Shteinberg gave him a bleary stare. “Don’t worry? Are you out of your mind? Why not?” He plucked at the cold compress on his forehead-except, if it was anything like Bokov’s, it wasn’t cold any more.
“Because all the officers out drinking tonight will be just as bad off as we are,” Bokov answered. “They’ll have more fun getting there”-no German girl was going to suck him off tonight, not when he couldn’t get it up with a crane-“but they’ll be fucked over, too.”
“Maybe,” Shteinberg said grudgingly. “But do you suppose the stinking Heydrichite fanatics will drink themselves blind tonight? Not likely! They’re no fools, damn them-they know how we do things. And you just wait and see if they don’t try something while we’re plastered out of our minds.”
That struck Captain Bokov as much too likely. He shrugged anyway. It hurt-but what didn’t right now? This was even worse than a hangover, and he hadn’t even had the pleasure of getting plastered himself. Definitely unfair.
“Comrade Colonel, the two of us can’t do a thing about it,” he said.
“Too right we can’t,” Shteinberg agreed. “I feel like dogshit.”
“Da.” Bokov looked around for that private. He wanted more tea, and he wanted his compress soaked in cold water again-or, better yet, in the snow outside.
He didn’t see the fellow. Where the devil had he gone? Was he off smoking a cigarette? Or had he cached a flask somewhere? Was he swigging right this second? Bokov’s spirit lusted after vodka. His body told his spirit it had to be kidding. Sometimes you had to listen to your body, even if you didn’t want to.
The orderly came back. He didn’t look so sullen now. Sure as hell, he’d found some way to make himself feel better. And if the men he was supposed to be taking care of got short shrift, that was their hard luck. They were already sick, weren’t they?
Bokov drifted into a restless, uneasy sleep-the only kind he’d had since this miserable thing landed on him like a Katyusha rocket. His dreams were confused and dark. That was all he remembered of them.
Then a doctor with a thin, clever Jewish face much like Colonel Shteinberg’s was shaking him awake. Another doctor, this one an authentic Slav, was waking the NKVD colonel. “Get up,” the Jew told Bokov. “We need you.”
“What is it?” Bokov tried to sit up. His head swam. “I beg your pardon, Comrade Physician. I am not well.” He gulped, hoping the juices in his stomach would stay down. He wasn’t kidding, not even a little bit. In the next bed, Shteinberg was also feebly protesting.
“You don’t have time to be sick,” the Jewish doctor said bluntly. “The fucking Nazis have poisoned half the officer corps in Berlin, maybe more. You’ve got to track them down and pay them back. Give me your arm.”
“Bozhemoi! How?” Bokov exclaimed. Automatically, he stuck out his left arm. The doctor undid the cuff on his uniform tunic, then rolled up his sleeve and tapped at the inside of his elbow to bring up the veins there. As soon as he found one, he stuck a hypodermic needle into it and pushed in the plunger. Bokov shook, not only from the influenza but also because he flat-out hated needles. The doctor knew his stuff; he didn’t let the hypodermic slip out of the vein till he’d finished the injection. “What did you shoot me with?” Bokov asked. “I didn’t think there was any medicine for the grippe.”
“There isn’t,” the doctor said. “You’ll still be sick. But with enough benzedrine in you, you’ll be able to work anyhow. We’ll feed you pills from now on, but we want to get you up and moving right away.”
He knew how to get what he wanted. The dose he shot into Bokov was brutally effective. The NKVD man’s heart pounded as if he’d drunk fifty cups of strong coffee all at once. His snot dried up. So did his mouth. So did his eyeballs. His brain felt on fire. He knew he still had the influenza. He also knew he’d have to pay for this artificial vitality, and that he’d be even sorrier later than he was before the injection. But all that would wait. Right this second, he was raring to go.
“Poisoned? How?” he demanded. Far from being fuzzy with sickness, his wits raced at triple time. He beat the doctor to the answer: “Fuck my mother if they didn’t put something in the booze for the New Year’s bash!”
“Right the first time-wood alcohol,” the Jew said. “Lots and lots of wood alcohol. They must have been setting this up for weeks, the fucking cunts. It’s the best thing in the world to use if you’re poisoning liquor. You won’t notice it while you’re drinking. Most people even like the taste. But afterwards…Afterwards, it’ll kill you if you drink enough. And it’ll leave you blind even if you don’t.”
Bokov nodded. He knew what wood alcohol could do. Plenty of illicit liquor got cooked up in the Soviet Union. Some of it was as good as any you could buy in the government stores. Some was better: a labor of love. But some was pure poison. He’d heard people say you could get rid of the bad stuff if you filtered booze through a loaf of black bread. Bokov didn’t know whether that was true-he’d never tried it. He did know they wouldn’t have filtered their drinks at the New Year’s feast. They’d have poured them down as fast as they could.
Over in the next bed, Colonel Shteinberg had also risen like a drug-fueled Lazarus. “You will have held the bartenders and the serving women?” he demanded of the doctor who’d injected him back to life.
The only answer he got was a broad-shouldered shrug. “They told me to run my cock over here and start your motor,” the man answered. “I don’t know what all else they’re doing. If it weren’t for the commotion in the hall, they wouldn’t even’ve told me how come I had to do that.”
Like so many Red Army officers, he’d carried out his orders precisely and to the letter, and hadn’t taken one step beyond them. Stalin had terrified initiative out of the whole country. If being wrong landed you in the gulag, you couldn’t take the chance. That kind of caution had cost casualties, maybe even battles. What would it cost here?
Would anybody at the banquet hall have kept his head enough to think to make the necessary arrests? Bokov had to hope so. (Would the barmen and barmaids have been the ones who poisoned the liquor? No way to know till you started hurting them.)
“Come on,” Shteinberg said, and then, “Where the devil are my valenki?” Bokov had already found his own felt boots under his cot. He was pulling them on. His superior grunted when he came up with his.
“Here.” The Jewish doctor gave Bokov a vial of pills. “Take two of these whenever you start slowing down. They’ll keep you going for three or four days. Eat a lot. Drink a lot. If you were an airplane, you’d be running on your reserve tank.”
“Right.” Bokov could feel that. He wrapped his greatcoat around himself. “Ready, Comrade Colonel?”
“You’d best believe it.” Shteinberg barked hard, mirthless laughter. “See? We get to go to the party after all.”
“Just what I wanted,” Bokov said in a hollow voice. Benzedrine or no benzedrine, the colonel’s chuckle also sounded less lively than it might have.
A jeep waited outside the barracks. Bokov and Shteinberg piled in. the jeep took off toward the south and west. “Potsdam?” Shteinberg asked. “Again?”
“Yes, sir. That palace with the German name,” the driver answered.
“The Schloss Cecilienhof.” Bokov didn’t make it a question. The Red Army noncom behind the wheel nodded. Bokov muttered. That was where Stalin had met with the American President and British Prime Minister. More recently-not even two months ago now-the Red Army had celebrated the anniversary of the Russian Revolution there. And now this.
“We got careless. We got predictable.” Moisei Shteinberg took the words out of his mouth. “We came back to the same place three times in a row, and the fucking Nazis went and made us pay.”
“Somebody should answer for that, sir,” the noncom said. “Even in the trenches, you don’t stick your head up in the same place three times. A sniper’ll put one through your ear if you’re dumb enough to try it.”