We went through a set of swing doors and were met with a strong smell of formaldehyde and a traffic jam of trolleys, each of them bearing a naked body for autopsy. Even in death, most of them through old age or accident, Russians were still obliged to wait in line.
The professor stopped by a door and opened it. Colonel Shelaeva stood up, collected her papers and joined us in that dreadful corridor.
What took you so long?' she said to Grushko.
We were at Mikhail Milyukin's funeral,' he said.
All of you?' she said frowning. For that troublemaker?'
Grushko nodded.
Shelaeva shook her head, offended by this waste of manpower. Professor Derzhavin spoke quickly as if to defuse a potential disagreement.
We're in the blue section-room,' he said. If you'll come this way?'
We proceeded down the corridor, through a gauntlet of dead bodies.
And what mood is blue?' said Grushko.
Efficient and businesslike.'
Grushko explained to me that Professor Derzhavin had ordered the morgue's builders to tile each section-room in a different colour, so that the staff working there might be spared any further lowering of their spirits that could have been occasioned by something more homogeneous.
There were two section tables. On one of them a beautiful young woman was being cut open, her body a yellow coat half-stripped off the meaty skeleton that had worn it. Derzhavin's staff worked loudly, like workers in a meat-processing factory, habituated to what they were doing, wielding knives and handling viscera, with rubberised bloody fingers staining the butts of their blasAc cigarettes.
At the other table, the table that we gathered round like a group of black priests performing a service of communion, lay a naked man of about forty-five years old, his upper torso still positioned on the dissecting block, his arms outstretched as if he had fallen from the ceiling. That which was never meant to be seen intestines, lights and brain had been bundled back inside his stomach, and the body crudely stitched up like a piece of Red Indian buckskin.
Derzhavin had not exaggerated the man's facial injuries. One of his ears was missing while the cheek and the underside of his chin were cratered with coin-sized wounds.
He's not yet been identified,' said Colonel Shelaeva. There was nothing but air in his pockets.' She opened a file and handed Grushko a photograph. But I think we can agree that it's not Sultan Khadziyev.'
Grushko nodded silently.
Still, I asked you to come here because it seems that your hygiene-conscious smoker was on the scene.' She shot Nikolai a meaningful look and then showed us a plastic bag containing another soft-pack of Winston that had been opened upside down.
They found this near the body,' she said.
I lit a cigarette that helped to keep my nose, my mind and most importantly my stomach off the smell.
Cause of death?'
He was shot once through the head,' said Professor Derzhavin. At first I thought it was another animal bite. But if you look at the centre of his forehead you can see the bullet hole. Whoever shot him pressed the gun right up against the skull. The muzzle has pinned the force of discharge on to the scalp, splitting the entry wound. An executioner's shot.'
It's too early to say that it's the same gun,' said Shelaeva, but I shouldn't be at all surprised if it was.'
Any idea when he died?'
About a week ago,' said the professor. Perhaps a little longer. It's difficult to be more precise than that. Not with all the sunbathing he's been doing.'
A week or a little longer,' Grushko said ruminatively. Then he could have been dead before Milyukin?'
Yes, I'd say so.'
What about those triangular marks on the chest and the stomach?'
Burn marks, inflicted before death,' said Derzhavin.
Inflicted with an electric iron,' Shelaeva added.
The Mafia meat-tenderiser,' murmured Nikolai.
Just so,' said Grushko. I wonder what they wanted to know?' He lifted the dead man's hand. What's this, under his fingernails?'
Diesel oil,' said Shelaeva. There's more on his clothes and his boots.'
She drew a cardboard box across the floor and pointed inside. Grushko bent forward and picked out one of the dead man's boots. He looked into the boot and frowned as he tried to make out the name of the manufacturer.
Lenwest,' he said finally.
Perhaps he was a mechanic, sir,' suggested Nikolai.
Grushko nodded silently, turning the boot over in his hands as if it were some fossil recovered from a palaeontologist's dig.
Or a driver, maybe,' he said. Take a look at the wear on this boot. It's heavily worn on the right heel. That could be from repeatedly pressing an accelerator.'
A bus-driver?'
Could be. Or a truck-driver.'
I'll have a better idea for you when we've had a chance to analyse that oil,' said Shelaeva.
Oh, one more thing,' said Professor Derzhavin. He turned to one of his staff and called her over.
Anna, that liver, could you do the honours?'
The girl Anna was a small, red-haired creature who looked hardly old enough to vote, let alone dissect a human cadaver. She produced a bucket from underneath the table and removed a glutinous black-red hunk that she then lay on the slab by the dead man's feet.
It's pretty enlarged,' said the professor, so I thought he might be a heavy drinker. But I thought we'd wait for you before we made sure.'
The girl produced a scalpel and prepared to slice the liver in two.
When she cuts the liver open, I want you to get a sniff of it.' We leant towards the liver. All right, Anna.'
As the scalpel moved perfectly through the dead man's organ, the air was filled with such a stench of stale alcohol that I thought I would choke. We reeled back from the table, coughing and laughing disgustedly.
Well I don't think there can be any doubt about that,' chuckled the professor. But what is curious is that he seems to have been a vegetarian.'
Yes, that is unusual,' agreed Grushko.
Oh I don't know,' said Nikolai. Have you seen the price of meat lately?'
Sasha groaned as one of the staff working on the girl's body opposite began to remove the top of her skull with an electric saw.
I don't think I'll ever eat meat again,' he muttered weakly.
Nikolai had asked Chazov to come and see him at the Big House again, only on this occasion he had chosen a time more inconvenient to the restaurateur, in the early evening, when he would normally have been preparing to open for dinner.
I left the two of them arguing, to deal with the investigation of the Kazakh gang that had now been arrested for the robberies of the Jewish emigrants and, in particular, the Goose.
The Goose was a big man with a shaven head and a long, scrawny neck and it was easy to see how he had come by his nickname. Although he could speak Russian fluently I asked him if he wished to have the services of an interpreter. The man shrugged and shook his head. Then I read him the rules of his interrogation as laid down in Article 51.
You have the right to remain silent,' I told him. You have the right to an advocate. You have the right to appeal to the State Prosecutor and say why you have been wrongly arrested. You may add something to this protocol if you wish to do so.'
The Goose knew that the two arresting detectives had obtained plenty of evidence to convict him and he was an old enough hand at the game to exercise his right to silence. He signed the protocol and then they took him back to his cell. At some later date I would have to reacquaint him of the charges pending against him in the presence of his lawyer.
After this my wife telephoned to say that the gasket for my car had arrived and when would I be coming back to Moscow to repair it and drive it away? I told her, in a few days. I wanted to tell her I missed her, but something stopped the words in my mouth. Maybe because it wasn't true. I missed my own bed, my television set, my fishing rods, my books and having my meals cooked for me, I even missed my daughter. But her? No way.