There are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union

Rudakov looked pretty invulnerable. Even his attempt to leave the scene of the incident pointed to his innocence. Unless he’d managed to get up someone important’s nose, he looked safe.

Mrs Lovchev was even safer. Who the hell could accept a fat old widow from Yaroslavl as a subversive? In any case it would be impossible to implicate her without dragging in her daughter also.

Natasha was a pretty good bet, regarded objectively. Young upwardly mobile professionals were just the group that tended to throw up the dissenters, the dissidents, the moaners and groaners about human rights. Serebrianikov would probably be delighted to be given one to squeeze publicly to encourage the others.

Chislenko shuddered at the thought. It mustn’t happen. The KGB mustn’t be allowed even a sniff of Natasha. If there had to be a culprit, he would do all he could to make it that poor bastard, Josif Muntjan.

Meanwhile, he had to accomplish task one and scotch the ghost. It was of course absurd that the State should need to disprove physically what it denied metaphysically, but there was no doubt that the best way of convincing that great mélange of logic and superstition which was the Russian mind that there’d been no ghost in the Gorodok Building was to prove that there was nothing for there to be a ghost of!

The strength and the weakness of Soviet bureaucracy is a reluctance to throw away even the smallest scrap of paper. The whole life of the Gorodok Building was there to be read in the archives of the Department of Public Works.

There were two ways of gaining access. One was to write an official request which would be dispatched to the office of Mikhail Osjanin, the National Controller of Public Works. The request, of course, would never get anywhere near the Controller himself, who had far more important things to do (mainly, according to rumour, brown-nosing top Praesidium people, in pursuit of his own high political ambitions). But one of his minions would doubtless consider it, ask for clarification, consider again, and finally accede. It might, if Kozlov countersigned the request, go through in only a week.

The other way was for Chislenko to check his own mental archives, which were in their way merely an extension of this same Soviet bureaucracy.

Yes, there it was, the half-remembered scrap of information. Six months earlier he had interrogated several men detained after a raid on a gay bar near Arbat Square. It was not a job Chislenko liked and he was easily persuaded that most of those he questioned had been in the bar accidentally or innocently. One of them had been called Karamzin and he had given his job as records clerk in the Department of Public Works.

Chislenko went to see him.

The frightened little clerk nearly fainted when he recognized the Inspector, but once he grasped the reason for his visit, his cooperation was boundless, and within minutes rather than days, Chislenko had at his disposal all he required.

The Gorodok Building had been projected in 1947, approved in 1948 and erected in 1949, under the guiding hand of a project director called M. Osjanin.

‘This Osjanin, is that the same one who’s your boss now?’ inquired Chislenko of the hovering clerk.

‘Ultimately, I suppose,’ said Karamzin. ‘In the same way as Comrade Bunin’s your boss.’

Chislenko knew what he meant. The only time he ever saw the Minister for Internal Affairs was on television when he stood in the rank of hopefuls on the saluting platform in Red Square.

‘I take your point,’ he answered.

‘Naughty boy,’ said the clerk coquettishly, then a look of such consternation spread over his face that Chislenko almost laughed out loud.

‘What about the building’s maintenance history?’ he asked.

‘Over here.’

They spent an hour going over this. There was no reference to anything other than routine maintenance with regard to the lifts or indeed to any other part of the building.

He thanked the clerk formally, resisting a strong temptation to wink, and continued his researches among the records of the emergency services, principally fire and police. Again nothing. Finally he composed a memo to the Chief Records Officer, KGB, beginning it further to an inquiry authorized by Y.S.J. Serebrianikov, and sent it across to the Lubyanka, uncertain whether it would produce the slightest effect. To his surprise, a reply came back within the hour. KGB records had nothing on file about any sudden death or violent incident in the Gorodok Building during its whole existence.

The speed of the reply confirmed one thing. Comrade Serebrianikov was no old buffer put out to grass till he went to the Great Praesidium in the sky.

His task now finished so far as scotching the ghost was concerned, Chislenko drafted out the first part of his report. It was a job well done, but now the time had come when he could no longer delay beginning the second part of his investigation. The proof of Serebrianikov’s continued authority in the KGB had been a salutary warning of just how delicately he would have to tread in keeping Natasha Lovchev safely out of the official eye. He made a vow to himself that, whoever else might suffer, he would at all costs protect Natasha.

An hour later he found himself arresting her.

It happened like this.

Deciding that it made sense to start his new inquiries with the Lovchevs (and also feeling a sudden longing to see that all-weather beauty again), he set out for the girl’s tiny apartment. When he got there, he found Mrs Lovchev preparing to return to her home in a village close to Yaroslavl on the banks of the Volga, about two hundred and thirty kilometres away. She greeted him like an old friend and demanded to know if he’d found out anything more about ‘the ghost’, adding that she’d always thought Moscow folk a bit standoffish, but since she’d started talking about her experience in the local shops, she’d found them just as friendly and curious as the folk back home.

‘And she can’t wait to get back home and tell them there that it’s not all motor-cars and concrete here in the big city, can you, Mother?’ laughed Natasha.

She looked and sounded delightful when she laughed, but Chislenko was too horrified at what had just been said to fully appreciate her beauty. Surely he’d warned them to keep quiet about the incident? Fears for the Lovchevs’ and for his own future mingled to make him speak rather brusquely to the garrulous old woman. Natasha intervened sharply, the laughter dying in her eyes. He replied with equal sharpness in his best official tone, but this only provoked her to a slanderous if not downright subversive attack upon the MVD and all its works.

Jesus! thought Chislenko. If Procurator Kozlov could hear this …

And then the dreadful thought occurred that perhaps worse people than Kozlov could be listening. What more likely than that Serebrianikov would have arranged for all those involved in the Gorodok Building affair to be bugged?

It was at that point that he arrested Natasha.

White-faced – with anger, he guessed, rather than fear – she let herself be thrust into the passenger seat of the little official car he was using. Normally ‘pool’ cars were as hard to come by as Western jeans, but in the last few days he’d found one permanently set aside for him, proof again of the strength of the Serebrianikov connection.

After he had been driving a few minutes Natasha burst out, ‘Where are you taking me, Inspector? This isn’t the way to Petrovka?’

‘No, it’s not. But we’ll get there, never you fear,’ said Chislenko grimly. ‘I just want a quiet word with you first. I’m going to give you some advice and I think you’d be wise to take it.’

‘What do you mean?’ she said, looking at him with contempt. ‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours, is that it?’

‘What do you mean?’ he demanded in his turn, growing angry.

‘I’ve seen the way you look at me, Comrade Inspector,’ she retorted. ‘But I warn you, I’m not one of your little shop-girls to be frightened out of her pants by an MVD bully!’

The suggestion horrified Chislenko. Was this really how his admiration of Natasha’s lively spirit and gentle beauty had come across – as unbridled lust?

Holding back his anger with difficulty, he said, ‘Listen, Natasha, for your mother’s sake if not for your own. This business at the Gorodok Building, it’s not wise to talk about it. It’s certainly been very unwise of your mother to go spreading tales of ghosts and ghouls all over Moscow, and it would be even unwiser for her to fill the Yaroslavl district with them too.’

‘Unwise for her to tell what she saw?’ said Natasha indignantly. ‘How can that be? And I saw it too, don’t forget!’

‘I’d try not to be so sure of that,’ said Chislenko.

‘What are you trying to tell me, Inspector?’ demanded the girl. ‘And why do I have to be driven all over Moscow to be told it?’

She still thinks I’m going to park the car somewhere quiet and invite her to take her skirt off, thought Chislenko.

He swung the wheel over and accelerated out of the suburbs back towards the centre of town.

‘It would be wise to admit the possibility of error, Comrade Personal Assistant to the Deputy Costings Officer,’ he said coldly. ‘It would be wise for your mother to do the same.’

‘Wise? Give me one good reason?’

He slowed down to negotiate the turn from Kirov Street into Dzerzhinsky Square.

‘There’s your best reason,’ he said harshly, nodding towards the pavement alongside which loomed a massive, ugly building. In many ways this was the most famous edifice in the city, out-rivalling even St Basil’s. Yet it appeared on no postcards, was described in no guide books.

This was the Lubyanka, headquarters of the KGB.

They drove on in silence.