“Well, as you like. If you don’t want to cooperate, we have other methods.”
Alov got to his feet and put his head outside the door. “Bring Mr. Rogov’s daughter here!”
The prisoner’s face fell at the words. “You have no right to touch the child!”
“The fate of your little Chinese girl depends entirely on you,” said Alov curtly. “We can arrange for her to be sent to a good orphanage, or we can send her to one full of TB sufferers.”
He took a piece of paper and a pencil out of his pocket and put them on the table. “Here. Write out a voluntary confession. I need everything from the beginning: where you were born, what you did before the revolution, when you met Kupina and under what circumstances. I want to know who hired you and who briefed you. Don’t mess with us, or you know what will happen.”
Rogov stared at him, dumbstruck. “You mean torture?”
“What sort of a word is that to use—‘torture’?” Alov said, shaking his head reproachfully. “It’s you in the bourgeois world that torture people and execute them. We use ‘socialist defense measures.’”
Alov left feeling extremely pleased with himself now that he had put the fear of God into his “client.” Well, he thought, let him stew for a while in his own juice.
He rang Diana Mikhailovna again. “Did you find out about the numbers?”
“Yes—they all match,” she replied. “They’re our banknotes.”
Alov beamed at the news. If Rogov had got his hands on some of the money stolen from Reich, he probably had an idea what had happened to the rest.
Unfortunately, the team sent off to Rogov’s apartment in Chistye Prudy had come back with nothing. Neither Rogov’s child nor his servant had been at home.
Agitated at this setback, Alov could sense an agonizing tightness growing in his chest. For God’s sake, when would all this torment end? There had to be some sort of medicine that could help cure his sick lungs!
In desperation, he attacked the OGPU agents who had just returned from Rogov’s house. “What’s the matter with you? Couldn’t you have spoken to his neighbors? Isn’t there some sort of housing officer or yard keeper there?”
They replied that the yard keeper had been in a drunken stupor while the office on the ground floor had been shut for the anniversary celebrations.
It was eleven o’clock at night.
Once again, Alov peered through the spy hole into the cell. Rogov was sitting quite still, staring down at a blank sheet of paper. His fringe, slicked back with brilliantine that morning, now hung forward into his eyes, and the cuffs of his shirt, bare of cuff links, protruded comically from the sleeves of his dinner jacket.
Alov made an effort to gather his thoughts. It would have been far simpler to have the information he needed from his “client” with the help of the little Chinese girl, but they didn’t have her. An ordinary interrogation could drag on for hours, but if he called in specialists, there would be screams and hysterics. Alov felt quite bad enough already without that.
He was racked by a fresh fit of coughing.
“Do you need a drink of water?” asked the duty officer with sympathy.
Alov shook his head and made his way to the exit, holding on to the wall.
He did not have the strength to handle Rogov’s case, but he could not hand it over to one of his colleagues; then the reward for bringing the affair to light would go to somebody else.
I still have time to lie down for a bit, thought Alov. Right now, Drachenblut was out at the dacha of the People’s Commissar for Defense drinking. Afterward, he would be sleeping it off for a while. So, in any case, there was nobody to report to at the moment.
“Transfer Rogov to a general cell,” he told the duty officer. “I’ll deal with him later.”
Klim was taken by prison guards along a dimly lit corridor. All his emotions were dulled. It was as if he had been drugged with something foul and could not wake up from a nightmare.
But still, Kitty had not been brought in. Did that mean she had escaped the OGPU? And if so, how? Where could she have gone?
The rasp of locks and bolts behind him was like the gnashing of iron teeth.
It must have been Galina who had reported me to the OGPU, thought Klim.
How much did they know about him? Just about everything, he supposed. Galina must have noted down every careless word he had let slip.
They reached a cell with a small barred window in the door, and the guards told Klim to stop.
One of them turned the light switch and opened the door. “In you go.”
The cell was fiercely heated. A broad platform ran around the room, and on it, prisoners in underwear were lying with their feet to the center of the room. There were two small barred windows close to the ceiling, a basin, and a galvanized bucket with a lid next to the door.
One of the prisoners raised a bald head. “Look—fresh meat!”
The guard shoved Klim in the back. “Lie down and go to sleep. This instant!”
The door slammed shut, and the light went out. Klim stood in the middle of the cell, dazed and uncertain.
“What’s with the fancy dress?” asked the bald prisoner. “Are you some sort of a magician? What are you in for then?”
“I don’t know,” said Klim.
“Well, if you don’t know, you must be a counter-revolutionary,” said another man with a laugh. “Ten years of hard labor—or a bullet in the basement.”
The prisoners began to stir and complain.
“Keep the noise down!”
“Shut up!”
“Go to hell!”
“Over here, Mister Magician,” Klim heard a man calling with a strong Caucasus accent. “Lie down here.”
Klim moved forward, felt with his hand for the edge of the platform, and sat down.
The atmosphere of the prison—the heat, the stench, the snoring of the men all cramped together—closed over Klim’s head like the black water of a murky millpond.
“You have nothing with you?” asked his neighbor. “What will you sleep on? Do you have a spoon or a bowl?”
“I was arrested on the street,” said Klim.
He spread his coat on the platform and lay down, appalled by the feel of bodies on either side of him.
Only recently, looking at the emaciated and tormented figure of Elkin, Klim could not have imagined for a moment that he would end up in his place. He was used to thinking of himself as an observer, not a participant. Klim Rogov could not be arrested or frightened, still less tortured. He was sacred and inviolable.
And now he had joined another category of people—those whose lives meant next to nothing. Slaves to be sent to their death, felling trees or working in mines.
Klim pictured himself as a camp inmate in a padded jacket and felt his hair stand on end.
“Hey, Mister Magician!” he heard the man from Caucasus call out again. “In this cell, you can’t be a coward for more than twenty minutes, and you’ve already used up ten.”
Klim shuddered. “Who are you?” he asked.
“My name is Ahmed. Now, you listen. You start feeling sorry for yourself in here, and it’s the end. Have you been in battle? I have. In a war, you know you can be killed, but you just keep galloping forward and don’t think about it—you attack. You make decisions! It’s the same in prison. You say to yourself, ‘Only I can decide whether to be afraid.’”
Klim was not in any state to hear mantras for survival. “What if they torture me?” he hissed through his teeth.
“Then you don’t think of it as pain. I got a bullet in my chest in the war. I ran about for half a day without even noticing. So long as a man does not dig his own grave, he can survive anything.”