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

picked up one of the photographs. Then turned it around so they could examine it together. A faceless man stared back up at them.

‘Of course, of course, our duty to the Party is always paramount,’ Lipukhin murmured. ‘Which one is this?’

Rossel stared at them and realised they had been taken in the morgue, not at the railway line where they had discovered the bodies. Taneyev must have considered them unusually interesting to leave them on his desk. He was right.

‘The priest. The one we found wearing the dog collar. As you instructed, we have concentrated on the blue-top first and so I followed up on the earrings. But the priest is the latest victim the pathologist Dr Volkova has examined. The orderlies only stripped the corpse a few hours ago and discovered this inky treasure trove.’

The tattoos covered every inch of the naked torso. The lines were crudely inked but the drawings themselves were detailed and ornate. Just above his left nipple was an image of the Madonna and child. Above the right a coiled serpent, and above that a series of simple dots. On the back, stretching from one shoulder blade to another, a grinning Reaper, the outline of its cloak not black but blood red, and holding not a scythe but a hammer and sickle.

Only one group of people had tattoos like that: the thieves.

Lipukhin stared down at the photograph for a moment more. Then he pushed back his chair and stood up. The pitch of his voice was considered but also contained a slight undertone of embarrassment.

‘Trust, yes. An important Bolshevik virtue, Lieutenant Rossel. And my trust in you is, as always, absolute. I have therefore given you entire jurisdiction in this case. Especially as it is one that may turn out to be of vital importance to the Party. I filed the relevant notifications this morning so as to inform the appropriate authorities of my decision immediately.’

Rossel did not look up. He could hear the fear in Captain Lipukhin’s voice and did not feel the need to embarrass him any further by confronting his self-serving pragmatism directly. Something had happened between the conversation they’d had in the car on the way back from Lake Ladoga and now. Presumably, Lipukhin had calculated the odds on their collective survival and wasn’t liking them very much. In Leningrad, people made decisions like that every day – to step away from wives, lovers, friends or colleagues as the icy waters began to rise. He was not in any way offended by Lipukhin’s desire to save his own skin. He simply accepted it for what it was: a banal, personal case of realpolitik.

Rossel heard the glass rattle in its frame as the door to their room slammed shut. Lipukhin’s footsteps faded away as he descended the stairs. Then Rossel stacked the photographs into a neat pile and slipped them into the brown case file. In the grate, an ember glowed and died. The fire had been neglected, or maybe they had run out of wood.

An ex-girlfriend at the conservatory had been very keen on Mayakovsky. The poet’s father had pricked his finger on a pin when filing some papers, she told him, and subsequently died of blood poisoning. It was now clear to him that, unlike Mayakovsky Senior, Captain Lipukhin had a sound understanding of potentially dangerous paperwork.

*

Rossel undid his zip and emptied his bladder. He had stopped for a glass of vodka at a grubby ryumochnaya on the way home – his favourite place when he needed to retreat from the world. For when he needed to think. The first shot hadn’t helped so he’d bought another. That hadn’t helped, either, but at least it had fortified him for the ordeal of the toilet at his communal flat.

Old man Kostiuk had struck again. Rossel tried to hold his breath while he pissed so as not to breathe in the stench of his elderly neighbour’s congealing faeces. Leningrad was built on a swamp and thousands had died toiling in the feverish, foetid air to turn Peter the Great’s vision into reality. Rossel knew how they felt.

He shared the apartment with five other families. Sixteen people in all, crammed into six rooms. They all lived together on the fourth floor of a block that overlooked the Griboyedova Canal, and considered themselves lucky to have it. Living with the bitter aroma of Vladislav Kostiuk’s repugnant turds was a small price to pay to live in an apartment like this one.

He couldn’t hold his breath any longer. But as soon as he breathed out, the toxic odour began to scour the inside of his nostrils.

Mother of Christ!

A sharp drumming sound. Someone standing in the cold passage outside was knocking impatiently on the door.

‘Is that you, Vladislav Gerasimovich? It is, isn’t it? I can smell your stinking bumhole from out here. Hurry up, can’t you? I need to pee like the Volga . . .’

No one else had a mouth like that, and in a kommunalka that was saying something. It was Lena, who lived with her younger sister, Irina, in room number three.

‘It’s me,’ he answered. ‘Give me a minute, Lenochka. Kostiuk’s been here before me and my life is now in grave danger. I have only sixty seconds left before I am asphyxiated.’

Through the door he heard Lena laugh. ‘It was borshch last night, Mrs Fyodorovna always cooks him borshch on Sunday nights. I think the beetroot must corrode his bowels. That’s why I generally try to not take a pee all day on a Monday. That tea was a grave tactical error.’

Rossel flushed the toilet and opened the door. He grinned as he stepped out and saw that Lena was now standing as far away from him as possible; next to the hat-rack near the front door of the apartment, piled high with the winter coats and scarves. As a child she’d run messages between infantry lines during the war.

He held the door wide open for her.

‘Come, come, Lena, I know you are braver