George Bartram - Under the Freeze

“Strip,” the beefy one said.

“I protest,” he had time to say before they hit him again. The beefy one locked his arms behind him and the Mongol opened the overcoat and broke three ribs with a kick. Tarp tried to kick back and gave it up after a punch in the groin. He was sensible enough that he was in the hands of two experts, and fighting them would be futile.

They stripped him and went away with the clothes. They came back after half an hour and beat him again. Tarp was afraid that one of the broken ribs would puncture a lung and he covered his chest, and they began to work on his back and kidneys. One of them, in swinging him around, hit his mouth, and they both stopped and looked worriedly at his upper lip.

“Is he bleeding?”

“Mostly inside the mouth.”

“I missed. The fucker ducked.”

“It was stupid.”

“You saw it. He ducked.”

“They won’t like it.”

They pounded his back with lead-filled, phallic-looking saps and then left him again.

Two hours later he was moved to a cell on the level above. When he did not move fast enough, they beat his back and buttocks. The flesh there, already bruised, was excruciatingly tender.

He was alone in the prison, so far as he could tell. There might have been thirty cells around the central opening, but he heard no sounds and never saw another person. It had been reserved entirely for him, he supposed. There would be no record of his having been there and no witnesses except the absolutely essential, probably absolutely loyal few.

The cell was cold. There was an iron cot with a thin mattress but no bedclothes. In the corner was a water tap and, below it, a three-by-six-inch hole in the concrete — the toilet. There was no window, but high up in the wall opposite the steel door was a metal grate. In the middle of the ceiling were three light bulbs covered with a basket of metal mesh, like the lights in an old gymnasium. The walls were scarred and painted over so much that the once square holes in the gratings were almost round and partly closed. It was a very old part of the Lubyanka, probably a very historic part, in which some very good people had died.

He tried wrapping himself in the mattress, but it was sewn to the cot with wire. He lay on it and shivered.

Beranyi . It seemed disappointingly clear. Beranyi , all the time . He wondered if he had been set up in some way by all of them, to give the appearance of an investigation that would end with his disappearance. Perhaps the word was already out in Moscow that he had disappeared. Where ? Where did people disappear in Moscow? A thousand places. Anywhere. Or maybe it was Beranyi working all by himself, audacious enough to say that one of the others had done it and Tarp had never reached him. I sent my car to get him , Beranyi might say ; he was already gone . We were going to discuss this terrible Maxudov business like civilized men over supper at the Slavansky Bazaar . The Guards men at the house said a car came for him , pretending to be from me . Not mine , of course . Thugs . Criminals hired for the purpose . And so on.

Well , at least I didn’t destabilize the new regime . “ Mr . Smith ” will be relieved .

The door opened and three men came in, the two who had been beating him and a slender man with glasses.

“He’s a doctor,” the Mongol said. “He’s going to examine you.”

The doctor probed quickly, deftly. Like many medical men who go into the service of the doomed — prisons, the military — he looked a little defeated. Perhaps he had an ethos, and self-hatred was defeating him. When he prodded the cracked ribs and Tarp cried out, he showed no sympathy. He made notes.

“Twenty minutes,” he said.

They took him down to the tiled room and beat him again. When the doctor came in, Tarp was lying with his face almost on the metal drain cover. There was a smear of blood along the floor where he had pulled his right cheek, trying to get up.

“You have made him bleed,” the doctor said. “Do you never do as you are told?” He put an astringent on the cut and examined Tarp again. Tarp wanted to ask how he was doing, but he knew he would get no answer.

“Take him upstairs.”

He hobbled along, holding himself up on the iron railings, as if he were making his way along a pair of parallel bars. He had been kicked in the right thigh and he had trouble walking now. One of them hit his buttocks with the sap to make him go faster.

The doctor told him to lie down on the cot, and then he began to fill a syringe. “For the pain,” he said.

Tarp knew better than that. The other two had to hold him. He felt the contents of the syringe go into the muscle, stinging and spreading. Twenty minutes later he was having trouble breathing.

Perhaps it had looked like an opportunity to try out a new biological agent. His nose was so filled he could not breathe through it; his sinuses pounded; his chest felt small and dry and he could never draw enough air into it. His body temperature fell and he thought that he was losing his strength and his will. When he tried to get up so he could go to the corner and relieve himself, he could not stand.

“Take him to room seven.”

Tarp had been asleep. His nightmares had been dreadful, filled with an omnipotent, many armed Maxudov. He looked up at the doctor with hunted eyes. The doctor did not look into his eyes but put a stethoscope to his chest instead. Tarp could not feel its cold touch. He wanted to say that he could not breathe, but his mouth was dry and his tongue was thick and unusable.

“Don’t make him go too fast. The heart is weak now.”

They almost had to carry him. He was shivering. Twice he nearly fell, and only their hands under his arms kept him from going down. Their faces loomed horribly at him like things from dreams, all eyes and wrinkled foreheads. He understood after he had thought about it for a while that they were wearing surgical masks.

He had to go up one flight of metal stairs and down a corridor. There was a room there with a varnished door. Inside were a wood desk and five wood chairs. There was a recorder’s machine on a small table and a typewriter on the desk, but nobody was there to use them. There was no telephone. The walls were bare of decoration, painted mustard below and brown above shoulder height. It was like a room where people had to wait for state employees to process papers for mundane things like auto licenses. The banality of evil.

There was a short man standing in the room. He had curly gray hair and a dark, almost black mustache. He wore an almost black suit whose tightness suggested powerful shoulders and the beginning of a belly. His nose had a bump below the bridge and another at the end between broadly flared nostrils, below which were very deep nasolabial folds so that he always looked as if he detected a bad smell. He could have been a New York cabdriver or a Paris union organizer, but he was Mikhail Beranyi, the chief of Department V.

“Put him in a chair.”

Tarp felt himself pushed to the right. His supports left him and he sank down, to find himself sitting in a straight wood chair.

The doctor muttered something and showed Beranyi a piece of paper. Next he handed him a surgical mask, which he helped him to tie behind his head. Beranyi made a gesture with his hand, and the others left the room.