Yevgeny Semochev and Josef Patiski carried Dr. Alexander Piotr Katchatkovich through the door, squeezing together to do so, compressing between them the blindfolded old man with his spines of white hair and his dirty white sweater. "Ahhh – ahhh," Katchatkovich noised, sounding like he was trying to dissuade children from going any further.
"Shut the door," Yevgeny ordered the fourth man who had opened the door for them and preceded them into the room. When the man, in a black overcoat and soft cap that made his ears invisible between them, stepped as if to close the door and remain in the room, Yevgeny snapped, "then go and watch the street."
The man looked at Yevgeny as if he'd just heard the barking close at hand of a very large wolf. Then Yevgeny's words seemed to resolve themselves into Russian in the man's head, and he opened, pirouetted around, and closed the door with the desperate fluid grace of a fish escaping from a bucket to the river.
Sometimes, Yevgeny saw the fear he caused in his own comrades. He knew his reputation was ferocious. But if it was ferocious, it was ferocious in the one and only cause. He had not joined the Judges to be loved. He had not joined the Judges for anything doing with himself whatsoever.
Yevgeny Semochev was a big man, with arms like the forks on a forklift. Josef was much smaller, and in reality, Josef's "help" in carrying the doctor was a formality. Really Yevgeny was jerking the doctor around, and Josef was just trying to hold on to preserve the idea that he was helping.
The front room of the apartment was no more than four meters on a side, and probably less. The furniture was wooden, cheap, old, but carefully cared for, smelling of polish. Lace doilies decorated the dining table. There was a portrait of Vladimir Lenin on the wall, and a portrait of Nikita Khruschev in his Red Army uniform, smiling red-cheeked in the snow with Vassili Zaitsev, the famous Soviet sniper of the battle for Stalingrad. There was a smell, too, that Yevgeny, after several visits to the apartment, had only just recognized as arthritis ointment.
The apartment had until a few months ago belonged to the grandmother of one of the younger Judges. She had been found dead in her shower one day, but the Judges had deceived the government into thinking that she was alive and well, and so the apartment had not been reassigned. The old woman had lost a husband and two little daughters at Stalingrad; one to Fascist bullets, one to starvation, and one to disappearance. The husband, the story went, had known the sniper Zaitsev personally.
Yevgeny had not planned it like this because of the connection between Stalingrad and the ghost of the old woman, but ghosts were something that concerned him very much, and the connection tickled the thing in his breast that had formerly caused him to smile. And he liked the old wooden furniture, which spoke to him of a time in Russian history that was now a long time gone; it caused a vibration of pain, reminding him that what was worth trying to save had been lost ten years before he was born. It was somewhat surprising that the old woman had been allowed to keep it. It must have been a bureaucratic oversight.
Yevgeny flung Dr. Alexander Piotr Katchatkovich in a slatted wooden chair. "Bastards," the blindfolded Doctor grunted dismissively.
"Bind him," Yevgeny ordered Josef.
"I know," the smaller man said with a little reproof in his voice, his hand already in the drawer where the wire was waiting.
"Hah," the Doctor snorted. "Bind a man who will be eighty years old in two more winters."
"Fucking vodka," Yevgeny snarled, dashing in front of Josef, who rolled his eyes at being interrupted, and bashing his hard fist against Katchatkovich's temple. The Doctor's head lolled and spit and a tiny puff of steam popped out of his mouth – the apartment was not well heated.
Yevgeny took off his cotton gloves. He had hit Katchatkovich impulsively just now, but there would be many more blows before this was over, and he wanted his hard knuckles mashing the monster's face. "You were supposed to have stayed out longer."
Josef slipped in as Yevgeny stepped back, and began bending the wire around Katchatkovich's wrists, fastening them to the arms of the chair.
"Fucking vodka!" The old man barked, his head returning to upright like a compass needle. "At Stalingrad, vodka was milk and bread and blankets to us. Half a liter of vodka, a dozen hand grenades, a hundred bullets for the Thompson submachine gun. Those were my morning rations."
"As if you ever got close enough to see a Fascist. You were locked up in the back with your plans and your designs while patriots starved and froze and died on the lines."
"There were no lines!" The Doctor shouted, as if there was only a little time remaining and it was vitally important that he make Yevgeny understand this one thing. "You think you frighten me with this cold chair? Once I helped defend an antitank gun in the ruins of a factory for seventy-five hours, without resupply, and it was so cold a brick in the open air was our freezer! The bodies of the men before us had frozen solid so we couldn't tell them from the rubble, until I brushed snow away for a place to steady my rifle and found a face staring up at me. The German tanks froze just as hard after we pierced them with our gun! And now," the Doctor suddenly grew quiet, his voice thin and melancholy, "now you tell me I am an enemy of the state, and bring me to the Lubyanka. After I'm done away with, remember what I did for Mother Russia long before you were born…"
In spite of himself Yevgeny felt a great sympathy for the old man hit him, and a horrid rage, too. Yevgeny had become accustomed to being battered by strong emotions. He thinks we are the KGB. And why shouldn't he? Why shouldn't he? Why shouldn't those monsters, those murderous whores, come for him, as well?
His thoughts disoriented him, and he quickly said the first thing that came to mind in order to keep the initiative. "I wanted chloroform. But others told me no. No, even something as crude as chloroform was too hard to come by, too rare on the black market. If we went asking around for it, we would leave an arrow that pointed straight to us." Because they were now in the room, and because Katchatkovich had thought they were the KGB, and while Yevgeny was prepared to do many things, he couldn't stomach that, he untied the Doctor's blindfold. "So we used what was in great supply, and poured vodka down your throat with a hose. We are not, old man, the KGB. We are very far from the Lubyanka here. Both physically, and spiritually. If that place can be said to have any spiritual part." He took the blindfold from the Doctor's face.
Yevgeny could see that, even if he'd woken up hours early, Katchatkovich was hung over in a way that only an accomplished alcoholic could survive. His hands trembled grossly in their wire bindings, and his eyes looked like pulp. He turned them around the room, looking more at the room than at Yevgeny. A big man with a scarred lip and a shaved head is no surprise to him in these circumstances, Yevgeny mused. But the grandmother's furniture is.
"Where are we?" The Doctor wanted to know.
Yevgeny was to ask questions, not answer them. "We are the Judges, old man. You have heard of us?"
Katchatkovich squinted up at him. Yevgeny had placed himself so that to look at him from the chair was also to look up into the light fixture. "I have heard of you," Katchatkovich sulked.
"There are twenty-five freedom fighters in this building," Yevgeny told him. "Watching the streets. Watching the sky. Watching the other rooftops, on which there are other freedom fighters, who watch the streets adjacent to this one. We are all armed, of course." He took the remote control from the deep pocket of his overcoat. "This button," he laid his finger on it, "detonates the bomb that will, as a last resort, kill all of us in this room. My name is Yevgeny Semochev. I was born in a village in the Ukraine, outside of Kiev. I tell you this because I have no doubt that you will die in this room. I have no doubt that you will die in that chair, with your wrists and ankles still tied with that very wire. I do not want you to have any doubt about this, either."
"We will see what we will see," Katchatkovich did not lose eye contact. But he sounded like Socrates being offered the hemlock.
Yevgeny glanced at Josef, who was standing by the door. Josef did not make eye contact with him. Satisfied, he turned back to the Doctor.
"You have heard of us. Very well. But have you heard the truth, or have you heard only what the state press is allowed to report?"
Katchatkovich looked away from him in haughty disgust. "Tell me the "truth", criminal, and I will tell you if it matches what I have heard."
The vodka was a fucking mistake, Yevgeny realized. Damn it! He's still drunk, and all it does is strengthen his nerves. He's a sot! He's probably been drunk since the Americans launched the nuclear attack on the northern submarine bases during the Patriotic War of Expansion!
But on the other hand…when he dries out…and we give him no more…the balance will shift.
"Your Soviet Union has made the communist utopia a bloody steaming Hell," Yevgeny explained. "Instead of a paradise for the worker, we live in a vast slave market where our very thoughts are exterminated. We, the Judges, sentence you, the criminal against the proletariat, to punishment. We are few in number, of course you know that. The machine against which we struggle is without a scrap of humanity or compunction. We know that. Whole families have been given the bullet through the back of the neck when a Judge has been suspected among them. Genealogies wiped out in single nights of arrests – mothers, daughters, babies with dolls in arms vanishing forever, to root us out." He leaned into the old man's face, he controlled the instinct to fly into a beating rage, he smelled vodka so pure from the old man's pores he could have immolated them both by lighting a match. "But I want you to look at me, Doctor Alexander Piotr Katchatkovich, and see if you think pain or grief can sway me."
Yevgeny couldn't help that his eyes were so wide with feral rage that his vision swam at the edges. He did not speak until the Doctor gave him his answer. The Doctor answered by saying nothing at all.
"We are patient, Doctor Alexander Piotr Katchatkovich. We are as fucking patient as a spider in Lenin's fucking tomb. We caused the "motor accident" that killed KGB Director Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov. We hanged that Politburo member in his mistress's house in 1977. It was even us who hunted down the Fascist Dr. Josef Mengele at his lab on the Black Sea and burned him alive in 1953. That was before my time, but it is a story the veterans tell that keeps me warm at night, when we have no fuel rations."
"Huh," Katchatkovich grunted. And even with his hands wired to the chair, he managed to flick his wrists dismissively.
"Now our patience has won us you," Yevgeny said heavily.
"You've won a worn-out shell. I'm a bull so old you can't tell me from a cow. I drink the days away."
Yevgeny couldn't help the slightest crease of a smile. He'd thought that a man like Katchatkovich, legendary Hero of the Soviet Union, might be tough. But then, he knew the Scientist of Stalingrad was old now…it had been forty years since he'd won the Order of Lenin in the Great Patriotic War. He'd wondered – dreaded – that he might wind up interrogating only a sloppy elderly punching bag, who shit his pants every day anyway, without being beaten for half an hour first. That would have been a travesty on the audio tape.
But that didn't seem to be the case. But when his wheat mash courage wears off…who knows?
"Now we begin with the questions," Yevgeny told him. "You seem to know what the Lubyanka is for, so none of this will be too new to you. We do not have the government resources of the KGB, but we make do with what solutions we can devise. This is being recorded, you know. For posterity."
Yevgeny snapped his fist forward, a one-quarter power blow, and mashed Katchatkovich's lips against his teeth. The Doctor yelped and snapped his head back to escape the pain, but only banged it against the slats of the chair.
Yevgeny brought his fist down on the Doctor's leg just above the knee, feeling the muscle bruise under the blow.
Then he darted forward – his chair legs rutched against the floor – and socked Katchatkovich in the solar plexus.
"I don't know –" the word know was a painful evacuation, "anything. I am too old to be told anything. You are wasting your time."
Yevgeny cocked his head to give the impression that he was considering the answer – then he dealt Katchatkovich the same three blows in a different order, to keep him guessing.
"We know that. There were only two lazy KGB agents protecting you, dozing away the days until their retirement. We know how little you matter now." Yevgeny fitted his fist into his palm, to show that it was ready to pock flesh again. "We know also the state version of your story. But what we have brought you here to do – besides give you the ultimate sanction for your crimes in service to the tyrant bureaucracy – is to find out the real truth about the Scientist of Stalingrad."
Katchatkovich actually began bawling with laughter, doubled over as far as he was able in his chair. Yevgeny's face froze, but he let the Doctor bawl away. Let him build up a feeling of control, he told himself, resisting the urge to bounce his fist off that chin with its carpet layer of white stubble.
"Well, well," Katchatkovich gasped. "Let's see. The name my mother gave me really is Alexander Piotr Katchatkovich. I really was born in Arkhangel'sk, on the White Sea...and my father and uncles were indeed fishermen, even the ones that drowned. I was raised from the cradle – the Communist Manifesto was read to me in my diapers! That is true! My family was good, loyal...at least in the early years, when it was easy to be."
"Yes, we have heard," Yevgeny sneered. "The only Bolsheviks in a city that was otherwise loyal to the czar to the very end. Your heroic father and uncles fighting street to street for the Revolution. And you, too...in your diapers."
"You think this makes you strong?" Katchatkovich shouted. "Making fun of an old man after tying him to a chair? You bastards! I spit on your faces!" The Doctor spat on the floor. Then, as if Yevgeny and Josef might not have completely understood, he added, "Fuck your mothers."
The Judges had pulled the drapes across the living room's one window, to keep Katchatkovich from seeing the view and recognizing where he was. But the drapes weren't quite wide enough to cover the window completely. They'd had to leave a two-inch strip uncovered. It was on the far angle from Katchatkovich. Yevgeny was confident that the Doctor could not see anything through it.
Yevgeny could see out of it; against a two-inch strip of a state pharmaceuticals factory, he could see the snow that was falling. The snow made him calm; it made him patient. As long as the snow was falling, they had the upper hand.
