Elvira Baryakina - The Prince of the Soviets

Klim looked at him in horror. Not too long ago, Elkin had been in the prime of life, smart and self-assured; now, he was a broken man. Even if he got out of prison, he would never recover.

“What do they want from Nina?” asked Klim.

“They want the money she stole from Reich. I told them that I was trying to take it over the border when I was robbed. They don’t believe me though. They know Nina’s in Berlin. Tonight, they’ll take you for questioning and torture you.”

Elkin held up one of his fingers: at the end, instead of a fingernail, there was a wrinkled hollow.

“Don’t make the same mistake I did,” he said. “String yourself up while you still have a chance. It’s the only way to save Nina. I’m planning to get away too—to escape to the next world. I’ll be safe from them all there.”

“Lights out!” shouted the guard, turning the switch and plunging the cell into darkness.

Klim lay on his back, gazing into the dark with unseeing eyes. He ran the tip of a finger over his cheekbones, his collarbone, and his wrist. Say goodbye, Mr. Rogov, he thought. Goodbye to yourself as you are now: healthy, strong, and in your right mind. Today, you’ll either be beaten or maimed. By the time they drag you back in here, your teeth will have been shattered and your kidneys kicked to a pulp. And no matter how brave you are, it won’t help.

Thank goodness Galina had not been the one to betray him. If it had been Galina, Klim would never have seen Elkin. Still, that was cold comfort in the circumstances.

Klim bit his lips as he struggled not to give in to panic or to sickening, desperate misery. Perhaps, he really should try to kill himself.

Screwing up his eyes and squeezing his fingers together until they hurt, he prayed deliriously for a miracle. Now, looking back, all those quarrels with Nina and the jealous games he had played seemed ridiculous. He should have lived his life to the full and been glad of what he had. But now, it was too late.

Could he find within him the strength not to betray Nina? If Soviet intelligence found out she was staying with Seibert, they would hunt her down and kill her. There were any number of Soviet secret agents in Germany.

Klim remembered their house in Shanghai and the bathroom with the blue tiles. He pictured Nina emerging from the shower, shivering with cold, her dark curls dripping water. She threw on a white dressing gown and wrapped a towel around her head so tightly that it made her eyes slant upward. He said that it made her look Chinese, like Kitty, and Nina readily agreed.

The electric light flared on, and a hefty, clean-shaven guard with a fat, freckled face came into the cell.

“Rogov!” he shouted out, checking his list.

So, this was it. They had come for him.

Klim sat up slowly.

“Name and patronymic?” asked the guard.

“I’m a citizen of the United States,” Klim reminded quietly. “We don’t have patronymics on American documents.”

“Shut your mouth, scum! Leave your stuff and come out now.”

Klim’s heart was hammering in his chest. He felt as if he were about to have a heart attack. He put on his shoes and, for some reason, buttoned his shirt collar.

The freckle-faced guard shoved him in the back. “Hurry up!”

They went out into the corridor lined with rows of doors. A dim light filtered from the lightbulbs overhead, throwing crisscross shadows on the floor.

The guard gave curt instructions. “Straight ahead. Right. Right again.” Then suddenly he shouted, “Halt! Face to the wall.”

Two other guards dragged along a man, bloodstained and struggling. He had a rubber bulb in his mouth and kept bellowing something indistinctly.

“Come on now!” said Klim’s guard. “Straight ahead.”

Should I attack him? Klim wondered. It would surely be better to be killed for resisting the authorities than to endure hours of “socialist defense measures.”

“Halt!” shouted the guard.

They stopped outside a brown door.

“Knock.”

Klim closed his eyes for a moment.

“Knock, you bastard!”

This time, Klim knocked on the door.

“Yes?” came a male voice from inside.

“In you go,” the guard ordered.

As Klim entered the interrogation room, he saw Alov and felt himself grow weak with relief. This man would never torture him. Alov might be a fanatic and a scoundrel, but he was no cold-blooded killer.

There was also a typist in the room, sitting under a large portrait of Lenin—a plain, aging woman with a prominent forehead and a mouth that turned down at the corners. She looked at Klim with a weary, disinterested gaze and then adjusted the paper in her typewriter.

No, thought Klim, nothing terrible would happen to him here. They would never beat him in the presence of a woman, surely.

Alov blew his nose loudly into a handkerchief and gestured to a chair in the middle of the room. “Sit down.”

The chair was screwed to the floor, which was covered with battered yellow linoleum. Still, Klim said to himself, that doesn’t mean anything. It was the usual setup for an interrogation room.

Alov looked sick. His eyes were red-rimmed, and the skin under his nose raw. He patted at his pockets and then began opening each one of the desk drawers in turn. At last, he had found what he was looking for—a crumpled packet of filter-less cigarettes.

“Smoke?” he asked, holding the packet out to Klim. “No? Your loss. Now then, let’s try to wind up this business as quickly as we can so that we can all get home.”

The typist began to bang away at the typewriter. With a loud ding, the carriage of the typewriter shot back.

Alov set an envelope on the table. The address was in Klim’s handwriting. “London Central Post Office, for collection by Mr. Smith.” Judging by the stamp, the letter had been sent from Warsaw almost a year ago.

“Do you recognize this?”

Klim shrugged. “I don’t remember what it is.”

“The addressee of that letter never picked it up, so it was returned to the sender, Klim Rogov,” Alov said. “The letter was opened at the Soviet border, and what do you think was inside?”

Alov put his cigarette down on the edge of the ashtray, drew out several postcards from the envelope, and fanned them out. The cards all had holes punched right through them. One bore a portrait of Stalin with a hole straight through his forehead.

At last, Klim remembered. These were the postcards Kitty had been planning to hang on the tree as decorations. Last Christmas, without thinking, Klim had shoved them into an envelope and handed it to Oscar Reich.

“So, what do we have here?” asked Alov. “A former member of the White Guard, Klim Rogov, and his wife, Nina Kupina, were recruited by Chinese intelligence to carry out espionage and sabotage in the Soviet Union. They were given orders to assassinate Comrade Stalin, and we have this on irrefutable evidence.”

“That’s a lie!” Klim interrupted but stopped himself immediately. Here, nobody cared what was a lie and what was the truth. Alov knew quite well it was all nonsense. He was just showing Klim that he was in deep trouble and in it for the long haul.

“You know,” said Alov. “I have a neighbor who’s an expert in preparing skeletons for display. There are maybe ten people in the whole of the USSR with that level of knowledge. It’s quite a skill. First, you have to soak the body for a year to get the flesh off the bones. Then you use chlorine to bleach the bones and dry them out in the sun. And only then can you put the skeleton together, bone by bone. Would you like us to make you into a skeleton for the biology class? I shall make sure you’re put into the school at the orphanage—the one in which your Kitty will be sent. That might even be rather fun! Just think: your little girl will come into the classroom and see her father smiling at her.”

The typist gave a faint snort of laughter.

“Still, if Mr. Rogov will cooperate with us, there’ll be no need for skeletons,” said Alov amiably. “Let’s begin at the beginning. Who sent you to the Soviet Union?”

“I won’t say a thing until you call for Mr. Owen,” retorted Klim.

Alov looked at him for a long time with his blood-shot eyes before dissolving in a furious fit of coughing

“Damn it!” he shouted when he got his breath back. “Do you think I’ve nothing better to do than run around after you, you bastard? Guards!”

Two hefty men came into the room.

Klim tried to get up, but they twisted his arms and handcuffed them to the back of the chair.

Alov blew his nose again into his drenched handkerchief and turned to the typist. “Take this down please, Olga Rustemovna: Record of interrogation of a suspect—”

The carriage bell rang out again, and one by one, the metal letters stamped into the paper.

Whatever Galina tried to do, she never seemed to succeed. She had not even managed to commit suicide successfully.

She had been taken to the hospital to have her stomach pumped, and now, she lay for days on end in the general ward, recovering.

With her face to the wall, Galina tried not to think of anything, but the wretched thought kept coming back to haunt her. How was Klim and his Nina? How was Tata? Was anybody even feeding her?

At first, the other women on the ward had tried to speak to Galina, but soon, they gave up and left her in peace.

“She’s not quite right in the head, that one,” the patients explained to the young woman doctor who came to do the rounds of the ward.