Peter Pišťanek - The End of Freddy

“They’ll avenge me,” says Telgarth darkly. “Oh, their vengeance will be terrible.”

“They won’t,” says the commander of the mercenaries. “They’ll be happy to escape with their skins intact. The attack is planned for today. They’re already fighting in the streets. Can’t you hear?”

Telgarth tries to listen. Yes, from a distance comes the sound of muffled shots and explosions.

“Űŕģüllpoļ is surrounded and nobody will help you,” laughs the mercenary. “The Czechs took off like rabbits the moment the shooting began. By air and submarine. The harbour and the airport are deserted. Well, where are your allies? Only the journalists are left in the city. And you’ll croak here slowly, in agony, alone and abandoned.”

Telgarth is quiet. Icy horror slowly permeates his soul. He’d like to say something, but he can’t control the twitch in his mouth.

Soon they mercilessly and brutally coil him up. The pain in his spine and abdominal muscles takes his breath away and stops him breathing properly. A long time ago he experienced this fear in Rivers of Babylon 2 , when he was in early puberty and girls in an enemy gang caught him, tied him up and whipped him with stinging nettles. He even felt a strange pleasure then. But there are no girls here, only mercenaries armed to the teeth, stinking of tobacco. No pleasure is coming, only deadly horror.

Soon it’s unbearable. Telgarth begins to moan aloud and plead. The mercenary commander comes in.

“So how are we doing?” he asks ironically. “Look at the coward! He’s even pissed himself with fear. It’s not that pleasant, is it? To pass the time before you die, try to count how many of our men you finished off this way. Put a gag in his trap, his squealing annoys me!”

He is about to leave the room.

“Hey, listen,” Telgarth shouts behind him with his last bit of energy, drenched in mortal sweat. “Let me say a word.”

The commander stops. With a gesture of his hand he stops the mercenaries about to gag Telgarth with sticky tape.

“Well, what do you want to say?” he asks.

Freddy weeps. Big tears fall from his eyes; his face is wrinkled like a statue of the Buddha.

“I’ve always basically admired you,” he says in tears. “I wanted to switch to your side a long time ago. And you’ve done this to me…”

The mercenary commander looks at him with contempt.

“Yes,” says Freddy. “I really want to join you and fight the Slovaks. Untie me quick, so I can join the fighting. I’ll show you how I can fight.”

“Shut his trap,” says the mercenary commander on his way out. “Before I throw up.”

“Just a moment!” Freddy shouts desperately. “I know how to help you in a big way. I know a secret that will help you defeat the rebels. If you untie me, I’ll tell you.”

“First tell us,” says the commander. “Then we might untie you.”

“No, first untie me!” Freddy insists.

“Shut him up!” orders the commander.

And despite his noisy protests, Freddy is silenced.

He closes his eye. He tries to think of something else, but his mind keeps reverting to his painfully stretched tendons, dislocated joints and pinched nerves that he now feels like white-hot light bulb filaments in his body. Time has stopped and no longer moves.

“What will I die of?” Freddy wonders. A man who is shot dies because his heart stops, or because he bleeds to death; a hanged man dies because he suffocates, a beheaded man dies because his spinal cord is cut. But what will he die of? If it were of pain, then he should have by now at least lost consciousness. But he’s still aware of everything round him. If anything, he is even more sensitive than ever.

Only cold water brings him back from his swoon. They’ve brought him round by drenching him with a bucket of water.

“No sleeping,” says the mercenary commander. “I want you to enjoy it, like all the men you disposed of this way. You wanted to tell me something?”

At the commander’s signal, an armed mercenary rips the tape off Freddy’s mouth. “You were saying something about some secret that might make our victory over the rebels easier?”

“First, untie me,” moans Freddy.

“We will, we will,” agrees the commander. “We’ll even give you a rifle and we’ll fight the rebels together, as you wanted. But first, talk!”

“But will you really accept me?” Freddy asks sceptically.

The commander looks at his armed men. They all nod their heads.

“Of course we will,” says the commander. “We need every real fighter as much as we need salt.”

“Apart from the propaganda effect,” says Freddy, “you’ve no idea of the devastating impact my changing sides will have on rebel morale.”

“Yes, that will be the transfer of the season,” agrees the commander. “And now the secret.”

“All right, then,” says Freddy and licks his dry lips. “Listen: I know where the rebels hide their women and children. If you go there and take them hostage, the rebels may surrender, or they may not, but in any case, you’ll have hit them very hard.”

“That sounds interesting,” says the mercenary leader, draws up a chair and straddles it. “So where are they hiding?”

“In the tundra,” says Freddy, “on the pastures of a reindeer herder Kresan, a Slovak.”

“Have you been there?” the commander asks.

“No, never,” says Freddy. “But the men have been talking about it a lot. I know exactly where it is.”

“Where does this Kresan live?” asks the commander.

“His pastures are some five hundred kilometres inland from a hill the Slovaks call Stormy Tooth,” says Freddy. “Kresan is not only sheltering the rebel leaders’ families, but he also stores the cargo from the Czech submarines. He knows all the signals for the submarines. If you put pressure on him, you could learn the signals and catch at least some submarine crew members in the act.”

“So, his name’s Kresan, you say?” the mercenary commander nods. “Well, we’ll take a closer look at this Kresan of yours. Thanks for the information.”

“By the way,” says Freddy, “they say the Slovak guerrillas’ wives and the older daughters are really good looking, at least so they say. We could have some fun with them before we torture them all and kill them.”

Freddy cackles frivolously and voluptuously, as far as the pain in his stretched tendons allows him.

“Well,” agrees the mercenary commander of the mercenaries, “we’ll certainly have some fun with them. Spasibo , thanks for the tip. But not you, Telgarth. You know, I’ve changed my mind. You’d betray us, just as you’ve betrayed your friends without batting an eyelid, just to save your pathetic life. We don’t need people like you. Now you just croak here in silence.”

“At least shoot me!” Freddy begs. The soldiers burst out laughing.

“It’d be a waste of ammunition,” says the commander. “You’ll croak on your own, anyway. Now stuff his big mouth shut.”

Freddy again loses his consciousness from pain and despair. You can’t call it merciful unconsciousness. That’s only a literary phrase. Writers often imagine that unconsciousness is something like sleep or anæsthesia, when a person can’t feel anything. This is not the case. It is more a semi-conscious state, when a person has no control over his limbs, still feels pain, hallucinates and can’t distinguish hallucination from reality. And so it was with Freddy. His laboured breathing is coming to an end, his entire body is in pain, and he longs only for a quick death. But death is in no hurry.

* * *

Video Urban had to endure a long and boring wait, as he did a few days before. He mostly slept through them in his room in hotel Zarya, his head turned to the plastic wall. His situation filled him with despair. Seven hundred dollars have gone, and he’s still in Polyarny.