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

were dishevelled. His niece was playing with a doll behind the curtain that separated the sleeping area she shared with her mother from the space where her uncle slept.

Rossel swept the last pieces of the glass into a dustpan and walked towards a bin in the little kitchen area that was part of the apartment.

‘No, don’t put it in there, Revol.’

Rossel looked around.

‘Where then?’

Lipukhin lit a cigarette.

‘You’ll need to take it with you.’

‘Take it with me?’

The captain nodded.

‘There’s a copy of Pravda next to the sink. Wrap it up in that.’

Rossel walked towards the small kitchen area, folded out the newspaper and then slid the broken glass from the dustpan inside it.

Lipukhin suppressed a belch.

‘Raisa will get back from the hospital at ten. Tongue like a rusty saw, my sister. I don’t want her to know I’ve been on the sauce again when I’m supposed to be keeping an eye on Darya.’

‘Losing family is hard for anybody,’ said Rossel. ‘Just because it happened to so many people during the war doesn’t make it any easier for you.’

‘Sometimes I wish the bomb that took our parents had seen to one extra Lipukhin. Raisa is stronger than me, in that way. She copes better.’

Rossel folded the newspaper with the glass inside it. A shard sneaked through both the paper and one of his gloves’ thin fingertips. He muttered a curse.

‘Shall we have some music?’ he asked.

On the wall was a wooden radio. Lipukhin reached up and pressed a button. The radio only had one channel, which at that moment was playing a stirring march. He adjusted the volume to the precise level to which all Soviet households had become accustomed – to the point where a private conversation could not be overheard.

Rossel sat down on the couch.

‘Grachev wants you to tell Sarkisov it’s me, doesn’t he?’ he said. ‘That I’m the connection to the bodies on the line – on the flimsy basis that I knew one of the victims so I must have killed them all. That if you give me up, everyone else at Vosstaniya Street will be saved.’

‘Well, you did study at the conservatory with her,’ said Lipukhin.

‘That’s not enough for you to condemn me,’ said Rossel. ‘For Grachev, yes – but you?’

Darya had come out of the bedroom holding her doll, which was now in two parts. She held them out.

‘It’s broken again, Uncle.’

‘Give it to me, my sweet.’

‘I’m asking you to get me some more time to investigate the case and keep the MGB off my back, that’s all,’ said Rossel. ‘Will you do that for me, Ilya?’

Lipukhin ran a hand through his ragged hair. ‘That’s all, he says. As if it’s that easy. We’re all in danger, Revol. All of us.’

‘This would have put the fire in your belly once, Ilya. This case would have obsessed you.’

Lipukhin sat up straighter, grabbed Darya by one arm and wrapped her in an embrace. The child submitted without enthusiasm. He let her go and she retreated to a corner, still clutching the broken toy that her uncle had already forgotten about.

‘Why did you never tell me that you were in the 2nd Shock Army?’ Lipukhin asked. He sounded almost angry.

Rossel shrugged. ‘We live in a world where many things are best left unsaid.’

‘It makes you a bloody miracle. The 2nd, well, that’s a legend. I know you don’t like talking about the past. But you’re asking me to trust you. So, I need to know a little more.’

‘Mine was a short and undistinguished military career,’ Rossel said. He stopped but could see that was not going to be enough. ‘When the war started, I was in civil defence – digging trenches, hauling tank traps into place, putting out fires. Then, in May ’42, I was arrested. That’s when my hands were . . . But, in June of the same year, when they needed every last man who could hold a rifle and run a hundred metres without falling over – that, quite literally, was our training – they bandaged me up and sent me forward.’

He held up his right hand.

‘I was left with a functioning trigger finger. As you gathered, my call-up got me out of a spot. They needed every last man for the Sinyavino Offensive and, at that point, they didn’t give a damn about your fidelity to Marxist–Leninist orthodoxy. The idea was to make sure the Germans used up all their bullets on the first few waves so that later attacks might have a chance of breaking through. It didn’t work. Nothing did.’

‘Stupid doll!’ Darya threw the doll on the floor in frustration.

‘Quiet, Dashenka,’ said Lipukhin. ‘Let Uncle Revol speak.’

‘I spent the next few weeks sucking filthy water out of a ditch and watching my comrades get blown to pieces,’ continued Rossel. ‘I was one of a few dozen men in our battalion who walked out of that shithole alive and there was not a shred of heroism involved. If it’s a test of courage you want, this case – pursuing the killer, not whitewashing it all away – takes far more of it.’

Lipukhin stared at his feet. The military march ended and for a moment the radio emitted nothing but a quiet hiss. Darya hummed a tune in a voice that set Rossel’s teeth on edge.

‘And there is Grachev, bragging about his scalps for all this time,’ said the captain in a low voice. ‘Now you – fuck your mother, the 2nd Shock. And after that?’

The little girl’s eyes widened in delight at her uncle’s bad language but before she could imitate him the radio started up again.

Dear comrades, now for our evening concert of songs and symphonic works dedicated to our beloved collective farms . . .

‘In ’43, fighting near Shlisselburg, I got shrapnel in my lower back,’ said Rossel. ‘Once I recovered, I spent most of the rest of the war with an anti-aircraft battery. Then joined the militia in ’46. And that’s it.’

Lipukhin cleared his throat.

‘Now, thanks to Sarkisov, you know his name,’ he