City of Ghosts

by Ben Creed

  ‘Varvara, now you say that’s your name?’ Grachev said, turning back to the girl.

  ‘Yes.’

  She looked uncertain about Rossel’s arrival.

  The tip of Sergeant Grachev’s tongue was now sticking out of his customarily surly mouth and pressing against his top lip. His brown eyes were locked on her face. He was wearing what one of the junior officers had once called his ‘pussy-licking face’.

  ‘Not Valentina?’ sneered Grachev.

  ‘No, like I told you before, no.’

  ‘It’s just that, when they brought you in, they said Valentina.’

  ‘I slurred my words, that’s all. I have to take a little vodka to keep out the cold.’

  ‘Keeping out the cold, that’s what you were doing, is it? When my officers found you sucking khui in an old workmen’s hut behind the Hippodrome?’

  ‘No, no, I like to drink, that’s all,’ said the girl.

  She leaned forward and smiled coyly at Rossel.

  ‘Perhaps, would it be possible, officers, to request a little vodka? It’s not been a good night for me, after all.’

  Grachev opened a table drawer and took out a small bottle of spirit of unknown origin, but probably brewed in a sink in the sergeants’ communal apartment. He stood it next to him on the table and half unscrewed the lid. The girl looked at it and smiled. Grachev moved it back a little on the table.

  ‘Ah, ah, princess. First a little information.’

  ‘All right. Yes, it’s true, I do offer the odd cuddle for a kopek every now and then. Times are hard. For me they have always been hard.’

  Oh, for Lenin’s sake – this was a waste of time. They had work to do. Rossel would order Grachev back to his desk and get someone else to charge this girl for hooliganism or offending Soviet morality.

  Grachev retightened the cap.

  ‘Not about you, bitch. Sluts aren’t worth investigation, since everyone knows exactly what it is that sluts do. About this customer of yours, Comrade Zhevtun?’

  Zhevtun? That was different.

  Rossel opened up the manila file in front of him and read out the full name of the suspect.

  ‘Zhevtun, Dmitri Viktorovich. Wanted for profiteering, illegal import and various other black-market activities.’

  ‘Never heard of him,’ said the girl.

  Rossel stepped forward to a position where he could see both their faces.

  ‘That is who she was with, Sergeant?’

  Grachev scowled. ‘That’s why his file is there, isn’t it?’

  ‘We didn’t have much time for introductions,’ the girl said.

  ‘Comrade Zhevtun is someone we’ve been interested in for a while,’ Rossel told her. ‘He is a known black-marketeer.’

  Zhevtun was being pursued as a part of a recent crackdown on those who ‘persistently refused socially useful work and led a parasitical way of life’. Only a few months ago, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet had issued a decree against them, promising ‘five-year sentences of exile to special settlements in remote regions’ for anyone arrested for begging, prostitution and racketeering. The decree had thinned out the ranks of the city’s beggars – mostly army veterans trying to scrape a few kopeks together for vodka – who made a nuisance of themselves on public transport, in shops, parks and bathhouses. And also dragged in a few prostitutes, like the girl. But the bigger fish, professional criminals like Zhevtun, were harder to pin down.

  ‘Not me. I only met him tonight.’

  Grachev sighed and got up from his chair. He walked slowly around the desk and then leaned in close, so the girl could smell his foul breath.

  ‘Stop fucking with us, you little piss hole.’

  She moved her cheek slightly to the left, showing the darkening bruise, and raised a disdainful eyebrow.

  ‘All right, I met him a few more times than that, always in the same place, near the Hippodrome. What’s he done, anyway? Why are you all so hot for him? It can’t just be for flogging a few packs of silk stockings to the wives of the Party nobs coming out of the shops on Nevsky.’

  Grachev sat back down. He patted his fat stomach with one hand and with the other rubbed the dirty nail of his index finger over two words of despairing graffiti some long-forgotten prisoner had carved into the desk. ‘Pomogite mnye’, it said. Help Me. Rossel noticed the brown stain of the wood varnish was worn a little there. The girl was playing with fire.

  Grachev grinned, showing a decaying row of grey teeth.

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘You can think it over in the cell with the Hound.’

  ‘The Hound?’

  Rossel rolled his eyes. But perhaps it was the quickest way.

  ‘I think he’s downstairs in his favourite cell, the one with the dead rat in it next to the shithouse,’ Grachev went on. ‘Yes, slut, we have deeper cells than this. For the real crazies.’

  The girl’s eyes flickered towards Rossel but he kept his face blank. She shifted in her seat. The sergeant’s nail began another rhythmic scratching at the graffiti carved into the desk.

  ‘Sad, sad story,’ he said. ‘Biology professor he was, a brilliant man by all accounts. Some unfortunate views, however, so the authorities wouldn’t evacuate him with the rest of those spineless State University intellectuals during the siege. Left him here to eat communal sawdust with the shop girls, street cleaners and cops like us. He managed not so bad for a while. But when his dog died – well, you know what these brainboxes are like when their heads get all fucked up. In my experience the craziest are the ones who suffer from a little too much imagination. I saw a 51st Army captain at Stalingrad, he took out one of his eyeballs with the tip of his own bayonet, told me his eyes had seen more than his soul could bear.’

  The girl’s bravura was subsiding. Her eyes flicked between the bottle of vodka and the two police officers.

  ‘This professor, his dog died?’

  Grachev picked up the vodka bottle and slipped it into his coat pocket.

  ‘A poodle called Pushkin. His pride and joy. The reactionary scum had even managed to get it a separate ration card from some other faggot he knew in the Ministry of Production. Can you believe that? All his fellow citizens are cradling their bloated empty bellies, every other dog in Leningrad has long since been sautéed, along with all the cats, rats and stray fucking children, and this bastard is feeding his precious poodle cold cuts.’

  The girl put a hand to her mouth and, just for a second, gnawed absent-mindedly at her palm.

  ‘Bastard,’ she agreed. ‘My mother died in the siege. And my nephew.’

  Grachev thrust his face into hers.

  ‘Someone found out,’ he spat. ‘Broiled the mutt up. And shared it with him in a pan of broth. That’s when it started.’

  ‘It?’

  ‘The barking.’

  The girl blinked at them.

  ‘Barking?’

  ‘And the howling,’ added Grachev, sitting back. ‘And, on occasions when the moon is full, the biting. Do you believe in ghosts, princess? I think the Hound does.’

  It was amazing how superstitious people still were, Rossel thought. Thirty-four years since the revolution, thirty-four years of Marxist-Leninist education and atheist indoctrination, and you still found people believing in house elves, forest spirits and magic.

  This was Grachev’s favourite part. He sat bolt upright, threw back his shoulders and began to howl.

  The girl watched him, mesmerised. She pulled her cheap red coat tight across her chest and did up two of the buttons.

  Grachev stopped howling and smiled at her.

  ‘Never recovered, did the Hound. Not once the fucking fruitcake realised he’d supped on the bones of his beloved little Pushkin. These days he likes to take a dump in flower beds, piss on trees and howls like the mother of a true martyr of the revolution every time he spots another poodle in the park.’

  ‘The Florist,’ said the girl. ‘My friend, Natasha, says this Zhevtun sometimes works for a man that he calls t
he Florist. Some sort of high-up, a Party bigwig. She went to a party with him once at a posh dacha out near Lake Ladoga. He told her this Florist had arranged it.’

  ‘How high up?’ asked Rossel.

  ‘Very, is all she said.’

  ‘What sort of work?’

  The girl shrugged. ‘That’s all I know, honest. I won’t have to go down there now, with him, will I, the dog man?’

  Rossel picked his militia cap up off the table and stared back down at her.

  Worked every time, that stupid story.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ he said.

  *

  They left the girl to stew.

  ‘Give me ten minutes alone with her and I’ll have all the information about this Florist we want,’ said Grachev. ‘She’s holding something back.’

  There was a leak in the foundations – no one had attended to the merchant’s house for years – and they faced each other on either side of a slowly spreading puddle.

  ‘Thank you for your diligence, comrade, you are an example to us all. But no,’ said Rossel.

  Ten minutes alone with her? Did Grachev think he was stupid?

  Grachev’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘What’s she to you? She takes cock for a living.’

  ‘Then you can wait until you’re off duty and pay her, Sergeant,’ said Rossel, leaning forward so that Grachev would have to look up to meet his eye. ‘Although in so doing you will be guilty of compelling a woman to engage in prostitution, which as we both know carries a sentence of up to five years’ deprivation of freedom, with confiscation of some or all property. So, don’t let me catch you.’

  The Soviet project of moulding the tsarist-era police into a respected and efficient organ of justice had not yet been completed but Lieutenant Revol Rossel – a man who had been named in honour of the Bolshevik revolution – was damned if he was going to let men like Grachev rule the roost.

  Grachev marched off down the corridor and threw open the door to the stairs.

  ‘To hell with you, comrade,’ he said. ‘To hell with you.’

  *

  After another hour, Dr Volkova rang to say she wouldn’t be able to get to Vosstaniya Street until late evening, if at all. Another pathologist had been arrested three days earlier. Now she was one of two left in the whole city and their caseloads were backing up. There had been rumours of another doctors’ conspiracy to murder Party officials. Rossel had seen junior and senior officers stand to attention for no reason and declare, ‘These accursed intellectuals must be shown the full force of Soviet justice, without mercy.’ To which he had bitten back the reply: ‘As long as they keep their hands off our last few pathologists.’

  Taneyev and Grachev went home, a few hours beyond their usual night shift. Grachev handed in a few lines of scrappy notes from the crime scene, which told Rossel nothing his own memory could not. Taneyev had clipped his photos up to dry in the darkroom and left orders downstairs for them to be sent up once they were ready.

  It went very dark again, the fire crackled in the grate, consuming the last scraps of firewood, and the windows misted up. Nobody disturbed them. First Lipukhin drifted off. Rossel fought for as long as he could, his pen scratching across the paper, tracing the outlines of five torn bodies in macabre fancy dress.

  *

  Desperate to get to the samovar and make some tea, Rossel pushed through the communal kitchen of his apartment block – past women in aprons, their sleeves rolled up, addressing vast tureens of soup and buckwheat kasha or manically chopping piles of vegetables. The smell of cabbage, beetroot and onions, always present to some degree, was intense and pleasurable. Jars of pickled cucumbers and tomatoes, grown on dacha plots and preserved for the winter to guard against the inevitable shortages, lined the shelves. The swirling clouds of steam lent the scene the mirage-like atmosphere of a bathhouse.

  ‘Tatyana Borisovna, what is going on?’ he asked one of the cooks.

  The woman glanced up from the beef bones floating in a seething vat, keeping one eye on a small pan of frying chicken livers.

  ‘The deliveries were late again and everyone had to join the queues after work,’ she said, passing a wrist over her brow. ‘Long queues, too. We’ve all only just started. I’ll be here till midnight, I shouldn’t wonder. Making sure nothing gets wasted.’

  Weekends were always busy in the communal kitchen as Soviet womanhood – it was rare to see men labouring in there – attempted to create an entire week’s menus in advance. Mikoyan, the great quartermaster of the war and author of the country’s most popular recipe book, recommended the preparation of ten days’ worth. But now everyone was trying to do so at once. There was tension in the air, blending in with the assorted aromas.

  Rossel reached the samovar, found a stray glass and spooned in some tea leaves from a communal jar. He turned, leant against the counter and watched. The radio was on and he caught snatches of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade but the music was mostly drowned out by clanging metal, exchanges of culinary advice, and laughter.

  On the side of the room furthest away from him was a woman he didn’t recognise. Even before he saw her face, something in the way she carried herself told him she was attractive. Then she did turn, caught him staring, and pointedly turned away again.

  ‘Oy, Kira, your piroshki are the best,’ one of the women around the table complimented another. Rossel looked over at the mound of perfectly shaped pastries, filled with ersatz cheese or perhaps real vegetables. He needed a second supper all of a sudden. It was amazing what could be fashioned out of extremely limited resources.

  He sat down. Across the table was a growing pile of golubtsy, cabbage leaves stuffed with rice and a smattering of finely ground mince. Even though he had eaten plain meat patties and kasha at his usual stolovaya on the way home, he felt his saliva glands tingle.

  He stole another glance across the kitchen. She was wearing a light blue dress patterned with yellow flowers. Her hair was dark as night but in curlers. Like everyone else, she was simultaneously chopping, frying, boiling and tasting. With care, she tasted one of her concoctions and seemed dissatisfied but unsure how to improve it. Rossel wondered if she would welcome an outside opinion.

  A poke in the ribs. Rossel looked around into the freckled, grinning face of Lena, a teenager with whom he sometimes shared occasional late-night glasses of tea and – in her case – illegal cigarettes. Lena was seventeen years old, dark-haired, small and boyish with, once she got to know and like you, an engaging gap-toothed smile and the vocabulary of a drunken sailor. She was studying art history at the Repin Institute.

  ‘You’ve spotted her, then?’ Lena said.

  ‘Spotted who?’

  ‘Our new neighbour. She’s making a vegetable soup, meatballs and a potato salad. And since you’re such a skinny one, I think she’d . . .’

  ‘I’ve eaten.’ Rossel sipped his tea and tried not to stare at the blue dress.

  ‘I can find out if she’s married, if you like?’ said Lena with another poke in his ribs.

  ‘With such investigative instincts, there is definitely a place for you in the People’s Militia, Lena.’ Rossel tried to poke her back but she wriggled out of reach and shot off, seizing a morsel from the table as she went.

  He looked across the room, once more seeking out the stranger, staring through the steam and smoke whirling up from a dozen pots.

  But she had disappeared.

  5

  Sunday October 14

  The dead are more trustworthy than the living. They don’t inform on you, for a start.

  The treasonous nature of the thought unnerved him. What do you have to hide that the MGB needs to know, comrade? Everyone lived with that question burrowing into their minds. Keeping the answer unspoken was the thing that kept you safe. Until the day that Comrade Beria’s scientists figured out a way to plant a bug in a man’s mind and eavesdrop on his soul.

  Rossel sat on a metal chair in the middle of the morgue, waiting for
Dr Volkova. The pathologist had not turned up last night and was late again this morning. He sighed and glanced around the room, encircled by a silent quintet of cold corpses.

  It had been twelve hours since they discovered the bodies on the railway line. Six since he filed his preliminary report.

  And no phone call. No visit. Nothing.

  Militia headquarters had reported the unexplained mutilation and murder of five citizens, one possibly an agent of the MGB, Ministry of State Security, up the chain of command and nothing had happened. They were just being left to get on with this investigation unimpeded.

  Which could only mean one thing.

  There were many ways to buy a one-way ticket to a gulag: a drunken secret whispered to a lover at a party, an unexpected denouncement for black-market profiteering by a jealous rival at work, poor productivity levels on a tank factory assembly line which an ambitious political kommissar angling for promotion might decide to interpret as deliberate sabotage. Every week, every day, every hour, people disappeared for transgressions such as these.

  Rossel turned towards the half-skinned skull, with its badly dyed peroxide hair, which lay to his right. It was staring up at a fly that was crawling around a dead bulb in the metal ceiling lamp.

  Perhaps she was meant to be his ticket. Not just him. The whole station’s, probably. The blue-top they had discovered on the railway lines at Lake Ladoga felt like a trap. But if she was, he had no idea how the trap had been sprung.

  *

  Rossel looked up from the faceless body – eyes still resting in the sockets like two delicately poached egg whites – that lay on the mortuary slab and glanced at Dr Volkova.

  ‘Anything to report, Comrade Doctor?’ He tried to keep his voice steady to disguise his queasiness.

  Rossel had noticed Dr Volkova’s gaudy nail varnish before she pulled on her surgical gloves. She had red nails. Very red. She always did them like that. As though the pathologist occasionally came back to the morgue at midnight and dipped her buffed cuticles in fresh blood.