City of Ghosts

by Ben Creed

Rossel felt a twist of recognition.

  Eliasberg opened his lips and then repeated the refrain, louder and more clearly.

  Rossel pounded the table to silence him. ‘How did you know?’ he shouted.

  ‘Know what, detective?’

  ‘Those notes. That they were the notes we found on the tracks?’

  Eliasberg looked at him. He was calm now, his face marked only by serenity and acceptance.

  ‘I do not know what you are talking about, comrade,’ the conductor murmured. ‘I only know these as the notes Suvorin wrote, that Vronsky sang out in a mocking falsetto to us in the grounds of our school. And which formed the leitmotif of the piece that was performed to the tsarina in a simple but elegant string trio written by Vronsky.’

  ‘But I thought you said Suvorin was the chosen one.’

  ‘He was. But a week before royal inspection, Suvorin disappeared. His parents came for the recital and had to be told he had vanished.’

  Rossel’s mind was racing. ‘Why tell me this?’ he said. ‘It is ancient history.’

  ‘Because you asked me about the great musical competition. And because you should know what Vronsky is capable of. Incidentally, if you have heard that refrain before, that is because it appears in every Vronsky composition.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes, every one. Sometimes it is hidden. Almost imperceptible. Sometimes it is inverted. Every time it is harmonised differently. But it is always there. I have always found it. Even though it is not his, but Suvorin’s.’

  Rossel got to his feet and pounded at the door. The outside bolt slid back and a sliver of light thrust into the interrogation room.

  He paused at the threshold.

  ‘I will do my best for you, maestro,’ he said. ‘I will tell them you are innocent.’

  ‘Will that help me?’

  The maestro looked more curious than concerned, save for the two tears dampening the whiskers of his cheeks.

  Rossel shrugged.

  ‘The six people whose names are underlined were students from the Leningrad Conservatory who were called upon to play the solo parts in the Vronsky. But having that list found in your possession has been unfortunate. People have been condemned for far less.’

  He turned and opened the door wider. Over his shoulder, Rossel added: ‘It was an honour to play under your baton, maestro, even if for only one rehearsal.’

  36

  Sunday November 4

  The dark skin on Madame Shishani’s cheeks looked just as it had when he was a student – drier than the leaves of the oldest scores she kept on the library shelves that surrounded them.

  Sixty years old, half Chechen and proud of it, Madame Shishani seemed to have lived her life in the conservatory library. There were whispers she was a Muslim and kept a tattered copy of the Koran hidden among the symphonies and sonatas, but they were very quiet whispers; it didn’t pay to be a Chechen Muslim in Soviet Russia and the students liked Madame Shishani. In any case, her thin blue lips and contemptuous dark eyes were straight out of the savage, northern world of Russian folklore.

  The library was on the bottom floor of the conservatory. You filled out a request for a score and Madame Shishani would take it and disappear behind countless shelves, sometimes for several minutes, before materialising with the work you needed. As she had done so many times when he was a student, so she did now, handing Rossel a thick green tome. On the front of it was a neatly typed title:

  Raskolnikov’s Feast. N. Vronsky.

  ‘Professor Lebedeva told me about your enquiry so I put this to one side, Lieutenant Rossel.’

  Rossel opened the score and leafed through the sheets of white paper. Six solo parts, all jumbled up, nothing sticking the disparate pages and parts together, and in a separate box folder, the full orchestral parts. On the back of the last page was Vronsky’s flourish of a signature.

  This was the composition Vronsky had submitted to the All-Soviet Contest to find the greatest patriotic music for the Great Patriotic War – a work for an orchestra and six soloists. Where Shostakovich had gone for scale, grandiosity and sheer volume, Vronsky had tried intensity, intimacy, a foray into the Russian soul, darkness laced with light. Shostakovich had scored his work for a vast ensemble, an orchestra you could hear in Berlin. In total, close to a hundred musicians. The advantage was size and noise – the kind of fist-waving defiance the authorities would love. The disadvantage was that it had been almost impossible to find enough musicians of the right calibre who were alive and had the energy to blow, scrape or bash their instruments. That had been Eliasberg’s task. Every able-bodied adult was either at the front, in armaments factories, fighting fires from incendiaries or digging ditches. But he had found enough to form a ragged orchestra – and turned them into something worth listening to.

  The soloists for Raskolnikov’s Feast were a soprano, two violins, cello, clarinet and trumpet. The accompanying orchestra was of roughly the size needed for a classical symphony. To be sure, compositions for smaller forces could have extraordinary power – but as a piece to rouse the masses in the name of war? It was a gamble. And it hadn’t paid off.

  ‘Did you ever receive a complete copy of Raskolnikov’s Feast, Madame Shishani?’

  ‘A copy? No – these are the only parts ever printed,’ she said. ‘These are the originals.’

  Rossel reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the list of everyone who had played in both pieces on the day of the contest. He thought back to that day. Most of the time he had been gazing at Sofia when not struggling to play his violin or thinking about food. The rest of the day was wrapped in fog.

  He showed the list to Madame Shishani. ‘Forgive me, I know you are the librarian, not the administration. But do you remember this name? Gusts Landau – it is an unusual one.’

  She took the paper from him and held it right up to her face, her lips moving as she read.

  ‘Oh!’ She jabbed a finger at the paper. ‘Oh yes – that was a bad business. I could never forget that one.’ She beckoned him to look with her.

  ‘Gusts,’ said Madame Shishani. ‘The poor man . . .’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Rossel, his heart racing.

  Madame Shishani looked around for hidden Chekists and spoke in a whisper.

  ‘Not one of ours,’ she said. ‘A Latvian. They said he was a big band trumpeter really. And a Jew . . . we thought someone had murdered him because he was a Jew.’

  The memory hit Rossel between the eyes. The trumpeter in the rehearsal – ‘Normally I play for dinner dances so forgive me all the wrong notes.’ A refugee from Riga after the Latvian capital had fallen to the Wehrmacht in the earliest days of the war. But Gusts Landau had ended up surrounded by the Germans anyway a few months later in Leningrad. A rotund, cheerful soul, bemused at finding himself preparing Leningrad’s anti-tank defences one minute and having to sight-read Shostakovich and Vronsky the next.

  Madame Shishani nodded with vigour. ‘He had played in some sort of rehearsal of Raskolnikov’s Feast but forgotten to hand back his part. I should have reported it at the time, I know, but there was so much death, so much suffering, it hardly seemed worth it.’

  ‘Reported what?’

  ‘Isn’t that why you’re here, asking about this piece? What the girl saw in that flat on the Griboyedova Canal? It’s a very long time ago now, but I thought that must be why you were interested in this particular composition.’

  Rossel raised an eyebrow.

  ‘A girl?’

  ‘Alla, she was an assistant here during the war. She, well, it was all very strange, really. Or, in those terrible times, perhaps, not so.’

  ‘Describe it to me.’

  ‘It was in the second summer of the blockade, so 1943, maybe July – the last days of the White Nights. I missed the last evacuation train out and in any case I refused to go. I would fight and die with my home city, I told them. Alla was only fourteen. Her parents had died so she had gone to live with her aunt
and uncle, out near the St Peter and Paul Fortress. Then the aunt and uncle went, too, in the winter of that year. I let her stay with me, shared what little food I could find with her. We came to work here each day, just to try and do something, anything to take our minds off the monsters our bellies had become. Not very much was happening. By then the only time anyone ever picked up an instrument was to burn it or turn the strings into soup. Then one day a messenger came from the Deputy Kommissar for Culture, Nikolai Shevchuk himself, with a special executive order.’

  ‘An order to do what?’

  ‘It seemed crazy. I could hardly walk, neither could Alla,’ continued Madame Shishani. ‘But we were told to go to the homes of everyone who had any music by Vronsky in their possession and return them all to the library. This Landau character had played in his rehearsal and wandered off with his part instead of returning it, do you see? He was a stranger. His Russian was only so-so. He didn’t know the way things were done. And there were all sorts of other bits of music missing, as you can imagine. Library candy, do you remember that? People boiling the glue out of books and manuscripts to make soup. And also, we presumed, because some of those who had borrowed them in the first place were already dead. I objected – what a waste of time, when everyone was fighting just to survive. But the messenger made it clear that we would be failing in our duty to the Party if we did not comply.

  ‘We split up the list between us, I took the ones furthest away – the Vasilieostrovsky and Petrogradsky Districts, and as far north as I dared go before it was too dangerous. I gave Alla the ones in the centre of town, around the Moscow Station, the Smolny Institute, places like that. We agreed to just do a few each day; by then the bread ration was down to a hundred and twenty-five grams and most of that was sawdust. Walking anywhere was difficult.’

  Rossel broke in.

  ‘So what exactly did Alla see?’

  ‘A corpse.’

  Madame Shishani’s voice cracked a little as she forced the memories to return.

  ‘Alla was a nice girl, a sweet girl. I liked her so much. The child was very upset when she returned. Even though everyone had seen so much, it shook her to the core.’

  ‘What did?’

  Madame Shishani raised her right hand and stretched out her index finger, pushing it against her larynx.

  ‘Somebody had stuck him with a kind of glass tube. In his throat.’

  37

  The Union of Composers building was on Bolshaya Morskaya, not far from the Hotel Astoria. Decorated with marble busts and friezes, the mansion had once been the luxurious home of the wealthy Gagarina family. Vronsky had become head of the union in 1950; shortly afterwards he had moved into a grace-and-favour apartment in the building.

  It was twilight by the time Rossel’s car drew up to the pavement opposite the white stuccoed entrance. A man was waiting for him, leaning against another vehicle. It was Nikitin. Rossel peered through the misted back windows of the major’s car, expecting to see more MGB. But Nikitin was unaccompanied.

  ‘I asked at Vosstaniya Street as to your whereabouts. They didn’t want to tell me. But I insisted,’ said Nikitin.

  The major was unshaven and a little dishevelled. There was something about his manner, too, Rossel thought, which was different. He seemed less certain of himself; somewhat subdued.

  ‘If all you are interested in is following orders and just want to pin it on Eliasberg, I can’t stop you,’ said Rossel, ‘but I’m determined to apprehend the real killer.’

  Nikitin pushed himself upright. For a moment, Rossel thought the major was about to draw his pistol. Instead, he simply said, ‘Lead on, Lieutenant.’

  They stamped through the snow down Bolshaya Morskaya.

  ‘A small army to arrest Eliasberg, who is innocent, and just you and me for Vronsky?’

  ‘Eliasberg is a nobody,’ said Nikitin, adjusting his blue-topped cap. ‘Vronsky is Vronsky.’ But Rossel sensed there was some other reason Nikitin had come alone.

  They trudged a few yards further. This part of Bolshaya Morskaya reminded Rossel of the siege. He had limped down it once, towards the temporary hospital at the Astoria, with a small piece of shrapnel from a German shell stuck in his right ankle. The spring sunshine, he remembered, had just started to loosen the snow and shrunken hands, withered arms and twisted icy faces had begun to sprout – people had called them ‘black snowdrops’. He would soon see a lot more of them at the front.

  His left boot slopped into a deep puddle of gritty sleet as they reached their destination. The composers had only moved there in 1948. It was a beautiful building, but then Bolshaya Morskaya had beautiful buildings to spare.

  As he rang the big brass bell, he looked down at the kerb, about five feet away from where he was standing. The corpse of a child had once lain there. A boy of perhaps ten years old. Only the greying tip of his nose and a pair of broken wire-frame glasses had been fully visible above the slush. His lifeless eyes had seemed to scan the indifferent white clouds above him.

  Rossel pulled his greatcoat tighter at the neck as a young man in a servant’s outfit opened the door, saw Nikitin’s uniform and cap and swallowed. They were shown in.

  *

  She was well into her sixties, greying and diminutive. But there was danger to her, a cool, effortless magnetism of someone who had spent a lifetime turning heads. Everything about the way she held herself was an almost balletic calculation, one intended to hold the attention of anyone who gazed upon it.

  ‘You are looking for my son, perhaps?’ she said.

  Nikitin stared at her. ‘That depends, comrade,’ he said after a pause. ‘Identify yourself. And him.’

  ‘My son. Nikolai Nikolayevich Vronsky. The maestro.’

  She tilted her head, almost imperceptibly, towards the servant at the door. As she did so, a flickering light from the jewelled candelabra above her traced a shoal of tiny pink dots across the skin of her neck.

  A silver-framed photograph on a dresser in the corner of the room showed the composer’s mother in her twenties. The face was thin, the chin round, the lips bow-shaped, the eyebrows arched suggestively upwards, like a Russian Marlene Dietrich. Now, her once lustrous dark hair was cut short and speckled with grey but she remained powerful and alluring. And she knew it.

  The servant – a squat, middle-aged man with a bull neck squeezed into a white, gold-trimmed waiter’s jacket – stepped forward and refilled her cup. She reached across and spread a little beluga onto a tiny crêpe. Then fed it to the tiny, yapping black dog at her feet – a mutt that wouldn’t last five minutes in a Leningrad winter if it had to call the street its home, thought Rossel.

  The two visitors hadn’t moved.

  She sat in one of two large matching chaises longues. The room was oak-panelled and covered, on all four sides, with banks of polished shelving. Every available space was cluttered with gold and silver ornaments – snuff boxes, candlesticks, trays, mirrors – and a collection of Dyatkovo crystal. In pride of place, above the mantelpiece, were two blue Fabergé eggs, tiny and exquisite. Rossel felt as though he had stumbled upon the antechamber to some magnificent palace in which all the riches of the Romanovs were being held in safe keeping.

  Madame Vronsky followed Rossel’s eye.

  ‘You like my trinkets?’

  He gave her what he hoped was a cold look.

  ‘I haven’t seen such a display of privilege outside the Hermitage itself,’ he said.

  It was the kind of blunt accusation that had sent millions to the gulag. Madame Vronsky made no attempt to deflect it. To do that, a Soviet citizen had to be utterly confident of their own status and position.

  ‘As a girl, in the days before our great and noble socialist revolution, I worked in the Elisseyev Emporium on Nevsky. The store is still there, of course, but only a pale shadow, I’m afraid, of the way it was in those far-off days. The silks, the perfumes, the dresses, my goodness. The tsarina herself visited on occasion, with her daughters. I was told by a clos
e friend that the chemise pretty little Maria was wearing when she came face to face with the bullets of revolutionary justice in Sverdlovsk came from Elisseyev’s last-ever collection. So shameful to put holes in an item of such unsurpassed quality. This casual cultural vandalism makes me, on occasion, question my own Marxist zealotry, Lieutenant Rossel. And you must be Major Nikitin?’

  Madame Vronsky leaned down and fed the dog more caviar. It barked and then demolished the delicacy.

  Rossel found his voice.

  ‘Where is the maestro?’ he asked.

  Madame Vronsky shrugged.

  ‘Rehearsing, I expect.’

  ‘The Kirov Ballet is performing Swan Lake this evening. There is no rehearsal of The Blockade.’

  She looked at her nails. ‘Then I do not know.’

  Nikitin cleared his throat.

  ‘Forgive the interruption, comrade,’ he said. ‘We were just . . .’

  Rossel took out his pen and notepad.

  ‘Just to clear something up for me,’ he said. ‘Could I ask you to recall if you issued instructions to all music conservatories and concert halls to collect all copies of your son’s work, Raskolnikov’s Feast, after it was performed for the first and only time? And that the staff of the library of the Leningrad Conservatory of Music were, in turn, instructed to go about the city and pick them up?’

  Madame Vronsky patted the dog gently on the head.

  ‘There, there, Zib, good girl, good girl.’

  She stared up at Rossel, her right eyebrow arched à la Dietrich.

  ‘Zib is a movie star, Lieutenant. Do you recognise her?’

  Rossel shook his head.

  ‘Oh, yes. Vladimir Yazdovsky, a Lenfilm director, is a personal friend. He gave Zib to me once she had played her role.’

  ‘Her role?’

  ‘Zib here was just a scruffy mongrel bitch that hung around the Lenfilm studio kitchen feeding on potato peelings. Then one day a dog scheduled to be in a film ran away. They couldn’t change the scene, they were on a schedule. And so Zib, being a young lady of prescience, sensed an opportunity. They grabbed her, hoped she would sit still until encouraged to walk across the set, and she behaved perfectly. She practically won the Stalin Prize. And Yazdovsky gave her to me. Now she resides under a chaise longue that once belonged to Princess Gagarina, being fed the finest caviar by the mother of Nikolai Nikolayevich Vronsky, the head of the Leningrad Union of Composers and soon to be lauded, once The Blockade has premiered, as the greatest Russian composer that ever lived.’