The Prince of the Soviets

34. THE LUBYANKA

A call came for Alov from the duty room to tell him that Rogov had been arrested.

Struggling with a dreadful migraine, Alov set off downstairs to the building where arrestees were taken.

He was shown a box containing the items confiscated from Rogov on his arrest: his passport, watch, fountain pen, and two train tickets. In his wallet, apart from some loose change, there were two gold ten-ruble coins, thirty German marks, and a separate envelope containing two brand new hundred-dollar bills.

“Where’s your internal telephone?” Alov asked the duty officer.

The officer showed him an ancient wooden apparatus fixed to the wall. Alov picked up the receiver and asked for Diana Mikhailovna.

“Could you write down the numbers of some banknotes for me?” he asked her. “I want you to check them against the numbers of the notes that were stolen from Oscar Reich.”

He hung up and decided to take the pill after all. It was impossible to work with such a headache.

The duty officer took him to the cell where Rogov was being held. The spy hole on the door was low, and Alov had to lean down to look through it.

The small room, painted a dull yellow, was lit up by a light bulb protected by a metal guard. A table and two chairs were in the middle of the room, all bolted to the floor. Rogov’s coat lay on one chair, and Rogov himself, still in his hat, evening dress, and bow tie, was pacing from corner to corner.

There he is, my lucky number, thought Alov. Thanks to him, I’ll get myself a room of my own.

He always found it interesting to see how people reacted when they were arrested unexpectedly. Suddenly, all their plans for the future were changed dramatically, and the landscape of their lives altered. At this point, most people still had no idea why they had been brought in and how serious it was. Some would begin to weep from fear while others would hammer at the door with their fists and demand to see whoever was in charge. Rogov, on the other hand, did not seem particularly frightened. The only emotion visible on his face was that of extreme annoyance.

Alov remembered how Rogov had once refused to cooperate with him. Let’s see what you have to say for yourself now, Alov thought.

He turned to the duty officer. “I want a full search,” he said quietly.

A few minutes later, two heavies—professional boxers—came into the cell.

A full search was the first step in breaking the spirit of a detainee. First, he would be made to undress completely; then the heavies would make a great show of examining the clothes, fingering every crease in the cloth. Then, they would subject the “client” himself to a long, unhurried examination, like a medical, peering and prodding at every inch of his body.

Alov remained glued to the spy hole. Rogov made no move to resist. He merely sneered derisively as if he were above everything that was going on. The heavies confiscated his scarf, cuff links, shoelaces, and suspenders. Then they left him on his own to get dressed.

After leaving Rogov alone for a while so that his panic would escalate, Alov entered the room and sat down sideways on one of the chairs.

“Do you remember how I once asked if you would cooperate with us?” he said. “And how you said you would have nothing to do with us? I was disappointed to hear that.”

“I hope you’re not keeping me in this establishment of yours overnight,” grumbled Rogov. “I have a train to catch tomorrow.”

“Oh, yes, believe me, I understand your concern,” smiled Alov.

“Could you at least tell me what I’m accused of?”

“Of being a spy.”

“If you don’t release me this instant, I can assure you that you’ll be facing an international scandal.”

“And just who do you think will tell your patrons and protectors that Klim Rogov has disappeared? You’ve told everyone you’re leaving, so nobody will be looking for you.”

There was silence.

“You can make things better for yourself,” said Alov, “if you tell us where Nina Kupina is. I know she’s your wife, but as you pimped her to Oscar Reich, I don’t suppose there’s much love lost between you.”

“I refuse to talk to you unless you bring in Mr. Owen. He’ll let my employers know what’s happened, and the matter will be settled at a diplomatic level.”

“Well, as you like. If you don’t want to cooperate, we have other methods.”

Alov got to his feet and put his head outside the door. “Bring Mr. Rogov’s daughter here!”

The prisoner’s face fell at the words. “You have no right to touch the child!”

“The fate of your little Chinese girl depends entirely on you,” said Alov curtly. “We can arrange for her to be sent to a good orphanage, or we can send her to one full of TB sufferers.”

He took a piece of paper and a pencil out of his pocket and put them on the table. “Here. Write out a voluntary confession. I need everything from the beginning: where you were born, what you did before the revolution, when you met Kupina and under what circumstances. I want to know who hired you and who briefed you. Don’t mess with us, or you know what will happen.”

Rogov stared at him, dumbstruck. “You mean torture?”

“What sort of a word is that to use—‘torture’?” Alov said, shaking his head reproachfully. “It’s you in the bourgeois world that torture people and execute them. We use ‘socialist defense measures.’”

Alov left feeling extremely pleased with himself now that he had put the fear of God into his “client.” Well, he thought, let him stew for a while in his own juice.

He rang Diana Mikhailovna again. “Did you find out about the numbers?”

“Yes—they all match,” she replied. “They’re our banknotes.”

Alov beamed at the news. If Rogov had got his hands on some of the money stolen from Reich, he probably had an idea what had happened to the rest.

Unfortunately, the team sent off to Rogov’s apartment in Chistye Prudy had come back with nothing. Neither Rogov’s child nor his servant had been at home.

Agitated at this setback, Alov could sense an agonizing tightness growing in his chest. For God’s sake, when would all this torment end? There had to be some sort of medicine that could help cure his sick lungs!

In desperation, he attacked the OGPU agents who had just returned from Rogov’s house. “What’s the matter with you? Couldn’t you have spoken to his neighbors? Isn’t there some sort of housing officer or yard keeper there?”

They replied that the yard keeper had been in a drunken stupor while the office on the ground floor had been shut for the anniversary celebrations.

It was eleven o’clock at night.

Once again, Alov peered through the spy hole into the cell. Rogov was sitting quite still, staring down at a blank sheet of paper. His fringe, slicked back with brilliantine that morning, now hung forward into his eyes, and the cuffs of his shirt, bare of cuff links, protruded comically from the sleeves of his dinner jacket.

Alov made an effort to gather his thoughts. It would have been far simpler to have the information he needed from his “client” with the help of the little Chinese girl, but they didn’t have her. An ordinary interrogation could drag on for hours, but if he called in specialists, there would be screams and hysterics. Alov felt quite bad enough already without that.

He was racked by a fresh fit of coughing.

“Do you need a drink of water?” asked the duty officer with sympathy.

Alov shook his head and made his way to the exit, holding on to the wall.

He did not have the strength to handle Rogov’s case, but he could not hand it over to one of his colleagues; then the reward for bringing the affair to light would go to somebody else.

I still have time to lie down for a bit, thought Alov. Right now, Drachenblut was out at the dacha of the People’s Commissar for Defense drinking. Afterward, he would be sleeping it off for a while. So, in any case, there was nobody to report to at the moment.

“Transfer Rogov to a general cell,” he told the duty officer. “I’ll deal with him later.”

Klim was taken by prison guards along a dimly lit corridor. All his emotions were dulled. It was as if he had been drugged with something foul and could not wake up from a nightmare.

But still, Kitty had not been brought in. Did that mean she had escaped the OGPU? And if so, how? Where could she have gone?

The rasp of locks and bolts behind him was like the gnashing of iron teeth.

It must have been Galina who had reported me to the OGPU, thought Klim.

How much did they know about him? Just about everything, he supposed. Galina must have noted down every careless word he had let slip.

They reached a cell with a small barred window in the door, and the guards told Klim to stop.

One of them turned the light switch and opened the door. “In you go.”

The cell was fiercely heated. A broad platform ran around the room, and on it, prisoners in underwear were lying with their feet to the center of the room. There were two small barred windows close to the ceiling, a basin, and a galvanized bucket with a lid next to the door.

One of the prisoners raised a bald head. “Look—fresh meat!”

The guard shoved Klim in the back. “Lie down and go to sleep. This instant!”

The door slammed shut, and the light went out. Klim stood in the middle of the cell, dazed and uncertain.

“What’s with the fancy dress?” asked the bald prisoner. “Are you some sort of a magician? What are you in for then?”

“I don’t know,” said Klim.

“Well, if you don’t know, you must be a counter-revolutionary,” said another man with a laugh. “Ten years of hard labor—or a bullet in the basement.”

The prisoners began to stir and complain.

“Keep the noise down!”

“Shut up!”

“Go to hell!”

“Over here, Mister Magician,” Klim heard a man calling with a strong Caucasus accent. “Lie down here.”

Klim moved forward, felt with his hand for the edge of the platform, and sat down.

The atmosphere of the prison—the heat, the stench, the snoring of the men all cramped together—closed over Klim’s head like the black water of a murky millpond.

“You have nothing with you?” asked his neighbor. “What will you sleep on? Do you have a spoon or a bowl?”

“I was arrested on the street,” said Klim.

He spread his coat on the platform and lay down, appalled by the feel of bodies on either side of him.

Only recently, looking at the emaciated and tormented figure of Elkin, Klim could not have imagined for a moment that he would end up in his place. He was used to thinking of himself as an observer, not a participant. Klim Rogov could not be arrested or frightened, still less tortured. He was sacred and inviolable.

And now he had joined another category of people—those whose lives meant next to nothing. Slaves to be sent to their death, felling trees or working in mines.

Klim pictured himself as a camp inmate in a padded jacket and felt his hair stand on end.

“Hey, Mister Magician!” he heard the man from Caucasus call out again. “In this cell, you can’t be a coward for more than twenty minutes, and you’ve already used up ten.”

Klim shuddered. “Who are you?” he asked.

“My name is Ahmed. Now, you listen. You start feeling sorry for yourself in here, and it’s the end. Have you been in battle? I have. In a war, you know you can be killed, but you just keep galloping forward and don’t think about it—you attack. You make decisions! It’s the same in prison. You say to yourself, ‘Only I can decide whether to be afraid.’”

Klim was not in any state to hear mantras for survival. “What if they torture me?” he hissed through his teeth.

“Then you don’t think of it as pain. I got a bullet in my chest in the war. I ran about for half a day without even noticing. So long as a man does not dig his own grave, he can survive anything.”

“Don’t listen to him,” said an older man’s voice. “You should see Ahmed—he had his nose broken with a rifle butt. His eyes stare in different directions, and he’s soft in the head. There’s no sense living in a fool’s paradise. We all are doomed here. I was an infantry general, and I spent five years mucking out the latrines in a Bolshevik camp. They let me go and then arrested me again a week later. I’ve written to all their departments to ask them to stop tormenting me. ‘Shoot me and have done with it!’ I say, but they tell me it’s their business who’ll be shot and who’ll be ‘reeducated.’”

“Why are you lying to Mister Magician?” Ahmed became angry. “Neither you nor I know what will happen to him. Only Allah himself knows, and he won’t tell us.”

The light flared under the ceiling, and the face of the guard appeared in the window in the door. He cast an eye around the cell to check all was quiet. Then, once again, the cell was plunged into darkness.

Seibert stood at the stove frying eggs for himself. He was not going to cook Nina’s breakfast for her.

The crazy Russian woman gave him no peace and was always bothering him about something. One minute, she would ask where she could get some decent clothes, and the next minute, she was asking him to drive her to the station to wait for Elkin. Of course, Elkin never showed up, so the whole thing was a waste of time.

Seibert’s life was enormously complicated by Nina’s presence. He wanted to sleep in his own bed, not on the couch in the living room. He was used to walking about the apartment in his underwear with his bathrobe open, and now he had to be constantly on parade.

Most maddening of all, Frau Hauswald, a very nice woman who lived across the street, had decided that Nina was Seibert’s lover. Now, when she saw Seibert, she pursed her lips and exchanged a chilly “Good morning.” And that was instead of stopping to discuss the Christmas committee and plans for festive lights on the balconies.

It was all like some cheap circus act. Seibert was not so rude or unkind as to throw Nina out on the street, but how long could this mess continue?

He told himself time and time again that he should ask her to leave, but then he kept postponing the conversation. Seibert enjoyed the company of docile women like Lieschen and Galina. Nina’s presence discomfited him—he felt as if he were being stifled.

No sooner had Seibert sat down to eat his eggs than Nina herself came into the dining room.

“Heinrich, let’s send another telegram to Moscow. I need to know what’s happened to Klim.”

Seibert threw down his fork and fixed Nina with an indignant stare. “You know what? I’m tired…. I don’t need any of this—I have my own life to live!”

He realized he was behaving rudely, and this made him still more furious.

“You promised to help me with the Volga Germans,” he ranted. “And what happened? You didn’t bring the money for transport. You deceived me by passing yourself off as Hilda Schultz…. I wanted to interview her and introduce her to some of the benefactors from our religious community. But what am I supposed to do with you?”

“You don’t have to help me, I know—” began Nina, but Seibert cut her short.

“Fine! That’s excellent! Then you can go to Charlottenburg—it’s full of Russian immigrants. Get yourself a paper with small ads and find work as a waitress or something. Excuse me, but I’ve had enough of visitors.”

But Nina did not seem to be listening. She went up to Seibert, took him by the shoulders, and looked him in the eye.

“Klim was your friend,” she said. “Help me to find out what’s happened to him! I don’t have anyone else to turn to.”

Seibert groaned. There she went again, putting pressure on him.

“What do I have to do,” she said, “to get you to come to the telegraph office with me?”

“Leave me alone!” Seibert almost howled.

“I have some notes about what happened to Elkin in the prison camp,” said Nina. “I was going to give them to Klim, but perhaps you could make use of them?”

She ran to the bedroom and brought in some pages torn from a notebook covered in small handwriting.

Seibert began to read. Well, well… logging, labor camps…. He felt his mood brighten at once.

“All right. We’ll send one more telegram,” he muttered grudgingly. “But we’ll address it to Magda. She should know what’s going on.”

These memoirs of Elkin’s might bring in some money, Seibert thought. He had long suspected that the timber Oscar Reich was planning to sell to Germany came from Soviet labor camps. If the Berliner Tageblatt carried an article about the dubious provenance of Soviet timber, it might blow up into a top-notch scandal.

He would remind readers of the crimes of Belgian King Leopold II, who had made himself a huge fortune exploiting the inhabitants of the Congo Free State. He had enslaved them and forced them to work in rubber plantations, having them mutilated or killed for the slightest misdemeanor. The story was still fresh in people’s memories. Readers would grasp immediately that something similar was happening in the Soviet Union.

The article would have to be published under a pseudonym, Seibert decided. Then he could hint to Oscar Reich that if he did not want his patrons in Moscow to gain a reputation like that of the butchers of King Leopold, he would have to put some of his money into counter-propaganda.