At once the answer hit him and he felt incredibly thick. He broke the dumpling open and began to pick through its contents. He was looking for a microchip. He was looking for an ear transmitter. He found neither. He found bits of diced root vegetable and gray flecks of herb suspended in a starchy goo. He flattened the exterior dough and held the pieces up, hoping beyond hope for instructions written on their insides. But he found nothing. It was a dumpling and nothing more. Disappointed, he moved to throw it away, pausing as his stomach let out a growl. He’d eaten nothing today and a week in West Zlabia had taught him never to turn down food. He stuffed a piece of the dumpling in his mouth and carried the rest to bed, switching on the television in time to catch the theme song to The Poem, It Is Bad!
It was an interesting episode. The student poet had reinterpreted the one hundred tenth canto of Vassily Nabochka, popularly known as the “Love Song of the Prince,” in which the protagonist reflects on what he has forsaken in order to undertake his quest: the love of a beautiful maiden—a moment pregnant with irony, as the reader has been privy to scenes showing the maiden to be a nasty piece of work, poisoning the king and plotting to do the same to the prince upon his return. Pfefferkorn groped on the nightstand for the room copy so he could follow along for comparison. He opened to the back of the book and Fyothor’s business card fell out onto his chest. He picked it up and stared at it regretfully. The name, the number. Private tour guide. After a moment he took it to the bathroom and tore it into dozens of tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet. He watched them spin and disappear. He got back into bed.
The student poet had taken liberties with rhyme and meter, but his boldest stroke was spicing the prince’s tone with cynicism. While this choice diminished the dramatic irony somewhat, it gave nuance to a character who often came across as a Goody Two-shoes. Pfefferkorn approved. A little edge went a long way. A character didn’t have to go around like Dick Stapp or Harry Shagreen, pulverizing fingers and snapping vertebrae at the slightest provocation, to be interesting. He put the last piece of pyatshellalikhuiy in his mouth and wiped his palms on the bedspread. How anything so dense and gluey could be a delicacy escaped him. He yawned. It was only twenty after nine but he felt sleepy. The panel of judges was going ballistic. They seemed to feel that the national poem made a bad platform for experimentation, and they laid on a critique so vicious that the camera zoomed in to show a spreading stain near the student’s crotch. Pfefferkorn disapproved. Never had he let a workshop get so out of hand. The closing theme played. Another yawn came on, a huge one that sucked all the air from the room. He got up to use the bathroom but his feet missed the floor somehow and he ended up flat on his face on the carpet. He waited for himself to stand up. New theme music played. Stand up, he told himself. His body wouldn’t listen. His arms said to leave them alone. So did his legs. It was as if he had four surly teenagers for limbs. He knew how to deal with that. He had raised a daughter. He pretended not to care. It was going fine until he noticed the room dimming. On-screen a teacher was being flogged. He saw her at the end of a narrow, shrinking tunnel. Her screams came tumbling toward him across an abyss. It was thankless work, teaching.
Moments before he blacked out, he remembered why pyatshellalikhuiy were so treasured. The recipe called for wheat flour, a rarity in West Zlabia. Practically the only way to get some was to smuggle it across the border from the east, a crime that carried the death penalty. As he heard the fading sound of a key in the door, he was thinking that it wasn’t worth the risk.
82.
He awoke in darkness. His hands and feet were bound. His mouth was full of cloth. His groin was clammy. He felt forward momentum in his bowels and rattling in his joints. He heard the modulating pitch of a shifting transmission. The heat was suffocating and the air suffused with mildew. He could state with confidence that he was tied up in the trunk of a car. Hysteria clutched at him. His throat started to close up. He bucked and thrashed around and ended up banging his head hard enough to subdue himself. He commanded himself to be rational. What would Dick Stapp do? He would lie still and conserve energy. What about Harry Shagreen? He would count turns. Pfefferkorn lay still, conserving his energy and counting turns. He determined that his right shoulder was up against the rear of the trunk. Hence pressure on top of his head meant a right turn. Pressure on the soles of his shoes meant left. He soon became attuned to changes in the elevation: the rightward jolt that indicated uphill, the gentler leftward yaw for down. They drove for what seemed like hours, making what seemed like a thousand turns. The car had rotten suspension. It hit a pothole and he was tossed against the roof of the trunk, landing painfully and losing count. The third time it happened he gave up counting and gave in to despair. All the turns in the world would tell him nothing if he didn’t know the starting point and what direction they had set out in. Nor did he have any idea how long he’d been passed out. He knew nothing, nothing at all, and to be confronted by his ignorance sparked a new fit of rage. He thrashed and bucked and rolled and kicked and screamed and gnawed at his gag, rivers of spit running down his neck.
The car slowed.
It stopped.
Doors opened.
Humid night air kissed him.
He put up no fight as they removed the blindfold. The orange glow of a highway sodium vapor lamp haloed four faces. A fifth face appeared, close enough to eclipse the light. The fifth face had two crinkly eye sockets, two thin bloodless lips, a bulbous pate like an overfilled balloon. It smiled, showing unnaturally even teeth. Pfefferkorn could tell they were dentures.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” he said, or tried to say. He was still gagged.
“Hush,” Lucian Savory said.
He shut the trunk.
FIVE
(Welcome to East Zlabia!)
83.
“You look good,” Savory said. “Have you lost weight?”
Pfefferkorn couldn’t answer. He was still gagged. The henchmen—he’d never before had occasion to use the word, and despite his abject state he could appreciate its aptness, for the four apes dragging him across the parking garage and into the elevator carried an unmistakable air of henchiness about them—smirked.
“The hell happened to your face, anyway? You look like Salvador Dalí with a cattle prod up his ass.”
The elevator doors closed and they began to rise.
Savory sniffed. He frowned. “Christ,” he said. “You pissed your pants, didn’t you.”