“You have got to be kidding me,” Pfefferkorn said.
“Hush,” Savory said.
The blond man pressed the cloth into Pfefferkorn’s face.
SIX
(Welcome [Back] to West Zlabia!)
90.
Pfefferkorn fought off his attackers in a series of fluid motions, landing blows to their solar plexuses that left them sinking to their knees, gasping for breath. He heard the satisfying crunch of bone as Lucian Savory’s bulbous forehead caved under a fearsome barrage of elbows and karate chops. He grabbed Savory around the neck and wrung him like a chicken on the eve of Yom Kippur. It felt wonderful. Savory turned five different shades of blue. It was beautiful. Pfefferkorn closed his eyes and reveled in the feel of the old man’s pulse fading beneath his fingers. He kept compressing Savory’s neck, smaller and smaller, until it seemed as though he had squeezed all the blood and bone and neck meat out of the way and was clutching empty skin. He opened his eyes. He was wringing his pillow wrathfully. All the stuffing had been forced out to the sides. He released it and fell back, panting.
His new cell was spartan and chilly. It was made of solid concrete, painted lint gray. He was lying on a mattress on the floor. The mattress was narrow and sharp with twigs. The blanket covering him was made of a coarse goathair. There was a formidable steel desk. There was a wooden desk chair. A drain was set into the floor near the toilet. There was no bidet. The ceiling was high. There were no windows. A fluorescent tube provided the light.
He kicked off the blanket. His custom-made suit was gone, replaced by thick woolen trousers and a scratchy T-shirt. Instead of his penny loafers he wore straw slippers. There was a leg cuff around his left ankle. It was connected to a heavy chain. The chain ran across the floor and attached at the other end to the foot of the desk.
“Sir, good morning.”
The man standing outside his cell was bald and sunken-cheeked. He wore an austere suit and steel-rimmed glasses, and his voice—clipped but clear, accented but precise—marked him as a man of worrisome efficiency. His eyes were black and cold, like twin camera lenses, or a chocolate-covered Eskimo. He bowed deeply.
“Sir, it is an honor to make your acquaintance,” Dragomir Zhulk, the dead prime minister of West Zlabia, said.
91.
“You are surprised. Sir, this is understandable. I, the individual, am dead, or so you have been led to believe. It would be surprising to most people, even a man of your powerful imaginative gifts. Sir, pertinent background information will ameliorate the expression of wonderment that I, the individual, observe in your face.”
Dragomir Zhulk’s version of events differed drastically from both Kliment Thithyich’s and the Americans’. According to Zhulk, the Party had been running the show all along. Everything that happened—from the publication of Blood Eyes to Pfefferkorn’s recent stint on death row—was designed either to advance Party aims or to underscore the inherent incompetence and inferiority of the capitalist system.
The Party, he said, had planted the assassination code in Blood Eyes, thus exploiting the capitalist system by tricking it into killing Kliment Thithyich, who after all was himself a tool of the capitalist system. That the assassination had failed proved nothing, because anything the capitalist system did must by definition fail, and so while the superficial objective—namely, Thithyich’s death—had not been achieved, the underlying ideological objective—namely, a demonstration of the inherent incompetence and inferiority of the capitalist system—had.
“QED,” Zhulk said.
Blood Night was also the Party’s handiwork. It contained a dummy code designed to disrupt the capitalist system’s transmission sequence, thereby creating confusion. The Party had then carried out the assassination of a man dressed up to look like Zhulk.
“The reason for this is self-evident,” Zhulk said. “The Party wished to give the appearance that I, the individual, was dead. This has enabled me, the individual, to engage in covert activities free from capitalist scrutiny. The comrade who volunteered his life for this purpose has been accorded appropriate honor in death.”
As for the May Twenty-sixers, the movement was not a splinter group at all but a top-secret elite unit of the Party whose ostensible illegality was an ingenious ruse designed to exploit the inferior intellect of capitalist aggressors. “You object: ‘Kliment Thithyich has informed me that he is the leader of this movement.’ Sir, this is incorrect. The ruse he claims as his own is in fact a counter-ruse. The Party has allowed him to believe this, so that the Party may obtain information about his nefarious capitalist designs. Sir, do not be fooled. Many of his most trusted agents in truth work to advance the cause of the Party, including the man you know as Lucian Savory. Sir, everything has gone according to the plan. Soon national destiny shall be achieved in accordance with the principle stated in preamble to the manifesto of the movement of the glorious revolution of the Twenty-sixth of May, which I, the individual, humbly penned at a desk provided by the Party, namely, the reunification of greater Zlabia under true collectivist rule by any means necessary. Sir, it is for this purpose that your government has sent you. QED.”
“I don’t have it,” Pfefferkorn said, or cut in, or interjected, or managed to say.
“Sir?”
“I don’t have it. The Workbench. I don’t know where it is. It was in my suitcase but I lost it when I was kidnapped.”
“Sir, you have been misinformed.”
“I don’t have it. You may as well kill me and get it over with.”
“Sir, you are mistaken. There is no Workbench.”
“At least let Carlotta go. She’s of no further use to you.”
“Sir, you are not listening.” Zhulk began to pace agitatedly in front of the bars. “Your government has misled you. This is not surprising, for the capitalist system is inherently depraved. It is rapacious and bellicose, an abhorrent monster of gluttonous imperialism gorged on materialism and overconsumption. The terms of the deal, sir, do not include carpentry. The terms of the deal, sir, concern you.”
“Me?”
“Sir, yes.” Zhulk plunged his hand inside his coat and withdrew a small hardcover book. He held it up for Pfefferkorn to see, like a hopeful suitor bearing flowers.
The book was covered in a protective plastic wrapper. The jacket was blue with yellow lettering and a drawing of a tree. Pfefferkorn’s own copy, back on the mantel in his apartment, was in far worse shape, and he needed a moment to fully recognize the thing in Zhulk’s hands as a mint-condition first edition of his first and only novel, Shade of the Colossus.
The prime minister smiled shyly. He bowed.
“I, the individual,” he said, “am such a very big fan.”
92.
“As a child I dreamed of becoming a writer. My father did not approve. ‘These are not the ambitions of a man,’ he told me. He liked to beat me with a rake, or sometimes a trellis. When he was in a bad mood, he would pick up my infant sister and use her to beat me. He called this ‘saving time.’ Often I prayed for his death. Yet when it came I was heartbroken. Who can understand love?”