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

head and laughed. He stood up to his full height, dwarfing Rossel and Karlof, and then slapped the trombonist on the back, whose short legs almost buckled.

The maestro took a step closer to Rossel. Brown eyes, whites tinged a smoky yellow, held Rossel’s gaze. The detective felt oddly queasy – claustrophobic, even cowed by their power. As if the composer possessed the ability to take an X-ray of his soul.

‘You are a listener, Lieutenant, as I said. So, I ask you, you heard our own rehearsal today. Do I persevere with Karlof here? That is my question. Is he deserving of a place at my table for my opera’s last act?’

Rossel thought for a moment. He didn’t want the trombonist to lose his job.

‘How could he meet your standards? He lacks your empathy, your genius for understanding the infinite capacity for suffering that marks out the Russian people from all others. No one could feel and encompass their triumph in the great siege of Hero City, like you have done, except Shostakovich himself. But give Comrade Karlof time, and the continued honour of your masterful tutelage, and then, perhaps, he may do.’

Vronsky glanced at Karlof’s expectant face. Then sighed as if he was disappointed with himself. Before breaking into a broad grin.

‘Perhaps the lieutenant is right, Karlof? Very well. On this occasion, I relent. But don’t make me regret it.’

Karlof looked relieved. Vronsky turned back to Rossel.

‘Sometimes, I wonder if I have the rigour of mind, the discipline required, to make the harsh decisions truly great art demands of its creators, Lieutenant Rossel. But good answer. Very good, in fact. You are indeed the listener I have been looking for.’

The composer took a small piece of card from his pocket and handed it to the policeman.

‘With my compliments, comrade.’

Then he stretched out his arms and slapped Rossel and Karlof hard on the back before bursting into booming laughter.

‘Yes, very good. Except for the part about that pompous arse, Shostakovich!’

14

In the hall outside his bedroom, he could hear one of the Sazonov children playing hide and seek. There was a small storage cupboard in the alcove opposite and it was a favourite hiding place.

On a glass ashtray by the windowsill was a pile of cigarette butts. Next to that, propped up against an empty glass, was the golden card Vronsky had given him. Black letters on it read:

The Blockade – N. N. Vronsky. A new opera to celebrate the glorious opening of The Road of Life and the victory of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War. 19 November 1951. Honoured guest.

If the music he had heard at the rehearsal was anything to go by, it would be a privilege to attend the premiere. A talent like Vronsky’s was given to few men.

Rossel lay on his bed staring up at a long thin crack in the plaster, a cigarette stuck to his lips. Two hours spent turning over the facts of the case in his head and he still had nothing of substance. Only a list of unanswered questions.

Why five bodies? Not three? Or six? There was something about the way they had been arranged so neatly on the tracks out at Ladoga, which made him feel that the actual number of corpses, in itself, had peculiar significance to the murderer, or murderers. As though he, or they, were leaving a message.

But why go to such lengths to conceal their identities and then dump them on a railway line where they were bound to be discovered?

And why had they all been starved before being slaughtered? If Dr Volkova’s theory was right, each of the victims had lost a catastrophic amount of weight before being killed. Who would do something like that? Why would they inflict such a slow and deliberate ratcheting up of pain and terror?

And the blue-hat? What kind of person was supremely confident enough to do something like that? To kill an officer of the Ministry for State Security was to risk everything. Admittedly, she was, as Lipukhin had pointed out, low level – using her role as a dresser to spy on the company abroad. But that act alone should have ensured a relentlessly thorough investigation. It was spitting in the face of the Chekists, and that never went unanswered. The fact that the Vosstaniya Street militia department had been given any time at all to investigate such a crime on their own, was, to Rossel’s mind, still the biggest mystery of all.

And now the ruby earrings had led him to Little Nadya. Led back to the conservatory.

*

He awoke with a start. The butt of his cigarette had burnt a black hole into the blanket. He was not sure how long he had slept. The music was starting up once again. The mystery guitarist was tuning up. And this time it sounded like Oy, to ne vyecher was going to feature again.

A minute later there was a knock at the door.

Rossel got up and answered it.

Lena smiled, revealing the gap between her two front teeth.

‘Mama says she can’t take any more, Revol. Not tonight, she’s on early shift at the factory in the morning. It could be anyone playing that guitar on the fifth floor, she says.’

Lena dropped into an impression of her mother’s country-bumpkin Urals’ accent.

‘And so she is wondering if the handsome militia lieutenant in room four, the one with the dark eyes and the beautiful smile, would go and do something about it?’

*

The singer’s voice did not sound as though it was coming from inside one of the main apartments on the fifth floor. It must, he reasoned, be from one of what were called the janitor flats. Each floor had a cupboard-like apartment that, at one time, when the block was first built, had been used for a live-in cleaner. Now they were greatly prized because being allocated one meant that an unmarried and childless citizen could enjoy the luxury of living alone.

The janitor flat doors were painted brown, not