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

‘The deliveries were late again and everyone had to join the queues after work,’ she said, passing a wrist over her brow. ‘Long queues, too. We’ve all only just started. I’ll be here till midnight, I shouldn’t wonder. Making sure nothing gets wasted.’

Weekends were always busy in the communal kitchen as Soviet womanhood – it was rare to see men labouring in there – attempted to create an entire week’s menus in advance. Mikoyan, the great quartermaster of the war and author of the country’s most popular recipe book, recommended the preparation of ten days’ worth. But now everyone was trying to do so at once. There was tension in the air, blending in with the assorted aromas.

Rossel reached the samovar, found a stray glass and spooned in some tea leaves from a communal jar. He turned, leant against the counter and watched. The radio was on and he caught snatches of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade but the music was mostly drowned out by clanging metal, exchanges of culinary advice, and laughter.

On the side of the room furthest away from him was a woman he didn’t recognise. Even before he saw her face, something in the way she carried herself told him she was attractive. Then she did turn, caught him staring, and pointedly turned away again.

‘Oy, Kira, your piroshki are the best,’ one of the women around the table complimented another. Rossel looked over at the mound of perfectly shaped pastries, filled with ersatz cheese or perhaps real vegetables. He needed a second supper all of a sudden. It was amazing what could be fashioned out of extremely limited resources.

He sat down. Across the table was a growing pile of golubtsy, cabbage leaves stuffed with rice and a smattering of finely ground mince. Even though he had eaten plain meat patties and kasha at his usual stolovaya on the way home, he felt his saliva glands tingle.

He stole another glance across the kitchen. She was wearing a light blue dress patterned with yellow flowers. Her hair was dark as night but in curlers. Like everyone else, she was simultaneously chopping, frying, boiling and tasting. With care, she tasted one of her concoctions and seemed dissatisfied but unsure how to improve it. Rossel wondered if she would welcome an outside opinion.

A poke in the ribs. Rossel looked around into the freckled, grinning face of Lena, a teenager with whom he sometimes shared occasional late-night glasses of tea and – in her case – illegal cigarettes. Lena was seventeen years old, dark-haired, small and boyish with, once she got to know and like you, an engaging gap-toothed smile and the vocabulary of a drunken sailor. She was studying art history at the Repin Institute.

‘You’ve spotted her, then?’ Lena said.

‘Spotted who?’

‘Our new neighbour. She’s making a vegetable soup, meatballs and a potato salad. And since you’re such a skinny one, I think she’d . . .’

‘I’ve eaten.’ Rossel sipped his tea and tried not to stare at the blue dress.

‘I can find out if she’s married, if you like?’ said Lena with another poke in his ribs.

‘With such investigative instincts, there is definitely a place for you in the People’s Militia, Lena.’ Rossel tried to poke her back but she wriggled out of reach and shot off, seizing a morsel from the table as she went.

He looked across the room, once more seeking out the stranger, staring through the steam and smoke whirling up from a dozen pots.

But she had disappeared.

5

Sunday October 14

The dead are more trustworthy than the living. They don’t inform on you, for a start.

The treasonous nature of the thought unnerved him. What do you have to hide that the MGB needs to know, comrade? Everyone lived with that question burrowing into their minds. Keeping the answer unspoken was the thing that kept you safe. Until the day that Comrade Beria’s scientists figured out a way to plant a bug in a man’s mind and eavesdrop on his soul.

Rossel sat on a metal chair in the middle of the morgue, waiting for Dr Volkova. The pathologist had not turned up last night and was late again this morning. He sighed and glanced around the room, encircled by a silent quintet of cold corpses.

It had been twelve hours since they discovered the bodies on the railway line. Six since he filed his preliminary report.

And no phone call. No visit. Nothing.

Militia headquarters had reported the unexplained mutilation and murder of five citizens, one possibly an agent of the MGB, Ministry of State Security, up the chain of command and nothing had happened. They were just being left to get on with this investigation unimpeded.

Which could only mean one thing.

There were many ways to buy a one-way ticket to a gulag: a drunken secret whispered to a lover at a party, an unexpected denouncement for black-market profiteering by a jealous rival at work, poor productivity levels on a tank factory assembly line which an ambitious political kommissar angling for promotion might decide to interpret as deliberate sabotage. Every week, every day, every hour, people disappeared for transgressions such as these.

Rossel turned towards the half-skinned skull, with its badly dyed peroxide hair, which lay to his right. It was staring up at a fly that was crawling around a dead bulb in the metal ceiling lamp.

Perhaps she was meant to be his ticket. Not just him. The whole station’s, probably. The blue-top they had discovered on the railway lines at Lake Ladoga felt like a trap. But if she was, he had no idea how the trap had been sprung.

*

Rossel looked up from the faceless body – eyes still resting in the sockets like two delicately poached egg whites – that lay on the mortuary slab and glanced at Dr Volkova.

‘Anything to report, Comrade Doctor?’ He tried to keep his voice steady to disguise his queasiness.

Rossel had noticed Dr Volkova’s gaudy nail varnish before she pulled on her surgical gloves. She had red nails. Very red. She always