There are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union

He said, ‘Well, get in if you’re getting in. We can’t hang around here all day.’

Gingerly she stepped inside. When the lift stopped at the ground floor, he said formally, ‘I may have some more questions to put to you later, Comrade Lovchev. I would like you to be available for interview this evening.’

‘This evening is not possible, Comrade Inspector, but at the moment, I have no plans for tomorrow evening,’ she said pertly. ‘So try me then. Who knows? You may be lucky!’

The supervisor shook his head as she walked away.

‘Give ’em a bit of status and they think they’re boss of the universe, these young ones, eh, Inspector? What that one needs is a randy man to satisfy, and half a dozen kids to bring up, what say you?’

‘What I say is, why don’t you keep your stupid mouth shut,’ said Chislenko.

Half an hour later, relatively clean, he was back at Petrovka. There was a bit of a setback when he could find no reference to a German town called Chemnitz in his up-to-date World Gazetteer. That know-it-all Sub-Inspector Kedin, solved the mystery.

‘Try Karl-Marx-Stadt,’ he said. ‘The name was changed in 1953.’

So at least the town was in the Democratic Republic which would make cooperation easier once the initial contact had been made. That was where the real difficulty lay. An Inspector of the MVD might just get away with mailing an official request for help to the police force of a friendly country, but telephoning, which was what Chislenko wanted to do, was impossible without higher approval.

He asked to see Procurator Kozlov.

‘I don’t see any point in it,’ said Kozlov after he’d listened to Chislenko’s report. ‘Muntjan is obviously at the centre of this business. I’m not certain Comrade Serebrianikov is going to be happy that it’s all down to drunkenness. He seemed certain there must be a Western connection somewhere, but I’ve no doubt he can track that down for himself once he has Muntjan. This supervisor seems a likely contact to me. Check him out thoroughly, Chislenko.’

Chislenko shuddered. Poor old Uncle Josif! Poor old nephew supervisor!

Kozlov continued, ‘As for this lift business, I don’t see what difference it makes. There’s probably some simple explanation. Perhaps it’s you that’s got things muddled, Inspector. Don’t think I’ve forgotten that it was your muddle that got us into this in the first place!’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Chislenko, admitting defeat. ‘I’ll put my report in writing, then.’

‘I’d appreciate that,’ said Kozlov sarcastically. ‘And stick to the relevant facts, will you? Nothing about lifts and Germany, understand?’

Chislenko left and returned to the Inspectors’ office. Half an hour later he was summoned back to Kozlov’s room. The Procurator was writing at his desk and did not once look up as he spoke.

‘I’ve been thinking, Chislenko. I don’t like loose ends. You have permission to contact the authorities in Karl-Marx-Stadt in pursuance of your inquiries. Thoroughness in small things, that’s what makes the State great, you’d do well to remember that. Dismiss!’

Chislenko dismissed. It was clear to him that the change of heart had not been Kozlov’s. He must have reported to Serebrianikov and that terrible white-haired old man had given the go-ahead.

Suddenly Chislenko wished he’d kept his mouth shut. A man should be careful in his choice of masters. True, at the head of the MVD was Minister of Internal Affairs Bunin who was known to be Serebrianikov’s protector. But it would be a comfort to know for certain that the Comrade Minister knew for certain what the Comrade Secretary was up to.

On the other hand, that burning curiosity to learn the causes of things which had taken him into the police force in the first place demanded to be satisfied in this matter.

He sent for Sub-Inspector Kedin who knew everything.

‘I bet you speak good German, Kedin?’

‘Pretty fair.’

‘I thought so. Sit here with me. I may need you.’

It took three phone calls spread out over the rest of the day to get things under way.

The first established contact and brought the information that there was no machine manufacturing company called Elsheimer currently operative in Karl-Marx-Stadt.

The second confirmed that yes, there had been a firm called Elsheimer, founded in 1885 and foundering in 1932.

The third revealed that rather than simply foundering in 1932, Elsheimer had been taken over by Luderitz GmbH, a subsidiary of Krupp, and thereafter had diverted to the manufacture of armaments. This in its turn had been taken over first by the Russians in 1945, and subsequently by the Democratic Republic itself, and still survived in a much developed and expanded form as State Machine Factory (Agriculture, Heavy) Number 364 AK.

With not much hope, Chislenko gave the details of the lift. They sounded slight, the story sounded feeble, the task impossible. He could almost hear the incredulity at the other end of the line as Kedin translated his request that the Karl-Marx-Stadt Polizei should check to see if any old records of the Elsheimer company remained and if they contained any reference to the lift in question.

Such a request to a Russian official would, he knew, have been tossed into a pending tray; a couple of months later, after two or three reminders, a token search might have been made, and the negative response sent through the slowest of official channels some few weeks later.

German efficiency – plus the desire to impress these Russian peasants with that efficiency – might speed things up in this case. But after all this time, it didn’t really seem likely the response could be anything but negative.

Early the following morning the phone rang. This time he did not need Kedin. The East Germans – clever bastards – had got their own Russian speaker who told him in a studiedly matter-of-fact voice that the records of the Elsheimer company had been found intact and that the lift in question was one of a pair manufactured in the spring of 1914 and shipped to St Petersburg (as it was then), shortly to be renamed, first, Petrograd (because after 1914 St Petersburg sounded too Germanic), and finally, in 1924, Leningrad. The order had been placed in 1913 by a St Petersburg construction company and the lifts were intended for a new hotel in the city to be called (the interpreter allowed himself the ghost of a chuckle) the Imperial.

These details would be confirmed in writing within the next few days, with photocopies of the relevant record sheets. If the Comrade Inspector required any further assistance, he should not hesitate to ask.

Chislenko smiled as he recognized the triumphant insolence behind the measured correctness.

‘We are most grateful,’ was all his reply. He didn’t grudge them their triumph. But once again he found himself wondering about the wisdom of the course he had set himself on.

But to turn back now was impossible. This information was official. When the written confirmation arrived, it would be on the record. He had to proceed, even though now he was beginning to guess where his progress would take him.

He picked up the telephone and asked to be put through to MVD Headquarters in Leningrad. The traditional rivalries between the two cities – Muscovites regarding natives of Leningrad as peasants and being regarded in their turn as barbarians – unfortunately extend even into official circles. Chislenko did not want to be messed about, so he cut through any potential delaying tactics with the sharpest instrument at his disposal.

‘This is an inquiry authorized by Comrade Secretary Serebrianikov of the Committee on Internal Morale and Propaganda,’ he declared baldly. Then after a pause to let the implications sink in, he made his request.

The promised return call came midway through the morning.

The Hotel Imperial no longer existed. Indeed it hadn’t really existed as the Hotel Imperial at all. Planned for completion at the end of 1914, its construction had been suspended at the outbreak of the war and it wasn’t actually finished till 1922. It occurred to someone shortly afterwards that Imperial was perhaps not the most suitable name for this revolutionary city’s most modern hotel, and the name was changed about the same time as Petrograd became Leningrad. It must have seemed a name for all time when they decided to christen it after the Father of the great Red Army and re-named it the L.D. Trotsky Building. The name survived Trotsky’s expulsion from the Party in 1927 – rehabilitation perhaps still seeming possible – but not his exile two years later, when it was rechristened, uncontroversially, the May Day Centre. During all these vicissitudes it was used as an administration and accommodation centre for visiting officials and delegations from all over the country. Moscow might be the official capital, but Leningrad was, and would always be, the historical centre of the great revolutionary movement …

Chislenko interrupted the threatened commercial brusquely. ‘And what happened to the place, whatever you call it, in the end?’

‘It was hit by German shells in 1943,’ came the reply in a rather hurt tone of voice.

‘Hit? You mean destroyed?’

‘It was rendered unusable, that’s what the records say.’

‘And it was never reconstructed as such.’

‘No, Comrade. That area of the city, like many others, was cleared and totally rebuilt in the great post-war reconstruction programme.’

‘Is there in the records a list of those who were in charge of that particular site in the clearance stage of the reconstruction programme?’

For the first time the MVD man in Leningrad let a hint of impatience sound in his voice.

‘We’ve no list as such, but I suppose I could go through the minutes and progress reports and see which names turn up.’

‘That would be kind. The Comrade Secretary would, I am sure, appreciate that,’ said Chislenko.

The names were soon forthcoming. In fact it wasn’t too long a list, and one name dominated the rest. Clearly this was the man on the ground who was in direct control of the day-to-day work.

Chislenko noted it without comment. He’d already written it down on his jotter with a large question-mark next to it. Now he crossed out the question-mark.

The name was Mikhail Osjanin.

6

That evening in Natasha’s apartment with the radio turned up high just in case he was right about KGB bugs, he told the girl about the two reports he had left in the Procurator’s office that afternoon.

One of them had been long and very detailed. This was the one which showed there was no possible historical basis for a ghost, then went on to give the new and revised accounts of events from Natasha, her mother, and Rudakov, ending with the conclusion that a combination of heat, fatigue, stale air and a little restorative alcohol had combined to make Josif Muntjan hallucinate so strongly that his hysteria had communicated itself to those around.

Chislenko then declared boldly that he could find no evidence of subversive intent and recommended that Muntjan should undergo a medical examination to test if he were fit for his job. If, as seemed likely, he failed this, he should then be pensioned off to be looked after by his niece who happened to be the supervisor’s wife.

Natasha whistled.

‘That’s bold of you, isn’t it?’

‘Is it?’

‘Yes. You could just have tossed him and the supervisor to the wolves, couldn’t you?’

‘Don’t think that I wasn’t going to do it,’ said Chislenko drily.

Then he told her about the second report.

It had been very short.

In it he said that it appeared that the lifts in the Gorodok Building had been manufactured in Chemnitz, Germany, in 1914 for the Hotel Imperial in St Petersburg. This building had been damaged in 1943 and the site had been cleared in 1945 under the supervision of M.R.S. Osjanin.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Natasha.

‘You would if you could see the photostat documents accompanying the other report. The full history of the Gorodok Building’s there. Plans, costing; material and machines; purchase, delivery; everything. All authorized and authenticated by the project director, who has since risen to the rank of Controller of Public Works, one Mikhail Osjanin.’

Natasha digested this.

‘You mean Osjanin was on the fiddle?’

‘Possibly,’ said Chislenko.

‘But a couple of lifts … how much would they cost, by the way?’

‘I forget the exact costing, but a lot of roubles,’ said Chislenko. ‘The point is, of course, how much else was there?’

‘Sorry?’

‘How much other material cannibalized from demolition sites and officially written off did Osjanin and his accomplices recycle into the reconstruction programme? And what else has he been up to? A fiddler rarely sticks to one fiddle!’

Natasha studied him earnestly.

‘This is dangerous, isn’t it?’ she said softly.

‘Could be. That’s why I’ve put these reports in separately. By itself the second one is pretty meaningless. I even left the old names in – Chemnitz, St Petersburg, the Hotel Imperial. You could drop it in a filing cabinet and no one would look at it for a hundred years. But set it beside the documents on the Gorodok Building attached to the other …’

‘I see. You make no accusations, draw no conclusions. That’s for someone else.’

She sounded accusing.

‘Right,’ he said.

‘And will conclusions he drawn?’

‘Osjanin’s a youngish man, mid-fifties. Rumour has it he feels ready for even higher things. It all depends whether Oscar Bunin, my MVD Minister, sees him as an ally or a threat. If he’s a threat, then Bunin will almost certainly set Serebrianikov on him.’

‘Otherwise he’ll get away scot-free?’ said Natasha indignantly.

‘Certainly,’ smiled Chislenko. ‘But, at least, giving the Comrade Secretary that has put me in credit enough to dare recommend that poor old Josif Muntjan gets let down lightly.’

She thought about this for a moment, then leaned forward and kissed him.

‘You’re a nice man, Lev Chislenko,’ she said.

‘No, I’m not,’ he said bluntly. ‘I’m a policeman.’

‘Yes, you’re that too. I’ve been wondering about that. You shouldn’t be telling me all this, should you? Why are you doing it?’

He took a deep breath.

‘Because I’m in love with you,’ he said. ‘Because I’ve nothing to give except what I am, (which I’m not ashamed of, by the way) and that means telling you things you shouldn’t hear, telling you things you won’t want to hear. It’s called trust, I believe.’

She sat very still, then said, ‘You’re taking a hell of a risk, you know that?’

His face lit up with a kind of delight.

‘Yes. I know that.’

‘Suppose I can’t love you?’

‘I could persecute you.’

‘I could blackmail you.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

She leaned forward and kissed him again. He tried to take her in his arms but she drew back.

‘You’re not related to the Chislenko who used to play for Dynamo, are you?’ she asked.

‘No, I’m not,’ he said.

‘Good. I hate football,’ she said leaning towards him once more.

The wireless was still blaring when he woke up in the middle of the night. It was dark and Natasha was warm beside him under the coarse linen sheet. She was awake.

‘Lev,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘I was thinking.’

‘Yes.’

‘All that stuff about there being no one for that man to be a ghost of. Because no one had died in the Gorodok Building since it was erected.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, it’s not true now, is it? I mean, if the lift was made as far back as 1914, anything could have happened in it, couldn’t it? And those old-fashioned clothes he was wearing, they would make sense now. Have you thought of that?’

He didn’t tell her, yes, of course I’ve thought of all that, because no one loves a know-it-all policeman, and he desperately wanted this girl to love him. Instead he turned towards her and began kissing her breasts and after a while had the satisfaction of knowing he’d put all thoughts of the strange events in the south lift of the Gorodok Building out of her mind.

Putting it out of his own mind in any permanent sense proved much more difficult.

Every instinct told him that his wisest policy was now to shun the whole affair completely. If Serebrianikov and Bunin decided that nothing should be done about Osjanin, then it would be very silly to let himself be discovered apparently still paddling in these muddied waters. Particularly as his only excuse could be that he was still hunting for a ghost!

What he wanted to do was contact Leningrad again, or better still to go there, but there was no way he could hope to conceal even a simple telephone call, let alone a journey. So he compromised by paying yet another visit to the Records Office.

‘Hello, Comrade Inspector,’ said Karamzin, the clerk, with a simpering smile of welcome. ‘Do we want to rifle my records again?’

Good Lord! thought Chislenko. Can it be that the vain little bastard’s beginning to imagine my frequent visits have got something to do with him!

He said, ‘Is this really a Central records office? I mean, do you have records of other buildings – in Leningrad, say?’

‘Oh yes,’ said the clerk confidently, then modified his certainty to, ‘At least, some of them. As long as it’s post-war, that is.’

‘This would be pre-war,’ said Chislenko.

‘A public building?’

‘A hotel that was taken over by the State, more or less,’ said Chislenko. ‘So in a sense it was a public building.’

‘What year?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Chislenko. ‘It’s the Hotel Imperial, to start with. Then it becomes the L.D. Trotsky Building, and it ends up as the May Day Centre.’

The clerk left the room rolling his eyes as if to say, if all he wants is my conversation, why does he have to invent such bloody inconvenient excuses? He was away for thirty dusty minutes, but his face was triumphant beneath the smudges when he returned.

‘Here’s something,’ he said. ‘It’s not much, but at least it shows we’re willing.’

He simpered again.

Chislenko ignored him and studied the musty file. Basically it was a record of maintenance expenses. Once the Imperial became the property of the State, it was State money that was required to replace broken windows, make good storm damage, renovate the heating system. Once again, he blessed the bureaucrats. His practised eye quickly scanned the sheets. There was nothing of interest till he reached 1934.

And there it was, July 1934, a sum of money, and typed alongside it, repair to lift.

‘Thanks,’ he said to the clerk. ‘Thanks a lot.’

‘My pleasure,’ said the clerk to the policeman’s rapidly retreating back. ‘Entirely, it seems.’

Now one thing remained to do. Again, a telephone call to his MVD colleagues in Leningrad would probably have been the quickest way, but the same objection remained as before. So instead he took a calculated risk and drove down Leningradsky Prospekt till he reached Pravda Street, where the offices of the great newspaper of the same name were situated.

His application to examine copies of the paper for July 1934 was greeted with the bored resentment which is the Muscovite’s conditioned response to almost any request for help or information, but at least he was not required to produce any authorization other than his MVD card.

Seated at a rough wooden table, he began his search.

His first discovery was that in 1934 the thirteenth of July had also fallen on a Friday.

He found the report he was looking for printed three days later. Probably in the impatient West it would have been in the very next edition, but wise Mother Russia always takes time to weigh carefully what her children may safely be told, what is best kept from them.

This was a small report, easily missed. It merely stated a man had been killed in an unfortunate accident at the May Day Centre on July 13th. For some reason the lift had jammed between the ninth and tenth floors, but the indicator had continued to function. Thinking the lift had arrived, the accident victim had opened the outer door on the seventh floor and stepped into the shaft before he realized his error. The lift had then started to function again and medical evidence was not clear whether the fall had killed him or whether the descending lift had crushed him to death in the basement.

Chislenko swallowed hard. But it was not just the ghastliness of the story which twisted his stomach. It was the man’s name.

He was a rising light in the Leningrad Party, a valued friend and associate of the famous Sergei Kirov.

His name was Fyodor Bunin.

Chislenko called for the man in charge of the archives.

‘Do you have a copy of the Encyclopædia of Historical Biography?’ he asked.

The man looked as if he’d have liked to deny this, or at least to say that it was nothing to do with him if they’d got one or not. But something in Chislenko’s expression made him reply with only token surliness, ‘I expect so,’ and go and fetch it.

It was the latest edition, though there was nothing to show that there had been previous editions. Anyone who had a full set would be able to chart all the ebbs and flows of the great power struggles which had shaken the State since its inception nearly seventy years before. But as private ownership of the work was forbidden by edict, private owners were few and far between.

Chislenko thumbed through the bulky tome till he found Bunin. It was a sign of something, he didn’t know what, that Bunin the novelist and Nobel Prize Winner, who chose to live in Paris after the Revolution, actually merited a few lines. This contrasted with a page and a half on Boris Bunin, Head of the MVD, the Ministry of the Interior. His star was clearly in the ascendant, so much so that its light had spilled over to illuminate the brief life and minor eminence of his elder brother, Fyodor, whose promising career had been nipped off by a tragic accident.

According to the Encyclopædia, in the atmosphere of growing distrust in the early ’thirties between Stalin and his powerful henchmen, Sergei Kirov, Party Leader in Leningrad, Fyodor Bunin’s voice had been one of the few influences towards conciliation and compromise. Young though he was (only 25 at his death) he had the ear of both leaders and was widely regarded as one of tomorrow’s men. With his death any vague possibility of reconciliation between the opposing forces had disappeared, and a few months later Kirov’s assassination had signalled the beginning of the Great Terror.

Chislenko finished reading and closed the volume with a snap that made the archivist purse his lips in irritation. On his desk a telephone rang and the man glowered at Chislenko as if that too was his fault, but the Inspector did not notice.

Everything in this case seemed to lure him into greater peril. To be found pursuing a ghost as if he believed in it would do his career no good at all, but to offend the sensibility, as well as the sense, of his own MVD Minister by suggesting that this was the ghost of his own dearly beloved brother might well destroy it.

The best, the only thing to do was to tiptoe quietly away and never again mention the Leningrad accident.

‘Inspector!’

He realized the archivist was digging his finger into his shoulder as if he’d been trying to attract his attention for some while.

‘Yes?’

‘It is for you,’ said the archivist triumphantly.

He evidently meant the telephone.

Chislenko rose and went to it.

‘Chislenko,’ he said.

‘Kedin here. Look, you’d better get back, quick as you can. Serebrianikov’s in the Procurator’s office and he wants to see you.’

‘I’m on my way,’ said Chislenko. ‘Hold on though, Kedin …’

‘Yes?’

‘How did you know where to contact me?’

‘Serebrianikov said we would get you at the Pravda building. Why do you ask?’