City of Ghosts

by Ben Creed

  Lipukhin stared into the fire.

  ‘I wish I could have fought the fascists,’ he said in a soft voice.

  ‘Those of us who did are very glad that the next generation will not have to do the same,’ said Rossel.

  ‘But how do you know if . . .’

  Lipukhin tailed off. Rossel would have liked to give him a drink but he knew where that would end.

  The captain threw his cigarette into the flames.

  ‘I don’t know how to make sense of any of this,’ he said.

  ‘There are many aspects of this crime that make no sense, Comrade Captain,’ Rossel replied, ‘and that’s not including our interview with the good Colonel Sarkisov. Five mutilated corpses. This is no drunken argument that ended with the killer waking up with a hangover and only the vaguest memory of knifing his best friend across the kitchen table. It’s not, to my mind, MGB either – the MGB would herd a hundred people into the Bolshoi Dom and we’d never see any of them again. State security does not deal in groups of five, comrade. Criminals might, but a turf war would have ended in the bodies being buried under a thousand tonnes of concrete or dumped in the river, not splayed out on a railway line dressed like characters from a baroque fairy tale retold by Mayakovsky.’

  He began to pace as his reasoning unfolded in his mind. Saboteurs and wreckers? Nonsense – what were they wrecking? Anti-Soviet agents didn’t draw attention to themselves by dressing up corpses and leaving them in plain sight. This was the key to the crime, he thought – being noticed.

  ‘The whole thing is un-Soviet, yes. But why that merits a personal visit from Colonel Sarkisov presently eludes me.’ Rossel picked up his greatcoat and his cap. ‘Nonetheless, I am going to take his advice.’

  ‘Which part?’ asked Lipukhin, looking nervous.

  ‘The bit about legwork.’

  16

  Saturday October 20

  Hospital 40 at Sestroretsk, a satellite district to Leningrad’s west, was only half the size it had been before the blockade. It had been heavily bombed by the Luftwaffe in the depths of the siege. When the war ended, there were more bomb craters in its formerly leafy grounds than beds, wards and operating theatres.

  As Rossel walked down the corridor leading to the maternity ward, the sound of drills and hammers came from a nearby corridor. Seven years since the siege was lifted, Hospital 40 was still being rebuilt. He sat in a little room next to the ward, listening to the mewling of babies and the shushing of their mothers, for about ten minutes, waiting for the nursing shifts to change.

  Finally, a bell rang. Moments later, two young nurses, chatting and giggling about their exploits at a dance night, shot past him, buttoning up their coats.

  Then – he checked the small black and white photograph in his wallet, yes, definitely her – Nurse Durova appeared.

  Now is the time I find out whether that stupid seabird really is lucky, he thought. He’d made a special journey to the fireplace before he left the station. One of Gerashvili’s flatmates had to be an informer. Perhaps both were?

  ‘Nurse Durova?’

  The girl – she was little more than that, maybe only eighteen years old, with dark hair and a pretty face – turned towards him.

  She looked at his uniform.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I have a question for you. Is there somewhere we can talk?’

  The girl looked around the empty corridor.

  ‘I’ve already told the others everything I know.’

  ‘A minute of your time is all I need. It could help Lidia Gerashvili.’

  ‘I don’t know anything.’

  She was very nervous. That was good. He had picked the right girl, he figured. The informer would have been expecting him – would even have been pleased to see him. Another opportunity to prove her worth to the MGB with a full report of his visit. Their vicious internal politics were legendary. Just because Rossel was under orders from the Fifth Directorate, in a manner of speaking, that wouldn’t prevent him being arrested by the Second. Ratting out two militia officers in the same week might even get her some privileges.

  No, this one was not on the payroll.

  *

  Tears trickled down both of Nurse Durova’s cheeks. She and Rossel sat side by side on two green chairs about halfway down the hospital corridor.

  ‘Dominika, the other nurse who shared with me, said we couldn’t trust Lidia, you know, with her being a . . .’

  She stopped herself.

  ‘In the militia,’ said Rossel.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me, again, exactly what happened on the night she was arrested.’

  ‘I liked Lidia. She was kind, is kind, she let me borrow her best dress to go on a date a couple of weeks ago – not every girl would do that. It’s green with a beautiful pattern around the collar. She said I looked like Lyubov Orlova in it. I know I don’t look like any film star but she does, sometimes. Dominika says she’s a little fat, but I think she’s really pretty. Dominika’s too thin. Thin enough to slip through a crack in the floorboards. Men don’t like that. I think she’s just jealous.’

  ‘Please, the night she was arrested. It would help me.’

  ‘We sometimes eat together, the three of us. We did that night. Lidia was late in, about seven thirty. When she arrived, she was carrying a package with her – it was books, books covered in brown paper.’

  ‘How many books?’

  ‘I told them already,’ Nurse Durova said.

  ‘Tell me again.’

  ‘Three, there were three of them.’

  ‘And what did she do with the books?’

  ‘Put them in a small cupboard next to her bed. Then we all sat around the table in the middle of the room talking, smoking and eating piroshki that I made.’

  ‘Did any of you leave the room before the security officers came?’ he asked.

  ‘Only Dominika for about ten minutes. She went to use the telephone.’

  ‘Did Lidia say anything to either of you about the books?’

  Nurse Durova shook her head.

  ‘No, Dominika asked her what was in the package, but she said it was nothing important, just work stuff.’

  ‘And what happened when the MGB came?’

  ‘We all were laughing about this old man, Volodya, on the second floor who has his eye on Lidia and sometimes leaves posies outside our door. There was a knock and we all cried out, “It’s him, Volodya has come courting.” And then . . .’

  The nurse took a hanky out of her bag and dabbed at her eyes.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Dominika opened it, and the officers came in. MGB, we all could tell. It was terrifying. But one of them read out Lidia’s name from his notebook. They said they needed to talk to her about a matter of state security. Lidia got up from the table and went with them. She didn’t say anything at all, either to us, or them. Not a word. It was like she knew they were coming. She didn’t act surprised in any way.’

  ‘And the books?’

  ‘That was the really odd thing. They never mentioned the books. Never asked Lidia about them. But one of the officers went straight to where they were, straight to the little cupboard next to her bed, and took them.’

  ‘Nothing else? They didn’t search your room?’

  Nurse Durova shrugged.

  ‘No. And I, well.’ She looked away. ‘I was glad they hadn’t come for me.’

  Rossel thought for a moment.

  ‘Was there anything else out of the ordinary that happened while the three of you were together before the officers came? Anything she did? Anything else she said?’

  The girl started to shake her head. Then stopped.

  ‘You know there was one thing. I didn’t think much of it at the time but . . .’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Pskov, she asked about the town of Pskov. Dominika’s grandma is from somewhere near there. When I first put out the plates of blinis, she asked Dominika if she had visited any of the fam
ous churches there. I mean, Lidia wasn’t religious in any way, not at all.’

  ‘And what did Dominika say?’

  ‘Nothing. Just that she thought most of them had been turned into storehouses, libraries and museums, same as everywhere else. “No priests left in Pskov, then?” Lidia asked her. Dominika just laughed and said: “Not many. Once God left, so did most of the priests.”’

  He stood up.

  ‘That’s it, no more questions?’ She sounded confused.

  Rossel smiled and pointed in the direction of the maternity ward.

  ‘You watch the babies in there, am I right?’

  Nurse Durova’s expression softened.

  ‘Sometimes on the incubation ward with the ones who are premature, on a night shift, it’s just me and them. It’s so quiet in the darkness, all you can hear is their soft breathing, coughing and crying,’ she said. ‘After a while, you can tell just from the way they breathe if something’s not quite right.’

  Rossel began to walk away but then stopped himself.

  ‘Your friend, Dominika. Is she a good friend?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure she is. Just as you watch over those little ones. So attentively. I’m certain that, in exactly the same way, your friend, Dominika, watches over you.’

  *

  Rossel sat in the filing room in Gerashvili’s chair. There were seventeen files in front of him. They constituted every file he had found on Gerashvili’s desk – the exact paperwork she had been examining just before her arrest. He had sorted through them and piled fifteen on one side of the desk, two on the other. All were of priests and clergy who had gone missing over the past five years in the administrative regions around Leningrad.

  As he settled down to examining the files, he reached for the radio switch, an on-off button that activated a speaker on the wall. It was All-Union Radio or nothing. It took him a moment to recognise the music – the second movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, about halfway through. With the celebrations of the Road of Life coming up, they were playing it a lot, he’d noticed. The composer had dedicated his mammoth work to his home city of Leningrad, which at the time had been in the grip of the German and Finnish blockade. Nine hundred days of hell. Rossel stopped for a moment to listen. By the time of the premiere in Leningrad itself, in August 1942, the symphony had been played around the world, hailed as the sound of Soviet defiance. But for those who had endured and survived the siege, it also evoked a great many terrible memories.

  Rossel flicked the radio off.

  He turned back to the files. The pile of fifteen were cases he had already discounted. The other two were the ones who had a connection to the monasteries around Pskov. According to Nurse Durova, the city seemed to have piqued Gerashvili’s interest.

  The first of the Pskov files was that of a former archbishop who had been patriarch of the Cathedral of St John before the revolution. He had taken to drink in his declining years and been reported missing by one of his old parishioners about fourteen months ago. The parishioner wondered if he had been kidnapped. According to the file, the local militia suspected he’d got blind drunk on moonshine, wandered into the forest near Lake Peipus and frozen to death.

  The second one was much more interesting.

  17

  Sunday October 21

  In the twilight, the great stone walls of the Pskov-Pechersky Dormition Monastery rose and plunged like a giant white serpent in some twisted Slavic fairy tale. Driven into sloping ground, over the centuries the walls had been built and attacked and rebuilt; now they were going through the same process and, as Rossel did a circuit, he could make out rickety scaffolding clinging to the thick fortifications. The weather was still but cold – minus twenty, he had heard someone say on the bus from Pskov – and thick clouds kept the day dark. The city was nearly three hundred kilometres from Leningrad. A long drive at the best of times but in this freakish winter, a true odyssey. The train journey had helped him to think before the rattling bus had set him on edge again.

  Every now and then, at even intervals, a large wooden gatehouse jutted out of the shadows, their pointed roofs looking like the hut, minus the fat chicken legs, of Baba Yaga, the old witch with iron teeth and an appetite for a human supper. His mother had read the stories to him when he was small. ‘Do you know what it means to allow a wicked thought to enter one’s heart? The wicked thought grows all the time like a poisonous plant and slowly kills the good thoughts.’ Rossel’s mother had often read him that line from the folk tale. Lifting her head up from the book and staring, so he understood its meaning and importance. She needn’t have bothered. Stalin and Beria made the same point daily, in the papers, on the radio and in the propaganda posters. And besides, a few years spent mingling with the blackmailers, spivs, prostitutes and corrupt cops of Sennaya Square had convinced him of its truthfulness.

  He dropped the cigarette he had been smoking under the glare of a flickering street light and started to walk through dots of snow across the cobbled path that led towards the monastery’s St Nicholas Gate and, he hoped, information on Father Tikhon, the troubled priest who had attracted Gerashvili’s attention.

  *

  Archimandrite Pimen was sitting at a large zinc desk whittling a piece of pinewood with a small, pearl-handled penknife. The head of the monastery had long and yellowing nails; his fingers were curled and gnarled. The image of what looked like a tiny bird was emerging from the pine.

  There were not many places left in Stalin’s empire where a man could believe the revolution had never taken place but the caves of the Pskov-Pechersky monastery was most definitely one of them. Built fifty kilometres away from Pskov itself, it was on the edge of the Russian Socialist Republic, a stone’s throw from Estonia. Its blue and gold domes stood proud above the walls and the grounds; under the churches was a network of caves in which the holy men who had established the community had once lived. The caves were freezing and the damp air penetrated everything Rossel had put on as a defence. How the archimandrite could stand it for more than an hour or two was beyond him. But Pimen preferred to work here, he had been told.

  There were icons everywhere, lit by candles hung in the alcoves; each stony nook and cranny housed a golden image of Christ, the Trinity, St Catherine or some other saint. Pungent, cloying incense filled the air. From somewhere impossible to trace, Rossel could hear monks chanting plainsong.

  ‘My predecessors generally preferred to live and work in the monastery proper, but I like the solitude of the caves. I have been an archimandrite, here at Pskov, since 1915 and a humble monk for twenty years before that. This working into the wood is a habit I have affected to quiet my sometimes-troubled soul, Lieutenant Rossel.’

  ‘You have lived through turbulent times, Father.’

  Rossel sat opposite the monk on a low stool, the table between them.

  The archimandrite, himself seated on an ornate, cushioned chair with his arms dangling off high rests, nodded. He rested the incomplete bird, if that was what it was, on the bench and then pulled at a loop in his long grey beard. Twisting it with his fingers so it slowly began to smooth and straighten. Well into his eighties, he looked younger, no more than sixty-five. But his face was gaunt, his cheeks hollowed.

  ‘Before the war, our troubles were many. All the churches and monasteries were dissolved and our buildings absorbed by the state but, in its darkest hour of need, the Great Leader, guided by God, called the faithful back to into his own fold, so we could help fortify the Russian soul against the Nazi aggressors. I recently carved a figure of St Catherine. Do you know her story?’

  Rossel shook his head.

  ‘At school, I was taught only to genuflect before statues of Marx or Lenin,’ he said.

  Pimen let go of his beard.

  ‘A stunning beauty, St Catherine, as the story goes, desired by the Roman emperor Maxentius. He had the greatest philosophers of his day converse with the young girl i
n an attempt to break her faith by force of their reason but they could not. She broke them, can you believe it? She converted some of those wise minds to the one true path and Maxentius had them all put to death on the spot. Then, finally, unable to convert her to his own way of thinking, he had Catherine broken on the wheel.’

  The archimandrite’s grey pupils appeared unnaturally large in the candlelight.

  ‘When earthly power is denied, when it is not allowed complete conquest, it shows no mercy.’

  ‘Is that the moral of your tale?’ said Rossel. ‘I expected something a little more uplifting.’

  ‘I simply make an observation, Lieutenant.’

  ‘About our great and noble Soviet Union?’

  ‘About human nature.’

  The monk picked up his knife again and began to whittle at the stick once again.

  ‘You were asking about Father Tikhon,’ he said. ‘Yes, I remember him. We all do. As you say, he had many tattoos about his person – from time spent in the camps, we all assumed, where all manner of vice and depravity is practised – but I cannot be certain if they were exactly the same as the ones on the picture you showed me. What I can say, with some accuracy, is that he was a troubled man.’

  ‘With drink, with women?’

  The archimandrite shrugged.

  ‘With everything, I think. Eventually, I expect, he gave way to all the vices. I sensed a darkness within him – a secret of some sort – but even within the binding sacrament of confession, he refused to share it with me.’

  ‘Apart from the missing person’s report that brought me here, I could find no other file for a priest named Tikhon,’ said Rossel. ‘My assumption is that it is not his real name.’

  ‘It is the one he gave when he arrived here at the monastery.’