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

our Snow Queen played the cornet in a navy band?’

‘No, of course not. It’s just the shape of this tube. It being like that makes me wonder if it has been designed to amplify some kind of sound.’

The cynical twinkle in Rossel’s steel-grey eyes faded.

‘What kind of sound?’

Dr Volkova thought for a moment. Then shrugged.

‘You’re right. I’m being foolish and seeing similarities that don’t exist. You know, Comrade Lieutenant, you are the music man, someone who studied violin at our famous conservatory. Destined for great things, so the rumours go.’

She glanced down at Rossel’s gloved hands.

‘The rumours, as it turns out, were correct,’ he said. ‘There can be no greater destiny than to serve the Soviet people, keep order in society and guard against counter-revolutionary tendencies.’

He picked up the glass tube. He held it close to the jagged end so the glass lip of the cylinder occupied the space between them. In the semi-darkness, it looked like a small flower that was about to bloom.

‘I don’t know about a sound, Dr Volkova. But whoever made this certainly intended it to amplify something.’

Volkova angled the lamp up so the beam shone through the tube, which now became a sinister prism casting a shimmering ripple of light; tiny fluorescent petals began to dapple the ceiling.

She frowned.

‘Amplify what, then?’

Rossel took a moment to consider his answer.

‘Fear. For the mind that conceived and manufactured this strange instrument, it is possible simple fear was not enough and only absolute terror would do.’

There was a sharp knock at the door. Rossel and Dr Volkova both stepped back from each other.

Junior Sergeant Taneyev’s grey face poked around the door. He was sweating at the temples; looking more agitated than usual.

‘The captain wants to see you, Comrade Lieutenant.’

‘I will be there in five minutes.’

‘No, I mean, sorry, but Captain Lipukhin was most insistent. He said now.’

Rossel handed the tube back to the doctor and picked up his cap from the table.

‘Trouble?’

Taneyev nodded. ‘It’s Gerashvili, Comrade Lieutenant.’

‘Gerashvili?’

‘The captain says she has gone. That she’s missing.’

‘Missing?’

‘Yes, since yesterday. She never returned from that high-class jeweller in Passazh.’

Rossel put on his cap and twisted the rim a half a centimetre to the right so it was perfectly centred.

‘I’ll take a car and go to her apartment. I’m sure there’s a simple explanation. It’s unlikely she been abducted by foreign agents, Sergeant.’

Taneyev took a grey handkerchief from his pocket and wiped some of the sweat from his brow.

‘No, Comrade Lieutenant. The captain doesn’t think she’s been abducted, either.’

‘Well, then.’

‘He thinks she’s been arrested.’

11

Thursday October 18

A thin winter sunlight was seeping from behind two bili-ous clouds. On both sides of Nevsky Prospect, lines of shop girls and office workers bumped and jostled each other in fur coats, scarves and hats as they competed to get home from work before yet more snow fell, as the radio had warned. As their car sped past the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism, Rossel stared out of the passenger window through the rain towards the brightly lit glass globe on top of the House of Books. His mother had bought him a biography of Rimsky-Korsakov from there for his birthday – his thirteenth? There was a grainy photograph of the composer in its middle pages. Dark eyes stared out through small round glasses. They were the eyes of a detective, he remembered thinking – shrewd and penetrating. Lieutenant Rimsky-Korsakov. Perhaps the good comrade composer could help him solve this case. He certainly did not feel up to it on his own.

And now Gerashvili was missing.

Lipukhin spun the wheel and pulled the car into a side street at the back of Passazh department store. The captain’s face was even pinker than usual. He must have upped his vodka ration – he had been reading Pravda’s article about the ‘Season of Traitors!’ just before the news of Gerashvili’s disappearance came through.

Both men jumped out of the car and stood side by side in the busy street. Rossel cupped his gloved hands to guard the flame from his match and lit a cigarette, an Elbrus.

‘Nothing seemed different when I went to her apartment,’ he said. ‘She shares it with a couple of nurses from Hospital 40 in Sestroretsk. Except, of course, that she wasn’t there.’

‘She’s been missing since yesterday morning,’ said Lipukhin, ‘when she went out to pick up the sales ledgers as you had requested. She signed out of the station at 10.35 and never signed back in. It was nearly the weekend so Sergeant Taneyev just assumed that she was as administratively incompetent as him and would arrive back all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning.’

‘But Gerashvili is always punctilious.’

‘Exactly so.’

‘You have had official notification of an arrest, Captain?’ asked Rossel.

‘No, I have not.’

‘Then what makes you so certain?’

Lipukhin turned his head to the right and nodded towards the doorway of a shop. Rossel followed him. Opposite them stood the wire shelves of a newspaper kiosk, each stacked high with copies of Pravda, sweets for children and cigarettes. A headline in Trud, the union newspaper, caught his eye.

MORE ARRESTS OF TRAITOROUS ELEMENTS. Comrade Beria calls for unrelenting vigilance against counter-revolutionary conspirators.

‘I rang our beloved MGB comrades of the Bolshoi Dom first thing this morning to report her disappearance, as you would expect,’ said Lipukhin.

‘And?’

‘Someone took my call and made a note of the incident but otherwise did not react. Even in a week like this one, it’s not every day a junior sergeant of the militia goes missing.’

‘No.’

‘He didn’t sound at all surprised. He knew exactly where our girl is. I can feel it in my gut.’

‘The cells of the Bolshoi Dom?’

Lipukhin nodded and pointed to the doors of Passazh.

‘I think you and Gerashvili must have upset some very important people when you went to see your friend Djilas in there.’

Rossel dropped his cigarette butt onto the slushy pavement and ground it under the heel of his boot.

‘Let’s go and upset that stuck-up prick a little bit