City of Ghosts

by Ben Creed

  Rossel fought to master the agony.

  ‘As a member of the People’s Militia, I am ready to discuss any criminal case with our glorious MGB,’ he said, fighting for breath. ‘I shall recount the investigation to date for you. First identified corpse. Nadya Bazhanova. A former student of the Leningrad Conservatory. She studied clarinet but became a dresser at the Kirov. One of yours – an MGB officer of lowly rank, whose job it was to keep an eye on the leading singers on foreign tours. Too many defections of late, I am assuming.’

  ‘I can find all this in the militia files we have brought in from Vosstaniya Street,’ interrupted Nikitin. ‘It is not relevant to your confession.’

  ‘Small, round dumpling of a girl,’ said Rossel. ‘Problem with dandruff. She used to gossip like a drunken babushka. At the conservatory she was everyone’s friend but nobody’s friend. I wasn’t surprised she found a way to go abroad; she had a problem with inferiority – she was one of those average players who talk big and suck up to the right people to compensate.’

  Nikitin nodded. The guard hit Rossel across the shoulder blades. A good place to whack them, Grachev had once told a small audience of junior officers before Rossel had broken up the tutorial. Stings like a fucking bastard. He was, as it turned out, quite right.

  Rossel writhed but kept going, blurting out the first memories that came to mind. It helped him to forget where he was to try and keep ruminating.

  ‘Corpse number two. Maxim Avdeyev. French horn player, from Pskov, always wore black, hid his pale mystical face behind his floppy hair. I never saw him drunk, not once. Older than us because he’d had to take two years out to go and look after his mother. Could beat anyone in the conservatory at chess. Even the professors. You’ll have masses on him – he spent ages in the gulag, more ink than skin by the time he left. Went crazy for religion, prophesying the Apocalypse, said the Jews were just the start and we were all going that way, may have been cannibalising human flesh, blessing it and then swallowing it down as if it was some sort of black Eucharist.’

  What was coming next?

  Not his fingers?

  Not for a second time, please . . .

  ‘You knew three of the victims, three!’ said Nikitin. ‘Do you know what that makes me think?’

  ‘Number three. Sofia Fedotova. Singer. Wanted to join the Kirov – always dreamed of going abroad. Of sailing away. Of lakes, of the sea. She loved the sea. And French poetry. She hated her parents; I think her father beat her sometimes but she never ever said so.’

  ‘If you know them so well, Lieutenant, why do you not know who killed them?’ Nikitin pointed at him. ‘Unless it was you. Of course – and this is your confession?’

  ‘I thought it was Maxim for a while,’ said Rossel, slowly rotating like a carcass on a butcher’s hook. He had to twist his head to look at Nikitin. ‘He was obsessed with death. I believed he had old grudges against the others, or had gone mad, or both. I believed he got his followers to kidnap four people and slaughter them, and then him, in penitence, or revenge, or whatever. But now I do not think that, at all. There is something else. Someone else. Whose motivation is stranger still. So perverse somehow that it is impossible for me to imagine.’

  The guard raised his truncheon again but this time Nikitin stayed his hand.

  ‘Spare me the incoherent, irrelevant details of your non-existent investigation, Lieutenant. Do not waste my time or yours. Confess to sedition and harbouring a traitor. In the end, you will anyway.’

  ‘Just before you arrested us, Dr Volkova was able to examine one of the remaining two bodies,’ said Rossel. ‘The older male. He was the only one of the five not to have starved so Dr Volkova extracted traces of alcohol from his blood and caviar – beluga – from his mouth.’

  Nikitin took the truncheon out of the guard’s hand and tried out a couple of practice swings.

  ‘You will confess. Colonel Sarkisov says it must be so, and so it will be. For the colonel has Comrade Beria’s ear. Station 17 is a traitorous counter-revolutionary unit corrupted by the imperialist and fifth-columnist Grachev. Admit it.’

  Nikitin drew back the truncheon for a third time and aimed it at Rossel’s already livid belly.

  ‘Confess,’ he said as he set to work. ‘Confess.’

  A banging at the cell door. A junior female officer stepped inside and saluted.

  ‘Not now,’ said Nikitin. ‘Can’t you see I’m . . .’

  ‘A phone call, sir. It’s Colonel Sarkisov from Moscow. He says it’s urgent.’

  *

  How much we all want to live, thought Rossel. We should all rise up, we should damn them to hell and spit in their faces, and yet we will clutch at any tiny scrap of hope they toss our way.

  Uncounted hours later. Time spent in oblivion. Time spent conscious but reluctantly so – time spent longing for death, less to ease the agony, though that would be welcome, and more to remove the need for further interrogation. Time spent licking moisture off the floor of the cell with a swollen tongue. Time spent trying to give up and fade away – and, failing that, time spent mildly surprised at one’s own indifference in survival.

  Doors in passages opening, words spoken. More time spent alone. Then the dread sound of the rusty bolt in the cell door turning . . .

  *

  ‘Your uniform, Comrade Lieutenant.’

  Rossel sat on one side of a small wooden table. Nikitin sat on the other. With his eyes the major indicated a small bench to Rossel’s right. This interrogation room was smaller, darker. His militia uniform was folded on the bench, his boots parked next to it.

  ‘Your papers.’

  Nikitin pushed them over the desk. Rossel looked at them through swollen eyes.

  ‘What?’ he began. But could go no further.

  Nikitin placed two fists on his desk, as if preparing to rise. ‘Colonel Sarkisov called. He says there is now talk in Moscow of the murders by the lake. Of how the city of Leningrad, always seen since the days of that reactionary scum Trotsky as a hotbed of dissidents and reactionaries, is running out of control. Those protectors of our city in the highest circles, the very highest, want this case solved. And, despite what I would see as your abject failure to date, someone believes you are, as the leading sober officer on the case, still best placed to perform that task. As you will be aware, the Party Congress begins in Leningrad very soon, the beginning of two weeks of events running up to the tenth anniversary celebrations of the opening Road of Life. There will be parades and concerts. I hear you have been making a nuisance of yourself at the Kirov. Maestro Vronsky’s grand opera The Blockade will open the festivities. Stalin himself may attend. Minister Beria wants everything just so. Neither the Leningrad Party nor its protectors, it seems, need any distractions at this time. And certainly no repeats.’

  So that was it. No unpleasantness to mar the Party Congress – no whispers of crime out of control. Soviet justice and the forces of law and order must prevail.

  ‘I will need some assistance,’ said Rossel.

  Nikitin shook his head. ‘Comrade Lieutenant, I am amazed that you make any requests of me at this particular moment,’ he said.

  ‘Minister Beria, you say, “wants everything just so”. Ask yourself this, Major: are you the kind of man who wishes to prevent the minister getting his way?’

  A look came over Nikitin’s face. That of someone who had been unexpectedly cuffed in a fight with a lesser opponent but who was enjoying the sting of the blow. The major smiled a crooked smile, his razor-thin lips blending with the ragged scars on his face.

  ‘You can take only two people,’ he said. ‘I will not put my name to any more than that. Do you have someone in mind?’

  Rossel could still taste blood in his mouth. As he changed position in the seat, a sharp jolt of pain shot up from his right side and centred itself just behind his brow. Feeling exhausted and a little faint, he sighed.

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  *

  Snow clung to h
is face as he followed the River Neva west – it was a driving blizzard and Rossel relied on the embankment wall to guide him. Two MGB guards had marched him to the gates of the prison and shoved him out into the street – clothed and shod but with no coat to shield him from the rising wind. Disbelief at his change in fortunes mingled with jolts of agony from his battered torso. One eye was almost shut.

  As one of the ethereal white dots turned to meltwater on his tongue he felt for a moment as close as any veteran of the League of Militant Godless could get to sipping from a chalice of holy water. The temperature was falling again – they were in for another bitter spell. If this was the weather in October then they were in for one of the worst winters since the war. And yet every step was intoxicating; any taste of freedom was to those few changelings – he, miraculously, being among them for a second time – who had clambered out, reborn and blinking, into the weak morning sunlight, from the black womb of The Crosses.

  Sofia. He could smell the spirit on her breath. He could see her lower her eyes, feel the hand she placed on his chest.

  No, Revol, because . . .

  ‘Because of what, Sofia?’

  As he cried out for her to tell him, an old woman in front of him turned around, then drew up her collar and hurried away – but nothing came in answer. Only after a moment, and he did not understand why, Vronsky’s otherworldly music, an eerie melody from the scene he had watched at the Kirov, skulked around inside his brain. And Eliasberg’s dark, sneering face stared down at him from the stage. The snow drifts were piling up higher and higher, pushed by the east wind against every obstruction. His senses were dulled a little more with every step and yet with each one, he still savoured the feeling of simply being, of being allowed his own thoughts, of tramping, childlike, through the powder.

  He stopped. He should have reached Liteiny Bridge by now. From there, if he went south, he could get to Station 17 on Vosstaniya and try to light a fire. He needed to do that quickly. The shock of all he’d uncovered and the beatings he had suffered had almost undone him. If he went north, he could reach his apartment in another twenty minutes – to the sanctuary of the kitchen, of little Lena’s jokes and a delicious plate of her mother’s greasy, unctuous borsch. But where was the bridge?

  Ahead of him, on the very edge of his vision before the blizzard closed over the world, he could just make out the dulled lights of a car going over it. Trying to move too fast, he stumbled and fell, jamming the remaining fingers of his left hand into the snow. It was the first time for months, even years, that he had felt snow on the dull, scarred skin there. Nikitin’s lackeys had forgotten to return his gloves – or, more likely, not forgotten. He dug deeper into the powder, clutching at it, willing it to heal him. The cold was there, somewhere, on the edge of his feeling. But not anything like close enough. An image of the five bodies on the railway tracks came into his mind. Only this time he saw them anew, as if, like the albatross in the Baudelaire poem Sofia had given him and loved so much, he now soared above them. Becoming the bird itself, a lord of ‘sky and cloud’. Feeling truly alive – as he once did only when he played his violin. Beneath him, the tracks stretching out into the distance, black as coal and twinkling in the moonlight against the impossible whiteness of the snow. Parallel lines etched into the earth, studded with five torn corpses.

  Now he felt as those abandoned souls must have done in the moments before their last breath.

  Rossel realised he had to get to his room and his bed as soon as possible or, his spirit and body broken, lie down here, next to Liteiny Bridge, and let the flakes cover him, too. He veered north, the snow whipping at his face, with Vronsky’s haunting music and memories of Sofia swirling around him.

  His skull still in a blizzard all of its own.

  26

  Tuesday October 30

  His eyes grainy, encrusted with sleep, blinked open in the grey morning light. He felt as though he’d slept for a thousand years. His ribs ached but someone seemed to have dressed and padded them, so he managed to turn himself in the bed. There she was, a soft, warm body next to his. He kissed the nape of her neck.

  ‘Sofia,’ he whispered. ‘Sofia.’

  The woman sat up in her bed, the white sheet slipping down and revealing a figure trussed up in a blanket over a thick dressing gown, all over layers of undergarments.

  ‘No, I’m not your precious Sofia,’ said Tatiana Vasiliyeva, his upstairs neighbour with the guitar and the beguiling voice.

  Rossel’s eyes widened. Under the sheets he patted himself down, absurdly concerned for his modesty. But he, too, was trussed in a dressing gown and on top of that swaddled in blankets.

  ‘You have been mumbling her name half the night. I like you, comrade policeman, because from our short acquaintance so far, I have formed the view that you’re relatively honest. And so, with you, right from the start a girl gets to know where she is in the pecking order.’

  Rossel sat up.

  ‘How did I . . .?’

  Everything hurt. It was the sharpness of the pain in his ribs that took his breath away, but he had been beaten so thoroughly that as he subsided back into the mattress, every other part of his anatomy began registering its own agony.

  She got out of bed and took off the blanket, her dressing gown and most of the undergarments. Then picked up her clothes from a small green armchair and began to dress. Even though it was so cold in the room that her breath froze in the air, she dressed unhurriedly, holding his gaze as she spoke.

  ‘I found you last night, lying in the street in front of the apartment block. A stray dog was licking at your heels. Everyone in the building knows you have been in The Crosses so I figured at least five or six of our friends and neighbours had stepped over you before I came. Another hour, I think, and it would have been too late. If you had leprosy or bubonic plague, they might have taken you in, propped you up in front of the fire and nursed you back to health, but a trip to prison can be just as contagious and is something they fear more.’

  ‘Not you, though?’

  She did up the last button on her plain white shirt.

  ‘It’s cold,’ she said. ‘I’ll brew some tea.’

  Rossel tried to lever himself back into a sitting position and half succeeded. He glanced around him at the ruffled sheets and his uniform, discarded on the floor.

  He looked at her. It was hardly possible, given the state he was in, but . . .

  She shook her head.

  ‘No such luck, for you, comrade. You were shivering and barely conscious. I got in beside you to warm you through. You were in the war?’

  He nodded.

  ‘So you know it’s the only thing that works. Besides, as a rule, I like to do the deed with people who can at least get my name right.’

  *

  She fried him some eggs, all she had, and served them on a chipped blue plate with two slices of black bread. He wolfed them down.

  Although she had the luxury of a secluded room, she was forced to share the kitchen on his floor. Back on familiar territory, Rossel felt his appetite return. Vassya – she preferred to be called Vassya, a play on her surname – got up and went over to the window. She rested half her backside on the sill and blew hard on her tea. Rossel leant back, at last finding himself a little at ease with her. Enjoying watching her be herself. An errant pink curler – she had set them in her hair – sprang free and rolled away under the table.

  ‘Talking of names,’ Vassya said, ‘your parents must have been dedicated Bolsheviks to name their son after the revolution.’

  ‘It was my father’s choice,’ he replied. ‘I was born a few weeks after the storming of the Winter Palace. Babies were being given all manner of revolutionary names, in my case literally. It could have been worse. Vladlen, or Barrikad, or Spartak. Elektrofikatsiya or Oktyabrina for the girls. I’ve met a few of those.’

  ‘That is impressive devotion to the Communist cause on your father’s part.’

  ‘It cooled.’r />
  After a while, Vassya began to talk.

  She had been a pilot in the war. ‘We cut our engines as we approached our targets,’ she said. ‘Biplanes, the slowest thing in the air, slower than big Mongolian geese, so we cut the engines to fly in as quiet as we could. But you can’t stop the wind whistling around those heavy wings and the bracing wires. The Krauts said it sounded like witches zooming around the night sky. Except that we were dropping bombs instead of casting spells.’

  Rossel had heard the story of the Nachthexen, the Night Witches, many times before – it was a staple of wartime propaganda – but he let her talk on as he sipped his tea.

  The women of the Night Bomber Regiment had flown hundreds of sorties each, bombing arsenals, supply lines, depots, enemy airfields. ‘The Nazi planes were too quick for their own good. If they saw us, we just had to bank hard and they would fly right past. But the flak and the ground fire – we weren’t too slow for that. Get caught in the searchlights and they would turn you into mincemeat if you didn’t know what you were doing.’

  She looked sad.

  ‘What were you doing before the war?’ he asked.

  ‘A student. Engineering. I was only in my second year when I flew a plane for the first time.’

  ‘Difficult to go from engineering studies to dropping bombs from biplanes.’

  ‘Difficult?’ Vassya shook her head. ‘It was beautiful. I was alive, truly alive. You understand that?’

  She looked at him as if he didn’t. But he had fought a very different war.

  ‘That’s why, unlike our neighbours, I’m not bothered about you and the Bolshoi Dom, militiaman. Up there you learned to take your chance. You needed luck to get you home. At first, I was scared every time I took off. But then I taught myself a trick – to pretend I was already dead. That way, I told myself, it doesn’t matter if a bullet or a piece of shrapnel hits me. The dead are braver than the living. They have already lost everything there is to lose. We weren’t witches. We were ghosts.’