Brian Freemantle - Kings of Many Castles

“What are you telling me?” demanded Olga.

“That he badly hit his head in the fall, in addition to all the other injuries,” said Agayan.

“Is he brain damaged!”

“I won’t know that until he recovers consciousness,” said the psychiatrist.

“But I’m going to sedate him more deeply, to counteract any possibility of epilepsy,” said Badim. “At the moment his medical condition is more important.”

“When’s he likely to recover sufficiently for any sort of interrogation?”

“I’m not going to allow him to open his eyes for at least another twenty-four hours and only then when I see some lessening in the bruising area. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” said Olga. “That’s fine.”

Lefortovo is the embodiment of terror- The Terror-that dominated Russia and its once Soviet Union for most of the twentieth century, initiated there before 1917 but quickly afterwards becoming the experimental laboratory in which was perfected every art and device of bone-crushing, mentally molding State oppression of State opposition.

The Okhrana, the intelligence service that so fatally failed to protect the ineffectual Czar Nicholas II from impending revolution, created it as the prison in which dissent and its advocates were literally snuffed out, like flickering candles. Within its uncleaned,blood-splattered walls the goatee-bearded Feliks Dzerzhinsky, who founded modern Russian intelligence by creating the succeeding Vecheka, installed his torturers and firing squads to maintain Lenin’s rule. He didn’t bother with wall cleaning. Neither did the terrorfuelled intelligence agencies of Stalin-the GPU and the OGPU and the NKVD and NKGB-NKVD and the MVD-MGB and the KGB-that followed, although occasionally spaces were scoured for official plaques proclaiming their chairmen as Heroes of the Soviet Union, psychopaths like Yagoda and Yezhov and Lavrenti Beria, the most psychopathic of them all.

There is an irony that in this glowering, barred-windowed mausoleum for a million-tens of millions-ghosts, such uncertified maniacs could unintentionally have left a psychological legacy making unnecessary their truncheons and electrodes and scalpels and syringes.

Fear is sufficient: fear of those truncheons and electrodes and scalpels and syringes and of the age-blackened gouts on the walls of bare cells without a bed or a lavatory hole or a bucket.

Olga Ivanova Melnik had learned to use that psychology of fear as successfully as she adopted-and adapted-her different questioning techniques. There were no bars at the sun-filled windows of the room into which Vera Bendall was escorted. There wasn’t a desk, either. Easy chairs were arranged around a low table dominated by a display of bright yellow daffodils that had been moved slightly to one side for the tea thermos and cups. A cherry topped the sugar icing of each of the six cupcakes. The tape recorder was very small, unobtrusive.

Olga dismissed the escorts with a jerk of her head and gestured the other woman to a chair directly opposite. Vera Bendall remained just inside the door, terrified eyes flickering around the room. She was a gaunt woman, her uncombed gray hair straggled around a pinched, lined face. There had been no make-up to start with and her eyes were red, from recent crying. Her shoulders briefly heaved, with the closeness of more tears, but she managed to hold back. Although thin she was heavy-breasted and her unsupported bosoms sagged.

“Come in. Sit down,” beckoned Olga, soft-voiced. This wassomeone of the old Soviet, crushed, susceptible, malleable: a show trial puppet. From the preliminary interrogation Olga knew the woman was sixty-one years old.

Vera obediently did as she was told, although hesitantly, scuffing in pressed cardboard shoes from which the laces had been removed. There was a button missing from the badly knitted cardigan and the crumpled black skirt was stained and shiny from wear. The blouse was stained, too.

“They didn’t hurt you?”

Vera shook her head.

“That’s good. Most of them here only know one way of behaving.” On Olga’s instructions the initial arrest interrogator, in a windowless basement cell, had been a towering, brutish-featured militia sergeant in uniform. Olga unscrewed the thermos cap and poured. “Do you have milk?”

“No … thank you, no. Black.” Vera needed two hands to pick up the cup but it still rattled in the saucer, spilling. “I’m sorry … so sorry …” She made a noisy slurping sound in her urgent need to drink.

“Have some cake.” There’d only been one square of bread that morning and a small pitcher of water for the fifteen hours she’d been in custody.

The woman used two hands again, nibbling mouse-like. Her fingertips were puffed and swollen, from constant nail biting.

“You’re here in Moscow-Russia-because of what your husband did. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You’re allowed the apartment for the same reason.”

“I know.”

“I want you to tell me all about it. You’ll do that, won’t you?”

“Yes … please … I mean of course.” The voice was frail, like the woman herself. The Russian was heavily accented.

“Would English be better?” asked Olga, who was fluent in that as well as French and Spanish.

“No. I understand. Is he … how …?”

“Hurt, falling from the platform.”

The woman stopped eating. “What …?”

“Why did he do it?” asked Olga, her tone abruptly sharp.

“I don’t know … didn’t know …”

“What about the gun?”

“No! Believe me. I never saw it. Didn’t know.”

“He lives with you?”

“Most of the time.”

“You must know about the gun then?”

“He never had it at home … brought it home.”

“So where did he get it … keep it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does he have anywhere else to live?”

“He stayed away sometimes … quite a lot, I suppose … I never knew where …” She tried individually picking up the cake crumbs that had fallen on to her greasy skirt.

“Don’t do that! Concentrate on what I am asking!” ordered Olga, sharply again, and the other woman stopped at once.

“Sorry … I am …”

“You must know where he stayed when he wasn’t at home?”

“I didn’t!”

“Didn’t you ask him?”

“He told me it was none of my business. He was always telling me that.”

“Does he have a wife? A girlfriend?”

Vera Bendall shook her head. “He’s not comfortable with women.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Frightened … doesn’t know how …”

“Does he like boys?”

“Not like that … not how you’re saying …”

“What about friends?”

“I don’t know.”

Olga poured more tea and pushed the cakes towards the woman. “Vera, you promised to help me. Tell me everything. Would you rather talk to the man who questioned you first …?”

“No. Please no,” broke in the woman.

“Then you have to help me, Vera. Do you understand what he’s done?”

“Yes.” The voice was a whisper.

“He shot the president.”

“I saw, on television. What will happen …?”

“He’ll have to be punished.”

“Yes.”

Olga pushed the cakes further towards the other woman. “Let’s think about you.”

“Me?”

“What’s going to happen to you, Vera? You’re not Russian. You live here by permission …”

The woman nodded, dumbly.

“You get a State pension because of what your husband did?”

The shoulders started to heave again.

“I can only help you if you help me. Prove to me you weren’t involved.”

“ I’m not … wasn’t …”