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

Nikitin shook his head.

‘I didn’t. He’s full of surprises, I have to say. Play what?’

Colonel Sarkisov smiled and opened the door of the limousine. He held out a hand to usher Rossel and Nikitin inside it.

‘When he was in Baku, so I’m told, Minister Beria did, on occasion, like to perform Mingrelian peasant songs on the balalaika.’

He looked at Rossel again.

‘You already have a love of music in common. Perhaps that’s why he so very much wants to see you, Comrade Lieutenant.’

*

The journey through the busy Moscow traffic was considerably quicker for black limousines than for other vehicles. During it Nikitin and Sarkisov exchanged small talk about Vsevolod Bobrov; the CSKA winger also played ice hockey for the same Red Army club. Sarkisov thought he should stick to football. Nikitin thought not.

After about ten minutes they turned off Sadovaya Kudrinskaya Street into Malaya Nikitskaya and, moments later, swept through black metal gates into an impressive courtyard. Rossel’s knowledge of Moscow was poor and he was uncertain what district they were in but they had come from the station around the ring road so this must be on the city’s western side. Two junior officers were piling up snow on either side of the yard with a brush and shovel.

As the three men got out of the limo the junior officers stood to attention and saluted. The house was a large blue and white one with painted alabaster pillars and fresco work; some kind of scene from Greek mythology. Originally a merchant’s or a banker’s, Rossel surmised, before the repercussions of the revolution had led to it becoming the home of Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria.

*

The wall was painted a reptilian shade of jade. The large door was a very dark oak and Rossel was having great difficulty taking his eyes off its faded brass handle. Next to the door was a small table on which stood a white vase filled with pale yellow irises. He checked his watch for the tenth time. They had been waiting for over an hour and a half now. His mouth had dried up completely. His stomach was churning. No one had uttered a word since they had been shown to the leather chairs in the corridor outside the minister’s office by a junior officer. Sarkisov and Nikitin presumably knew the building well but their mood was not one of relaxed familiarity. They had become noticeably less jocular ever since the Packard had pulled into the courtyard.

Now the brass doorknob rattled. In the silence, the noise was as alarming as a shot – all three men jumped to attention. A sharp twist to the left. The junior officer who had shown them to their seats earlier stuck his head around the door.

‘He will see you now.’

*

Music was coming from an old Victrola gramophone that sat on a piano stool in the corner of the room, next to a bay window through which the winter sunlight streamed. Rossel recognised the music immediately – a piece the student orchestra at the conservatory had played, albeit rarely: Rachmaninov’s symphonic poem The Isle of the Dead. It was supposed to evoke Charon’s oars cutting through the water of the Styx as he rowed lost souls towards the island. And there, behind a small desk covered in neatly stacked manila files, sat the great Soviet Charon himself.

The deputy prime minister of the Soviet Union was smaller than Rossel had been expecting. Apart from propaganda posters like the one attached to Smolny Cathedral, he had only ever seen Beria in pictures on the front of Pravda or standing directly behind Stalin reviewing the May Day parade in cinema newsreel footage, his balding and wrink-led head and darting black eyes reacting with a calculated condescension towards the adoring masses. The press portrayed him as a Bolshevik colossus, a towering defender of Marxist-Leninist purity against reactionary capitalism and traitorous fifth columnists. He would actually be, in his stocking feet, Rossel guessed, a little less than 165 centimetres tall.

Beria stood as the two men entered – Sarkisov had not joined them in the inner sanctum. Somewhat unexpectedly, considering his rank, the minister shook hands with both Rossel and Nikitin, holding onto Rossel’s just a little longer than was necessary. His palms were soft, Rossel thought. It was rumoured that Beria had personally strangled Nikolai Yezhov, his predecessor in charge of the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the forerunner of the MGB. If so, thought Rossel, it must at first have felt like a gentle embrace.

Beria gestured towards two scarlet leather armchairs in front of his desk and resumed his own seat. He wore small pince-nez spectacles which he slipped off and, using a tiny piece of red cloth he took from a green leather case, began to clean them. No one spoke. All they could hear was the music playing on the Victrola and the steady rhythmic squeak of the cloth moving back and forth across the lenses. Beria buffed and polished in his quest for perfection, in tempo with the music.

After a minute, he put the cloth back into the case and repositioned his pince-nez. He blinked a couple of times and then stared at Rossel and Nikitin as though he had only just noticed them.

‘You like Rachmaninov?’

It was not clear to which of them the question had been asked. Nikitin, a forced jauntiness in his tone, got in first with a pre-emptive tactical denial.

‘Rach who, Comrade Deputy Premier?’

Beria used the middle finger of his left hand to set the glasses more firmly upon his head. He fixed his gaze upon Rossel.

‘And you?’

‘His music, yes, Comrade Deputy Premier.’

Beria raised a hand. ‘Comrade will do, Lieutenant.’

‘Yes, comrade – his music, that is. I despised the man. A reactionary bourgeois recidivist and enemy of the people.’

Rossel felt his heart pound as he negotiated the trap. The dead were, he thought, fair game for denunciation.

Beria sat back. He looked pleased with the answer. In the same way a man