Part IV
Reuben awoke disoriented, as he often did, to the sound of screams.
“Pachemoo?” the voice wailed. “Pachemoo!”
Why, the man lamented. Why?
It was not a question; it was simply agony and despair. The wailing exhausted itself after a while, leaving only a softer moaning sound. Then there were other voices, lower in pitch, guttural. Telling the man to be quiet. Threatening to strike him if he made another sound.
Reuben’s eyes came fully open. He sat up and looked around. He no longer gave much thought to the cramped, stifling space that was his cell. He had somehow managed to grow used to the place. He had a bunk with a bare, filthy mattress and a hole in the floor that served as his toilet. He had a pitcher and a wash basin and a plate. He was given water and food, such as it was, once a day. He was taken out regularly for what were euphemistically referred to as “debriefing” sessions.
There was a pattern, here: a routine. He had adjusted to it.
Reuben was now in his second month of detention. He was dressed in a tattered prison uniform which had been too tight when he first put it on, but which was now loose fitting, and getting baggier every day.
He had had only one visitor. A thin, nervous guy from the American consulate — named Tubbs or Stubbs or something (for some reason, Reuben could never get it straight), an annoying little bureaucrat with a whiny voice and a pinched face — had made two appearances. On his first visit, he listened to Reuben’s story with little interest, taking the occasional perfunctory note on a small clipboard he carried with him. On his subsequent visit, he asked Reuben about his health, and whether he was being treated well. Those details struck Reuben as being beside the point.
“What about getting me out of here?” Reuben had asked. “Is anyone working on that?”
“I’ll be frank with you,” the man answered. “There isn’t much we can do in a case like this. Even my being here today involves something of a concession. Your circumstances are sufficiently unusual that some allowances have been made. We’re arranging for a psychiatric evaluation as soon as we possibly can. It could provide the grounds for your release to American custody.”
“Meaning you think I’m crazy?”
He looked at Reuben coldly.
“I don’t have an opinion one way or the other. Should you be found to be in your right mind, it doesn’t look good for you. You’ll have to stand trial for counter-revolutionary activities. I don’t think I need to inform you of the severity of sentencing for such crimes.”
“No. I’ve heard.”
In fact, Reuben had been hearing about the punishments doled out to traitors — death by hard labor in the gulags, numerous highly imaginative forms of torture, and (maybe most cruelly) notification that you’re going to be unexpectedly released followed by summary execution — on an almost daily basis since arriving. These descriptions were often screamed at him, with an occasional backhand slap or a nightstick jab to the ribs to make sure he was paying attention. He would sometimes get an hour or more of this at a time.
“Then I don’t have to tell you that you had better hope for your own sake that you are crazy.” With that the irritating bureaucrat named Tubbs or Stubbs turned to leave.
He turned back for a moment, remembering something.
“There’s one other possibility. Even if they find you guilty, they might be persuaded to exchange you for one of theirs. It’s been done before, but not lately.”
With that, he left. The visit had been more than three weeks earlier. Reuben had seen no one from the outside since then, and was given no indication when the psychiatric test would take place.
He was eager to take it. Not just for the possibility of release; it would be a relief to have confirmation that he had lost his mind. His memories of the past few months — the past few years, even — could not be reconciled with reality. The only explanation for this (at least, the only one that he cared to entertain) was that his mind had played some vast trick on him. Whatever else had happened, he knew that he had suffered a head injury at some point in the recent past; he had the scars to prove it. But even that couldn’t have happened the way he remembered it happening.
Technically, he was being held on charges of carrying a forged visa. This was certainly a serious enough offense in its own right. But what had really caught the attention of the authorities was the country which had supposedly issued the visa: the Russian Federation.
There was no such country.
This was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Still. Always. The Soviet Union had never fallen. Apparently, from what Reuben had been able to gather, there had been a Glasnost and a Perestroika. The Berlin Wall had fallen. Gorbachev had presided over tremendous changes in a short period of time. All as he had remembered.
But then things changed.
Gorbachev was assassinated. He was replaced by Boris Yeltsin, who didn’t last long in the office himself. The man who replaced Yeltsin was someone Reuben had never heard of named Gamilov. The new Premiere cracked down hard, bringing the would-be breakaway Republics back into line. Perestroika and Glasnost were now forbidden terms. The Gulags were overflowing with persons accused of pursuing these outlawed notions. Tensions with the west were higher than they had been in years.
Reuben managed to put all this together from information gleaned from his interrogators. They weren’t particularly forthcoming with the historical details, but they would occasionally blurt something out when they became frustrated with his obstinate insistence on his own memories. Of course, it was possible that this was all disinformation, that his captors were deliberately hinting at a false history to confuse him. But Reuben couldn’t make out what motivation they might have for that
In any case, he was the one who had been shot in the head recently and who had lost three months between January and May. The smart money said that these people were telling more or less the truth, and that Reuben was terribly confused.
And to those people, the guardians of the security of this new regime, Reuben’s visa was viewed as being much more than a clumsy forgery. It was evidence of sedition or, as they termed it, counter-revolution.
“Time you go,” a voice grunted at Reuben.
He looked up. Two of the prison guards were standing at the door to his cell. It was time for Reuben’s debriefing.
Per established procedure, Reuben stood up and faced the door, situating himself two paces from it. The door opened, and one of the guards entered. Reuben held out his hands. The guard placed the heavy iron manacles on his wrists, biting into flesh already bruised and scabbed from wearing them every day since arriving.
The guards led him down the passageway: one in front, one behind. Reuben didn’t look into the other cells as he walked past. He had grown used to the hopelessness of this place. The sorrow and desperation of his fellow inmates no longer held any fascination for him. He couldn’t even smell the stench any more.
They walked out of the cell block and into a maze of stairwells and corridors that took them through six separate security checkpoints — some days they took an alternate route that had only four security stops; Reuben had never been able to ascertain why there were two different ways of getting there — arriving at last at the interrogation room. Reuben had never seen this building from the outside, but he knew inside that it was vast. The hall that contained the interrogation room stretched a good fifty yards off into the distance, lined by doorways to what he assumed were similar rooms. And they had climbed six flights of steps in order to arrive there.
The walls here, as in the prison below, were bare stone blocks. And like in the prison, there were no windows. The only lighting came from dim lamps with black shades dangling from the ceiling. The lamps had been placed begrudgingly, if precisely, at distant intervals from each other.
As the lead guard opened the door to the interrogation room, Reuben steeled himself for what was to come. He had endured two months of verbal and physical abuse. The physical handling had been somewhat restrained, but was painful and wearying nonetheless. Through it all, Reuben had struggled to remain indifferent, to appear to be unperturbed by the whatever treatment was doled out. He entered the interrogation room and was seated in front of the desk.
As always, the Colonel was seated behind the desk. He looked up from his paperwork as Reuben was brought in, which was a change from routine. Reuben didn’t know the Colonel’s name, much less his actual rank. But the man’s white hair and goatee had reminded him of the spokesman for Kentucky Fried Chicken, and so the name had stuck.
The Colonel issued an order to the guards. Reuben couldn’t make it out, but he knew that it wasn’t the usual dismissal. To his surprise, one of the guards reached down with a key and removed his manacles. The Colonel then dismissed the guards.
The Colonel studied Reuben for a moment.
“Good morning, Mr. Stone,” he said at last. “You would like cup of tea?”
Definitely a change.
“Sounds good,” said Reuben.
The Colonel poured a cup from the incongruous white china teapot in front of him. He passed the teacup to Reuben. Reuben took a sip. It was mostly milk and sugar. His stomach rumbled. This was the first sweet thing he had tasted in a while.
“So you’re retiring Bad Cop after only a couple months?” Reuben asked. “And now we’re onto Good Cop? You know, in my experience, those work better if you have two guys doing it at more or less the same time.”
The Colonel eyed him dully.
“You have not been mistreated, Mr. Stone. This must be understood clearly. At no time have you been mistreated. And if you were, you must tell me who has done this thing. That man will be punished.”
Reuben sat back and gawped. Good Cop, indeed.
“Why is that an issue?” he asked.
The Colonel sighed. He turned back to his paperwork, which Reuben recognized as a record the officer kept of all their meetings.
“You have been charged with serious crimes. Men who have been charged with such, sometimes they are beaten. Sometimes they go two, three days with no food or nor water. Sometimes they are not allowed to sleep.”
Reuben raised his eyebrows.
“Sometimes they are killed,” the Colonel concluded.
“Fine,” said Reuben. “None of that has been done to me. We’ve had our regular chats. You’ve yelled a lot and made a lot of threats. Sometimes you or one of the boys have roughed me up a little. But no permanent damage. I haven’t lost any teeth.”
The Colonel shook his head.
“Some men lose much more than teeth,” he said.
Reuben took another sip from the tea.
“I’m sure. So you’ve mollycoddled me…because I’m an American? I don’t care. Why bring it up? Are you going to start beating me now?”
The Colonel shook his head.
“You are to be remanded today to custody of…other authorities. Order comes from very high. Men will be here shortly to take you away.”
The Colonel closed the notebook. He looked up, his face showing a bit of satisfaction. Just like that. Another case closed.
“These are strange times, are they not? Things can change quickly. Now things change for you, Mr. Stone. But before you leave, I want it clear between us what happened here. And what did not happen.”
Reuben nodded.
“Sure. But do you really think it’s going to matter to anybody whether I was mistreated? Because frankly, I’d be pretty surprised.”
“Someone cares. Someone has made enquiries as to how you were treated.”
There was a knock at the door.
The Colonel stood up and said something loudly in Russian. The door swung open. Three men in dark suits stood at the door of the interrogation room. The man in the middle spoke:
“Reuben Stone?”
Reuben nodded, surprised. This man was either an American or a Russian who had been trained to talk like one.
“My name is Hamilton. We’ll be taking you out of here.”
Reuben stood up. The other two men flanked him on either side. He waited for a moment before realizing that no handcuffs or chains were in the offing.
“I wish you the best, Mr. Stone,” said the Colonel.
Reuben turned and looked at him. He nodded again. This could be it. The fake release followed by summary execution. But he doubted it. For one thing, they never said they were letting him go, which was supposed to be part of the deal.
The man in charge, Hamilton, led them out.
—
Reuben sat near the back of the airplane, freezing. He shivered from the cold. He was still wearing his prison uniform, which provided scant warmth. The cabin of the plane was quite small — eight seats in four rows, with an odd single seat behind him. One of the guards was seated there. The other was across the aisle from him. The mysterious Mr. Hamilton was seated in the front row.
He estimated that they had been in the air for an hour.
Reuben looked out the window, but there was nothing to see but clouds. He hoped they would clear the top of them soon. He hadn’t seen the sun in a while.
He had no idea where they were going. He had kept quiet as they exited the prison, and during the drive to the airfield. Hamilton had spoken only to the guards, in Russian. Reuben worked to keep his curiosity in check. Sometimes it didn’t do to ask questions.
And, besides, at least he was out of prison.
Reuben closed his eyes and tried to slow his breathing. His teeth were chattering. He knew that keeping his muscles relaxed would lessen the stress of shivering. There was something else he was supposed to do, too, but he couldn’t remember what it was.
Oh, wait. That was it.
Think warm thoughts.
Reuben clenched his teeth. At least his sense of humor, such as it was, was intact.
For the first time in a long while, he wondered what was happening with Betty and with Ksenia. How was it working out between them? Did they know what had happened to him? He thought about the old man. Surely he and Sergei were working behind the scenes to find out where he was.
While in prison, Reuben wouldn’t allow himself to think of them. But now he was out.
Sort of.
He didn’t want to give himself over to it, but he had a suspicion that the old man must somehow be behind his release. The fact that there was an American involved seemed to support this suspicion.
“Do you want a sandwich?”
Reuben opened his eyes. Hamilton was standing in the aisle in front of him, a brown paper bag in hand. He nodded to the guard seated across the aisle from Reuben, who got up and moved to the front of the cabin. After Hamilton sat down, the other guard got up and joined his comrade in the front.
“I could use a blanket it you’ve got one.”
“Sorry,” said Hamilton, “no blankets.” He stood up and barked an order at one of the guards. The man opened a small compartment in the bulkhead in front of him and removed the black raincoat that Hamilton had been wearing earlier. He brought the coat back and handed it to Hamilton, who nodded towards Reuben. The guard grunted his understanding and dropped the coat in Reuben’s lap.
“Thanks,” said Reuben, squeezing himself into it. Hamilton was by no means a thin man, but he was smaller in the shoulders than Reuben. Reuben didn’t mind the pinching in his shoulders; at least he would stop shivering.
“How’s that?” Hamilton asked.
“Fine,” said Reuben. “Thanks.”
Hamilton nodded. He opened his brown paper bag and peered into it.
“Let’s see, I have chicken and…I think this is egg salad.”
“Chicken,” said Reuben.
Hamilton handed him the sandwich, which was wrapped in wax paper. Reuben unwrapped it and began eating. It was a very ordinary sandwich, but it was wonderful. He had had nothing for weeks but stale black bread and some kind of very thin onion soup.
“Sorry there’s no coffee,” said Hamilton. “I’ll get us some when we land.”
Reuben swallowed a bite of sandwich.
“Where are we headed?” he asked, as casually as he could.
“Georgia. Tbilisi.”
Reuben tried to think of answers to his question that he might have expected. This was not one.
“Oh? What’s there?”
Hamilton didn’t answer right away. He took another bite from his sandwich.
“A facility,” he said after a moment. “And someone who wants to see you.”
Reuben nodded.
“And is it somebody who you think…I will want to see?”
Hamilton looked over his shoulder out the window.
“Not likely,” he said, not bothering to turn back. “Not likely at all.”
Not the old man, then.
“This isn’t my psychological evaluation, is it?
“No.”
“Well, can you tell me who it is that wants to see me?”
Hamilton turned and looked back at Reuben.
“Sure. His name is Markku. Nino Markku.”
Posted by Phil at March 1, 2004 12:00 AM | TrackBack