Arch Patton

by James Strauss

  The Russian guards made no move to open the front door. I turned the ancient handle on one of the double doors, opened it out, and then waved for Benito to pass. I followed her in.

  A man stood just inside the door. He held out one arm to Benito. She put her hand on the man’s arm. He guided her into a study. I was right behind them.

  Benito stopped when her guide stopped. His arm fell away and he departed quietly, the way we had come in. I stepped up next to her. In front of a huge old fireplace, sitting at a chess table, sat two men, obviously engaged in a game. I inhaled deeply, coming to full alert. One of the men was a large Russian in full uniform who had to be Igor Kasinski. The other was also in full uniform. The uniform of our ship. Captain Kessler had turned up unexpectedly.

  Benito and I stood motionless five feet from them. Kessler knocked his pipe against the side of the chessboard. The big Russian took a large swig from a brandy snifter. He eyed us both, but Kessler never bothered to take his eyes from the chessboard.

  “Well, well, well, our cruise director and our little ugly version of Indiana Jones have come to dinner,” Kessler snarled more than spoke.

  I could tell immediately that Benito felt the same malevolence coming from Kessler that I had. I looked from one smiling man to the other. I took them to be friends. Kessler was on strong terms with U.S. Customs and Immigration. He was bright and adroit enough to have figured out how to possibly get the gold off of Aguiak. I had underestimated the man. I was in much deeper than I had calculated. Quite possibly, I was in over my head.

  “Chess, it is a wonderful game, is it not Professor Jones?” Kasinski said to me, raising his glass in a salute and then gulping the golden liquid down.

  “Patton,” I replied, quietly, “not Jones.”

  Both men smirked knowingly at one another, which sent a shiver straight down my spine.

  “Come, come, let us not stand on titles, drink with us,” the Russian demanded, “Heinrich tells me that you are a player. Are you a player?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX:

  Instrument of God

  I approached the chessboard. I examined the table, the woods used in its construction, and the players themselves. I hefted a white rook after glancing at Kasinski for permission and getting his nod. Double tournament-weighted ash. The black players looked to be of walnut. And there was an odd custom element to them. Some clear resin had been inset into the top of each piece. A class set-up not normally owned or handled by rank amateurs of the sport.

  And I knew the sport well. I had beaten Bent Larson, a grandmaster at the time, while I was still a high school senior. Larsen hated me for that and shamed me in front of my classmates, so I had studied harder and swore never to become a master like him. I learned a better way to play the game. Seldom did I ever win a game against anyone I played, except in my mind. Losing at chess, I discovered, was a masterful psychological weapon to deploy, if carefully wielded.

  I observed a bottle of Russian liquor inside a nearby cabinet. I did not see any American booze, which was highly prized by all Russians. I wondered why Kessler had not brought any with him.

  Kasinski lifted the rook from my hand and then began quickly resetting the board. Neither man spoke. Finally, I did.

  “Would the lady like a drink?” I asked of Benito.

  I knew she was way out of her element and still did not grasp how she had come to be there with me.

  Kessler unlimbered himself from his chair, walked to the cabinet, and half-filled another snifter. He proffered it unceremoniously across the reset chess table. She immediately tipped it and then drank deeply. Kessler held his own glass in one hand and his dead pipe in the other. Kasinski reclined, watching without expression, his arms folded.

  I perused my opponent across the table of men. White was on his side, but I didn’t care. I was not here to play chess. I was here for higher stakes, but in that game I didn’t know much at all about the pieces or rules. So I delayed my next move.

  “Do you prefer any particular opening?” the Russian said, revealing himself for what he was.

  A dedicated Russian chess player of some repute, no doubt. He knew the openings. He guessed that I did or he was attempting to gauge me and he didn’t care. Kessler had probably set him up to expect something a little different from me.

  I shook my head. He advanced his king pawn. I advanced my own.

  “Did we come here to play chess?” I asked quietly, unwilling to proceed further without some clarification.

  The Russian eyed me.

  “You came for dinner at Captain Kessler’s request. Which we will proceed to in a few minutes. I did not know you played the game.”

  I believed the man. I watched him advance his queen’s knight. A lead-in to the “Four Knights Game.” Very conservative, if I was to pick it up. Very labored. Very complex. Very boring. And very Russian.

  “Captain, would you be so kind as to get the lady a chair?” I asked.

  Kessler pondered his reply over the lip of his glass. I detected fire in his eyes. But he moved off. I heard him speak to someone in an adjoining room. Kessler soon returned. The same man who had met us at the door was beside him, carrying a chair.

  Benito smiled as she sat, but not at Kessler. At me. I made believe I didn’t notice.

  I answered Kasinski’s knight with a knight. I accepted the Four Knights Game and waited to see if he wanted to proceed on into the full opening. He did.

  “What is the occasion of this dinner?” I asked, lightly feigning that the board had my full attention.

  Kasinski moved his other knight. We go to the game, I thought, but still remained well into former master’s play. Kessler bent over the board.

  “I see that the game has not yet really begun,” he said, musing more to himself than to us. He continued on. “I thought since you were coming out here tomorrow anyway that you might like to see the place first.”

  I glanced into Kasinski’s eyes. I saw a twinkle. Kessler didn’t know why I was visiting the gulag. At least I didn’t think he did, but I didn’t have enough data to come to a reasonable conclusion.

  Kasinski’s assistant returned. He leaned into the Commissar’s ear before departing.

  “It would seem that dinner is served. We can continue later?”

  I agreed. We all rose to follow the assistant.

  Dinner went without incident. The food was surprisingly Western and tasty. I sensed that Kessler, although he appeared not to have provided booze, had indeed come through with great American steaks. I had no good reason, but I doubted that the gulag had much of a supply of grain-fed beef.

  Prior to leaving the ship, I had reflected upon one thing for which I had not prepared. I lacked hard evidence that the objective of my mission was, in fact, physically present in the gulag. I was not even certain that he was alive. As dinner was ending, I probed.

  “What about a tour of the place?” I requested.

  Kessler immediately demurred.

  “I want no part of any tours. I like the way my uniform looks right now and I’ve heard enough from others about what goes on here.”

  The assistant was back with a box of cigars. Both Kessler and Kasinski took one. I declined but was nearly stunned out of my chair when Benito took one. The three of them cut, clipped, and did other things to the large brown things that cigar smokers know how to do. The assistant appeared to light each one very carefully, as if he was lighting roman candles. Benito grinned in contentment and then blew a cloud of smoke at me. I grinned back. I liked her with the cigar. Or without it.

  “Captain, we shall repair to the lower environs whilst you, my captain, can consider the game the professor and I have begun … and, of course, enjoy more of that fine Russian whiskey. The vodka is undrinkable, but the whiskey’s not that bad.”

  Kasinski rose, leading the way back towards his study, one hand holdi
ng his smoking cigar, the other his full snifter, and Benito and I in tow. Our cruise director was not nearly as stable as when we came in. All three had restocked their glasses from the whiskey bottle. Kessler sat down with him at the chess table. He loosened the top button of his shirt, which was the first informality I had ever seen the man take.

  Kasinski motioned for Benito and me to follow him. We complied. We reached a well-lit stairway leading down. Kasinski pivoted.

  “This is not really a place for a lady if you know what I mean,” he stated.

  “Don’t mind me, I’ve been to tough places before,” she responded.

  I looked at the Cruise Director quizzically. Maybe she really had. Her purpose on the visit still eluded me as we headed down the many steps of the unbroken stairway.

  The bottom of the stairwell was a flat concrete landing. As we came to a halt, Kasinski rapped on a tall steel door once, quite hard. It opened with a nearly silent, well-oiled metallic sound. We stepped through, finding ourselves inside a brightly lit room about ten feet by ten feet. Another steel door, identical to the first, stood ajar at the far wall. The man who opened the first door had already disappeared through the second.

  “What is the real purpose of your visit?” Kasinski drilled me directly.

  I leaned, with my back against an unexpectedly clean white wall.

  “The O’Donelly boy. I’ve heard nothing. Is he here? Is he okay? If he’s here, can I see him?”

  I watched the Commissar’s self-importance grow.

  “Proof of life,” he answered. “You want ‘proof of life,’ as you American’s like to say.”

  “What are you talking about?” Benito blurted out.

  I looked over at her, as did Kasinski, before I fielded her question.

  “I came here to get this young American boy named O’Donelly out of this place and back to his home in the U.S.”

  She scrutinized me, closely, soberly.

  “Who the hell are you?” she finally demanded after a moment, her drink at her side, forgotten.

  I didn’t answer her. Instead, I steered back to the mission.

  “Yes, Commissar, you have it exactly. What have you got?” I held out my hands in question as I spoke.

  Kasinski motioned me forward.

  “Come this way,” he said, then went through the second door. I entered another world. I picked up a stench, which hit me full in the face. Benito trailed me, missing the smell of raw sewage and worse, probably because of the amount of alcohol she had consumed. We followed Kasinski into a mammoth, dimly lit, underground pipe, maybe fifteen feet in diameter. We carefully stepped around a runnel of fluid, which traced a course through the hardened muck all the way up its center. The stink overpowered the unprepared. Its intensity made it seem almost lethal.

  I halted when I heard Benito retch behind me. Her glass then hit and bounced off the pipe’s bottom muck. I stepped back to put my arm on her shoulder, but she pushed me off. She tried to talk, then retched some more. Finally, I applied pressure to her shoulder with both hands. I guided her back to the clean white room, closing the door behind her. I ground her unfinished cigar into the muck. I thought of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He had not lied about gulag conditions or the inhumanity.

  “Was that for effect?” I said angrily to Kasinski.

  The man didn’t react at all. I accompanied him to what I thought was a “T” in the pipe, but it turned out to be a hollow of cells. There was a circular area cut from the pipe filled in with four steel doors facing outward. A man in overalls stood by them. Kasinski communicated with him. He unlocked a great padlock from a latch on the door and then opened it. Kasinski motioned me forward.

  “Take as much time as you want. Simply knock when you’re ready to talk.”

  I went through the opening.

  The inside of the cell was totally dark. The heavy door slammed behind me, triggering a current of fear through me. Had there been a second chess game? Had I been suckered into my own imprisonment? I grew tense and nervous.

  A switch from the outside was thrown. In the bright light, I blinked rapidly, reorienting myself. There was a stone bench against the far wall, which was only about six feet away. A human boy lay curled up on the bench without a blanket. The room was not cold, but too cool to lie upon concrete without a covering. The boy wore no shoes and his feet were in a sad state.

  Dirt covered his entire body. He had no toilet. I suddenly realized that the earthen floor in the cell probably did not consist simply of dirt alone. I flinched. The smell was beyond description. The boy covered his dirty face with his dirty hands.

  “O’Donelly?” I called.

  The boy opened his eyes wide.

  “What do you want?” he whimpered. “Leave me alone!”

  I did not need the boy to say who he was. Who else could he be? His accent was American. He was of the right age and definitely in the right place. And the Commissar was showing him off as if he was a slave ready for the auction block, which he was. I had been in this exact spot before. I knew what worked and what did not. Psychology did not work. Gentleness did not work. I now used what I had learned did work.

  “O’Donelly, have you prayed?” I whispered as I lowered myself to a crouch.

  His eyes opened between splayed fingers.

  “Have you prayed to God for help?” I asked, this time in a louder tone.

  I waited. The boy’s head rose and fell. I felt relief.

  “You prayed to God for help and he sent me. Do you understand?”

  The boy just stared, his hollow eyes wide open.

  Then he blinked rapidly. I knew he understood.

  “Good, because here is what you are going to do. I’m going to leave you and then return tomorrow to get you. I want you ready to go. I want you to exercise, so you can run if you have to. I want you to take this coat,” I stripped off my Brioni cashmere coat, “wrap yourself in it and sleep as much as you can. I’ll be here tomorrow.”

  The boy reached out his hand. I placed my coat in it, careful not to touch him in any way or move too quickly. The boy was in a sad state, mentally and physically. I needed him capable of moving on his own and at least able to follow simple directions.

  I rose up slowly from my crouch and then knocked sharply on the door with my knuckles. There was nothing else I could do for the boy until the next day. Any more time spent with him might lead to his emotional breakdown. I felt his eyes on my back. It can be hard to be God’s instrument, I admitted to myself, without any humor in the idea at all.

  The light went out and the door opened. I stepped through, flinching when the iron door slammed behind me. The Commissar stood in front of me, backlit by the big lights strung along the top of the giant sewer pipe.

  “Nothing to say?” he asked.

  I shook my head. I eased past him, heading back to the white room.

  “Don’t you want to see the dissident? Or what used to be the dissident?” Kasinski asked.

  I paused and then continued. I looked at the Commissar, but I did not judge him in the same way I had before. He had become an obscurity.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN:

  Endurance

  Kasinski and his assistant preceded me through the pipe. Our direction seemed up, although from deep underground it was hard to tell. The cool air bit into my torso, now uncovered by the cashmere coat. I’d spent five thousand dollars of Agency money on that coat, which I had so casually handed over to the boy. I intended to extract a lot more than five thousand dollars from the Commissar, given the opportunity.

  I was accustomed to jailers around the world. Whatever the country, they were not much different from one another. They selected the job because they had a penchant for controlling others. They also were usually mean-spirited people who blamed their mean-spiritedness on the prisoners they handled. Kasinski had just seemed different
above ground. Down in the fetid misery of the underground cesspool of a gulag, he was in his element, fully exhibiting his true character.

  We came to another recessed area. This one only had one door set into the curvature of the pipe’s cutaway. Igor’s assistant jerked up on a steel lever, then pulled the large heavy door back. He stepped aside. Kasinski gestured for me to enter, but I demurred. I was not going into any more dark cells, no matter who might be inside. The Commissar spoke roughly to the assistant, who promptly hit an external light switch. I peered in. A man lay across a larger bench than the boy’s. The cell was also much larger.

  Kasinski spoke in Russian again. I heard a ratcheting and then watched thin chains snake across the floor and rise up to the prisoner. They kept rising until the prisoner dangled by cuffs welded around his wrists. I moved deftly to avoid being struck by his swinging body as it centered itself just above the filthy floor.

  “This is the famous dissident from Moscow. Alexi Demetrius. I introduce you.”

  The Commissar laughed as he poked the prisoner’s chin around. He stared back into mine. His look chilled me even more than the temperature of the place. I bent very slightly towards him. He blinked back. We had communicated in that small series of seconds. I pitied him and sided with him. I felt him read that message. Quite possibly, it was the only thing I would be able to do for him.

  “Look,” Kasinski said, his voice conveying pride, “we have carefully broken his legs in three places. When we re-set them, we made sure to set them at angles.”

  I looked down. The man’s legs were mangled pieces of mis-shaped spaghetti. Dirty, bloody spaghetti.

  “He will never use those for walking again. We do not even need a lock. He is ours for life, although I fear that he has little of that left.”

  I did not know what we were doing there. Was I being introduced to some negotiation process? I could not gauge it. I knew that I had no capability whatever to transport a dying prisoner out of Northern Russia.