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

The captain hesitated, but Rossel was determined.

‘Or you could leave this entirely to me, Comrade Captain. Like you said yesterday.’

Captain Lipukhin’s cheeks went almost rouge.

‘Watch yourself, Lieutenant. That was then. I can hardly step back from a case that involves the disappearance of one of my own team. It would be a gross dereliction of duty.’ The captain sighed and nodded. ‘Anyway, Djilas must be a Serb. Foreign name. I never did like Serbs. Treacherous bastards.’

Lipukhin sounded calm but, as he adjusted his cap, his fingers were quivering.

*

When they arrived in front of the jewellers, the metal shutters were pulled down and the neon sign switched off. Comrade Djilas’s oiled moustache and his sparkling trinkets were nowhere to be seen. Rossel and Lipukhin looked around the almost empty arcade. A middle-aged woman with the wrinkled face of an eighty-cigarettes-a-day smoker and erratically dyed red hair peeping out from under her knitted headscarf was closing up a flower shop two doors down.

They walked towards her.

‘Djilas, Comrade Djilas, the jeweller, have you seen him today?’

‘No, not today,’ she said. ‘Not since yesterday when they took him.’

‘They?’

She looked first at Lipukhin, then at Rossel and sniffed a couple of times, as though she didn’t much like what she saw.

‘Not your lot. These had blue hats with steel stars on them, and much shinier boots.’

Lipukhin glanced down at his left boot. There was a splattering of mud on it.

‘State security, then?’ he said.

She pulled down the shutter and twisted a rusty key in a padlock to close it. Then stood up, pushing the dark roots of her hair back under the scarf as she did so.

‘Like I say, shinier shoes.’

*

Taneyev was stuffing his face with sauerkraut and sausage, shovelled down with the aid of a clump of black bread that he dropped back onto the plate as soon he saw them walking into the office. He jumped up, looking agitated – looking old.

‘Where’s Grachev?’ Lipukhin demanded.

‘Gone, Comrade Captain. He grabbed his coat and just left about two hours ago. He didn’t say where.’

‘Any sign of Dr Volkova?’

‘She is in the morgue, Captain.’

Lipukhin swivelled on his heel and slammed the door behind him. Taneyev turned towards Rossel.

‘More trouble, Comrade Lieutenant? I can’t stop with the sauerkraut and sausage this week. I get that way when things get tense around here. And then there’s all this stuff in the papers about . . .’

Taneyev’s voice trailed away. ‘And why is the captain so angry?’

Rossel took off his coat and hung it on a hat stand near the fireplace with the carved wrought-iron seabird on it. Then he grabbed the chair from Grachev’s desk, turned it around and sat down opposite Taneyev.

‘The captain is angry, comrade, because he has decided to take charge of this case and become a proper policeman again. For now, at least.’

‘Oh,’ said Taneyev. ‘And how is the case progressing?’

‘The jeweller from Passazh, the one Gerashvili went to see, has gone, just like her. So, now we have five bodies, a missing junior sergeant and a witness who has vanished like a rabbit in a cheap magician’s hat. Arrested, most probably. Like Gerashvili.’

Taneyev swallowed.

‘Do you think they’ll . . .?’

Rossel took another stumpy Elbrus out of his jacket pocket and wondered how many he’d had that day. He lit it anyway.

‘I don’t think, Junior Sergeant. Not about things like that.’

‘It’s just – I have a daughter, sir. A son, too. A talented boy. Zenit are looking at him. I want to spend my retirement watching him play football, not . . .’

He tailed off again. There was a tear in his eye.

Rossel got up and walked towards the fireplace.

‘Then I suggest you try this.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Taneyev. ‘I don’t understand.’

Rossel beckoned and the sergeant stepped towards him. Rossel tapped the faded metal bird with the tip of the middle finger of his left hand.

‘My father told me once that luck was not worth the worship she got from desperate gamblers as she was more of a “reactionary bourgeois slut”, distributing her favours to the few and not the many. Both capricious and elitist, which is a tricky combination. On occasions, those days and weeks when I, too, am nervous, I try to placate her nevertheless.’

Taneyev looked at the bird. Then glanced at Rossel’s twisted hands.

‘Are you sure it works?’

‘It has to be worth a try, Comrade Sergeant. I’m still here, at any rate.’

When Taneyev had joined the militia, it had been a revolutionary mob in uniform – brutalised children with no homes to go to, proletarians settling scores with their one-time bosses, peasants with an astounding capacity for violence. Three decades had professionalised it to a very limited degree. Who knew what Taneyev had seen over the years? Who knew what he had already done to survive?

The ageing sergeant stared at the fireplace, mesmerised.

‘What sort of bird is it?’ he asked

‘No idea,’ said Rossel.

Taneyev nodded and wiped his eyes, as if that made all the sense he needed it to make, and everything had become clear.

‘I have a name for you, Comrade Lieutenant,’ he said. ‘A name on one of the females – the blue-hat. I’ve been through all the available missing persons reports and perhaps, I think, maybe, I have a match that might fit her.’

Rossel’s smile was a thin one.

‘Perhaps, I think . . . maybe. Such confidence. And you wait until now to tell me?’

Taneyev bowed his head.

‘Give me the file anyway,’ said Rossel. ‘I’ll take a look.’

He gestured towards the fireplace.

‘But first, being capricious and a little bourgeois, the lady demands her payment.’

Taneyev handed Rossel the manila file, before reaching out a hand towards the tarnished seabird.

Rossel opened the file and stared down at the face of a chubby blonde-haired woman.

‘Nadya?’ he mumbled to himself.

He looked up at Taneyev but it was too late – he had given himself away.

The file slipped from his hand and spilled papers onto the floor. Hurriedly, he bent down to pick them up.

The old sergeant looked like he was going to be sick.

‘You know her, Lieutenant? You know