grushko’s shoulder like a hungry dog. He was wearing a dirty denim jacket and a polo-neck sweater that was several sizes too big for him. He rubbed his short-cropped, almost bald head and then his dark-shadowed eyes. I guessed him no more than twelve years old. He smelled worse than a mangy dog.

  ‘Come on,’ said one of the militiamen gruffly. ‘You don’t want us to send you to an institution, do you?’

  ‘Hey, hey,’ said Grushko, ‘that’s my star-witness you’ve got there.’

  Grushko took out his cigarettes and offered the boy one. He took it, dipped the end on Grushko’s gold lighter and puffed it expertly.

  ‘Rodya,’ he said finally. ‘Rodya Gutionov.’

  ‘Well, Rodya,’ said Grushko. ‘You’re a brave fellow. Most boys of your age would have run away when they saw what you saw.’

  The boy shrugged modestly. ‘Me? I wasn’t scared,’ he bragged.

  ‘Of course you weren’t,’ said Grushko. ‘So, what did you see?’ He tucked the rest of his cigarettes into the pocket of the boy’s greasy jacket.

  ‘The man who got shot had just pulled up at the traffic lights,’ said Rodya, ‘when, a few seconds later, this other car pulls up alongside him. The passenger in the front seat leaned out with a chalk and waved it, like he was after a light. So the other man, the one who got shot, winds down his window and is handing over some matches when the other man —the one with the cigarette, grabs him by the arm and starts shooting.’ He shook his head excitedly and mimed the action of the gunman. ‘Bam-bam-bam —just like that. I never heard such a noise. Well, then they drove off, fast. The car went up Nevsky a bit, towards the Admiralty building and then did a U-turn, tyres squealing like it was something out of a movie.’

  ‘What kind of car was this, Rodya?’

  ‘Zhiguli. Beige colour. Local plate.’

  ‘And how many men were in it?’

  Three. But I think the one in the back was a woman.‘ He shook his head. ’I couldn’t be sure, because the other car was in the way. And when they started shooting I was trying to keep my head down in the doorway there.‘

  He pointed at the cinema entrance. The film was some old historical epic of the early sixties starring Anthony Quinn. His was a face not unlike Grushko’s own.

  ‘You did the right thing,’ said Grushko. ‘Tell me, Rodya, where do you live?’

  ‘Block 1, 77 Pushkinskaya Street,’ replied the boy. ‘Flat 25.’

  ‘You’re out a bit late, aren’t you?’

  The boy looked down at his filthy trainers. ‘My father’s on leave from the navy,’ he said. ‘When he’s on leave he likes to get drunk. And then he hits me. So I make myself scarce.’

  Grushko nodded. It sounded plausible. Pushkinskaya Street was only a few blocks away. The drunken father was a common enough feature in a Russian home. With mine it had been my mother.

  ‘All right, Rodya, you can go. But be careful.’

  The boy grinned and walked carefully away.

  ‘The lying little scrap,’ Grushko muttered. ‘Escaped from an institution more like, if that haircut is anything to go by.’

  ‘So why are you letting him go?’ I asked.

  ‘Because I’ve been in a few of these places and I wouldn’t keep an animal in them. You might better ask why he risked being sent back to an institution to speak to us.’ He chuckled as he answered his own question. ‘Bravado, I suppose. So he can brag to his mates about it, I wouldn’t wonder.’

  Grushko turned and went round the far side of the car to inspect the contents of the dead man’s pockets that had been laid out on a plastic carrier bag. He picked up Sultan’s revolver.

  ‘Milyukin was shot with an automatic,’ he said, and flipped open the gun’s cartridge chamber to inspect the barrel. ‘Not that this would have shot anyone. It’s a replica.’

  Nikolai was examining a packet of Kosmos cigarettes.

  ‘Russian chalks,’ he said and lifted one of the filter ends clear of the foil wrapping. ‘And opened from the right end of the packet.’

  Grushko unfolded Sultan’s wallet. He tossed a wad of dollars on to the carrier bag, then some food coupons, a condom, a railway warrant and a cutting from Novy Mir about Milyukin’s death. One thing seemed to interest him. It was a small piece of paper with an official-looking rubber-stamp on it.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ he said quietly.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Sultan’s alibi,’ said Grushko. ‘I imagine this is what he wanted to talk to me about. It’s a release form, from the Petrogradsky Region Militia. According to this piece of paper, Sultan Khadziyev spent the night of Mikhail Milyukin’s murder drunk in the local LTP. That was why he felt so confident about meeting me. If this is genuine and he did spend that night in the drying-out tank, then he would have been in the clear.’

  Grushko handed Nikolai the document.

  ‘You’d best check this out in the morning,’ he said. ‘Just to make sure.’

  He sighed and stared up at the purpling sky. It would soon be dark, if only for about fifty minutes.

  ‘And that is that.’

  ‘So why buy him a ticket upstairs?’ said Nikolai.

  ‘The Georgians put two and two together and made five,’ said Grushko. ‘Just like we did.’ He shrugged. ‘Or that’s what they want us to think. Either way we’re back where we started.’

  ‘Still want us to pick the Georgians up tomorrow?’

  Grushko looked at his watch. ‘You mean today, don’t you?’ he murmured wearily. ‘Yes, I do. More than ever.’

  ‘There is some good news, sir,’ announced Lieutenant Khodyrev.

  ‘Well, don’t make us beg for it,’ said Grushko.

  ‘We’ve found your burglar. One of my men picked him up this evening. At Autovo Market. He was trying to sell Mr Milyukin’s Golden Calf.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘His name is Valentin Bogomolov,’ she replied. ‘He’s a juvenile offender, lives with his parents in the same building as Milyukin.’

  Grushko nodded appreciatively at her. ‘Well done, Lieutenant,’ he said. ‘And Lieutenant?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Sorry… sorry for biting your head off like that. It’s been a long day.’

  ‘That’s all right, sir.’

  ‘First thing in the morning, Nikolai, I want you and the lieutenant here to interview him.’

  ‘What about the Georgians, sir?’

  ‘You can leave them to Sasha and the OMON squad boys. I want to hear this little punk singing before lunchtime. Got that?’

  ‘Sir.’

  By now Zverkov and his crew had succeeded in getting past the militia line. The cameraman was as close to Sultan’s dead body as his lens permitted. Zverkov stood beside him describing the scene into the microphone he was holding. There was a bright, intense sort of look on his face and he was grinning wildly, as if he was excited by what he saw. He reminded me of the small runaway boy, Rodya, who was still hovering near the scene. Once again Zverkov called out to Grushko and followed us as we walked back to the car.

  ‘Colonel Grushko? Can you tell us what happened here please? For St Petersburg Television.’ Zverkov covered the microphone. ‘Come on, Grushko. You’re not going to sulk about what happened the other night, are you? I was just doing my job. Same as now. Trying to find out what happened here. Was it a Mafia killing?’

  Grushko stopped and looked at Zverkov with undisguised loathing. His lip wrinkled and for a second I thought he would punch the man. Instead he nodded towards the car and Sultan’s body.

  ‘Why don’t you ask him?’ he said.

  14

  The OMON squad was a special-purpose unit, a sort of militia-commando outfit. They wore military-style uniforms with helmets, blue flak jackets and carried machine pistols and AK47s. While awaiting the order to move they sat in a large room in the Big House and watched an Arnold Schwarzenegger video, their weapons cradled in their strong arms like schoolboys emulating their screen hero. The film, Predator, was in English, but only the action seemed to matter. Most of the squad’s members were in their twenties. Good-humoured and slightly nervous, they seemed more like a team of footballers trying to relax a little before a big match than a dedicated group of police gunmen. But there was nothing sporting about the way they tackled criminals and it was rare that anyone was inclined to offer these ruthless young men more than a token resistance.

  Grushko put his head round the door and spoke to a man with a moustache who was smoking a cigarette and seemed less interested in the film than the others.

  ‘Pavel Pavlovich,’ he said, ‘a word, if you please.’

  Lieutenant Pavel Pavlovich Khlobuyev, who was the unit’s commander, stubbed out his cigarette and followed Grushko into the corridor.

  ‘Have you got a Georgi Rodionov in your squad, Pavel?’ Grushko asked him.

  ‘Not any more. He took a bullet in the leg about a year ago. D’you remember? It was when we hit Kumarin and his gang.’

  Grushko nodded vaguely.

  ‘Anyway, he was invalided out of OMON. He’s now a firearms instructor at the Police Training Centre in Pushkin. Best shot with a handgun I ever saw.’

  ‘Do you think he’s the sort who might handle a little private security work?’

  Khlobuyev turned and looked back into the room. His men cheered as Arnie let rip with a heavy machine-gun.

  ‘Sir, half my squad is doing some kind of moonlighting.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s a fact of life, salaries being what they are. At 225 roubles a month I wouldn’t blame any of them if they were male models during their off-duty periods. The man you mentioned, Rodionov, do you know how much his compensation was when he got shot? Nothing. Nothing at all.’

  ‘Like I always say,’ said Grushko. ‘There’s nothing more expensive than a cheap police force.’

  I met Grushko on the stair, under the watchful eye of Iron Felix.

  ‘Have you seen Pushkin yet?’ he asked.

  I told him I hadn’t.

  ‘You Muscovites,’ he said, shaking his head with pity. ‘You’ve got nothing to compare with it. I’ll show you the Catherine Palace on the way to the Police Academy.’

  He explained about Georgi Rodionov when we were in the car.

  ‘Does he know we’re coming?’

  ‘God, no,’ said Grushko. ‘It’ll be a nice surprise for him, eh?’ He chuckled sadistically.

  Pushkin is about twenty-five kilometres south of St Petersburg and so named, since 1937, after the famous poet. For Stalin the best poets were always the ones who had been dead for a century. It was a quiet, leafy little place with some beautiful parks and not one but two royal palaces.

  The Pushkin Police Academy stood only a short way east of the Catherine Palace and yet it would have been hard to have found two more contrasting buildings in the whole of Russia: the palace with its 300-metre-long facade of blue and white stucco, its gold cupolas and its gilded wrought-iron gates; and the crumbling brown brick of the Academy, with its potholed courtyard, its leaking roof and its peeling paintwork.

  I was no Communist, but you didn’t have to be Lenin to see that a dynasty that could have built such palaces for themselves while peasants went hungry was headed for serious trouble. Yet I was glad that such places still existed: without these magnificent reminders of our former glories it would have been hard to see ourselves as anything but a third-world banana republic. With an acute shortage of bananas.

  The Director of the Academy was a big ox of a man with a full, dark moustache you could have steered a motorcycle with. He had a friendly smile of the kind that is supposed to be lucky and, I was soon to suspect, a nose for making money that smelt in his Academy as many business opportunities as there were gaps between his teeth.

  His office was big and gloomy, unremarkably Soviet in every way save only for the strange pictures that hung on the yellowing walls; when the telephone rang, I took a closer look at them.

  Although they were expensively framed, none of the oil-pastel drawings looked particularly well rendered. But then lack of talent never stopped anyone from making a living as an artist in Russia. At the same time, what had been drawn was easily recognisable, even familiar, to anyone who has seen a science-fiction comic. There were four pictures in all and they formed a sequence that told the story of a man driving a car at night whose journey was interrupted by the arrival of an alien spaceship and who was engaged in conversation by one of these strange beings prior to being taken away in the flying saucer on a day-trip to a strange planet. UFOs were a common enough interest among people: UFOs, faith-healers, spiritualism, Nostradamus, pyramid power and Satanism. When it was a matter of believing in the impossible we are a most credulous people. Maybe that’s not such a surprise. After all, we have had more than seventy years of practice.

  I turned and found Grushko standing at my shoulder. He nodded with polite appreciation as the director replaced the telephone.

  ‘You’ve certainly picked a busy day to come and see us,’ said the director. ‘After the local priest has finished blessing our new canteen, the newspapers are coming here to photograph those pictures and to interview me about my UFO experience.’

  I felt my jaw slacken with surprise.

  ‘I imagine that’s where we’ll find Georgi Rodionov,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ I heard myself say. ‘In a UFO?’

  The director chuckled. ‘No, in the canteen. You’ll stay to lunch, of course?’

  ‘Well —’ Grushko glanced at his watch.

  ‘But I insist. Our canteen is excellent. You won’t find a better one. Not anywhere. To be honest, we put a lot of cooperative restaurants to shame. You and Georgi can have your little chat in the officers’ dining-room.’

  Grushko was still too surprised to disagree with him.

  ‘Er, fine,’ he said, and we followed the director into the corridor.

  ‘He’s not in any trouble, I hope. Georgi’s a good man. Best weapons instructor I’ve ever had.’

  We hurried by some women who were busy replastering a wall.

  ‘We just want to ask him a few questions,’ said Grushko. ‘About an old inquiry.’

  The director stopped abruptly and flung open a door. Several cadets looked up from the gym equipment they were exercising on.

  ‘Carry on,’ he yelled at them. Then he looked at the two of us and grinned. ‘What do you think? I got a couple of metal workers to copy some American Nautilus equipment. Otherwise we could never have afforded a gym like this. In the evening this place is a health and fitness club for the local community. Leastways for those who are prepared to pay the membership fee. All the money is ploughed back into the Academy. Not bad, eh?’

  Grushko and I conceded that he had done well. The director was starting to interest me in a way I had not expected.

  We moved on down the corridor and once again he stopped and flung open another door. This time it was a large lecture theatre with a cinema screen.

  ‘At the weekend,’ he said without any sign of embarrassment, ‘this is the town cinema. Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Madonna—anything. For just two roubles a head.’

  ‘You seem to have thought of everything,’ I said.

  To run a place like this, you have to be a good businessman. The new canteen cost 50,000 roubles. The money has to come from somewhere. It certainly doesn’t come from the Ministry.‘ He laughed bitterly. ’You find it any way you know how. And it’s lucky I know how.‘

 

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