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

The face chilled him more than a Leningrad winter ever could.

Acting on instinct, Rossel glanced over to his left, at a clutch of his fellow militia officers from Station 17. Grachev was looking right at him, face twisted with hatred, and Rossel realised the sergeant thought he was responsible for this disaster, that Rossel had denounced him. Rossel held his gaze and shook his head but Grachev only spat at him.

But on the other side of the fear in Rossel’s gut was another thought. The thought that he might get close to his torturer again. A chance to sing a song of his own. A chance to get even.

*

He would not scream. He refused to give them that.

After the first one, when he realised he would never play the Mendelssohn or the Tchaikovsky or any of the Beethoven sonatas or the Paganini caprices again, the pain didn’t really matter anymore.

Pick a concerto, he thought. Pick that bloody Brahms. Start from the second subject, put some passion into it. He heard the admonitions of his professor . . . Revol, my goodness, what’s the rush? Fill every note, Revol, treat everyone like your own precious child. Technically this is one of the easier sections yet everyone is in such a hurry to finish it. Then they moan about how hard the rest of the piece is. What did Brahms write at the beginning?

Allegro non troppo, professor.

Allegro non troppo. Non. Troppo. Again, please.

Allegro non . . .

In his mind he tried to pick up his violin but his arms would not respond.

More, said the one-eyed major, as he carefully placed the chisel at the knuckle of Rossel’s left ring finger. We’ve sung do, and re. What is next? Mi? Do, re, mi . . .

From far away, there was a screeching sound. God, was that him? No, another hapless victim. Someone hopelessly out of tune. If he could only get to the pegs and do some tuning . . .

Do, re, mi, fa . . .

No, he would not scream.

But later, when he awoke with a start and found himself staring down at the splattered crimson of the cell floor, he stared down at his two severed fingers, clutching at the others that gave him nothing but unrelenting pain.

Now he cursed. Now he sobbed. Until there seemed to be nothing left of him, save for one singular animalistic sound.

Not because of the blood. Or the pain.

For the music.

Without that, Rossel knew, he would never be himself – his true self – ever again.

25

Monday October 29

Major Nikitin sat with his pen an inch from the paper. As if he were a factory book-keeper applying himself to a particularly stimulating chess puzzle in the few minutes he had left to relax before starting his proper work.

Stripped of his shirt – another MGB thug was preparing to continue the beating with a rubber truncheon and coils of wire – Rossel shivered in the cold and damp of the interrogation room. He dangled by his wrists from a beam that ran the length of the cell, only just able to touch the floor with the balls of his feet.

Pick another concerto. Something easier. The Bruch. All about beauty of tone.

Nikitin put the cap on his blue fountain pen with two slow twists and tucked it inside his breast pocket. He raised his head, displaying in the cell’s dim light the smear of burns and skin grafts that ran from his temple to his neck, and fixed Rossel with his lone eye.

‘I do remember you now,’ he said. ‘Yesterday you caught me by surprise – in truth, I have no memory of our previous encounter. Thanks to an incendiary bomb in the very first days of the Great Patriotic War, of course’ – he reached up and touched his own scarred cheek – ‘my own face is much more difficult to forget. But something in your manner, your stubbornness during these interrogations. Why, it’s beginning to ring a bell. I apologise, Lieutenant Rossel, if in any way I came across as being impolite. But you know how it is – at this age, the years roll by, and the people we meet at work, well, after a while, their faces just blur one into the other.’

‘I am sure you have my file, Major, so you must have known,’ replied Rossel.

Nikitin sighed. ‘No. Your prison file from The Crosses is, it seems, regrettably missing. We lost a lot of paperwork in the last days of the siege. A 7.5mm from a Kraut Leichtgeschütz hit the admin block. It does not matter. I need a list of your own crimes and a list compiled by you of the crimes of each and every officer in Station 17. Are you ready today to confess?’

‘Only to doing my job,’ said Rossel.

The major nodded at the guard, standing to attention in a corner of the cell. The truncheon hit him on his right side, just below the rib cage. He groaned and spat a little fresh blood onto the stone floor.

‘We can spend several more days like this, Lieutenant, weeks even, if that’s what it takes,’ said Nikitin, watching his victim’s face contort. ‘The boy, one of the privates, has implicated you all in Grachev’s crimes already, anyway. All I had to do was lean forward and gently squeeze one of those nasty pimples on his lily-white cheeks and he crapped his pants. Most unsavoury. Your most prudent course of action would be to back up his story and save yourself any more unpleasantness.’

Rossel fought to master the agony.

‘As a member of the People’s Militia, I am ready to discuss any criminal case with our glorious MGB,’ he said, fighting for breath. ‘I shall recount the investigation to date for you. First identified corpse. Nadya Bazhanova. A former student of the Leningrad Conservatory. She studied clarinet but became a dresser at the Kirov. One of yours – an MGB officer of lowly rank, whose job it was to keep an eye on the