“Yes, of course,” Innokenty readily agreed, making room for him. He was intoxicated, overexcited, mentally holding out his hand for his letter of appointment and visa, imagining himself boarding the morning plane at Vnukovo the day after tomorrow; but he would not begin to relax before he got to Warsaw, and even there a telegram might arrive to stop his journey.
The mechanic, gripping a long lighted cigarette with the corner of his mouth, got into the car with an offhand “All right by you?” and plopped down beside Innokenty.
The car jerked forward.
Innokenty scowled at him in disgust (What a boor!) but was soon absorbed in his thoughts again, ignoring the route.
Puffing at his cigarette, the mechanic had already half filled the car with smoke.
Time to put him in his place.
“Could you perhaps open the window!” Innokenty said, raising just his right eyebrow.
Irony was lost on the mechanic. Instead of opening the window, he lay back in his seat, took a piece of paper from his inside pocket, unfolded it, and held it out to Innokenty.
“Comrade Chief! Could you kindly read this for me? I’ll shine a light.”
The car turned sharply into a steep ill-lit street, possibly Pushechnaya. The mechanic shone a pocket flashlight on a scrap of pinkish paper. Shrugging his shoulders, Innokenty grudgingly accepted the sheet of paper and began reading casually, as if to himself.
“Authorized. Deputy Prosecutor General, USSR. . . .”
He was still too engrossed in his own thoughts to wonder whether the mechanic was illiterate, simply incapable of understanding the document, or perhaps drunk and anxious to confide in somebody.
“Warrant for the arrest . . .” he read, still not taking in what he was reading—“of Volodin, Innokenty Artemievich, born 1919”—and only then did a single great needle pierce his body from top to bottom and scalding heat envelop it. Innokenty opened his mouth, but before he could utter a sound, before the hand holding the pink page fell on his knees, the “mechanic” had gripped his shoulder in a painful hold and growled menacingly: “Easy now, take it easy; don’t move or I’ll strangle you here!”
He blinded Volodin with the flashlight, blew cigarette smoke into his face . . . and retrieved the document.
Innokenty had read that he was arrested, which spelled disaster and the end of his life, but for one brief moment what he could not bear was the man’s insolence, his vise-like grip, the cigarette smoke, and the light shining in his face.
“Let go!” he cried, trying to free himself with his own weak fingers. It had finally sunk in that this really was a warrant for his arrest, but it might, he thought, be merely an unfortunate coincidence that he had landed in this car and given the “mechanic” a lift; he imagined that if only he could shake them off and get to his boss in the ministry, the warrant would be canceled.
He tugged convulsively at the handle of the left side door, but it would not give; it, too, was jammed.
“Driver! You’ll answer for this! What is the meaning of this provocation?” Innokenty cried angrily,
“I serve the Soviet Union, Counselor,” the driver rapped out, with an insolent glance over his shoulder.
Obeying the traffic regulations, the car circled the whole brightly lit expanse of Lubyanka Square as though it were making a valedictory round, giving Innokenty one last look at this world and the five-story bulk of the amalgamated Old and New Lubyankas, where he was to end his life.
Cars clustered at the traffic lights and then broke free, trolleys swished past, buses honked, people walked by in dense crowds, and no one knew or saw the victim being dragged to execution before their very eyes.
A little red flag, lit up by a searchlight from a recess in the roof, flapped in a gap between the columns of the tower above the Old Great Lubyanka. It was like Garshin’s little red flower, which had absorbed all the world’s evil. Two insensate stone naiads, semi-recumbent, gazed down scornfully at the miniature citizens pottering about below.
The car drove past the facade of the world-famous building, which levied tribute in human lives from all continents, and turned into Great Lubyanka Street.
“Let go, I tell you!” Innokenty was still struggling to shake free of the mechanic’s fingers, which were digging into his shoulder near the neck.
The black iron gate opened as soon as the car pointed its radiator at them and closed again as soon as it had passed through.
The car coasted through the dark gateway into the yard.
The mechanic had relaxed his hold in the gateway. Once in the yard, he removed his hand from Innokenty’s neck. “Out we get!” he said peremptorily as he scrambled from the car.
By now it was obvious that he was perfectly sober.
The driver also got out.
“Out with you! Hands behind your back!” he ordered. Could this icy voice of command really belong to the jester of a little while back?
Innokenty climbed out of the mantrap on wheels, straightened up, and, although there was no obvious reason for him to do so, obediently put his hands behind his back.
The arrest had been rough but not so terrifying as might be expected. He even felt a certain relief: no more need to fear, no need to struggle, no need to plot and plan. He felt the pleasurable numb relaxation that sometimes pervades the body of a wounded man.
Innokenty surveyed the small yard, which was patchily lit by two or three lights and lamps here and there in upper windows. Walled in by towering buildings, the yard was like the bottom of a well.
“No looking around!” the driver barked. “Move!”
With Innokenty in the middle, the three of them filed past uninterested MGB personnel, under a low arch, down steps into another little yard, dark under a low roof, turned left, and discovered a neat front door like the entrance to an eminent physician’s office.
The door opened onto a short, very tidy corridor flooded with electric light. Its freshly painted floor seemed to have been washed very recently, and a strip of carpet ran down the middle.
The driver made a strange clicking noise with his tongue, as if he were calling a dog. But there was no dog.
The corridor ended at a glass door with faded curtains on the other side. The door was reinforced by a steel grille of the sort used to fence flower beds at railway stations. On the door, instead of a doctor’s nameplate, there was a sign saying “Reception of Prisoners.”
There was no line.
They rang. The bell was an antique with a handle to turn. After a while, someone peeked around the curtain, then opened the door: a guard with a long, blank face wearing sky blue epaulets with a sergeant’s white stripes across them. The driver took the pink form from the mechanic and showed it to the guard. He scanned it indifferently, as a drowsy pharmacist disturbed in the night might read a prescription, and the two of them went inside.
Innokenty and the mechanic stood in profound silence outside the firmly closed door.
“Reception of Prisoners” made him think of another sign meaning much the same: “Mortuary.” Innokenty couldn’t even be bothered to take a good look at the smart aleck in the sharp overcoat who was playing this silly game with him. He should perhaps have been protesting, shouting, demanding justice; but he had even forgotten that he was clasping his hands behind his back and continued to hold them there. Thinking had come to a dead stop. He stared like a man under hypnosis at the words “Reception of Prisoners.”
There was the sound of a key turning smoothly in an English lock. The long-faced guard nodded them in and went ahead, making those dog-calling clicks with his tongue.
Still no dog.
This corridor was just as brightly lit and just as clinically clean.
There were two doors in the wall, both painted olive green. The sergeant flung one of them open and said, “Inside.”
Innokenty went in. He had scarcely had time to look around and see that the room was empty except for a large, rough table and a pair of stools, and that it was wind
owless, when two of them jumped on him, the driver from the one side, the mechanic from behind, held him with all four arms, and adroitly searched his pockets.
“What’s the meaning of this thuggery?” Innokenty cried feebly. “What right do you have?” He resisted briefly, but the realization that this was not a mugging but men carrying out a routine duty robbed his resistance of force and his voice of conviction.
They removed his wristwatch and fished out two notebooks, a fountain pen, and a handkerchief. He caught sight also of the narrow silver epaulets in their hands and was struck by the coincidence that they, too, belonged to the diplomatic service and had the same number of stars as he did. They relaxed their rough embrace, and the mechanic held out the handkerchief.
“Take it.”
Innokenty shuddered.
“After it’s been in your dirty hands?” he said shrilly.
The handkerchief fell to the floor.
“You’ll get a receipt for your valuables,” the driver said, and they both hurried out.
The long-faced sergeant, however, was in no hurry. Glancing at the floor, he advised Innokenty to pick up the handkerchief.
Innokenty did not bend down.
“What have they done? Have they ripped my epaulets off?” He had only now realized, feeling under his overcoat, that they were no longer on the shoulders of his uniform. He was furious.
“Hands behind your back!” the sergeant said tonelessly. “March!”
He clicked his tongue.
Still no dog.
Rounding a sharp bend, they found themselves in another corridor, with facing rows of small olive green doors in close succession, each with a shiny oval number plate. A careworn middle-aged woman in army regulation skirt and tunic, and the same light blue epaulets with sergeant’s white stripes, was walking between the rows of doors. As Innokenty and the guard appeared from around the bend, she took a quick look through the peephole in one of the doors. When they drew level, she let the flap fall back over the peephole and looked at Innokenty, as though he had walked that way hundreds of times before and she was not a bit surprised to see him walking there yet again. Her face was somber. She inserted a long key into the steel casing of the lock on a door numbered 8, unlocked it noisily, and nodded to him.
“Inside.”
Innokenty crossed the threshold, and before he could turn around and ask for an explanation, the door was shut behind him and the key grated the lock.
So this was now to be his home! For a day? For months? For years and years? His quarters could not be called a room or even a cell because, as we know from literature, a cell must have a window, if only a little one, and room to pace the floor. Here, not only pacing the floor, not only lying down, but even sitting comfortably was impossible. A small table and stool occupied almost all the floor space. If you sat on the stool, you could not stretch your legs out freely.
There was nothing else in the cell. To chest height the walls were paneled and painted dark green. The upper part of the walls and the ceiling were whitewashed and glaringly illuminated by a big two-hundred-watt electric bulb enclosed in a wire basket.
Innokenty sat down. Twenty minutes ago, he had still been imagining himself arriving in America and, of course, reminding them of his telephone call to the embassy. Twenty minutes ago, his past life had seemed to him a harmonious whole, every event lit by the steady light of premeditation and welded to other events by white flashes of good fortune. But after the last twenty minutes, his whole past life seemed to him just as certainly an agglomeration of errors, a heap of meaningless fragments.
Sounds from the corridor reached him only twice, when a nearby door was opened and closed. Every minute the little disk over the glazed peephole was disturbed and a single inquisitorial eye observed Innokenty. The door was four fingers thick, and the spy hole ran right through it, a cone of which the optic was the apex. Innokenty surmised that it was made this way so that there was nowhere in this torture chamber for the prisoner to escape the guard’s gaze.
It was hot and stuffy. He took off his warm winter overcoat and squinted miserably at the ragged holes where his epaulets had been torn from his uniform. Finding neither a nail nor any sort of protuberance on the walls, he laid his overcoat and hat on the little table.
Strangely, now that lightning had struck and he has been arrested, Innokenty felt no fear. On the contrary, his mind was released from its temporary paralysis, and he began going over the blunders he had made.
Why had he not read the warrant in full? Was it drawn up correctly? Did it have the official stamp? The public prosecutor’s authorization? Ah, yes, of course, it invoked the public prosecutor’s authority right at the beginning. On what date was the warrant signed? What was he charged with? Did the Boss know about it when he sent for me? He must have known. So his summons was a trick? But why this bizarre procedure, why this farce with the “driver” and the “mechanic”?
In one of his pockets his hand felt something small and hard. He took it out. An elegant miniature pencil, it had detached itself from a notebook. Innokenty was greatly cheered by this little pencil: It could prove to be very useful! Rank amateurs! Even here in the Lubyanka, they were rank amateurs, didn’t even know how to search a prisoner! Trying to think of the best place to hide the pencil, Innokenty broke it in two and eased one half under the sole of each of his shoes.
Heavens, how careless! He hadn’t noticed what he was accused of! Perhaps his arrest had nothing at all to do with that telephone call? Perhaps it was a mistake, a coincidence? What was the correct way to behave now?
Maybe there was nothing they could accuse him of? Probably not. Let’s just arrest him!
He had not been there very long, but several times already he had heard the steady hum of some sort of machine beyond the wall farthest from the corridor. A disturbing thought suddenly occurred to Innokenty. What sort of machine would you expect to find in a place like this? This was a prison, not a factory. Why the machinery? Any man of the forties had heard so much about mechanical means of destroying people that something sinister immediately came to mind. A thought at once bizarre and yet highly probable flashed through Innokenty’s mind: that this was a machine for grinding the bones of murdered prisoners. He felt frightened.
Yes—by now the thought stung worse than ever—what a mistake not even to read the warrant through, not to begin protesting his innocence then and there! He had submitted to arrest so meekly that they must be convinced of his guilt! How could he have failed to protest? Why, oh why, had he not protested? It must look for all the world as if he had been expecting arrest, that he was resigned to it.
He was cut to the quick by this fatal mistake! His first thought was to jump up, thump and kick, yell at the top of his voice that he was innocent, but second and wiser thoughts prevailed: None of that would come as a surprise to them; no doubt people were always banging and shouting here, and his silence in the first few minutes had complicated things anyway.
To think that he had let himself be taken so easily! A high-ranking diplomat allowing himself to be plucked from his apartment, from the streets of Moscow, carried off, and locked up in this torture chamber with no attempt to resist, without a sound.
There could be no escape from here! No escape from here!
Unless, perhaps, the Chief was still expecting him? Was there any way to get through to the Chief, if only under escort? How to find out?
No, his thoughts were becoming no clearer, only more confused and complicated.
The machine beyond the wall hummed and was silent by turns.
Innokenty’s eyes, blinded by the artificial light that was too bright for this high but narrow three cubic meters of space, had for some time sought relief by resting on the single black square that broke the monotony of the ceiling. This square of wire mesh was to all appearances an air vent, though it was uncertain what it led to or away from. Then, suddenly, it was starkly obvious that this vent . . . was not a vent at all, that poisonous
gas was gradually released through it, perhaps produced by that very same humming machine, that they had been pumping gas in from the very first minute he had been shut in there, and that such a hermetically sealed cell, with not even the narrowest of cracks between door and floor, could have no other purpose.
That was why they kept spying on him through the peephole—to see whether he was still conscious or already gassed.
And that was why his thoughts were so confused; he was losing consciousness! That was why for some time now he had been short of breath! That was why there was such a pounding in his head!
Gas was seeping in! Colorless! Odorless!
Terror! The primitive animal terror that unites predators and their prey in a single stampeding herd fleeing from a forest fire gripped Innokenty, and incapable by now of any other thought, he began hammering on the door with fists and feet, calling upon any living being.
“Open up! Open up! I’m suffocating! Give me air!”
That was another reason why the spy hole was conical: No fist could reach the glass to break it!
An unblinking eye pressed against the glass on the other side and gloated over the wreckage of Innokenty.
What a spectacle! The detached eye, the eye without a face, the eye that has concentrated all expression in itself! . . . now watching you die!
There was no way out!
Innokenty collapsed onto the stool.
The gas was suffocating him. . . .
Chapter 92
Keep Forever
SUDDENLY THE DOOR, which was always crashed shut, opened quite noiselessly.
The long-faced guard stood in the narrow opening and from inside the cell, not from the corridor, asked in a menacing growl: “What’s all this banging?”
Innokenty was relieved. If the guard was not afraid to enter, there was no risk of poisoning yet.
“I’m not feeling well!” he said hesitantly. “Give me some water!”
“Well, just remember,” the guard said sternly, “no banging, in any circumstances; otherwise, you’ll be punished.”
In the First Circle Page 89
