A small sting in his neck. He wouldn't have noticed it amid the blizzard of pain, were it not for the fact that Blokhin had grabbed one of his torn ears just before he jabbed the needle in. This was unexpected. Death by injection. It was not standard. It was…
A trickle of soft, indescribably sweet pleasure. No, it wasn't that, either. It was… an absence of pain. It spread from the site of the small sting, flowing down his spine and out along his thin, scabrous arms and legs. It was like slipping into a warm bath. Even his mind, which had been as badly abused as his body, found itself floating on a summer breeze, drifting away from the horrors of his torture. The beatings remained in his memory, but now he felt so disconnected from them that they were as easily endured as the thousands of beatings and murders he himself had ordered over the years. Other people's misery, he'd learned, was a much lighter burden than one's own.
Even when the guard flipped him over roughly, so that his skull hit the floor with a crack and the glare of the cell's naked lightbulb shone into his dying eye, he did not care.
"So, Nikita Sergeyevich, you have lost weight. The regimen here agrees with you, da?" That was a new voice. A familiar one.
Khrushchev blinked the tears from his eye. He tried to wipe them away, forgetting his broken fingers, but the guards still pinned him to the cold floor. Each crushed a wrist beneath one boot, and they held long rubber truncheons in their hands. He didn't care. They could do as they pleased. It's a free country. The thought made him chuckle in spite of himself.
"Is there something funny, my friend. Why do you laugh so?"
Khrushchev coughed up clots of dark blood and a few broken pieces of his teeth as he regarded his latest visitor across a gulf he could not fathom. Beria stood there like a snake in human form. He had stepped from behind Blokhin, appearing without warning.
His former friend, now chief tormentor, wore a general's uniform and carried a small cosh. Khrushchev recognized it from previous beatings. Early on, in this new phase of their relationship, he had repeatedly wet himself when it had appeared in Beria's thin, white hands. Now it was just a curious artifact. He didn't even flinch when the NKVD boss took three long strides toward him and bent down to smash him across the jaw with it. An awareness of blinding pain flashed through his thoughts, but at no stage did it connect with his concerns. Then the pain faded, and he did not care that it had been visited upon him.
Nikita Khrushchev, despite the fact that he was teetering on the edge of mortal existence, found himself fascinated. What on earth were they doing to him?
Beria just smiled. "I can see that you are intrigued, comrade. But before I can satisfy your curiosity, I wonder, would you mind signing this confession for me? I know it has been a matter of some difficulty between us. But I thought I might seek your indulgence one last time. The Vozhd is pressing me for a resolution. You understand, my friend."
Khrushchev did. After all, they had known each other for years. A few years anyway, which counted for something in the charnel house known as the Soviet Union. It was Beria who had warned him off his friendship with Yezhov, just before the perverted little monster had been snatched up and fed into the meat grinder. Why, that made him closer to the NKVD chief than poor Blokhin over there, who had once served loyally under Yezhov, and nearly died for it.
As Beria squatted beside him and motioned for one of the guards to step off Khrushchev's arm, the fallen Communist felt something that was akin to love well up within his breast. It was suddenly very important that he make a gesture of good faith for his old friend.
What did it matter what had passed between them? He didn't care that he had been made to lie in his own excrement while Blokhin and Beria beat him on the soles of his feet with iron bars. He did not care that they had tied him to a chair and beaten his legs until they were black masses, then returned to beat the bruises so that it felt like boiled water had been poured over them. It was no longer even a concern that Beria had gouged out his eye with a gloved thumb, and then crushed the ruined eyeball as it hung on his cheek.
He didn't shudder as he recalled the memory. He had seen worse, and had ordered worse things done.
"What is it I'm to sign?" he croaked.
"You forget?" asked Beria. He seemed disappointed. "It is your confession. That you worked as a German agent to undermine the defense of the Southwestern Front."
Khrushchev's thoughts moved as slowly through his mind as a child's balloon in the air of a hot summer's day. He recalled the rout and encirclement at Kharkov only dimly. It was from his past life. Before Lubianka.
"I do not remember so well, Lavrenty Pavlovich," he confessed. "But I am quite certain I was not a German agent."
Beria smiled, a gesture that fell on Khrushchev like a shaft of spring sunlight. "It matters not. Will you do me this favor anyway? Will you sign this for me? For the Vozhd?"
Sinking deeper into narcotic lassitude, Khrushchev was ashamed of himself for quibbling. With a great effort he took the confession in the broken claw of his free hand. The weight suddenly came off his other arm, and a fountain pen appeared. He could not concentrate sufficiently to read the document, but he had seen enough of them over the years. He knew it mattered not.
His signature was barely legible, and he smeared blood on the paper.
A dreamy, almost happy indolence had taken hold of Khrushchev.
"Fascinating," Beria said quietly as he turned to leave.
Khrushchev felt himself forever tottering on the edge of blessed sleep, but he never quite tumbled over. With a great effort he managed to rouse himself to speak. "Tell me, Lavrenty Pavlovich," he croaked at Beria's retreating back. "When your time comes, will you be able to withstand the pain?"
The NKVD chief stopped and turned, regarded Khrushchev with the flat curiosity of a viper sizing up a small meal. "This is my time," he replied. "It has already come."
Blokhin moved to bar the door, and the two guards hoisted Khrushchev up by the arms. He knew without being told what was about to happen. He would be taken from the cell and placed in a Black Crow, driven a short distance to the killing house in Varsonofyevsky Lane and into the courtyard where stood a low, square building. The floor was concrete, just like his cell. It sloped down slightly toward one wall constructed of thick wooden logs. Taps and hoses were provided to wash away the blood. He would be placed against the wall and shot in the back of the head by Blokhin, who personally undertook the most important executions. Then his body would be placed in a metal box and driven to a nearby crematorium. Most likely his ashes would later be dumped in the mass grave at the Donskoi Cemetery.
He didn't care. Nothing mattered any longer. Not Stalin. Not Beria. Certainly not the Party or the revolution, or the tens of thousands he had sent to be killed by men like Blokhin. As they dragged him down the narrow, damp corridor he could raise neither self-pity nor hope, anger nor terror. Nothing really interested him.
Not even the odd sight of a woman in a naval uniform with a British insigne sewn onto the shoulder. She was being dragged, unconscious, out of a cell three doors down from his. At first he thought the woman had been beaten black and blue like him, but then he realized she was dark-skinned. However, her swollen, battered face did testify to a number of savage assaults, such as he had endured.
He supposed he should have wondered at her presence. What with everything that had happened. But the closest he came to curiosity was a very brief, almost preconscious moment of trying to recall what the letters HMS stood for in the name HMS Vanguard. He read that on a small cloth tag on her uniform as they passed. It reminded him vaguely of the initials VMN, standing for the "Highest Measure of Punishment." Somewhere in Lubianka there was a file with those letters written next to his name, probably in Stalin's own hand.