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

The composer slapped the notepad shut and handed it to him. ‘Have you ever seen a moth near a candle?’ said Vronsky. ‘“He’ll keep circling around me, circling around me, as around a candle; freedom will no longer be dear to him, he’ll fall to thinking, get entangled, he’ll tangle himself all up as in a net.”’

The maestro held Rossel’s eye for a second.

‘The words of plodding Porfiry. So certain that his man would trip up. But then, you knew that.’

Vronsky leant forward and reached out to the detective’s neck. The lieutenant did not move, letting the composer touch a raised brown mark on the left side, under his ear. Many violinists had them, caused by years of holding the instrument between the shoulder and the chin. Even after all this time, his had not faded. Which was why he took care to keep his uniform buttoned up and the mark out of sight. Sometimes, though, the collar slipped a little. The composer was tender, as if stroking a kitten.

Rossel took a step back and hitched up his collar as high as it would go. As he did so there was a click off-stage, as a stage hand cut the lights, and they were both plunged into darkness. Amongst the shadows, Rossel heard Vronsky’s voice become softer again, teasing.

‘You like to hide your fiddler’s mark, Lieutenant, am I right? Need to. Not from others, no, not from others, but from yourself. Is that because you no longer play the Tchaikovsky concerto as you could, and are condemned instead to spend your life playing poor, lost Porfiry Petrovich instead?’

*

Rossel took off his gun and holster and dropped them on his bedside table. He picked up his copy of Fleurs du Mal, which was lying open upon it. Turned to The Albatross. Baudelaire used the bird in the poem as a symbol for an artist, poet or musician. Someone whose talent lets them ‘soar’ above the crowd but, also, separates them from it; making them sometimes mocked, forever awkward, ill at ease amongst their fellow men. There was a handwritten note in the margin: This is who I am. Always. Remember that, whatever happens. Love S x.

Rossel closed the book and placed it back down on the table. Then he knelt down and dragged his old violin case from underneath his bed. He needed to feel the change, to prove to himself he wasn’t hiding anything.

He sprang the catches and pulled out bow, instrument and chin rest. Tightening the bow, he worked the rosin into the hair, hard. Then he picked up the violin with his broken left hand and whirled it into position, tucking it under his chin, feeling the edge of the body run into the remnants of the mark on his neck.

His head was pounding.

‘You like to hide your fiddler’s mark, Lieutenant, am I right? Need to. Not from others, no, not from others. But from yourself.’

Fuck you, Vronsky, he thought.

But, in his heart, he knew the maestro was right.

24

Friday October 26

And so, at last, they came.

A dozen of them or more, yelling orders and waving automatic rifles, pushing and kicking militia officers to the floor. Rossel and Taneyev were on the ground floor with two of the most junior ranks, sorting through missing persons reports. Trying to identify the two remaining victims – the older man who had been castrated and the younger one who had, at least, avoided that fate. Winnowing out the impossibles – ‘too young, too old, too tall, too, no . . .’ They saw the doors burst open. A dozen MGB crack troops, followed by an officer holding a Nagant pistol.

The officer stood in the middle of the station and waited for his men to finish subduing the cops. It did not take long. Rossel stared at him. The man’s face was a sea of scar tissue that flowed over his left eye and up to the temple. The nose a mess, as if it had been held to a fire on one side. His one remaining eye was as grey as Magnitogorsk steel and swept over everything.

Rossel had seen the face before.

It had been a long time – almost a decade – but this was a face he had not forgotten, and never would.

You had to keep still. Motionless. Beside him, he heard Taneyev’s breathing quicken. Rossel put out an arm. It was too late. The older man was leaving the safety of the desk. He approached the leader of the MGB detachment.

‘No,’ said Taneyev. ‘No, please. I have a . . .’

A shot roared and flashed in the dark confines of Station 17 and Taneyev staggered. A hole had opened in his back as the bullet punched its way through his torso. He fell to the floor and lay there, wheezing and alone.

‘Sergeant Pavel Grachev,’ the officer shouted.

No one answered.

‘Find this counter-revolutionary scum Grachev. Get the others into the trucks.’

Amid the sudden movement, Rossel stepped towards Taneyev and dragged him into a chair. He slumped in it like a sandbag, head back, a small bubble of blood and air stuck to his bottom lip. Buoyed by his rasping breath, the bubble rose and fell almost imperceptibly, looking like a tiny but macabre Christmas bauble, of the kind his grandmother hid in a box under the stairs of her old dacha. The Nagan swung towards him and Rossel froze. Taneyev was trying to whisper something. A name – Artyom. That of his boy who played for Zenit.

He said it twice. Then the bubble popped.

Above their heads came a yell and a series of thuds – Lipukhin was prudent enough to submit but Grachev was crazy enough not to.

They, then, might be the next to die.

The MGB officer spoke again. ‘I am notifying all members, without exception, of this department of the People’s Militia, Vosstaniya Street, Station 17, that they are under arrest for harbouring and possibly collaborating with a reactionary fifth-columnist traitor to the Bolshevik cause. Anyone else who resists will be shot.