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

but a very good skater. In a couple of weeks, she’s going to the Soviet championships in Moscow.’

‘I’m very happy for your niece.’

‘Yes, sorry, Comrade Lieutenant. My point is, my niece wears earrings. They have clasps. Jana, my sister, thinks piercing is only for sluts from Sennaya.’

‘So?’

‘Those ruby earrings are small. Very small with clasps. I wondered if they might once have belonged to a child? Perhaps our faceless woman has a daughter?’

Grachev, fully dressed in his winter uniform, came through the door and marched to his desk. He glared at Gerashvili.

‘You still here doing your make-up? Rossel and me have some proper work to do. We are, apparently, off to interrogate a dangerous subversive who has already served ten years’ imprisonment in the hands of the great Soviet state.’

Rossel turned back towards Gerashvili and called after her as she left.

‘Thank you, Junior Sergeant, you have made an excellent point.’

Then he picked up his own hat and gloves from the rack in the centre of the room and started to put them on. By the fireplace, Grachev stomped his feet. The flames had gone out.

‘So we’re off to see a source of yours, Rossel. Who is he?’

‘I suppose you could say he is a reader.’

‘A reader? Where are we going to meet the bastard, the State Library on Nevsky?’

‘Not of books. A reader of bodies.’

Rossel adjusted his right glove and then straightened his hat. One of the seabirds carved into the mantelpiece was a little more tarnished than its companions. Something of an outcast. It reminded him of a Baudelaire poem, The Albatross, a favourite of Sofia’s. When they were still together, she had read it to him many times. He reached out, as he often did before leaving the station, and touched one of its wings for good luck.

‘A bootlegger I know. And occasional informer. Kirill Pugachev is a man who can read gulag tattoos in the same way one of those august university professors can read Crime and Punishment,’ he continued, ‘and then explain to two idiots like me and you, Sergeant, exactly what the artist meant by it.’

*

The reader of bodies sucked on his papirosa as he waved his other hand around his head and gestured to the wooden shack’s three other customers. They were all nursing tin mugs of vodka around a small brazier in which a blackened log was trying to burn. By the smell of it, petrol had been used to get the thing alight.

‘Can you believe that this place, a shitty ryumochnaya all the way out in Moskovskaya, has Armenian cognac?’ said Pugachev. ‘It’s been months since I had so much as a dribble of the stuff. Hardly anywhere in Leningrad can a man get himself a glass of Ararat, but the fat babushka who runs this dump apparently has it running from the taps.’

Grachev glared at him.

‘Perhaps she sucks cock at the Armenian trade delegation in her spare time?’

The babushka, a whale-like woman who was guarding a crate of dirty bottles in her own foul corner, swore at him.

Pugachev drained his glass and gasped as the fire went down.

‘For cognac like this it would be worth it. For cognac like this I’d fucking do it myself.’

‘Armenians are a dirty people,’ Grachev said, mouth twisting.

‘Says who?’ said Rossel.

‘Your file says you were a teacher?’ continued the sergeant, ignoring him.

Pugachev nodded. He had taught art in Moscow before the war. He had even taught the children of some of the Politburo. The sons of Mikoyan. The daughters of Yezhov. He was a big man with a muscular neck and bald head, plus a flat and broken nose. The eyes that stared back at Rossel and Grachev over the little wooden table had been tutored by his time in the camps. They were calculating, secretive and as green as pond lichen.

‘I was a good teacher, too, and my pupils loved me for it. Then one day I turned up for a life class and all the students were missing. Only the model had turned up – a red-haired dwarf from the Moscow State Circus. Then the double doors at the back of the class opened and two men in grey coats stepped through. I was taken directly to the Lubyanka and then, after a couple of weeks, sent to Siberia and spent ten years in a gulag. I never got to know why.’

Pugachev took another sip of his cognac. Then fixed Rossel with a stare.

‘Does it give a reason?’

Rossel lifted up his own hand and waved away the smoke. The shack stank of cheap tobacco.

‘Does what give a reason?’

‘My file. Does my file give a reason for my arrest?’

Rossel ignored the question.

‘Thank you for meeting us, Comrade Pugachev,’ he said. ‘I hear you are employed as a kitchen porter in the Hotel Astoria these days, cooking quail for those lucky few who are allowed – thanks to their exceptional service to the Party – to dine there.’

‘What?’ Grachev was surprised. ‘I thought the thieves were barred from work by their code. The Astoria? Do you spread your buttocks for the Party, comrade?’

Pugachev spat into the fire and glared at Grachev.

‘You’re sure you’re a cop? Because you know fuck all about anything, cop.’

Rossel smiled.

‘Pugachev has special dispensation,’ he said. ‘He delivers bootleg vodka to the hotel and swaps it for the good stuff.’

‘Our stuff is also good stuff – nobody has complained so far,’ interjected Pugachev.

‘And takes the good stuff off to be sold in backstreet markets for half the price but still four times the cost of production of the bootleg. In the service of the thieves, Comrade Pugachev is permitted to work, even at the service of the bigwigs who stay at the best hotel in town.’

‘Best hotel? Do you know last week they ran out of toilet paper?’ said Pugachev. ‘Had to cut up a few old copies of Pravda and hang them on string same as the rest of us do. There was a Chinese delegation on the fifth floor, some bullshit