‘Do you know what goes on in the peasant villages, Lord Powerscourt? No? Fascinating, quite fascinating. Some of the miscreants in these places,’ Derzhenov went on, walking slowly along his corridor, ‘were known to have had their eyes pulled out, their nails hammered into their body, legs and arms cut off, and stakes driven down their throats. We find most terrorists are only too happy to talk before they get to the end of that.’ This time Derzhenov beamed happily at his visitor.
Powerscourt saw to his horror that the man was worse than a sadist. He was a connoisseur of torture, discussing its refinement as Johnny Fitzgerald might compare the more expensive brands of Bordeaux.
‘Another favourite punishment in the peasant village,’ Derzhenov went on, smiling slightly at the cruelty, ‘was to raise the victim on a pulley with his feet and hands tied together and to drop him so that the vertebrae in his back were broken; this was repeated several times until the victim was reduced to a spineless sack.’
They were halfway up the corridor now. Powerscourt was feeling sick. Through the door to his left he could hear the swish of a whip. It sounded as if two were being applied at the same time.
‘One last example, Lord Powerscourt, one of our most successful imports from the peasant village.’ Derzhenov was smiling broadly now, rather like a wolf, Powerscourt thought, as he looked at the dirty teeth of the secret policeman. ‘The naked victim is wrapped in a wet sack, a pillow is tied around his torso, and his stomach is beaten with hammers or iron bars, so that his internal organs are crushed without leaving any external marks on his body. Not a single one! Neat, don’t you think?’
A single piercing scream came suddenly from the last cell on the right. It was followed by a second, even more agonized than the first. Then Powerscourt heard a terrible thump as if somebody had hit the victim in the stomach with tremendous force. Then the General disappeared into the cell himself. Again Powerscourt heard the sound of whips applied in a frenzy. Derzhenov was sweating slightly as he came out, rubbing his hands together.
‘Sorry about that, Lord Powerscourt. Fellow was quite out of order. Now then, pity we’ve got to leave here but you mustn’t be late for your appointment with the Interior Ministry. Come, we’ll talk in my office upstairs.’
How, Powerscourt wondered, did the man know about the time of his interview at the ministry? He hoped the General didn’t have a torture collection in his room, glass bookshelves perhaps, filled with whips and clamps and racks. He wasn’t very far wrong.
‘I think I’m going to open a torture museum when I retire, Lord Powerscourt,’ General Derzhenov said, taking the stairs two at a time. ‘Maybe you’ll be able to send me some contributions from England. I particularly like the sound of the Scavenger’s Daughter from the time of the Tudors. Very labour-saving, that one, I’ve always thought. You just fit the hoops on the criminal, making sure he or she is properly bent over, and you can leave them, for days or weeks if necessary. You don’t have to go on pulling the bloody levers as they do with the rack.’
The General seated himself behind an enormous desk. There was not a note or a file to be seen. It was as if the General or his staff tidied up every scrap of paper after his day’s work each evening. He waved Powerscourt towards a small uncomfortable chair to the side. A great brute of a man with thick black hair and a black beard that almost covered his face slipped into a seat opposite Powerscourt. He was enormous. His hands looked as though they could pull a normal person’s arms or legs off with a couple of tugs.
‘Colonel Kolchak, my assistant, Lord Powerscourt. He will be helping us in our interview.’
The Colonel growled at Powerscourt who folded his hands neatly on his lap and tried not to look alarmed. The combination of what he had seen in the basement and the presence of the human gorilla across the desk was unsettling, to say the least. It was the General with his intelligence and his obsession with the refinements of torture who frightened him most. He wondered what role the Okhrana might have played in the death of Roderick Martin.
‘Perhaps, Lord Powerscourt, you might be able to help us with our inquiries, as your London policemen say.’ The General was smiling at his victim, like a headmaster welcoming a miscreant schoolboy to his study for another beating.
‘Of course, General,’ said Powerscourt, whose brain was beginning to move very fast indeed. ‘I am here to inquire into the death of Mr Roderick Martin of the British Foreign Office, who died in this city some days ago.’
‘The unfortunate Mr Martin . . .’ The General was almost purring. Powerscourt wondered if Martin had been a guest of the Okhrana in one of their bloodstained cells down in the basement. ‘Tell us if you can, Lord Powerscourt, we are all friends here after all, do you know what Mr Martin was doing in St Petersburg? He must have come for a reason, such a distinguished diplomat, such a clever man.’
The remains of a scream that had travelled up four floors from an opened grille window in the basement to the General’s office temporarily stopped the conversation. Derzhenov grabbed a black telephone and dialled furiously. When answer came he shouted very loudly and very violently in Russian. He began to turn red, so great was his fury. ‘My apologies, Lord Powerscourt. I’ve told the fool down there that if he can’t put the bloody tape on properly, he’ll be the next victim himself.’ Powerscourt wondered if the man had been an older recruit, not one of the recent peasant intake who showed such aptitude for the work.
‘I come back to Mr Martin, my friend,’ the General went on. ‘What did you say he was doing in St Petersburg?’
‘I know it must sound strange, General,’ Powerscourt was conscious of a continual scowl directed at him from Colonel Kolchak, ‘but I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.’
‘Does that mean,’ the General said, doodling on a large piece of paper he had taken from one of his drawers, ‘that his mission was so secret that only the Ambassador was cleared for it perhaps? I am not sure I would put great faith in your Ambassador myself, Lord Powerscourt, but did he know?’
‘No, he did not,’ said Powerscourt, realizing suddenly how improbable it all sounded.
‘The clever Secretary, Mr de Chassiron, did he know?’
‘I know it sounds unlikely, General, but he didn’t know either.’
‘Let me just get this straight, Lord Powerscourt.’ Derzhenov smiled a truly evil smile. ‘You expect us to believe that you did not know why Martin was here, Mr Secretary de Chassiron did not know, the Ambassador did not know. Do you have an Embassy cat, Lord Powerscourt? Did the four-legged one know what the two-legged ones did not? This is hard to believe, surely.’
‘Sometimes, General, the most unlikely explanation turns out to be the truth.’
‘Let me take him downstairs, General.’ Colonel Kolchak broke his silence. ‘I’ll soon get some sense out of him.’ The English came very slowly. Powerscourt was astonished by the voice. A man like Kolchak should come with a deep powerful bass. Instead his voice was very high-pitched, almost like a girl’s. It made him, Powerscourt felt, more frightening, the thought of those tones shrieking at you for your confession.
‘Lord Powerscourt is a most distinguished man, Colonel Kolchak. It is not for us to treat him at this time as if he were a common revolutionary, distributing pamphlets in the university perhaps, or learning to make bombs in some slum on the Petrograd side.’
Powerscourt smiled nervously as the words ‘at this time’ sank in.
‘Let me put a hypothesis before you, Lord Powerscourt, if I may.’ The General completed one of his doodles with a great flourish. ‘Mr Martin is sent on a mission here. Let us pretend it is a secret mission, as you say.’ Powerscourt realized suddenly that the Okhrana might not know any more about Martin’s death than he did. In this scenario, he was there to enlighten them. If true, that might work to his advantage. But then, champion chess players are moving pieces in their brains ten or fifteen moves ahead. Maybe he should ask the General how good he was with the rooks and the knights and the bishops.