City of Ghosts

by Ben Creed

  Rossel stared at the road in front of him. Once they got to Vronsky’s island, Nikitin would head southwards to Shlisselburg, to where Malenkov’s dacha overlooked Ladoga’s southern shore as he and his rivals waited for the call to Leningrad for the Party Congress and the days of celebrations to mark the anniversary of the Road of Life.

  He gestured to the black and white photograph, lit by the thin morning light, that Nikitin had fixed to the car’s dashboard with a piece of tape.

  ‘She has the air of an innocent, your Svetlana. Sofia had that, too.’

  Nikitin stared down at the portrait of his daughter. The pretty nineteen-year-old was wearing a simple spotted pinafore and clutched a small bunch of poppies to her breast. A frozen gargoyle’s smile was fixed to her face. As if she had been snapped by a Medusa.

  ‘She was that . . . before . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  They rumbled on. That morning’s newspapers had promised a new wave of cold weather – minus twenty-five, at least.

  ‘How did you find out about the girls?’

  ‘Like I said, Sarkisov is disgusted. He keeps a list of their conquests. They love lists in the MGB. The whole country is run on lists. But Beria doesn’t know.’

  ‘Why should he care?’ asked Rossel, steering around some metal fencing that protected an open manhole. ‘Beria can do what he likes.’

  ‘Not entirely,’ scoffed Nikitin. ‘You think people like Malenkov, Molotov, MGB generals, army generals, admirals, party bosses with family and friends in the camps, you think they aren’t out to get him? One little vice, sure – but add that to something he said twenty years ago, someone he drank with thirty years ago, add it all up . . . “I heard Beria say you were looking a little ill the other day, Comrade Stalin. And did you know what he gets up to in his special cellar . . .?” That’s how it’s done. A list like that is an insurance policy.’

  He fell silent, watched as the city’s outskirts drifted past.

  ‘But Sarkisov doesn’t know that I’ve read that list. We were around his apartment the other night, drinking. Celebrating the arrest of Eliasberg. Singing, of all things.’

  He began to bellow out an old army marching song.

  ‘My ears are bleeding, comrade,’ said Rossel.

  Nikitin stopped singing.

  ‘You know, outside the service, you are the only person in the Soviet Union who would dare talk to me like that,’ he said. ‘Anyway, we had several bottles lined up to applaud our every note. Sarkisov got smashed and started showing off. He brought out five pieces of paper and waved the top sheet at me. Then he slid off his chair and fell asleep. I was curious, of course, so I took a look. And there, on page six, was her name and my address. I wanted to strangle him right there, and then find Beria and put a bullet straight between his eyes. And then go to Vronsky’s pad and do the same. But I have a wife and another child. A simple man does not make life complicated. That’s how I got to live this long.’

  The car slowed again as a filthy truck pulled out from a side street.

  ‘So, I bit my own lip until I could taste the blood in my mouth like I was gargling with it and decided to come and see you outside the Union of Composers.’

  A road sign appeared about fifty metres in front of them. It showed the way to Lake Ladoga.

  *

  It took three hours of crawling through the growing blizzard to reach the edge of Nizino, on the southeastern shore of the lake. Rossel glanced down at the picture of Svetlana. It could have been just another family snap – but the expression on her face and the flowers in her hand told a different story.

  ‘How did you get your hands on that photograph?’ he said.

  Nikitin, who had been half asleep and slumped forward, opened his eyes and stretched. Then slapped his gloved hands together.

  ‘When he was still drunk and asleep, I rifled through the drawer Sarkisov had taken his list from. Taped underneath it was an envelope filled to bursting with pictures and negatives of Beria’s victims. Some of Vronsky’s, too. It was in there.’

  Rossel dropped a gear as he overtook a horse-drawn farmer’s cart filled with lumber. Then he looked at the photograph again.

  ‘Poppies. Your daughter is holding poppies. You said roses and irises before. Did Beria or Vronsky ever mention a story, a Greek myth, about Thanatos and Hypnos?’

  Nikitin nodded.

  ‘That’s what they called themselves when they went out in the Packard, Thanatos and Hypnos. Some creepy joke between them which me and Sarkisov never properly understood. The poppies only started when Vronsky arrived on the scene. How the hell did you know about that?’

  In the distance, through the swirling snow, Rossel made out a sign: Krestovsky Island. He pressed his foot down on the accelerator.

  ‘Hypnos is Sleep, Thanatos is Death,’ said Rossel. ‘In the legend, they lived in a cave. Through it ran the River of Forgetfulness and outside it grew poppies. That’s where the opiate came in, I think. Extract of the poppy, used to instill a deep sleep from which the victims awoke into an endless nightmare. Vronsky had used the names before, as nicknames for himself and a boy called Andrei Suvorin, when they both attended a school for gifted children. Suvorin went missing in the summer of 1916.’

  The car slid and skipped over a patch of the road and Rossel performed a complicated dance with brakes, gearstick and steering wheel.

  ‘You know, you’re good at this,’ said Nikitin. ‘How long have you been in the militia?’

  ‘Since ’46. After the war, they were kind enough to give me a choice between the fire brigade, the militia and pushing paper in some meaningless department. I chose the militia. I wanted to be a detective.’

  ‘You had good training?’

  Rossel laughed. ‘We had basic tuition in the criminal code so we could tell drunks, whores and thieves what they were being arrested for. There was a little less training around forming tips and clues and hunches into a real investigation.’

  They pulled up onto a slushy bank next to a hedge. Nikitin stared out at Lake Ladoga. About a half a kilometre away was a phalanx of black pine trees that lined the shore of an island. And one hundred metres to their left was a slightly lopsided telephone pole, studded on each side with the metal steps the engineers used to climb it, a tangle of wires leading from it to a pole on the opposite bank.

  ‘As agreed, I will wait until you get to the island, then take the phone lines out,’ said Nikitin. ‘This school – it was here, on Krestovsky?’

  Rossel took his revolver out of its holster and checked the chamber.

  ‘Yes. If I’m right, I’m about to cross not a river but a lake of forgetfulness.’

  Nikitin picked up the picture of his daughter and kissed it.

  ‘I can’t stop thinking about what those bastards did to her. I can never forget . . . Remember Stalin’s slogan from before the war? Life has never been better, life has never been more beautiful?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Rossel. ‘To be honest, I was never totally at one with the sentiment.’

  Nikitin smiled his tormentor’s smile.

  ‘I used to use that all the time in the cells. I’d make the counter-revolutionary scum recite it – sing-song style. Repeat after me, I’d shout: “Life has never been better.” Then I’d kick the mudak in the balls. Repeat after me: “Life has never been so beautiful.” Then I’d break their knee-caps. Louder, I’d bellow. Say it so I believe that you believe it. “Life has never been better, never been more beautiful,” and thud go their heads against the wall.’

  Rossel got out of the car and began to walk through the still deepening snow towards the thin line of dark pines that ringed Vronsky’s island. Behind him he could still hear the voice of his former torturer shouting, as Nikitin banged out an accompanying rhythm on the dashboard.

  ‘I want you to sing it to me one more time! And make sure you sing it so convincingly that Comrade Stalin himself believes it. “Life has never been better, life ha
s never been more beautiful.” Sing it to me now . . .’

  *

  Wind-whipped flakes whirled around him. Whiteness blurred into whiteness. If only the whole world could wipe itself clean like this, he thought, in preparation for the creation of some other, better version of itself.

  Only the thin smudge of the distant horizon and the pines on the shoreline, now about two hundred metres in front of him, punctuated his sense of abandonment – of being lost, even to himself. He had, he felt, now become a mere thought in that other malicious mind, a minor character in the plot it had devised, an inanimate stage prop, as were the bodies on the lines. He, like them, had been arranged upon a page. Orchestrated. Scribbled into the margins of a score, as Vronsky’s imagination cast him as, no doubt, a dullard detective.

  Although the distance was relatively short, it took him twenty minutes to cross the ice to the middle. He stumbled twice in the drifts but picked himself up and moved forward.

  At last, Rossel reached a ridge at the edge of the island and crouched behind it. He caught his breath before making another three bounds forward. Then he stepped between the dark sentries of the shoreline pines and began to make his way toward the rotunda of the old house, of which Eliasberg had had such fond childhood memories. The island was only just a kilometre across; somewhere within were its grand mansion and gardens.

  The trees were twenty deep but as soon as he emerged through the last row, the dacha came into view. Its walls were stuccoed white and so, in the snow, barely perceptible, making it appear as if the golden dome of the rotunda roof was hovering high above the ground.

  To his left, near the shoreline, about one hundred metres away, a huge tarpaulin. Sagging with the weight of the fresh drift, it was hung between some pines. Beneath it were some rusting petrol pumps and five trucks, three looking in very poor condition, two as if they had been recently repaired and used. Leftovers from the war, he thought. This must have been one of the many temporary filling stations set up around Lagoda to fuel vehicles before they crossed the ice; there would be a fuel pit under there somewhere. They were all ZIS-5s – that old warhorse. One was fitted with a snowplough and caterpillar tracks.

  To his right, about fifty metres away and surrounded by black stumps poking through the snow – the remains of thirty or forty trees – was what seemed to be the top half of an entrance.

  A door to a cellar?

  Rossel reached down and took out his gun.

  He walked forward, pulling down his hat to shield his face from the wind that was blowing up the long drive leading towards the rotunda, still some distance away. When he got to the door, he could see it was half submerged and surrounded by the drifting snow. The building it led into was stone and brick, and looked as if a giant had pressed it into the earth. Six steps led down to it – recently gritted. A spade and shovel rested against the door post at the bottom. The wooden door was ajar.

  As he shoved the door further open, the pale winter light showed a deep interior – six metres down, he reckoned, which felt deep and very cold.

  He looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was behind him and continued down the thin steps until he stood on the bottom. It was hard to make much out in the gloom. The space was obviously for storage of some kind. Forage, perhaps? No, ice – ice for the summer, cut from the lake in winter and packed in straw for insulation. But during the war anything could have been stored here – fuel, weapons, spare parts for the trucks that crossed the Road of Life . . .

  The space was about five metres long and the same wide. He looked up to see frost glittering on the ceiling. The walls were for the most part unmarked but here and there he could see traces of faded graffiti. He took out his lighter to read it.

  Hitler kaput, Sokolov was here. After Leningrad, onward to Berlin! Masha, I love you.

  There were six small alcoves cut into the walls at about waist-height. Rossel thought he could see more clearly into one of them than the rest – the one in the right-hand corner, furthest from the door. He bent down, listening, but there was only silence. He crept forward towards a lump of stone, almost a cube.

  The source of light became evident. Two candles on top of the stone. Rossel could see what looked like more graffiti. But it was different: five irregular lines carved into the stone.

  And into those lines had been carved musical notes scraped. Five of them.

  Rossel leant forward and traced a gloved hand over the carvings. Unbidden, the notes rose in his throat.

  Fa, la, mi-bemol, si-bemol, sol . . .

  F, A, E-flat, B-flat . . . G

  Rossel shot to his feet, intending to race for the steps and the safety of open ground. It must have been then, he thought afterwards, that Madame Vronsky’s Cossack bodyguard hit him.

  41

  The sound seemed to be coming from somewhere distant. Out on the very edge of consciousness. Not from one point. But everywhere.

  Now the noise changed in pitch. Became thicker and rounder. A pulsating shadow that stilled back into blackness in the moments between each beat. But then, on the numbing notes themselves, would ripple out into a single vague image. A thing barely discernible but provocatively real. Like a childhood glimpse of something forbidden that instantly disappears behind a closing door. Sofia, the apple brandy on her breath. Her eyes lowered. No, Revol, because . . . The scribbled pages of her notebook. Thanatos & H. Galya mute among the drifting snows. A cursing Nazi sergeant whose throat he’d stabbed in a muddy shell hole during the hand-to-hand fighting in Shlisselburg. The blood on his tongue and fear in his pumping heart induced by Nikitin’s percussive violence. A black snowdrop – the partly decomposed body of a thawing boy he had once seen outside the Union of Composers.

  Rossel’s lips were cracked and dry. He blinked his eyes open. A large, shadowy circle of brick and stone, divided into sections. No natural light, so somewhere a lamp or some candles burned.

  But the space was not empty. Five empty steel mesh cages, each about a metre and a half square, hung by dirty chains to the beams of the ceiling. Each one hovered about a metre above the ground, inside an empty stall that made the whole place look like it had once been a stable. Suspended from the ceiling by a piece of insulating cable, a microphone hung in front of each one of them. They looked, to Rossel, like the very best – the kind used for professional recordings.

  He winced as he felt the pain from the back of his skull. He tried to lift an arm but found he could not. He was seated but his arms and legs were bound. There was the noise again. Insistent. Rippling. Now he felt he could place it. He turned his head left, trying to locate the tapping in the gloom.

  His eye caught a sliver of a different spectrum of light. For a moment he was unable to process what he saw but then they came into focus – five glass tubes. Each one a little taller than the next, arranged on a table before him.

  He could hear the noise more clearly now, persistent and hypnotic.

  Rossel squirmed in his chair. Looked down. His gloves had been removed. His feet were bare and, like his hands, tethered with a thick twine. It was a smart move to remove his boots. Even if he escaped, he wouldn’t get very far in these temperatures.

  Then the voice spoke in a baritone whisper which seemed – like the beats – to be in front of him, behind him, to his left, to his right.

  ‘Stolypin, the original resident of this house, was the tsar’s very own Beria. He used to keep his Lipizzaner here. When we were friends, Suvorin – you will know who he is by now – and I would come and admire them.’

  A last beat, then the metallic rhythm stopped. A sudden movement to Rossel’s left and Vronsky loomed above him, grey and massive, like the Commendatore in Don Giovanni, a stone nemesis conjured to life by the maestro’s percussion.

  The maestro circled him a couple of times, saying nothing. Tapped his gold-ringed fingers on top of the table as though he were stilling the undisciplined cacophony of tuning in the pit. There was a little dampness on the compos
er’s brow but otherwise he looked no different from the last time Rossel has seen him, at the Kirov. After a minute, Vronsky took a seat at the other end of the table.

  The click of a latch. A door set into the farthest alcove of the wall opened slowly. A woman entered carrying two circular silver platters on a tray and some cutlery. Madame Vronsky placed one platter in front of her son. Then put the other one down in front of Rossel.

  ‘I sensed you did not like my little dog, Lieutenant,’ she said. ‘A pity. I think my little one liked you. Or perhaps she merely pities you. In her world there is no MGB, no gulag, no citizens ready and willing to inform on a next-door neighbour for the price of a Party membership card, and so it must be, just as you are about to discover, a much kinder world than this one.’

  Her tone was cordial. That of someone greeting an old friend they had just bumped into after only a day or so’s parting.

  ‘Your son is not in any way sane,’ said Rossel. ‘And yet it does not seem to concern you in the slightest, comrade?’

  Rossel heard his own voice as though he were listening to someone else. It was dry and deep. Basso profundo. And sounding ephemeral. Otherworldly. He assumed he had been injected with the same drug as the others. That would explain the intensity of the images in his head. Dehydration, too, was a common side-effect of an opiate.

  Madame Vronsky smiled.

  ‘That is what the doctors said during the siege. After Razin found him standing over the dead body of that useless Latvian bugler Landau, I arranged for my son’s psychiatric evaluation. Pulled strings, to ensure an order was issued which meant that any existing manuscripts were immediately recalled from the conservatory library. I did it to calm him after his defeat. My son demanded it. Told me that he had come to despise its imperfections. But that within its “crude phraseology” lay the embryo of a much greater work – The Blockade. “And now, at last, after the trumpeter’s death, I finally understand what is necessary. The level of ambition a true artist must possess.” Those were his words. If he were an ordinary man, I would have agreed with the doctors’ assessment of his psychopathology. But my child is not that. Has never been that. He is and has always been extraordinary. To those with such special gifts everything must be allowed.’