“A Jew,” said Tomas Crohan and they had laughed at that though the joke was slightly beyond Kronenbourg’s understanding.
Now there’s a mental problem, Crohan thought. Kronenbourg was not a bad fellow but he had definitely lost his mind. He was good at small things. He folded the boxes in the cardboard factory. It was the lowest sort of work.
The Jews would not admit they were mentally unstable.
That is the problem, Natasha Gulonov had told him once. She was the medical assistant who gave them their pills each morning. The pills were a reward and a punishment. The pills enabled one to make it through the day but they made the night unendurable and there were no pills given for night. The night was faced naked. Like prisoners working in the snow of a camp run by a madman. Definitely mad. His name had been Fodoroff. Mad as a hatter.
Hatter. What an interesting image. Where had that come from?
Crohan turned in his cot and faced the light beyond the rows of cots containing restless, sleeping men.
Natasha Gulonov said the Soviet Union had many peoples, many tongues. Only the Jews appeared mad, she said.
“Baptists,” Crohan had replied.
“What did you say?”
“Jews. And Baptists. The three fellows we had at Number 19 in Kiev about six years ago. Baptists. They baptized me three times in the barracks.”
“Madness,” Natasha Gulonov had said.
“It was a way to get a bath,” Crohan had replied. “They saved the rainwater and they would not drink it. They baptized all the prisoners before they died. I was baptized three times.”
“You should not make a joke of religion,” she had said.
“Why? Do you think God will be angry with me?”
“There is no God.”
“Of course not. So there is no reason to think he will become angry with me.”
“But it is not good for you, Tomas.”
“Doctor—”
“I am not a doctor. Yet.”
“The Jews are mad,” he had said. “Because they wish to be Jews?”
“No. Because they do not accept the State.”
“Is everyone mad who does not accept the State?”
“No. Some are traitors.” She talked to him as though he were a child. Tomas Crohan had become her pet. Sometimes she allowed him to give pills to the prisoners. Once she gave him a small cache of extra pills which he could sell for cigarettes.
“I accept the State,” Tomas Crohan had said.
“Yes, I know.”
“How can I still be mad?”
She had turned away from him that morning. “Don’t speak of such things. Go away, Tomas, you make me angry.”
The Jews, at least, had an instinct for survival inside the camps. Crohan could not understand how some of the others would just give up suddenly. Take the Finn. What was his name? Unpronounceable in any case. He had been brought to Novo Gordunov — what was it? ten years ago? — and he had raged so greatly they nearly shot him right away just in self-defense. That would have satisfied the Finn. He wanted it over with. But when they didn’t shoot him, he became indifferent, even to food. Naturally, the other prisoners stole his food. And his clothing. If the fellow wasn’t going to make a protest, then it was too bad for him. The Finn died in the summer. Hardly anyone at Novo Gordunov died until October came and the first snow. The Finn did not have an instinct for survival, Crohan realized. But the Jews always did. Once you are willing to die gladly at the hands of the guards, then you are dead already.
An instinct for survival was not such a common thing. And it was not simple. Crohan could lecture on the subject and did from time to time, to fill the restless days. For example, resistance was useless and therefore counterproductive. Do not resist; survive. A very thin line, a fine point, wouldn’t you agree?
Darkness.
Crohan blinked; the restless night ward was suddenly still.
Crohan blinked again but he could not bring back the light. And then he saw the two men at the door of the ward blocking the light. He turned in his cot to stare at them. The ward was deathly silent; all tears, all screams had ceased. Night visitors, and they always brought bad luck with them. Sometimes they took prisoners away and the prisoners were never seen again. Sometimes they gave patients midnight examinations, as they were called. A day or two days later, the exhausted patient would be returned to the ward, covered with bruises, his face hideously reshaped by the pounding blows of the examiners.
They had paused at the door and now one of them, at the direction of the night nursing guard, had started to walk through the tangle of beds in the ward.
Crohan closed his eyes. It was always best not to be too curious. It was best to pretend the matter of the night visitors was a bad dream and that when one opened one’s eyes, the dream would be ended.
“Crohan.” The voice was harsh, low.
My God, he thought and shivered and held his eyes tight. It was just a dream.
He felt the rough warm hand on his shoulder. He was being pulled up. He opened his eyes and saw the flat face before him. The night visitor had steel teeth that glittered in his mouth in the thin light from the single bulb in the corridor.
“Come,” he said.
“What have I done?”
“Come,” he said.
And Crohan’s feet somehow found the cold floor. In a moment, he was out of the ward, in the light of the corridor. He blinked because of the light, because of the fear that wrapped itself around him. From the dark womb of the ward came the sounds of night again, so comforting and so beyond his reach now: screams and the familiar sounds of men crying in the darkness.
11
On the same night that Tomas Crohan was taken from his ward in the Kresty Prison psychiatric hospital in Leningrad and a man named Sims was murdered in a sauna in Helsinki, Rita Macklin finished her work at the rectory of St. Adrian’s parish and began the long trek to Baggot Street to find a cab to take her back to her room.
It had not been difficult at all.
Father Cunningham had no family left anywhere in Ireland and only a vague reference to “a family friend” who might live in Chicago in America. Rita Macklin assured the priests at St. Adrian’s that she was the family friend. The deceit was never questioned because there was nothing to be gained from the old man’s possessions.
Indeed, there was no wealth among them.
Rita Macklin was not looking for money, however. She catalogued the possessions meticulously, including his clothing.
Her presence in the rectory for four days upset the housekeeper, Mrs. Ryan, but did not seem to displease the priests. If Rita Macklin was pretty, it was the sort of fresh-faced beauty that is not dispensed in creams or lotions but comes from genes and good health.
“Priests again,” and ME had laughed when she called him.
Even Rita Macklin, despite the painful memories, had smiled during the transatlantic telephone conversation. Priests again. Nearly three years before, she had worked on the story of the old priest named Leo Tunney who had come out of the Asian jungles after twenty years and had a dreadful secret to tell someone. He eventually told Rita, before he died, and put Rita’s life in peril. But that could never happen again in any case; the matter of priests was just a coincidence, she thought.
“I’m sorting through his things, I’m trying to get some clue—”
“I think I told you to be careful,” Mac said and his voice was so lazy and calm that she could imagine him now leaning back in his leather swivel chair with the phone cupped in the crook of his shoulder, with his hands folded on the back of his graying head.