City of Ghosts

by Ben Creed

  Vronsky stilled his hand, let it fall to his side.

  ‘By the end, just stretching out the tips of my fingers and simply listening – it was electric.’

  43

  Vronsky’s hands stretched out towards the unopened silver platter for a third time, letting them hover. His grin was ghoulish and terrifying.

  ‘Sofia was the hardest one to entice up here. She had no interest in my offer of a job in the chorus of the Kirov Opera. No interest in Marina’s offer of lessons and patronage. But your name, Lieutenant. That got her on the first train to Leningrad. I promised her a reunion with you at my dacha – and to use my influence so she would never have to inform again. And so, of course, she came.’

  Rossel’s eyes remained fixed on the platter. There was no way he would let Vronsky know the pain of the wounds he was causing, no way he would grant him that satisfaction . . . but his fastened hands could not wipe away the treacherous tears that were pooling in his eyes.

  ‘How does it feel, Lieutenant Rossel, to not be the person you were supposed to be? To know you will never play your violin again?’

  Under those silver bowls there could be . . . For Vronsky it had just been some sort of raw meat, he thought.

  But this one was meant for him. This dish could contain anything.

  ‘You know how that feels, maestro,’ he said. ‘That’s what you’re trying to say, isn’t it? You missed out. I did, too. We are kindred spirits, you and I?’

  Vronsky shrugged.

  ‘The thing that has eaten my heart,’ the composer said, ‘is knowing that if I came back to Leningrad in a hundred years and strolled down Nevsky, I would find Stalin remembered, I would find the siege remembered, but – and this above all I abhor – I would find Shostakovich remembered. A court bard, a modernist parrot, now fixed in the cultural memory of the nation as the keeper of its spirit. The guardian of its eternal flame. But not me, Rossel. No one would remember me.’

  Rossel spat a little blood onto the floor.

  ‘I used to feel exactly as you describe,’ he said. ‘Imagine myself playing at the Kirov instead of opening a cell in the morning and gagging at the stench of shit. But no more, comrade. Militia station 17 is my destiny now. These days if I tried to tap my foot to the national anthem, I’d probably end up a half-step behind but it doesn’t really matter anymore. Because I get to hunt down people like you.’

  ‘You didn’t hunt me down, Lieutenant. I simply picked up my baton, extended my arms, and here you are.’

  Vronsky lifted the lid of the salver.

  The package was six inches square, brown with a yellow sticker the size and shape of a rouble stuck to the front. It read: AEG Magnetophon. Vronsky tipped it and out slid a spool of tape.

  ‘Only five cages, not six. I assume you noticed that immediately, on waking. So, why is he here, Lieutenant Rossel must have asked himself, if he is not to be part of Maestro Vronsky’s chorus? What is his purpose – his melodic function in the second part of this particular aria? Have you worked it out yet?’

  Rossel did not even acknowledge the question.

  No, Revol, not for you . . .

  His eyes were on the salver where the reel lay but all he could see was Sofia’s face close to his.

  ‘At the Kirov,’ continued Vronsky, ‘I told you, gave you the answer to the entire riddle, and on our second meeting I also clearly reiterated it. I thought you might have an inkling then. And yet, you still haven’t worked it out.’

  He stood and walked to the nearest of the three tape recorders squatting on the green metal shelf nearest the door. Pushing the tape onto the empty left-hand spindle, he wound the first strip onto the right-hand one and pressed a button. Then he walked back to the table and took his seat again.

  ‘They had food there. Can you imagine that? At the Leningrad State Mental Hospital, on the very night I was admitted – shortly after what I did to Landau, all of that – I ate a chicken seasoned with rosemary and salt, even some tinned beetroot. Imagine how that tasted? Whilst the city’s belly was round and empty, its madmen grew fat on contraband. The brother of the director was prepared to grant favours to those with a certain influence and a wallet full of roubles. So, I dined well. And each evening, once sated, I could stare out of a skylight at the searchlights of St Isaac’s as they swept the clouds and watch as the Nazi Dorniers flew by. One million dead, the world on fire. How could I capture that, I asked myself? And then it came to me.’

  As the tape whirred, Sofia sang. Her voice seemed no more than a melodic whisper, faltering as she either failed to recall the words or, when they did remember, vocalise them with any conviction. Occasionally, true notes were attempted but the voice cracked and died. At times she muttered only a single word without any connection to what had gone before or to the sounds to come. As though the sound itself had been freed from the body and now journeyed on alone, shorn of all meaning. Had she been drugged, or was it the hallucinations of famine? Or – and here Rossel glanced at the cages again and shuddered – something much worse.

  If ghosts could sing, he thought, and, in doing so, forced themselves to recollect the horrors of the life they had left behind, this is what they would sound like.

  ‘Listen,’ Vronsky said. ‘I need you to listen. That’s why I’ve brought you here. That’s why I needed a musical detective. You have always been my listener. So listen, I implore you.’

  He was pacing up and down in front of the Magnetophon. As soon as the spools had begun to whirr, he had become animated.

  ‘I have it here, Rossel. I have it pinned down. A lifetime’s work.’

  The composer gesticulated at the stacks of spools lying on the shelves that surrounded the walls near the door.

  ‘But I was unable to reveal it to another living soul. Until now.’

  Vronsky lowered his voice.

  ‘The Road of Life? I heard the subtle cadence of a different road, one of death – the roll and rattle of the rails as the trains that transport the hundreds, the thousands, the millions out to the gulags. That, comrade, is Lenin’s lullaby, Beria’s little ditty, Stalin’s refrain. The wolves in the taiga can hear it. The stray mongrels in the back alleys can. The people try to drown it out. For what is it now to be Russian if not to clap your hands over your ears and refuse to hear? But my refrain is also a timeless proclamation – all that we humans have ever been – a first sigh, a last breath. The low rasping moan . . .’

  Vronsky tapped on a suspended microphone and smiled as the dials on the Magnetophon danced. He kneeled in front of Rossel and placed one of his huge hands around the detective’s throat.

  ‘. . . . made by a slowly compressing trachea, as one man presses his boot down upon the throat of another, a sound which always contains within it that other noise, its twin – triumph. Is that not what Dostoevsky means when he asks us: “Am I a monster, or a victim myself?”’

  Vronsky exerted more pressure on Rossel’s neck with his left hand as his right picked up one of the remaining glass tubes on the table.

  ‘Finger placement, Rossel. As a violinist, you know it’s everything.’

  Rossel began to gulp in an effort to take in extra air. The end was near if he didn’t talk, fast. It was time for some revelations of his own.

  ‘A photograph,’ he mumbled.

  Vronsky’s left hand pressed down even more firmly.

  ‘In my pocket . . . a photograph.’

  The composer hesitated. With the left hand still on the detective’s throat, he dropped the tube from his right and began to delve inside Rossel’s jacket. It took him only moments to find the wallet. As soon as he did so, he relaxed his grip. Then stood up and began to leaf through it. After a few seconds, he found and drew out the black and white image.

  Rossel swallowed hard. Then took in three more big lungfuls of air before he spoke.

  ‘Her name is Svetlana. She is the daughter of an MGB major by the name of Nikitin. She is carrying poppies, too. So, the majo
r knows it was you who raped her. Probably after Beria, maybe before, but definitely also. Poppies are your flower. Nikitin knows as much as I do about everything – the girls you abducted, the people you murdered. So does his fellow officer, Sarkisov. They have lists with all the names on it.’

  Vronsky stared at the photograph. His grip loosened. Air wheezed through Rossel’s windpipe.

  ‘That list is on its way to the finest dachas about fifty kilometres south of here, where Malenkov and all those other Party high-ups are. Let’s just say Beria has never been their favourite person.’

  The composer still couldn’t take his eyes off Svetlana. Did he remember her? Did he recall her small, doleful eyes? Her delicate body?

  ‘We also know about the jewellery too,’ said Rossel.

  He nodded to the tapes on the shelves.

  ‘I don’t need to listen anymore, Vronsky. Just look at how much you have laboured. Shostakovich understands the concept of brevity – would have instinctively known two notes were all that were necessary. An MGB car, a black raven, parks in the street outside, boot-steps echo in a stairwell at midnight, and then two notes ring out.’

  Rossel suddenly slumped back in the chair and began to laugh. After a moment, his body was shaking.

  ‘Perhaps the great composer might call it his Doorbell Symphony?’

  Vronsky looked back up into Rossel’s eyes. Then he released his grip, picked up the photograph and tore it into pieces. Dropping them, he picked up the steel rod from the table.

  When the blow came it was delivered with such force that the chair to which Rossel was tied toppled over.

  44

  Vronsky had left the dacha in a hurry, presumably after finding the phone line dead. Rossel still took five minutes before he felt able to stretch out his fingers and move both the chair and his torso, inch by inch, close enough to pick up the shard of glass he had been concealing under his foot. And then a further ten to cut through the loosened twine and free himself. Two more to locate a small porthole window at the back of one of the box-stalls, break the glass and wriggle free into the freezing night.

  His right arm was in bad shape. His throat was bruised and swollen. Blood flowed from the palm of his left hand where he had cut himself with the glass shard. But Vronsky had done him the favour of toppling the chair. And left him alive, or for the Cossack to slay at his leisure, in his haste to get to Beria and warn him of the deadly threat to their partnership. And to their lives.

  The composer had at least twenty minutes on him. But Beria’s dacha at Sinyavino was more than fifty kilometres away, and driving at night, following the edge of the lake in this snow, would take at least an hour, possibly more. There was still a way he could intercept Vronsky. It was not an enviable option and no one would take it unless desperate. But ten years ago, such desperation had given birth to a miracle.

  The lieutenant looked towards the distant ice house and, with two heavy tape spools under one arm, began to stagger through the snow.

  *

  At night, in this kind of temperature – about twenty below – it was his feet that worried him the most. Without boots he might last only five minutes, ten at the most, before frostbite set in.

  Rossel left the main building and stables behind him and ran towards the ice house, his breath coming in staccato exclamations each time the soles of his bare feet touched the frozen ground. Before he got there, he found what he was looking for – through the shadows where the moon broke the dark, where the pine trees ringed the edge of the island. Now he saw them. To his right, the line of old ZIS-5 trucks that he had come upon earlier. One of them was already missing – Vronsky must have taken it.

  There were still four trucks left. But it wasn’t them the detective was interested in. He had to head Vronsky off before the composer could get to Beria. It was his only chance of defeating the maestro and it was probably a suicide mission, but, at this juncture, pretty much every road led to his end anyway.

  After hearing Sofia’s voice, after reading her words, he would be glad of it.

  The snowplough was about three metres long, scooped, V-shaped and attached to a truck, the back wheels of which had been replaced by caterpillar tracks, its front ones underpinned by two wide metal skis. It was a bizarre-looking vehicle but Rossel had seen plenty like this one during his army service. Every soldier worth his salt knew how to drive one of these in case the poor bastard who had last driven it was killed.

  But there was no need – the key was in the ignition and a metal hip flask and an entrenching shovel lay on an old copy of Sovietsky Sport on the driver’s seat. Someone had just parked it? Rossel swung round but it was too late – Razin was already pointing a pistol at him.

  Rossel grimaced with the pain from his right arm as he put his hands in the air.

  ‘I shoot you now, not think twice, militia man. But it might be more fun to just stand here and watch your toes begin to swell. Frostbite is not a pretty sight. I saw plenty of it during the war.’

  The Cossack was wearing an ushanka fur hat, an ex-army greatcoat and Kirza boots.

  Rossel stared down at them. Then back up at Razin.

  ‘I need your shoes,’ he said.

  Razin smiled.

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  Rossel sprang forward into a deafening retort as the Tokarev discharged. A zinging vibrating sound near his left ear as the bullet passed by. Razin stopped him with an arm like a steel bar and thrust him back. He pushed the pistol into Rossel’s face and squeezed the trigger. But he was too slow – the second shot disappeared into the night as Razin’s body buckled and he fell to his knees. Before he had touched the snow, Rossel hit him again with the shovel he had grasped on the floor of the ZIS. This time in the face. Razin keeled backwards and his body lay in the snow, an eddy of blood leaking from his left temple and pooling on the white ground. His shoulders and neck jerked and trembled, contorting his features.

  Rossel knelt down and started untying the Cossack’s laces.

  ‘As I say,’ he said, ‘I need your shoes.’

  *

  Everything inside the ZIS snowplough rattled. It would only take another mile or two to shake the fillings out of his back teeth. The rasping of the engine was matched only by the squealing of the caterpillar tracks as they protested about being forced to grip the icy surface of Lake Ladoga.

  ‘Please God, let there be ice.’

  At least a metre of it. Two, if possible. About fifty centimetres would support a small car but the ZIS weighed over three thousand kilos. He needed fifty solid centimetres at a bare minimum. And as little current as possible, because the motion of the current thinned the ice. ‘That other road, not one of life but of death’ – the composer was right about that. Many had never made it. Only a fool would risk it at this time of year, and especially at night. Even in a snowplough. Which is why Vronsky had opted for the road.

  He was wearing Razin’s bloodied greatcoat over his own jacket, his life-saving Kirza boots and the dead Cossack’s socks. Beside him were the newspaper and two round metal cases that contained the tape spools he’d taken from Vronsky’s macabre collection. They were all the evidence he could carry and still slither out of the tiny stable window. The hip flask in his pocket, he had been pleased to find out, was full of something alcoholic. Rossel had already drunk about half.

  His headlights, on full beam, stretched a few dozen metres ahead. Everything to the left and the right was pitch black; thick cloud covered the moon and stars. The only things that seemed to be twinkling anywhere on the vast surface of Lake Ladoga were the tiny, slightly cockeyed headlamps of his vehicle.

  ‘White good,’ he thought, ‘dark bad.’ The whiter the ice appeared, the thicker it probably was. Darker ice meant water close to the surface. At this season of the year, the lake waters often ran with strong currents.

  And, given enough time, a strong current could mean no ice.

  *

  White good, dark bad.

  It had take
n Rossel about thirty minutes to reach the southwestern corner of Ladoga, between Vronsky’s island and the shore road that led to Sinyavino and the complex of dachas reserved for the higher echelons of Soviet politics. He had finished all the alcohol but his feet were still ice.

  ‘White good, dark ba . . . To hell with it . . .’

  In the distance, beyond the headlamps’ beams, he saw a single light flickering. And, moments after that, the outline of a building.

  A shore cabin, he thought. Or a banya. Shelter for ice fishermen to warm up and get drunk.

  Rossel rammed his left boot down on the accelerator. As he did so, the wail of the engine-and-track chorus rose and the ZIS lurched towards the snow-covered beach. Beyond the wooden cabin and another column of pines would be the road to Shlisselburg and then Sinyavino. And somewhere in the countryside around it was Beria’s dacha.

  Vronsky, he was betting – only using the road and having to travel around Lagoda’s southwestern shoreline – would not have reached this point yet.

  The sound of the tracks changed as they crossed onto deeper snow; a softer, muffled creaking. Rossel turned the snowplough hard right and headed further up the shoreline.

  The headlamps ran along the dense rows of trees and he noticed a break in the shadow, a little up ahead, near what looked like a stone post. As he got closer, he realised his luck was in. It was set at the side of a small path that was being used to haul boats down from the main road to the water’s edge. A rowing boat on a two-wheeled trolley, mostly covered by snow, was parked in the middle of it.

  Rossel maintained the pressure on the accelerator and the boat popped about a metre in the air just as the snowplough swept it aside. Another twenty metres of path and then he hit a huge bank of snow that looked like a frozen wave racing towards him. For a second the rubber wipers strained left and right and the snowplough faltered. Yet he emerged onto the other side and realised he had reached the road.

  *

  Rossel positioned the snowplough in the middle of the single track, its headlights still on and facing the way he expected Vronsky to come. Few people would be mad enough to be out at this time of night in this kind of weather. The next vehicle that turned up, if any did, would almost certainly be the composer.