by Ben Creed
‘Such comparisons are foolish. David Oistrakh is one of the finest musicians ever to grace the stage. I never even had a job in a folk band.’
Marina took a sip of tea. Then reached across the table and touched him on the back of his gloved left hand.
‘I heard that you had stopped playing. I’m so sorry.’
Rossel withdrew the hand and shrugged.
‘The Kirov’s loss is the militia’s gain. That’s how I try to see it.’
Marina looked blankly at him for a moment before smiling, not without sympathy.
‘I’d heard rumours. Why would a brilliant violinist stop playing the violin?’ she said.
Rossel put his gloved hands down on the glass tabletop and leaned in. The table wobbled; tea swirled in the two mugs and ran into the cracked saucers. Almost imperceptibly, the tone of his voice changed.
‘Little Nadya, Marina. Nadya Bazhanova. Tell me about her.’
She leaned back.
‘So that’s why you are here. They finally decided to investigate that woman.’
‘Yes.’
‘Have my jewels turned up?’
‘Tell me about Paris and the Palais Garnier, Marina.’
As soon as he asked the question, her mood altered. Marina now assumed the role of prima donna in the Kirov Opera. Rossel leaned forward still further, now a policeman and nothing more.
‘Had she been your dresser for a long time?’
‘No, not that long really. Six months. Someone recommended her. I didn’t even recognise her when she turned up. Or realise we’d been at the conservatory together. I realised later that she had been a little put out about that. But you know how it was there. Circles within circles, all musicians together, all good communists together, everyone equal, of course – but . . .’
‘Some more equal than others.’
The soprano nodded.
‘“Talent, unlike milk, bread or cheese, is not distributed according to the needs of the proletariat via a five-year economic plan.” So says our mercurial maestro.’
She stopped.
‘Don’t worry, comrade,’ Rossel said. ‘We are old friends, you and I. I’m simply here to ask questions about Nadya.’
‘At first, she was fine, good at her job. I didn’t really like her, I can say that, but she was efficient. There was always a feeling with her of endless calculation. That everything she said and did served some strategic purpose. She had a grand design, I think, but I never got to find out what it was. Then, after she’d been with me for a few months, things started going missing.’
‘Things?’
‘Not jewellery, at first. I had a perfectly divine little Hermès clutch bag that Nikolai had brought me back from Lisbon one time.’
‘Nikolai?’
‘Vronsky. The maestro.’
‘Ah.’
Marina Morozova raised her slender eyebrows. Gently signalling: Yes, of course, I’m screwing the maestro. This, dearest Revol, is how the world works.
She smiled.
‘It was not particularly expensive, I think, but of great sentimental value to me.’
‘How so?’
‘It was a symbol.’
‘Of, what, exactly?’
She sipped at her tea. ‘We took Nikolai’s Inferno, his opera based on Dante’s poem, to the Teatro de São Carlos for a summer season. He told me I was his Beatrice. Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate, Abandon hope all ye who enter here. Nikolai loves to joke. In that and many other little ways I find him gloriously childlike. He likes to tease me with it sometimes – he quotes the line before we make love; enter what Dante calls: il secondo cerchio.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘The second circle. In the book and also in Nikolai’s opera. Those afflicted with sins of lust were kept in the second circle of hell.’
Marina held his gaze for a second and then reached out, picked up her cup and sipped again. Rossel could see she was enjoying herself.
He decided to put a stop to that.
Rossel reached into the pocket of his jacket, then put a picture of the ruby clasp-earrings onto the table.
‘Were these amongst what you believe Nadya took from you, Comrade Morozova?’
She looked down at the photograph and instantly shook her head.
‘No, I’ve never seen them before.’
‘What, then, beside the Hermès bag, was the jewellery that you believe she stole?’
‘A bracelet, a sapphire bracelet. From a jeweller called Tiffany, in New York.’
Rossel picked up the photograph and put down another on the table.
‘This is what Nadya looked like when we found her. I don’t know what cerchio of hell she had visited before she died, only that she must have sinned very greatly to deserve it.’
Marina stared down at it for a moment, but quickly looked away and handed the photograph back to Rossel.
‘How horrible,’ she said. The singer took out a small yellow silk handkerchief and began to wipe away a tear. ‘What happened?’
‘It is not clear,’ replied Rossel. ‘But she was murdered, we know that much. Why, when and by whom? Well, that is why I am asking questions, Marina.’
The soprano leaned out of her chair as if in a semi-swoon.
‘No animal could ever be so cruel as man, so artfully, artistically cruel,’ she said.
Rossel sighed inwardly. She must think he was an idiot. Was it the uniform? An MGB officer would have had her blabbing away but the militia did not command enough respect. He would have to frighten her.
‘I have a recording of Vronsky’s Inferno at home. In fact, I own many of the maestro’s recordings,’ Rossel began. This was true. He had always admired the composer’s work. Vronsky might, at times, be ‘childlike,’ as she claimed, but he wrote symphonies like someone who had lived a dozen different lifetimes and, in each of them, fathomed the wisdom of the ages. ‘Not the one with you in the lead, the one with Ira Malaniuk. She is superb. Wouldn’t you agree? A performance devoid of all superficiality. As I remember there are nine circles in total. Lust, as you say. Limbo, gluttony, greed, anger, heresy, violence, fraud. And treachery. Our glorious MGB would be strongly in agreement with the poet as he reserves the ninth and most terrible circle of perfidy for traitors.’
At the mention of the MGB, Marina put down her cup on the table and straightened her back. Almost as though they had already brought her in for an interview.
‘Then you quote Dostoevsky to me,’ said Rossel. ‘A man who thought and wrote a great deal about murder.’
Marina gazed at him as he stood to leave, all traces of the smile gone.
‘This new piece of Nikolai’s is influenced by Crime and Punishment,’ the singer replied. ‘Themes of thwarted ambition, destiny, sacrifice. He says Dostoevsky is the Dante of the Russian soul.’
Rossel picked up and put on his cap. He gave her a small salute and spoke formerly.
‘Thank you, Marinochka. It will, I’m sure, be of little interest to him but please pass on my own admiration of this sublime new work to the maestro.’
She nodded.
‘Of course. And what of Sofia, Revol? Are you and she still in touch? For a time, you were the conservatory’s very own Tristan and Isolde.’
He coloured slightly. Then shook his head. Why, even after all these years, was it still so difficult for him to hear her name dropped into a conversation?
‘Ah, I see,’ said Marina. ‘Perhaps, in the end, she grew tired of you?’
*
‘You!’
Rossel spun on his heels.
‘Yes, you. Come here.’
The maestro was sitting on one side of the Kirov’s foyer on a gold chaise longue, almost filling it with his bulk. Before him stood a small grey-haired man. The hapless Karlof.
Rossel walked towards them and then stood next to the trombone player.
Vronsky was, it seemed, still in a playful mood.
‘So here you are, our mysterious visi
tor from the militia. How perfect.’
‘In what way, Comrade Vronsky?’ said Rossel.
‘I saw you from the balcony. Listening – actually listening. I like the way you listen, attentively, with your eyes closed, paying all proper respects.’ He glanced up at Rossel’s epaulettes with their thin red band and two gold stars. ‘Bravo, Lieutenant.’ Then he gestured to Karlof.
‘Despite all aural evidence to the contrary, Vitaly here believes that he is good enough to play in the brass section of Vronsky’s orchestra at the Kirov Theatre. Don’t you, Karlof?’
Karlof took off his glasses and wiped them with a grubby handkerchief before putting them back on again.
‘I have a family, maestro. I have responsibilities. Please, another chance, I beg you.’
Vronsky sat back in the chaise longue and rested his arms on its gold-lacquered back. Like one of the great marble Romanov eagles that decorated the foyer, brought suddenly to life.
‘Vitaly has a family, Lieutenant, and so has been begging me not to sack him. What do you think of that? Some heroic daughter of the Soviet Union has allowed herself to be impregnated by Vitaly’s apologetic appendage. They should give her the Order of Lenin.’
Karlof’s face reddened. He looked as though, family or not, he was about to turn on his heel and leave the theatre. That would be a mistake. One word from the maestro and Karlof would be lucky if his next job was playing in a folk band in a Siberian village. Rossel decided to change the subject.
‘I am a huge admirer of your work, Comrade Vronsky. Symphony number 3, in particular. You broke new ground – I dare to suggest it was the work that marked you out as a pioneer in Russian composition.’
In a crowded field of Russian musical geniuses, either as Soviet artists or exiled ones, Vronsky had somehow found a distinctive voice between the unabashed Romanticism of Rachmaninov, the exhilarating modernism of Stravinsky and the gut-wrenching emotion of Shostakovich. Vronsky took Russia’s suffering and made it sound beautiful.
Vronsky grinned.
‘The Third? Really, you like that? No one plays it now. “Too experimental for the common man, exhibiting an un-Soviet sense of unfettered individuality,” is what that imbecile Denikin wrote in Pravda.’
He tapped the back of two gold-ringed fingers against the chair and began to beat out a few notes of his suppressed symphony.
‘And quite right, too, of course. We do, after all, live in a country where the will of the people and therefore the tastes of the proletariat, be they, on occasions, ever so slightly tedious, are paramount. The Third, eh? You know your music, for a militsioner.’
‘We have met once before, maestro.’
Vronsky’s fingers stopped tapping.
‘We have?’
‘I was honoured to perform for you once, during the war. An ensemble piece, a rehearsal of something you were developing to honour the courage and nobility of Soviet sacrifice. I’m not sure you ever completed it.’
‘And was I impressed?’
Rossel smiled. Then shook his head.
‘No, maestro, you were not. You told us that it was a first-rate composition but our playing had done something impossible and rendered it fifth-rate.’
Vronsky threw back his head and laughed. He stood up to his full height, dwarfing Rossel and Karlof, and then slapped the trombonist on the back, whose short legs almost buckled.
The maestro took a step closer to Rossel. Brown eyes, whites tinged a smoky yellow, held Rossel’s gaze. The detective felt oddly queasy – claustrophobic, even cowed by their power. As if the composer possessed the ability to take an X-ray of his soul.
‘You are a listener, Lieutenant, as I said. So, I ask you, you heard our own rehearsal today. Do I persevere with Karlof here? That is my question. Is he deserving of a place at my table for my opera’s last act?’
Rossel thought for a moment. He didn’t want the trombonist to lose his job.
‘How could he meet your standards? He lacks your empathy, your genius for understanding the infinite capacity for suffering that marks out the Russian people from all others. No one could feel and encompass their triumph in the great siege of Hero City, like you have done, except Shostakovich himself. But give Comrade Karlof time, and the continued honour of your masterful tutelage, and then, perhaps, he may do.’
Vronsky glanced at Karlof’s expectant face. Then sighed as if he was disappointed with himself. Before breaking into a broad grin.
‘Perhaps the lieutenant is right, Karlof? Very well. On this occasion, I relent. But don’t make me regret it.’
Karlof looked relieved. Vronsky turned back to Rossel.
‘Sometimes, I wonder if I have the rigour of mind, the discipline required, to make the harsh decisions truly great art demands of its creators, Lieutenant Rossel. But good answer. Very good, in fact. You are indeed the listener I have been looking for.’
The composer took a small piece of card from his pocket and handed it to the policeman.
‘With my compliments, comrade.’
Then he stretched out his arms and slapped Rossel and Karlof hard on the back before bursting into booming laughter.
‘Yes, very good. Except for the part about that pompous arse, Shostakovich!’
14
In the hall outside his bedroom, he could hear one of the Sazonov children playing hide and seek. There was a small storage cupboard in the alcove opposite and it was a favourite hiding place.
On a glass ashtray by the windowsill was a pile of cigarette butts. Next to that, propped up against an empty glass, was the golden card Vronsky had given him. Black letters on it read:
The Blockade – N. N. Vronsky. A new opera to celebrate the glorious opening of The Road of Life and the victory of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War. 19 November 1951. Honoured guest.
If the music he had heard at the rehearsal was anything to go by, it would be a privilege to attend the premiere. A talent like Vronsky’s was given to few men.
Rossel lay on his bed staring up at a long thin crack in the plaster, a cigarette stuck to his lips. Two hours spent turning over the facts of the case in his head and he still had nothing of substance. Only a list of unanswered questions.
Why five bodies? Not three? Or six? There was something about the way they had been arranged so neatly on the tracks out at Ladoga, which made him feel that the actual number of corpses, in itself, had peculiar significance to the murderer, or murderers. As though he, or they, were leaving a message.
But why go to such lengths to conceal their identities and then dump them on a railway line where they were bound to be discovered?
And why had they all been starved before being slaughtered? If Dr Volkova’s theory was right, each of the victims had lost a catastrophic amount of weight before being killed. Who would do something like that? Why would they inflict such a slow and deliberate ratcheting up of pain and terror?
And the blue-hat? What kind of person was supremely confident enough to do something like that? To kill an officer of the Ministry for State Security was to risk everything. Admittedly, she was, as Lipukhin had pointed out, low level – using her role as a dresser to spy on the company abroad. But that act alone should have ensured a relentlessly thorough investigation. It was spitting in the face of the Chekists, and that never went unanswered. The fact that the Vosstaniya Street militia department had been given any time at all to investigate such a crime on their own, was, to Rossel’s mind, still the biggest mystery of all.
And now the ruby earrings had led him to Little Nadya. Led back to the conservatory.
*
He awoke with a start. The butt of his cigarette had burnt a black hole into the blanket. He was not sure how long he had slept. The music was starting up once again. The mystery guitarist was tuning up. And this time it sounded like Oy, to ne vyecher was going to feature again.
A minute later there was a knock at the door.
Rossel got up and answered it.
Lena
smiled, revealing the gap between her two front teeth.
‘Mama says she can’t take any more, Revol. Not tonight, she’s on early shift at the factory in the morning. It could be anyone playing that guitar on the fifth floor, she says.’
Lena dropped into an impression of her mother’s country-bumpkin Urals’ accent.
‘And so she is wondering if the handsome militia lieutenant in room four, the one with the dark eyes and the beautiful smile, would go and do something about it?’
*
The singer’s voice did not sound as though it was coming from inside one of the main apartments on the fifth floor. It must, he reasoned, be from one of what were called the janitor flats. Each floor had a cupboard-like apartment that, at one time, when the block was first built, had been used for a live-in cleaner. Now they were greatly prized because being allocated one meant that an unmarried and childless citizen could enjoy the luxury of living alone.
The janitor flat doors were painted brown, not green like all the other doors on the floor, and positioned nearest the stairs. Rossel stopped outside the only brown door on the corridor and listened. This was it, all right. The guitarist was not singing any more but they were still strumming gently at the strings. He knocked sharply – his policeman’s knock.
The strumming stopped.
He heard footsteps. Ah, it is not yet evening, Oy, to ny vyecher, the song was the same. Even though the voice was completely different, for the briefest of moments, he allowed himself to entertain the ridiculous notion that it might actually be Sofia.
The sound of a bolt being turned. The door swung open.
It was the woman in the light blue dress Lena had teased him about in the communal kitchen.
She was in her mid-thirties and short. The singer was wearing black workman’s boots and a blue towelling dressing gown, pulled tight at the waist with a cord. Her hair was dark brown and held tight by a battery of plastic red curlers and hairclips. Her eyes were blue, he noticed, and radiated determination.
‘Yes?’
Rossel caught himself eyeing her. Trying to cover his embarrassment, he stared directly into her eyes. She pulled at the neck of her dressing gown, drawing it across the exposed flesh. He saw a vicious red scar, about two inches long and wide, between the nape of her neck and her left breast. She pulled the dressing gown even tighter and hid it.