had gotten that right!
The prisoner looked slightly bewildered. Grisha had caught him with his guard down. Now was the time to press the advantage.
“Do you still deny it?” Grisha snarled.
Perplexed, the prisoner shifted his weight.
“Answer me,” Grisha demanded.
“It’s not true,” the man said in simple honesty and looked strangely at his NKVD antagonist.
Offended, Grisha could see that the man was not the least bit intimidated.
“How can you expect me to believe that?” He twisted his face into a pained expression.
The prisoner began to answer, then hesitated, as if he thought better of it.
“Tell me,” Grisha coaxed with a certain gruff sincerity. “We’re here to tell the truth.”
“For the last week you have been accusing me of Menshevik wrecking through Bukharinist counterrevolutionary circles,” the man said with no emotion.
Shamed at his lack of revolutionary vigilance and enraged by the prisoner’s lack of fear, Grisha screamed, “I’ll squeeze your balls until you piss blood! You’ll sign whatever the charge is. And if the charge changes, you’ll sign again. You think it makes a difference. You’ll sign that your mother was a garbage truck. And it will be true, too!”
Grisha’s head was reeling. He had never talked this way. This was the new way, the way his younger colleagues spoke, all vulgar bluster. Ashamed of indulging in such a primitive outburst, and embarrassed—the organs never made a mistake—Grisha wanted to get rid of the prisoner immediately. He rang for the guard to remove him.
While waiting, he took his pen and entered a few meaningless remarks in the file about “double-dealing as a means of wrecking the truth.” He didn’t want to look at the prisoner until the guard arrived. Grisha wasn’t afraid of revealing his own fear, but he was unnerved by the absence of any in the prisoner. The man should have experienced a terrible, debilitating fear that would reduce him to putty in the interrogator’s hands, to be molded for the good of the state. Why wasn’t he afraid? After all, Grisha really could squeeze his balls until he pissed blood. There were investigators in the building who beat prisoners on the base of their spines until they were crippled, and in some cases without the subtle pretense of serial blows. They simply snapped men’s spines. Grisha’s vulgar, demeaning threat might have been proved idle, but how could the prisoner, whatever his name was, know that? Grisha felt the shadow of his immediate superior Colonel Nikolai Svetkov hovering over him. Only Svetkov’s informer would have nothing to fear. If Grisha popped this old Menshevik into a punishment cell for a week, he might look at things a little differently, but to do so would be admitting his own failure.
Grisha felt weak and vulnerable, which was the best reason not to put this what’s-his-name into solitary. If he were in the hold, Grisha would be freed for another insulting assignment. Heaven only knew what Svetkov would come up with next time. In 1936, where in the world had he found a Menshevik? Grisha was probably better off with the case he had, embarrassing as it was. In the early twenties the Mensheviks had been jailed, and by the early thirties most had been exterminated. How could Svetkov swirl in from Kiev to Moscow and find a Menshevik to investigate?
Svetkov’s handing the assignment to a colonel was a clear insult. “This calls for the tested eye of an old Chekist,” Svetkov had announced with his usual burst of energy. It wasn’t clear, however, who was testing whom. And as Grisha heard the guard approaching, he had an overwhelming desire not to be found wanting. Contradicting all his previous thoughts, he had what seemed to be a brilliant solution: he would send the leftover prisoner to a punishment cell for insulting Soviet justice. Yes, in a feverish rush he decided that was the certain way to save himself. It would demonstrate his loyalty, his courage, and the correctness of his beliefs. But another voice screamed that it would leave him naked, exposed to Svetkov’s machinations and charges of incompetence. Svetkov would suggest that he had failed by not eliciting a confession from what’s-his-name and by wasting a punishment cell that was needed for really dangerous elements. And if Svetkov could find a Menshevik with whom to torture him, what else might he find?
A knock on the door, and two guards entered. Grisha was swept by a wave of terror as the carousel whirled around. So they had come for him, too. Would his last ride be an elevator descent to the basement or a sedan drive to some NKVD woods outside the capital? As his mind split, falling into the basement and flitting to the outskirts of Moscow, his eyes fell onto the ugly, scratched surface of the blocky desk, and the filthy top suddenly fascinated him, with its myriad scratches, abrasions, and dirt; it was altogether unique and worth a lifetime of study. A lifetime he no longer possessed.
While Grisha studied the desk, one guard escorted the Menshevik from the office. The other stepped forward and cleared his throat. Reluctantly, Grisha looked up to discover that his jailer was Yuri, a plodding, dull-witted man whom he had gotten to know well over the past years. He lacked all personal spite, and Grisha looked at him in resignation.
“Colonel Svetkov would like to see you in his office now,” Yuri announced.
“Why didn’t he telephone?” Grisha asked suspiciously.
Yuri shrugged uncomfortably. It wasn’t his job to guess why the new director of investigations did things the way he did. His job was to lock and unlock cells. He shrugged again.
“Who asked you to call me?” Grisha asked.
“The colonel himself,” the guard answered.
“Where were you?” Grisha covered his embarrassment with a strong aggressive tone. No longer servile, he fixed his strong gaze on the jailer.
“In his office,” the man replied, his discomfort steadily increasing.
“Good, Sergeant, things are working well. The party is doing its job!” Grisha announced with revolutionary bravado.
“Yes, Comrade Colonel,” the guard replied with a serious enthusiasm that erased all signs of unease.
Grisha nodded, dismissing him. Comforted by the familiar dogma, Yuri left.
Grisha did not share the dullard’s sense of well-being. What did Svetkov want, and why hadn’t he used the telephone? Grisha didn’t like it. Since he had arrived from Kiev two months ago, Svetkov had been working to isolate Grisha and discredit him. Take this Menshevik, this what’s-his-name—and Grisha felt a pang of conscience. An NKVD investigator who spent five nights interrogating a socially hostile element and couldn’t remember a name, or even the action of the enemy, discredited himself and should be isolated.
Colonel Shwartzman leaned forward and checked the front of the folder: Sergei Gasparov. Grisha quietly stared at the unfamiliar name. What was it?—a name on a folder in the Lubyanka, a paper tombstone. Grisha shook his head. A Menshevik. Who would have imagined such a thing these days? Realizing that the Mensheviks lacked all understanding of historical necessity and were bourgeois to the core, Lenin himself had begun to root them out. How could Grisha expect to remember a Menshevik? But Grisha couldn’t forget Sergei Gasparov’s eyes; they revealed no fear. A Menshevik buried alive. How could he not be afraid? His absence made Grisha uncomfortable—he no longer had an insurance policy. He picked up the folder and stood up. His superior, Nikolai Svetkov, wanted to see him.
CHAPTER TWO
