City of Ghosts

by Ben Creed

  And yet, when they were together . . .

  ‘You’re my Cossack,’ she would tell him before they made love. ‘Who comes running, first to rescue . . .’ Sofia would roll on her back, put her hands behind her neck and stare into his eyes, ‘. . . and afterwards to ravish me.’

  But often, just as he did as she commanded and matched his intensity to hers, she would giggle at his seriousness. Then they would both collapse into laughter.

  Afterwards, she would instantly retreat again. Barely acknowledge his whispered questions. Reveal almost nothing of her self to him. Become Magnus’s Frau once more.

  Felix had been in love with her, too, he remembered. As much as it was possible for Felix Sorokin to love anyone other than himself. ‘I so dearly want that sultry little dark-haired songstress to whisper me a lullaby,’ his friend had told him. ‘The way she sings unsettles me; makes me wish to be something better than myself.’

  But Sofia hadn’t sung for Felix. She had sung for her Cossack.

  Oy, to nye vyecher . . .

  Oy, it will surely come off, he said, that wild head of yours . . .

  Rossel had always loved that line.

  He got up from the faded green armchair, walked across his room and, even though it was still snowing, slipped the broken catch on the frame to open the window wider to see if he could hear the music of the guitarist on the floor above better.

  Oy, to nye ny vyecher . . .

  ‘Ah, it will surely come off,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Ah, it will surely come off, that wild head of yours.’

  Are you in love or something?

  He had been once.

  And it had meant everything.

  9

  Tuesday October 16

  Gerashvili pulled on her thick leather gloves and regulation hat.

  ‘Just the ledgers. That is all you need, Comrade Lieutenant?’

  Rossel nodded. He picked up a pine log from the meagre pile by the fire grate and threw it into the flames. On the outside, he was calm, playing the part of the thorough, conscientious detective. But Lipukhin had sidestepped the investigation and put Rossel at its centre. It was hard, therefore, to put the threat of the MGB out of his mind – the invisible but merciless threat that haunted every Soviet citizen, dutiful or not. Failure would be unforgiveable. Failure would not merit mere demotion but a much more inventive punishment. And even success might be unwelcome, depending on what he found out.

  But there was no point spooking Gerashvili with his fears. ‘If Djilas has sold those earrings then there’s a good chance they will be listed in there somewhere,’ he said. ‘Next to a purchaser, perhaps, who may be of interest in our enquiry?’

  ‘He may have doctored them by now.’

  ‘That’s the trap I set for him by not removing them yesterday. Let’s see if he is a fool. If he doctors the ledgers, under Article 58–14 of the Penal Code that would be classed as counter-revolutionary sabotage – deliberately careless execution of defined duties, aimed at the weakening of the power of the government and of the functioning of the state apparatus. And so he would be subject to at least one year’s deprivation of freedom. Obstructing state investigators carries a further automatic sentence of eight years’ deprivation of liberty.’

  Yet as a man who handled luxurious items of foreign origin without making any attempt to disguise the fact, Djilas was also indubitably a man with political cover.

  ‘Djilas strikes me as a man who likes the finer things in life and moves in circles where he can obtain them. I don’t think he will do anything to jeopardise that. If he keeps his ledgers intact and unedited, we may learn something.’

  The fireplace in the main room of the station was a grand one, cast in iron. A mixed motif of seabirds and a merchant’s ship decorated its mantelpiece. The personal choice, presumably, of the silversmith who once owned the house before it became a police station after the revolution. Rossel watched as a pale blue flame began to lick and flutter around the wood.

  Gerashvili walked towards the main door that led to the stairs. Then she turned back towards him.

  ‘I took my niece to the ice rink in Tauride Gardens last night. She’s only eleven but a very good skater. In a couple of weeks, she’s going to the Soviet championships in Moscow.’

  ‘I’m very happy for your niece.’

  ‘Yes, sorry, Comrade Lieutenant. My point is, my niece wears earrings. They have clasps. Jana, my sister, thinks piercing is only for sluts from Sennaya.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Those ruby earrings are small. Very small with clasps. I wondered if they might once have belonged to a child? Perhaps our faceless woman has a daughter?’

  Grachev, fully dressed in his winter uniform, came through the door and marched to his desk. He glared at Gerashvili.

  ‘You still here doing your make-up? Rossel and me have some proper work to do. We are, apparently, off to interrogate a dangerous subversive who has already served ten years’ imprisonment in the hands of the great Soviet state.’

  Rossel turned back towards Gerashvili and called after her as she left.

  ‘Thank you, Junior Sergeant, you have made an excellent point.’

  Then he picked up his own hat and gloves from the rack in the centre of the room and started to put them on. By the fireplace, Grachev stomped his feet. The flames had gone out.

  ‘So we’re off to see a source of yours, Rossel. Who is he?’

  ‘I suppose you could say he is a reader.’

  ‘A reader? Where are we going to meet the bastard, the State Library on Nevsky?’

  ‘Not of books. A reader of bodies.’

  Rossel adjusted his right glove and then straightened his hat. One of the seabirds carved into the mantelpiece was a little more tarnished than its companions. Something of an outcast. It reminded him of a Baudelaire poem, The Albatross, a favourite of Sofia’s. When they were still together, she had read it to him many times. He reached out, as he often did before leaving the station, and touched one of its wings for good luck.

  ‘A bootlegger I know. And occasional informer. Kirill Pugachev is a man who can read gulag tattoos in the same way one of those august university professors can read Crime and Punishment,’ he continued, ‘and then explain to two idiots like me and you, Sergeant, exactly what the artist meant by it.’

  *

  The reader of bodies sucked on his papirosa as he waved his other hand around his head and gestured to the wooden shack’s three other customers. They were all nursing tin mugs of vodka around a small brazier in which a blackened log was trying to burn. By the smell of it, petrol had been used to get the thing alight.

  ‘Can you believe that this place, a shitty ryumochnaya all the way out in Moskovskaya, has Armenian cognac?’ said Pugachev. ‘It’s been months since I had so much as a dribble of the stuff. Hardly anywhere in Leningrad can a man get himself a glass of Ararat, but the fat babushka who runs this dump apparently has it running from the taps.’

  Grachev glared at him.

  ‘Perhaps she sucks cock at the Armenian trade delegation in her spare time?’

  The babushka, a whale-like woman who was guarding a crate of dirty bottles in her own foul corner, swore at him.

  Pugachev drained his glass and gasped as the fire went down.

  ‘For cognac like this it would be worth it. For cognac like this I’d fucking do it myself.’

  ‘Armenians are a dirty people,’ Grachev said, mouth twisting.

  ‘Says who?’ said Rossel.

  ‘Your file says you were a teacher?’ continued the sergeant, ignoring him.

  Pugachev nodded. He had taught art in Moscow before the war. He had even taught the children of some of the Politburo. The sons of Mikoyan. The daughters of Yezhov. He was a big man with a muscular neck and bald head, plus a flat and broken nose. The eyes that stared back at Rossel and Grachev over the little wooden table had been tutored by his time in the camps. They were calculating, secretive and as
green as pond lichen.

  ‘I was a good teacher, too, and my pupils loved me for it. Then one day I turned up for a life class and all the students were missing. Only the model had turned up – a red-haired dwarf from the Moscow State Circus. Then the double doors at the back of the class opened and two men in grey coats stepped through. I was taken directly to the Lubyanka and then, after a couple of weeks, sent to Siberia and spent ten years in a gulag. I never got to know why.’

  Pugachev took another sip of his cognac. Then fixed Rossel with a stare.

  ‘Does it give a reason?’

  Rossel lifted up his own hand and waved away the smoke. The shack stank of cheap tobacco.

  ‘Does what give a reason?’

  ‘My file. Does my file give a reason for my arrest?’

  Rossel ignored the question.

  ‘Thank you for meeting us, Comrade Pugachev,’ he said. ‘I hear you are employed as a kitchen porter in the Hotel Astoria these days, cooking quail for those lucky few who are allowed – thanks to their exceptional service to the Party – to dine there.’

  ‘What?’ Grachev was surprised. ‘I thought the thieves were barred from work by their code. The Astoria? Do you spread your buttocks for the Party, comrade?’

  Pugachev spat into the fire and glared at Grachev.

  ‘You’re sure you’re a cop? Because you know fuck all about anything, cop.’

  Rossel smiled.

  ‘Pugachev has special dispensation,’ he said. ‘He delivers bootleg vodka to the hotel and swaps it for the good stuff.’

  ‘Our stuff is also good stuff – nobody has complained so far,’ interjected Pugachev.

  ‘And takes the good stuff off to be sold in backstreet markets for half the price but still four times the cost of production of the bootleg. In the service of the thieves, Comrade Pugachev is permitted to work, even at the service of the bigwigs who stay at the best hotel in town.’

  ‘Best hotel? Do you know last week they ran out of toilet paper?’ said Pugachev. ‘Had to cut up a few old copies of Pravda and hang them on string same as the rest of us do. There was a Chinese delegation on the fifth floor, some bullshit about military assistance. I like to think of their vice chairman wiping his arse on the latest Ukrainian wheat production statistics.’

  He leaned forward and took another puff on his cigarette.

  ‘If Pravda is still printing all the sycophantic crap it was last time I bothered to read it then he’s probably got a picture of Comrade Beria printed on each of his yellow arse cheeks.’

  Grachev whistled.

  ‘And you’re looking for a reason they put you in the camps? We’ve only been here five minutes and you’ve already said enough to earn yourself another ten years.’

  Pugachev stifled a yawn.

  ‘One day they took me. I never knew why. Another day they released me. Ditto. There’s a little freedom in that, Sergeant, if a man understands it properly. I can misbehave and be arrested, sure. But I can also behave and be arrested just the same. So why worry? I should be dead by now anyway after sawing pine logs through ten Siberian winters. It’s minus fifty in the winter out there. Did you know that? A man can snap off his prick just trying to take a piss. In a place like that, a wise man looks for what protection he can get – and in the camps, that means joining the thieves.’

  Pugachev stubbed out the remnants of his cigarette.

  ‘They arrested the model, too – just in case, I assume,’ he said. ‘As far as I know that hapless dwarf never made it back to the circus.’

  He rapped his tin mug on the tabletop. The babushka looked up from behind her counter and nodded.

  ‘These two are paying,’ Pugachev told her.

  He turned back to the militia officers.

  ‘You say you have some ink to show me?’

  *

  ‘Interesting.’

  Pugachev tapped the photograph that Grachev was holding up, the one of the priest. His nicotine-stained middle finger pointed to an area just below the shoulder.

  ‘A bunch of dots,’ said Rossel. ‘What’s so interesting?’

  ‘It means he’s been in solitary in a punishment block. Not just once. Each dot denotes a confinement. Ten marks, like this guy has got, means ten times.’

  ‘A troublemaker? Someone the guards and other inmates would remember?’ said Rossel.

  Pugachev nodded.

  ‘A man would have to be a little crazy to put himself in harm’s way like that so often. Even I would pass on those odds.’

  ‘A boss, then?’ said Grachev. The thieves had their own code and their own hierarchy; in the gulag, bosses had as much power over life and death as the state.

  ‘No. There’s no tattoo that marks him out that way. And a boss doesn’t often get solitary. They get others to do the dirty work.’

  ‘What about this one? The coiled serpent?’ asked Rossel.

  Pugachev took the photograph with one hand and peered closer. He prodded a finger of the other against the snake above the man’s right nipple.

  ‘It’s nicely done. But lots of prisoners have those,’ he said. ‘It could be drugs. Or it simply expresses polite surprise at being so often ill used by our glorious Soviet state.’

  He pointed at the red reaper holding the hammer and sickle.

  ‘This one is unusual, though. I’ve seen plenty of reapers but not one that is holding a hammer and sickle before. And not on the shoulder. Or red. Never red. Gulag inkings are rarely coloured as the ink is made in the camps and it’s too difficult to get the pigments.’

  ‘How do you make the ink in the camps?’ asked Rossel.

  ‘Ashes, burnt tyre, soot, mixed in with a mug of urine. Lasts a lifetime,’ said Pugachev.

  Grachev yawned.

  ‘This is going nowhere, Rossel. We’ve been here for half an hour already. I’m going outside – my bladder’s about to burst. When I come back, I suggest we take Comrade Pugachev back to Vosstaniya Street and get him to confess to something.’

  ‘Confess to what?’ asked Pugachev. The green eyes that stared up at Grachev contained not a single note of apprehension.

  Grachev shrugged and pushed his way past a couple of customers towards the shack’s front door.

  ‘He’s an angry man, your colleague,’ said Pugachev. ‘I remember you are a little more on the patient side, Lieutenant? Patient enough to send the occasional symbol of your appreciation my way as compensation for violating the thieves’ code.’

  Rossel was already handing him half a dozen notes. Traditional thieves claimed to shun all contact with the state, scorning anyone who cooperated with the state. Occasionally, however, it was deemed worth bending the rules in order to have a line to a militia officer. As long as he left them largely alone.

  ‘If you have anything else to tell me, I’ll listen,’ said Rossel.

  Pugachev leafed through the photographs, straining to pick out details in the dim orange light. Behind him one of the other drinkers slumped forward off his chair and onto the floor. The babushka tutted.

  The rest of the priest’s flesh was a confused whorl of cupolas, angels and saints at prayer. Pugachev frowned as he traced them with a finger. ‘There’s something not right,’ he said.

  Rossel waited as the thief continued tracing. Grachev reappeared. ‘Right. Are we going to arrest this arsehole or what?’ he said. ‘This is a joke. This prick is wasting our time.’

  His voice trailed away. Pugachev had pulled his shirt and sweater off in one movement.

  The glow from the light bulb dangling at one end of the shack, barely augmented by the sputtering brazier, was weak but it was enough. Pugachev stood before them, covered in black markings.

  ‘This one,’ he said, pointing. ‘A tsarist medal. I got it for beating up a guard. It was my first tattoo. It signified my acceptance into the thieves’ law. These – the devil’s head. Says fuck you to the system. The sword and shield – loyalty to my boss, while the burning book is the life I left behind. All symbols
of a thief who lives by the thieves’ law. I’ve got more, but’ – he nodded in the direction of the babushka – ‘there’s a lady present.’

  Pugachev replaced his shirt and poked at the photographs the two cops had brought with them.

  ‘Your man, he has cupolas but they could mean anything – faith, or atheism, time in the camps, number of people he has killed, anything. You can only tell from the other tattoos. Is he a killer, a burglar, a rapist, what? He has no cross, and every thief has a cross. Everyone’s ink tells a story. Except his.’

  ‘So what?’ said Grachev. ‘He could have been a political.’

  Pugachev sneered.

  ‘A political with ink? The thieves would have scoured it off his skin with a fucking cheesegrater. No, your man has got almost the full suit, front and back, and yet he’s not a thief. And that makes him a real mystery.’

  Rossel leaned forward and pointed to the red reaper.

  ‘What about that one? Can you give me any idea what the rest of that tattoo might look like?’

  Pugachev stared down at the photograph.

  Then back up at Rossel.

  He shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But I think I know someone who may do. If you’re willing to take the risk of meeting him?’

  10

  Wednesday October 17

  The thin glass tube Dr Volkova had extracted from the throat of the corpse they had christened the Snow Queen was glowing. Rossel pushed the head of the desk lamp a little closer. The tube lay in a metal tray on a small table inside the pathologist’s lair. It was about 22 centimetres long, 3 centimetres wide at the base, tapering to a point but fluted, so it gradually tapered upwards to become a few centimetres wider at the other end. The end that had been sticking into the Tsarevna’s larynx was jagged and tainted with blood.

  ‘Do you think our maniac might be a chemist, Doctor? Or some other kind of scientist?’

  Dr Volkova shrugged.

  ‘There is no manufacturer’s mark. Besides, although I am clearly not a research scientist, I did study both chemistry and human biology before I specialised in forensic pathology and I have never come across a pipette, burette or graduated cylinder shaped exactly like this one.’