City of Ghosts

by Ben Creed

  On the other side of the road, beyond a rough stone wall, was a small farmer’s byre, about three metres square and almost completely submerged under snow. Rossel could just see the top of a line of hay bales peeping out from beneath its corrugated iron roof.

  As the minutes went by, a thought struck him. He searched behind the driver’s seat and, after a couple of minutes, found a battered green metal tool box. He tipped out the spanners, bolts and screwdrivers and replaced them with the two tape spools he’d taken from Vronsky’s dacha. Then he crossed the road and pushed the tool box down inside the byre, making sure it was completely hidden and, as much as was possible, protected from the weather by the bales of hay.

  He checked his watch again – almost midnight.

  Maybe he had missed him?

  Rossel shivered as he waited behind what remained of the large snow bank. His revolver, which he had reclaimed from Razin, was drawn.

  No, it wasn’t possible. It had only taken him thirty minutes to cross the ice. And, on the shore road, it would take at least an hour from Krestovsky Island to Sinyavino.

  Another five minutes went by.

  Then, in the distance, he heard the low rumble of an engine. He dropped down behind the drift and trained the pistol on the road in front of him. As Vronsky’s truck rounded a sharp bend about twenty metres ahead of Rossel’s hiding place, the detective saw the composer’s silhouette as the full beam picked him out. His hair wild and unkempt, his eyes now wide and staring, and his huge frame dwarfing the cab and wheel. There was no space to pass on either side of the snowplough – that, at least, had been Rossel’s assumption. He’d hoped to bring Vronsky’s truck to a hard-braking standstill.

  Vronsky whipped the wheel to the left and his truck headed straight for what remained of the drift. Rossel fired once and then threw himself to his right as the other vehicle shot past, destroying the rest of the snow bank, taking out three pine saplings and knocking splinters out of a telegraph pole before re-centring on the other side of his rudimentary blockade in the middle of the road.

  Rossel rolled over and began patting the deep snow all around him.

  He swore under his breath – he had just constructed the world’s worst roadblock and now the Tokarev was buried somewhere deep in the drift.

  He climbed back into the cabin of the snowplough, yanked on the rusty gearstick and started reversing.

  *

  Sparks leapt up in front of the snowplough’s wipers as the metal skis on its front and, sometimes, the base of the plough, hit rocks and potholes hidden beneath the snow.

  About a kilometre before Sinyavino, with the frozen lake visible to his left and a squat, half-built barn to his right, he slowed to take a blind corner. As he rounded it the boxy frame of Vronsky’s ZIS suddenly came into sight. It was lurching from side to side. The left-back wheel was flat and it was limping along as Vronsky tried to control it.

  I got lucky with my shot. The thought had only just crossed his mind when Vronsky and the ZIS disappeared into an unlit tunnel. Seconds later, Rossel followed, hoping to get close enough to do some damage with the snowplough.

  Now he was no more than a metre behind, but Vronsky had accelerated. Sparks burned orange and blue as he hit first one wall of the tunnel, and then the other, in an effort to escape.

  Rossel matched him, got to touching distance, close enough to see the back of Vronsky’s head through the glass panel of the cabin.

  Then a searing light made Rossel throw up an arm to shield his eyes.

  Another truck, another car? Something right in front of them. Blinded, he stamped on the brake. The snowplough rocked from side to side and made a screeching sound as it began to slide. He heard a crash up ahead, just as the light vanished, and as he thundered on he saw the astounded face of a uniformed MGB soldier manning a searchlight and realised Vronsky had turned sharply and smashed through the outer security gate of Beria’s dacha.

  Rossel stamped on the accelerator again and barged into the back of Vronsky’s truck but his own vehicle was starting to protest. Bolts popped – spat into the trees that lined the driveway, as the caterpillar tracks sheared away. Glass shattered as a chunk of metal took out the windscreen. Rossel’s forehead smashed into the driver’s mirror. Blood began to flow. Vronsky’s truck shuddered to a stop just before the snowplough lurched sideways and ended its journey in the back of the composer’s ZIS.

  Rossel scrabbled for the passenger door handle and leapt down into knee-deep snow. As he did so, Vronsky fell out of his vehicle. Rossel launched himself at the maestro, put both hands around his throat, used the full weight of his body to drag him down onto the ground. One punch – one single blow – was all he was allowed. Then he heard the safety catches come off the PPSh submachine guns and the familiar shouted command:

  ‘Ruki vyerkh! Ruki vyerkh! Hands up!’

  Rossel staggered to his feet and obeyed.

  45

  Vronsky’s huge arms stretched skyward. Rossel stood no more than a metre behind. The maestro looked as though he were ready to conduct the final act of one of his own operas, and was pausing to build tension and anticipation among an admiring Kirov audience instead of six MGB officers holding PPShs. They were fanned out, three to each side of the drive, and aiming directly at Vronsky and Rossel.

  About twenty metres behind them was a set of stone steps that rose into the elegant private residence, shining in the blaze of lights that the security guards had trained on the scene. Off to one side stood the birch trees that shielded the elite dacha from view. On the other, its icy surface glittering in the moonlight, was Lake Ladoga. At the top of the steps, Kalashnikov slung over one shoulder, was Colonel Sarkisov.

  Half a minute later, Beria appeared and stood next to him. The minister glanced to his left and right, taking a moment to familiarise himself with the unexpected turn of events. He looked unperturbed, as if he were about to inspect a troop of particularly unpromising young recruits lined up in some provincial town square. Then he took off his glasses and used a small cloth to polish them. Satisfied, he slipped them back on again and, followed by Sarkisov, began to walk down the steps towards Vronsky and Rossel.

  Vronsky was standing just in front of Rossel. Something about Beria’s unruffled composure had unnerved the maestro. He turned his head a little so he could talk out of the side of his mouth.

  ‘Arrest me.’

  The composer’s normal deep baritone had become a tremulous whisper. ‘Arrest me, Lieutenant. Murder is a militia matter. Not something that should be of any interest to the ministry of state security. I still have friends in the highest echelons. I will arrange for you to be promoted. What do you want to be? A captain? A major? Arrest me, for God’s sake, Rossel. The militia have jurisdiction here . . .’

  The composer’s voice trailed away. Beria was standing directly in front of them. ‘You wish to see me, Comrade Vronsky?’

  ‘To warn you, Lavrentiy. I was coming to warn you.’

  ‘Really, am I in some kind of trouble?’

  Rossel, his arms in the air, snorted. Beria’s gaze settled on the lieutenant.

  ‘Ah, yes. The man who likes jokes. What is it this time, Lieutenant?’

  Blood still trickling down his forehead from the collision with the driver’s mirror, Rossel looked back.

  ‘I don’t think the maestro can be feeling well, Comrade Minister. He just asked me to arrest him and then claimed, if I did, he would get me promoted to the rank of major. Of course, his assessment of my current situation and job prospects does not fully align with my own.’

  Beria’s expression was a study in stony-faced restraint. Then a grin began to spread from one side of the minister’s sallow face to the other, and – shoulders shaking – he began to laugh. No one else dared join in.

  After a minute or so, the chortling subsided into silence. Beria took out the cloth again but this time gave his glasses only a cursory wipe before nodding at Sarkisov who – taking a club from a deep pocket
in his greatcoat – stepped behind Vronsky and swung it. The composer dropped to his knees.

  Beria popped his spectacles back on and stared at Vronsky.

  ‘I never used to like it,’ he said.

  Vronsky reached back to the crown of his head and then gazed uncomprehendingly at the blood on his palm.

  ‘Like what, Lavrentiy? Like what?’

  ‘That stupid name you gave me: Thanatos – Death. There was always a certain intellectual bourgeois condescension in the way you used to pronounce it. As if you didn’t expect some Mingrelian shitkicker, like me, to ever have heard of the Greek myths.’

  Another nod to Sarkisov.

  Another swing of the club.

  A sickening sound: wood playing the simplest of scales on bone.

  Vronsky’s huge frame toppled forward into the snow and lay prone. Beria leaned over him and spat onto the side of his face.

  ‘Thanatos, Death, yes, back then, I never used to like it, Nikolai Nikolayevich,’ he said. ‘But, tonight, I find, I do.’

  Vronsky began to wail. ‘Please, comrade, I told no one, I don’t know . . .’

  Beria clamped a gloved hand over the maestro’s mouth.

  ‘Girls, Nikolai. Mere musical extravagances. I can make the Party look the other way at even the most depraved escapades. But the jewels. The jewels. To festoon your slut in our smuggled baubles and then allow them to be traced to the ledgers of Djilas the jeweller – and from there to me. That I do not forgive.’

  Beria let Vronsky go. ‘Take the maestro to the lake,’ he said to Sarkisov, ‘make a hole in the ice, and drop him in it.’

  Then, with a stiff bow, he turned and began to walk back towards the house. Sarkisov raised his club. All around Rossel, MGB men cocked their weapons and aimed them at him.

  Just as he reached the foot of the stone steps, alerted by the sound of approaching vehicles, Beria stopped and turned.

  A sleek Packard limousine, followed by two snub-nosed military trucks, rolled into view and came to a halt on the drive. A dozen Red Army special forces clambered out of the trucks and, almost nonchalantly, trained their weapons on Beria’s MGB.

  The driver of the limousine opened his door and slid out. He adjusted his cap and sauntered round to the passenger door, which he opened as if its occupants were arriving at a state function. Out stepped a tall middle-aged man, dressed head to toe in black, who wore the concerned air of a punctilious funeral director. This was Georgy Malenkov, Second Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, member of the Politburo. And presumptive heir to Stalin.

  Another man got out from the opposite side of the limousine and stood next to him. Major Nikitin.

  ‘Cordial greetings, Lavrentiy,’ said Malenkov to Beria. ‘And here is our maestro too. Why this is a stroke of luck. I was on my way to his hideaway on Krestovsky Island when we noticed your gate security had been compromised. I do hope there’s nothing amiss?’

  Beria’s face gave nothing away. But it took him a moment to answer. When he did so, however, his voice sounded calm, gentle – solicitous.

  ‘What I always ask myself at times like this, Georgy, is the same thing you – with all your practical experience of the world – undoubtedly do too.’

  ‘Which is?’ said Malenkov.

  Beria took a moment to adjust his glasses and then grinned broadly.

  ‘Why simply this – what would Comrade Stalin do?’

  Malenkov considered the question. Finally, after a moment or two, he nodded at Nikitin.

  ‘Comrade,’ he said to the major. ‘Do your patriotic duty.’

  Rossel, his arms still in the air, watched as Nikitin walked forward and took the club from Sarkisov. The MGB major placed a boot on Vronsky’s cheek. Then he began to beat a rhythm on the maestro’s body, singing as he did so.

  ‘Life has never been better,’ the torturer sang, ‘Life has never been more beautiful. Sing it to me, bourgeois. Sing it to me now!’

  The lieutenant turned his eyes away and stared out toward the vast, mute, frozen lake upon which Captain Mikhail Murov had once built a miraculous road.

  PRAVDA 12 November 1951

  Obituary

  Nikolai Nikolayevich Vronsky

  A Hero of Hero City

  I weep as I write this – just as every true socialist and member of the People’s Party of the Soviet Union must, surely, shed a patriotic tear as they, in turn, read it.

  ‘Nikolai Nikolayevich Vronsky is dead.’ When I first heard those terrible words, and learnt of his accidental death in the fire which burnt down his dacha, I felt almost exactly as I did on 21 January 1924, when news reached me of the death of Lenin himself, at Gorki Leninskiye.

  And if Lenin was still with us, I have little doubt he would lead the outpourings of socialist grief that must now surely stretch all across our great Soviet Union; from Minsk and Baku to Donetsk and Rostov, and, of course, in Moscow, and here in the maestro’s home city of Leningrad.

  It is a bitter but nevertheless true honour to be, even in such tragic circumstances, chosen to write the official obituary for my esteemed colleague, cherished friend and fellow member of the Union of Composers.

  No Russian composer, in modern times, not Stravinsky, nor Scriabin, or Boradin or Korsakov, Rubenstein or Medtner, has come close to matching the breadth of Vronsky’s creative range and vision. No one understood more of what it means to be a citizen and comrade of this great revolution than he did.

  The widest masses of the toilers of the whole world will lament his passing. As the farmer puts his shoulder to the plough and the factory worker his heart into his vital production targets, in the exact same way Nikolai Nikolayevich applied his prodigious intellect and profound musical sensibilities to examining and penetrating the suffering of the workers in their unceasing struggle against the bourgeois.

  In this way, he became a hero to us all, most certainly to me. For no one has expressed the soul of socialism – captured its joyous cadences, melodies and undertones – with more clarity and precision than he did.

  Nikolai Nikolayevich Vronsky 12.04.1904 – 06.11.1951

  D. D. Shostakovich

  46

  Monday November 19

  ‘Citizens! In case of artillery fire, this side of the street is extremely dangerous.’

  It was because the shelling had come in from the south and west. As the German shells arced in, they had made the northern side of Nevsky Prospect more vulnerable, so if caught outside you cowered on the south pavement and got the hell out of there as soon as possible. The warning signs, stencilled into buildings, had been left as a cheap memorial to the blockade.

  As he and Vassya hurried past one now, Rossel tried to remember the sound of sirens and whistle of incoming fire. But a shrill voice emanating from dozens of loudspeakers along the broad boulevard and exhorting all Leningraders to welcome visitors to the city’s commemorations of the Road of Life drowned out every thought. Except the ones to do with their current quest.

  Rossel drew his greatcoat a little closer to him. The wind picked up, stirring the snowflakes into a gently dizzying dance, and he drummed nervously on a round metal container hidden in his greatcoat pocket. When they got to the corner of Mikhailovskaya Street, close to the grand entrance of the Grand Hotel Europe, he saw – exactly as Vassya had said he would – the scaffolding and tarpaulin that hid one of the many entrances to the half-built Gostiny Dvor station of the underground railway system. Since she had helped to design it, Vassya knew her way around.

  As it was early evening, no construction workers were about. They looked left and right before crossing to the same side of the road where the Philharmonic Hall was and stepped behind a green tarpaulin. Vassya felt in her greatcoat pocket for a key. Then turned it in the rusty padlock attached to a wood and chicken-wire door and opened it.

  *

  The service tunnels running under the hotel, the concert hall and various other buildings would be blocked off when the metro station final
ly opened, Vassya said, but while open they had served several purposes. ‘Storage. Shelter during the blockade.’ And for Rossel, a place to stash the recordings he had returned to recover from the tool box he had hidden in a hay byre at the shore of the lake, as well as a way into the Philharmonic Hall without being seen.

  The tunnel ran straight to another makeshift door that led to a basement room, then to stairs behind the stage that ran all the way to the top of the Philharmonic Hall, from where they could observe everything. The hut was small, only about two metres square, and perched alongside a sad troupe of three ageing stage lights, at the very back of the auditorium.

  The lieutenant checked his watch: 6:45pm. The performance was due to start at quarter past seven. There were already plenty of concertgoers sitting on the red velvet seats with the gold trims in the circle and stalls. The Philharmonic Hall had been built in a classical style, with huge white ionic columns, five large chandeliers – similar in shape to the ones Sofia had loved so much in her ‘ocean room’ at the Kirov – and could seat over fifteen hundred people.

  It would be full tonight.

  The Blockade was a hugely anticipated Soviet cultural event. Vronsky’s death could not derail it. As Pravda had declared, the Leningrad City Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had unanimously decided it should go ahead to ‘write forever into history the name of this august hero of Hero City’. Everyone who was anyone was going to be there. And, like the first Leningrad performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, Vronsky’s work would be broadcast far and wide on loudspeakers to thousands of people in the city centre who had eagerly complied with requests to stand in the cold in Arts Square, next to the concert hall, and listen to this masterpiece.

  As well as a small control panel, sometimes used to help with the lighting, the gantry also contained two Magnetophon tape decks which were, on occasion, used for public announcements and to play recorded music. They were hardly used but serviceable. Rossel had done his homework well.