4715 stood before a shower stall in the guards' quarters. He stripped quickly, stepped inside and turned on the blast of hot water. It scalded blissfully, grinding off years of filth. He shivered in pleasure, found a rough bar of soap and lathered. Possibly they were readying him for his own hanging; it didn't matter. This was worth dying for.
"Speshnev, Speshnev, Speshnev," came a voice familiar to 4715 from a thousand or so years ago. 4715 blinked hard in the newness of it all; yes, his name. His name spoken publicly, loudly, affectionately, when to utter it had been forbidden for so long. It was a weirdness so profound he had no idea how to comprehend it, but that drama was dwarfed by the next, when he encountered the speaker himself, large and blustery, but with shrewd eyes and glossy hair that only partially softened the brutality of his features.
It was his mentor, his teacher, his sponsor, his betrayer, his interrogator, his most reluctant torturer, his sentencer, the famous wizard of the service, one P. Pushkin, once a university professor and chess champion, then a secret soldier in the wars of Red conquest. P. Pushkin was the warrior incarnate, a kind of natural cossack who saw all opponents as manifestations of pure evil, fit only for obliteration. Though brilliant and even charming, his flaw and his genius was that he was without moderation in all things. He wore the dress uniform of a senior general of NKVD, and a chestful of ribbons that dwarfed even Senior Sergeant Koblisky's.
"How are you, my good man?" Pushkin inquired warmly, giving the spindly prisoner a bearish hug, as if Speshnev had just returned from a week in the country.
"Well, I am fine," said the man named Speshnev. "I just ate a delicious cockroach. I won it at cards from a Polish saboteur named 6732."
"I see you've lost none of your edge. That's Speshnev, always at the top of his game, no matter the circumstance. Come, sit down, have some tea. A cigarette? No, cigarettes are probably meaningless to you at this stage of your socialist evolution. I'm hearing now they may even be bad for your health, so you were probably lucky to find them unavailable."
He smiled, flipped a ciggie from a pack of American Luckies, and made a show of putting the pack away. Then he smiled, the cigarette wobbling in the tightening of his lips in that broad smile, and handed the package to Speshnev, who quite naturally adored cigarettes even if he hadn't had one in years.
Speshnev internally cursed himself for his weakness of character, but he could no more turn down a cigarette than the shower, or the fresh clothes and the actual leather shoes he now wore.
The lighter flared. It came to the cigarette Speshnev had inserted in his own lips; he drew the fire to himself, through the vessel of the tobacco, and his lungs flooded with the pure drug of pleasure. His head buzzed, his senses blurred, and for a second, he was happy.
Was this some plot? Make him see the things he had disciplined himself to forget. Get him to taste pleasure, comfort, warmth, which had all but ceased to exist except in the zone of the theoretical? Then to plunge him back to the bitter nothingness of the barracks? To return him to zekness? That would be beyond endurance. He would hang himself, there could be no other way.
"I know you may have some resentments, Speshnev," said Pushkin. "It can't have been pleasant out here, no indeed. And though no official apology will ever be uttered, I think you will begin to see people who will admit that mistakes were made. A shake-up now and then is good, of course, but the Boss went too far. I told him myself, yes, I did. Boss, I said, I'm all for discipline and commitment and keeping the fellows on their toes, but don't you think you've sent too many away? Well, you know the Boss, he always played his cards close to his chest. He just smiled in that mysterious way and went about his program."
This, of course, was apostasy; it would have earned any speaker a trip to the cellars instantly and a committee meeting with a Tokarev bullet behind the ear by dinnertime. But the Boss was dead; new things were in the works.
So Speshnev merely enjoyed his fabulous cigarette, feeling its smoke in his lungs, and drank the tea and felt the warmth everywhere.
Pushkin leaned forward conspiratorially. It was as if he were afraid men were listening and reports would be made, when in fact, if he so wished, he could order all the men in the camp shot.
"I will tell you this, Speshnev," he said in a whisper. "You may even have been luckier to be out here, though it can't have been fun. No, but Moscow in the last years of the Boss's madness was a terrible place. The fear, the paranoia, the betrayal, the burning out of whole bureaucracies, sometime three and four times, the brutal whimsy of the Black Marias as they took this one and left that one. No, it wasn't fun. A fellow hardly knew what to do. Here at least things were clear."
Pushkin could not have believed this even for a second: he was a man without illusions, a practical man in all habits of mind. It pleased him, however, to utter the absurd and know that it would be accepted without argument.
But Speshnev could not help himself. Merrily he said, "Yes, many a time, General, I woke at four in the morning for the long trudge across the snowy plains to work on that infernal road to the North Pole, telling myself, 'I am the luckiest man on the face of the earth, and thank the stars I have General Pushkin in my corner, looking out for me!' "
Pushkin ignored the irony, as was his whimsy of the morning.
"Speshnev, it's with great pleasure I have come all this way to announce your rehabilitation! Speshnev, so hard have I fought for justice in your case, so fiercely have I waged a campaign! I never forgot you, Speshnev, when all the others did. It is to me, Pushkin, that you should genuflect in thanks. I, Pushkin, give you your life back!"
"Does this mean-unlimited access to cockroaches?"
"Absolutely. Now listen. There is a county, Speshnev, that has long been oppressed. Its trajectory is toward chaos, crime, filth, degradation. It is owned lock, stock and barrel by American criminal and business interests, who use it as their whorehouse, shitter, and sugar factory."
"Actually, it sounds delightful."
"It is. Quite. The senoritas! Muchas bonitas!"
"I take it this is a Latin country?"
"The island paradise known as Cuba."
"Excellent senoritas."
"As there were in Spain. Same stock, actually, though with a tinge of negro blood for that extra paprika in bed."
"In my mind, I'm there already."
"Speshnev, there is a boy. We have him spotted. He is clever, committed, ambitious, unbearably courageous. He could be the leader."
"I see."
"You will study the documents on the train back to Moscow with me. But you already see where this is going."
"I see where I am going."
"This boy. He must be seduced, smoothed, trained, aimed, disciplined, taught to expect success. As he is currently situated, well, it's that Latin temperament. Romantic, unrealistic, too quick to act, too slow to think. He needs a mentor, a senior fellow of wisdom and experience. Speshnev, with your magic ways, your charm, your ruthlessness, I think this is a task for you. It was made to order. It is your redemption, your future, your rehabilitation."
"So I'm to help the regime that imprisoned me twice. Eagerly, willingly, aggressively?"
"Of course. There's only a paradox if you build it yourself. You can have a model contradiction in which we punish you unjustly, almost to the point of death, certainly to the point of misery, then we demand heroic service of you. A lesser man might find a source of resentment somewhere in the equation. It takes a great man to make the contradiction irrelevant on the strength of his will alone. Speshnev, I won't even ask you. Because of course I know the answer."
"There's really not an alternative, is there? Not after tea and showers and American tobacco. Who could say no?"