City of Ghosts by Ben Creed (most important books of all time txt) 📕

Rossel held out a hand and Gerashvili dropped them into his glove. He squinted at them.

‘They look the same to me,’ said Rossel.

‘Yes, they are exactly the same,’ replied the junior sergeant. ‘I expressed myself inadequately. I mean her – our victim. Body Number Five. They do not match her.’

‘As she currently has no face, it is my considered view, Junior Sergeant, that it’s very difficult to make an accurate judgement on whether the victim suits her earrings or not.’

‘Especially, they do not match the cheap red knickers she was wearing. A three-kopek whore would turn her nose up at them. But these earrings are, I think, expensive.’

Rossel’s face remained impassive as he considered the junior sergeant’s observation.

‘I’m just the archive clerk, of course,’ said Gerashvili. ‘I apologise for my impertinent speculations.’

Her tone undermined the apology. Gerashvili’s round, half-Georgian face coloured a little – her sarcasm had gone far too far. It was always a mistake to antagonise your senior officers. Especially when you were right.

Rossel’s voice softened. Gerashvili was twenty-five years old, only a year in the militia, and small; just an inch or so above five foot. Her short hair was bottle-blonde with dark roots showing at the centre parting. She had wide round dark eyes that forced an unexpected and immediate playful intimacy on anyone who looked into them. It was not flirtation. No, just simple candour of a kind, Rossel thought, which no longer seemed to exist. An almost pre-revolutionary openness of spirit. And a sharp intelligence and keen eye.

He had missed the significance of the red knickers at which a three-kopek whore would turn up her nose.

‘Explain to me exactly what you mean,’ Rossel said.

Gerashvili pointed to the earrings in Rossel’s hand. He held them up and examined them. They were the kind with clasps fitted to them worn by women who had not had their ears pierced.

‘Her ears are pierced. The right one, anyway. I looked at the photographs Taneyev took at the scene when I was preparing the case file this morning. The left earring is correctly attached to the woman’s lobe, so I could not see whether it was pierced or not, but the right one was dislodged slightly and so, under a magnifying glass, I could observe that it had been pierced.’

‘Why would she be wearing earrings with clasps if her ears were actually pierced?’

The clasp was gold with tiny flowers engraved around its base. They were minute, delicate, exquisite.

‘The earrings are small but very expensive,’ said Gerashvili. ‘I think these rubies are real. There is only one shop in Leningrad that I know of where a citizen might obtain jewellery like this: Djilas, in the Passazh department store. And to access a shop like that, they would either have to be a very important citizen, or a friend of such a person.’

Rossel brought an earring closer to his eyes and examined it in more detail.

‘There is no jeweller’s mark on the clasp. In an expensive piece I would think that is unusual,’ said Gerashvili. She took the other earring from him, opened the clasp and pointed to a tiny, almost imperceptible mark hidden underneath it.

‘This one has been soldered, I think. There was a hallmark but it has been removed. The one you are holding has the same kind of indentation, only smaller. I wondered if they could, in fact, not have been bought in Leningrad. If they could be from abroad.’

Her voice trailed off as he stared at her. Gerashvili swallowed and added: ‘If someone was trying to hide where they came from . . .’

It was excellent detective work, thought Rossel, and it landed them in a whole pile of trouble. Not just any MGB agent but one trusted to travel abroad. Very few people had access to travel passes. So why the hell had no one come for her?

‘You have been wondering about a lot of things, it seems,’ said Rossel, ‘while in fact you are supposed to have been working diligently in our archive department filing reports on stolen bicycles, shipments of black-market cigarettes and other vital areas of criminal administration. I wonder is it possible that the Vosstaniya Street militia station’s filing is not, currently, quite as it should be?’

Gerashvili’s face gave nothing away at this unjust assessment. Good, he thought – she cares.

Rossel handed the other earring back to her. She placed them both inside a paper evidence bag.

‘Good work, Junior Sergeant. I would like you to accompany me to Nevsky Prospect, to Djilas, the jeweller, tomorrow so that we may ask them some questions. Would you like that, Junior Sergeant – time away from your desk?’

He watched as Gerashvili placed the bag inside the correct red folder.

She looked up at him and tried a small smile.

‘Yes, sir, I would.’

*

The missing looked back at Rossel as they always did – a little puzzled, even put out, to find themselves incarcerated in a dusty file. A bemused collection of display cabinet butterflies, unable to fully comprehend the strange turn of events that had brought them to reside in such a place. A few mugshots, like those in the standard files of criminals and the condemned, but mostly family images handed to the authorities to help in the search for loved ones. They said nearly a million people had died in the siege. How many more had disappeared? No one knew. But their spirits were here, in hundreds of thin missing persons files, arranged in a cramped room wedged under the staircase of the police station, turning L-shaped at one end to eke out a little more space for filing cabinets and shelves.

No one imagines they will become one of the missing, Rossel thought. Until, one day, there you are.

He drew on his Belomorkanal papirosa, savouring the acid burn as the smoke reached his lungs, and positioned the battered tin mug of vodka so that it would be within easy reach.

This room was Junior Sergeant Gerashvili’s domain.

When he needed to get in, Rossel waited until she had