City of Ghosts Read online

  ‘This one’s a blue-top,’ said Grachev. ‘This one’s MGB.’

  Her cap was, indeed, blue-topped with a red band and black visor. The tunic had flashes on the sleeves and throat that Rossel couldn’t identify, blue thread at the wrists, and epaulettes without any markings. A corroded badge was clipped to the breast – he could just make out a sword designating the bearer as a member of the Ministry for State Security.

  Like the others, most of the face had been removed. Unlike them, her eyelids had been left open though her eyes were only white, milky globes. Grachev inspected the mouth.

  ‘More amateur dental work. Her tongue’s gone, too.’

  She was naked from the waist down apart from some voluminous knickers. Pink ones, or red ones that had faded. Real passion killers. Whoever she was, she had been short and stout, and the flesh of her thighs had frozen into stubby white lumps that looked nothing like human legs.

  ‘Three men, two women,’ said Rossel. ‘A Princess, a Priest, Nude without bollocks, Nude with, and now the Secret Police Officer.’

  Grachev blew out his cheeks. ‘A real fucking jazz band,’ he muttered.

  ‘Jazz is bourgeois, comrade,’ said Taneyev.

  They stared at him. Taneyev cradled his camera, his face as long and solemn as ever. He wasn’t trying to crack a joke.

  Grachev spat.

  ‘Thank you, as ever, for your close attention to Party doctrine, comrade,’ he said, ‘and for setting me, all of us, indeed, on the right fucking path, comrade, and for . . .’

  Rossel intervened. ‘That’s enough, Sergeant.’ Once Grachev got going, he wouldn’t stop.

  Grachev, as ever, flirted with disobeying orders but this time fell silent. Probably because Taneyev didn’t give a shit how long he ranted for. Mouthing platitudes and scraping through to retirement was the old man’s priority now. Or perhaps it was because the sight of the MGB uniform had put them all on edge.

  ‘Comrade Lieutenant, I’m not sure how best to proceed. What do you think we should do?’

  This was Lipukhin, sidling up to him. The captain had got the vodka out of his stomach and some colour had returned to his cheeks but he still gave off the petrol scent of cheap alcohol. Tall though he was, Lipukhin still had to raise his head to murmur the question into Rossel’s ear.

  Rossel knew what they were all thinking. Grachev, crouched once more over the woman, his face set in his habitual mask of rodent insolence. Taneyev, hands twisting over his camera, his eyes round and unblinking, desperate to make it through the last few weeks before the safe harbour of retirement, a pension and anonymity. Lipukhin, with the film star looks that the drink had only just begun to spoil. A captain in name only, these days, waiting for orders.

  The thought was: Might it be possible to forget about the one in the MGB uniform . . .?

  The row of dead was being dusted anew with snow flicked over them by a stiffening breeze. Beyond them was the light that arrowed out of the steam engine. The driver was stamping in the thick drifts and the local copper was still staring at his boots.

  Rossel tapped his thumb rhythmically on the ring and little fingers of his left hand – or the little that was left of them – his habit when he needed to think. The twin stubs were a memento from the Chekists, the name still given to the secret police. Rossel was well aware there’d be no hiding anything from them. There never was. In fact, he was mildly surprised MGB officers weren’t here already. Dead bodies were, after all, their speciality.

  No, there would be no hurried burials, no cover-ups. They had to get the bodies back to Leningrad, get the officers swarming all over the case, smother it in paperwork before the MGB smelt it out and got their hands on four lonely officers of the people’s militia.

  He could afford no more encounters with the MGB. Not after last time.

  Rossel raised his head.

  Perhaps they really could pin it on the Snow Queen, he thought. An easy arrest to make, given her legendary temper and fairly obvious royalist sympathies.

  His voice assumed an air of command.

  ‘Get that lad to find a truck. And let’s get some hot water from the train to unstick that . . .’

  But Grachev had already swung a leg back. His boot thudded into the head of the priest.

  ‘Done,’ the sergeant said.

  3

  They had left Grachev and Taneyev behind to commandeer an ex-military ZIS-5 truck that the local policeman had conjured up after an hour’s hunt – the only useful thing he’d done all night. Taneyev had taken another twenty photographs before they loaded the corpses into the back of the ZIS, wrapping them in tarpaulins. Grachev hadn’t been joking – the bodies were as stiff as tree trunks. The morgue would probably warm them up. But they were surprisingly light. Corpses, as all of them had experienced, were usually a devil to shift, but not these.

  Rossel and Lipukhin drove back alone in the Moskvich, Rossel at the wheel, while his captain hacked at the ice on the inside of the windscreen that formed when their breath billowed onto the glass, forming tiny crystals before their eyes. A broken wooden cooking spoon and old copies of Pravda and Soviet Sport were kept in the glove compartment for exactly that purpose.

  They travelled in silence for the first thirty minutes, focused on staying on the road, Rossel battling with the slipping and sliding, the car’s winter tyres and snow chains grinding and squeaking under the flimsy floor, Lipukhin scraping.

  Once they got closer to Leningrad the road was a little easier, the snow flatter and more compact.

  ‘Any thoughts, Revol?’

  ‘None worth sharing, Comrade Captain.’

  Lipukhin smiled.

  ‘On the case, I mean.’

  Rossel shrugged.

  ‘He’s neat, our maniac is neat. I mean, lined up like that, as if they were queuing for the Bolshoi? When I think of madness I think of chaos, of utterly irrational acts. This isn’t like that.’

  ‘He took out their teeth and cut off their faces,’ said Lipukhin. ‘That says maniac to me. Drunken headcase.’

  ‘Or he wanted to disguise their identities,’ said Rossel. ‘He has purpose. He has reason.’

  Lipukhin grunted and gave the window a desultory scrape with the spoon.

  ‘He or they?’ he said after a moment.

  ‘That I’m not sure about, yet. Are you?’

  The captain hesitated before answering.

  ‘No, not really. Although that was a lot of meat, a lot of cold cuts to shift for just one person.’

  ‘Two men, then,’ said Rossel. ‘They bring them out in a truck and then plonk them on the rails. Piss off well before the train arrives. The fresh snow covering their tracks, as it did most of the bodies before the light from the engine picked them out.’

  ‘Yes, maybe two. But I’m still not sure. Why would they do it? What could be their motive for arranging them like that? It would be a strange pact to make.’ The captain took a swig from an imaginary bottle and then put on the slurred and exaggerated voice of a tramp hammered on black-market hooch. ‘Care to come out to Ladoga with me, comrade? I have some corpses I wish to place in rather particular poses on the railway lines out by the lake.’

  ‘There could be another, more obvious, explanation.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘I didn’t want to say anything in front of Grachev and Taneyev. Especially not Grachev. He’d sell his own mother for three kopeks.’

  Lipukhin nodded.

  ‘Taneyev, on the other hand, is obviously a man of great integrity,’ said the captain. ‘Well, he might hold out for four. But your explanation is that the Chekists did this, Revol? Yet why would they murder one of their own?’

  On the face of it, this was a fantastically stupid question. The Chekists – as OGPU, as NKVD, as MGB – had spent years liquidating each other as enthusiastically as they had liquidated spies, saboteurs, fascists, writers, priests, kulaks, Trotskyites, musicians, generals, doctors, coppers, anyone who spoke a foreign lang
uage or who had been abroad, any anti-Soviet elements in general.

  Rossel sought a diplomatic answer.

  ‘Most likely, no. But it wouldn’t be the first time?’ he ventured.

  Lipukhin shook his head.

  ‘I can’t see it, myself. Not out there, near the lake. Too far for the blue-tops to travel. Especially in this weather. Too much like hard work. I’m told they have a favourite spot for that sort of thing. In the woods near Toksovo. Be careful if you go picking flowers out there, Lieutenant. They say every snowdrop, in every coppice, blooms from a traitorous seed.’

  Rossel pressed his foot down on the brake. The Moskvich veered to the right on the icy road as he slowed it down. Then he turned left at a road sign half-buried in a deep flurry: Leningrad 35 km. He glanced at his watch. It was well past 4am.

  ‘Maniac it is, then,’ he said. ‘It seems to me we’re looking for a peculiar kind of monster, though. One who first butchers his victims – slices off balls, rips out throats, takes out teeth, cuts off faces – but then arranges their bodies like silk socks in a bourgeois sock drawer, each next to the other. All in a neat little row.’

  *

  On the outskirts of the city, the snow thinned out and the tyres found it easier to get a grip. The Moskvich had warmed up and Lipukhin settled back into his seat. Rossel was surprised the little car had run out to Lake Ladoga and back without much complaint.

  Five thirty, and Leningrad was waking up in the dark. Yesterday had been a typical mid-October day, cold but not unmanageably so. Now, twenty-four hours later, the ‘Venice of the North’, as the locals called it, with its wide canals and imposing pre-revolutionary palaces and mansions, was caked in ice. Rossel drove back the way they had come, down Piskaryovsky Prospect, skirting the city to its east before cutting in over the Bolsheokhtinsky Bridge. At a depot off Smolny Prospect, tram drivers were lighting fires under the chassis to warm up the fuel – a trick they had probably learned getting T34 tanks going during the war. High above them, lit by spotlights – printed on a huge red poster that was lashed to the stately domes of Smolny Cathedral – three men surveyed the scene. One of them was Stalin. The second, a round-faced lifelong bureaucrat with a disdainful gaze, was Georgy Malenkov, rumoured by some to be Stalin’s heir. The third, a middle-aged man with a receding hairline above pince-nez spectacles, was Lavrentiy Beria, deputy prime minister, his name synonymous with state security. The words on the poster read: VICTORY AND FREEDOM! The Tenth Anniversary Celebrations of the opening of THE ROAD OF LIFE. 19 November.

  As the Moskvich trundled past, Rossel stared upward into the inkblot eyes that lurked behind the giant lenses, wondering if they helped Beria to bring the sins of Leningrad’s two million citizens into sharper focus.

  Police Department No. 17 was on the corner of Vosstaniya and Nekrasova. The Moskvich drew up outside and Rossel cut the engine. The two policemen sat in silence for a few moments, unwilling to start the day any earlier than necessary now that they had lost a night’s sleep, letting Leningraders stumble past them on their way to offices, factories, schools. A gang of construction workers went by, raucous even in the dark morning; eight years since the siege had been lifted and the city was still putting itself back together. Grachev and Taneyev were coming off shift and could go to bed once they had seen the bodies to the morgue.

  For the first time since dragging himself out of bed the previous morning, Rossel felt the cold possess him, chilling the lungs and stomach and spine. It could take days to properly warm up from a night like that. He yawned.

  ‘No time for dozing, Lieutenant,’ Lipukhin said, now thoroughly sober and trying to lighten the mood. ‘I think we need tea. Let’s go and warm our hands and our hearts. Lidia will have filled up the samovar.’

  The captain got out of the car, slapping its roof in approval. Rossel watched him cross the road and push open the heavy wooden door to the police station. Before he went in, Lipukhin removed his hat and ruffled his blond hair. He could have been a poster boy for the Soviet paradise – until he’d made the mistake of succumbing to the green snake.

  Mistakes.

  Everyone had made one. Sometimes they were fatal. Sometimes, Rossel wished his own had been. If he’d kept his mouth shut, kept his smart remarks to himself, perhaps he would still be playing the violin – maybe a job at the Kirov Theatre, maybe some solo concerts here and there. Still young at heart, raising smiles, chasing the occasional romantic liaison with singers or dancers – not forced to confront the craggy, chastened face he saw staring back at him out of the shaving mirror each morning. Prizrak, he would whisper, pointing back – a ghost, its face as white as the suds plastered all over it.

  He took off his gloves and examined his hands.

  The ring and little finger of the left were both missing. The middle and index intact but stiff and somewhat twisted. His right hand had fared a little better – no fingers missing. But the ring and little finger were broken and malformed.

  Like a scale, Rossel could recall the order with perfect clarity.

  Do – the left little finger. Already broken by his interrogator who, when that did not inspire a confession, turned to a chisel.

  Re – his mind wandering up and down all the most difficult scales, imagining the tips of his fingers pressing the strings into place just so.

  Mi. Severed.

  ‘You can stop this,’ murmured the interrogator. ‘All it takes is your confession.’

  Fa – the ring finger. Down came the chisel.

  Sol – the interrogator put the chisel down but started with the hammer on the right. Agony in symmetry.

  Scales turned into arpeggios, then the most difficult studies. In the end, he had confessed anyway – confessed to anti-Soviet sentiments, they told him later, though exactly what sentiments he could not quite recall.

  Maybe it had been encouraging counter-revolutionary sabotage – that was a favourite during the war. Or enemy propaganda. Plotting to assassinate party cadres. Conspiracy to aid fascism. Profiteering. Wrecking. Diversionary acts. Spreading rumours to undermine morale. Espionage. Hoarding. Choose from an extensive menu, comrades, because in these troubled times, the one thing we’ve got plenty of is crimes of treason. Choose anything you fancy.

  The long, angular nose and scarred face of his torturer. The stench of the cell. The musty straps and iron-cold restraints. The way his back was contorted over the special bench. It was all as clear as a sparkling night sky. But the confession was wrapped in fog.

  La.

  It hadn’t stopped. Not for a long time.

  But, when it did, Rossel knew he had become somebody else. It felt as though he had been struck dumb. He had stared for hours at the stumps of his missing fingers. And, then, he had turned to a fellow inmate in that foetid, overcrowded cell and said, They might as well have cut out my tongue. He would never be able to play another note.

  In the steamed-up confines of the Moskvich, Rossel shivered and decided it was time to search for that tea. Fuck your mother! He was cold all over.

  Except for his hands, which were already numb. His hands couldn’t feel a thing.

  4

  The blizzard swirling in from the River Neva had turned Leningrad white but everything inside the little station house was shadow. A thick layer of black soot from the logs burning in the fire covered every inch of the walls. Vosstaniya Street was home to Militia Station 17. It was a battered fragment of a lost age left behind by the merchants who once owned it before the October Revolution.

  Everyone and everything in it had a nickname. Rossel was the Fiddler, because someone had gone through his file on day one and found his diploma from the Leningrad Conservatory of Music. Sometimes he also got compared to Crazy Borya, a deranged tramp who literally scraped a living in all weathers on the bridges of the Griboyedov Canal with a cracked violin and hairless bow. ‘Screeching like a tomcat who’s dipped his balls in chilled vodka,’ as Grachev had put it.

  The violin had marked him out as diff
erent. Especially as it was buried in the past of a man who hardly ever took his gloves off.

  Lipukhin got ‘Comrade Lenfilm’ as he bore an uncanny resemblance to Nikolai Cherkasov, Stalin’s favourite film star. Grachev was ‘Pavel Stalingrad’, as he never stopped bragging about his role in the battle, as part of the 8th Guards Army. And Taneyev was ‘Taneyev’, on account of being so bland and boring nobody could even be bothered to make a nickname up for him. Even the police station itself had its own moniker: The Black House. Because of the soot and, perhaps, the things Grachev did to those suspects who might be having a little trouble confessing in its dank basement.

  ‘Grachev’s in there with some tart from Sennaya,’ Junior Sergeant Lidia Gerashvili whispered, intercepting Rossel in the middle of the room amid the chairs and desks of the lowest ranks. Station 17, home to a dozen militia officers, was full. Those supposed to be out on patrol on such a freezing morning had discovered vital paperwork that needed doing without delay, while those who really needed to do their paperwork were concentrating on getting the samovar going. ‘He came straight in and dragged her off for interrogation. And you know . . .’

  ‘I know,’ said Rossel. ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Only a few minutes.’

  Rossel headed for the stairs.

  Five dead bodies. Five blood-red stains on the soul of Mother Russia. No sleep to speak of. A corpse in the uniform of a state security officer. He needed to think. But first he had to tackle this.

  *

  Rossel barged into the interrogation room without knocking. Grachev had his hand raised. He had probably knocked the girl about a fair bit already but she had her clothes on and the sergeant’s trousers were still buttoned up. It could have been a lot worse.

  The girl was probably only in her early twenties but she looked a lot older. Her hair was cut short and dyed a dark red.

  Grachev started to say something but closed his mouth again. Rossel outranked him. Just.

  Grabbing the girl by the neck, Grachev thrust her back into her chair before taking his own seat. He pulled out a fountain pen and notebook from within his tunic. Rossel closed the door and stood by it. Grachev twisted in his chair but Rossel stared him down.