(1993) Dead Meat by Philip Kerr

Author:Philip Kerr [Kerr, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: crime, USSR
ISBN: 9780385254663
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 1994-07-31T22:00:00+00:00

13

Grushko lived modestly, I thought. Too modestly, it seemed, for someone who could have been having his paw stroked. The colour television set was an old one, but not as old as the record-player. There were more books than I had expected, although many of them were medical textbooks. The sofa and armchairs were made of plastic-vinyl and in need of re-springing, while the linoleum in the tiny hallway was worn in places. About the only thing that looked new was a radio-cassette player in the kitchen and a rather gaudy set of wine-glasses that still had the labels on their bases. Of course Grushko might have been the type who was patient spending any corruptly received money. Maybe he was hoarding dollar bills underneath his mattress for a holiday abroad or, police pensions being as miserable as they were, for the day when he retired. I wondered how I might get a chance to go in his bedroom and make a quick search.

But he had not exaggerated his wife’s abilities in the kitchen. We ate a delicious cabbage soup, followed by some deep-fried cheese with mushrooms and potatoes and then a scoop of icecream. We drank some of Grushko’s home-made whisky, which was a lot stronger than it seemed, a discovery I was only to make the following morning.

With the exception of Tanya, Grushko’s daughter, they were a fairly typical family: the old mother who drank just a little too much of the Georgian wine I brought with me; her daughter Lena, small and neatly dressed, who ate less so that her guest could eat more and who seemed hardly old enough to have a twenty-four-year-old daughter of her own; and Grushko himself, whose strength of character and obvious authority counted for nothing in this, the most matriarchal of Russian institutions, for Lena ran the home and he knew it.

Tanya was a different flock of sheep: young, beautiful and intelligent, she looked like one of those people who can travel—more like a musician or a ballet dancer than a doctor at the Vreden Casualty Institute. Of course the fact that she was so well-groomed I learned was due not at all to Grushko but to her boyfriend, Boris, who seemed to have unlimited access to foreign goods, or so Grushko told me later. She was also a rather capricious young woman, for I can think of no other explanation to account for why she should have chosen the occasion of my being there to announce that she and Boris were planning to get married. Unless it was simply that she knew Grushko was less likely to lose his temper about it with me being there. Or perhaps it was some sort of revenge for all the times he must have embarrassed her with his obvious dislike of Boris. Neither one of the explanations appeared to me to be particularly satisfactory. But then I am a lawyer.

On hearing the news, Lena Grushko and her old mother seemed delighted. But it was all Grushko could do not to take a bite out of his table mat.

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