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

on the case, still best placed to perform that task. As you will be aware, the Party Congress begins in Leningrad very soon, the beginning of two weeks of events running up to the tenth anniversary celebrations of the opening Road of Life. There will be parades and concerts. I hear you have been making a nuisance of yourself at the Kirov. Maestro Vronsky’s grand opera The Blockade will open the festivities. Stalin himself may attend. Minister Beria wants everything just so. Neither the Leningrad Party nor its protectors, it seems, need any distractions at this time. And certainly no repeats.’

So that was it. No unpleasantness to mar the Party Congress – no whispers of crime out of control. Soviet justice and the forces of law and order must prevail.

‘I will need some assistance,’ said Rossel.

Nikitin shook his head. ‘Comrade Lieutenant, I am amazed that you make any requests of me at this particular moment,’ he said.

‘Minister Beria, you say, “wants everything just so”. Ask yourself this, Major: are you the kind of man who wishes to prevent the minister getting his way?’

A look came over Nikitin’s face. That of someone who had been unexpectedly cuffed in a fight with a lesser opponent but who was enjoying the sting of the blow. The major smiled a crooked smile, his razor-thin lips blending with the ragged scars on his face.

‘You can take only two people,’ he said. ‘I will not put my name to any more than that. Do you have someone in mind?’

Rossel could still taste blood in his mouth. As he changed position in the seat, a sharp jolt of pain shot up from his right side and centred itself just behind his brow. Feeling exhausted and a little faint, he sighed.

‘Yes, I do.’

*

Snow clung to his face as he followed the River Neva west – it was a driving blizzard and Rossel relied on the embankment wall to guide him. Two MGB guards had marched him to the gates of the prison and shoved him out into the street – clothed and shod but with no coat to shield him from the rising wind. Disbelief at his change in fortunes mingled with jolts of agony from his battered torso. One eye was almost shut.

As one of the ethereal white dots turned to meltwater on his tongue he felt for a moment as close as any veteran of the League of Militant Godless could get to sipping from a chalice of holy water. The temperature was falling again – they were in for another bitter spell. If this was the weather in October then they were in for one of the worst winters since the war. And yet every step was intoxicating; any taste of freedom was to those few changelings – he, miraculously, being among them for a second time – who had clambered out, reborn and blinking, into the weak morning sunlight, from the black womb of The Crosses.

Sofia. He could smell the spirit on her breath. He could see her lower her eyes, feel the hand she placed on his chest.

No, Revol, because . . .

‘Because of what, Sofia?’

As he cried out for her to tell him, an old woman in front of him turned around, then drew up her collar and hurried away – but nothing came in answer. Only after a moment, and he did not understand why, Vronsky’s otherworldly music, an eerie melody from the scene he had watched at the Kirov, skulked around inside his brain. And Eliasberg’s dark, sneering face stared down at him from the stage. The snow drifts were piling up higher and higher, pushed by the east wind against every obstruction. His senses were dulled a little more with every step and yet with each one, he still savoured the feeling of simply being, of being allowed his own thoughts, of tramping, childlike, through the powder.

He stopped. He should have reached Liteiny Bridge by now. From there, if he went south, he could get to Station 17 on Vosstaniya and try to light a fire. He needed to do that quickly. The shock of all he’d uncovered and the beatings he had suffered had almost undone him. If he went north, he could reach his apartment in another twenty minutes – to the sanctuary of the kitchen, of little Lena’s jokes and a delicious plate of her mother’s greasy, unctuous borsch. But where was the bridge?

Ahead of him, on the very edge of his vision before the blizzard closed over the world, he could just make out the dulled lights of a car going over it. Trying to move too fast, he stumbled and fell, jamming the remaining fingers of his left hand into the snow. It was the first time for months, even years, that he had felt snow on the dull, scarred skin there. Nikitin’s lackeys had forgotten to return his gloves – or, more likely, not forgotten. He dug deeper into the powder, clutching at it, willing it to heal him. The cold was there, somewhere, on the edge of his feeling. But not anything like close enough. An image of the five bodies on the railway tracks came into his mind. Only this time he saw them anew, as if, like the albatross in the Baudelaire poem Sofia had given him and loved so much, he now soared above them. Becoming the bird itself, a lord of ‘sky and cloud’. Feeling truly alive – as he once did only when he played his violin. Beneath him, the tracks stretching out into the distance, black as coal and twinkling in the moonlight against the impossible whiteness of the snow. Parallel lines etched into the earth, studded with five torn corpses.

Now he felt as those abandoned souls must have done in the moments before their last breath.

Rossel realised he had to get to his room and his bed as soon as possible or, his spirit and body broken, lie down here, next to Liteiny Bridge, and let the