Well, at least I didn’t destabilize the new regime. “Mr. Smith” will be relieved.
The door opened and three men came in, the two who had been beating him and a slender man with glasses.
“He’s a doctor,” the Mongol said. “He’s going to examine you.”
The doctor probed quickly, deftly. Like many medical men who go into the service of the doomed — prisons, the military — he looked a little defeated. Perhaps he had an ethos, and self-hatred was defeating him. When he prodded the cracked ribs and Tarp cried out, he showed no sympathy. He made notes.
“Twenty minutes,” he said.
They took him down to the tiled room and beat him again. When the doctor came in, Tarp was lying with his face almost on the metal drain cover. There was a smear of blood along the floor where he had pulled his right cheek, trying to get up.
“You have made him bleed,” the doctor said. “Do you never do as you are told?” He put an astringent on the cut and examined Tarp again. Tarp wanted to ask how he was doing, but he knew he would get no answer.
“Take him upstairs.”
He hobbled along, holding himself up on the iron railings, as if he were making his way along a pair of parallel bars. He had been kicked in the right thigh and he had trouble walking now. One of them hit his buttocks with the sap to make him go faster.
The doctor told him to lie down on the cot, and then he began to fill a syringe. “For the pain,” he said.
Tarp knew better than that. The other two had to hold him. He felt the contents of the syringe go into the muscle, stinging and spreading. Twenty minutes later he was having trouble breathing.
Perhaps it had looked like an opportunity to try out a new biological agent. His nose was so filled he could not breathe through it; his sinuses pounded; his chest felt small and dry and he could never draw enough air into it. His body temperature fell and he thought that he was losing his strength and his will. When he tried to get up so he could go to the corner and relieve himself, he could not stand.
“Take him to room seven.”
Tarp had been asleep. His nightmares had been dreadful, filled with an omnipotent, many armed Maxudov. He looked up at the doctor with hunted eyes. The doctor did not look into his eyes but put a stethoscope to his chest instead. Tarp could not feel its cold touch. He wanted to say that he could not breathe, but his mouth was dry and his tongue was thick and unusable.
“Don’t make him go too fast. The heart is weak now.”
They almost had to carry him. He was shivering. Twice he nearly fell, and only their hands under his arms kept him from going down. Their faces loomed horribly at him like things from dreams, all eyes and wrinkled foreheads. He understood after he had thought about it for a while that they were wearing surgical masks.
He had to go up one flight of metal stairs and down a corridor. There was a room there with a varnished door. Inside were a wood desk and five wood chairs. There was a recorder’s machine on a small table and a typewriter on the desk, but nobody was there to use them. There was no telephone. The walls were bare of decoration, painted mustard below and brown above shoulder height. It was like a room where people had to wait for state employees to process papers for mundane things like auto licenses. The banality of evil.
There was a short man standing in the room. He had curly gray hair and a dark, almost black mustache. He wore an almost black suit whose tightness suggested powerful shoulders and the beginning of a belly. His nose had a bump below the bridge and another at the end between broadly flared nostrils, below which were very deep nasolabial folds so that he always looked as if he detected a bad smell. He could have been a New York cabdriver or a Paris union organizer, but he was Mikhail Beranyi, the chief of Department V.
“Put him in a chair.”
Tarp felt himself pushed to the right. His supports left him and he sank down, to find himself sitting in a straight wood chair.
The doctor muttered something and showed Beranyi a piece of paper. Next he handed him a surgical mask, which he helped him to tie behind his head. Beranyi made a gesture with his hand, and the others left the room.
“Tell me your name,” he said.
Tarp tried to speak. No sound wanted to form in his throat. “Ta—” He took a breath. “Tarp.” He shivered violently.
“Tell me in Russian why you are in Moscow.”
Beranyi was simply trying to find if he could talk and think. He knew all these answers, as Tarp had known the answers to so many of the questions he had asked the others.
“I came — to — look for — look for—” He had to swallow. He sucked air in, trying to fill his burning lungs. “Maxudov. Stolen plutonium.”
“Good. I am Beranyi. You have already guessed that. You wanted to meet with me; well, we meet. I am not like the others, you see. I do not choose to tell you anything. Instead, I choose that you tell me. Once you have told me things, you will be quite safe. But you understand your position here. You are alone. You can hardly walk; you are very sick. If you do not work with me, you will be beaten. And there are worse things, to be sure.” He passed his right hand over his cheek, making a scratchy sound that Tarp associated with not shaving. Maybe it was late in the day, or even night. “Tell me now in Russian that you understand.”
“I understand.”
“Good. Now, we begin.”
He pulled a chair closer and sat down, taking a dingy notebook from a pocket as he did so. He uncapped a plastic pen. He took a pair of plastic-rimmed glasses from a case and put them on. “Begin with Telyegin. You saw him when, please?”
“Telyegin?” He had to concentrate fiercely to remember who Telyegin was. Old man in the wheelchair. He hated me. In the dacha. Yes, that one. He began to talk, the words disjointed and his voice hoarse, but Beranyi paid no attention to his condition. He made notes. Tarp shook so badly sometimes that he thought he would fall out of the chair. Beranyi called the others into the room and said, “Do something with him, he keeps falling.” The Mongol put a chair on each side of Tarp and draped his arms over them so that they supported him. Beranyi jerked his head and the man left.
“Feodor Strisz next. That is correct, is it not — Strisz next?”
Tarp fought for air and could manage only panting breaths. His head was down on his chest. His arms were shaking on the chairbacks, yet there was a film of sweat matting the hair on his chest and belly, as if he had been rubbed with grease.
Beranyi went on. He would let Tarp talk until he ran out of voice; then he would backtrack and ask a question from another direction. The character named Strisz in the Theatrical Novel — who had brought that up? Why? Did Strisz laugh then? Did Strisz mention Cuba? What did he say? Why did he say that? What was his tone of voice?
Tarp woke up in his cell. He did not remember it ending, but here he was. Maybe I just stopped. Maybe I died.
He was not shivering now; in fact, he was hot. He had new pains across his shoulders that were not the result of the beating, but of fever.
Tarp put a foot on the floor, then a hand, and then he let himself down and crawled to the corner. He squatted over the hole, smelling the sickness of his body. There was no paper, no towel. He slowly raised his left hand to the faucet above him, only to find that he lacked the strength to turn it on. He gave up and crawled back to the iron cot but had to lie next to it on the floor because he could not get up on it.
This isn’t fatal, he told himself. This is some kind of flu. They do ads about it on television. Everybody gets it. He knew that that was not quite true. He had never been this sick. Common ailment. Keeps doctors in business. Keeps doctors’ wives in fur coats. Keeps doctors in the Republican party. Without flu, doctors would have to go on welfare. Very common. What he had was not common, but it might become so if the Soviets used it as an ABC agent. Perhaps they would try it out in Afghanistan or Southeast Asia, where respiratory infections really cut a swath. Take two aspirin and go to bed. He looked up at the underside of the bed he couldn’t get into.