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

He had seen the vase once before. In Sofia’s sketchbook. Perhaps one of her last drawings.

*

The encounter had left Nikitin agitated. He ordered Rossel to get in the car. They drove off, Nikitin silent and brooding, heading back the way they had come until the major glided to a halt not fifty metres away from the House of Composers, in a spot out of the lamp light, a place where they had a good sight of the door but where anyone emerging would have difficulty seeing them.

They did not have long to wait. About ten minutes after they had exited the building, Madame Vronsky, wearing a black sable coat and accompanied by the sullen Razin, emerged. A gleaming red car pulled up to the pavement. Madame Vronsky and her bodyguard got inside.

‘Look at that,’ said Nikitin. ‘A Moskvich 400-420. Brand new. Isn’t she a beauty?’

Lit by the dull glimmer of the street lamps, the Moskvich pulled out into the snow and advanced into busier traffic as Bolshaya Morskaya drew parallel with the Moika Canal. Nikitin followed, keeping the car a good hundred metres behind. After only a few minutes, the two vehicles turned left, crossed the bridge and bore right, following the canal but on the other side. Only two minutes more and the Moskvich pulled up in front of an orange and white building fronted with white classical columns, the Yusupov Palace.

Nikitin drove straight past. The major continued for another hundred metres and pulled into an empty space behind a battered Gaz truck and next to an old bicycle, chained to the embankment railings and missing both of its wheels.

He switched off the engine and adjusted the driver’s mirror so he could see the front of the Yusupov.

‘Watch,’ he said. ‘Use the side mirror.’

After a minute or two, a woman came out of a dimly lit side street and got straight into the back of the Moskvich.

Rossel recognised her immediately. It was Dr Volkova.

38

‘Did I scare you?’

Vassya yawned and wiped some sleep from her eyes. Then opened her door a little wider.

She looked down the passage, left and right, before answering Rossel’s question.

‘Scared? I simply thought you’d come to do what you failed to do the other evening and show a girl a good time.’

Rossel stepped into her doorway, closed the door behind him and kissed her.

‘That is better,’ she said.

His voice dropped to a whisper.

‘I think this thing involves some important people who are beginning to regret my involvement,’ he said.

‘Beria?’

‘We should go.’

He had hit on the idea as he was driving over, wrestling with the steering wheel as the car skidded and slid from one side of the road to the other. The new metro – nearly complete as an engineering project, not yet open to the public – Vassya would know it better than anyone. The MGB might have the plans but every project of that scale was only truly known to those who had worked on it.

‘You could hide down there forever,’ he said. ‘There must be side tunnels, shelters, storage rooms.’

‘And why would I do that?’

‘Nikitin has seen us together. Colonel Sarkisov knows that you flew us over the tracks – he was fully debriefed when we went to Moscow. Anyone with a close connection to me is now in danger.’

‘And then what?’ She raised her voice. ‘Roll around like a mole for the rest of my life? Hunt for scraps of potato peelings dropped by my fellow workers? I was a Night Witch. I flew over Stalingrad. On moonlight nights the anti-aircraft gunners hit us as easily as tins at a fairground shooting stall and because of the weight of the bombs and the low altitude of the planes, we never bothered with parachutes. I flew forty-seven missions. What did you do in the Great Patriotic War, Rossel? Catch burglars? Put out fires?’

Rossel let go of her arms and stepped back.

‘At the beginning, yes, I put out fires with the civil defence. Have you ever tried putting out a fire caused by an incendiary bomb? I saw one man lose the skin from his entire body. Later, I was in the 2nd Shock Army – at Sinyavino. I was in a detachment of forty-seven men. Two of us survived the first week of fighting. When they sent in reinforcements, I watched from a crater as nearly three hundred men were killed in the first ten minutes. About thirty made it through so we formed a new detachment. This time three of us survived to the following week. When no more reinforcements came, we crawled out through slime and shit and dead bodies and the NKVD soldiers were so stunned they forgot to shoot us.’

Vassya sighed.

‘I am sorry. But all that does is make you a survivor, like myself,’ she said. ‘I won’t hide in a tunnel.’

*

They had laid out the fifth body on a trolley in the middle of the morgue.

Rossel pointed to the victim’s chest.

‘He is still a mystery. Male, black-haired, despite signs of starvation still carrying a little belly fat. Pattern of cuts slightly different from the other corpses, in that the killer had also sliced heavily into the back of his neck on the right-hand side, so the flesh was fully separated from there, as well as on his face. In her report, Dr Volkova estimates the age of the victim as fifty-five to sixty.’

The Night Witch looked again at the corpse.

‘Do you know who it is?’ she asked.

‘I have a good idea.’

Rossel walked across to the heavy door of the morgue and checked, for a second time, that it was properly locked. Then he turned up the radio to full volume before undoing the bottom two buttons of his uniform jacket and pulling out a blue file he had pushed into his belt. He spread it out on a small metal table that Dr Volkova kept her surgical instruments on. Vassya stepped closer to him and stared down at the file. She could see the