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

These days the Po-2 was used as a trainer at a small airfield at Pavlovsk, just outside Leningrad. Nikitin’s presence was all the authority they had needed to be allowed to borrow it.

Above Rossel’s head, in the almost pitch darkness set by the thick cloud cover, he was sure he could hear the rivets rattling in the biplane’s upper wing. The noise had beaten its way into his skull ever since take-off and now felt as though it would be a relief if the little plane plunged into the white fields of the Leningrad Region. He leaned forward with his torch and crouched down to look at his map but the tears in his eyes from the intense cold made it almost impossible to make anything out. He had marked the place where they had found the corpses but the map was not sufficiently exact to be sure. But there were the railway lines, vaguely drawn, there was the main road they had driven along, and there was the turn-off – a stubby line that came to an end in the middle of some white space.

*

So far, he had concentrated on who the victims were: identification, history, links to each other, links to him. But not enough, he was now sure, on where the bodies were found. And definitely not enough on the manner of their arrangement.

In the car en route to the aerodrome, Nikitin had still needed convincing. The photographs Taneyev had taken were close-ups – not one shot was from a general point of view.

‘At the station today I inspected an old military map,’ said Rossel to the back of Nikitin’s head. ‘There are only two places in the entire region where two tracks run together, as they do out here.’

Nikitin, at the wheel, gave an exaggerated shrug.

‘And?’

‘I’m not sure yet.’

‘Too much of your investigation has been based on hunches, Comrade Lieutenant.’

This was fair enough, Rossel had to admit.

As they were clambering into the plane, Nikitin had slipped, stumbled to the ground. He cursed, lay prone, hands splayed out. The left had been touching the tip of Rossel’s right boot. Neither man moved. Nikitin looked up, waiting for Rossel’s heel to grind down in vengeance.

But it had not been done. They had an unarticulated armistice based on mutual need.

*

Rossel jammed the map onto his knee to keep it from disappearing into the night sky. Tucked inside his coat were five dark prints – images of the victims in exactly the same order they had been found. Vassya pushed the joystick forward and the Polikarpov pitched downward and broke through the icy cloud that had blanketed them for the entire journey. Almost immediately, Rossel heard a guttural sound and was grateful for the direction and ferocity of the wind, as the major bent over the side and vomited. He was no aviator, but he was certain the constant upward and downward pitching of the Po-2 had become more exaggerated once its pilot had realised one of her passengers was a little airsick.

As the cloud broke, moonlight bathed the fields below. Rossel reckoned their altitude at about five or six hundred metres. He leaned forward slightly in his seat and tapped Vassya on the shoulder. She turned her face toward his.

‘I can see Shlisselburg over there. Those pointed tower roofs are built on top of the fortress walls.’ The engine was on lower revs but Rossel still had to shout above the sputtering cacophony. ‘We’re not far away from the place where the bodies were found. Can you get lower?’

Vassya nodded and pushed forward on the stick. The plane nosed downward again and Nikitin groaned. Rossel leaned out of the right-hand side of the cockpit as it descended. In the distance he could see the vast shore of Lake Lagoda and, beyond it, the ethereal, glittering whiteness of the frozen waters, looming as large as the ocean.

As the plane glided over the snow-swaddled pines, Rossel could see black smoke rising up from one of the old U-class locomotives that still worked these lines – old passenger trains dating back to before the revolution, now reduced to pulling freight. This one was hauling about forty carriages of coal from, most probably, the mines at Slantsy to the power station in Narva.

As the snaking line passed underneath and then began to disappear eastward, Rossel could see the twin tracks – temporarily cleared of snow by the passage of the locomotives – standing out dark against the frozen earth.

Five notes.

The image had first come to him as Nikitin had thrashed at his body and he strove to set his mind free. It had returned to him as he was walking, trance-like, towards Liteiny Bridge after his own unexpected delivery from The Crosses.

Notes. Five notes. A simple refrain.

One railway line came from the northwest before it straightened and travelled east. The other, along which the coal train had just travelled, rose from the southeast, met the first line and then bent westward.

This was it. For a few metres only, two tracks, four lines.

He felt inside for the photographs but there was no need to take them out – he knew them by heart. Five bodies, stick figures, curled like a stillborn in a newly barren womb. The earth of Mother Russia herself was the musical score. And, by some as yet unknown hand, five black notes had been etched upon it.

30

Wednesday October 31

A five-note sequence.

Five bodies arranged between Leningrad and Ladoga. The snow-clad countryside of the oblast was the pure white score, the black railway lines that ran parallel to each other on that short stretch near the lake were the stave upon which the melody had been composed, and then, in a final flourish, each body had been set, head laid to one side, as a cadaverous note.

Fa, la, mi-bemol, si-bemol, sol.

F, A, E-flat, B-flat, G.

As he tried to start a meagre fire in the grate next to his