City of Ghosts

by Ben Creed

  Madame Vronsky made a swift, twisting movement with her right hand. She grabbed the dog’s ear and yanked it roughly. The yap turned into a growl. It lurched forward to snap at her hand. She moved her red silk slipper and kicked it forcibly.

  ‘But I must always be careful because, as you can see, this bitch hasn’t forgotten how to bite.’

  Whining, the dog scuttled off into the corner of the room.

  ‘Your son’s music, Madame Vronsky,’ said Rossel. ‘Was it you who persuaded Deputy Kommissar Shevchuk to order the collection of all of your son’s music that was not already in your personal possession?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘I really have no recollection. Everything about those times, the siege, was unworldly. I like to think of it as something that never really happened at all.’

  Rossel matched her stare. Her eyes, he noticed, were a brittle metallic blue.

  ‘You are an investigator, Comrade Rossel. And yet I’m led to understand that, in a somewhat ironic turn of events, you and your militia colleagues are now also under investigation.’

  He began to mouth another question. But thought better of it. Madame Vronsky clapped her hands. The liveried flunky stepped towards them.

  ‘Yes, Madame. Shall I show them out?’

  He had an accent – southern, Rossel thought. From the Caucasus? He didn’t look it.

  ‘Show them out, Razin.’

  Rossel picked up his cap and stood. It was a good Cossack name, and though plenty of ordinary Soviet citizens were at liberty to call their children Razin, it would be just like Madame Vronsky to give herself a pet warrior Cossack.

  She smiled at him.

  ‘So sorry not to have been more helpful.’

  *

  Outside the living room was a gold-painted vestibule. Off to one side was an oak door decorated with an armoured hand holding a magnificent scimitar – the ancient coat of arms of the Gagarina family. Beyond that door were the areas of the mansion now used by the Union of Composers for rehearsals, recitals and academic work.

  The Cossack escorted them out, with a look on his face suggesting he would have liked them served up for his lunch. Nikitin was in a hurry to leave but Rossel lingered at a large, gilt mirror near the entrance. Under the mirror was a vase filled with fresh flowers. It was pseudo-Grecian in shape, with a golden handle, and looked – just as the ones in the living room did – as if it was made of the most expensive Dyatkovo crystal.

  Rossel finished buttoning his coat and headed out after Nikitin into the dark. As he stepped back onto Bolshaya Morskaya, he smacked his gloves together with a retort that made the MGB major turn.

  He had seen the vase once before. In Sofia’s sketchbook. Perhaps one of her last drawings.

  *

  The encounter had left Nikitin agitated. He ordered Rossel to get in the car. They drove off, Nikitin silent and brooding, heading back the way they had come until the major glided to a halt not fifty metres away from the House of Composers, in a spot out of the lamp light, a place where they had a good sight of the door but where anyone emerging would have difficulty seeing them.

  They did not have long to wait. About ten minutes after they had exited the building, Madame Vronsky, wearing a black sable coat and accompanied by the sullen Razin, emerged. A gleaming red car pulled up to the pavement. Madame Vronsky and her bodyguard got inside.

  ‘Look at that,’ said Nikitin. ‘A Moskvich 400-420. Brand new. Isn’t she a beauty?’

  Lit by the dull glimmer of the street lamps, the Moskvich pulled out into the snow and advanced into busier traffic as Bolshaya Morskaya drew parallel with the Moika Canal. Nikitin followed, keeping the car a good hundred metres behind. After only a few minutes, the two vehicles turned left, crossed the bridge and bore right, following the canal but on the other side. Only two minutes more and the Moskvich pulled up in front of an orange and white building fronted with white classical columns, the Yusupov Palace.

  Nikitin drove straight past. The major continued for another hundred metres and pulled into an empty space behind a battered Gaz truck and next to an old bicycle, chained to the embankment railings and missing both of its wheels.

  He switched off the engine and adjusted the driver’s mirror so he could see the front of the Yusupov.

  ‘Watch,’ he said. ‘Use the side mirror.’

  After a minute or two, a woman came out of a dimly lit side street and got straight into the back of the Moskvich.

  Rossel recognised her immediately. It was Dr Volkova.

  38

  ‘Did I scare you?’

  Vassya yawned and wiped some sleep from her eyes. Then opened her door a little wider.

  She looked down the passage, left and right, before answering Rossel’s question.

  ‘Scared? I simply thought you’d come to do what you failed to do the other evening and show a girl a good time.’

  Rossel stepped into her doorway, closed the door behind him and kissed her.

  ‘That is better,’ she said.

  His voice dropped to a whisper.

  ‘I think this thing involves some important people who are beginning to regret my involvement,’ he said.

  ‘Beria?’

  ‘We should go.’

  He had hit on the idea as he was driving over, wrestling with the steering wheel as the car skidded and slid from one side of the road to the other. The new metro – nearly complete as an engineering project, not yet open to the public – Vassya would know it better than anyone. The MGB might have the plans but every project of that scale was only truly known to those who had worked on it.

  ‘You could hide down there forever,’ he said. ‘There must be side tunnels, shelters, storage rooms.’

  ‘And why would I do that?’

  ‘Nikitin has seen us together. Colonel Sarkisov knows that you flew us over the tracks – he was fully debriefed when we went to Moscow. Anyone with a close connection to me is now in danger.’

  ‘And then what?’ She raised her voice. ‘Roll around like a mole for the rest of my life? Hunt for scraps of potato peelings dropped by my fellow workers? I was a Night Witch. I flew over Stalingrad. On moonlight nights the anti-aircraft gunners hit us as easily as tins at a fairground shooting stall and because of the weight of the bombs and the low altitude of the planes, we never bothered with parachutes. I flew forty-seven missions. What did you do in the Great Patriotic War, Rossel? Catch burglars? Put out fires?’

  Rossel let go of her arms and stepped back.

  ‘At the beginning, yes, I put out fires with the civil defence. Have you ever tried putting out a fire caused by an incendiary bomb? I saw one man lose the skin from his entire body. Later, I was in the 2nd Shock Army – at Sinyavino. I was in a detachment of forty-seven men. Two of us survived the first week of fighting. When they sent in reinforcements, I watched from a crater as nearly three hundred men were killed in the first ten minutes. About thirty made it through so we formed a new detachment. This time three of us survived to the following week. When no more reinforcements came, we crawled out through slime and shit and dead bodies and the NKVD soldiers were so stunned they forgot to shoot us.’

  Vassya sighed.

  ‘I am sorry. But all that does is make you a survivor, like myself,’ she said. ‘I won’t hide in a tunnel.’

  *

  They had laid out the fifth body on a trolley in the middle of the morgue.

  Rossel pointed to the victim’s chest.

  ‘He is still a mystery. Male, black-haired, despite signs of starvation still carrying a little belly fat. Pattern of cuts slightly different from the other corpses, in that the killer had also sliced heavily into the back of his neck on the right-hand side, so the flesh was fully separated from there, as well as on his face. In her report, Dr Volkova estimates the age of the victim as fifty-five to sixty.’

  The Night Witch looked again at the corpse.

  ‘Do you know who it is?’ she asked.

  ‘I have a goo
d idea.’

  Rossel walked across to the heavy door of the morgue and checked, for a second time, that it was properly locked. Then he turned up the radio to full volume before undoing the bottom two buttons of his uniform jacket and pulling out a blue file he had pushed into his belt. He spread it out on a small metal table that Dr Volkova kept her surgical instruments on. Vassya stepped closer to him and stared down at the file. She could see the usual black and white photograph and densely typed columns of information. And the unmistakable stamp at the top of the file.

  ‘You really are on a suicide mission. You’ve stolen an MGB file.’

  ‘Two, to be precise. When I was last in the Bolshoi Dom I didn’t waste my time. I’ve got the other one somewhere safe.’

  ‘Nikolai Shevchuk.’ Vassya read out the name on the file. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Deputy Cultural Kommissar Shevchuk was one of the people who decided what was “good” or “bad” in Soviet culture. Who chose what our great patriotic Soviet state considered to be a work of artistic genius, or a piece of “bourgeois, reactionary recidivism” that might earn its creator a little time sunbathing in the Siberian permafrost. But Shevchuk also had an extra special role. He was given the task of deciding what great work would be the Soviet Union’s music for the war. A few months ago, he disappeared from his workplace. To a gulag, people supposed. But I believe it is more likely that he had fallen into the embrace of dear Comrade Vronsky.’

  ‘How can you be certain it is Shevchuk?’

  ‘Four of the victims we found on the railway tracks were in their early thirties – not surprising, since they were all classmates. But one was in his early fifties. According to Dr Volkova, he had access to luxury items like caviar. Thus he was likely to hold a position of privilege. He is the right age, the right rank, and the only other person Vronsky would have wanted to kill, since he chose Shostakovich as the Soviet Union’s war composer. And there is one more clue. See that?’

  Rossel pointed to a column in the file headed: Distinguishing marks. Vassya read from it aloud.

  ‘Three large black moles, one of very distinct triangular shape, each about a centimetre in diameter, found at the base of the neck on the right-hand side,’ she said. She looked up. ‘So?’

  ‘So that is why we have hoisted him out of the freezer. Roll him over.’

  On the count of three, they manhandled the corpse onto its front. The wound was immediately obvious – a deep, crude incision a little below the nape.

  ‘So, the murderer had to slice off the skin on his neck to disguise the moles, otherwise it would have been too easy to identify the body? Is that it?’

  Rossel nodded.

  ‘Meet Comrade Shevchuk. Body number five.’

  Vassya stared at the corpse. ‘Did Dr Volkova not work out who it was?’

  He smiled. ‘Possibly. But perhaps she was more preoccupied with keeping maestro Vronsky and his good mama abreast of our investigation.’

  ‘How long for?’

  ‘I’m not sure. At least, I suspect, for the last few weeks.’

  Vassya’s mouth twisted as if she had tasted something unpleasant. ‘An informer.’

  ‘Yes. She seemed frightened at times, but never enough,’ said Rossel. ‘Only two forensic pathologists in the whole of Leningrad have managed to escape arrest in the Doctors’ Plot, and she was one of them. When the MGB came to the station, despite their unrivalled revolutionary zeal, urgency and purpose, which saw them kill Taneyev in cold blood, they did not pursue Dr Volkova and arrest her even though her profession is under such scrutiny. And she returned to this station to help us when most sane people would give it a wide berth. Either she is incredibly lucky or extremely dull-witted. Or, she has been protected by someone very well connected. Her mother is a history professor who wound up in a labour camp in the Urals and recently contracted tuberculosis – she might get medical attention or it might be withheld. There are plenty of ways to put pressure on someone in Dr Volkova’s position, and plenty of things, on top of protection from the MGB, which Madame Vronsky could offer her in return for her eyes and ears.’

  Rossel turned his attention back to the late Deputy Kommissar.

  ‘And now that Comrade Shevchuk and I are at last reacquainted, I think I understand everything. Or almost everything. The madness of it I do not understand.’

  ‘You knew this man, too?’ Vassya said, shaking her head. ‘As well as the others?’

  ‘No, I didn’t know him. Or, more exactly, we were never introduced. I was in the same room with him briefly only once in my entire life, as were, I’m almost certain, Nadya, Felix, Max and Sofia. And a trumpeter named Gusts Landau.’

  ‘When was that?’

  Rossel stepped a little closer to the trolley and stared down at Body Number 5.

  ‘March 12, 1942, at the RadioKom headquarters of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra. The day of the greatest all-Soviet composers’ competition. The day Shostakovich and Vronsky went head to head to see which of those great men would become famous throughout the world as the eternal symbol of Soviet resistance against the Fascist menace and, eventually, come to represent something even more powerful than that: hope for all of mankind.’

  *

  Afterwards, Rossel found he could recall very little about the music in the competition. Not the thunderous first movement of Shostakovich’s seventh, or the intense adagio of Vronsky’s submission. The Shostakovich had involved a drummer, he recalled that much, but otherwise very little had remained with him. Both maestros had protested at the lack of time to prepare their pieces. Both were doubtless aghast at the performances of their music by a motley band of stinking scarecrows rounded up from the city’s defenders. And the scarecrows were equally unimpressed by the composers’ protestations.

  The percussionist who had tackled the side drum part, a pounding, endless ostinato, had collapsed near the end with dystrophy and been taken out. Otherwise Rossel could remember none of it.

  But he could remember the onions – the small, glistening onions that floated like tiny gastronomic jewels on top of a battered blue tin bowl of pale soup. They had given a helping to each member of the ensemble. How those tiny onions looked, how they smelt, how they tasted! ‘A bowl full of Heaven, served up in the midst of hell,’ Felix had said. Vital provisions had been flown in, past the German guns, over Lake Ladoga. They had indeed seemed miraculous. Eliasberg had managed to get extra rations for every skeletal fiddler, percussionist and brass player who turned up. For the most part, that had been the only reason why they played. Not one of them – not Felix, clutching a loaned violin, not Nadya, staring at her clarinet like she had never seen it before, not Gusts Landau, with his red face and apologetically unclassical Sunday-afternoon-band style, not Maxim with his long hair and meditative French horn playing – not one of them would have been able to play a single note in front of Deputy Cultural Kommissar Shevchuk without those onions.

  Rossel’s own hands had been shaking. Nothing made you feel the cold as keenly as starvation did. They all wanted more food, needed more, demanded more, but Eliasberg the maestro was a hard taskmaster. ‘If you want a second bowl, then you must play for it,’ he warned them just before he raised his arms to conjure some music out of his scarecrows.

  Then, as he sat in the midst of the first violins, eyes flickering between the sheet music and Eliasberg’s baton, bow biting string once again, it happened.

  The pure joy of playing coursed through him.

  How he had missed it.

  As they pounded through the opening pages, the violin of the woman sitting beside him slipped off her shoulder and onto her lap – she had no strength left to lift it up and so sat there, resting her fiddle on her knees. Around them, other string players were doing the same, some unable to stop their instruments falling from their fingers. Woodwind solos died in mid-phrase, brass fanfares wheezed into silence.

  But he played on.

  He did not remember the opening to the Vronsky, only that
it was profoundly moving and that his own part was a long, sweeping solo above pulsating strings.

  Soon – too soon – his own soaring phrases were over and Eliasberg was cueing the others. But the musicians were seeing nothing but stars and hearing nothing but the pounding of their own blood, and hoping only that the fiasco would not mean their second bowl of onion soup would be withheld.

  *

  They had moved into the station to escape the chill of the morgue but the grate was black and lifeless. Rossel slouched back into his chair and blew out a stream of smoke. Now he knew it was time to sleep. Time to give in.

  Vassya would not let him.

  ‘So, the killer is Vronsky? Winner of the Stalin Prize, People’s Artist of the Soviet Union, one of the country’s leading artistic figures. A murderer. Put dead bodies on the tracks as if they were a composition?’

  ‘Five on the line, arranged like notes on a score. Landau he killed during the war. The trumpeter was a stranger in the city, knew no one, and no one knew him. He was Vronsky’s first kill, I think. The others were murdered later. Recently, in fact.’

  ‘How will you ever prove any of this?’

  ‘Prove it? Proof depends on who is willing to listen and what they want to hear. But there is a long, long trail, much of it laid for me to follow. To begin at the beginning, the unexplained death of a young musical genius at a school on Krestovsky Island, a school he and Vronsky attended. An early example of the hatred he has for anyone he sees as a rival.’

  Rossel poked the embers.

  ‘Eliasberg also mentioned a nickname, Thanatos, which Vronsky gave himself back then. A name from Greek mythology. A sketch I saw in Sofia’s sketchbook had that name written on it: Thanatos & H . . . And I now believe the shadowy figure in the same drawing was Vronsky, because in one corner is a Grecian-shaped vase of crystal – and it is sitting in Madame Vronsky’s apartments in the Union of Composers.’