One early morning in late February, Novsky returned to his cell, exhausted but satisfied, ready to memorize the revised manuscript of his confession. The manuscript was edited, with corrections scribbled over it in ink as red as blood; his confession seemed to him so weighty that he could not escape the death sentence. He smiled, or it seemed to him that he was smiling. Fedukin had accomplished his secret intention of preparing the final chapter of his honorable biography. Under the cold ashes of these absurd accusations, future investigators would discover the pathos of a life and the consistent ending (despite everything) of a perfect biography.
So the indictment was finally revised on February 27, and the trial for the saboteurs scheduled for the middle of March. At the beginning of May, after a long postponement, there was a sudden and unexpected change in the plans of the investigation, Novsky was brought into Fedukin's office for the last rehearsal of his memorized confession. Fedukin informed him that the indictment had been altered, and handed him the typewritten text of the new one. Standing between the two guards, Novsky read the text and suddenly began howling, or so it seemed to him. They dragged him again to the "doghouse" and left him there among the well- fed rats, Novsky tried to smash his head against the stone wall of the cell; they put him in a strait jacket and took him to a hospital room. Awaking from the delirium induced by morphine injections, Novsky asked to see the interrogator.
In the meantime, Fedukin, conducting two interrogations simultaneously, succeeded in getting a confession out of a certain Paresyan, who, influenced only by threats (and most likely a drink or two), signed a statement in which he claimed that he personally had delivered the first sum of money to Novsky as early as May 1925, when they were co-workers in the cable factory in Novosibirsk. That money, Paiesyan claimed, was a part of the regular trimonthly sum they received from Berlin as a bribe for the satisfactory arrangements that Novsky, through Paresyan and a man named Titelheim, was setting up for certain foreign firms, primarily German and British, Titelheim, an engineer with a small goatee and glasses, a man of the old school with old-fashioned principles, couldn’t understand why he had to drag into his confession other people whom he didn't even know, but Fedukin found a way to persuade him: after a long resistance old Titelheim, determined to die honorably, heard terrible screams from the adjoining room, and recognised the voice of his only daughter. Promised that her life would be spared, he agreed to all of Fedukin's conditions, and signed the statement without even reading it. (Years went by before the truth about the Titelheims came to light: in some transit labor camp the old man found out almost by chance, from a woman prisoner named Ginsburg, that his daughter had been murdered in a prison cell on the very day of his interrogation.)
In the middle of May the confrontation between those two and Novsky took place. It seemed to Novsky that Paresyan reeked of vodka; with a thick tongue he threw at Novsky in bad Russian the fantastic details of their longstanding collaboration. From Paresyan's sincere fury, Novsky knew that Fedukin, in his art of squeezing out confessions, had in Patesyan's case attained that ideal level of cooperation which was the goal of every decent interrogation: Paresyan, thanks to Fedukin's creative genius, had accepted the premises as the living reality, more real than a jumble of facts, and had colored those premises with his own remorse and hatred. Titelheim, oblivious, with a gaze turned toward a distant dead world, couldn't remember the details he had put In the signed statement, and Fedukin had to remind him sternly of the rules of good conduct. Titelheim slowly remembered the amount, cited figures, places, and dates. Novsky realized that his last chance for rescue was slipping away, that Fedukin had prepared the most dishonorable of deaths for him: he would die as a thief who, like Judas, had sold his soul for thirty pieces of silver. (Most likely it will remain forever a secret whether this was only a part of Fedukin’s prepared plan to get Novsky to cooperate sincerely, or yet another revision of the indictment brought about by the one who didn’t want to die dishonorably.)
That night, after the confrontation, Novsky again tried to commit suicide and thereby save a part of the legend. The watchful eye and doglike hearing of the guards, however, detected some suspicious sound, probably the sigh of relief that reached them from the dying man's celclass="underline" with his veins slashed, Novsky was taken to the hospital cell, where he stubbornly kept tearing off the bandages, and they had to feed him intravenously. (This was the next step toward the final liquidation of Novsky.)