City of Ghosts

by Ben Creed

  The tram halted in Theatre Square and Rossel jumped down. The huge doors of the Kirov were locked so he strode round to the artists’ entrance, swatting aside the guard, demanding to know where Marina Morozova was. To be taken to her immediately. A young man dressed as a troubadour pointed him in the direction of her dressing room and he hammered on the door, wishing that the terrified guard who had accompanied him all the way but who seemed to know nothing useful would push off.

  She wasn’t there so, with an increasing entourage of stage hands and chorus members pressed into the cause of finding her, Rossel blundered about the warren of corridors until he found himself at the edge of the great stage of the Kirov Opera itself. All was confusion, a harsh blur of lights, crashing chords and frantic movement.

  ‘It’s the rehearsal,’ said the guard, reproach in his small voice.

  It was, in fact, a break in rehearsal – stage managers were yelling, men and women in filthy rags or wearing uniforms of the Red Army were talking and laughing while men in overalls hoisted shattered walls, bullet-pocked vehicles and heavy machine guns onto their shoulders and wandered off into the darkness.

  Vronsky’s opera The Blockade, rumoured to be his most accomplished work, was almost ready – with a cast of thousands, by the looks of it. It was intended to be a masterpiece to rival that cry of defiance and tribute to the city’s unconquerable spirit, the Leningrad Symphony, by the only Soviet composer thought able to surpass Vronsky, Dmitri Shostakovich.

  Just as Rossel was wondering how he would ever find her in the chaos, Marina Morosova ran straight into him. In the rough shirt and trousers of a hero of socialist labour and anti-fascist defence, she looked a far cry from the elegant figure he had spoken to a few days ago.

  Marina drew back and berated him for his clumsiness but cut it short as she espied the uniform.

  ‘That is not a costume for the opera,’ she said. ‘Ah, Revol. It is you.’

  ‘Marina,’ Rossel said, taking her to one side. The crowd was thinning out. A stage hand shouted out, ‘Fifteen minutes, only fifteen minutes!’

  ‘Marina,’ Rossel repeated. ‘Marina, I believe that . . .’

  He stopped. What did he believe? That her life was in danger? That the leader of a rogue Orthodox death cult had been murdering musicians? That this crazed priest was still capable of killing from beyond the grave? Of course not – it was ridiculous. So, then what?

  ‘When we last met, we spoke of Felix, did we not?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, we did,’ she said.

  ‘Has he been in contact? Has he been here, or to your home?’

  She coloured.

  ‘What are you insinuating?’ she said. ‘I have not seen Felix Sorokin for a long time. For many years.’

  ‘How many years, exactly?’

  She paused. ‘Three or four, perhaps longer,’ she said. ‘He just dropped out of sight. Must have got tired of me.’

  ‘What about Maxim?’ asked Rossel. ‘Maxim Avdeyev?’

  ‘Max? Not since the conservatory. He was not in my circle.’

  Indeed not, thought Rossel.

  ‘Do you ever see a priest?’

  Marina glared. ‘For my many sins, you mean?’

  Rossel looked her back in the eye. ‘For whatever reason.’

  ‘I see them at Easter and I see them when I go to lay flowers in the cemetery,’ she said, jaw tight. ‘Otherwise, no.’

  ‘Where is your apartment?’ he asked her.

  Marina laughed, but without merriment. ‘You get ever more personal, Lieutenant.’

  ‘My interest is your safety, Marina. You must forgive the intrusion. Where?’

  ‘Near the Nikolsky Cathedral,’ the singer said, looking bemused, ‘a stone’s throw. Why?’

  ‘And what is the security there? What protection do you have?’

  ‘Comrade Lieutenant, this is a melodrama worthy of grand opera. What is going on?’

  Rossel rubbed his eyes. It was dangerous to tell her too much . . . On what authority did you divulge crucial information in a murder investigation potentially involving members of state security to the prima donna of the Kirov Opera before you gave it to the MGB, comrade?

  Particularly if she was an informer.

  He would have to go step by step, listening for the ice cracking under his feet.

  ‘Sofia Fedotova,’ Rossel said. ‘Last time we spoke you mentioned her.’

  Marina removed her flat cloth cap and unbundled her hair. ‘Sofia? Yes – of course. Such a sweet soul. Never quite had what it takes. Perhaps she could have been a junior chorus member . . .’

  ‘But not Maxim Avdeyev?’

  ‘Are you planning a reunion, Revol? Is that what this is all about?’

  ‘When did you last see Maxim?’ Rossel pressed her.

  She thought for a moment. ‘Not since the war. You were friends with him much more than I was; you played in the conservatory’s orchestra together, if I am right. Wait – didn’t you both play in the Leningrad symphony? The performance here, I mean?’

  Rossel shook his head.

  ‘Max, perhaps, but not me. I was at the front.’

  He pulled out Sofia’s green leather-bound sketchbook and found the drawings of the house and the room. ‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘Sofia drew it. Does it mean anything to you? Do you recognise anything?’

  Marina took the book from his hands and held it up so that some of the stage light would illuminate it.

  ‘All I can make out is badly hatched shadow. A bedroom scene that she has subsequently scribbled over. But, as I remember, she had the good sense to have many lovers.’

  ‘Do you know what the writing might mean?’

  ‘Thanatos and something? No idea. Greek? For opera, I have to know Italian, German and some French, Lieutenant, but there are no Greek masterpieces that I know of.’

  Rossel turned the page. ‘How about the domed building?’

  Marina looked down again. The lights were behind her and Rossel could not see her face properly, but he heard the sharp inhalation. The soprano turned the pages and stared at the other sketches of the same house.

  ‘When did she draw this?’ Marina’s voice was tight.

  ‘Do you recognise it, Marina?’

  She bent her head again over the pages, flicking through the rest of the sketchbook.

  Rossel asked her again if she knew the place. Marina snapped the covers together and handed it back to him. She opened her mouth just as a huge figure stepped directly behind her and almost blotted out the light. Marina whirled round, straight into the hulk of Vronsky.

  The composer was enveloped in an enormous wolfskin coat, like a Red Army general surveying the frozen wastelands after a battle with the Wehrmacht. He looked at once eccentric and terrifying. There was not a trace left of his previous affable charm. In his presence Marina wilted, bowed her head and walked off into the wings without another word.

  Vronsky towered over Rossel for half a minute – relishing the silence, as if daring the militia man to speak – before swaggering past him.

  In the Kirov, the composer was the law.

  *

  Rossel was escorted to the foyer of the theatre and then to the exit. But he did not feel like going.

  He stopped at the heavy swinging door, turned, and headed back in the direction of the auditorium.

  ‘Comrade Officer, you can’t go in there,’ bleated the stage manager sent to ensure his departure. ‘We are nearing our conclusion. The Blockade is almost complete. Maestro Vronsky says he is not comfortable with observers at today’s rehearsal.’

  Rossel pushed past and yanked open the door that led into the opulent interior of the Kirov Theatre. He marched without pausing down to the very front of the stalls. Fuck Vronsky. Fuck Colonel Sarkisov. And the MGB.

  Nothing mattered to him now. Sofia was gone. Someone had to pay for it.

  Rossel glanced into the orchestra pit where the musicians were gathering after their break. It was a huge ens
emble: he counted thirty violins, twelve each of violas and cellos, as many double basses as they could pack in, four each of all the woodwind including contrabassoon, bass clarinet and cor anglais, six horns, five trumpets, four trombones, tuba, and enough percussion to lead an army to Berlin and win the Great Patriotic War all over again – timpani, xylophone, bass drums, side drums, tam-tam, cymbals, bells. The players were cheek by jowl, barking at each other to take care as they high-stepped a route to their chairs, flapping their music as they made their own markings or scrawled reminders to themselves to make the correct changes of tempo or dynamic. It was probably double the size of the usual pit orchestra that hacked its way through Nutcracker once or twice a month. It was both a raucous, anarchic assembly and an elite club. Rossel felt like a pauper watching the princes at play. Compared to this, every other existence seemed drab. How he had missed it.

  Suddenly a man in his fifties, the conductor, Eliasberg, a stalwart of the Kirov company, elegant, with swept-back, nicotine-stained hair, pale bullfrog-like cheeks and a pinched mouth, came threading his way through the second violins to reach the rostrum. He paused halfway up the steps, catching Rossel’s eye for a split second, giving him a curt nod.

  This was the man who had conducted Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony in the depths of the siege, with the worst not over by a long way. He had taken a band of starving musicians, forced them to defy their privations, master Shostakovich’s gigantic work and hurl it into the face of the surrounding Germans. Vronsky had spoken of the toughness of mind necessary to ‘make the harsh decisions truly great art demands of its creators’. Eliasberg was notorious for it – denying his players half of their meagre bread rations until they did his bidding, hauling them from their beds and demanding they put bow to string, mouth to reed, forcing them to play on.

  Eliasberg turned to the orchestra and quelled it into silence with a glare.

  For the second half of that evening’s rehearsal, the conductor declared, they were to receive a huge honour: the opera would be conducted by the great composer himself, Nikolai Nikolayevich Vronsky, ‘People’s Artist of the Soviet Union, winner of the Stalin Prize, winner of . . .’

  Whatever else the maestro was winner of was drowned out by tremendous applause as the mighty frame of Vronsky, now shorn of his wolfskin and in a dark three-piece suit, trudged through the pit to take his place on the rostrum. Eliasberg, keen either to learn or to pay calculated homage, found a space at the bottom of the steps that led up to the rostrum and sat down.

  Vronsky pointed at the oboe for an A and the orchestra began tuning up. On stage, a chorus of no fewer than one hundred singers gathered in the ruins of Leningrad to bury their dead and shake their fists at the Fuhrer.

  Vronsky looked slightly behind him, along the front row of seats towards Rossel. If he was displeased, he didn’t let it show. His gaze fell instead upon the lieutenant’s still-gloved hands. Rossel had rested them on the brass rail along the first row; he drew them back, not knowing where to place them, before thrusting them in his pockets. Vronsky smiled.

  ‘Let us begin,’ he murmured.

  The lights in the auditorium began to dim – as if, it seemed to Rossel, the great man controlled even the heavens – and a hush blanketed the stage and pit as he raised his arms.

  It began with an undulating pulse in the violas and violins, a motion suggesting quiet bleakness, a troubled peace. The key was E flat – the hero’s key. An abrupt cres-cendo and a sudden return to pianissimo was the only change for perhaps sixteen bars, before a clarinet sounded a note of slight dissonance, an F, like a drop of paint in clear water.

  More strings joined in, the pulse beating a little harder. A bassoon stabbed a hard A – sforzato, subito diminuendo. Vronsky’s hands were barely moving; he cued in one of the French horns with his eyes – an E flat, the core note. The sound was rising now, the cellos and basses adding more dissonance but gradually, in layers, as the major key became minor with a muscular clench of Vronsky’s fist.

  On stage, the members of the chorus rose from the rubble of the flattened city. Rossel looked for Marina but the survivors of the blockade, the tank makers, the armaments workers, the firefighters, trench diggers and soldiers, the lorry drivers who risked the Road of Life across the frozen Lake Ladoga to bring supplies to the city that bore Lenin’s name, they were all one. The people.

  The oboe played a B flat, this time sustained, with a sweet, shallow vibrato, and the chorus began a soft chant.

  Here men work without ceasing, rest and sleep forgotten – burdened and labouring with dread . . .

  Was that Marina? A slim and feminine figure stepped forward to the sound of a repeated staccato G from the principal trumpet. Now Vronsky turned towards the mass of his first violins and now the music became sublime, epic; inside his coat Rossel felt himself curling his already twisted and broken left hand into a protective fist.

  Let our gruel be no more than mere water, our bread worth more to us than gold. Like men of steel, we will endure . . .

  He stared at Vronsky, who was exhorting both orchestra and singers to ever greater heights, and sensed the maestro could somehow feel his eyes upon him. At that exact moment, the composer began to conduct the piece even more intensely, more passionately, forcing the violinists towards new peaks of excellence, forcing them to play at a level Rossel could once reach but was now far, far beyond him. The musicians were being pushed to the limits of their technique, some clinging to the soaring melody, others tackling a furious moto perpetuo that underpinned this section. Playing as if their lives depended on it.

  As the volume subsided, Marina’s not quite crystal-clear soprano – his ear detected an imperfect but almost indiscernible emotional tension – floated through, a wordless line following the notes of E flat major before ending on an ethereal A natural at the top. Rossel closed his eyes and let the rest of the section wash over him until, at last, the music subsided and only a regular rhythm in the double basses and timpani remained – the sound of a cortège.

  The lieutenant opened his eyes again and saw Vronsky conduct the final bars with only the faintest gestures from one enormous paw.

  Rossel himself was the thing that connected them all. Nadya, Max and now Sofia – they had all gone to the conservatory with him. Lipukhin and Taneyev were still working busily on identifying the other two corpses but he had no doubt now – whoever they were – that they, too, would lead back to his past. Lieutenant Revol Rossel. He was the biggest clue in his own case.

  As he looked back down into the pit, he noticed Eliasberg, still sitting at Vronsky’s feet, staring up at him. An insouciant half-smile momentarily flickered on the conductor’s lips. Then he glanced back down at his score.

  How could have Rossel been so foolish?

  The arrest of all members of the local militia department out at Lake Ladoga had deceived him into believing that his involvement was a coincidence. Those arrests were more than plausible – one person’s slip of the tongue could condemn a hundred friends and colleagues. So, it had seemed credible – just another evening of misfortune – that the Vosstaniya Street station, far away from the scene of the crime, should merely have drawn the short straw on a filthy winter’s night to journey into the wilds of Karelia. Now, that plaintive telephone call direct to Rossel’s station was as tell-tale as a spot of blood in the snow. The killer had arranged it. He was certain of it.

  Inside his coat he tried to flex his broken fingers, to get them to resist the tone, resist the rhythm, resist his own sickening conclusions. But they would not obey.

  *

  Vronsky’s right arm was fully extended, jutting out from the spotlight into the shadow that surrounded him. As the music stopped, he let it fall for a final time.

  ‘No orchestra other than a Soviet orchestra could reach such heights,’ he told them. ‘I am honoured to have you perform my music.’

  The composer smiled at the excited turmoil as the Kirov’s orchestra – lighting cig
arettes, exchanging compliments, pulling on fur coats and hats – struggled out of the pit and the chorus cleared the stage.

  Before long only two men remained in the great hall.

  Rossel had waited. Marina had recognised the building in the sketch. He was sure of it. It seemed significant to her. And she was, after all, sleeping with the maestro. So Vronsky might recognise it too.

  The composer pulled on his wolfskin coat and then picked up a green manila file, bursting with manuscript papers, from his stand. His voice boomed from the stage. The silent auditorium emphasising its aggressive autocratic sibilance.

  ‘This time you didn’t listen, Listener. I sent word that you had to go.’

  Rossel was sitting on one of the red velvet seats in the middle of the stalls. He got up and began to walk towards the stage. Talking as he moved down the aisle.

  ‘Marina’s top A, maestro. A little flat, didn’t you think?’

  Vronsky’s eyes twinkled. For a moment, as last time, Rossel half expected the composer to break into laughter, changing his mood in an instant. But it passed.

  ‘Your hands may be twisted and contorted but there’s nothing wrong with your ears. People here remember you. They saw us talking and thought they recognised your face. And Marina cannot stop talking about “young Rossel”. How your professor had told her you were the best student she’d ever had. That when you first turned up at the conservatory you could already play the Tchaikovsky concerto well enough to make people fall at your feet. Raw talent, talent of the kind that turns up once in a generation. And so handsome, too.’

  The composer gestured with his huge right hand back towards the set of The Blockade. ‘A tiny fragment of this piece is, in part, inspired by an earlier work of mine, based on Crime and Punishment. And you are every inch a young Raskolnikov, like Dostoevsky describes him. “Slim, well built, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair.” That’s what Marina said. But you know what women are like? They do tend to wax a little overlyrical about any exotic fruit they feel nature has forbidden them.’

  Rossel was standing next to that stage now; staring up at the great man.