Martin said, “You are mistaking me for someone else. I swear to you I don’t remember any of the details you describe.”
The interrogator opened a dossier with a diagonal red stripe across the cover and began leafing through a thick stack of papers. After a moment he raised his eyes. “At some point your relationship with Samat and his uncle deteriorated. You disappeared from view for a period of six weeks. When you reappeared, you were unrecognizable. You had obviously been tortured and starved. Early one morning, while road workers were paving the seven kilometer spur that led from the main Moscow-Petersburg highway to the village of Prigorodnaia, two of the Oligarkh’s bodyguards escorted you across the Lesnia in a rowboat and prodded you up the incline to a crater that had been gouged in the spur by a steam shovel the previous day. You were stark naked. A large safety pin attached to a fragment of cardboard bearing the words The spy Kafkor had been passed through the flesh between your shoulder blades. And then, before the eyes of forty or so workers, you were buried alive in the crater—you were forced to lie in fetal position in the hole, which was roughly the size of a large tractor tire. Thick planks were wedged into place above you, after which the road workers were obliged to pave over the spot.”
Martin had the unnerving sensation that a motion picture he had seen and forgotten was being described to him. “More water,” he murmured.
Another glass of water was placed within reach and he drank it off. In a hoarse whisper Martin asked, “How can you know these things?”
The interrogator twisted the arm of the lamp so that the light played on the top of the desk. As the interrogator set out five blown-up photographs, Martin caught a glimpse of Kafkor’s Canadian passport, a wad of American dollars and British pounds, the picture postcard that he’d swiped from the door of the dacha in Prigorodnaia, along with his shoelaces. He scraped his chair closer to the desk and leaned over the photographs. They were all taken from a distance and enlarged, rendering them grainy and slightly out of focus. In the first photograph, an emaciated man, completely naked, with a matted beard and what looked like a crown of thorns on his head, could be seen stepping gingerly through the shallow slime onto dry land. Two guards in striped shirts followed behind him. In the next photograph, the naked man could be seen kneeling at the edge of a crater, looking over his shoulder, his eyes hollow with terror. The third photograph in the series showed a thin figure of a man with a long pinched face, a suit jacket draped cape-like over his shoulders, offering a cigarette to the condemned man. The fourth photograph caught a heavy set man with a shock of silver hair and dark glasses in the back of a limousine, staring over the tinted window open the width of a fist. In the last photograph, a steamroller was backing across the glistening tarmac, raising a soft fume. Workers leaning on rakes or shovels could be seen staring in horror at the scene of the execution.
“One of the workman on the road crew, the ironmonger in point of fact, was employed by our security services,” the interrogator said. “He had a camera hidden in the thermos in his lunch box. Do you recognize yourself in these photographs, gospodin Kafkor?”
A single word worked its way up from Martin’s parched throat. “Nyet.”
The interrogator switched off the light. Martin felt the world spinning giddily under his feet. His lids drifted closed over his eyes as his forehead sank onto one of the photos. The interrogator didn’t break the silence until the prisoner sat up again.
Martin heard himself ask, “When did all this happen?”
“A long time ago.”
Martin sagged back into his seat. “For me,” he remarked tiredly, “yesterday is a long time ago, the day before yesterday is a previous incarnation.”
“The photographs were taken in 1994,” the interrogator said.
Martin breathed the words “Three years ago!” Kneading his forehead, he tried to work the pieces of this strange puzzle into place, but no matter which way he turned and twisted them, no coherent picture emerged. “What happened after this individual was buried alive?” he asked.
“When the photographs were developed and circulated, we decided to mount an operation to free him—to free you—in the hope that you were still alive. When we reached the site of the execution, in the dead of night, we discovered the peasants, led by the village priest, had already scraped away the tarmac and pried up the planks and rescued the man buried in the crater. Before first light, our people helped the peasants replace the planks and tar over the spot.”
“And what happened to … this person?”
“The village’s tractor repairman drove you to Moscow in Prigorodnaia’s tow truck. His intention was to take you to a hospital. At a red light on the ring road, not far from the American Embassy, you leaped from the cab of the truck and disappeared in the darkness. Neither the municipal police nor our service was able to find any trace of you after that. As far as we were concerned, you disappeared from the surface of the earth—until today, until a custom’s officer at the airport signaled the arrival of a Canadian bearing a passport issued to Kafkor, Jozef. We assumed you would be returning to Prigorodnaia, which is the reason the interior ministry troops closed the road—we knew we could pick you up on the way out.”
A secretary appeared behind the desk and, bending close, whispered in the interrogator’s ear. Clearly annoyed, the interrogator demanded, “How long ago?” Then: “How in the world did he find out?” Shaking his head in disgust, the interrogator turned back to Martin. “The CIA station chief in Moscow has learned that you are in our hands. He is sending a formal request through channels asking us to turn you over to his agency for interrogation when we’ve finished with you.”
“Why would the CIA want to question Jozef Kafkor?”
“They will want to discover if you were able to tell us what we want to know.”
“And what is it that you want to know?”
“Whose side were they on—Samat Ugor-Zhilov and the Oligarkh, Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov? And where are they now?”
“Samat took refuge in a West Bank Jewish settlement in Israel.”
The interrogator carefully unhooked his eyeglasses from one ear and then the other and began to clean the lenses with the tip of his silk tie. “Bring tea,” he instructed the secretary. “Also those brioche cakes stuffed with fig confiture.” He fitted the glasses back on and, collecting the five photographs, slipped them back into the folder. “Gospodin Kafkor, the Russian Federal Security Service is underfunded and understaffed and underappreciated, but we are not dimwits. That Samat took refuge in Israel we have known for a long time. We were negotiating with the Israeli Mossad to have access to him when word reached him that Chechen hit men had tracked him to Israel, causing him to flee the country. But where did he go when he disappeared from Israel?”