Nina was helping Katya in the kitchen, learning how to make pelmeni.
Every now and then, while Sam was scribbling his thoughts and painful reminiscences on his knackered notepad, he would hear the two women burst out in shrieking laughter. This would be followed by an admission of some ineptitude by Nina, while Katya would negate her embarrassing mistakes.
“You are very good…” Katya hollered, falling into her chair with a hearty chuckle, “for a Scot! But we’ll make a Russian out of you yet!”
“I doubt it, Katya. I’d offer to teach you to make highland haggis, but truthfully, I also suck at that!” Nina spurted out with a rowdy laugh.
This is all sounding a bit too festive, thought Sam, and he closed the cover of the notepad and tucked it safely into his satchel with his pen. He rose from his wooden single bed in the spare room he shared with Alexandr and walked along the wide hallway and down the short staircase toward the sunken kitchen where the females were making a hellish noise.
“Look! Sam! I made… uh… I made a whole batch of… of many? Many what…?” she frowned and gestured for Katya to help her out.
“Pelmeni!” Katya cried gleefully, motioning with her hands over the mess of dough and spilled meat on the wooden kitchen table.
“That many!” Nina giggled.
“Are you lassies inebriated, per chance?” he asked, amused at the two beautiful women he was blessed to be stranded with in the middle of nowhere. Had he been a more cavalier man with iniquitous notions there might well have been a dirty thought in there, but being Sam, he just plopped down in a chair and watched Nina trying to cut the dough properly.
“We are not intoxicated, Mr. Cleave. We are just tipsy,” Katya explained as she stalked Sam with a plain glass jam jar with an ominous clear liquid filling it halfway.
“Ah!” he exclaimed, running his hands through his thick dark hair, “I’ve seen that stuff before and it is what us Cleaves would call a shortcut to Slosherville. Bit early for me, thank you.”
“Early?” Katya asked, honestly bewildered. “Sam, it is an hour short of midnight!”
“Aye! We started drinking at 7 p.m. already,” Nina chimed in, her hands splattered with the pork, onions, garlic, and parsley she had been mincing to fill the dough pockets with.
“Don’t be daft!” Sam marveled as he rushed to the small window and saw that the sky was way too light for what his watch indicated. “I thought it was much earlier and I was just being a lazy sod for wanting to hit the bed.”
He looked at the two women, as different as day and night, but both as beautiful as the other.
Katya looked exactly as Sam first imagined at the sound of her name just before they first arrived at the farm. With big blue eyes sunken into bony ocular cavities and a wide mouth of full lips she looked stereotypically Russian. Her cheekbones were so pronounced that they cast shadows on her face under the sharp light above her and her straight blonde hair fell wildly about her shoulders and brow.
Lean and tall, she towered over the petite frame of the dark-eyed Scottish lass next to her. Nina finally had her own hair color back, the rich, dark brown he so loved to drown his face in when she mounted him back in Belgium. Sam was relieved to see that her pallid gauntness had worn off and she once again boasted her dainty curves and flushing skin. The time away from the talons of the Black Sun had healed her quite a bit.
Maybe it was the country air far, far away from Bruges that soothed the both of them, but they felt more exhilarated and rested in their raw Russian surroundings. Things were far more simple here and the people were polite, but tough. This was not a land for prudence or sensitivity and Sam liked it.
Looking out over the flat plains growing violet in the dying light, and listening to the merriment in the house with him, Sam could not help but wonder how Alexandr was faring.
All Sam and Nina could hope for was that the insurgents on the mountain would trust Alexandr and not mistake him for a spy.
“You are a spy!” the skinny Italian rebel shouted as he paced patiently in circles around Alexandr’s strung-up body. It caused a terrible headache in the Russian, which was only exacerbated by his upside0down position over the tub of water.
“Listen to me!” Alexandr implored for the umpteenth time. His skull was bursting with the flooding blood that ran to the back of his eyeballs, and his ankles gradually threatened to dislocate under the weight of his body that hung from a crude rope and chains that were fixed to the stone roof of the chamber. “If I was a spy, why de fuck would I walk right in here? Why would I come here with information that would help your cause, you stupid fucking wop?”
The Italian did not appreciate Alexandr’s racial slur and without retort just sank the Russian’s head back into the tub of freezing water, so that only his jaw remained above. His colleagues sniggered at the Russian’s reaction while they sat drinking near the padlocked gate.
“You better know what to say when you come back up, stronzo! Your life depends on this wop, and this interrogation is already cutting into my drinking time. I’ll fucking leave you to drown, I will!” he shouted, kneeling next to the tub so that the submerged Russian would hear him.
“Carlo, what is the problem?” Bern called from the corridor he was approaching from. “You sound unnaturally high-strung,” the captain said plainly. His voice grew louder as he drew nearer to the arched entrance. The other two men stood at attention at the sight of the leader, but he waved dismissively for them to relax.
“Capitano, this idiot say he has information to help us, but he has only Russian papers that look fake to us,” the Italian reported as Bern unlocked the sturdy black gates to enter the interrogation area, more aptly — the torture chamber.
“Where are his papers?” the captain asked, and Carlo pointed to the chair where he first had the Russian tied. Bern had a look at the well-forged border pass and identification. Without peeling his eyes from the Russian writing, he calmly said, “Carlo.”
“Si, capitano?”
“The Russian is drowning, Carlo. Let him up.”
“Oh, mio Dio!” Carlo jumped and pulled the choking Alexandr up. The soaked Russian gasped desperately for air, coughing profusely before he vomited out the excess water in his body.
“Alexandr Arichenkov. Is that your real name?” Bern asked their guest, but then realized the man’s name was inconsequential to their prodding. “That doesn’t matter, I suppose. You’ll be dead before midnight.”
Alexandr knew that he had to state his case to the superior before being left to the devices of his attention-deficit stricken tormentor. The water still pooled in the back of his nostrils and burned in his nasal passages, making it nearly impossible to speak, but his life depended on it.
“Captain, I am not a spy. I wish to join your company, that is all,” the wiry Russian rambled.
Bern turned on his heel. “And why would you want to do that?” He signaled for Carlo to introduce the subject to the bottom of the tub.
“Renata is being deposed!” Alexandr screamed. “I was part of a plot to overthrow the leadership of the Order of the Black Sun and we succeeded… sort of.”
Bern raised his hand to stop the Italian from executing his last order.
“You don’t have to torture me, captain. I am here to freely give you the information!” the Russian explained. Carlo stared him down hatefully, his hand twitching on the pulley that controlled Alexandr’s fate.
“In return for this information, you want…?” Bern asked. “You want to join us?”
“Da! Da! Two friends and I, who are also running from the Black Sun. We know how to locate the higher order members and that is why they are trying to kill us, captain,” he stuttered through the discomfort of shaping proper words while the water in his throat still impeded his breathing.