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

leading singers on foreign tours. Too many defections of late, I am assuming.’

‘I can find all this in the militia files we have brought in from Vosstaniya Street,’ interrupted Nikitin. ‘It is not relevant to your confession.’

‘Small, round dumpling of a girl,’ said Rossel. ‘Problem with dandruff. She used to gossip like a drunken babushka. At the conservatory she was everyone’s friend but nobody’s friend. I wasn’t surprised she found a way to go abroad; she had a problem with inferiority – she was one of those average players who talk big and suck up to the right people to compensate.’

Nikitin nodded. The guard hit Rossel across the shoulder blades. A good place to whack them, Grachev had once told a small audience of junior officers before Rossel had broken up the tutorial. Stings like a fucking bastard. He was, as it turned out, quite right.

Rossel writhed but kept going, blurting out the first memories that came to mind. It helped him to forget where he was to try and keep ruminating.

‘Corpse number two. Maxim Avdeyev. French horn player, from Pskov, always wore black, hid his pale mystical face behind his floppy hair. I never saw him drunk, not once. Older than us because he’d had to take two years out to go and look after his mother. Could beat anyone in the conservatory at chess. Even the professors. You’ll have masses on him – he spent ages in the gulag, more ink than skin by the time he left. Went crazy for religion, prophesying the Apocalypse, said the Jews were just the start and we were all going that way, may have been cannibalising human flesh, blessing it and then swallowing it down as if it was some sort of black Eucharist.’

What was coming next?

Not his fingers?

Not for a second time, please . . .

‘You knew three of the victims, three!’ said Nikitin. ‘Do you know what that makes me think?’

‘Number three. Sofia Fedotova. Singer. Wanted to join the Kirov – always dreamed of going abroad. Of sailing away. Of lakes, of the sea. She loved the sea. And French poetry. She hated her parents; I think her father beat her sometimes but she never ever said so.’

‘If you know them so well, Lieutenant, why do you not know who killed them?’ Nikitin pointed at him. ‘Unless it was you. Of course – and this is your confession?’

‘I thought it was Maxim for a while,’ said Rossel, slowly rotating like a carcass on a butcher’s hook. He had to twist his head to look at Nikitin. ‘He was obsessed with death. I believed he had old grudges against the others, or had gone mad, or both. I believed he got his followers to kidnap four people and slaughter them, and then him, in penitence, or revenge, or whatever. But now I do not think that, at all. There is something else. Someone else. Whose motivation is stranger still. So perverse somehow that it is impossible for me to imagine.’

The guard raised his truncheon again but this time Nikitin stayed his hand.

‘Spare me the incoherent, irrelevant details of your non-existent investigation, Lieutenant. Do not waste my time or yours. Confess to sedition and harbouring a traitor. In the end, you will anyway.’

‘Just before you arrested us, Dr Volkova was able to examine one of the remaining two bodies,’ said Rossel. ‘The older male. He was the only one of the five not to have starved so Dr Volkova extracted traces of alcohol from his blood and caviar – beluga – from his mouth.’

Nikitin took the truncheon out of the guard’s hand and tried out a couple of practice swings.

‘You will confess. Colonel Sarkisov says it must be so, and so it will be. For the colonel has Comrade Beria’s ear. Station 17 is a traitorous counter-revolutionary unit corrupted by the imperialist and fifth-columnist Grachev. Admit it.’

Nikitin drew back the truncheon for a third time and aimed it at Rossel’s already livid belly.

‘Confess,’ he said as he set to work. ‘Confess.’

A banging at the cell door. A junior female officer stepped inside and saluted.

‘Not now,’ said Nikitin. ‘Can’t you see I’m . . .’

‘A phone call, sir. It’s Colonel Sarkisov from Moscow. He says it’s urgent.’

*

How much we all want to live, thought Rossel. We should all rise up, we should damn them to hell and spit in their faces, and yet we will clutch at any tiny scrap of hope they toss our way.

Uncounted hours later. Time spent in oblivion. Time spent conscious but reluctantly so – time spent longing for death, less to ease the agony, though that would be welcome, and more to remove the need for further interrogation. Time spent licking moisture off the floor of the cell with a swollen tongue. Time spent trying to give up and fade away – and, failing that, time spent mildly surprised at one’s own indifference in survival.

Doors in passages opening, words spoken. More time spent alone. Then the dread sound of the rusty bolt in the cell door turning . . .

*

‘Your uniform, Comrade Lieutenant.’

Rossel sat on one side of a small wooden table. Nikitin sat on the other. With his eyes the major indicated a small bench to Rossel’s right. This interrogation room was smaller, darker. His militia uniform was folded on the bench, his boots parked next to it.

‘Your papers.’

Nikitin pushed them over the desk. Rossel looked at them through swollen eyes.

‘What?’ he began. But could go no further.

Nikitin placed two fists on his desk, as if preparing to rise. ‘Colonel Sarkisov called. He says there is now talk in Moscow of the murders by the lake. Of how the city of Leningrad, always seen since the days of that reactionary scum Trotsky as a hotbed of dissidents and reactionaries, is running out of control. Those protectors of our city in the highest circles, the very highest, want this case solved. And, despite what I would see as your abject failure to date, someone believes you are, as the leading sober officer