After a day without interrogation, Nikitin came. Shrewd eyes in a round face, the senior investigator for Government Liaison regarded his colleague and former pupil with sighs of disappointment.
‘The last time we saw each other you pointed a gun at me,’ Nikitin said. ‘That was almost a month ago. You look a little calmed down now.’
‘I don’t know what I look like. I don’t have a mirror.’
‘How do you shave?’
‘They bring me an electric razor with my breakfast and take it away with the tray.’ Given somebody to talk to, even Nikitin, he felt positively effusive. And there had been a time years ago when Nikitin was senior investigator for Homicide that they’d been close.
‘Well, I can’t stay.’ Nikitin produced an envelope. ‘The office is in an uproar, as you can understand. They sent me over with these for you to sign.’
In the envelope were three copies of a letter of resignation from the prosecutor’s office for reasons of health. Arkady signed them, almost sad that Nikitin had to rush off.
‘I get the impression,’ Nikitin whispered, ‘that you’re giving them quite a wrestle. It’s not easy to interrogate an interrogator, eh?’
‘I guess not.’
‘Look, you’re a clever boy, don’t be modest. Maybe you should have listened to your uncle Ilya a little bit more, though. I tried to steer you right. It’s all my fault; I should have been firmer. Anything I can do to help, you just ask.’
Arkady sat down. He felt immensely depressed and tired, and grateful that Nikitin was taking the time to stay. Nikitin was now sitting on the bed, although Arkady couldn’t recall seeing him move.
‘Ask me,’ Nikitin suggested.
‘Irina . . .’
‘What about her?’
It was difficult for Arkady to concentrate. All the secrets he had hoarded pressed with urgency for Nikitin’s sympathetic ear. His only other visitor that day had been a nurse who had given him an injection just before Nikitin’s arrival.
‘I’m the only one who can help you,’ Nikitin said.
‘They don’t know . . .’
‘Yes?’
Arkady felt nauseated and dizzy. Nikitin’s hand, as small and plump as a baby’s, rested on his.
‘What you need now is a friend,’ Nikitin said.
‘The nurse—’
‘Is no friend of yours. She gave you something to make you talk.’
‘I know.’
‘Don’t tell them anything, boychik,’ Nikitin urged.
Sodium aminate, Arkady guessed; that was what they used.
‘Quite a lot of it, too.’
He knows what I’m thinking, Arkady told himself.
‘It’s a very strong narcotic. You can’t be held responsible for not having your usual control,’ Nikitin reassured him.
‘You didn’t have to bring the letters.’ Arkady made a point out of speaking distinctly and loudly. ‘No one needs those letters.’
‘Then you didn’t take a good look at them.’ Nikitin produced the envelope again and opened it for Arkady. ‘See?’
Blinking, Arkady reread the letters. They were confessions of all the crimes he had been accused of for the last week. ‘That’s not what I signed,’ he said.
‘They have your signature. I saw you sign them. Never mind.’ Nikitin tore the letters into halves and then quarters. ‘I don’t believe a word of it.’
‘Thank you,’ Arkady said gratefully.
‘I’m on your side; it’s us against them. Remember, I was the best interrogator of all, you remember that.’
Arkady remembered. Nikitin leaned forward confidentially and spoke softly into Arkady’s ear. ‘I came to warn you. They’re going to kill you.’
Arkady looked at the closed door. Its very flatness was ominous, a façade for the people on the other side.
‘After you’re dead, who’s going to help Irina?’ Nikitin asked. ‘Who’s going to know the truth?’
‘My report—’
‘Is to fool them, not your friends. Don’t think of yourself, think of Irina. Without me she’ll be all alone. Think how alone she’ll be.’
They probably wouldn’t even tell her he was dead, Arkady thought.
‘The only way she’ll know I’m afraid is if you tell me the truth,’ Nikitin explained.
There was no doubt that they were going to kill him; Arkady saw no escape from that. Maybe a fall from the window, an overdose of morphine, an injection of air. Who would look after Irina then?
‘We’re old friends,’ Nikitin said. ‘I’m your friend. I want to be your friend. Believe me, I’m your friend.’ He smiled like a buddha.
The rest of Arkady’s vision was tinged gray by the sodium aminate. He heard the collective breathing in the halls. The floor was far below his feet. Corpses wore paper slippers; they’d given him paper slippers. His feet were so white and sickly, what did the rest of him look like? His mouth was a pesthole of fear. He brought his fists up to his forehead. Not fear – insanity. Thinking as a process was impossible; better to tell everything now while he could. But he clamped his mouth over the words. A narcotic sweat broke from his skin, and he was afraid that words were coming from his pores. He brought his knees up tight together until they cramped, so that every orifice was shut. When he thought about Irina, the words would start to force their way out like a snake, so he thought about Nikitin – not the Nikitin beside him on the bed because that was an insistent friend who had torn up a confession, but the Nikitin of before. The old Nikitin was an elusive subject, slipping and teasing the short grasp of Arkady’s mind. The paranoia of the moment overwhelmed memory. The only man in the world he could trust was Nikitin, the Nikitin beside him insisted. He trembled and tried to cover his eyes and ears, working backward from Nikitin’s last words to the ones just before those, and so on, in this clumsy way examining the new Nikitin for a clue to the old.
‘I am your oldest and dearest and one friend,’ Nikitin said.
Arkady brought his hands down. Tears covered his face, but there was a glow of relief in his head. He raised one hand as if it held a gun and pulled an imaginary trigger.
‘What’s the matter?’ Nikitin asked.
Arkady didn’t speak because the words about Irina were still waiting to spring from his mouth. He smiled, though. Nikitin shouldn’t have mentioned the episode of the gun when he’d first arrived in Arkady’s room; that was the connection. He aimed at Nikitin’s face and pretended to fire again.
‘I’m your friend,’ Nikitin said with less conviction.
Arkady squeezed off a full magazine of invisible bullets, reloaded and fired some more. Something of his insanity penetrated Nikitin. After much protesting he fell silent; then, recoiling from Arkady’s empty hand, he edged from the bed. Like the Nikitin of old, he moved faster the closer he got to the door.
Chapter Two
At the start of the summer Arkady was moved to an estate in the country. It was an old aristocratic affair with a brave front of white columns and French doors, porticoes to glass conservatories, its own little church used as a garage, and a clay tennis court on which the guards played volleyball all the time. Arkady was free to wander where he wished as long as he returned in time for supper.
The first week a small plane touched down on the landing strip with a pair of interrogators, Major Pribluda, a mail pouch and such items as fresh meat and fruit that were available only from Moscow.
Interrogations took place twice a day in a conservatory. No plants were left except some giant rubber trees, hunched and as out of place as formal servants. Arkady sat in a wicker chair between the interrogators. One of them was a psychiatrist and the questions were clever; as usual when questioning is friendly, there was a smarmy bonhomie in the air.
During lunch on the third day Arkady encountered Pribluda alone in a garden. His jacket hung over the back of a wrought-iron chair, the major was cleaning his gun, gross fingers dexterously handling pins, springs and rag. He looked up in s
urprise when Arkady took the chair across the table.
‘What’s the matter?’ Arkady asked. ‘Why do they leave you out here?’
‘It’s not my job to question you,’ Pribluda said. His ugly, honest eyes had become a constant to Arkady, and a relief after a morning with the other officers the KGB had sent. ‘Anyway, they’re specialists; they know what they’re doing.’
‘Then why are you here?’
‘I volunteered.’
‘How long will you be here?’
‘As long as the interrogators are.’
‘You only brought a change of shirts; that’s not long,’ Arkady said.
Pribluda nodded and went on cleaning, developing a sweat in the sun. He hadn’t even rolled up his sleeves, although he worked so carefully that there was no danger of dirtying them with oil.
‘If it’s not your job to question me, what is your job?’ Arkady asked.
Pribluda pushed the gun’s slide and barrel assembly forward and out of the guides of the receiver. From the receiver he daintily picked out the subassembly and hammer mechanism. A stripped gun always struck Arkady as a cripple undressed.
‘You mean it’s your job to kill me, Major. Speak up – you volunteered.’
‘You speak about your life very lightly.’ Pribluda slipped the rounds out one by one from the magazine like lozenges.
‘That’s because it’s being treated lightly. If you’re going to shoot me when you run out of clean shirts, how serious can I be?’
Arkady didn’t believe that Pribluda would kill him. Pribluda had gladly volunteered to, no doubt, and was primed to do so hour by hour, but Arkady didn’t believe that it would happen. So the next morning when the interrogators and Pribluda rushed by car to the landing strip, Arkady followed the kilometer’s distance on foot. He arrived in time to see Pribluda outside the plane arguing furiously with the interrogators inside. The plane left without him, and he got back into the car. When the driver asked him if he wanted a ride back, Arkady answered that it was a nice day and he’d walk.
Except for the gentlest undulations the surrounding countryside was flat. In the morning sun his shadow stretched thirty meters along the road, the shadow of a rare tree over a hundred meters. There were few woods to speak of, mostly the occasional rubble and shag of berry bushes. Grass gone wild contained all manner of flowers and young grasshoppers bright as jade. Lying down in the grass, Arkady knew that he was seen by field glasses from the observation walk on top of the main house. He never thought of trying to escape.
Arkady and Pribluda ate at the only table set in a dining room of ghostly dustcloths. In his dirty clothes the major grew testy, loosening his shoulder holster and pulling his shirt away from his armpits. Arkady watched with interest. A man about to be shot always regards the shooter with great interest, and with the fatal shot indefinitely delayed, Arkady had an opportunity to study his would-be executioner closely.
‘How do you plan to kill me? From behind, the front? The head or the heart?’
‘The mouth,’ Pribluda said.
‘Outside the house? Inside? A bathroom is easy to clean.’
The major truculently refilled his glass with lemonade. No vodka was allowed at the house, and Arkady was the only one who didn’t miss it. After long days of volleyball the guards played table tennis late into the night to go to sleep.
‘Citizen Renko, you are no longer a senior investigator, you no longer have any rank or standing of any nature, you are nothing. I can simply tell you to shut up.’
‘Ah, but it goes the other way, Major. Now that I am nothing, I don’t have to listen to you.’
Almost what Irina had said to him, he thought. How easily perception changes. ‘Tell me, Major,’ he asked, ‘has anyone ever tried to kill you?’
‘Only you.’ Pribluda pushed his chair away and left his food uneaten.
Out of frustration, Pribluda began working in the garden. Stripped to an undershirt, his pants rolled up above the handkerchiefs tied around his knees, he savaged weeds.
‘It’s too late to plant anything but radishes, but we do what we can.’
‘What’s your quota?’ Arkady asked from the porch. He squinted up at the sky in search of the plane returning from Moscow.
‘This is enjoyment, not work,’ the major muttered. ‘I’m not going to let you ruin it. Smell that.’ He lifted some peat-rich soil to his snout. ‘There’s no earth anywhere in the world that smells the same.’
The sky was empty, and Arkady turned his gaze down to the major and the handful of dirt. The gesture reminded him too much of Pribluda digging through the bodies in Gorky Park. Arkady thought again of the major’s victims at the Kliazma River. Yet here they were in a country garden, Arkady with scars from his ribs to his groin and Pribluda on his knees.
‘They found Iamskoy’s money. That’s what’s holding everything up,’ Pribluda offered. ‘They took his dacha apart board by board, and dug up the whole place. They finally found it under some shed, I hear, where he kept dead ducks and geese. There was a fortune, though I don’t understand why he bothered. What was he going to spend it on?’
‘Who knows.’
‘I said you were innocent. I said right from the start that you were innocent. Detective Fet was a pissant informant, so I’m proud to say I acted on my own instincts. Everyone said no senior investigator would carry out the sort of investigation you claimed to have done contrary to the orders of a prosecutor. I said you would because only I knew how you tried to ruin me. Everyone else said that if Iamskoy was as corrupt as you claimed, then you must be too, and that it was just a case of thieves falling out. I said you’d ruin a man for no good reason at all. I know you. You’re the worst kind of hypocrite.’
‘How’s that?’
‘If I follow orders, then you call me a killer. What did I care about those prisoners from Vladimir Prison? There was nothing personal – I didn’t even know them. All they were to me were enemies of the state, and I had the job of getting rid of them. Not everything in the world can be done with perfect legality – that’s why we are given intelligence. You must have figured out I had orders. But on a whim, out of some hypocritical superiority, you want to bring a case against me – in other words, to kill me for doing my duty. So you’re worse than a killer; you’re a snob. Go ahead, laugh, but admit there’s a difference between duty and sheer egotism.’
‘You have a point,’ Arkady conceded.
‘Aha! Then you knew I was following orders—’
‘Whispers,’ Arkady said, ‘you were following whispers.’
‘Whispers, then – so what? What happens to me if I hadn’t done it?’
‘You leave the KGB, your family doesn’t talk to you, you’re an embarrassment to your friends, you can’t go to special stores anymore, you’re moved to a smaller apartment, your children lose their tutors and fail the university examinations, you drop off the rolls for cars, you’re never trusted in any new job you’re given – and, besides, if you hadn’t killed them, someone else would. I had a lousy marriage, no kids, and I didn’t especially care if I had a car.’
‘My point exactly!’
Arkady went back to watching a jet-vapor trail climb the sky. Nothing that concerned him, unless they planned to bomb him. He listened to Pribluda spading and the soft patter of seeds. As long as he was alive, Irina was alive.
‘If I’m innocent, maybe you won’t have to shoot me.’
‘No one is completely innocent.’ The major dug.
The plane ferried in more interrogators, food and changes of clothing for Pribluda. Sometimes the interrogators were different, sometimes the same; some used drugs, some hypnosis, each stayed a night and left. Now that he had fresh clothes, Pribluda dressed every day – when the interrogators were out of sight – in a standard gardening outfit of rolled-up pants, undershirt, handkerchiefs wrapped around his knees and brow, and scuffed shoes. He kept his gun close by, hanging from a stake. Dogged rows of radishes, lettuce and carrots appea
red.
‘It’s going to be a dry summer, I can feel it,’ he told Arkady. ‘Have to plant a little deeper.’
He would curse and trudge behind when Arkady went on one of his long strolls around the grounds.
‘No one’s going to run away,’ Arkady said. ‘You have my promise.’
‘There are bogs. They can be dangerous.’ The major stayed ten meters behind. ‘You don’t even know where to step.’
‘I’m not a horse. If I break a leg, you won’t shoot me.’
For the first time, Arkady heard Pribluda laugh. The major was right, though. Sometimes Arkady would start one of his walks still so doped on sodium pentothal that he could have walked into a tree without knowing it. He walked the way a man walks when he feels it is the only way to find himself. Away from the house and the precautionary towels on the couch for times when an injection made him throw up. Interrogation is largely a process of rebirth done in the clumsiest fashion possible, a system in which the midwife attempts to deliver the same baby a dozen times in a dozen different ways. Arkady walked until the day’s poison was diluted with oxygen; then he would sit under a shade tree. To begin with, Pribluda insisted on sitting in the sun; it took him a week to accept the shade.
‘I hear this is the last day for you’ – Pribluda smirked – ‘the last interrogator, the last night. I’ll come for you when you’re asleep.’
Arkady closed his eyes and listened to the insects. Each week it was a little hotter and the insects were a little louder.
‘You want to be buried here?’ Pribluda asked. ‘Come on, I’m losing patience, let’s go.’
‘Go cultivate your garden.’ He kept his eyes shut and hoped the major would leave.
‘You really must hate me,’ Pribluda said after a while.