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

He muttered something about boilers and valves and made as if to go without wishing to demean himself by asking permission. Rossel shrugged and the driver vanished behind the engine’s headlight.

The other one, the youngster from the local cop shop, looked up at him, awaiting orders. He was only a private.

‘Where is everyone?’ Rossel asked him.

‘Arrested.’

‘I mean your colleagues. Why are you here alone?’

The lad looked down at the snow.

You’re joking.

‘All of them?’

A nod.

Well, fuck your mother. The MGB were sweeping through the ranks of the militia like a scythe through a wheat field. The military, the police, the Chekists’ own ranks . . . Where terror reigned, it often reigned most cruelly among men and women unwise enough to have put on a uniform. An entire station, though, even if it was just a provincial outpost? The militia existed to keep some measure of public order but social discipline was mostly enforced elsewhere. The unions, the factory floor, the people’s courts, even the criminal underworld – all were in competition for the loyalty of the Soviet citizen. Being a policeman was a simple job that recruited people with a simple attitude to justice, and therefore had a high number of thugs in its ranks. Counter-revolutionary sedition was hardly their forte.

Rossel looked back at the bodies and tried to bring his thoughts into line.

The driver of a standard night-time freight train stops because there is something on the track. He jumps down to have a look. He suspects fallen trees, or cargo spilled from some other train. But it isn’t.

He radios to the next station; the station calls the local police. Except there aren’t any apart from this pathetic specimen, who – although he’s been denying it – calls the first Leningrad militia headquarters whose number he can see on the wall. And Sergeants Grachev and Taneyev, doing their turn on the night shift, call me. And because Sergeant Grachev is a bastard who only plays it by the book when he can cause maximum disruption, he gets Captain Lipukhin out of bed, too, knowing he will have a head like industrial glue.

More than fifty kilometres outside our jurisdiction, in the middle of nowhere. The local militia purged by the MGB.

Rossel knew better than to ask why. Stick to the crime.

He left the wretched private and stomped over to his men, staggering a little where the plough had made fresh peaks of the snow. He reached Captain Ilya Lipukhin first.

‘What have we got, boss?’

Captain Lipukhin stared back at him through melancholic, bloodshot eyes. As so often these days, the breath of Rossel’s superior stank of cheap vodka.

‘Murder,’ he said. ‘Maniac.’

And vomited.

2

‘Number one. Frozen solid – and I mean solid. Right the way through, I reckon. Like the clumps of bread they used to give us in the 8th Guards. Fucking teethbreakers.’

Sergeant Grachev brushed the snow off the body and tapped it with his gloved knuckles to underline the point.

‘Face removed, some of the teeth taken out. Or smashed out. Hands cut off.’

At the sight of the corpse’s cheerful, toothless grin, Captain Lipukhin turned away, coughed furiously and heaved again. Rossel guessed he’d managed to puke up a fair amount of alcohol already. Lipukhin’s little weakness was getting bigger by the day.

‘Look at what she’s wearing,’ Grachev continued. ‘She looks like a Snow Queen. But the gown isn’t frozen. This bitch has been dressed by somebody after she was killed.’

Too small. Too thin. It wasn’t her. Just as always, relief swept through Rossel in an intense but fleeting wave. Every female corpse might be Galya until he knew it wasn’t. Until he was certain.

He leaned over and stared at the girl’s red velvet dress. Grachev was right. It looked expensive.

‘What’s that in her throat?’ He pointed. ‘An icicle?’

A long and thin frosted object stuck out of the corpse’s larynx. Grachev took off a glove and tapped it before quickly putting it back on again.

‘Glass,’ he said.

Grachev bent closer, turned his head sideways. His cap slid off, revealing his scarred and shaven skull.

‘Hollow. A glass tube.’ He glanced across at the other four bodies. ‘Different size tubes but they’ve all got them, Comrade Lieutenant.’

Rossel straightened himself and clapped his hands together to warm them.

‘Pity they aren’t icicles, Sergeant. If that was so, all available evidence would be pointing directly at the magic powers of the Snow Queen and our case would be closed. Comrade Taneyev?’

Sergeant Taneyev, their old-timer, only a few weeks from his pension, stepped forward. The flash of his camera flared as he took a portrait or two of the unknown icy aristocrat. Hands by her sides, her body perpendicular to the track, her head exactly in the middle of the rails.

Rossel took out another cigarette – a Belomorkanal papirosa – twisted the cardboard tube at one end that served as a crude filter and lit the rank tobacco at the other.

‘Number two,’ said Grachev, replacing his cap as they shuffled to the next corpse and sweeping the snow off the body. ‘A priest. Also frozen solid. I reckon they all are. No face, teeth bashed in, fingers snipped. And – well, look at that.’

Rossel took an extra hard drag.

The priest’s throat and chest had been opened and the voicebox pulled out. It lay on the victim’s neck, next to a large gold cross, with the robes covering the rest of the body. Above the faceless skull sat a black cylindrical hat. Again, the body was at right angles to the track but in this case the head had been set on the rail. To which it was probably now stuck.

Taneyev stepped forward again and pressed the shutter without warning. The flash went off right in their faces, the flare made worse as it rebounded off the pure white ground. The other three sprang away, temporarily blinded, Sergeant Grachev spewing curses.

‘Taneyev, you clumsy prick. Who do you think you are? Sergei fucking Eisenstein?’

Rossel sank to one knee in the deep snow and tried to