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

Grabbing the girl by the neck, Grachev thrust her back into her chair before taking his own seat. He pulled out a fountain pen and notebook from within his tunic. Rossel closed the door and stood by it. Grachev twisted in his chair but Rossel stared him down.

‘Varvara, now you say that’s your name?’ Grachev said, turning back to the girl.

‘Yes.’

She looked uncertain about Rossel’s arrival.

The tip of Sergeant Grachev’s tongue was now sticking out of his customarily surly mouth and pressing against his top lip. His brown eyes were locked on her face. He was wearing what one of the junior officers had once called his ‘pussy-licking face’.

‘Not Valentina?’ sneered Grachev.

‘No, like I told you before, no.’

‘It’s just that, when they brought you in, they said Valentina.’

‘I slurred my words, that’s all. I have to take a little vodka to keep out the cold.’

‘Keeping out the cold, that’s what you were doing, is it? When my officers found you sucking khui in an old workmen’s hut behind the Hippodrome?’

‘No, no, I like to drink, that’s all,’ said the girl.

She leaned forward and smiled coyly at Rossel.

‘Perhaps, would it be possible, officers, to request a little vodka? It’s not been a good night for me, after all.’

Grachev opened a table drawer and took out a small bottle of spirit of unknown origin, but probably brewed in a sink in the sergeants’ communal apartment. He stood it next to him on the table and half unscrewed the lid. The girl looked at it and smiled. Grachev moved it back a little on the table.

‘Ah, ah, princess. First a little information.’

‘All right. Yes, it’s true, I do offer the odd cuddle for a kopek every now and then. Times are hard. For me they have always been hard.’

Oh, for Lenin’s sake – this was a waste of time. They had work to do. Rossel would order Grachev back to his desk and get someone else to charge this girl for hooliganism or offending Soviet morality.

Grachev retightened the cap.

‘Not about you, bitch. Sluts aren’t worth investigation, since everyone knows exactly what it is that sluts do. About this customer of yours, Comrade Zhevtun?’

Zhevtun? That was different.

Rossel opened up the manila file in front of him and read out the full name of the suspect.

‘Zhevtun, Dmitri Viktorovich. Wanted for profiteering, illegal import and various other black-market activities.’

‘Never heard of him,’ said the girl.

Rossel stepped forward to a position where he could see both their faces.

‘That is who she was with, Sergeant?’

Grachev scowled. ‘That’s why his file is there, isn’t it?’

‘We didn’t have much time for introductions,’ the girl said.

‘Comrade Zhevtun is someone we’ve been interested in for a while,’ Rossel told her. ‘He is a known black-marketeer.’

Zhevtun was being pursued as a part of a recent crackdown on those who ‘persistently refused socially useful work and led a parasitical way of life’. Only a few months ago, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet had issued a decree against them, promising ‘five-year sentences of exile to special settlements in remote regions’ for anyone arrested for begging, prostitution and racketeering. The decree had thinned out the ranks of the city’s beggars – mostly army veterans trying to scrape a few kopeks together for vodka – who made a nuisance of themselves on public transport, in shops, parks and bathhouses. And also dragged in a few prostitutes, like the girl. But the bigger fish, professional criminals like Zhevtun, were harder to pin down.

‘Not me. I only met him tonight.’

Grachev sighed and got up from his chair. He walked slowly around the desk and then leaned in close, so the girl could smell his foul breath.

‘Stop fucking with us, you little piss hole.’

She moved her cheek slightly to the left, showing the darkening bruise, and raised a disdainful eyebrow.

‘All right, I met him a few more times than that, always in the same place, near the Hippodrome. What’s he done, anyway? Why are you all so hot for him? It can’t just be for flogging a few packs of silk stockings to the wives of the Party nobs coming out of the shops on Nevsky.’

Grachev sat back down. He patted his fat stomach with one hand and with the other rubbed the dirty nail of his index finger over two words of despairing graffiti some long-forgotten prisoner had carved into the desk. ‘Pomogite mnye’, it said. Help Me. Rossel noticed the brown stain of the wood varnish was worn a little there. The girl was playing with fire.

Grachev grinned, showing a decaying row of grey teeth.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘You can think it over in the cell with the Hound.’

‘The Hound?’

Rossel rolled his eyes. But perhaps it was the quickest way.

‘I think he’s downstairs in his favourite cell, the one with the dead rat in it next to the shithouse,’ Grachev went on. ‘Yes, slut, we have deeper cells than this. For the real crazies.’

The girl’s eyes flickered towards Rossel but he kept his face blank. She shifted in her seat. The sergeant’s nail began another rhythmic scratching at the graffiti carved into the desk.

‘Sad, sad story,’ he said. ‘Biology professor he was, a brilliant man by all accounts. Some unfortunate views, however, so the authorities wouldn’t evacuate him with the rest of those spineless State University intellectuals during the siege. Left him here to eat communal sawdust with the shop girls, street cleaners and cops like us. He managed not so bad for a while. But when his dog died – well, you know what these brainboxes are like when their heads get all fucked up. In my experience the craziest are the ones who suffer from a little too much imagination. I saw a 51st Army captain at Stalingrad, he took out one of his eyeballs with the tip of his own bayonet, told me his eyes had seen more than his soul could bear.’

The girl’s bravura was subsiding. Her eyes flicked between the bottle of vodka and the two police officers.

‘This professor, his dog died?’

Grachev picked