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

Rossel, confused by the interruption, followed the captain’s gaze until he realised it was fixed on his gloved hands.

‘Yes, Nikitin. Major Nikitin,’ he said.

Rossel’s voice gave nothing away. But he shoved his hands deep down inside his coat pockets.

Their eyes met for a second. Lipukhin broke off first and looked over at his niece. He gave a loud sniff.

‘Dashenka, my little one, bring that dolly over here,’ he said. He took the two pieces from the girl’s outstretched hands and began to twist them back together.

‘It’s not broken, it just clips together like the others, but I will fix it for you as long as you don’t tell your mama about the broken bottle and the glass. Is that a deal?’

There was a click as the two halves became one again.

‘You know what a deal is, don’t you, Dashenka?’ he said.

The little girl held out her hands and nodded.

‘You do what I want as long as I do what you want. That’s what you told me about deals, Uncle Ilya.’

Lipukhin patted his niece’s head.

‘That’s right, Dasha, that’s right. Good girl. We have a deal, you and me.’ He glanced across at Rossel. ‘As do Uncle Ilya and Uncle Revol.’

Rossel nodded back. The exchange had drained him and he wanted to go home and collapse into bed.

He stood up, holding the newspaper and broken glass in both hands.

‘One last thing,’ said Rossel. ‘Pugachev has been in touch.’

‘Pugachev?’

‘The reader of bodies – the thief who looked at the priest’s tattoos.’

‘And?’

‘He has a rather unusual request.’

20

Tuesday October 23

The priest’s body was wrapped from head to toe in a black tarpaulin. Lipukhin opened the back of the van. Rossel was holding one end of the corpse, where the head was, Pugachev the dead man’s feet.

‘Raz, dva, tri . . .’

Lipukhin gave them the count. They both lifted their arms up together and then let go. There was a metallic clunk as Father Tikhon’s body dropped into the back of the van.

The three men stared down at it.

‘He won’t start decomposing or anything, will he?’ said Lipukhin.

Pugachev slapped his gloved hands together to warm them and blew out a misty cloud of frozen breath.

‘I shouldn’t think so, Captain. Not in this weather. It’s seventeen below. Colder in the back of this van, in fact, than in one of those dead men’s filing cabinets we stole him from. Let’s hope those rusting snow chains you’ve got will hold up until we get there.’

Lipukhin slammed the boot shut.

‘I’d prefer to come.’

‘Sorry, comrade. Like I told you, Gubaz said only one officer from our noble militia. Only one. And he’s not a man to cross.’

‘How long will it take?’ asked Lipukhin. They had been kicking their heels all day, waiting for the call from Pugachev. The captain had failed to master his impatience.

‘Half an hour there, half an hour back, and in between depends on how chatty Gubaz is feeling. I’ll try and get the good lieutenant home by midnight. Like Cinderella,’ said Pugachev.

The three men walked around to the front of the truck. Rossel and Pugachev clambered inside. Rossel turned the key in the ignition.

‘Why did Kerselidze say he needed to see the monk’s body?’ asked Lipukhin.

Pugachev shrugged.

Lipukhin pulled the collar of his greatcoat up around his ears.

‘And you didn’t think to ask him?’

Pugachev leaned forward and started to scrape at some of the ice on the windscreen.

‘Of course not. There have been many people, down the years, who thought it would be a good idea to ask Gubaz Kerselidze silly questions,’ he said, ‘and, today, most of them are almost certainly feeling a damn sight less optimistic about life than the human ice cube we just dumped in the back of this van.’

‘I’ll see you in the morning with my report,’ Rossel addressed Lipukhin. The captain nodded and turned away.

Pugachev gave a snort.

‘There’s a comrade with a little too much on his mind. Come on, Lieutenant, let’s you and I go and do some detecting.’

*

The hat-rack was an ingenious touch. Two of Kerselidze’s henchmen had made use of it to keep Father Tikhon fixed in position, lashing him to it using a couple of old rubber engineering cables. The naked body of the dead priest stood bolt upright next to a red leather barber’s chair. Beside the chair was a man Rossel presumed to be the shop’s owner, a small, swarthy, middle-aged man wearing a stained purple fez who might have been Georgian, Turkish or a combination of those two plus more thrown in. And next to him, in another barber’s chair, sat Gubaz Kerselidze himself, huge and brooding with thinning grey hair. The gangster was eating a pie that dripped hot fat and grease onto the fading yellow linoleum.

Thick white scars cut across Kerselidze’s brow and cheekbones. His nose was so broken that it no longer resembled a proboscis, more a collection of bone fragments held together in a thin skin bag. The gangster’s neck was a fat Kamaz truck tyre made flesh. There were words inked on it in Gothic lettering. But it was the rest of his tattoos that really held your attention. Almost every inch of available skin on his body was covered in the spidery, hand-drawn inkings – reapers, satyrs and Christs crucified – that were used to project status and fear in the gulags. In the very centre of his brow was an unblinking third eye. It created a strangely beguiling impression: a human Cyclops, all-seeing and monstrous.

Rossel stood in the centre of the room, opposite Kerselidze, the barber and the hat-rack. The little shop had two doors, both guarded by thieves – ethnic Russians, Rossel guessed, not from the Caucasus. Kerselidze stuffed the last of the pie into his mouth and licked the grease off his fingers. Then he stood up and took a step towards the dead monk.

‘The last militia man who got this close to me was an unlucky soul they rounded up in the Terror, before the war, and sent to north Urals camp, 34th