City of Ghosts Ben Creed (13 ebook reader .txt) 📖

Became thicker and rounder. A pulsating shadow that stilled back into blackness in the moments between each beat. But then, on the numbing notes themselves, would ripple out into a single vague image. A thing barely discernible but provocatively real. Like a childhood glimpse of something forbidden that instantly disappears behind a closing door. Sofia, the apple brandy on her breath. Her eyes lowered. No, Revol, because . . . The scribbled pages of her notebook. Thanatos & H. Galya mute among the drifting snows. A cursing Nazi sergeant whose throat he’d stabbed in a muddy shell hole during the hand-to-hand fighting in Shlisselburg. The blood on his tongue and fear in his pumping heart induced by Nikitin’s percussive violence. A black snowdrop – the partly decomposed body of a thawing boy he had once seen outside the Union of Composers.

Rossel’s lips were cracked and dry. He blinked his eyes open. A large, shadowy circle of brick and stone, divided into sections. No natural light, so somewhere a lamp or some candles burned.

But the space was not empty. Five empty steel mesh cages, each about a metre and a half square, hung by dirty chains to the beams of the ceiling. Each one hovered about a metre above the ground, inside an empty stall that made the whole place look like it had once been a stable. Suspended from the ceiling by a piece of insulating cable, a microphone hung in front of each one of them. They looked, to Rossel, like the very best – the kind used for professional recordings.

He winced as he felt the pain from the back of his skull. He tried to lift an arm but found he could not. He was seated but his arms and legs were bound. There was the noise again. Insistent. Rippling. Now he felt he could place it. He turned his head left, trying to locate the tapping in the gloom.

His eye caught a sliver of a different spectrum of light. For a moment he was unable to process what he saw but then they came into focus – five glass tubes. Each one a little taller than the next, arranged on a table before him.

He could hear the noise more clearly now, persistent and hypnotic.

Rossel squirmed in his chair. Looked down. His gloves had been removed. His feet were bare and, like his hands, tethered with a thick twine. It was a smart move to remove his boots. Even if he escaped, he wouldn’t get very far in these temperatures.

Then the voice spoke in a baritone whisper which seemed – like the beats – to be in front of him, behind him, to his left, to his right.

‘Stolypin, the original resident of this house, was the tsar’s very own Beria. He used to keep his Lipizzaner here. When we were friends, Suvorin – you will know who he is by now – and I would come and admire them.’

A last beat, then the metallic rhythm stopped. A sudden movement to Rossel’s left and Vronsky loomed above him, grey and massive, like the Commendatore in Don Giovanni, a stone nemesis conjured to life by the maestro’s percussion.

The maestro circled him a couple of times, saying nothing. Tapped his gold-ringed fingers on top of the table as though he were stilling the undisciplined cacophony of tuning in the pit. There was a little dampness on the composer’s brow but otherwise he looked no different from the last time Rossel has seen him, at the Kirov. After a minute, Vronsky took a seat at the other end of the table.

The click of a latch. A door set into the farthest alcove of the wall opened slowly. A woman entered carrying two circular silver platters on a tray and some cutlery. Madame Vronsky placed one platter in front of her son. Then put the other one down in front of Rossel.

‘I sensed you did not like my little dog, Lieutenant,’ she said. ‘A pity. I think my little one liked you. Or perhaps she merely pities you. In her world there is no MGB, no gulag, no citizens ready and willing to inform on a next-door neighbour for the price of a Party membership card, and so it must be, just as you are about to discover, a much kinder world than this one.’

Her tone was cordial. That of someone greeting an old friend they had just bumped into after only a day or so’s parting.

‘Your son is not in any way sane,’ said Rossel. ‘And yet it does not seem to concern you in the slightest, comrade?’

Rossel heard his own voice as though he were listening to someone else. It was dry and deep. Basso profundo. And sounding ephemeral. Otherworldly. He assumed he had been injected with the same drug as the others. That would explain the intensity of the images in his head. Dehydration, too, was a common side-effect of an opiate.

Madame Vronsky smiled.

‘That is what the doctors said during the siege. After Razin found him standing over the dead body of that useless Latvian bugler Landau, I arranged for my son’s psychiatric evaluation. Pulled strings, to ensure an order was issued which meant that any existing manuscripts were immediately recalled from the conservatory library. I did it to calm him after his defeat. My son demanded it. Told me that he had come to despise its imperfections. But that within its “crude phraseology” lay the embryo of a much greater work – The Blockade. “And now, at last, after the trumpeter’s death, I finally understand what is necessary. The level of ambition a true artist must possess.” Those were his words. If he were an ordinary man, I would have agreed with the doctors’ assessment of his psychopathology. But my child is not that. Has never been that. He is and has always been extraordinary. To those with such special gifts everything must be allowed.’

She turned and looked at her son. Vronsky was staring into one of the empty cages and