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

‘Not know. Knew. She was no more than an acquaintance, really.’

Even to Rossel, it sounded like a lie. As though he was already rehearsing how he might answer the first question of his next Bolshoi Dom interrogation. Aiming for nonchalance. But, just as everyone did, failing.

12

In the photograph in the file, her face was not quite how Rossel remembered it. Nadya was fatter around the cheeks and neck. Her hair was dyed blonde and worn in a bun pinned tight to the scalp. She must have been one of the countless millions of Soviet women who had seen Tamara Markova in The Stone Flower and copied the look. ‘Majestic Markova. Seen for the very first time in glorious colour!’ is what the posters outside the cinemas had said. That’s just what Nadya would have done, he thought. She’d always had her heart set on being somebody important.

But the mouth was exactly the same. Small, secretive, unsmiling. ‘Like the last smear of sour cream, Revol, squeezed from a baker’s pipe,’ as Felix Sorokin, his closest friend at the conservatory, had once put it.

Rossel looked up from the black and white shot in the manila file and fixed an expression on his face – half matter-of-fact, half purposeful.

‘Yes. I do know her. Knew her.’

Lipukhin’s face was granite.

‘You knew her. How . . . interesting.’

Rossel glanced up at Taneyev, who was standing next to Captain Lipukhin’s desk.

‘How did you track the file down, Comrade Junior Sergeant Taneyev?’

With everyone so tense, crushing formality had become the order of the day.

‘I just did as you said, Comrade Lieutenant – I mean, I did what Gerashvili was in the middle of doing. I checked all the places where people are allowed lots of foreign travel: the Kirov, trade missions, diplomats. I even tried the football team – FC Zenit went on a tour to China this year. My boy was hoping to go with the juniors but . . .’

Lipukhin slapped the palm of his hand on the desk.

‘Your son’s level of athletic competence is of no concern to me or Lieutenant Rossel, comrade. Get on with it.’

Taneyev jumped.

‘Yes, Comrade Captain, I beg your pardon. I was thorough. It took me a while. I had to rule a few people out but then, well, Junior Sergeant Gerashvili had done all the hard work. I just had to make some phone calls.’

‘She had?’

‘Gerashvili had requested missing persons lists from every police department in Leningrad,’ said Taneyev. He paused to blow his cheeks out in admiration. ‘Then she had got hold of a list of Leningraders with permission to travel abroad from the central administrative department of the Leningrad Communist Party. How the hell she thought to get that, I have no idea.’

Like the earrings, Rossel thought. A hunch, but a smart one.

‘Then she had cross-checked the two and ended up with fifteen names,’ finished Taneyev.

Lipukhin mopped his brow. ‘You’re telling me there are fifteen people with permission from the Party to travel abroad who are all missing?’

‘No, Comrade Captain. Almost all of them acquired a permit to live in a new place – Moscow, mainly, though also Pskov, Kuibyshev, Murmansk, others. The paper trail is clear and every permit and registration is official. Only three remain untraced, and only one is a woman. I called the Kirov Opera and they confirmed it. Missing for nearly six months now, since the middle of April.’

‘Hold on,’ said Lipukhin. He looked over one shoulder and then the other. Both doors leading to the office were closed but that was scarcely enough. ‘It’s ten to six – they’ll give us the weather soon. I have a difficult journey home.’ The captain crossed the room and turned on the radio. A crackling Tosca began to sing – it was a great aria, Vissi d’arte; anyone listening in, by microphone or with a glass to the door, would find it harder to pick out their words.

‘She might not be anyone on that list,’ Lipukhin said as the radio began to emit a high-pitched warble. ‘She might be a real MGB officer, in which case the usual bureaucratic system won’t know anything about her.’

‘True,’ said Rossel. ‘What’s worse, even if that is Nadya, she could still be an officer of state security. That would explain her ability to simply disappear. But I doubt it. If she was a real MGB agent, would they not have carted her off five minutes after we brought her in?’

Lipukhin swore. He yanked open a drawer and pulled out a bottle of vodka. More rummaging uncovered three glasses.

‘Unless she was very low level, perhaps. An informant of little consequence?’

Rossel stood, leaned over the desk, picked up the bottle and shut it in one of the drawers. The captain let out a cry of protest and extended a finger with the intention of wagging it and demanding his vodka back but realised how that would look and sank back in his chair, deflated.

Taneyev’s eyes flitted from one superior to the other. ‘There is more, comrades. The last time anyone at the Kirov saw her was shortly after the company had returned from a foreign tour. There had been a dispute of some sort, apparently, between this Nadya and one of the soloists she was meant to look after – she was a dresser.’

‘Oh, of course, a dresser,’ said Lipukhin, in a tone that said, ‘dresser, my arse’. They all understood. It made sense now – Nadya being MGB. Her role was clear: to spy on the company and keep an eye on them in foreign jurisdictions. And to stop them defecting. A mere informant would never have been so trusted.

‘Nadya Bazhanova,’ said Rossel. ‘Same height as the Nadya I knew, same approximate age, according to Dr Volkova’s calculations. A clarinettist. No great talent but always practising. If all it took to be a genius was hard work then little Nadya would rank amongst the greats.’

Lipukhin leaned forward in his chair and picked up the photograph.

‘Little Nadya is dead, Revol. Somebody