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

Like the others, most of the face had been removed. Unlike them, her eyelids had been left open though her eyes were only white, milky globes. Grachev inspected the mouth.

‘More amateur dental work. Her tongue’s gone, too.’

She was naked from the waist down apart from some voluminous knickers. Pink ones, or red ones that had faded. Real passion killers. Whoever she was, she had been short and stout, and the flesh of her thighs had frozen into stubby white lumps that looked nothing like human legs.

‘Three men, two women,’ said Rossel. ‘A Princess, a Priest, Nude without bollocks, Nude with, and now the Secret Police Officer.’

Grachev blew out his cheeks. ‘A real fucking jazz band,’ he muttered.

‘Jazz is bourgeois, comrade,’ said Taneyev.

They stared at him. Taneyev cradled his camera, his face as long and solemn as ever. He wasn’t trying to crack a joke.

Grachev spat.

‘Thank you, as ever, for your close attention to Party doctrine, comrade,’ he said, ‘and for setting me, all of us, indeed, on the right fucking path, comrade, and for . . .’

Rossel intervened. ‘That’s enough, Sergeant.’ Once Grachev got going, he wouldn’t stop.

Grachev, as ever, flirted with disobeying orders but this time fell silent. Probably because Taneyev didn’t give a shit how long he ranted for. Mouthing platitudes and scraping through to retirement was the old man’s priority now. Or perhaps it was because the sight of the MGB uniform had put them all on edge.

‘Comrade Lieutenant, I’m not sure how best to proceed. What do you think we should do?’

This was Lipukhin, sidling up to him. The captain had got the vodka out of his stomach and some colour had returned to his cheeks but he still gave off the petrol scent of cheap alcohol. Tall though he was, Lipukhin still had to raise his head to murmur the question into Rossel’s ear.

Rossel knew what they were all thinking. Grachev, crouched once more over the woman, his face set in his habitual mask of rodent insolence. Taneyev, hands twisting over his camera, his eyes round and unblinking, desperate to make it through the last few weeks before the safe harbour of retirement, a pension and anonymity. Lipukhin, with the film star looks that the drink had only just begun to spoil. A captain in name only, these days, waiting for orders.

The thought was: Might it be possible to forget about the one in the MGB uniform . . .?

The row of dead was being dusted anew with snow flicked over them by a stiffening breeze. Beyond them was the light that arrowed out of the steam engine. The driver was stamping in the thick drifts and the local copper was still staring at his boots.

Rossel tapped his thumb rhythmically on the ring and little fingers of his left hand – or the little that was left of them – his habit when he needed to think. The twin stubs were a memento from the Chekists, the name still given to the secret police. Rossel was well aware there’d be no hiding anything from them. There never was. In fact, he was mildly surprised MGB officers weren’t here already. Dead bodies were, after all, their speciality.

No, there would be no hurried burials, no cover-ups. They had to get the bodies back to Leningrad, get the officers swarming all over the case, smother it in paperwork before the MGB smelt it out and got their hands on four lonely officers of the people’s militia.

He could afford no more encounters with the MGB. Not after last time.

Rossel raised his head.

Perhaps they really could pin it on the Snow Queen, he thought. An easy arrest to make, given her legendary temper and fairly obvious royalist sympathies.

His voice assumed an air of command.

‘Get that lad to find a truck. And let’s get some hot water from the train to unstick that . . .’

But Grachev had already swung a leg back. His boot thudded into the head of the priest.

‘Done,’ the sergeant said.

3

They had left Grachev and Taneyev behind to commandeer an ex-military ZIS-5 truck that the local policeman had conjured up after an hour’s hunt – the only useful thing he’d done all night. Taneyev had taken another twenty photographs before they loaded the corpses into the back of the ZIS, wrapping them in tarpaulins. Grachev hadn’t been joking – the bodies were as stiff as tree trunks. The morgue would probably warm them up. But they were surprisingly light. Corpses, as all of them had experienced, were usually a devil to shift, but not these.

Rossel and Lipukhin drove back alone in the Moskvich, Rossel at the wheel, while his captain hacked at the ice on the inside of the windscreen that formed when their breath billowed onto the glass, forming tiny crystals before their eyes. A broken wooden cooking spoon and old copies of Pravda and Soviet Sport were kept in the glove compartment for exactly that purpose.

They travelled in silence for the first thirty minutes, focused on staying on the road, Rossel battling with the slipping and sliding, the car’s winter tyres and snow chains grinding and squeaking under the flimsy floor, Lipukhin scraping.

Once they got closer to Leningrad the road was a little easier, the snow flatter and more compact.

‘Any thoughts, Revol?’

‘None worth sharing, Comrade Captain.’

Lipukhin smiled.

‘On the case, I mean.’

Rossel shrugged.

‘He’s neat, our maniac is neat. I mean, lined up like that, as if they were queuing for the Bolshoi? When I think of madness I think of chaos, of utterly irrational acts. This isn’t like that.’

‘He took out their teeth and cut off their faces,’ said Lipukhin. ‘That says maniac to me. Drunken headcase.’

‘Or he wanted to disguise their identities,’ said Rossel. ‘He has purpose. He has reason.’

Lipukhin grunted and gave the window a desultory scrape with the spoon.

‘He or they?’ he said after a moment.

‘That I’m not sure about, yet. Are you?’

The captain hesitated before answering.

‘No, not really. Although that was a lot of meat, a lot of cold cuts to