“No,” Martin said as Katovsky sat on the ground to pull on his shoes. “Never played that game.”
“On second thought you ought to avoid it, comrade visitor. Queen sacrifices are not for the weak of heart. I tried it once in my life. I was fifteen at the time and I was playing the State Grandmaster Oumansky. When he made his sixteenth move, I studied the board for twenty minutes and then resigned. There was nothing I could do to avoid defeat. The Grandmaster Oumansky accepted the victory gracefully. I later discovered he spent months replaying the game. He couldn’t figure out what I’d seen to make me surrender. To me, it was as conspicuous as the nose on your face. I would have been a pawn down in four moves. My bishop would have been pinned after seven and the rook file would have been open after nine, with his queen and two rooks lined up on it. What I saw was I could not beat the State. If I had it to do over again,” the driver added with a sigh, “I would not play the State.”
A hundred meters in from where the Prigorodnaia spur joined the four-lane Moscow-Petersburg highway, interior ministry troops in camouflage khakis had blocked off circulation, obliging the occasional automobile to slow to a crawl and slalom between strips of leather fitted with razor-sharp spikes. When Katovsky’s Zil came abreast of the parked delivery truck with the DHL logo on its side, baby-faced soldiers armed with submachine guns motioned for the driver to pull off the road. A brawny civilian in a rumpled suit yanked open the passenger door and, grabbing Martin’s wrist, dragged him from the car so roughly his cracked ribs sent an electric current through his chest. A second civilian wagged a finger at the driver, who was cowering behind the wheel. “You know the rules, Lifshitz—you could get six months for operating a taxi without a license. I might forget to arrest you if you can convince me you didn’t take a passenger to Prigorodnaia today.”
“How could I take a passenger to Prigorodnaia? I don’t even know where it is.”
Martin, looking back over his shoulder, asked, “Why are you calling him Lifshitz?”
Gripping the nape of Martin’s neck in one huge hand and his elbow in the other, the brawny civilian steered the prisoner toward the back of the DHL truck. “We call him Lifshitz because that’s his name.”
“He told me it was Katovsky.”
The civilian snorted. “Katovsky, the chess grandmaster! He died a decade ago. Lifshitz the unlicensed taxi driver was a finalist in the Moscow district Chinese checkers tournament five, six years ago. Chess grandmaster—that’s a new one in Lifshitz’s repertoire.”
Moments later Martin found himself sitting on the dirty floor in the back of the DHL truck, his legs stretched in front of him, his wrists manacled behind his back. The two civilians sat on a makeshift bench across from him, sucking on Camels as they gazed impassively at their prisoner through the smoke. “Where are you taking me?” Martin demanded, but neither of his captors showed the slightest inclination to respond.
At some point the truck must have turned off the ring road onto a main artery because Martin could sense that it was caught in bumper to bumper traffic. Horns shrieked around them. When the truck swerved sharply, Martin could hear the screech of brakes and drivers shouting curses. The two jailers, their eyes fixed on the prisoner, seemed unfazed. After twenty or so minutes the truck descended a ramp—Martin could tell by the way the motor sounded that they were indoors—and then backed up before coming to a stop. The civilians threw open the rear doors and, gripping Martin under his armpits, hauled him onto a loading ramp and through swinging doors down a long corridor to a waiting freight elevator. The two grilled gates slid closed and the elevator started grinding noisily upward. The doors on the first five floors were sealed shut with metal bars welded across them. On the sixth floor the elevator jerked to a halt. Other civilians waiting outside tugged open the double gates and Martin, surrounded now by six men in civilian suits, was escorted to a holding room painted glossy white and saturated in bright light. The handcuffs were removed from his wrists, after which he was stripped to the skin and his clothing and his body were meticulously inspected by two male nurses wearing white overalls and latex gloves. An overripe doctor in a stained white smock with a cigarette bobbing on her lower lip and a stethoscope dangling from her neck came in to examine Martin’s eyes and ears and throat, then listened to his heart and took his blood pressure and probed his cracked ribs with the tips of her fingers, causing him to wince. As she went through the motions of checking his health, Martin was more distressed by his nakedness than his plight. He concentrated on her fingernails, which were painted a garish phosphorescent green. He caught the gist of a question she posed in Polish; she wanted to know if he had ever been hospitalized. Once, he replied in English, for a shrapnel wound in my lower back and a pinched nerve in my left leg, which still aches when I spend too much time on my feet. The doctor must have understood his response because she ran her fingers down the length of the back wound, then asked if he took any medication. From time to time an aspirin, he said. What do you do between aspirins? she asked. I live with the pain, he said. Nodding, the doctor noted his response and checked off items on a clipboard and signed and dated the form before handing it to one of the civilians. As she turned to leave, Martin asked if she was a generalist or a specialist. The woman smiled slightly. When I am not freelancing for the Service, I am a gynecologist, she said.
Martin was ordered to dress. One of the civilians led the prisoner to a door at the far end of the room and, opening it, stood aside. Martin shuffled into a larger room (once again the laces had been removed from his shoes, making it difficult to walk normally) filled with sturdy furniture, hand-me-downs, so he surmised, from the days when Stalin’s KGB ruled the roost in what was then called the Soviet Union. A short, husky middle-aged man wearing tinted eyeglasses presided from behind a monster of a desk. The man nodded toward the wooden chair facing the desk.
Martin gingerly lowered himself onto the seat. “Thirsty,” he said in Russian.
The interrogator snapped his fingers. A moment later a glass of water was set on the desk within reach of the prisoner. Holding it in both hands, he drank it off in several long gulps.
“I am a Canadian citizen,” Martin announced in English. “I insist on seeing someone from the Canadian embassy.”
Behind the desk, the civilian angled a very bright light into Martin’s eyes, forcing him to squint. A husky voice that was perfectly harmonious with the huskiness of the civilian drifted out of the blinding light. “You are voyaging under a passport that identifies you as Kafkor, Jozef,” the interrogator said in excellent English. “The passport purports to be Canadian, though it is, as you are no doubt aware, a forgery. The name on it is Polish. The Russian Federal Security Service has been eager to get its hands on you since your name first came to our attention. You are the Kafkor, Jozef, who was associated with Samat Ugor-Zhilov and his uncle, Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov, better known as the Oligarkh.”
“Is that a question?” Martin asked.
“It is a statement of fact,” the interrogator replied evenly. “According to our register, you met Samat Ugor-Zhilov shortly after arriving in Moscow to work for the Polish tourist bureau. You were taken by this same Samat Ugor-Zhilov to meet his uncle, who was living in the former Beria dacha in Prigorodnaia. In the four months that followed your initial visit to Prigorodnaia, you spent a great deal of time as a guest at the dacha, sometimes remaining there the entire week, other times going out for four-day weekends. The ostensible reason for the visits was that you were going to teach conversational Polish to Samat’s mother, who lived in the dacha. Your superiors at the Polish tourist bureau did not complain about your prolonged absences, which led us to conclude that the tourist bureau was a cover. You were obviously a Polish national, though we suspected you had spent part of your life abroad because our Polish speakers who listened to tapes of you talking with your coworkers in Moscow identified occasional lapses in grammar and antiquated vocabulary. You spoke Russian—I assume you still do—with a pronounced Polish accent, which suggested you had studied the Russian language from Polish teachers in Poland or abroad. So, gospodin Kafkor, were you working for Polish intelligence or were you employed, with or without the collaboration of the Poles, by a Western intelligence service?”