William Ryan - The Twelfth Department

Once in, they took the rooms one by one—Korolev and Slivka first making sure the kitchen was clear, while Kolya and the others covered the corridor. There was no need to talk—they worked their way from kitchen, to pantry, to a strongroom with a massive metal door, then into some kind of storage room. They moved quickly and they moved smoothly. Everywhere was empty.

On the ground floor they repeated the exercise, working their way through an incongruously opulent dining room, the table set for twelve, then what seemed to be classrooms, then an office, another office, a sitting room, a toilet. They found the guards just where they’d been told they would be and, with gun barrels pushing into the napes of their necks, bundled them down to the strongroom and locked the half-naked, panicked-looking men inside. Then they started up to the first floor.

Perhaps they’d made too much noise with the guards, and certainly one or two of the stairs creaked as they’d made their way up them, but whether they’d woken him or he’d wandered out onto the landing by chance, Korolev looked up to see a half-dressed man wearing round-rimmed spectacles, staring down at them in surprise, and then fear.

God knew what they must have seemed like to him. Mishka with his broken nose, Kolya with his bumps and bruises, and Korolev’s two-day-old battering probably not looking pretty either. And if Korolev’s face reflected his mood then the fellow was right to look panicked—because a certain Captain of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Militia had been thinking something through during the last few minutes and had just worked out the answer. If there’d been an operation intended for this very night—then the probable patient had been his son. And if that was true, and if this wretch was a doctor—then Korolev would lay a handsome bet this fellow was the most likely would-be perpetrator of that so-called operation.

“Move one damned inch and I’ll put a slug right between your damned eyes and then I’ll spit in the hole.”

It was only when he’d finished speaking that Korolev realized the voice was his own. What was more, he was surprised to discover that a large part of him was praying the devil would move that damned inch. Korolev’s aim didn’t waver until Slivka reached the doctor and turned him until he was facing the wall, pressing her gun into his spine.

“Are you the doctor?” Slivka asked in a quiet voice and the fellow nodded. And it didn’t take much prompting for him to tell them where to find the nurses. They were broad-shouldered women—hard-faced even in slumber, and hard to wake as well, but wake them they did, and then Slivka and Mishka pushed them downstairs to join the guards.

Korolev kept the doctor though, and pushed him at gunpoint to the first of the children’s dormitories.

“Open it and turn on the light.”

There were twelve metal beds, six on either side of the room. Two of them were empty but the remainder contained boys of around Yuri’s age in various states between sleep and bleary awakening, as they reacted to the three men walking into the room.

“Is he here?” Korolev asked, turning to Kolya who was close behind.

Kolya looked at each boy then shook his head.

“No.”

It was curious that the boys didn’t seem surprised to find armed men walking among them. As they woke, they looked at them with calm disinterest. Korolev was about to reassure them when he realized they didn’t need it.

“The next room,” Kolya said, and there was anger in his voice as he pushed the doctor toward the door.

The second dormitory was the same as the first—a dozen beds—and, this time, a dozen boys. As the light went on they stirred, eyes opening, heads lifting from pillows, and suddenly Kolya pushed the doctor out of his way, going straight to a bed at the other end of the room, pulling the boy in it close to his chest, whispering to him, stroking his hair.

“I only did what I was told,” the doctor said to Korolev. “I only followed orders, no more than that.”

Korolev looked back to Kolya’s son and there it was again, that look of serene calm. The boy didn’t seem surprised that Kolya was stroking his hair, far from it—he seemed barely to notice.

“What did you do to them?”

“It wasn’t me. It was the professor and the others—they set everything up. I just do as I’m told.”

“We’ll see about that.”

“I swear it.”

Korolev took a step closer to him and pushed his gun into the doctor’s stomach.

“Tell me where the files are—the ones they brought out from Moscow.”

The doctor looked nonplussed.

“What files?”

“In the trucks. They started coming out on Tuesday.”

He looked terrified. “I’ve been here all week, there have been no trucks. The only visitors we’ve had are the ones who came last night, with a boy.”

“And that’s the boy you were going to operate on this evening.”

“I told you, Comrade. I only do what I’m told to do.”

“That boy’s my son,” Korolev growled.

The doctor took a step back, looking around him as if for a means of escape.

Kolya approached them. “What did you do to them? These children.” There wasn’t anger in his voice; if anything he looked lost. The doctor looked from him to Korolev and back again but he didn’t answer. Korolev lifted his gun. The doctor flinched back as the barrel tracked up the length of his body.

“Tell him,” Korolev said, his voice hoarse.

“They have machines,” he told them. “In the other house. They clean minds with electricity. So there’s nothing left.”

“So he doesn’t know who I am.”

Kolya wasn’t asking a question. He was stating a fact.

“He doesn’t know anything. They only know what the political teachers tell them,” the doctor said. And then the whispering began, the children getting out of their beds and moving toward them, pointing at Kolya.

“It’s him, I swear it’s him.” This, from a brown-haired tyke who was looking at Kolya as if he were the Lord himself come down to walk among them.

Korolev had noticed Kolya’s similarity to the General Secretary of the Party before—it had made him wonder sometimes, in fact; and now it seemed he wasn’t the only one to notice the resemblance.

“Comrade Stalin?” a boy asked.

“It’s all they know,” the doctor said. “It’s all they’ve been taught.”

And Kolya’s son broke through the group and lifted his hand to touch his father’s face, his eyes wet with adoration.

They left the other boys in the house. There wasn’t anything to be done—they couldn’t bring them all with them and, anyway, they didn’t seem to want to leave—the damage had been done. They’d be made into perfect little Party activists, no doubt, who worshipped Stalin and loved Lenin. And who was to say they wouldn’t be happier for it? Certainly having a mind that thought for itself hadn’t made Korolev content—far from it.

Korolev and Slivka took the doctor down the stairs, and even though he kept asking them what they were going to do with him, they said nothing—just let the man sweat and then pushed the fellow into the strongroom with the others.

Korolev stood in the doorway, looking in at the frightened faces in the small space, and lit the cigarette that every fiber in his body was crying out for. He thought he saw guilt in their expressions and possibly remorse. He hoped he did. He hoped they realized that if you did the kind of things to a person that they’d done—well then—you should expect that something similar might be done to you down the road.

“We said no killing, Kolya.”

Korolev could feel the heat of Kolya’s anger from where he stood behind him.