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, Madonnaanything. 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.
I wondered how much the UFO story was likely to raise. The pictures had been a shrewd addition: they would probably double the price. I began to like the director. He didn't care what people thought of him just so long as it brought in the money to improve the facilities for his cadets. At the same time I saw how the success of his UFO story depended on his never admitting the truth to anyone. The man wasn't corrupt, he was a genius. He ought to have been put in charge of the entire militia budget. He could probably have dreamed up a way of doubling that too.
In the new canteen nearly three hundred cadets were already seated at their refectory tables. Like their senior officers and the dinner-ladies they were awaiting the arrival of the black priest. With any Russian ceremony there is always a lot of waiting around. Grushko and I followed the director into the centre of the room and then suddenly, as if by magic, the priest and his acolyte were among us.
The priest was a young man of about thirty who stood a head taller than anyone else in the canteen so that his sharp blue eyes seemed to be on everyone. He was bearded and, as was traditional, he wore his hair long and tied in a tail behind his head. He was clothed in a voluminous black cassock with wide mandarin sleeves, a long white silk-brocade tippet, and a large cross on a silver chain. Handsome, and younger than most of the priests I had ever seen, he was also a dead ringer for Rasputin. His acolyte was altogether less distinguished, being younger, fatter, clean-shaven and rather sleepy-looking, as if he had just rolled out of a warm, greasy bed.