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

up the vodka bottle and slipped it into his coat pocket.

‘A poodle called Pushkin. His pride and joy. The reactionary scum had even managed to get it a separate ration card from some other faggot he knew in the Ministry of Production. Can you believe that? All his fellow citizens are cradling their bloated empty bellies, every other dog in Leningrad has long since been sautéed, along with all the cats, rats and stray fucking children, and this bastard is feeding his precious poodle cold cuts.’

The girl put a hand to her mouth and, just for a second, gnawed absent-mindedly at her palm.

‘Bastard,’ she agreed. ‘My mother died in the siege. And my nephew.’

Grachev thrust his face into hers.

‘Someone found out,’ he spat. ‘Broiled the mutt up. And shared it with him in a pan of broth. That’s when it started.’

‘It?’

‘The barking.’

The girl blinked at them.

‘Barking?’

‘And the howling,’ added Grachev, sitting back. ‘And, on occasions when the moon is full, the biting. Do you believe in ghosts, princess? I think the Hound does.’

It was amazing how superstitious people still were, Rossel thought. Thirty-four years since the revolution, thirty-four years of Marxist-Leninist education and atheist indoctrination, and you still found people believing in house elves, forest spirits and magic.

This was Grachev’s favourite part. He sat bolt upright, threw back his shoulders and began to howl.

The girl watched him, mesmerised. She pulled her cheap red coat tight across her chest and did up two of the buttons.

Grachev stopped howling and smiled at her.

‘Never recovered, did the Hound. Not once the fucking fruitcake realised he’d supped on the bones of his beloved little Pushkin. These days he likes to take a dump in flower beds, piss on trees and howls like the mother of a true martyr of the revolution every time he spots another poodle in the park.’

‘The Florist,’ said the girl. ‘My friend, Natasha, says this Zhevtun sometimes works for a man that he calls the Florist. Some sort of high-up, a Party bigwig. She went to a party with him once at a posh dacha out near Lake Ladoga. He told her this Florist had arranged it.’

‘How high up?’ asked Rossel.

‘Very, is all she said.’

‘What sort of work?’

The girl shrugged. ‘That’s all I know, honest. I won’t have to go down there now, with him, will I, the dog man?’

Rossel picked his militia cap up off the table and stared back down at her.

Worked every time, that stupid story.

‘I shouldn’t think so,’ he said.

*

They left the girl to stew.

‘Give me ten minutes alone with her and I’ll have all the information about this Florist we want,’ said Grachev. ‘She’s holding something back.’

There was a leak in the foundations – no one had attended to the merchant’s house for years – and they faced each other on either side of a slowly spreading puddle.

‘Thank you for your diligence, comrade, you are an example to us all. But no,’ said Rossel.

Ten minutes alone with her? Did Grachev think he was stupid?

Grachev’s eyes narrowed.

‘What’s she to you? She takes cock for a living.’

‘Then you can wait until you’re off duty and pay her, Sergeant,’ said Rossel, leaning forward so that Grachev would have to look up to meet his eye. ‘Although in so doing you will be guilty of compelling a woman to engage in prostitution, which as we both know carries a sentence of up to five years’ deprivation of freedom, with confiscation of some or all property. So, don’t let me catch you.’

The Soviet project of moulding the tsarist-era police into a respected and efficient organ of justice had not yet been completed but Lieutenant Revol Rossel – a man who had been named in honour of the Bolshevik revolution – was damned if he was going to let men like Grachev rule the roost.

Grachev marched off down the corridor and threw open the door to the stairs.

‘To hell with you, comrade,’ he said. ‘To hell with you.’

*

After another hour, Dr Volkova rang to say she wouldn’t be able to get to Vosstaniya Street until late evening, if at all. Another pathologist had been arrested three days earlier. Now she was one of two left in the whole city and their caseloads were backing up. There had been rumours of another doctors’ conspiracy to murder Party officials. Rossel had seen junior and senior officers stand to attention for no reason and declare, ‘These accursed intellectuals must be shown the full force of Soviet justice, without mercy.’ To which he had bitten back the reply: ‘As long as they keep their hands off our last few pathologists.’

Taneyev and Grachev went home, a few hours beyond their usual night shift. Grachev handed in a few lines of scrappy notes from the crime scene, which told Rossel nothing his own memory could not. Taneyev had clipped his photos up to dry in the darkroom and left orders downstairs for them to be sent up once they were ready.

It went very dark again, the fire crackled in the grate, consuming the last scraps of firewood, and the windows misted up. Nobody disturbed them. First Lipukhin drifted off. Rossel fought for as long as he could, his pen scratching across the paper, tracing the outlines of five torn bodies in macabre fancy dress.

*

Desperate to get to the samovar and make some tea, Rossel pushed through the communal kitchen of his apartment block – past women in aprons, their sleeves rolled up, addressing vast tureens of soup and buckwheat kasha or manically chopping piles of vegetables. The smell of cabbage, beetroot and onions, always present to some degree, was intense and pleasurable. Jars of pickled cucumbers and tomatoes, grown on dacha plots and preserved for the winter to guard against the inevitable shortages, lined the shelves. The swirling clouds of steam lent the scene the mirage-like atmosphere of a bathhouse.

‘Tatyana Borisovna, what is going on?’ he asked one of the cooks.

The woman glanced up from the beef bones floating in a seething vat, keeping one eye on