“Let’s go,” he said again.
They were using yet another dark sedan that they had pulled up under the trees. There was a driver in front, and the two guards got in on each side of him in the back. Tarp suspected Beranyi of having chosen them for their looks in order to shake him before the interview began.
They drove with that disdain for ordinary traffic laws that often marks policemen. It was dusk. Lights were on everywhere. There were deep pools of slush along the roads, and people stepped back as they roared along, trying to avoid the ice water that splashed shoulder high. They would be standing there, trying to wipe the water and the dirty ice from their clothes, muttering about bigshots and Party favoritism; would they have understood if they had known he was American? Being good Soviet citizens, they probably would have the sense not to try to understand.
It was only when they passed the Dzerzhinsky statue that Tarp understood they were headed for KGB headquarters itself. He was surprised. Beranyi was proving to be the only one audacious enough or secure enough to meet him on home ground. The others had felt a diffidence about being seen where, presumably, they were most themselves.
The car turned into the wide entrance from the square and drove along between two buildings, turned again and went through a small parking lot in which Tarp could see the white blurs of signs reserving each space. The driver flashed the lights and a door opened upward, exactly like a suburban American garage door. Beyond it was a tunnel through part of an older building, and, at the far end, a courtyard that looked black in the near darkness. The driver spun the wheel and brought the car to a stop in a reserved space next to a gloomy and ancient doorway.
Tarp had not seen it before, but he knew what it was by instinct: the old Lubyanka Prison.
Going right to the source.
The four of them, two in front, one in back with Tarp, walked through the doorway and along a brick corridor where the four sets of feet gave off noises that rang in a way to jangle the nerves. They stopped at a doorway above which a red bulb glowed; when one man knocked, a grill opened, somebody said something. The door opened and a green bulb went on.
The driver stayed behind. Tarp and the two men who had ridden in the back with him crossed a metal grating as, behind them, the heavy steel door thudded shut. There were metal doors on each side now, then a metal stairway that seemed to plunge down into an open well in the building. They directed him downward.
I’ve bought it, Tarp thought.
Beranyi was proving even more audacious than he had guessed. Beranyi was going to take control.
The metal stairway led to a concrete floor at the bottom of a large open area two stories high. Doors opened from it at each level. High up were lights in factory shades, but their light was inadequate. Any light would have been inadequate.
The Mongol had a key to one of the doors.
Inside was a room with a tile floor and white tiles running up the walls to head height. In the center of the room was a round drain with a pierced metal cover, and the floor sloped slightly to it from all four walls.
The mongol went in. He beckoned to Tarp.
Tarp started to speak. “I—”
The beefy one hit him from behind between the shoulders, knocking the breath out of him and sending him forward and down. He caught himself, but, clumsy in the heavy overcoat, he stumbled; another blow put him inside the tiled room. The Mongol swung his right hand, in which Tarp glimpsed something long and dark; it struck his head with a thud like the closing of a door. It was a leather sap, weighted with bird shot to deliver a crushing blow without breaking the skin.
“Strip,” the beefy one said.
“I protest,” he had time to say before they hit him again. The beefy one locked his arms behind him and the Mongol opened the overcoat and broke three ribs with a kick. Tarp tried to kick back and gave it up after a punch in the groin. He was sensible enough that he was in the hands of two experts, and fighting them would be futile.
They stripped him and went away with the clothes. They came back after half an hour and beat him again. Tarp was afraid that one of the broken ribs would puncture a lung and he covered his chest, and they began to work on his back and kidneys. One of them, in swinging him around, hit his mouth, and they both stopped and looked worriedly at his upper lip.
“Is he bleeding?”
“Mostly inside the mouth.”
“I missed. The fucker ducked.”
“It was stupid.”
“You saw it. He ducked.”
“They won’t like it.”
They pounded his back with lead-filled, phallic-looking saps and then left him again.
Two hours later he was moved to a cell on the level above. When he did not move fast enough, they beat his back and buttocks. The flesh there, already bruised, was excruciatingly tender.
He was alone in the prison, so far as he could tell. There might have been thirty cells around the central opening, but he heard no sounds and never saw another person. It had been reserved entirely for him, he supposed. There would be no record of his having been there and no witnesses except the absolutely essential, probably absolutely loyal few.
The cell was cold. There was an iron cot with a thin mattress but no bedclothes. In the corner was a water tap and, below it, a three-by-six-inch hole in the concrete — the toilet. There was no window, but high up in the wall opposite the steel door was a metal grate. In the middle of the ceiling were three light bulbs covered with a basket of metal mesh, like the lights in an old gymnasium. The walls were scarred and painted over so much that the once square holes in the gratings were almost round and partly closed. It was a very old part of the Lubyanka, probably a very historic part, in which some very good people had died.
He tried wrapping himself in the mattress, but it was sewn to the cot with wire. He lay on it and shivered.
Beranyi. It seemed disappointingly clear. Beranyi, all the time. He wondered if he had been set up in some way by all of them, to give the appearance of an investigation that would end with his disappearance. Perhaps the word was already out in Moscow that he had disappeared. Where? Where did people disappear in Moscow? A thousand places. Anywhere. Or maybe it was Beranyi working all by himself, audacious enough to say that one of the others had done it and Tarp had never reached him. I sent my car to get him, Beranyi might say; he was already gone. We were going to discuss this terrible Maxudov business like civilized men over supper at the Slavansky Bazaar. The Guards men at the house said a car came for him, pretending to be from me. Not mine, of course. Thugs. Criminals hired for the purpose. And so on.