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

crumbling rosin and ran it up and down the bow, exactly six times – a habit from his earliest lessons with his mother. Then he took the chin rest and the violin itself from the case and laid everything on his bed. He stood still, partly in reverence but also to decide on a piece. A Brahms sonata? A Wieniawski showpiece? No, the same piece he always chose – the Prokofiev he used to play in duet with his sister, the first movement, andante cantabile.

Rossel reached for the violin, grasping it with the thumb and two crooked fingers of his left hand and bringing it up to his shoulder. The violin settled into place. With his other hand he picked up the bow. His torturer had broken only the ring and little fingers of the right hand before that particular interrogation had ended, leaving them set in a slightly claw-like position that was oddly suited to his bow hold. He pulled away an errant bow hair and brought the bow to rest on the A-string. Allowed himself a bitter smile. All those nagging teachers who had never stopped talking about the importance of finger placement.

Rossel stood completely still and in total silence. As he always did now – unable to play a single note.

But listening. Remembering.

Rossel replaced his fiddle, bow, chin rest and rosin. Shut the lid and snapped down the catches. Slid the case back under the bed. Then the lieutenant put on his militia cap, picked up his pistol and holster from the bedside table and headed for the door and the city beyond.

*

The snow was relentless and swirling into hallucinatory grey flurries. Rossel tried to pinch a little heat into his cheeks. Gerashvili drew up her greatcoat until her head had sunk into it up to the eyes. A few hardy shoppers, refugees from a nearby butcher’s queue for pork and chicken, drifted past them as they stood in front of the imposing sandstone front of Passazh, a pre-revolutionary monolith to everything bourgeois and now a model Soviet department store. It faced Nevsky Prospect, the spine of the city centre, and ran down Sadovaya.

Rossel pushed through the heavy doors. Gerashvili, breathing with a slight wheeze as she drew the freezing air into her lungs, followed him.

They stepped into the entrance of the vast glass-roofed gallery that went back all the way to Italianskaya Street. There were maybe forty stores – doorways guarded by two sandstone columns and a white arched moulding above it – each one alike, on either side of the passage. The stone was dirty and discoloured in places but the repairs after the war were impressive. And how splendid that a relic of the ancien régime, when poor, ordinary folk would pay a few kopeks just to be allowed to gaze in awe at the fur coats, fine foods and exotic trinkets displayed in its luxurious stores, was now for the benefit of the Soviet people. Any citizen of old St Petersburg, who had spent a little time with their face pressed to these windows, would have needed little convincing of the need for a workers’ revolution by the time Lenin had arrived at the Finland Station.

His mother had talked to him about Passazh once when he was a very young child. An accomplished violin player herself, she had been teaching him and his sister to play when she began to recall a concert she had once seen there as a girl – at the Komissarzhevskaya Theatre. How well the tenor had sung. How beautiful the white taffeta gowns worn by the chorus were. How, as she walked toward the theatre, the emeralds and pearls in the shop windows sparkled under the miraculous new gas lights.

The bourgeois stores were all gone. Replaced by stores for the workers displaying goods from all over the Soviet Union. When they had any in.

But if you knew where to look and you dared to look there, there was a shop about halfway down on the left-hand side with a softly lit window and fresh paint on the sill. A discreet sign in the window said: Djilas.

They walked another few feet and stood directly in front of the entrance.

Rossel looked at Gerashvili and she nodded.

He turned a faded brass handle and heard the tinkle of a welcoming bell.

*

As soon as they stepped in, Comrade Djilas had ushered them away from the shop floor, gleaming counters made from oak and glass, and mannequins wearing sable and mink, and led them into a poky back office.

He removed the magnifying loupe with which he had been studying the tiny ruby from his eye and put the earring back on the table.

Djilas – the name wasn’t Russian, Rossel thought. Bulgarian? Serb? A Slav, anyway. The jeweller was tall and broad-shouldered with wide cheekbones and a high forehead. His thick black hair was speckled with grey, his eyes were a deep brown and somewhat elusive. But his nose and chin were weak, a fact he had tried to disguise by adopting a handlebar moustache.

His manner was aloof and untroubled, that of a man whose customers were the wives and girlfriends of the elite. It was calculated to convey, as effortlessly as was possible, the simple fact that two militia officers from Vosstaniya Street couldn’t touch him. He tapped an imperious middle finger on top of the glass counter, next to the ruby set in its flowered gold clasp.

‘Yes, very good. What the Americans call a “pigeon blood”.’

‘Pigeon?’ asked Gerashvili.

He smiled.

‘As rich and red as pigeon’s blood. These ones are quite beautiful and of the very highest quality. From Burma, perhaps. Often thought of as being the place where the world’s best rubies are mined – although, personally, as a good and loyal citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, I, of course, prefer those that are unearthed in Tajikistan. The miners there have a joke. They say the fat capitalist mountains of Rushan wished to yield only diamonds so the ruby hunters read