by Ben Creed
But listening. Remembering.
Rossel replaced his fiddle, bow, chin rest and rosin. Shut the lid and snapped down the catches. Slid the case back under the bed. Then the lieutenant put on his militia cap, picked up his pistol and holster from the bedside table and headed for the door and the city beyond.
*
The snow was relentless and swirling into hallucinatory grey flurries. Rossel tried to pinch a little heat into his cheeks. Gerashvili drew up her greatcoat until her head had sunk into it up to the eyes. A few hardy shoppers, refugees from a nearby butcher’s queue for pork and chicken, drifted past them as they stood in front of the imposing sandstone front of Passazh, a pre-revolutionary monolith to everything bourgeois and now a model Soviet department store. It faced Nevsky Prospect, the spine of the city centre, and ran down Sadovaya.
Rossel pushed through the heavy doors. Gerashvili, breathing with a slight wheeze as she drew the freezing air into her lungs, followed him.
They stepped into the entrance of the vast glass-roofed gallery that went back all the way to Italianskaya Street. There were maybe forty stores – doorways guarded by two sandstone columns and a white arched moulding above it – each one alike, on either side of the passage. The stone was dirty and discoloured in places but the repairs after the war were impressive. And how splendid that a relic of the ancien régime, when poor, ordinary folk would pay a few kopeks just to be allowed to gaze in awe at the fur coats, fine foods and exotic trinkets displayed in its luxurious stores, was now for the benefit of the Soviet people. Any citizen of old St Petersburg, who had spent a little time with their face pressed to these windows, would have needed little convincing of the need for a workers’ revolution by the time Lenin had arrived at the Finland Station.
His mother had talked to him about Passazh once when he was a very young child. An accomplished violin player herself, she had been teaching him and his sister to play when she began to recall a concert she had once seen there as a girl – at the Komissarzhevskaya Theatre. How well the tenor had sung. How beautiful the white taffeta gowns worn by the chorus were. How, as she walked toward the theatre, the emeralds and pearls in the shop windows sparkled under the miraculous new gas lights.
The bourgeois stores were all gone. Replaced by stores for the workers displaying goods from all over the Soviet Union. When they had any in.
But if you knew where to look and you dared to look there, there was a shop about halfway down on the left-hand side with a softly lit window and fresh paint on the sill. A discreet sign in the window said: Djilas.
They walked another few feet and stood directly in front of the entrance.
Rossel looked at Gerashvili and she nodded.
He turned a faded brass handle and heard the tinkle of a welcoming bell.
*
As soon as they stepped in, Comrade Djilas had ushered them away from the shop floor, gleaming counters made from oak and glass, and mannequins wearing sable and mink, and led them into a poky back office.
He removed the magnifying loupe with which he had been studying the tiny ruby from his eye and put the earring back on the table.
Djilas – the name wasn’t Russian, Rossel thought. Bulgarian? Serb? A Slav, anyway. The jeweller was tall and broad-shouldered with wide cheekbones and a high forehead. His thick black hair was speckled with grey, his eyes were a deep brown and somewhat elusive. But his nose and chin were weak, a fact he had tried to disguise by adopting a handlebar moustache.
His manner was aloof and untroubled, that of a man whose customers were the wives and girlfriends of the elite. It was calculated to convey, as effortlessly as was possible, the simple fact that two militia officers from Vosstaniya Street couldn’t touch him. He tapped an imperious middle finger on top of the glass counter, next to the ruby set in its flowered gold clasp.
‘Yes, very good. What the Americans call a “pigeon blood”.’
‘Pigeon?’ asked Gerashvili.
He smiled.
‘As rich and red as pigeon’s blood. These ones are quite beautiful and of the very highest quality. From Burma, perhaps. Often thought of as being the place where the world’s best rubies are mined – although, personally, as a good and loyal citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, I, of course, prefer those that are unearthed in Tajikistan. The miners there have a joke. They say the fat capitalist mountains of Rushan wished to yield only diamonds so the ruby hunters read to them nightly from Das Kapital and persuaded all those white stones to turn red.’
Comrade Djilas, who, if he was not Russian, had no trace of an accent, began to laugh at his own story.
Rossel’s face remained impassive. The joke was a mistake.
‘I am surprised that the miners of Tajikistan would put at risk their production targets with the exchange of such inconsequential stories. Make a note of that will you, Junior Sergeant?’
‘A note, sir?’
Gerashvili looked a little uncertain but she took out her notepad.
‘Yes, a note to send to our esteemed colleagues of the Ministry of State Security in Dushanbe, this note to detail possible anti-Soviet activity amongst miners in the Rushan area. Time wasting, akin to wrecking. Exchanging superfluous stories that may be jeopardising Comrade Stalin’s plans for state mineral production whilst filling their lungs with bourgeois laughter. Also, please include in this important message to the Ministry of State Security, Dushanbe, the name of our source: Comrade Djilas of the store of the same name, in the Passazh building, Leningrad. Who I’m certain is happy to make himself available, at any time, to undertake the four-thousand-kilometre journey to Dushanbe and testify against these unpatriotic Tajik miners.’
Gerashvili put her pad on the counter and began to scrawl across it with her pen. Djilas watched her filling the paper with black ink.
Rossel reached across and stilled Gerashvili’s hand. Then he looked the jeweller straight in the eyes.
‘Or perhaps there is no need for my colleague to file her report?’
Djilas licked his thumb and index finger and used the saliva to press down the two ends of his moustache.
‘May I ask, is it possible, Lieutenant Rossel,’ he said, ‘to know where you acquired these earrings?’
Gerashvili opened her mouth but Rossel raised a hand. We ask the questions. That’s how it works.
‘Have you ever sold a pair of earrings like these?’
The jeweller shook his head.
‘Have you ever stocked a pair of earrings like these?’
Djilas picked up the earring from the counter and then put it straight back down again.
‘These, no. Never. The workmanship is very fine. I think they come from abroad.’
‘Where?’
‘Somewhere very grand. Other than that, I haven’t a clue. Van Cleef and Arpels in Paris, or Tiffany in New York.’
‘Junior Sergeant Gerashvili.’
‘Yes, Comrade Lieutenant?’
‘Have you any questions for Comrade Djilas?’
Gerashvili put her pen down and glanced around the untidy office. It was furnished with only a desk and a chair, a picture of Stalin on the wall and a framed photograph of a family, presumably one belonging to Djilas, stuck on top of a green metal safe near the door. The safe was large, perhaps two metres tall and a metre wide.
She walked across to it and tapped the front with her finger.
‘Do you keep your sales ledgers in here?’
Rossel watched Djilas’s left hand gently push shut a half-open drawer in his desk before he replied.
‘I told you these earrings were not bought here. They are foreign, most certainly,’ he said.
Rossel sighed and repeated Gerashvili’s question.
‘Do you keep your sales ledgers here?’
‘No, the company has another office across town. Our daily receipts go there and the records are kept centrally.’
Gerashvili looked to Rossel for a lead.
‘Then it is settled,’ said
Rossel. ‘My colleague and I will leave but Junior Sergeant Gerashvili will return tomorrow and receive the sales ledger for the last ten years from you, Mr Djilas, in which case the Ministry of State Security in Dushanbe will not need to be informed of the treacherous counter-revolutionary comedians in their midst. And you will not have to travel four thousand kilometres to testify against them.’
‘Settled. Yes, of course.’ Djilas’s voice was flat. The jeweller half-heartedly licked his thumb and finger again, as if to groom his grandiose moustache. But this time he failed to complete the gesture.
8
Lipukhin had been eating a sweet apple pastila to try and disguise the vodka on his breath. Like so many of his other plans, this one wasn’t working.
The captain had been waiting in Rossel’s office when Rossel got back to the station. He was reading that day’s Pravda. The lead article was headlined ‘Season of Traitors!’ and outlined more details of the emerging Doctors’ Plot – a conspiracy of ‘killer doctors’, predominantly Jewish, who had apparently been trying to assassinate the most senior leaders of the Soviet Union.
The captain flicked his eyes across to the framed portrait of Stalin on the wall.
‘“From the wall Marx watches and watches, and suddenly, opening his mouth wide, he starts howling.” Do you know the poem?’
Rossel nodded.
‘Mayakovsky.’
It was hard to read Lipukhin. There was no endless stream of glorious war stories, not least because the dashing captain had been evacuated from Leningrad due to illness. No Stalingrad, no Kursk, no Berlin. But after the war he had shot to the rank of captain in record time – where he had stayed. Such a rapid rise suggested political reliability; such a sudden halt smelt of Stolichnaya.
‘My mother read some of his works to me when I was a child,’ Rossel continued, adding for safety: ‘A great patriot.’
Lipukhin pointed to the black phone on top of the desk between where they both sat.
‘Five corpses, found together like that, in one place. One of them a blue-top. It is unheard of. You filed your report yesterday. But only silence. They must be watching and yet no one has howled.’
Lipukhin drew a hand through the full head of blond hair that so suited the role of Soviet golden boy for which he had once seemed destined. But the once chiselled face was now a little softer and flabbier, his fine cheekbones already tinged with pink.
‘Perhaps they trust us, Ilya?’ said Rossel.
‘Trust us?’
Lipukhin held Rossel’s gaze as he repeated the question back to him. Then he wiped a last green fleck of the pastila from his lips.
Rossel picked up a small pile of photographs that lay on his desk – Taneyev had finished his developing. He spread them out in front of his boss.
‘To do our Bolshevik duty?’
Lipukhin picked up one of the photographs. Then turned it around so they could examine it together. A faceless man stared back up at them.
‘Of course, of course, our duty to the Party is always paramount,’ Lipukhin murmured. ‘Which one is this?’
Rossel stared at them and realised they had been taken in the morgue, not at the railway line where they had discovered the bodies. Taneyev must have considered them unusually interesting to leave them on his desk. He was right.
‘The priest. The one we found wearing the dog collar. As you instructed, we have concentrated on the blue-top first and so I followed up on the earrings. But the priest is the latest victim the pathologist Dr Volkova has examined. The orderlies only stripped the corpse a few hours ago and discovered this inky treasure trove.’
The tattoos covered every inch of the naked torso. The lines were crudely inked but the drawings themselves were detailed and ornate. Just above his left nipple was an image of the Madonna and child. Above the right a coiled serpent, and above that a series of simple dots. On the back, stretching from one shoulder blade to another, a grinning Reaper, the outline of its cloak not black but blood red, and holding not a scythe but a hammer and sickle.
Only one group of people had tattoos like that: the thieves.
Lipukhin stared down at the photograph for a moment more. Then he pushed back his chair and stood up. The pitch of his voice was considered but also contained a slight undertone of embarrassment.
‘Trust, yes. An important Bolshevik virtue, Lieutenant Rossel. And my trust in you is, as always, absolute. I have therefore given you entire jurisdiction in this case. Especially as it is one that may turn out to be of vital importance to the Party. I filed the relevant notifications this morning so as to inform the appropriate authorities of my decision immediately.’
Rossel did not look up. He could hear the fear in Captain Lipukhin’s voice and did not feel the need to embarrass him any further by confronting his self-serving pragmatism directly. Something had happened between the conversation they’d had in the car on the way back from Lake Ladoga and now. Presumably, Lipukhin had calculated the odds on their collective survival and wasn’t liking them very much. In Leningrad, people made decisions like that every day – to step away from wives, lovers, friends or colleagues as the icy waters began to rise. He was not in any way offended by Lipukhin’s desire to save his own skin. He simply accepted it for what it was: a banal, personal case of realpolitik.
Rossel heard the glass rattle in its frame as the door to their room slammed shut. Lipukhin’s footsteps faded away as he descended the stairs. Then Rossel stacked the photographs into a neat pile and slipped them into the brown case file. In the grate, an ember glowed and died. The fire had been neglected, or maybe they had run out of wood.
An ex-girlfriend at the conservatory had been very keen on Mayakovsky. The poet’s father had pricked his finger on a pin when filing some papers, she told him, and subsequently died of blood poisoning. It was now clear to him that, unlike Mayakovsky Senior, Captain Lipukhin had a sound understanding of potentially dangerous paperwork.
*
Rossel undid his zip and emptied his bladder. He had stopped for a glass of vodka at a grubby ryumochnaya on the way home – his favourite place when he needed to retreat from the world. For when he needed to think. The first shot hadn’t helped so he’d bought another. That hadn’t helped, either, but at least it had fortified him for the ordeal of the toilet at his communal flat.
Old man Kostiuk had struck again. Rossel tried to hold his breath while he pissed so as not to breathe in the stench of his elderly neighbour’s congealing faeces. Leningrad was built on a swamp and thousands had died toiling in the feverish, foetid air to turn Peter the Great’s vision into reality. Rossel knew how they felt.
He shared the apartment with five other families. Sixteen people in all, crammed into six rooms. They all lived together on the fourth floor of a block that overlooked the Griboyedova Canal, and considered themselves lucky to have it. Living with the bitter aroma of Vladislav Kostiuk’s repugnant turds was a small price to pay to live in an apartment like this one.
He couldn’t hold his breath any longer. But as soon as he breathed out, the toxic odour began to scour the inside of his nostrils.
Mother of Christ!
A sharp drumming sound. Someone standing in the cold passage outside was knocking impatiently on the door.
‘Is that you, Vladislav Gerasimovich? It is, isn’t it? I can smell your stinking bumhole from out here. Hurry up, can’t you? I need to pee like the Volga . . .’
No one else had a mouth like that, and in a kommunalka that was saying something. It was Lena, who lived with her younger sister, Irina, in room number three.
‘It’s me,’ he answered. ‘Give me a minute, Lenochka. Kostiuk’s been here before me and my life is now in grave danger. I have only sixty seconds left before I am asphyxiated.’
Through the door he heard Lena laugh. ‘It was borshch last night, Mrs Fyodorovna always cooks him borshch on Sunday nights. I think the beetroot must corrode his bowels. That’s why I generally try to not take a pee all day on a M
onday. That tea was a grave tactical error.’
Rossel flushed the toilet and opened the door. He grinned as he stepped out and saw that Lena was now standing as far away from him as possible; next to the hat-rack near the front door of the apartment, piled high with the winter coats and scarves. As a child she’d run messages between infantry lines during the war.
He held the door wide open for her.
‘Come, come, Lena, I know you are braver than that.’
‘I am fearless, Comrade Rossel, but not suicidal.’
Rossel took a step towards the door of his own room, which was the second one from the right at the end of the main corridor. Behind him, Lena decided she had no option but to risk it and slammed the toilet door after her. If you lived in the same kommunalka for long enough, few subjects were taboo.
He stopped and called out through the door.
‘Has she played tonight, Lena? Has she been playing Oy, to nye vyecher?’ he said.
‘No,’ came the reply. ‘Not last night, not for a week.’ He heard her giggle. ‘Are you in love or something?’
*
Ah, it is not yet evening. ‘Oy, to nye vyecher’ is a beautiful song.
Rossel’s girlfriend, Sofia, would sometimes half whisper, half sing the Cossack folk song to him, on one of those distant days at the conservatory when they lay in bed together. It had been many years now but when he closed his eyes, he could still see her face: the olive-green eyes, so big and wide and questioning; the black, untidy mop of hair, grown long enough to cover the nape of her neck; the lips, far too wide and thin to make her, to the world, truly beautiful and yet to him, from the moment he saw her, she was perfect. She’s like Magnus’s Frau, he had said to himself when they bumped into each other in the corridor, just before their first lesson together. He had not long seen Eduard Magnus’s painting of the enigmatic Swedish heiress, which hung in the Hermitage. A portrait of a woman who seemed to have permitted only the tiniest sliver of her true self to be observed by the artist, hiding the rest away from the world in some unreachable place.