City of Ghosts

by Ben Creed

  ‘Connects them how?’ said Grachev. ‘She was a clarinet player who packed it in after the Chekists recruited her as an informer at the Kirov Theatre, posing as an assistant to one of the Soviet Union’s leading opera singers. All we know about the monk and his music is that his eyes got a little wet when the choir sang hallelujah. That’s not much to hang a case on. How are we going to get our confession for Sarkisov and the MGB? By rounding up all the monks in the choir at Pskov and getting them to say they were all screwing the fat clarinettist? That she sucked Father Tikhon’s cock so hard he was smiling so wide his face split in two? I don’t think so. A death cult, on the other hand, the MGB might buy that. But first, we’re going to need to find someone to give us a confession.’

  Rossel dropped the file back on the middle of the desk.

  ‘Someone like who? Confessing to what?’

  Grachev could not hold back a smirk. ‘I’ve got someone in mind.’

  Rossel sat back down on his seat and moved it a little to the left so as to close the gap between him and the chairs that Grachev and Taneyev were sitting on. He reached out and gently patted Taneyev on the back. Then he leaned in towards Grachev. His voice became soft and cajoling.

  ‘Who is it – Pavel Konstantinovich? Aren’t you going to share the mysterious name with me?’

  Taneyev’s cheeks flushed. Grachev, refusing to take the bait, turned his face away from Rossel’s, and addressed Lipukhin.

  ‘Can I have a word, boss?’

  Lipukhin shrugged.

  ‘About what?’

  Grachev stood up and picked his cap off the table. He glanced contemptuously down at Rossel. Then turned back towards the captain.

  ‘In private.’

  19

  Lipukhin’s communal apartment was in Pulkovo, near the city’s Shosseynaya Airport. He had moved there when his marriage broke up. His parents and two of his three sisters died in the siege – a direct hit from a German bomb. The other sister, a doctor, had survived and lived here with him. Rossel had been to the place once before when he and the captain had gone to a football match together about five years ago. Zenit had beaten Traktor Stalingrad 1–0. Lipukhin celebrated a little too much afterwards, ended up puking in the gutter and Rossel had had to help him back to his apartment. Zenit had been playing today, as it happened, away to Daugava Riga. Rossel had heard on the radio that they lost 2–0.

  It was dark by the time he arrived. He knocked on the captain’s door. There was no answer. Another rap. Still nothing. Then he heard the shuffle of feet and the clank of several locks. The door opened an inch or so and a child’s face appeared in the crack. A little girl with blonde hair. It was Darya, Lipukhin’s seven-year-old niece.

  ‘My name’s Revol, Darya. Do you remember me? I work with your uncle. Is he here?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Mama’s at the hospital,’ she said. ‘Uncle Ilya is looking after me but he fell asleep.’

  ‘Can I come in?’

  The girl opened the door to let him pass.

  ‘Uncle Ilya threw a bottle at the mantelpiece and it smashed into a lot of pieces. He’s done it before. Mama won’t be happy when she gets back.’

  *

  Shaken awake, Lipukhin sat on a small couch in the shared room, looking even more puffy-faced than usual. His hair was out of place and his clothes were dishevelled. His niece was playing with a doll behind the curtain that separated the sleeping area she shared with her mother from the space where her uncle slept.

  Rossel swept the last pieces of the glass into a dustpan and walked towards a bin in the little kitchen area that was part of the apartment.

  ‘No, don’t put it in there, Revol.’

  Rossel looked around.

  ‘Where then?’

  Lipukhin lit a cigarette.

  ‘You’ll need to take it with you.’

  ‘Take it with me?’

  The captain nodded.

  ‘There’s a copy of Pravda next to the sink. Wrap it up in that.’

  Rossel walked towards the small kitchen area, folded out the newspaper and then slid the broken glass from the dustpan inside it.

  Lipukhin suppressed a belch.

  ‘Raisa will get back from the hospital at ten. Tongue like a rusty saw, my sister. I don’t want her to know I’ve been on the sauce again when I’m supposed to be keeping an eye on Darya.’

  ‘Losing family is hard for anybody,’ said Rossel. ‘Just because it happened to so many people during the war doesn’t make it any easier for you.’

  ‘Sometimes I wish the bomb that took our parents had seen to one extra Lipukhin. Raisa is stronger than me, in that way. She copes better.’

  Rossel folded the newspaper with the glass inside it. A shard sneaked through both the paper and one of his gloves’ thin fingertips. He muttered a curse.

  ‘Shall we have some music?’ he asked.

  On the wall was a wooden radio. Lipukhin reached up and pressed a button. The radio only had one channel, which at that moment was playing a stirring march. He adjusted the volume to the precise level to which all Soviet households had become accustomed – to the point where a private conversation could not be overheard.

  Rossel sat down on the couch.

  ‘Grachev wants you to tell Sarkisov it’s me, doesn’t he?’ he said. ‘That I’m the connection to the bodies on the line – on the flimsy basis that I knew one of the victims so I must have killed them all. That if you give me up, everyone else at Vosstaniya Street will be saved.’

  ‘Well, you did study at the conservatory with her,’ said Lipukhin.

  ‘That’s not enough for you to condemn me,’ said Rossel. ‘For Grachev, yes – but you?’

  Darya had come out of the bedroom holding her doll, which was now in two parts. She held them out.

  ‘It’s broken again, Uncle.’

  ‘Give it to me, my sweet.’

  ‘I’m asking you to get me some more time to investigate the case and keep the MGB off my back, that’s all,’ said Rossel. ‘Will you do that for me, Ilya?’

  Lipukhin ran a hand through his ragged hair. ‘That’s all, he says. As if it’s that easy. We’re all in danger, Revol. All of us.’

  ‘This would have put the fire in your belly once, Ilya. This case would have obsessed you.’

  Lipukhin sat up straighter, grabbed Darya by one arm and wrapped her in an embrace. The child submitted without enthusiasm. He let her go and she retreated to a corner, still clutching the broken toy that her uncle had already forgotten about.

  ‘Why did you never tell me that you were in the 2nd Shock Army?’ Lipukhin asked. He sounded almost angry.

  Rossel shrugged. ‘We live in a world where many things are best left unsaid.’

  ‘It makes you a bloody miracle. The 2nd, well, that’s a legend. I know you don’t like talking about the past. But you’re asking me to trust you. So, I need to know a little more.’

  ‘Mine was a short and undistinguished military career,’ Rossel said. He stopped but could see that was not going to be enough. ‘When the war started, I was in civil defence – digging trenches, hauling tank traps into place, putting out fires. Then, in May ’42, I was arrested. That’s when my hands were . . . But, in June of the same year, when they needed every last man who could hold a rifle and run a hundred metres without falling over – that, quite literally, was our training – they bandaged me up and sent me forward.’

  He held up his right hand.

  ‘I was left with a functioning trigger finger. As you gathered, my call-up got me out of a spot. They needed every last man for the Sinyavino Offensive and, at that point, they didn’t give a damn about your fidelity to Marxist–Leninist orthodoxy. The idea was to make sure the Germans used up all their bullets on the first few waves so that later attacks might have a chance of breaking through. It didn’t work. Nothing did.’

  ‘Stupid doll!’ Darya threw the doll on the floor in frustration.

  ‘Quiet, Dashenka,’ said
Lipukhin. ‘Let Uncle Revol speak.’

  ‘I spent the next few weeks sucking filthy water out of a ditch and watching my comrades get blown to pieces,’ continued Rossel. ‘I was one of a few dozen men in our battalion who walked out of that shithole alive and there was not a shred of heroism involved. If it’s a test of courage you want, this case – pursuing the killer, not whitewashing it all away – takes far more of it.’

  Lipukhin stared at his feet. The military march ended and for a moment the radio emitted nothing but a quiet hiss. Darya hummed a tune in a voice that set Rossel’s teeth on edge.

  ‘And there is Grachev, bragging about his scalps for all this time,’ said the captain in a low voice. ‘Now you – fuck your mother, the 2nd Shock. And after that?’

  The little girl’s eyes widened in delight at her uncle’s bad language but before she could imitate him the radio started up again.

  Dear comrades, now for our evening concert of songs and symphonic works dedicated to our beloved collective farms . . .

  ‘In ’43, fighting near Shlisselburg, I got shrapnel in my lower back,’ said Rossel. ‘Once I recovered, I spent most of the rest of the war with an anti-aircraft battery. Then joined the militia in ’46. And that’s it.’

  Lipukhin cleared his throat.

  ‘Now, thanks to Sarkisov, you know his name,’ he said.

  Rossel, confused by the interruption, followed the captain’s gaze until he realised it was fixed on his gloved hands.

  ‘Yes, Nikitin. Major Nikitin,’ he said.

  Rossel’s voice gave nothing away. But he shoved his hands deep down inside his coat pockets.

  Their eyes met for a second. Lipukhin broke off first and looked over at his niece. He gave a loud sniff.

  ‘Dashenka, my little one, bring that dolly over here,’ he said. He took the two pieces from the girl’s outstretched hands and began to twist them back together.

  ‘It’s not broken, it just clips together like the others, but I will fix it for you as long as you don’t tell your mama about the broken bottle and the glass. Is that a deal?’

  There was a click as the two halves became one again.

  ‘You know what a deal is, don’t you, Dashenka?’ he said.

  The little girl held out her hands and nodded.

  ‘You do what I want as long as I do what you want. That’s what you told me about deals, Uncle Ilya.’

  Lipukhin patted his niece’s head.

  ‘That’s right, Dasha, that’s right. Good girl. We have a deal, you and me.’ He glanced across at Rossel. ‘As do Uncle Ilya and Uncle Revol.’

  Rossel nodded back. The exchange had drained him and he wanted to go home and collapse into bed.

  He stood up, holding the newspaper and broken glass in both hands.

  ‘One last thing,’ said Rossel. ‘Pugachev has been in touch.’

  ‘Pugachev?’

  ‘The reader of bodies – the thief who looked at the priest’s tattoos.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He has a rather unusual request.’

  20

  Tuesday October 23

  The priest’s body was wrapped from head to toe in a black tarpaulin. Lipukhin opened the back of the van. Rossel was holding one end of the corpse, where the head was, Pugachev the dead man’s feet.

  ‘Raz, dva, tri . . .’

  Lipukhin gave them the count. They both lifted their arms up together and then let go. There was a metallic clunk as Father Tikhon’s body dropped into the back of the van.

  The three men stared down at it.

  ‘He won’t start decomposing or anything, will he?’ said Lipukhin.

  Pugachev slapped his gloved hands together to warm them and blew out a misty cloud of frozen breath.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so, Captain. Not in this weather. It’s seventeen below. Colder in the back of this van, in fact, than in one of those dead men’s filing cabinets we stole him from. Let’s hope those rusting snow chains you’ve got will hold up until we get there.’

  Lipukhin slammed the boot shut.

  ‘I’d prefer to come.’

  ‘Sorry, comrade. Like I told you, Gubaz said only one officer from our noble militia. Only one. And he’s not a man to cross.’

  ‘How long will it take?’ asked Lipukhin. They had been kicking their heels all day, waiting for the call from Pugachev. The captain had failed to master his impatience.

  ‘Half an hour there, half an hour back, and in between depends on how chatty Gubaz is feeling. I’ll try and get the good lieutenant home by midnight. Like Cinderella,’ said Pugachev.

  The three men walked around to the front of the truck. Rossel and Pugachev clambered inside. Rossel turned the key in the ignition.

  ‘Why did Kerselidze say he needed to see the monk’s body?’ asked Lipukhin.

  Pugachev shrugged.

  Lipukhin pulled the collar of his greatcoat up around his ears.

  ‘And you didn’t think to ask him?’

  Pugachev leaned forward and started to scrape at some of the ice on the windscreen.

  ‘Of course not. There have been many people, down the years, who thought it would be a good idea to ask Gubaz Kerselidze silly questions,’ he said, ‘and, today, most of them are almost certainly feeling a damn sight less optimistic about life than the human ice cube we just dumped in the back of this van.’

  ‘I’ll see you in the morning with my report,’ Rossel addressed Lipukhin. The captain nodded and turned away.

  Pugachev gave a snort.

  ‘There’s a comrade with a little too much on his mind. Come on, Lieutenant, let’s you and I go and do some detecting.’

  *

  The hat-rack was an ingenious touch. Two of Kerselidze’s henchmen had made use of it to keep Father Tikhon fixed in position, lashing him to it using a couple of old rubber engineering cables. The naked body of the dead priest stood bolt upright next to a red leather barber’s chair. Beside the chair was a man Rossel presumed to be the shop’s owner, a small, swarthy, middle-aged man wearing a stained purple fez who might have been Georgian, Turkish or a combination of those two plus more thrown in. And next to him, in another barber’s chair, sat Gubaz Kerselidze himself, huge and brooding with thinning grey hair. The gangster was eating a pie that dripped hot fat and grease onto the fading yellow linoleum.

  Thick white scars cut across Kerselidze’s brow and cheekbones. His nose was so broken that it no longer resembled a proboscis, more a collection of bone fragments held together in a thin skin bag. The gangster’s neck was a fat Kamaz truck tyre made flesh. There were words inked on it in Gothic lettering. But it was the rest of his tattoos that really held your attention. Almost every inch of available skin on his body was covered in the spidery, hand-drawn inkings – reapers, satyrs and Christs crucified – that were used to project status and fear in the gulags. In the very centre of his brow was an unblinking third eye. It created a strangely beguiling impression: a human Cyclops, all-seeing and monstrous.

  Rossel stood in the centre of the room, opposite Kerselidze, the barber and the hat-rack. The little shop had two doors, both guarded by thieves – ethnic Russians, Rossel guessed, not from the Caucasus. Kerselidze stuffed the last of the pie into his mouth and licked the grease off his fingers. Then he stood up and took a step towards the dead monk.

  ‘The last militia man who got this close to me was an unlucky soul they rounded up in the Terror, before the war, and sent to north Urals camp, 34th Kilometre, where I was generally agreed to be King Wolf. Pretty boy he was, so I had him trussed up like a tutu-wearing ballerina and fed him to the camp faggots. First they fucked his arsehole into a mush, then slit his throat. Nasty business. You are very pretty too, cop.’

  Kerselidze lifted the little barber’s fez, planted a big sloppy kiss on his bald skull and then popped the hat back down again.

  ‘Loma, here, used to be a kozyol back in the days of his youth. Isn’t that right, Loma? Until Gubaz found him.’

  A koz
yol was a prisoner who got singled out as a weakling and passed around for general sexual gratification. Loma reached up and straightened his fez. He looked as though he’d spent a long time learning how to tiptoe on eggshells when in the vicinity of Gubaz Kerselidze.

  Loma the barber grinned sheepishly.

  ‘Things is just as you say Papa Gubaz, things is always exactly as you say. Loma is happy to please, as always, he is, of course, your kozyol.’

  He took off his fez and performed a sweeping bow.

  Kerselidze’s cheeks reddened as he burst into laughter. Then, almost in the same moment, standing next to the dead priest, he became serious again. He stabbed a meaty middle finger against the third eye in the middle of his own brow.

  ‘A lieutenant, eh? Let’s hope you have brought me a man who can solve my problem, Pugachev, or I’ll slit your fucking throat and turn your ugly Ukrainian ass into a mitre for this dead priest, you understand me?’

  Rossel stepped forward.

  ‘A problem, Mr Kerselidze? How can we help you?’

  ‘I have a friend, Major Timoshenko, he runs the militia station here at Frunzensky District.’

  ‘And this friend has a problem?’

  Kerselidze shook his head.

  ‘No, I have a problem with my friend.’

  ‘Which is?’ said Rossel.

  ‘He’s not my friend any more. This piece of shit, Timoshenko, he’s nobody without me, you understand? Nobody. But now he tells my men he can’t help Mr Gubaz no more. I give this shitbag everything, you understand? Kickbacks, pussy, caviar. A nice little cut of the heroin I’m running out of . . . not your business. I even build him fucking dacha in the woods near Ladoga, now he don’t want to know. Normally, an arse-wipe like this I cut out his heart and serve it up with some kapusta. But I kill one of your boys and there’s a chance shit might rain down on old Gubaz’s head.’

  The thief boss stubbed his finger against his third eye again.