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

She coloured.

‘What are you insinuating?’ she said. ‘I have not seen Felix Sorokin for a long time. For many years.’

‘How many years, exactly?’

She paused. ‘Three or four, perhaps longer,’ she said. ‘He just dropped out of sight. Must have got tired of me.’

‘What about Maxim?’ asked Rossel. ‘Maxim Avdeyev?’

‘Max? Not since the conservatory. He was not in my circle.’

Indeed not, thought Rossel.

‘Do you ever see a priest?’

Marina glared. ‘For my many sins, you mean?’

Rossel looked her back in the eye. ‘For whatever reason.’

‘I see them at Easter and I see them when I go to lay flowers in the cemetery,’ she said, jaw tight. ‘Otherwise, no.’

‘Where is your apartment?’ he asked her.

Marina laughed, but without merriment. ‘You get ever more personal, Lieutenant.’

‘My interest is your safety, Marina. You must forgive the intrusion. Where?’

‘Near the Nikolsky Cathedral,’ the singer said, looking bemused, ‘a stone’s throw. Why?’

‘And what is the security there? What protection do you have?’

‘Comrade Lieutenant, this is a melodrama worthy of grand opera. What is going on?’

Rossel rubbed his eyes. It was dangerous to tell her too much . . . On what authority did you divulge crucial information in a murder investigation potentially involving members of state security to the prima donna of the Kirov Opera before you gave it to the MGB, comrade?

Particularly if she was an informer.

He would have to go step by step, listening for the ice cracking under his feet.

‘Sofia Fedotova,’ Rossel said. ‘Last time we spoke you mentioned her.’

Marina removed her flat cloth cap and unbundled her hair. ‘Sofia? Yes – of course. Such a sweet soul. Never quite had what it takes. Perhaps she could have been a junior chorus member . . .’

‘But not Maxim Avdeyev?’

‘Are you planning a reunion, Revol? Is that what this is all about?’

‘When did you last see Maxim?’ Rossel pressed her.

She thought for a moment. ‘Not since the war. You were friends with him much more than I was; you played in the conservatory’s orchestra together, if I am right. Wait – didn’t you both play in the Leningrad symphony? The performance here, I mean?’

Rossel shook his head.

‘Max, perhaps, but not me. I was at the front.’

He pulled out Sofia’s green leather-bound sketchbook and found the drawings of the house and the room. ‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘Sofia drew it. Does it mean anything to you? Do you recognise anything?’

Marina took the book from his hands and held it up so that some of the stage light would illuminate it.

‘All I can make out is badly hatched shadow. A bedroom scene that she has subsequently scribbled over. But, as I remember, she had the good sense to have many lovers.’

‘Do you know what the writing might mean?’

‘Thanatos and something? No idea. Greek? For opera, I have to know Italian, German and some French, Lieutenant, but there are no Greek masterpieces that I know of.’

Rossel turned the page. ‘How about the domed building?’

Marina looked down again. The lights were behind her and Rossel could not see her face properly, but he heard the sharp inhalation. The soprano turned the pages and stared at the other sketches of the same house.

‘When did she draw this?’ Marina’s voice was tight.

‘Do you recognise it, Marina?’

She bent her head again over the pages, flicking through the rest of the sketchbook.

Rossel asked her again if she knew the place. Marina snapped the covers together and handed it back to him. She opened her mouth just as a huge figure stepped directly behind her and almost blotted out the light. Marina whirled round, straight into the hulk of Vronsky.

The composer was enveloped in an enormous wolfskin coat, like a Red Army general surveying the frozen wastelands after a battle with the Wehrmacht. He looked at once eccentric and terrifying. There was not a trace left of his previous affable charm. In his presence Marina wilted, bowed her head and walked off into the wings without another word.

Vronsky towered over Rossel for half a minute – relishing the silence, as if daring the militia man to speak – before swaggering past him.

In the Kirov, the composer was the law.

*

Rossel was escorted to the foyer of the theatre and then to the exit. But he did not feel like going.

He stopped at the heavy swinging door, turned, and headed back in the direction of the auditorium.

‘Comrade Officer, you can’t go in there,’ bleated the stage manager sent to ensure his departure. ‘We are nearing our conclusion. The Blockade is almost complete. Maestro Vronsky says he is not comfortable with observers at today’s rehearsal.’

Rossel pushed past and yanked open the door that led into the opulent interior of the Kirov Theatre. He marched without pausing down to the very front of the stalls. Fuck Vronsky. Fuck Colonel Sarkisov. And the MGB.

Nothing mattered to him now. Sofia was gone. Someone had to pay for it.

Rossel glanced into the orchestra pit where the musicians were gathering after their break. It was a huge ensemble: he counted thirty violins, twelve each of violas and cellos, as many double basses as they could pack in, four each of all the woodwind including contrabassoon, bass clarinet and cor anglais, six horns, five trumpets, four trombones, tuba, and enough percussion to lead an army to Berlin and win the Great Patriotic War all over again – timpani, xylophone, bass drums, side drums, tam-tam, cymbals, bells. The players were cheek by jowl, barking at each other to take care as they high-stepped a route to their chairs, flapping their music as they made their own markings or scrawled reminders to themselves to make the correct changes of tempo or dynamic. It was probably double the size of the usual pit orchestra that hacked its way through Nutcracker once or twice a month. It was both a raucous, anarchic assembly and an elite club. Rossel felt like a pauper watching the princes at play. Compared to this, every other existence seemed drab. How he had missed it.

Suddenly a