City of Ghosts

by Ben Creed

  ‘So, why didn’t you stay on after the war?’ he asked.

  ‘In the air force? When the war was over, the men took over again and they threw us out. “You have a womb, comrade, go and fill it.” That’s what a staff officer told me. He very kindly offered to help with that, too, but I declined. I’m choosy about who I allow in my bed.’

  ‘Not last night,’ said Rossel.

  Vassya tried not to smile. ‘It was cold,’ she said.

  ‘So then what?’

  ‘Now I work as an engineer for Comrade Samodurov, who is building the underground system.’ The window bubbled with condensation. She traced it with a knuckle.

  Rossel got up from the table. Right now, more than anything else in the world, he wanted to stay.

  But he had to go.

  27

  A light was glowing through the grimy windows of the militia station. The snow before the main doors had been recently disturbed. Rossel went inside.

  He had asked Nikitin for two officers. Not really expected to get them, but he had. And Junior Sergeant Gerashvili and Captain Lipukhin had been joined by Dr Volkova – not present at the time of the raid, but who had found the courage to visit the morgue – to form a small, scared welcoming party.

  In just two weeks Gerashvili had become a ghost. Her head was shaved, she was as thin as a wire and one of her front teeth was chipped and broken so she whistled slightly as she spoke. Which she did infrequently, in slow, faltering sentences that trailed away before she was able to finish them. All three of them embraced him, even Lipukhin. However this miracle had been engineered, in their eyes Rossel had arranged it – whatever the reasons for their freedom, Rossel was the source. It seemed that the MGB had relented, had a change of heart. Or simply given them more rope, enabling them to further condemn themselves with their own failure. Who knew which?

  ‘What did they tell you?’ he asked them.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Lipukhin. ‘They came and took me from the cells, brought us here and told us nothing more than we are to give you every assistance. So the investigation continues? It must be very important to somebody.’

  It was disconcerting, actual leadership. Responsibility, duty, authority – with these he was familiar. Previously, the captain had been in charge, at least in name. Rossel had led not from the front but from the wings, guiding as subtly as he could, stepping in only when he felt it absolutely necessary. It was different to have all eyes on you, expecting you to make all the decisions, with people unable to act without your say-so.

  The MGB had gone but, in case they had planted microphones, he chose his words carefully.

  ‘Let us proceed, comrades, according to the guidance of Lenin,’ he told his new charges. “To delay action is the same as death.” He may not have been referring to murder investigations but we must do our Bolshevik duty.’

  Lipukhin sighed. ‘We are only four.’ He reached up and touched a yellowing bruise on his left cheek. Then glanced at Gerashvili. ‘And none of us exactly in the best of shape.’

  Rossel raised his index finger and pointed around the room, ending at the grubby ceiling light. The captain nodded. They all understood.

  ‘Lenin also said that a Marxist must proceed not from what is possible, but from what is real,’ Rossel continued. ‘Following his advice, we shall now descend to the morgue.’

  *

  Three down, two to go. If they could uncover the remaining two identities, enough of the puzzle might become clear for Rossel to understand the intent behind the murders. The militia officer in him was hungry for progress.

  But the more primal parts of his brain were making him as tense and wary as a hare that had heard a twig snap in the undergrowth. He was prepared for those two remaining bodies to point to him but that would hardly lessen the dread if and when everyone’s suspicions were confirmed.

  He had no choice but to find out. The only way was forward.

  Lipukhin looked a touch green around the gills but seemed ready to put life, or rather death, in perspective. He had, after all, just had a taste of MGB hospitality and now, by some miracle, he was out of jail and able to witness an autopsy other than his own.

  ‘Are you all right, Junior Sergeant?’ Dr Volkova took care in her tone to establish Gerashvili’s lowly rank. The question was redundant. It was obvious, simply from her appearance, that Gerashvili was in no way her former self.

  ‘I shall sit here and tell jokes to keep myself light of heart, while you dissect the corpse,’ Gerashvili replied. But the flatness of her voice robbed the words of all meaning. As if lightness of heart was a concept she could not fathom.

  Vassya is right, Rossel thought, we are all ghosts. Just look at Gerashvili. A shade in human form. Why does any of this caution really matter now?

  Dr Volkova bent over the mottled body and resumed her usual external examination, recording height, weight and other external characteristics. When she inspected what was left of the genitals, she clicked her tongue. ‘I hope our friend was not alive when they cut his balls off because whoever did this was no surgeon,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you, Doctor,’ said Rossel loudly, hoping to discourage further commentary. In a quieter voice he added: ‘Are you all right, Comrade Captain?’

  Even in the cold, Lipukhin’s temples were flecked with sweat.

  ‘Comrade Lipukhin, please take notes,’ said Dr Volkova. ‘I have completed the external examination and will begin the autopsy. I am beginning with the incision from the shoulders to the sternum, and then down to the pubic area.’

  Lipukhin seized a pad and paper, panicking a little at the onset of his new emergency duties. The noises were terrible. If you looked at the wall you could prevent yourself from seeing the doctor at work but you needed ear plugs to blot out the ripping and cutting. It was no use. The imagination cut bloodier incisions than the pathologist did, using sound alone.

  ‘No abnormalities in the chest cavity,’ said Dr Volkova. ‘Comrade Captain, pass me that elongated bowl.’ Clunk. ‘Let’s have a look inside the abdomen. Captain, this can take time so please take a seat and smoke as many cigarettes as you are able.’

  Lipukhin slumped down in an old green leather chair in the corner of the room. Freedom, it seemed, was not all he had hoped it would be.

  *

  A person can mask joy or suppress hatred. But fear, an intense and unrelenting fear experienced over a few short weeks, marks a face as much as death. Gerashvili – cheeks pinched, eyes haunted – seemed since her return from The Crosses incapable of formulating a sentence. But she could listen, and they were all listening to Rossel. Their lives depended on him now. This would be an added burden for his soul to bear, he realised, if they all ended up mining uranium in Kolyma. What are we going to do now? The question hung in the air.

  They had adjourned to the stairwell at the back of the station for Dr Volkova to take a short break from her grisly work. The rest of the building was silent, paperwork left unkempt and unattended, crimes left unrecorded. But the possibility of microphones had not disappeared and so Rossel spoke in an undertone. They all leaned in to hear him.

  ‘I cannot explain why Major Nikitin has let us go to continue with the investigation,’ he began. ‘But he has, and he would not have done so unless he had good reason. The identification of each body brings us closer to it. Dr Volkova, I require all the information you can elicit from the last two corpses.’

  ‘Comrade Lieutenant,’ said Dr Volkova. ‘The fourth body has revealed very similar results. My work is becoming more difficult as the bodies are now rapidly decomposing and emitting noxious fluids.’

  ‘I am, as ever, grateful for your professionalism, Doctor, but sometimes it would be enough to just say “same as last time,”’ Rossel said.

  ‘My apologies,’ said the pathologist, her face solemn. ‘I will examine the fifth body in a moment. There is one obvious difference: he was about twenty years older than the rest of them.’

  ‘What do you remember of
those others, Revol?’ asked Lipukhin.

  ‘Not a great deal.’ Rossel tried to calm his mind, to steady himself so that he could talk about them merely as professional cases. ‘The first three victims all attended the Leningrad State Conservatory before the war, as I did. And they were all student acquaintances of mine. So, I would place a large wager on the corpse Dr Volkova has been inspecting just now being someone else I knew back then, since I see in her report that Dr Volkova has recorded his age as between thirty and thirty-five – like them and like me.’

  ‘But, if they were all your student friends, surely you must now have some idea who it is already? Who were you close with back then?’ said Dr Volkova.

  Rossel shook his head.

  ‘I didn’t say friends, I said acquaintances. And there were over a hundred and fifty students in my year alone – students from all over the Union. You might know people by sight but not really know much about them. Nadya, Max, Sofia – yes, I knew them, to varying degrees.’ For now, he would play it safe and withhold the true nature of his relationship with Sofia. ‘That they all knew me, and I them, still has to be, of course, significant. So, much depends on you, Dr Volkova. Is there nothing else you can tell me about our fourth victim?’

  Dr Volkova straightened her back. ‘There is one thing,’ she said. ‘His head was shaved. I thought it was odd and I should have guessed before, but I took out a tiny fragment of an existing follicle, one of the few that had escaped the razor. I then examined it under the microscope.’

  She paused.

  ‘What?’ There was a tiredness in Lipukhin’s voice. ‘Out with it. No matter how trivial, if it’s better than what we have.’

  ‘Our corpse was a redhead,’ said Dr Volkova.

  Rossel’s face gave nothing away. But he took a prolonged draw on his papirosa before exhaling deeply.

  They looked at him.

  ‘Lidia, look for a file marked with the name Sorokin,’ he said. ‘Felix Sorokin.’

  ‘A file?’ The way Gerashvili said the word made it sound as though a file was a mysterious artefact from another world.

  ‘Oh God. Not another one,’ said Lipukhin.

  ‘Was he an acquaintance of yours too, Revol?’ asked Dr Volkova.

  Rossel shook his head. His voice was leaden.

  ‘No, he was my best friend.’

  *

  ‘Gambling is idle and bourgeois. You are very much in danger of becoming a counter-revolutionary, Felix.’

  ‘Nonsense, Revol. Lady Luck just likes to lift her skirts for me. All the ladies do.’

  ‘Are you still bringing your girls to the Yusupov Palace?’

  ‘Of course. It’s a question of keeping up feminine morale in a time of national crisis.’

  A blast resounded through the earth and jolted the park bench they had been lounging on, soaking in the sun. Too late, the air-raid siren began its wail.

  ‘Let’s run.’

  Another blast, and then another.

  ‘Come on, Felix, only you could saunter to the shelter like that, as if you were marked by the Fuhrer so his bombs knew to let you live . . .’

  *

  Dr Volkova emerged at intervals throughout the afternoon to feed them information about body number five, the man with beluga in his stomach.

  ‘He shows signs of strangulation. The eyes had an extremely high level of abnormally blood-filled cells, though skin impressions in the region of the neck were very light.’

  ‘What does that indicate, Doctor?’ asked Rossel.

  ‘Someone who is enjoying the kill. It takes a lot less force than your average murderer realises to finish someone off. Most victims end up with massive bruising around the neck, whether strangulation is manual or by ligature. But this suggests repeated asphyxiation of a pliant victim, with the minimum force required, and probably therefore a prisoner who was made to lose consciousness whenever the strangler wanted. He was really playing with this one.’

  The rest of the day continued in similar fashion, making phone calls in order to book more phone calls, while Dr Volkova continued to dissect, weigh and analyse the cadavers as Lipukhin stayed with her taking notes.

  At around eight o’clock in the evening, Lipukhin dropped two neat reports onto Rossel’s desk and sat down opposite them.

  ‘I sent Gerashvili home. She needs more time. But I have followed up on the file you asked her about. I have looked everywhere. Missing persons files are circulated to all departments in the city but there is no Sorokin.’

  Rossel sighed.

  ‘Felix was at the heart of every rumour, every party. Always flirting, always laughing.’

  ‘I’m sorry about your friend. About all of this,’ said Lipukhin.

  ‘Don’t be. Just because there is no file doesn’t mean that nobody knew he was missing,’ he said. ‘Only that, if he was, nobody reported it. And the reason for that, I suspect, was that he was either still registered in the army or the Ministry of Defence. If he went missing, it would be the army on the lookout for him, even the MGB, but not the militia.’ He thought back to his conversation with Marina in the opera house. A sweet boy – we were close for a while but . . .

  ‘Call the ministry in Moscow first,’ said Rossel. ‘Don’t just establish if he was working there. Find out as much as you can about his movements – where he lived, where he went on holiday, where his family is, if anyone is still alive.’

  The captain nodded, both accepting his task and acknowledging that their roles were now reversed. He pointed to the map Rossel had splayed out over his desk.

  ‘What’s that?’

  Rossel stood and pointed his finger at the place on the map where the bodies had been found.

  ‘Why there? Have we thought enough about that?’ he said. ‘We know who three of them are and now have a good candidate for number four. We will have the fifth soon, I hope. But perhaps I have been asking the wrong question all this time. Concentrating on who, too much, at the expense of where. Normal passenger lines run side by side but anything you left on them would get run over within an hour or two. I’ve scoured this map and there are only two places in that area, along the length of Lake Ladoga’s western shore and for thirty miles inland, where two single railway lines, along different routes, meet and run directly parallel, side by side like that, for a few metres before diverging. These are old freight routes. One is near Sosnovo, next to a brick factory. The other is where we found the bodies, further north.’

  ‘You think the place itself is, perhaps, personally significant? To the murderer, I mean?’

  Rossel looked up from the map, exhaled a cloud of smoke.

  ‘There’s nothing there except those lines, and a turn-off in the road. But after another 55 kilometres, that turning leads to some large dachas, which in turn indicates the presence, at least occasionally, of some very important people.’

  ‘Party officials. Do you think that’s why Nikitin let us out?’

  Rossel sighed.

  ‘I’m not sure. It’s just possible he genuinely doesn’t know who murdered those poor bastards and he actually wants someone to find out. But he doesn’t want to be standing anywhere near them when they do.’

  28

  Asking Vassya to join him for a cognac in the communal kitchen was the closest Rossel had got to asking anyone on a date for a good while. Now, despite his dire situation, he still felt a little foolish.

  The potential significance of the stranger in their kitchen did not go unnoticed by the other residents of the fourth floor. Most confined themselves to sticking their heads around the door. Either because they were ashamed, since some of them had walked past him when he was lying in the street outside, or because he had recently been in prison, which could be contagious. Only Lena, the art history student, scornful of her neighbours’ behaviour, attempted to wait on them hand and foot. Conversation with a grinning, gurning teenage girl present was difficult, however, so in the end he sent her away.

  ‘This won’t wo
rk,’ said Vassya, once she was gone.

  ‘What won’t?’

  ‘You using me like this to make everything seem normal. To make it seem like it can all go back to the way it was before you discovered those bodies out by the lake. That you could hear my music through the floorboards, and then, somehow, we could meet and take a liking to each other, and drink tea, like this, and go to the Maly Hall to listen to a concert or two and then go back to my room and complete the evening’s entertainment. Like you used to do with her – Sofia, I suppose.’

  Rossel reached across the table and touched her hand. She looked down, curious at the stiffness of his touch and the bumps and strange angles of his fingers.

  Then the front door to the kommunalka shook as someone began to batter it from the outside.

  Vassya withdrew her hand. The two of them stared at each other. The background chatter and commotion of half a dozen families fell silent.

  The visitor or visitors resumed the assault on the door. Failing to open it would achieve nothing. Besides, almost everyone had a bag packed under the bed, ready for an impromptu journey to the camps. Almost everyone was prepared. Though Rossel had never got around to it.

  He walked down the corridor.

  ‘Who is there?’ he said through the door.

  ‘State security,’ came the reply. ‘Open up.’

  *

  Major Nikitin was in full uniform.

  Rossel’s stomach lurched. There had been a change of heart, he thought.

  But the major was alone – no squad of MGB officers, lists in hand, burst in behind him.

  ‘Should I pack some possessions, Major?’ he asked.

  Nikitin’s mouth twisted. ‘You misunderstand. I want an update on your progress, that is all. May I come in?’

  It was not the MGB’s style to toy with its prey. Or to ask permission. They didn’t have the time. Nikitin’s politeness threw him a little.