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

someone he drank with thirty years ago, add it all up . . . “I heard Beria say you were looking a little ill the other day, Comrade Stalin. And did you know what he gets up to in his special cellar . . .?” That’s how it’s done. A list like that is an insurance policy.’

He fell silent, watched as the city’s outskirts drifted past.

‘But Sarkisov doesn’t know that I’ve read that list. We were around his apartment the other night, drinking. Celebrating the arrest of Eliasberg. Singing, of all things.’

He began to bellow out an old army marching song.

‘My ears are bleeding, comrade,’ said Rossel.

Nikitin stopped singing.

‘You know, outside the service, you are the only person in the Soviet Union who would dare talk to me like that,’ he said. ‘Anyway, we had several bottles lined up to applaud our every note. Sarkisov got smashed and started showing off. He brought out five pieces of paper and waved the top sheet at me. Then he slid off his chair and fell asleep. I was curious, of course, so I took a look. And there, on page six, was her name and my address. I wanted to strangle him right there, and then find Beria and put a bullet straight between his eyes. And then go to Vronsky’s pad and do the same. But I have a wife and another child. A simple man does not make life complicated. That’s how I got to live this long.’

The car slowed again as a filthy truck pulled out from a side street.

‘So, I bit my own lip until I could taste the blood in my mouth like I was gargling with it and decided to come and see you outside the Union of Composers.’

A road sign appeared about fifty metres in front of them. It showed the way to Lake Ladoga.

*

It took three hours of crawling through the growing blizzard to reach the edge of Nizino, on the southeastern shore of the lake. Rossel glanced down at the picture of Svetlana. It could have been just another family snap – but the expression on her face and the flowers in her hand told a different story.

‘How did you get your hands on that photograph?’ he said.

Nikitin, who had been half asleep and slumped forward, opened his eyes and stretched. Then slapped his gloved hands together.

‘When he was still drunk and asleep, I rifled through the drawer Sarkisov had taken his list from. Taped underneath it was an envelope filled to bursting with pictures and negatives of Beria’s victims. Some of Vronsky’s, too. It was in there.’

Rossel dropped a gear as he overtook a horse-drawn farmer’s cart filled with lumber. Then he looked at the photograph again.

‘Poppies. Your daughter is holding poppies. You said roses and irises before. Did Beria or Vronsky ever mention a story, a Greek myth, about Thanatos and Hypnos?’

Nikitin nodded.

‘That’s what they called themselves when they went out in the Packard, Thanatos and Hypnos. Some creepy joke between them which me and Sarkisov never properly understood. The poppies only started when Vronsky arrived on the scene. How the hell did you know about that?’

In the distance, through the swirling snow, Rossel made out a sign: Krestovsky Island. He pressed his foot down on the accelerator.

‘Hypnos is Sleep, Thanatos is Death,’ said Rossel. ‘In the legend, they lived in a cave. Through it ran the River of Forgetfulness and outside it grew poppies. That’s where the opiate came in, I think. Extract of the poppy, used to instill a deep sleep from which the victims awoke into an endless nightmare. Vronsky had used the names before, as nicknames for himself and a boy called Andrei Suvorin, when they both attended a school for gifted children. Suvorin went missing in the summer of 1916.’

The car slid and skipped over a patch of the road and Rossel performed a complicated dance with brakes, gearstick and steering wheel.

‘You know, you’re good at this,’ said Nikitin. ‘How long have you been in the militia?’

‘Since ’46. After the war, they were kind enough to give me a choice between the fire brigade, the militia and pushing paper in some meaningless department. I chose the militia. I wanted to be a detective.’

‘You had good training?’

Rossel laughed. ‘We had basic tuition in the criminal code so we could tell drunks, whores and thieves what they were being arrested for. There was a little less training around forming tips and clues and hunches into a real investigation.’

They pulled up onto a slushy bank next to a hedge. Nikitin stared out at Lake Ladoga. About a half a kilometre away was a phalanx of black pine trees that lined the shore of an island. And one hundred metres to their left was a slightly lopsided telephone pole, studded on each side with the metal steps the engineers used to climb it, a tangle of wires leading from it to a pole on the opposite bank.

‘As agreed, I will wait until you get to the island, then take the phone lines out,’ said Nikitin. ‘This school – it was here, on Krestovsky?’

Rossel took his revolver out of its holster and checked the chamber.

‘Yes. If I’m right, I’m about to cross not a river but a lake of forgetfulness.’

Nikitin picked up the picture of his daughter and kissed it.

‘I can’t stop thinking about what those bastards did to her. I can never forget . . . Remember Stalin’s slogan from before the war? Life has never been better, life has never been more beautiful?’

‘Yes,’ replied Rossel. ‘To be honest, I was never totally at one with the sentiment.’

Nikitin smiled his tormentor’s smile.

‘I used to use that all the time in the cells. I’d make the counter-revolutionary scum recite it – sing-song style. Repeat after me, I’d shout: “Life has never been better.” Then I’d kick the mudak in the balls. Repeat after me: “Life has never been so beautiful.” Then I’d break their knee-caps. Louder, I’d bellow. Say it so I believe that you believe it.