by Ben Creed
She stood on one side of the slab, Rossel on the other. In between them was Body Number Five, the fifth one in the line of the dead. The blue-top. The other four lay at the far end of the room.
The flesh of the woman’s thighs had thawed a little, giving her legs a more recognisable shape. Somehow, she looked a little more human, he thought – a little more feminine. Even though it was hours since they’d found her and her four companions on the railway line, the woman looked slightly better. As if, despite the unfortunate inconvenience of missing a face, being dead suited her.
‘Report to you, or to state security?’
‘To me first. Then, of course, I will relay your findings to the appropriate authorities.’
Dr Volkova had dark, well-cut hair that framed sharp, curious blue eyes. She liked to joust with Rossel. She had also made a pass at him once. More than once, in fact. But there was none of that in the air today.
‘How did she die?’ he asked.
‘Answering that question will require patience,’ said Dr Volkova. ‘It takes several days for a body to thaw properly if it has frozen solid, and until then I would only be speculating. Those dark red patches on the knees and elbows are typical of prolonged exposure. She was not shot or stabbed. The removal of the face is crude – not a professional’s work – and one hopes she was already dead at that point. A heart attack or stroke is possible, but as there are another four bodies in a similar state to this one, that seems unlikely. Poisoning? Overdose? We will have to wait.’
The doctor looked pale. It took a lot to spook Volkova but five faceless corpses turning up in her mortuary at the same time seemed to have done the trick.
‘This is the only place I feel safe these days,’ she said in a quiet voice. ‘Here, with you, where I work.’
This was flattering and disturbing in equal measure. Me and these corpses, comforting Dr Volkova. But if the MGB did come for her as a suspect in the current Doctors’ Plot, the five bodies on the slabs would be able to defend her better than he could.
Rossel returned to the matter in hand.
‘Captain Lipukhin was of the opinion our murderer was a maniac,’ he said.
Dr Volkova’s lips quivered but she brought herself under control.
‘I would agree,’ she said.
‘Really? The killer was methodical, not mad.’
‘The teeth. I’m assuming they extracted them to prevent identification of the victim,’ said the pathologist. ‘The face, too, and the fingers or even entire hands. For those acts there might be a pragmatic motivation but the other mutilations – that is malice, pure and simple. Surely you must agree?’
‘Malice, yes. But malice allied to method,’ said Rossel. He looked again at the face. There was none of the neat musculature he had seen in Volkova’s books. Just a mess that looked like . . . He tried hard not to make comparisons.
‘Those bodies were placed with care on the railway line,’ he continued. He looked away again before speaking further. The light green walls and metal benches that lined them were scrubbed spotless. Like the morgue’s guests, everything was sanitised and lifeless. ‘We were meant to find them like that. Five bodies loaded into a truck of some sort. Then driven out to the middle of nowhere in a snowstorm. Arranged with care, feet together, heads turned, clothing arranged. It seems to me whoever did this was in complete control of their emotions. I had to visit the Leningrad Psychiatric Hospital once. A big Georgian with a vicious scar on his neck pointed at the sky and told me that the clouds above the golden domes of St Basil’s were all oysters and every raindrop was a pearl. No one like that is capable of planning something as considered as this.’
Dr Volkova took off her gloves and headed for the sink.
‘Almost all the homicides I see are the result of spontaneous violence. A man walks in on his wife and her lover. Thieves turn on thieves – over status, gambling, money, suspicions that someone is an informer. The killer is almost always a man, and often a man who has been drinking. To have more than one victim is unusual. And so, five frozen and faceless victims are perhaps not the work of a frenzied lunatic. But neither does it look like the work of state . . .’
She stopped herself. Then continued.
‘Of higher powers. Nor the habitual drunken thug, nor thieves. Whoever that leaves as the killer may have been in control of their emotions but nonetheless did not enjoy a close working relationship with sanity. Come back in a few days and we’ll know more.’
Rossel pointed at the naked body on the slab.
‘I’m a layman, of course, but she looks malnourished.’
‘She does.’
Volkova walked back across to the slab and dipped her nose towards where the corpse’s mouth used to be. She sniffed.
‘Nothing yet. Needs to thaw a little.’
‘What are you checking for?’
‘A faint whiff of pears, a sure sign of starvation. We saw so much of it during the siege we used to call it Eau de Bone.’
Rossel stared at the corpse.
‘So, your guess would be?’
Dr Volkova ran a sleeve over her forehead.
‘Yes, I suspect so, Lieutenant. Whoever did this, before they cut off her face, they half starved her to death as well.’
6
The tiny rubies bled a twinkling circle of pink light into the surrounding gloom as Junior Sergeant Lidia Gerashvili held up the two earrings a little higher so Rossel could see them better. Even in the dimly lit officers’ department, amid the thick curls of wood smoke from the logs in the grate, which could not escape the ancient and partially blocked chimneys, the gems still shimmered.
‘They do not match, Comrade Lieutenant,’ said Gerashvili.
Rossel held out a hand and Gerashvili dropped them into his glove. He squinted at them.
‘They look the same to me,’ said Rossel.
‘Yes, they are exactly the same,’ replied the junior sergeant. ‘I expressed myself inadequately. I mean her – our victim. Body Number Five. They do not match her.’
‘As she currently has no face, it is my considered view, Junior Sergeant, that it’s very difficult to make an accurate judgement on whether the victim suits her earrings or not.’
‘Especially, they do not match the cheap red knickers she was wearing. A three-kopek whore would turn her nose up at them. But these earrings are, I think, expensive.’
Rossel’s face remained impassive as he considered the junior sergeant’s observation.
‘I’m just the archive clerk, of course,’ said Gerashvili. ‘I apologise for my impertinent speculations.’
Her tone undermined the apology. Gerashvili’s round, half-Georgian face coloured a little – her sarcasm had gone far too far. It was always a mistake to antagonise your senior officers. Especially when you were right.
Rossel’s voice softened. Gerashvili was twenty-five years old, only a year in the militia, and small; just an inch or so above five foot. Her short hair was bottle-blonde with dark roots showing at the centre parting. She had wide round dark eyes that forced an unexpected and immediate playful intimacy on anyone who looked into them. It was not flirtation. No, just simple candour of a kind, Rossel thought, which no longer seemed to exist. An almost pre-revolutionary openness of spirit. And a sharp intelligence and keen eye.
He had missed the significance of the red knickers at which a three-kopek whore would turn up her nose.
‘Explain to me exactly what you mean,’ Rossel said.
Gerashvili pointed to the earrings in Rossel’s hand. He held them up and examined them. They were the kind with clasps fitted to them worn by women who had not had their ears pierced.
‘Her ears are pierced. The right one, anyway. I looked at the photographs Taneyev took at the scene when I was preparing the case file this morning. The left earring is correctly attached to the woman’s lobe, so I could not see whether it was pierced or not, but the right one was dislodged slightly and so, under a magnifying glass, I could obser
ve that it had been pierced.’
‘Why would she be wearing earrings with clasps if her ears were actually pierced?’
The clasp was gold with tiny flowers engraved around its base. They were minute, delicate, exquisite.
‘The earrings are small but very expensive,’ said Gerashvili. ‘I think these rubies are real. There is only one shop in Leningrad that I know of where a citizen might obtain jewellery like this: Djilas, in the Passazh department store. And to access a shop like that, they would either have to be a very important citizen, or a friend of such a person.’
Rossel brought an earring closer to his eyes and examined it in more detail.
‘There is no jeweller’s mark on the clasp. In an expensive piece I would think that is unusual,’ said Gerashvili. She took the other earring from him, opened the clasp and pointed to a tiny, almost imperceptible mark hidden underneath it.
‘This one has been soldered, I think. There was a hallmark but it has been removed. The one you are holding has the same kind of indentation, only smaller. I wondered if they could, in fact, not have been bought in Leningrad. If they could be from abroad.’
Her voice trailed off as he stared at her. Gerashvili swallowed and added: ‘If someone was trying to hide where they came from . . .’
It was excellent detective work, thought Rossel, and it landed them in a whole pile of trouble. Not just any MGB agent but one trusted to travel abroad. Very few people had access to travel passes. So why the hell had no one come for her?
‘You have been wondering about a lot of things, it seems,’ said Rossel, ‘while in fact you are supposed to have been working diligently in our archive department filing reports on stolen bicycles, shipments of black-market cigarettes and other vital areas of criminal administration. I wonder is it possible that the Vosstaniya Street militia station’s filing is not, currently, quite as it should be?’
Gerashvili’s face gave nothing away at this unjust assessment. Good, he thought – she cares.
Rossel handed the other earring back to her. She placed them both inside a paper evidence bag.
‘Good work, Junior Sergeant. I would like you to accompany me to Nevsky Prospect, to Djilas, the jeweller, tomorrow so that we may ask them some questions. Would you like that, Junior Sergeant – time away from your desk?’
He watched as Gerashvili placed the bag inside the correct red folder.
She looked up at him and tried a small smile.
‘Yes, sir, I would.’
*
The missing looked back at Rossel as they always did – a little puzzled, even put out, to find themselves incarcerated in a dusty file. A bemused collection of display cabinet butterflies, unable to fully comprehend the strange turn of events that had brought them to reside in such a place. A few mugshots, like those in the standard files of criminals and the condemned, but mostly family images handed to the authorities to help in the search for loved ones. They said nearly a million people had died in the siege. How many more had disappeared? No one knew. But their spirits were here, in hundreds of thin missing persons files, arranged in a cramped room wedged under the staircase of the police station, turning L-shaped at one end to eke out a little more space for filing cabinets and shelves.
No one imagines they will become one of the missing, Rossel thought. Until, one day, there you are.
He drew on his Belomorkanal papirosa, savouring the acid burn as the smoke reached his lungs, and positioned the battered tin mug of vodka so that it would be within easy reach.
This room was Junior Sergeant Gerashvili’s domain.
When he needed to get in, Rossel waited until she had left for the evening, and since Gerashvili was conscientious to a fault, sometimes that could be hours. There were a few hundred files in the station and, every now and then, more arrived.
But Rossel’s goal was not to help her keep pace with these lost souls. He was looking for his missing sister, hoping he would open up a file one day and see Galya staring back at him.
It was more out of desperate hope than hard logic, for he had been looking for her file ever since he had joined the militia five years ago, not long after the war had ended, and not found her. On occasions he fed his hope with the thought that she might be using, or have been given, another name, or that her photographs might have got mixed up with someone else’s records. Perhaps there would be no photograph, just the written record of the disappearance into the snow of a woman born in 1917, the year of the revolution, on the very same day that Revol Rossel entered the world. And who vanished on 25 November 1935, when she was just eighteen years old.
This ongoing nocturnal quest was also a way of spending time away from the world, of feeling a little closer to the old one he and Galya had left behind. Of recalling life with their mother, a music teacher, and their father, a naval officer and Party stalwart, in a small but comfortable apartment in Kirovsky. Before their parents had been arrested and sent to the camps.
Of pretending to be, even for the briefest of moments, a little more like his old self. A youth once more. Naive and ridiculously hopeful. The abundantly talented violinist who had joked and drunk and sung and once declaimed the poems of Mayakovsky – ‘Eat your pineapples, chew your grouse. Your last day is coming, you bourgeois louse’ – through a megaphone from the Anichkov Bridge. His sister had laughingly shushed him – ‘Let’s go home, genius, time to sleep it off.’
After the arrest of their parents, he always felt protected by her. And always returned the favour; coming to blows with any slighted suitor who whispered against her, going into battle against any man who might take her name in vain. Once beating a swaggering brute of a naval officer into a bloody pulp.
As the drink warmed him, Rossel dragged on his cigarette again and kept flipping through the files, stopping at each image to reflect on the life into which he was intruding. Paying his respects and toasting every tenth individual with another slug of vodka. Offering them the momentary respect a godlier soul might pay to a religious icon. The portly midwife from Pskov with the dark hair and steely eyes, the spotty garage mechanic from Kalininsky, the plain-faced Narva teenager, gone missing on her way to a local dance, described by her grandmother as ‘Unexceptional, save for her virtue.’
It was foolish, he knew, this ritual, this time he spent with the missing.
Save for the simple fact that his twin sister now lived amongst them too. How could she not do? She had to be somewhere. How could someone just disappear like that, drifting away one night into the snow? At the time, it had felt that a sinister stage magician had broken in while he was sleeping and sawed his soul in two, stealing away the better half of him.
He held the picture of the Narva teenager between the twisted but intact middle and index fingers of his left hand. Then placed it next to his ear – as if the girl was about to impart a secret. He thought of these mute, monochrome faces as Galya’s only real friends now, the ones who kept his twin sister company. Until, one day, her brother would find her and rescue her, like a Slavic knight completing his quest. Earning redemption, perhaps forgiveness. The forgiveness he had sought ever since joining the Leningrad militia in an effort to track her down.
7
Monday October 15
All his fingers were present and correct, the missing ones restored, looking supple and elegant. Rossel waggled them, delighted, clicking the new ring finger on his left hand against the thumb.
He looked down again at the victim in the red gown, the Snow Queen. She was lying on the tracks but she had turned face down. That wasn’t right – Rossel knelt and reached out to turn the body over but stopped when he saw his miraculous hands.
‘Aren’t those Stalin’s fingers?’ sneered Grachev. ‘Have you stolen the hands of our great leader? That’s ten years in the gulag . . .’
Rossel rolled the body. Her head lolled against her right shoulder. But instead of a mess of muscle and glimpses of skull, he was gazing into the face of his missing sister.
/> Woken by his own cry, Rossel cursed and clambered out of bed. The nightmare had drenched him in an icy sweat. He pressed a hand to his chest in a futile attempt to steady his heart.
It was too late to go back to sleep, even if sleep had been possible, but too early to do anything useful. He chain-smoked three papirosy, laid out his uniform and washed in cold water in the basin that stood in the corner of his room, wiping away the cold sweat of his disturbed sleep. At last, he got dressed, pulled on his boots, took a deep breath and knelt beside his bed.
First, he pulled out a dog-eared poetry book, Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal. He leafed through its pages for a while before pressing the cover to his lips and putting it back where he had found it. The violin case was hidden under two or three bags of old clothes and bedding but he located it without trouble and dragged it out from under the bed. Rossel ran his palms across the cheap, battered leather and sprang the catches.
He picked up the bow and tightened the bow hair. Grasped the dry, crumbling rosin and ran it up and down the bow, exactly six times – a habit from his earliest lessons with his mother. Then he took the chin rest and the violin itself from the case and laid everything on his bed. He stood still, partly in reverence but also to decide on a piece. A Brahms sonata? A Wieniawski showpiece? No, the same piece he always chose – the Prokofiev he used to play in duet with his sister, the first movement, andante cantabile.
Rossel reached for the violin, grasping it with the thumb and two crooked fingers of his left hand and bringing it up to his shoulder. The violin settled into place. With his other hand he picked up the bow. His torturer had broken only the ring and little fingers of the right hand before that particular interrogation had ended, leaving them set in a slightly claw-like position that was oddly suited to his bow hold. He pulled away an errant bow hair and brought the bow to rest on the A-string. Allowed himself a bitter smile. All those nagging teachers who had never stopped talking about the importance of finger placement.
Rossel stood completely still and in total silence. As he always did now – unable to play a single note.