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

when they cut his balls off because whoever did this was no surgeon,’ she said.

‘Thank you, Doctor,’ said Rossel loudly, hoping to discourage further commentary. In a quieter voice he added: ‘Are you all right, Comrade Captain?’

Even in the cold, Lipukhin’s temples were flecked with sweat.

‘Comrade Lipukhin, please take notes,’ said Dr Volkova. ‘I have completed the external examination and will begin the autopsy. I am beginning with the incision from the shoulders to the sternum, and then down to the pubic area.’

Lipukhin seized a pad and paper, panicking a little at the onset of his new emergency duties. The noises were terrible. If you looked at the wall you could prevent yourself from seeing the doctor at work but you needed ear plugs to blot out the ripping and cutting. It was no use. The imagination cut bloodier incisions than the pathologist did, using sound alone.

‘No abnormalities in the chest cavity,’ said Dr Volkova. ‘Comrade Captain, pass me that elongated bowl.’ Clunk. ‘Let’s have a look inside the abdomen. Captain, this can take time so please take a seat and smoke as many cigarettes as you are able.’

Lipukhin slumped down in an old green leather chair in the corner of the room. Freedom, it seemed, was not all he had hoped it would be.

*

A person can mask joy or suppress hatred. But fear, an intense and unrelenting fear experienced over a few short weeks, marks a face as much as death. Gerashvili – cheeks pinched, eyes haunted – seemed since her return from The Crosses incapable of formulating a sentence. But she could listen, and they were all listening to Rossel. Their lives depended on him now. This would be an added burden for his soul to bear, he realised, if they all ended up mining uranium in Kolyma. What are we going to do now? The question hung in the air.

They had adjourned to the stairwell at the back of the station for Dr Volkova to take a short break from her grisly work. The rest of the building was silent, paperwork left unkempt and unattended, crimes left unrecorded. But the possibility of microphones had not disappeared and so Rossel spoke in an undertone. They all leaned in to hear him.

‘I cannot explain why Major Nikitin has let us go to continue with the investigation,’ he began. ‘But he has, and he would not have done so unless he had good reason. The identification of each body brings us closer to it. Dr Volkova, I require all the information you can elicit from the last two corpses.’

‘Comrade Lieutenant,’ said Dr Volkova. ‘The fourth body has revealed very similar results. My work is becoming more difficult as the bodies are now rapidly decomposing and emitting noxious fluids.’

‘I am, as ever, grateful for your professionalism, Doctor, but sometimes it would be enough to just say “same as last time,”’ Rossel said.

‘My apologies,’ said the pathologist, her face solemn. ‘I will examine the fifth body in a moment. There is one obvious difference: he was about twenty years older than the rest of them.’

‘What do you remember of those others, Revol?’ asked Lipukhin.

‘Not a great deal.’ Rossel tried to calm his mind, to steady himself so that he could talk about them merely as professional cases. ‘The first three victims all attended the Leningrad State Conservatory before the war, as I did. And they were all student acquaintances of mine. So, I would place a large wager on the corpse Dr Volkova has been inspecting just now being someone else I knew back then, since I see in her report that Dr Volkova has recorded his age as between thirty and thirty-five – like them and like me.’

‘But, if they were all your student friends, surely you must now have some idea who it is already? Who were you close with back then?’ said Dr Volkova.

Rossel shook his head.

‘I didn’t say friends, I said acquaintances. And there were over a hundred and fifty students in my year alone – students from all over the Union. You might know people by sight but not really know much about them. Nadya, Max, Sofia – yes, I knew them, to varying degrees.’ For now, he would play it safe and withhold the true nature of his relationship with Sofia. ‘That they all knew me, and I them, still has to be, of course, significant. So, much depends on you, Dr Volkova. Is there nothing else you can tell me about our fourth victim?’

Dr Volkova straightened her back. ‘There is one thing,’ she said. ‘His head was shaved. I thought it was odd and I should have guessed before, but I took out a tiny fragment of an existing follicle, one of the few that had escaped the razor. I then examined it under the microscope.’

She paused.

‘What?’ There was a tiredness in Lipukhin’s voice. ‘Out with it. No matter how trivial, if it’s better than what we have.’

‘Our corpse was a redhead,’ said Dr Volkova.

Rossel’s face gave nothing away. But he took a prolonged draw on his papirosa before exhaling deeply.

They looked at him.

‘Lidia, look for a file marked with the name Sorokin,’ he said. ‘Felix Sorokin.’

‘A file?’ The way Gerashvili said the word made it sound as though a file was a mysterious artefact from another world.

‘Oh God. Not another one,’ said Lipukhin.

‘Was he an acquaintance of yours too, Revol?’ asked Dr Volkova.

Rossel shook his head. His voice was leaden.

‘No, he was my best friend.’

*

‘Gambling is idle and bourgeois. You are very much in danger of becoming a counter-revolutionary, Felix.’

‘Nonsense, Revol. Lady Luck just likes to lift her skirts for me. All the ladies do.’

‘Are you still bringing your girls to the Yusupov Palace?’

‘Of course. It’s a question of keeping up feminine morale in a time of national crisis.’

A blast resounded through the earth and jolted the park bench they had been lounging on, soaking in the sun. Too late, the air-raid siren began its wail.

‘Let’s run.’

Another blast, and then another.

‘Come on, Felix, only