by Ben Creed
Rossel stood to one side. ‘Please.’
The major stepped over the threshold and removed his boots and cap. Rossel felt his hands curl into fists. They won’t just take me. They’ll take Vassya, the whole kommunalka. Would anyone notice if Major Nikitin failed to report for duty in the morning? If Rossel surrendered to his rage and started beating Nikitin to a pulp, the way the major had done to so many others?
Crouched down, the back of his neck bulging over his collar, the MGB man tucked the boots into the long line of footwear along the hallway and perched his blue and red MGB cap on top of the small hill of fur and woollen hats piled on the hat stand. These niceties came as a shock. His torturer must do this every evening, Rossel realised – wipe his feet, hang up his hat and then wash his hands before supper, as if he were just a normal person.
Of course they would notice. And then the entire apartment block would be rounded up and disappeared. Rossel’s hands uncurled. For the time being. One day, he thought. One day.
Nikitin strode on and nearly collided with Lena, who had emerged into the hall to see who the new guest was. Dwarfed by Nikitin’s bulk and looking straight into his scarred face, the teenager turned pale and stood rooted to the spot.
‘Good evening,’ said Nikitin.
Lena mumbled a greeting before turning tail and vanishing down the corridor. Rossel could hear a great deal of whispering and slamming of doors. Before he could think of a way to divert him and get Vassya out of the flat, the major was already entering the kitchen. Rossel hurried after him.
‘A nervous child, that one. Nevertheless, it’s good to be around young people. I have a son myself.’
‘Would you like some tea, Comrade Major?’ Rossel asked.
Tea? What the hell was he thinking?
‘That would be wonderful. On a night like this the cold is unrelenting. Ah, forgive me – your file makes no mention of a Mrs Rossel. Good evening.’
‘Major Nikitin,’ Rossel said, flustered. ‘Allow me to introduce Comrade Tatiana Vasiliyeva. A neighbour.’
Vassya got to her feet. ‘Comrade Major,’ she said.
‘It is very nice to meet you,’ Nikitin said.
‘It is very nice to meet you,’ Vassya echoed, failing to convince any of them. As Nikitin found a seat, she shot Rossel a look. ‘I must go, excuse me,’ she muttered.
But the MGB man had smelt them out. He looked from one to the other and smiled, his eye blinking above that mass of scar tissue.
‘Please stay, I insist. I have come only to encourage Lieutenant Rossel to proceed with all haste with his latest investigation.’
‘I thought you said you had come to ask for a progress report?’ said Rossel.
Nikitin’s good eye was like a searchlight. ‘There has been progress?’
Rossel nodded.
‘Yes, I think so. But I need to go back to the crime scene. I want to take another look at how the killer arranged the bodies.’
‘Then what are you waiting for? Why are you still here?’ The major’s voice was filled with impatience.
‘I am waiting for the weather to clear, Major. All the roads towards the crime scene are blocked by thick drifts. I reckon a day at least before I can get out to Lake Lagoda.’
Nikitin scowled.
‘I can buy you more time, Lieutenant. But only a little. Any more than that may prove impossible. The powers that be are becoming increasingly impatient for an arrest.’
Vassya stepped forward and stood by Rossel’s side.
‘I think I may know a way,’ she said.
29
‘Is it much further, Comrade Vasiliyeva?’
Nikitin had to shout to make himself heard over the biting headwind and the sound of the engines. They dropped fifty metres, leaving Rossel’s stomach fighting to leave his body through his nostrils. Then the little Polikarpov Po-2 rose again.
Some Russians called it the best plane ever built, though fewer praised its levels of comfort. In this model – modified to take non-military personnel, so with an extra seat behind the pilot and a covered cockpit – Rossel had had to cram himself into position. Behind him, Nikitin, shorter but stockier, was having an even worse time.
Vassya, piloting the Po-2, yelled over her shoulder. ‘I’m doing close to top speed, hundred and thirty kilometres per hour. So not far to Lagoda, another ten minutes, maybe fifteen . . .’
‘What did she say?’ bellowed Nikitin in his ear.
‘I didn’t hear,’ Rossel yelled back at him.
‘Fuck your mother!’
Both men were wearing thick flying jackets and hats that someone had unearthed at the aerodrome. It was barely good enough.
Vassya raised her gloved left hand, five fingers splayed. Then did it a second time.
‘Thank fuck for that,’ shouted Nikitin. ‘Rossel, why have you pulled back the screen? My bollocks are beginning to freeze to this tiny metal circle of a seat. I’d have less chance of getting piles if I had shoved an ice cube up my arse. And every time she touches the joystick I want to puke. This idea of yours had better be good.’
These days the Po-2 was used as a trainer at a small airfield at Pavlovsk, just outside Leningrad. Nikitin’s presence was all the authority they had needed to be allowed to borrow it.
Above Rossel’s head, in the almost pitch darkness set by the thick cloud cover, he was sure he could hear the rivets rattling in the biplane’s upper wing. The noise had beaten its way into his skull ever since take-off and now felt as though it would be a relief if the little plane plunged into the white fields of the Leningrad Region. He leaned forward with his torch and crouched down to look at his map but the tears in his eyes from the intense cold made it almost impossible to make anything out. He had marked the place where they had found the corpses but the map was not sufficiently exact to be sure. But there were the railway lines, vaguely drawn, there was the main road they had driven along, and there was the turn-off – a stubby line that came to an end in the middle of some white space.
*
So far, he had concentrated on who the victims were: identification, history, links to each other, links to him. But not enough, he was now sure, on where the bodies were found. And definitely not enough on the manner of their arrangement.
In the car en route to the aerodrome, Nikitin had still needed convincing. The photographs Taneyev had taken were close-ups – not one shot was from a general point of view.
‘At the station today I inspected an old military map,’ said Rossel to the back of Nikitin’s head. ‘There are only two places in the entire region where two tracks run together, as they do out here.’
Nikitin, at the wheel, gave an exaggerated shrug.
‘And?’
‘I’m not sure yet.’
‘Too much of your investigation has been based on hunches, Comrade Lieutenant.’
This was fair enough, Rossel had to admit.
As they were clambering into the plane, Nikitin had slipped, stumbled to the ground. He cursed, lay prone, hands splayed out. The left had been touching the tip of Rossel’s right boot. Neither man moved. Nikitin looked up, waiting for Rossel’s heel to grind down in vengeance.
But it had not been done. They had an unarticulated armistice based on mutual need.
*
Rossel jammed the map onto his knee to keep it from disappearing into the night sky. Tucked inside his coat were five dark prints – images of the victims in exactly the same order they had been found. Vassya pushed the joystick forward and the Polikarpov pitched downward and broke through the icy cloud that had blanketed them for the entire journey. Almost immediately, Rossel heard a guttural sound and was grateful for the direction and ferocity of the wind, as the major bent over the side and vomited. He was no aviator, but he was certain the constant upward and downward pitching of the Po-2 had become more exaggerated once its pilot had realised one of her passengers was a little airsick.
As the cloud broke, moonlight bathed the fields below. Ross
el reckoned their altitude at about five or six hundred metres. He leaned forward slightly in his seat and tapped Vassya on the shoulder. She turned her face toward his.
‘I can see Shlisselburg over there. Those pointed tower roofs are built on top of the fortress walls.’ The engine was on lower revs but Rossel still had to shout above the sputtering cacophony. ‘We’re not far away from the place where the bodies were found. Can you get lower?’
Vassya nodded and pushed forward on the stick. The plane nosed downward again and Nikitin groaned. Rossel leaned out of the right-hand side of the cockpit as it descended. In the distance he could see the vast shore of Lake Lagoda and, beyond it, the ethereal, glittering whiteness of the frozen waters, looming as large as the ocean.
As the plane glided over the snow-swaddled pines, Rossel could see black smoke rising up from one of the old U-class locomotives that still worked these lines – old passenger trains dating back to before the revolution, now reduced to pulling freight. This one was hauling about forty carriages of coal from, most probably, the mines at Slantsy to the power station in Narva.
As the snaking line passed underneath and then began to disappear eastward, Rossel could see the twin tracks – temporarily cleared of snow by the passage of the locomotives – standing out dark against the frozen earth.
Five notes.
The image had first come to him as Nikitin had thrashed at his body and he strove to set his mind free. It had returned to him as he was walking, trance-like, towards Liteiny Bridge after his own unexpected delivery from The Crosses.
Notes. Five notes. A simple refrain.
One railway line came from the northwest before it straightened and travelled east. The other, along which the coal train had just travelled, rose from the southeast, met the first line and then bent westward.
This was it. For a few metres only, two tracks, four lines.
He felt inside for the photographs but there was no need to take them out – he knew them by heart. Five bodies, stick figures, curled like a stillborn in a newly barren womb. The earth of Mother Russia herself was the musical score. And, by some as yet unknown hand, five black notes had been etched upon it.
30
Wednesday October 31
A five-note sequence.
Five bodies arranged between Leningrad and Ladoga. The snow-clad countryside of the oblast was the pure white score, the black railway lines that ran parallel to each other on that short stretch near the lake were the stave upon which the melody had been composed, and then, in a final flourish, each body had been set, head laid to one side, as a cadaverous note.
Fa, la, mi-bemol, si-bemol, sol.
F, A, E-flat, B-flat, G.
As he tried to start a meagre fire in the grate next to his desk in Station 17, Nikitin pacing up and down behind him and cursing with impatience, Rossel hummed the notes under his breath.
The refrain had dissonance at its heart, like a folk song from the Caucasus. Three of the notes formed the triad of E-flat major – a key associated with heroes. The F was the second note of that scale. The A natural was the odd one out – not part of the scale at all. From E-flat to A was a tritone, what composers three hundred years previously had termed a diabolus in musica. The devil’s interval.
The five bodies on the line had been composed into their own funeral dirge. One which Rossel increasingly believed had also been composed for him.
*
‘Two train lines running in parallel form a stave – the name for the lines on a piece of sheet music. The top line is missing but the killer didn’t need that.’
Rossel held the pencil in a dagger grip and drew four jagged lines on a blank piece of paper. Next to him, splayed on the table and reflecting the lamp light, were the photographs taken from the biplane as well as the images Taneyev had taken when the bodies were first discovered.
‘The way the bodies were arranged looked stylised in every way but one. They were dressed up, mutilated, and laid out at equal distances. But the positioning of the heads was different. Some were resting in between the lines, some on the rails. There had to be a pattern; it’s just that standing on the ground we didn’t see it. But from above . . .’
He tried to get a better hold on the pencil but writing was always an ordeal. After adjusting one hand with the other, he was able to draw stick figures onto the stave – oval blobs for heads and nothing but a brusque line to show the direction of the body.
‘Sofia. First in the row, though the fourth body to be identified. Her note is F – F in the German naming convention, fa in the solfege system that we use in Russia.’
Nikitin looked annoyed at this. A code he did not recognise.
‘How do you know you’re not reading this upside down?’ the MGB officer demanded.
‘I don’t know,’ admitted Rossel. ‘It’s just a theory. Her head rested between the tracks of the lower railway line, her feet pointing south, like everyone else’s feet.’
‘Go on.’
Nikitin had grumbled at coming to Station 17 and his mood was not being improved by Rossel’s unhurried presentation. Vassya, who sat muffled from head to toe in Sergeant Grachev’s chair, seemed unperturbed.
Rossel returned to his diagram. ‘Maxim. Second in line. His head was here,’ he made two more marks. ‘That would make him a lya in Russian but an A in German.’
‘What’s with the German? Is our killer a German?’
Rossel shook his head. ‘Not necessarily. But someone familiar with musical notation. More familiar than most. Composers, conductors, musicologists. Bach used the letters of his name to make a motif. Schumann, too.’
‘Germans,’ said Nikitin.
‘Comrade, it is quite difficult to escape the presence of Germans in classical music. German scores are played up and down the Soviet Union every week. In any case, our very own Dmitri, Dimitri Shostakovich, does it. The motif D-S-C-H appears . . .’
‘Get on with it.’
‘. . . in many of his works.’
Rossel leant over the paper and waved his pencil again.
‘Felix.’ He drew an E.
‘What is it in Russian?’
‘In Russian it is a mi. But look.’ He arranged two of the original photographs next to each other. ‘These three bodies have hats placed next to their heads, instead of on them. Positioned with care on the left-hand side. If that is intended as a musical sign, it would mean the killer wanted to alter the note, making it slightly higher or lower. So instead of mi it might be mi-bemol.’
‘More complicated,’ said Nikitin. ‘What’s this bemol?’
‘It flattens the note, comrade. Makes it a semitone lower.’
‘That’s not a Russian word, either.’
‘It is French, I believe,’ said Rossel.
Nikitin grunted. ‘Too many foreign influences in this musical language of yours,’ he said.
Rossel could think of a dozen Russian words off the top of his head that were borrowed directly from other languages, including French and German, but chose not to comment.
‘Corpse number four. Little Nadya, the first to be identified but the fourth in line.’ He dotted a B on his crude musical stave. ‘The head is in the correct place, lying on the third rail up.’ He showed Nikitin the photographs, from the ground and the air. ‘It could be a si, but the hat could make it a si-bemol.’ He added a flat sign.
Rossel made a final couple of strokes.
‘The last note. The fifth body had its head lying on the second rail. The means a G. Sol. This is assuming that the killer was writing in the treble clef, of course.’
Nikitin looked at Vassya.
‘Does any of this make sense to you?’ he demanded.
Vassya nodded. ‘Now I’ve seen it, it does.’
Rossel put down his pencil.
‘Those are our five notes.’
*
This case had always been a trap. Right from the very start of the investigation, he had felt it. Yes, he had move
d forward, placing one foot in front of the other but always suspecting the trap would be sprung.
And now, it seemed, he had his own personal musical score. A murderer who must have known from the outset that only a musician would have been able to decipher his refrain. And how many musicians could be found in the Leningrad militia?
Nikitin sat down at the table opposite him with a thick glass of tea in his hands.
‘So, I passed word of your crazy theory up the line.’
‘And?’
The MGB major took a sip, then sighed and slumped back in the wooden chair.
‘Congratulations. We are invited to Moscow tomorrow, you and me. They are, it seems, more convinced of the possibility of a musical murderer than I am. A special someone wants to get a personal update on the progress of your investigation.’
Keep on moving forward, Revol, placing one foot in front of the other. Now, perhaps, the only way to escape death will be to court it.
Rossel sat back in his own chair.
‘A special someone?’
Nikitin took out a cigarette, a foul Bulgarian import, and lit it. Then he blew out a ring of smoke that floated towards the soot-covered ceiling before curling into nothingness.
‘They didn’t give a name. They never do. But I think I can guess.’
31
Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich and Nikolai Vronsky. Either as a student or a professor, they had all walked this walk, across Leningrad’s Theatre Square towards the classical façade of the conservatory. Rossel had passed by many times since he left, in the summer of 1941, just before he had been called up to protect the city with the civil defence. But this was the first time he had ever attempted to go back inside.
The grey and white painted stone was looking a little shabby, but the imposing frontage with its oblong and arched windows still made his heart miss a beat as he stood in front of it, remembering the first day he had arrived here as an awkward teenager, believing he might, in some small way, follow in the footsteps of his heroes.