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

metres ahead. Everything to the left and the right was pitch black; thick cloud covered the moon and stars. The only things that seemed to be twinkling anywhere on the vast surface of Lake Ladoga were the tiny, slightly cockeyed headlamps of his vehicle.

‘White good,’ he thought, ‘dark bad.’ The whiter the ice appeared, the thicker it probably was. Darker ice meant water close to the surface. At this season of the year, the lake waters often ran with strong currents.

And, given enough time, a strong current could mean no ice.

*

White good, dark bad.

It had taken Rossel about thirty minutes to reach the southwestern corner of Ladoga, between Vronsky’s island and the shore road that led to Sinyavino and the complex of dachas reserved for the higher echelons of Soviet politics. He had finished all the alcohol but his feet were still ice.

‘White good, dark ba . . . To hell with it . . .’

In the distance, beyond the headlamps’ beams, he saw a single light flickering. And, moments after that, the outline of a building.

A shore cabin, he thought. Or a banya. Shelter for ice fishermen to warm up and get drunk.

Rossel rammed his left boot down on the accelerator. As he did so, the wail of the engine-and-track chorus rose and the ZIS lurched towards the snow-covered beach. Beyond the wooden cabin and another column of pines would be the road to Shlisselburg and then Sinyavino. And somewhere in the countryside around it was Beria’s dacha.

Vronsky, he was betting – only using the road and having to travel around Lagoda’s southwestern shoreline – would not have reached this point yet.

The sound of the tracks changed as they crossed onto deeper snow; a softer, muffled creaking. Rossel turned the snowplough hard right and headed further up the shoreline.

The headlamps ran along the dense rows of trees and he noticed a break in the shadow, a little up ahead, near what looked like a stone post. As he got closer, he realised his luck was in. It was set at the side of a small path that was being used to haul boats down from the main road to the water’s edge. A rowing boat on a two-wheeled trolley, mostly covered by snow, was parked in the middle of it.

Rossel maintained the pressure on the accelerator and the boat popped about a metre in the air just as the snowplough swept it aside. Another twenty metres of path and then he hit a huge bank of snow that looked like a frozen wave racing towards him. For a second the rubber wipers strained left and right and the snowplough faltered. Yet he emerged onto the other side and realised he had reached the road.

*

Rossel positioned the snowplough in the middle of the single track, its headlights still on and facing the way he expected Vronsky to come. Few people would be mad enough to be out at this time of night in this kind of weather. The next vehicle that turned up, if any did, would almost certainly be the composer.

On the other side of the road, beyond a rough stone wall, was a small farmer’s byre, about three metres square and almost completely submerged under snow. Rossel could just see the top of a line of hay bales peeping out from beneath its corrugated iron roof.

As the minutes went by, a thought struck him. He searched behind the driver’s seat and, after a couple of minutes, found a battered green metal tool box. He tipped out the spanners, bolts and screwdrivers and replaced them with the two tape spools he’d taken from Vronsky’s dacha. Then he crossed the road and pushed the tool box down inside the byre, making sure it was completely hidden and, as much as was possible, protected from the weather by the bales of hay.

He checked his watch again – almost midnight.

Maybe he had missed him?

Rossel shivered as he waited behind what remained of the large snow bank. His revolver, which he had reclaimed from Razin, was drawn.

No, it wasn’t possible. It had only taken him thirty minutes to cross the ice. And, on the shore road, it would take at least an hour from Krestovsky Island to Sinyavino.

Another five minutes went by.

Then, in the distance, he heard the low rumble of an engine. He dropped down behind the drift and trained the pistol on the road in front of him. As Vronsky’s truck rounded a sharp bend about twenty metres ahead of Rossel’s hiding place, the detective saw the composer’s silhouette as the full beam picked him out. His hair wild and unkempt, his eyes now wide and staring, and his huge frame dwarfing the cab and wheel. There was no space to pass on either side of the snowplough – that, at least, had been Rossel’s assumption. He’d hoped to bring Vronsky’s truck to a hard-braking standstill.

Vronsky whipped the wheel to the left and his truck headed straight for what remained of the drift. Rossel fired once and then threw himself to his right as the other vehicle shot past, destroying the rest of the snow bank, taking out three pine saplings and knocking splinters out of a telegraph pole before re-centring on the other side of his rudimentary blockade in the middle of the road.

Rossel rolled over and began patting the deep snow all around him.

He swore under his breath – he had just constructed the world’s worst roadblock and now the Tokarev was buried somewhere deep in the drift.

He climbed back into the cabin of the snowplough, yanked on the rusty gearstick and started reversing.

*

Sparks leapt up in front of the snowplough’s wipers as the metal skis on its front and, sometimes, the base of the plough, hit rocks and potholes hidden beneath the snow.

About a kilometre before Sinyavino, with the frozen lake visible to his left and a squat, half-built barn to his right, he slowed to take a blind corner. As he rounded it the boxy frame of Vronsky’s ZIS suddenly came