City of Ghosts

by Ben Creed

  ‘There was a certain tension in her voice, don’t you think so, maestro? Marina sounded distracted, perhaps?’

  Vronsky ran his fingers through his thick black beard and then nodded.

  ‘Yes, there was some imperfection of tone, Lieutenant, a barely perceptible trace of it. I, too, I like to believe,’ his voice was mocking, ‘have something of an ear. We’d squabbled a little earlier, she and I. It’s Marina’s way of getting her revenge, refusing to deliver of her very best. Keeping something back to torment her admirers. She does the same thing when she’s flat on her back – a cheap courtesan’s trick to elicit further payment. A tawdry negotiation around the level of attention she believes her beauty demands. Trouble is, I’ve had her so many times now it’s beginning to grate a little. Especially in the White Nights, when the sun slips through the drapes and picks out the ragged lines around her eyes. Such is life, eh, Lieutenant? Once a man is allowed to dine on foie gras every evening, he soon begins to dream of a simple breakfast of kasha and black bread.’

  Rossel climbed the steps to the stage and stood a few feet away from the composer. This close, in his all-enveloping fur and still singled out by the stage lights, Vronsky’s presence was as intimidating as ever.

  Rossel opened Sofia’s book and proffered it. Letting the composer get a good look at her sketches. ‘Do you recognise anything in here, maestro? I think Marina might have.’

  Vronsky took the book and glanced through it, as if uninterested. Then sighed deeply.

  ‘Ah, you disappoint me, Lieutenant, you really do. I, just now, cast you in the role of Dostoevsky’s greatest creation, Raskolnikov, an exceptional individual who was daring enough to take all the steps that are necessary for his will to triumph in this world and you reveal yourself, with this persistent plodding inquiry, to be nothing more than his sanctimonious, foolish detective, Porfiry Petrovich.’

  ‘So, you don’t recognise anything there, in the notebook?’ Rossel persisted.

  Vronsky shook his head. ‘No, plodding Porfiry, I do not.’

  ‘You are sure about that, maestro? There’s nothing in there that stirs even the most distant memory?’

  The composer slapped the notepad shut and handed it to him. ‘Have you ever seen a moth near a candle?’ said Vronsky. ‘“He’ll keep circling around me, circling around me, as around a candle; freedom will no longer be dear to him, he’ll fall to thinking, get entangled, he’ll tangle himself all up as in a net.”’

  The maestro held Rossel’s eye for a second.

  ‘The words of plodding Porfiry. So certain that his man would trip up. But then, you knew that.’

  Vronsky leant forward and reached out to the detective’s neck. The lieutenant did not move, letting the composer touch a raised brown mark on the left side, under his ear. Many violinists had them, caused by years of holding the instrument between the shoulder and the chin. Even after all this time, his had not faded. Which was why he took care to keep his uniform buttoned up and the mark out of sight. Sometimes, though, the collar slipped a little. The composer was tender, as if stroking a kitten.

  Rossel took a step back and hitched up his collar as high as it would go. As he did so there was a click off-stage, as a stage hand cut the lights, and they were both plunged into darkness. Amongst the shadows, Rossel heard Vronsky’s voice become softer again, teasing.

  ‘You like to hide your fiddler’s mark, Lieutenant, am I right? Need to. Not from others, no, not from others, but from yourself. Is that because you no longer play the Tchaikovsky concerto as you could, and are condemned instead to spend your life playing poor, lost Porfiry Petrovich instead?’

  *

  Rossel took off his gun and holster and dropped them on his bedside table. He picked up his copy of Fleurs du Mal, which was lying open upon it. Turned to The Albatross. Baudelaire used the bird in the poem as a symbol for an artist, poet or musician. Someone whose talent lets them ‘soar’ above the crowd but, also, separates them from it; making them sometimes mocked, forever awkward, ill at ease amongst their fellow men. There was a handwritten note in the margin: This is who I am. Always. Remember that, whatever happens. Love S x.

  Rossel closed the book and placed it back down on the table. Then he knelt down and dragged his old violin case from underneath his bed. He needed to feel the change, to prove to himself he wasn’t hiding anything.

  He sprang the catches and pulled out bow, instrument and chin rest. Tightening the bow, he worked the rosin into the hair, hard. Then he picked up the violin with his broken left hand and whirled it into position, tucking it under his chin, feeling the edge of the body run into the remnants of the mark on his neck.

  His head was pounding.

  ‘You like to hide your fiddler’s mark, Lieutenant, am I right? Need to. Not from others, no, not from others. But from yourself.’

  Fuck you, Vronsky, he thought.

  But, in his heart, he knew the maestro was right.

  24

  Friday October 26

  And so, at last, they came.

  A dozen of them or more, yelling orders and waving automatic rifles, pushing and kicking militia officers to the floor. Rossel and Taneyev were on the ground floor with two of the most junior ranks, sorting through missing persons reports. Trying to identify the two remaining victims – the older man who had been castrated and the younger one who had, at least, avoided that fate. Winnowing out the impossibles – ‘too young, too old, too tall, too, no . . .’ They saw the doors burst open. A dozen MGB crack troops, followed by an officer holding a Nagant pistol.

  The officer stood in the middle of the station and waited for his men to finish subduing the cops. It did not take long. Rossel stared at him. The man’s face was a sea of scar tissue that flowed over his left eye and up to the temple. The nose a mess, as if it had been held to a fire on one side. His one remaining eye was as grey as Magnitogorsk steel and swept over everything.

  Rossel had seen the face before.

  It had been a long time – almost a decade – but this was a face he had not forgotten, and never would.

  You had to keep still. Motionless. Beside him, he heard Taneyev’s breathing quicken. Rossel put out an arm. It was too late. The older man was leaving the safety of the desk. He approached the leader of the MGB detachment.

  ‘No,’ said Taneyev. ‘No, please. I have a . . .’

  A shot roared and flashed in the dark confines of Station 17 and Taneyev staggered. A hole had opened in his back as the bullet punched its way through his torso. He fell to the floor and lay there, wheezing and alone.

  ‘Sergeant Pavel Grachev,’ the officer shouted.

  No one answered.

  ‘Find this counter-revolutionary scum Grachev. Get the others into the trucks.’

  Amid the sudden movement, Rossel stepped towards Taneyev and dragged him into a chair. He slumped in it like a sandbag, head back, a small bubble of blood and air stuck to his bottom lip. Buoyed by his rasping breath, the bubble rose and fell almost imperceptibly, looking like a tiny but macabre Christmas bauble, of the kind his grandmother hid in a box under the stairs of her old dacha. The Nagan swung towards him and Rossel froze. Taneyev was trying to whisper something. A name – Artyom. That of his boy who played for Zenit.

  He said it twice. Then the bubble popped.

  Above their heads came a yell and a series of thuds – Lipukhin was prudent enough to submit but Grachev was crazy enough not to.

  They, then, might be the next to die.

  The MGB officer spoke again. ‘I am notifying all members, without exception, of this department of the People’s Militia, Vosstaniya Street, Station 17, that they are under arrest for harbouring and possibly collaborating with a reactionary fifth-columnist traitor to the Bolshevik cause. Anyone else who resists will be shot. I advise you to prepare your confessions now as they will be required in full and in writing. Outside with you.’

  More sounds of protest and resistance resounded above their heads. Someon
e, most probably one of the most senior ranks, prised out of his office for the first time in weeks, was threatening to write to Stalin. Stalin’s in-tray must be overflowing with complaints from outraged citizens certain he would help them, if only he knew of the injustices being perpetrated in his name.

  Had this been the army, whose officers hated state security and where the average captain believed he outranked anyone except Beria himself, there might have been a battle. But the militia was no match for the MGB. In meek silence a dozen cops shuffled towards the double doors and to the waiting vans and trucks. Rossel stopped and looked at the scarred face, wondering if it recognised him in turn. Or if it had tortured and broken so many people that one more old victim strapped to a chair and having its fingers crushed with pliers or severed with a cold chisel was very much like another.

  ‘What is Sergeant Grachev accused of?’ Rossel asked the MGB officer.

  One of the security troops drove the butt of his rifle at Rossel’s stomach but he had been ready for such an attack. He sidestepped and parried the blow with his forearm. The trooper swore and pointed the barrel straight at Rossel’s face, cocking the weapon – but at that moment Sergeant Grachev came crashing down the stairs head first, closely followed by the MGB soldiers who had ejected him from the upper floor.

  The sergeant had the same question as Rossel.

  ‘What the fuck have I done?’ Grachev shouted as the soldiers dragged him to his feet. ‘Fuck your mothers, what have I said that was so wrong?’

  His hands were cuffed and he held the chain before him as if it was an affront to Lenin himself.

  The MGB officer regarded him and sniffed. ‘We do not only look at a man’s words or his deeds as he lives today. Also his class, his ideology, his past,’ he said. ‘And your class is that of a treacherous imperialist. You have been unmasked as a former soldier for the imperialist cause in the Civil War. As a youth living in Kharkov province, you joined Kornilov’s vipers and fought against the Bolsheviks. Your past has just caught up with you, Comrade Grachev.’

  ‘I am a Soviet worker and only ever a Soviet worker, comrade.’ Still Grachev fought, earning him a punch in the kidneys. He barely winced. ‘And when you check my deeds,’ he snarled, ‘you will see I – I fought at Stalingrad, at Kursk. I fought in Prussia, I fought in Berlin. I have done nothing wrong.’

  The MGB major looked at him with a dulled eye before he gave a response.

  ‘They all say that.’

  Grachev’s face fell. For he knew, better than anyone, that they did all say that.

  They were led outside, Captain Lipukhin the last to be brought out. He looked up into the grey sky and sighed. As if his main regret was to have not opened a second bottle of vodka that morning.

  Rossel clambered into the back of the squat truck and took his place on the bench between Lipukhin and a spotty, trembling private who had only been with them for five weeks. How meekly they all accepted their fate. But then most of them, unlike Rossel, had no idea what an MGB torturer was capable of, what agonies he could inflict and the relentlessness and relish with which he would inflict them. For sure, everyone had heard tales of the filthy, freezing and brutal prison that was The Crosses. They knew how fast the camps of the north and east could annihilate body and soul. But they would trudge to the crowded cells, to the courts to stand before the ranting prosecutors, to the place where they dug their own graves, and there they would stand without a murmur. Because they had not yet experienced for themselves what an MGB interrogator could do to human flesh.

  Fear rose in him like bile – better to die in a hail of Chekist bullets than endure for a second time what he had endured then. Even after a decade, the terror of it haunted him. But it was too late; the vehicles were all moving now and Lipukhin and the young militia private were both clutching Rossel’s arms against the truck’s swaying.

  He yearned for a believer’s faith – it might comfort him in the cells or in the interrogation room or as they were about to execute him. Around him, men and women were murmuring prayers and shedding tears. But faith had never come easily to him. Even in the 2nd Shock Army.

  He fought to suppress the memory and focused on Grachev instead. A former White? Possibly – Grachev had been born belligerent and would pick any side if it meant the chance to kill people. Rossel knew nothing about the sergeant’s life before the Great Patriotic War but Grachev was committed to Grachev, not to the cause of Bolshevism, and if he had done a spell after the 1917 revolution in the service of the monarchist White army fighting for the Tsar’s cause, it would come as no surprise.

  Or was the raid linked to their investigation? It seemed excessive when you could just dream up a charge against Rossel himself. But there were always things you didn’t know, enemies you had no clue existed, plots that you discovered only when you were implicated in them.

  The column of vehicles rumbled through the arched, red-brick entrance of The Crosses and they were all ushered from the trucks, led under the white dome of the prison’s huge church and formed into an orderly line of the condemned.

  Rossel already knew the name of the man with the scarred face. It was the man who had – all those years ago – sung scales as he worked on his fingers. Nikitin.

  The face chilled him more than a Leningrad winter ever could.

  Acting on instinct, Rossel glanced over to his left, at a clutch of his fellow militia officers from Station 17. Grachev was looking right at him, face twisted with hatred, and Rossel realised the sergeant thought he was responsible for this disaster, that Rossel had denounced him. Rossel held his gaze and shook his head but Grachev only spat at him.

  But on the other side of the fear in Rossel’s gut was another thought. The thought that he might get close to his torturer again. A chance to sing a song of his own. A chance to get even.

  *

  He would not scream. He refused to give them that.

  After the first one, when he realised he would never play the Mendelssohn or the Tchaikovsky or any of the Beethoven sonatas or the Paganini caprices again, the pain didn’t really matter anymore.

  Pick a concerto, he thought. Pick that bloody Brahms. Start from the second subject, put some passion into it. He heard the admonitions of his professor . . . Revol, my goodness, what’s the rush? Fill every note, Revol, treat everyone like your own precious child. Technically this is one of the easier sections yet everyone is in such a hurry to finish it. Then they moan about how hard the rest of the piece is. What did Brahms write at the beginning?

  Allegro non troppo, professor.

  Allegro non troppo. Non. Troppo. Again, please.

  Allegro non . . .

  In his mind he tried to pick up his violin but his arms would not respond.

  More, said the one-eyed major, as he carefully placed the chisel at the knuckle of Rossel’s left ring finger. We’ve sung do, and re. What is next? Mi? Do, re, mi . . .

  From far away, there was a screeching sound. God, was that him? No, another hapless victim. Someone hopelessly out of tune. If he could only get to the pegs and do some tuning . . .

  Do, re, mi, fa . . .

  No, he would not scream.

  But later, when he awoke with a start and found himself staring down at the splattered crimson of the cell floor, he stared down at his two severed fingers, clutching at the others that gave him nothing but unrelenting pain.

  Now he cursed. Now he sobbed. Until there seemed to be nothing left of him, save for one singular animalistic sound.

  Not because of the blood. Or the pain.

  For the music.

  Without that, Rossel knew, he would never be himself – his true self – ever again.

  25

  Monday October 29

  Major Nikitin sat with his pen an inch from the paper. As if he were a factory book-keeper applying himself to a particularly stimulating chess puzzle in the few minutes he had left to relax before starting his proper work.

  Stripped of his shi
rt – another MGB thug was preparing to continue the beating with a rubber truncheon and coils of wire – Rossel shivered in the cold and damp of the interrogation room. He dangled by his wrists from a beam that ran the length of the cell, only just able to touch the floor with the balls of his feet.

  Pick another concerto. Something easier. The Bruch. All about beauty of tone.

  Nikitin put the cap on his blue fountain pen with two slow twists and tucked it inside his breast pocket. He raised his head, displaying in the cell’s dim light the smear of burns and skin grafts that ran from his temple to his neck, and fixed Rossel with his lone eye.

  ‘I do remember you now,’ he said. ‘Yesterday you caught me by surprise – in truth, I have no memory of our previous encounter. Thanks to an incendiary bomb in the very first days of the Great Patriotic War, of course’ – he reached up and touched his own scarred cheek – ‘my own face is much more difficult to forget. But something in your manner, your stubbornness during these interrogations. Why, it’s beginning to ring a bell. I apologise, Lieutenant Rossel, if in any way I came across as being impolite. But you know how it is – at this age, the years roll by, and the people we meet at work, well, after a while, their faces just blur one into the other.’

  ‘I am sure you have my file, Major, so you must have known,’ replied Rossel.

  Nikitin sighed. ‘No. Your prison file from The Crosses is, it seems, regrettably missing. We lost a lot of paperwork in the last days of the siege. A 7.5mm from a Kraut Leichtgeschütz hit the admin block. It does not matter. I need a list of your own crimes and a list compiled by you of the crimes of each and every officer in Station 17. Are you ready today to confess?’

  ‘Only to doing my job,’ said Rossel.

  The major nodded at the guard, standing to attention in a corner of the cell. The truncheon hit him on his right side, just below the rib cage. He groaned and spat a little fresh blood onto the stone floor.

  ‘We can spend several more days like this, Lieutenant, weeks even, if that’s what it takes,’ said Nikitin, watching his victim’s face contort. ‘The boy, one of the privates, has implicated you all in Grachev’s crimes already, anyway. All I had to do was lean forward and gently squeeze one of those nasty pimples on his lily-white cheeks and he crapped his pants. Most unsavoury. Your most prudent course of action would be to back up his story and save yourself any more unpleasantness.’