by Ben Creed
But the mouth was exactly the same. Small, secretive, unsmiling. ‘Like the last smear of sour cream, Revol, squeezed from a baker’s pipe,’ as Felix Sorokin, his closest friend at the conservatory, had once put it.
Rossel looked up from the black and white shot in the manila file and fixed an expression on his face – half matter-of-fact, half purposeful.
‘Yes. I do know her. Knew her.’
Lipukhin’s face was granite.
‘You knew her. How . . . interesting.’
Rossel glanced up at Taneyev, who was standing next to Captain Lipukhin’s desk.
‘How did you track the file down, Comrade Junior Sergeant Taneyev?’
With everyone so tense, crushing formality had become the order of the day.
‘I just did as you said, Comrade Lieutenant – I mean, I did what Gerashvili was in the middle of doing. I checked all the places where people are allowed lots of foreign travel: the Kirov, trade missions, diplomats. I even tried the football team – FC Zenit went on a tour to China this year. My boy was hoping to go with the juniors but . . .’
Lipukhin slapped the palm of his hand on the desk.
‘Your son’s level of athletic competence is of no concern to me or Lieutenant Rossel, comrade. Get on with it.’
Taneyev jumped.
‘Yes, Comrade Captain, I beg your pardon. I was thorough. It took me a while. I had to rule a few people out but then, well, Junior Sergeant Gerashvili had done all the hard work. I just had to make some phone calls.’
‘She had?’
‘Gerashvili had requested missing persons lists from every police department in Leningrad,’ said Taneyev. He paused to blow his cheeks out in admiration. ‘Then she had got hold of a list of Leningraders with permission to travel abroad from the central administrative department of the Leningrad Communist Party. How the hell she thought to get that, I have no idea.’
Like the earrings, Rossel thought. A hunch, but a smart one.
‘Then she had cross-checked the two and ended up with fifteen names,’ finished Taneyev.
Lipukhin mopped his brow. ‘You’re telling me there are fifteen people with permission from the Party to travel abroad who are all missing?’
‘No, Comrade Captain. Almost all of them acquired a permit to live in a new place – Moscow, mainly, though also Pskov, Kuibyshev, Murmansk, others. The paper trail is clear and every permit and registration is official. Only three remain untraced, and only one is a woman. I called the Kirov Opera and they confirmed it. Missing for nearly six months now, since the middle of April.’
‘Hold on,’ said Lipukhin. He looked over one shoulder and then the other. Both doors leading to the office were closed but that was scarcely enough. ‘It’s ten to six – they’ll give us the weather soon. I have a difficult journey home.’ The captain crossed the room and turned on the radio. A crackling Tosca began to sing – it was a great aria, Vissi d’arte; anyone listening in, by microphone or with a glass to the door, would find it harder to pick out their words.
‘She might not be anyone on that list,’ Lipukhin said as the radio began to emit a high-pitched warble. ‘She might be a real MGB officer, in which case the usual bureaucratic system won’t know anything about her.’
‘True,’ said Rossel. ‘What’s worse, even if that is Nadya, she could still be an officer of state security. That would explain her ability to simply disappear. But I doubt it. If she was a real MGB agent, would they not have carted her off five minutes after we brought her in?’
Lipukhin swore. He yanked open a drawer and pulled out a bottle of vodka. More rummaging uncovered three glasses.
‘Unless she was very low level, perhaps. An informant of little consequence?’
Rossel stood, leaned over the desk, picked up the bottle and shut it in one of the drawers. The captain let out a cry of protest and extended a finger with the intention of wagging it and demanding his vodka back but realised how that would look and sank back in his chair, deflated.
Taneyev’s eyes flitted from one superior to the other. ‘There is more, comrades. The last time anyone at the Kirov saw her was shortly after the company had returned from a foreign tour. There had been a dispute of some sort, apparently, between this Nadya and one of the soloists she was meant to look after – she was a dresser.’
‘Oh, of course, a dresser,’ said Lipukhin, in a tone that said, ‘dresser, my arse’. They all understood. It made sense now – Nadya being MGB. Her role was clear: to spy on the company and keep an eye on them in foreign jurisdictions. And to stop them defecting. A mere informant would never have been so trusted.
‘Nadya Bazhanova,’ said Rossel. ‘Same height as the Nadya I knew, same approximate age, according to Dr Volkova’s calculations. A clarinettist. No great talent but always practising. If all it took to be a genius was hard work then little Nadya would rank amongst the greats.’
Lipukhin leaned forward in his chair and picked up the photograph.
‘Little Nadya is dead, Revol. Somebody cut your friend’s face off and left her out on the railway lines at Lagoda. Genius or not, she won’t be playing at the Maly Hall again.’
Rossel shrugged and closed the file.
‘She wasn’t a friend. She was a hanger-on. Someone on the periphery of people I once knew. That was Nadya, always out on the edge of things, calculating how she could propel herself towards the middle. According to her file she never did play the Maly Hall. She was, as Comrade Taneyev says, a dresser with the Kirov, attached to one of the star sopranos. Back then she always tried to hide it but, as I say, Nadya was ambitious. I can’t imagine that being a dresser was something she’d have enjoyed settling for. She had grand plans for herself. I had a friend at the conservatory, Felix Sorokin, who absolutely despised her. Felix used to say she was like Uriah Heep in high heels.’
Taneyev took out his notebook and prepared to make a note.
‘Yuri who, sir?’
Lipukhin sighed.
‘Uriah Heep, Comrade Taneyev.’ He gave the name a great guttural rasp. ‘A character in a novel by the English author Dickens.’ Dickens, a great chronicler of capitalist injustice, was still safe to read, even if he was a foreigner.
Rossel looked up at Taneyev.
‘Nearly six months, you said? That’s a long time to be missing. Did they report it straightaway?’
‘When they got back, yes, they did.’ Taneyev flipped to the last page of the notebook. ‘They had been on a tour of Spain and France. Six weeks in all. A big success, that’s what the deputy manager of the Kirov told me. They had played Paris for ten nights, the Palais Garnier in the 9th Arrondissement. Everything was going really well but then there was an argument, apparently.’
‘An argument?’
‘Yes, between this Nadya and Marina Morozova, the opera singer she was assisting as dresser. Immediately on returning to Leningrad, Bazhanova went missing. And they haven’t seen her since.’
Rossel got up and pushed his chair back under Lipukhin’s desk. Lipukhin got up, too. Tosca serenaded all of them.
Diedi gioielli della Madonna al manto,
E diedi il canto agli astri, al ciel . . .
‘What was it about? Did he say?’ asked the captain.
The sergeant put his notebook back in his pocket and straightened his shoulders.
‘Jewellery, sir. This prima donna, Marina Morozova, reckoned Comrade Lieutenant Rossel’s old friend Nadya had stolen some of her jewellery.’
13
Rossel opened his eyes just as the last bars of the music faded away.
He knew the Kirov Theatre intimately – it was directly opposite the conservatory and he and his fellow students had been there countless times to watch rehearsals and performances. Yevgeny Mravinsky had been the maestro there. Now Mravinsky had moved on to the Leningrad Philharmonic and the Kirov’s chief conductor was Karl Eliasberg, whose task it was to grapple with The Blockade, a new opera commissioned by Stalin himself to honour the tenth
anniversary celebrations of the Road of Life. A poster in the foyer proclaimed the premiere was due on November 19. It was to be the culmination of two whole weeks of Party-sponsored trade shows, meetings and events.
Exactly ten years earlier, Captain Mikhail Murov and his transport regiment had carried the first supplies over the ice of Lake Lagoda using a horse-drawn sleigh. The road had initially borne only small amounts of flour into the besieged city, but this was not important. It had given the citizens of Leningrad a different kind of nourishment – hope. A heady moment of optimism that allowed those starving in the bombed cellars, or the wretched souls feverishly twisting and turning in the few remaining hospital beds, to believe that something other than death was to be their fate.
Felix had always been rude about the Kirov – ‘The inside is like a Venetian brothel and the outside is like a provincial train station, the kind of thing they built in Kazan or Sverdlovsk to make themselves feel as big and clever as Leningrad.’ But then Felix was rude about everything. The theatre itself was, indeed, a riot of velvet and gold leaf. But from the very first moment Rossel had stepped inside it as a student, he had fallen in love with it, and he felt that love rekindling as the music curled around him. It had been too long since he had attended the opera.
The orchestra was having difficulty with the piece, particularly the brass, who bore the brunt of the composer’s efforts to depict the frozen lake, the groaning and cracking of the ice beneath the feet of Murov’s team, the wind’s howling as it swept over the ice, and then, in its last few moments, the distant wail of a lone fighter. It was by turns violent and melancholic, and by the sound of it, technically almost impossible. Yet in the fragments the musicians were conquering, Rossel could hear how the composer had captured the primal essence of the siege, a rhythmic beast hidden deep in the Ladoga pine forests roaring defiance back across the rooftops of the distant city, out towards German Army Group North. Even though the auditorium was almost completely empty, Rossel could sense how tens of thousands of Soviet patriots would soon rise to their feet to applaud it.
The abrupt stilling of the timpani ushered in an unnerving silence. Then a colossal figure, chin on hands, leaned forward from the shadows of an unlit grand balcony just to the left of the main stage.
The giant clambered to his feet. He was almost two metres tall, Rossel reckoned, with a barrel-like chest and shoulders like haunches of venison. His face looked like a bronze bust, at once animated and monumental, as if the cast had only moments earlier been stripped from the sparks of a furnace. His physical presence alone was intimidating; a bear buttoned into a suit from which, at any second, it might tear itself free. Even before he spoke a word, the sheer force of the man’s personality filled the auditorium.
Nikolai Nikolayevich Vronsky. ‘Second only to Shostakovich in the great pantheon of twentieth-century Soviet composers,’ as Izvestia’s music critic had once called him. Vronsky had, it seemed, at last returned to the brilliant form of his precocious youth. Right now, however, he looked far from happy.
Vronsky stood, glaring down into the orchestra pit – a lord surveying his domain. He tapped the backs of two gold-ringed fingers on the brass rail of the box; drumming out a steady beat as he did so. Scratched, momentarily, at his thick black beard. Then he picked up a score from the music stand in front of him and began – very slowly – to rip it to pieces.
‘You cockroaches.’
Vronsky threw the torn paper up into the air. The ninety mute faces in the pit stared up as it fluttered down towards them.
‘I will have you all shot, do you hear me? No, not shot, hung, no, not hung, too quick, decapitated! No, not decapitated, too merciful. Drowned, yes, drowned but slowly, one at a time. I will call the people I need to call and have them stand you all on your heads on the shores of Lake Ladoga. And then I will kneel down on the banks of that godforsaken pond and pray, yes pray, for the Lake Gods to turn its waters into ten million gallons of beery German piss and then, do you know what I will do? I will wait; wait with a big fat smile on my bearded face, for the tide to come in.’
Vronsky pointed directly at a small grey-haired man in the orchestra pit.
‘That’s what I will do to you, Karlof, the next time you give me a false, farting note on that trombone of yours so abysmally poor that even a deaf mute who has gouged out their own eardrums with a hatpin can tell it is an abomination.’
Karlof’s face went a deep crimson. He started to stutter out a reply.
‘I’m sorry . . . Maestro . . . I . . . don’t . . . I . . . I’m . . .’
‘Don’t try and tell me what you are, Karlof. I decide what you are. And that is an epic reactionary bourgeois fool who wants to destroy my music. And when a man tries to do that, Karlof, do you know what he is trying to do?’
Karlof looked as though he wanted the sticky red carpet of the orchestra pit to rise up and swallow him. He shook his head.
‘He is trying to destroy my reputation.’
A woman sat down in the seat next to Rossel. Her perfume was expensive, unfamiliar, heavy with musk. Nothing like that available in the shops of Leningrad. The scent drew him in. He turned away from the confrontation. She smiled.
‘The maestro is nervous today, I think. Somewhat at odds with himself. He can be the sweetest of men, I assure you.’
She held out a perfectly manicured hand.
‘Marina Morozova. The deputy manager said an officer of the militia had come . . . ’
She stopped in mid-sentence.
‘Hello, Marina,’ Rossel said.
‘Revol.’
Rossel nodded.
There was a commotion above them and an anxious murmur from the pit. Rossel and the singer both looked up. In a surprisingly graceful movement for such a big man, Vronsky had stepped onto a stool and then leapt onto the edge of the balcony. He began to slow handclap his musicians, moving sarcastically from one foot to the other. Then suddenly his mood changed. His entire body began to shake with laughter. His voice became softer. Mischievous. Self-mocking. As if, at that precise moment, there was nothing in the world Nikolai Nikolayevich Vronsky found so ridiculous as his own grandiose pomposity.
‘Useless,’ he cried out. ‘Tone-deaf, talentless cretins. I, Vronsky, poet of the Russian soul, heir to Rimsky-Korsakov, to Mussorgsky, to Balakirev, salute you.’
*
The once gleaming crystal chandeliers were covered in dust and the Kirov’s café now exuded a decidedly prolet-arian demeanour. No such thing could be said of Marina Morozova, Honoured Artist of the Soviet Union and leading lady of the Kirov Opera.
They drank tea either side of a small glass table which had a folded beer mat underneath one leg to keep it balanced correctly.
She was still a great beauty. Her beauty was the first thing everybody, man or woman, noticed about Marina Morozova. When she had stood in front of him and Sorokin on their first day at the conservatory, neither of them could take their eyes off her. She had, of course, become one of Felix’s many conquests. ‘Don’t let that sweet, porcelain face fool you,’ his friend had said of her. ‘She screws like a navy whore.’
Sat opposite her, Rossel noticed something else. The exquisite, glittering diamond studs in each ear. They reminded him of the earrings on the blue-hat’s corpse.
‘The conservatory – oh, how I miss it,’ Marina said. ‘It’s where I learned who I was. Who I am! A good Bolshevik, of course, but also myself, too. I’m allowed that, am I not? Certainly, I must be allowed that. Waiter?’
The singer waved an elegant arm at a middle-aged man wearing an ill-fitting black suit, who came straight over to their table. She held up her chipped cup.
‘More tea.’
She turned towards Rossel.
‘And you, Revol? Can I call you that? I mean Lieutenant Rossel just feels too cold, too impersonal for old friends like us.’
Rossel handed his cup to the waiter and nodded. Then smiled at the soprano.
&nbs
p; ‘I thought it was Felix who was your particular friend, Marina?’
She ran a finger across the top of her brow, just beneath the hairline. Her skin was a dramatic, translucent white and, although, like him, she was now in her mid-thirties, unblemished. It was set off by lustrous dark locks, cut in a page-boy style. Her eyes were sea-blue and guarded.
‘Felix, my God. Do you still see him?’
Rossel shook his head.
‘Not for years now. At the conservatory, we were very close. But we drifted apart after we left. Like student friends often do. He moved, to Moscow, I think. A teaching job for some high-up member of the Politburo. Or the Defence Ministry. A girl who had some talent, apparently. Felix somehow wangled his way into the family’s affections. He will, by now, be either demonstrating Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet to Svetlana Stalin or breaking rocks somewhere east of Perm having been unable to resist ravishing the minister’s wife.’
She laughed but the laughter did not come easily. Whether this was because she disliked talk of Felix Sorokin’s amorous misadventures or because she had the Soviet allergy to gossip, he could not tell.
‘But I may be wrong,’ continued Rossel. ‘Felix was a wanderer. In every sense. In any case, I have not seen him since the end of the war. He was in the 23rd, I think, fighting the Finns.’
The waiter returned with fresh cups and a silver tray with two pots on it, one for tea, one for hot water. He put them on the table and walked back towards the counter.
‘A sweet, red-haired boy, my Felix,’ said Marina. ‘We were close for a while but I can’t say I’ve really thought of him in nearly fifteen years. You, on the other hand, Revol, well you had exactly what we all wanted. And, so, I have often wondered what happened to you.’
She gestured with her hand to his white cap with its red band, resting on the table.
‘I never expected this.’
She lifted the teapot and began to pour. ‘Talent, true talent. On a par with Oistrakh, even. I mean everybody said that.’
‘Not everybody.’
She smiled.
‘That’s true, Revol, very true. For you, I remember, did not.’