The electric light flared on, and a hefty, clean-shaven guard with a fat, freckled face came into the cell.
“Rogov!” he shouted out, checking his list.
So, this was it. They had come for him.
Klim sat up slowly.
“Name and patronymic?” asked the guard.
“I’m a citizen of the United States,” Klim reminded quietly. “We don’t have patronymics on American documents.”
“Shut your mouth, scum! Leave your stuff and come out now.”
Klim’s heart was hammering in his chest. He felt as if he were about to have a heart attack. He put on his shoes and, for some reason, buttoned his shirt collar.
The freckle-faced guard shoved him in the back. “Hurry up!”
They went out into the corridor lined with rows of doors. A dim light filtered from the lightbulbs overhead, throwing crisscross shadows on the floor.
The guard gave curt instructions. “Straight ahead. Right. Right again.” Then suddenly he shouted, “Halt! Face to the wall.”
Two other guards dragged along a man, bloodstained and struggling. He had a rubber bulb in his mouth and kept bellowing something indistinctly.
“Come on now!” said Klim’s guard. “Straight ahead.”
Should I attack him? Klim wondered. It would surely be better to be killed for resisting the authorities than to endure hours of “socialist defense measures.”
“Halt!” shouted the guard.
They stopped outside a brown door.
“Knock.”
Klim closed his eyes for a moment.
“Knock, you bastard!”
This time, Klim knocked on the door.
“Yes?” came a male voice from inside.
“In you go,” the guard ordered.
As Klim entered the interrogation room, he saw Alov and felt himself grow weak with relief. This man would never torture him. Alov might be a fanatic and a scoundrel, but he was no cold-blooded killer.
There was also a typist in the room, sitting under a large portrait of Lenin—a plain, aging woman with a prominent forehead and a mouth that turned down at the corners. She looked at Klim with a weary, disinterested gaze and then adjusted the paper in her typewriter.
No, thought Klim, nothing terrible would happen to him here. They would never beat him in the presence of a woman, surely.
Alov blew his nose loudly into a handkerchief and gestured to a chair in the middle of the room. “Sit down.”
The chair was screwed to the floor, which was covered with battered yellow linoleum. Still, Klim said to himself, that doesn’t mean anything. It was the usual setup for an interrogation room.
Alov looked sick. His eyes were red-rimmed, and the skin under his nose raw. He patted at his pockets and then began opening each one of the desk drawers in turn. At last, he had found what he was looking for—a crumpled packet of filter-less cigarettes.
“Smoke?” he asked, holding the packet out to Klim. “No? Your loss. Now then, let’s try to wind up this business as quickly as we can so that we can all get home.”
The typist began to bang away at the typewriter. With a loud ding, the carriage of the typewriter shot back.
Alov set an envelope on the table. The address was in Klim’s handwriting. “London Central Post Office, for collection by Mr. Smith.” Judging by the stamp, the letter had been sent from Warsaw almost a year ago.
“Do you recognize this?”
Klim shrugged. “I don’t remember what it is.”
“The addressee of that letter never picked it up, so it was returned to the sender, Klim Rogov,” Alov said. “The letter was opened at the Soviet border, and what do you think was inside?”
Alov put his cigarette down on the edge of the ashtray, drew out several postcards from the envelope, and fanned them out. The cards all had holes punched right through them. One bore a portrait of Stalin with a hole straight through his forehead.
At last, Klim remembered. These were the postcards Kitty had been planning to hang on the tree as decorations. Last Christmas, without thinking, Klim had shoved them into an envelope and handed it to Oscar Reich.
“So, what do we have here?” asked Alov. “A former member of the White Guard, Klim Rogov, and his wife, Nina Kupina, were recruited by Chinese intelligence to carry out espionage and sabotage in the Soviet Union. They were given orders to assassinate Comrade Stalin, and we have this on irrefutable evidence.”
“That’s a lie!” Klim interrupted but stopped himself immediately. Here, nobody cared what was a lie and what was the truth. Alov knew quite well it was all nonsense. He was just showing Klim that he was in deep trouble and in it for the long haul.
“You know,” said Alov. “I have a neighbor who’s an expert in preparing skeletons for display. There are maybe ten people in the whole of the USSR with that level of knowledge. It’s quite a skill. First, you have to soak the body for a year to get the flesh off the bones. Then you use chlorine to bleach the bones and dry them out in the sun. And only then can you put the skeleton together, bone by bone. Would you like us to make you into a skeleton for the biology class? I shall make sure you’re put into the school at the orphanage—the one in which your Kitty will be sent. That might even be rather fun! Just think: your little girl will come into the classroom and see her father smiling at her.”
The typist gave a faint snort of laughter.
“Still, if Mr. Rogov will cooperate with us, there’ll be no need for skeletons,” said Alov amiably. “Let’s begin at the beginning. Who sent you to the Soviet Union?”
“I won’t say a thing until you call for Mr. Owen,” retorted Klim.
Alov looked at him for a long time with his blood-shot eyes before dissolving in a furious fit of coughing
“Damn it!” he shouted when he got his breath back. “Do you think I’ve nothing better to do than run around after you, you bastard? Guards!”
Two hefty men came into the room.
Klim tried to get up, but they twisted his arms and handcuffed them to the back of the chair.
Alov blew his nose again into his drenched handkerchief and turned to the typist. “Take this down please, Olga Rustemovna: Record of interrogation of a suspect—”
The carriage bell rang out again, and one by one, the metal letters stamped into the paper.
Whatever Galina tried to do, she never seemed to succeed. She had not even managed to commit suicide successfully.
She had been taken to the hospital to have her stomach pumped, and now, she lay for days on end in the general ward, recovering.
With her face to the wall, Galina tried not to think of anything, but the wretched thought kept coming back to haunt her. How was Klim and his Nina? How was Tata? Was anybody even feeding her?
At first, the other women on the ward had tried to speak to Galina, but soon, they gave up and left her in peace.
“She’s not quite right in the head, that one,” the patients explained to the young woman doctor who came to do the rounds of the ward.
“Now, now, what’s all this?” said the doctor reprovingly. “How are we feeling today?”
“Abandoned,” said Galina and immediately regretted it.
Hearing this, the young doctor called the ward sister and scolded her for neglecting her patients.
Alov came to see Galina only on her fifth day in the hospital. No sooner had he entered the ward than he began to yell at her, calling her a hysterical fool. “Was it because of me you took it into your head to take an overdose?”
The other patients listened with baited breath, intrigued.