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

presumed, because some of those who had borrowed them in the first place were already dead. I objected – what a waste of time, when everyone was fighting just to survive. But the messenger made it clear that we would be failing in our duty to the Party if we did not comply.

‘We split up the list between us, I took the ones furthest away – the Vasilieostrovsky and Petrogradsky Districts, and as far north as I dared go before it was too dangerous. I gave Alla the ones in the centre of town, around the Moscow Station, the Smolny Institute, places like that. We agreed to just do a few each day; by then the bread ration was down to a hundred and twenty-five grams and most of that was sawdust. Walking anywhere was difficult.’

Rossel broke in.

‘So what exactly did Alla see?’

‘A corpse.’

Madame Shishani’s voice cracked a little as she forced the memories to return.

‘Alla was a nice girl, a sweet girl. I liked her so much. The child was very upset when she returned. Even though everyone had seen so much, it shook her to the core.’

‘What did?’

Madame Shishani raised her right hand and stretched out her index finger, pushing it against her larynx.

‘Somebody had stuck him with a kind of glass tube. In his throat.’

37

The Union of Composers building was on Bolshaya Morskaya, not far from the Hotel Astoria. Decorated with marble busts and friezes, the mansion had once been the luxurious home of the wealthy Gagarina family. Vronsky had become head of the union in 1950; shortly afterwards he had moved into a grace-and-favour apartment in the building.

It was twilight by the time Rossel’s car drew up to the pavement opposite the white stuccoed entrance. A man was waiting for him, leaning against another vehicle. It was Nikitin. Rossel peered through the misted back windows of the major’s car, expecting to see more MGB. But Nikitin was unaccompanied.

‘I asked at Vosstaniya Street as to your whereabouts. They didn’t want to tell me. But I insisted,’ said Nikitin.

The major was unshaven and a little dishevelled. There was something about his manner, too, Rossel thought, which was different. He seemed less certain of himself; somewhat subdued.

‘If all you are interested in is following orders and just want to pin it on Eliasberg, I can’t stop you,’ said Rossel, ‘but I’m determined to apprehend the real killer.’

Nikitin pushed himself upright. For a moment, Rossel thought the major was about to draw his pistol. Instead, he simply said, ‘Lead on, Lieutenant.’

They stamped through the snow down Bolshaya Morskaya.

‘A small army to arrest Eliasberg, who is innocent, and just you and me for Vronsky?’

‘Eliasberg is a nobody,’ said Nikitin, adjusting his blue-topped cap. ‘Vronsky is Vronsky.’ But Rossel sensed there was some other reason Nikitin had come alone.

They trudged a few yards further. This part of Bolshaya Morskaya reminded Rossel of the siege. He had limped down it once, towards the temporary hospital at the Astoria, with a small piece of shrapnel from a German shell stuck in his right ankle. The spring sunshine, he remembered, had just started to loosen the snow and shrunken hands, withered arms and twisted icy faces had begun to sprout – people had called them ‘black snowdrops’. He would soon see a lot more of them at the front.

His left boot slopped into a deep puddle of gritty sleet as they reached their destination. The composers had only moved there in 1948. It was a beautiful building, but then Bolshaya Morskaya had beautiful buildings to spare.

As he rang the big brass bell, he looked down at the kerb, about five feet away from where he was standing. The corpse of a child had once lain there. A boy of perhaps ten years old. Only the greying tip of his nose and a pair of broken wire-frame glasses had been fully visible above the slush. His lifeless eyes had seemed to scan the indifferent white clouds above him.

Rossel pulled his greatcoat tighter at the neck as a young man in a servant’s outfit opened the door, saw Nikitin’s uniform and cap and swallowed. They were shown in.

*

She was well into her sixties, greying and diminutive. But there was danger to her, a cool, effortless magnetism of someone who had spent a lifetime turning heads. Everything about the way she held herself was an almost balletic calculation, one intended to hold the attention of anyone who gazed upon it.

‘You are looking for my son, perhaps?’ she said.

Nikitin stared at her. ‘That depends, comrade,’ he said after a pause. ‘Identify yourself. And him.’

‘My son. Nikolai Nikolayevich Vronsky. The maestro.’

She tilted her head, almost imperceptibly, towards the servant at the door. As she did so, a flickering light from the jewelled candelabra above her traced a shoal of tiny pink dots across the skin of her neck.

A silver-framed photograph on a dresser in the corner of the room showed the composer’s mother in her twenties. The face was thin, the chin round, the lips bow-shaped, the eyebrows arched suggestively upwards, like a Russian Marlene Dietrich. Now, her once lustrous dark hair was cut short and speckled with grey but she remained powerful and alluring. And she knew it.

The servant – a squat, middle-aged man with a bull neck squeezed into a white, gold-trimmed waiter’s jacket – stepped forward and refilled her cup. She reached across and spread a little beluga onto a tiny crêpe. Then fed it to the tiny, yapping black dog at her feet – a mutt that wouldn’t last five minutes in a Leningrad winter if it had to call the street its home, thought Rossel.

The two visitors hadn’t moved.

She sat in one of two large matching chaises longues. The room was oak-panelled and covered, on all four sides, with banks of polished shelving. Every available space was cluttered with gold and silver ornaments – snuff boxes, candlesticks, trays, mirrors – and a collection of Dyatkovo crystal. In pride of place, above the