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

to them nightly from Das Kapital and persuaded all those white stones to turn red.’

Comrade Djilas, who, if he was not Russian, had no trace of an accent, began to laugh at his own story.

Rossel’s face remained impassive. The joke was a mistake.

‘I am surprised that the miners of Tajikistan would put at risk their production targets with the exchange of such inconsequential stories. Make a note of that will you, Junior Sergeant?’

‘A note, sir?’

Gerashvili looked a little uncertain but she took out her notepad.

‘Yes, a note to send to our esteemed colleagues of the Ministry of State Security in Dushanbe, this note to detail possible anti-Soviet activity amongst miners in the Rushan area. Time wasting, akin to wrecking. Exchanging superfluous stories that may be jeopardising Comrade Stalin’s plans for state mineral production whilst filling their lungs with bourgeois laughter. Also, please include in this important message to the Ministry of State Security, Dushanbe, the name of our source: Comrade Djilas of the store of the same name, in the Passazh building, Leningrad. Who I’m certain is happy to make himself available, at any time, to undertake the four-thousand-kilometre journey to Dushanbe and testify against these unpatriotic Tajik miners.’

Gerashvili put her pad on the counter and began to scrawl across it with her pen. Djilas watched her filling the paper with black ink.

Rossel reached across and stilled Gerashvili’s hand. Then he looked the jeweller straight in the eyes.

‘Or perhaps there is no need for my colleague to file her report?’

Djilas licked his thumb and index finger and used the saliva to press down the two ends of his moustache.

‘May I ask, is it possible, Lieutenant Rossel,’ he said, ‘to know where you acquired these earrings?’

Gerashvili opened her mouth but Rossel raised a hand. We ask the questions. That’s how it works.

‘Have you ever sold a pair of earrings like these?’

The jeweller shook his head.

‘Have you ever stocked a pair of earrings like these?’

Djilas picked up the earring from the counter and then put it straight back down again.

‘These, no. Never. The workmanship is very fine. I think they come from abroad.’

‘Where?’

‘Somewhere very grand. Other than that, I haven’t a clue. Van Cleef and Arpels in Paris, or Tiffany in New York.’

‘Junior Sergeant Gerashvili.’

‘Yes, Comrade Lieutenant?’

‘Have you any questions for Comrade Djilas?’

Gerashvili put her pen down and glanced around the untidy office. It was furnished with only a desk and a chair, a picture of Stalin on the wall and a framed photograph of a family, presumably one belonging to Djilas, stuck on top of a green metal safe near the door. The safe was large, perhaps two metres tall and a metre wide.

She walked across to it and tapped the front with her finger.

‘Do you keep your sales ledgers in here?’

Rossel watched Djilas’s left hand gently push shut a half-open drawer in his desk before he replied.

‘I told you these earrings were not bought here. They are foreign, most certainly,’ he said.

Rossel sighed and repeated Gerashvili’s question.

‘Do you keep your sales ledgers here?’

‘No, the company has another office across town. Our daily receipts go there and the records are kept centrally.’

Gerashvili looked to Rossel for a lead.

‘Then it is settled,’ said Rossel. ‘My colleague and I will leave but Junior Sergeant Gerashvili will return tomorrow and receive the sales ledger for the last ten years from you, Mr Djilas, in which case the Ministry of State Security in Dushanbe will not need to be informed of the treacherous counter-revolutionary comedians in their midst. And you will not have to travel four thousand kilometres to testify against them.’

‘Settled. Yes, of course.’ Djilas’s voice was flat. The jeweller half-heartedly licked his thumb and finger again, as if to groom his grandiose moustache. But this time he failed to complete the gesture.

8

Lipukhin had been eating a sweet apple pastila to try and disguise the vodka on his breath. Like so many of his other plans, this one wasn’t working.

The captain had been waiting in Rossel’s office when Rossel got back to the station. He was reading that day’s Pravda. The lead article was headlined ‘Season of Traitors!’ and outlined more details of the emerging Doctors’ Plot – a conspiracy of ‘killer doctors’, predominantly Jewish, who had apparently been trying to assassinate the most senior leaders of the Soviet Union.

The captain flicked his eyes across to the framed portrait of Stalin on the wall.

‘“From the wall Marx watches and watches, and suddenly, opening his mouth wide, he starts howling.” Do you know the poem?’

Rossel nodded.

‘Mayakovsky.’

It was hard to read Lipukhin. There was no endless stream of glorious war stories, not least because the dashing captain had been evacuated from Leningrad due to illness. No Stalingrad, no Kursk, no Berlin. But after the war he had shot to the rank of captain in record time – where he had stayed. Such a rapid rise suggested political reliability; such a sudden halt smelt of Stolichnaya.

‘My mother read some of his works to me when I was a child,’ Rossel continued, adding for safety: ‘A great patriot.’

Lipukhin pointed to the black phone on top of the desk between where they both sat.

‘Five corpses, found together like that, in one place. One of them a blue-top. It is unheard of. You filed your report yesterday. But only silence. They must be watching and yet no one has howled.’

Lipukhin drew a hand through the full head of blond hair that so suited the role of Soviet golden boy for which he had once seemed destined. But the once chiselled face was now a little softer and flabbier, his fine cheekbones already tinged with pink.

‘Perhaps they trust us, Ilya?’ said Rossel.

‘Trust us?’

Lipukhin held Rossel’s gaze as he repeated the question back to him. Then he wiped a last green fleck of the pastila from his lips.

Rossel picked up a small pile of photographs that lay on his desk – Taneyev had finished his developing. He spread them out in front of his boss.

‘To do our Bolshevik duty?’

Lipukhin