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

in, past the German guns, over Lake Ladoga. They had indeed seemed miraculous. Eliasberg had managed to get extra rations for every skeletal fiddler, percussionist and brass player who turned up. For the most part, that had been the only reason why they played. Not one of them – not Felix, clutching a loaned violin, not Nadya, staring at her clarinet like she had never seen it before, not Gusts Landau, with his red face and apologetically unclassical Sunday-afternoon-band style, not Maxim with his long hair and meditative French horn playing – not one of them would have been able to play a single note in front of Deputy Cultural Kommissar Shevchuk without those onions.

Rossel’s own hands had been shaking. Nothing made you feel the cold as keenly as starvation did. They all wanted more food, needed more, demanded more, but Eliasberg the maestro was a hard taskmaster. ‘If you want a second bowl, then you must play for it,’ he warned them just before he raised his arms to conjure some music out of his scarecrows.

Then, as he sat in the midst of the first violins, eyes flickering between the sheet music and Eliasberg’s baton, bow biting string once again, it happened.

The pure joy of playing coursed through him.

How he had missed it.

As they pounded through the opening pages, the violin of the woman sitting beside him slipped off her shoulder and onto her lap – she had no strength left to lift it up and so sat there, resting her fiddle on her knees. Around them, other string players were doing the same, some unable to stop their instruments falling from their fingers. Woodwind solos died in mid-phrase, brass fanfares wheezed into silence.

But he played on.

He did not remember the opening to the Vronsky, only that it was profoundly moving and that his own part was a long, sweeping solo above pulsating strings.

Soon – too soon – his own soaring phrases were over and Eliasberg was cueing the others. But the musicians were seeing nothing but stars and hearing nothing but the pounding of their own blood, and hoping only that the fiasco would not mean their second bowl of onion soup would be withheld.

*

They had moved into the station to escape the chill of the morgue but the grate was black and lifeless. Rossel slouched back into his chair and blew out a stream of smoke. Now he knew it was time to sleep. Time to give in.

Vassya would not let him.

‘So, the killer is Vronsky? Winner of the Stalin Prize, People’s Artist of the Soviet Union, one of the country’s leading artistic figures. A murderer. Put dead bodies on the tracks as if they were a composition?’

‘Five on the line, arranged like notes on a score. Landau he killed during the war. The trumpeter was a stranger in the city, knew no one, and no one knew him. He was Vronsky’s first kill, I think. The others were murdered later. Recently, in fact.’

‘How will you ever prove any of this?’

‘Prove it? Proof depends on who is willing to listen and what they want to hear. But there is a long, long trail, much of it laid for me to follow. To begin at the beginning, the unexplained death of a young musical genius at a school on Krestovsky Island, a school he and Vronsky attended. An early example of the hatred he has for anyone he sees as a rival.’

Rossel poked the embers.

‘Eliasberg also mentioned a nickname, Thanatos, which Vronsky gave himself back then. A name from Greek mythology. A sketch I saw in Sofia’s sketchbook had that name written on it: Thanatos & H . . . And I now believe the shadowy figure in the same drawing was Vronsky, because in one corner is a Grecian-shaped vase of crystal – and it is sitting in Madame Vronsky’s apartments in the Union of Composers.’

‘Coincidences? Hunches.’ Vassya’s voice rose.

‘It’s the little things that spark one’s suspicions,’ said Rossel. ‘Speaking of crystal, the librarian at the conservatory told me of a search for some of Vronsky’s music that led to our trumpeter friend, except that when he was found he was a mutilated corpse with a glass tube in his throat, identical to those we found inserted into the necks of the bodies on the railway tracks. Proof? No, I don’t have absolute proof yet. But I have motive, modus operandi, mute witnesses from beyond the grave.’

‘That is not all, though? You said Shevchuk’s identity made you understand everything.’

Rossel looked at Vassya through eyes he could barely keep open.

‘Back then, after the Germans had invaded and the initial chaos had abated, Stalin had decided there needed to be an anthem for the war. Music that would bear witness to the unconquerable Russian soul. Both Vronsky and Shostakovich were working on compositions that might serve but had written only sketches, themes, half-formed ideas. But Stalin ordered it to be done, and that gave the Party’s cultural arbiters a headache. Shostakovich was the obvious choice but Vronsky was the coming man and had the better connections – plus his scheming mother, always making friends in high places.

‘So a competition, an audition, was devised, and the composers given two weeks to make progress. And on that day in March 1942 they both presented their pieces – or as much of them as they had written – at the Radio Symphony Orchestra’s broadcasting hall, to be performed and assessed by Shevchuk.

‘There were two problems. One, the musicians were half dead. Most could not hold their instruments up, let alone blow into them or scrape them. They had found only fifty – fifty-one, to be exact, as I now know from a list that ended up tucked into a score of the Leningrad Symphony. They were shadows. And yet someone was setting out music stands and distributing parts as if they still played every day.’

‘The second problem?’

‘The competition was fixed. “Everyone knew Shevchuk was in Madame Vronsky’s pocket.” That’s what my old teacher told