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

‘Two men, then,’ said Rossel. ‘They bring them out in a truck and then plonk them on the rails. Piss off well before the train arrives. The fresh snow covering their tracks, as it did most of the bodies before the light from the engine picked them out.’

‘Yes, maybe two. But I’m still not sure. Why would they do it? What could be their motive for arranging them like that? It would be a strange pact to make.’ The captain took a swig from an imaginary bottle and then put on the slurred and exaggerated voice of a tramp hammered on black-market hooch. ‘Care to come out to Ladoga with me, comrade? I have some corpses I wish to place in rather particular poses on the railway lines out by the lake.’

‘There could be another, more obvious, explanation.’

‘Which is?’

‘I didn’t want to say anything in front of Grachev and Taneyev. Especially not Grachev. He’d sell his own mother for three kopeks.’

Lipukhin nodded.

‘Taneyev, on the other hand, is obviously a man of great integrity,’ said the captain. ‘Well, he might hold out for four. But your explanation is that the Chekists did this, Revol? Yet why would they murder one of their own?’

On the face of it, this was a fantastically stupid question. The Chekists – as OGPU, as NKVD, as MGB – had spent years liquidating each other as enthusiastically as they had liquidated spies, saboteurs, fascists, writers, priests, kulaks, Trotskyites, musicians, generals, doctors, coppers, anyone who spoke a foreign language or who had been abroad, any anti-Soviet elements in general.

Rossel sought a diplomatic answer.

‘Most likely, no. But it wouldn’t be the first time?’ he ventured.

Lipukhin shook his head.

‘I can’t see it, myself. Not out there, near the lake. Too far for the blue-tops to travel. Especially in this weather. Too much like hard work. I’m told they have a favourite spot for that sort of thing. In the woods near Toksovo. Be careful if you go picking flowers out there, Lieutenant. They say every snowdrop, in every coppice, blooms from a traitorous seed.’

Rossel pressed his foot down on the brake. The Moskvich veered to the right on the icy road as he slowed it down. Then he turned left at a road sign half-buried in a deep flurry: Leningrad 35 km. He glanced at his watch. It was well past 4am.

‘Maniac it is, then,’ he said. ‘It seems to me we’re looking for a peculiar kind of monster, though. One who first butchers his victims – slices off balls, rips out throats, takes out teeth, cuts off faces – but then arranges their bodies like silk socks in a bourgeois sock drawer, each next to the other. All in a neat little row.’

*

On the outskirts of the city, the snow thinned out and the tyres found it easier to get a grip. The Moskvich had warmed up and Lipukhin settled back into his seat. Rossel was surprised the little car had run out to Lake Ladoga and back without much complaint.

Five thirty, and Leningrad was waking up in the dark. Yesterday had been a typical mid-October day, cold but not unmanageably so. Now, twenty-four hours later, the ‘Venice of the North’, as the locals called it, with its wide canals and imposing pre-revolutionary palaces and mansions, was caked in ice. Rossel drove back the way they had come, down Piskaryovsky Prospect, skirting the city to its east before cutting in over the Bolsheokhtinsky Bridge. At a depot off Smolny Prospect, tram drivers were lighting fires under the chassis to warm up the fuel – a trick they had probably learned getting T34 tanks going during the war. High above them, lit by spotlights – printed on a huge red poster that was lashed to the stately domes of Smolny Cathedral – three men surveyed the scene. One of them was Stalin. The second, a round-faced lifelong bureaucrat with a disdainful gaze, was Georgy Malenkov, rumoured by some to be Stalin’s heir. The third, a middle-aged man with a receding hairline above pince-nez spectacles, was Lavrentiy Beria, deputy prime minister, his name synonymous with state security. The words on the poster read: VICTORY AND FREEDOM! The Tenth Anniversary Celebrations of the opening of THE ROAD OF LIFE. 19 November.

As the Moskvich trundled past, Rossel stared upward into the inkblot eyes that lurked behind the giant lenses, wondering if they helped Beria to bring the sins of Leningrad’s two million citizens into sharper focus.

Police Department No. 17 was on the corner of Vosstaniya and Nekrasova. The Moskvich drew up outside and Rossel cut the engine. The two policemen sat in silence for a few moments, unwilling to start the day any earlier than necessary now that they had lost a night’s sleep, letting Leningraders stumble past them on their way to offices, factories, schools. A gang of construction workers went by, raucous even in the dark morning; eight years since the siege had been lifted and the city was still putting itself back together. Grachev and Taneyev were coming off shift and could go to bed once they had seen the bodies to the morgue.

For the first time since dragging himself out of bed the previous morning, Rossel felt the cold possess him, chilling the lungs and stomach and spine. It could take days to properly warm up from a night like that. He yawned.

‘No time for dozing, Lieutenant,’ Lipukhin said, now thoroughly sober and trying to lighten the mood. ‘I think we need tea. Let’s go and warm our hands and our hearts. Lidia will have filled up the samovar.’

The captain got out of the car, slapping its roof in approval. Rossel watched him cross the road and push open the heavy wooden door to the police station. Before he went in, Lipukhin removed his hat and ruffled his blond hair. He could have been a poster boy for the Soviet paradise – until he’d made the mistake of succumbing to the green snake.

Mistakes.

Everyone had made