He Fell Among Thieves

CHAPTER IV

SILENCE and madness.

Quarters C.

Black, black, black…

Interminably.

Suddenly, light. Blinding, stabbing agony lancing in through dilated pupils, cutting into the brain, wrenching a scream from the lips.

Laughter. His own? Skinner didn’t know.

Then silence again.

Food. A bowl of slops from somewhere.

Thud! A crashing sound, every three seconds. Outside his cell at first, theft within it. Outside his head, then within. Thud, thud, thud…

Silence.

Silence.

SCREAMING SILENCE!

Damp seeping in, and cold. The damp froze, solidified. The clammy sweat on Skinner’s flesh turned to ice. Cold. Almost too cold to move. But you had to move, because if you stood still the cold would get out, and you never would move again. Stamp back and forth. Five paces forward, five to the rear. Beat your chest. Work your fingers. Slap your face against the cold.

Another bowl of slops, frozen slops. Suck the ice and it will melt into an odious slush which you can eat. If you can stop trembling long enough to eat.

To survive, the human body can acclimate itself to outrageous temperature changes. Skinner’s did. But not necessarily subtle, the Russian torture-chamber is unique in its thoroughness.

Skinner got so he could laugh at the cold. He laughed.

It grew hot. Not slowly, for Skinner hardly remembered that vague midpoint where mounting heat returned the room to normal. Heat merely encroached, at once, and the cold was gone. Broiling, roasting heat took its place.

Moisture evaporated. Lips cracked. Skin parched, blistered. Sweat failed to come. Eyes burned shut. Breathing became an impossible effort.

Cold again. Hot. Cold…

Then normal. Cheery light. Glowing dully at first, easing Skinner’s eyes back into the visible spectrum. More light, bright, invigorating.

A table. And food. Delicacies, heaped one on the other in attractive dishes. Caviar, black and red. Champagne. Crisp roast fowl. All the trimmings.

Taste them. Taste—

Spit and retch…

Champagne like dishwater. Worse than dishwater. Bicarbonate-flavored caviar.

Dark silence and another bowl of slops. Dark silence forever, and the slops periodically. Wait for something to happen. Something horrible will happen.

Nothing happened, and that’s worse.

Dark and silence and slops.

The M.V.D. had all the time in the world….

AFTER THREE weeks a doctor examined Skinner, shook his head in amazement, permitted them to take him, shaking and afraid, from Quarters C to a bright upstairs room.

“Ah, Mironov,” Laurenti Beria said. “How do you feel?”

“Uhh.”

“Did you ever, play a little game when you were young, Mironov? Associating ideas? I name something, you counter with the first word which comes to your mind. Shall we begin? Red. ”

“Color.”

“Communist.”

“Trotsky.” Hah, the Communist they hate.

“Square.”

“Lunatcharsky.”

“Remember.”

“Forget.”

“Briefcase.” Beria smiled, lit a cigarette.

“Courier.”

“Knife.”

“Tuma—blade! “ Careful, Skinner…

“Knife.”

“Blade.”

“Knife.”

“Blade, blade, blade—”

“Tuma.”

“Sound.”

“Tuman. Is it Tuman? Tuman who?”

“Name.” Skinner felt dizzy, but they stopped him when he tried to sit down.

“Sonya Fyodorovna Dolohov.”

“Name.” But how does he know? How does he know? Don’t let your heart jump so.

“Whose?”

“Woman.”

“Tuman and Sonya.”

“Man and woman.”

“Underground.”

“Subway.”

“Tula.”

“Mother.”

“Mironov.”

“Nikolay.”

Beria leaned forward, crushed out his cigarette. “America.”

“Country.” Why America? Coincidence?

“Iron Curtain.”

“Europe.”

“Stalin.”

“Tito.”

“Ah! Tito, eh? You would oppose Stalin, Mironov? Atomic Bomb.”

“Stop.”

“Project X.”

“The unknown quantity.”

“Confess.”

“Torture.”

“Confess.”

“Torture.”

“Confess?”

“Never! ”

Wearily, Beria stood up. “His mind is still sharp, don’t you think, Colonel Rashevsky?”

“Yes, my Commissar. Sharp.”

“UNFORTUNATELY, it may crack soon. Well, no matter. If we fail here, we have other ways. Take him below, Colonel.” After they had gone, Beria turned to the doctor, a small man with watery eyes and thick glasses. “Well?”

“You will notice that his mind is both keen and hostile. For Stalin his response is Tito—”

“Don’t be pedantic!” Beria snorted. “More important than that, my dear doctor, is the fact that he responded to ‘atomic’ bomb’ with the word ‘stop’. Apparently, he knows something, eh? But we drew a blank, with Project X. I’d like to keep Mironov around long enough to find out just what, if anything, he knows of Project X. Do you think, ‘unknown quantity’ might have been a calculated, rational answer?”

“It might indeed have been that, Commissar.”

“Could you be more definite?”

“If the Commissar desires—”

“No, no! I want your professional opinion, not an echo of my own thoughts.”

“Well, it is impossible to tell. If I had to render a verdict, all I could say is perhaps.”

“Perhaps! That’s most helpful. Very well, doctor, you’re dismissed.”

As the medical man shuffled from the room, Boris Rashevsky returned, lit a big cigar, waited for Beria to speak.

“Boris, how is the Polish investigation progressing?”

“Better than we could have hoped. The soldier Svidrigailov did not die. From his oral description, pictures have been drawn, and we’re circulating them in Pinsk now. Some day soon the woman should be found.”

“I hope so,” Beria said, leafing idly through some papers on his desk.

SKINNER was dumbfounded. They gave him a living room, a bedroom, a bath. All the good food he wanted, anything. They let him write his own menu each morning, brought him the food three times a day, excellently prepared. They encouraged reading, stacked the room with hundreds of books. Music was piped in somehow through the walls, and not all of it was the new Communist art which had replaced the accepted—and Capitalistic—forms with its own shallow, one-track theme.

Surprised or not, at first Skinner slunk around his quarters fearfully, expecting calamity to drop upon him at any moment in some new, and more hideous, form of torture.

It failed to materialize.

Four days, five, then a week. Skinner gained back the weight he had lost. Suspicion and fear faded away slowly. Confidence returned to his stride, to his eyes, to his thoughts, After two weeks he found himself humming along with the music, reading avidly the books they supplied—not all Communist dogma, either.

Once on the fifteenth day a phone in the living room rang, and Skinner picked up the receiver doubtfully. His doubts faded. A girl’s voice, pleasant, sweet, cultured. She spoke with him about the city of Tula, a warped conversation about the city, magnifying, its beauty, its points of interest, its charm, minimizing what the Communist regime had done there. Skinner’s answers were always vague—he had never been closer to Tula than he was at the present moment!

But each day the girl would call, and slowly Skinner grew homesick for the city he had never seen. Its streets its trees, the crystal streams which gurgled in its parks…

On the thirty-first day—Skinner kept his record carefully on a little scratch-pad they had given him—the girl did not call. A day later, the music stopped. Uniformed men came in and carted out, Skinner’s books. Others came and took the furniture, piece by piece, locking off the bedroom and the bath and leaving Skinner in the now-bare cubicle which had been, the living room.

He failed to get his dinner that night. And soon after, the lights in his underground vault faded, leaving him in darkness. He’d come to accept that, for they’d turned the lights off every night, the lights which were recessed in niches high up near the ceiling.

WHEN SKINNER awoke, it was still dark. It remained, dark. Pitch-black—and silent….

He tried to accept it with a Stoic calm. But he thought, over and over again: They tricked rne. They gave me everything, made me soft, then plunged me back into this! The intensity of his thoughts, and his hatred, bordered on hysteria, but he could not check them.

The phone rang.

Of all the furniture that alone they’d left in the room, some place on the floor. On hands and knees Skinner groped for it, found it, placed the receiver at his ear with trembling fingers. Silence.

He placed the receiver back on its cradle in the darkness.

The phone rang.

He picked it up.

Silence.

Keep it off the hook—

It rang anyway.

“Hello? Hello? HELLO!”

Silence.

He smiled, picked up the phone, fondled it for a moment when he remembered the nice girl’s voice which had spoken of Tula. Then he hurled the instrument at the wall, heard it strike, clatter to the floor.

It went right on ringing.

He lifted it, hurled it again. Still again, heard it shatter.

He sobbed foolishly when it stopped ringing. He sat in the center of the floor, gazing sightlessly into darkness, listening for anything, anything but the utter silence. He wished he hadn’t destroyed the phone, wished it could ring again.

Silence.

COME SMALL corner of his mind remained rational, knew he could not take much of the treatment this time without cracking. Only a few hours, it could not have been more than that, for they hadn’t brought his bowl of slops. And yet he felt his mind slipping, slipping….

The lights flashed on brightly. The door opened, swung in. Two guards came, lifted him to his feet. Sobbing, he pushed their hands away, stood up straight, marched out of the vault between them. An elevator, going up. A polished corridor, a flight of stairs. A familiar room, a suave, handsome face which Skinner had grown to hate—Laurenti Beria.

“Something came up which made me forget all about the schedule mapped out for you, Mironov. I think you will agree that you’re lucky.”

“Yes, I’m lucky.”

“We’re efficient here, Mironov. Quite efficient. I think our efficiency would surprise even you, and from what I’ve recently been led to believe, you’ve had intensive training. No, don’t answer. You’ll see what I mean in a moment. Colonel Rashevsky?”

Rashevsky poked his big head in from another room. “Yes, My Commissar?”

“You will bring in the woman now.”

Rashevsky entered the room briskly for all his great bulk, dragging behind him a creature which once had been a young woman. She hardly looked it now. Instead, Skinner saw a gaunt, trembling bag of bones with dirty, loose-hanging yellow skin, flaming cheeks, dull, sullen eyes, disheveled hair, an unsteady, faltering gait. She waited, halting in Rashevsky’s wake, her dull eyes riveted to the floor.

Beria smiled. “You know this woman, Nikolay Mironov?”

Skinner shook his head. “I never saw her before in my life.”

“Boris, you will elevate the woman’s face, please.”

Rashevsky prodded her chin, raised her head, got her glance off the floor.

“Miss Palowski,” said Beria, “do you know this man?”

The sullen eyes flickered, stared at Skinner. The woman grunted as her eyelids blinked shut.

“You know him?”

“I know him.”

“Who is he?”

“He calls himself Nikolay Mironov. He kissed me once, did you know that he kissed me? Oh yes, he did.”

“I don’t get it,” Skinner persisted.

“You will. Her name is Palowski—Natasha Palowski.”

NATASHA! This—Natasha? A broken, haggard, skinny wreck of a woman, the buxom Polish lass who, a couple of months ago, had led Skinner through the Pripet Marshes to the Russian frontier?

“I assure you,” said Beria, “this is Natasha Palowski. Subjected to the treatment with which you now are familiar, she did not prove quite so strong. Two weeks, and she crumpled. Utterly. You see, Mironov, we’ve patched together the entire story. A valiant youth of the Red Army, who now is convalescing in a Polish hospital, survived this woman’s murderous attack. A trader going from Lunniec to Pinsk found him, brought him in. The soldier described your girlfriend here, and it wasn’t too difficult to trace her.

“But you, Mironov—you are what intrigues me now. A parachute in the Pripet marshes, a man who speaks Great Russian like a native but who has never before set foot inside our frontier…”

“He is American,” Natasha said, sotto voce. “Did you know that I was kissed by an American?”

“Yes,” Beria repeated quietly.

“American. The parachute was of American manufacture, Mironov. Surely you’ll talk now? More conditioning would be so pointless—”

“What will you do with the girl?”

“Do with her? What can we do with her? Her mind is hopelessly shattered. She’d be a waste to the State. We’ll kill her, of course. Painlessly. Colonel Rashevsky, will you be good enough to take her out and have her shipped to the proper disposal unit? There’s no place here on, Lubianka Street for that….”

During his first long period of confinement, Skinner’s mind had filled with hatred, such stark, cold hatred as he never had known before. But he’d had no place to release it, and the emotion worked like a backlash, got all muddled up and produced hysteria. Now it could be different, now even as he ranted Skinner almost could feel a safety valve letting off necessary steam.

“You filthy, Godless bastard!” he cried. “You contemptible, stinking slime! You—”

RASHEVSKY ran back into the room after” giving Natasha over to some guards. He charged at Skinner, struck his face with stinging open-palm blows. Right, left, right—

Skinner took it for a while. Then he bellowed, ducking in under the wild swings and planting his right fist in Rashevsky’s ponderous belly. The man let out a loud groan as his face turned purple. He began to fall.

Skinner felt better all the time. Sometimes it could work like that. Maybe a few weeks in the hospital, a few months convalescing at some quiet, peaceful place might have returned him to normal. But there was another way, this way. His body needed no healing; the second phase of Beria’s treatment already had supplied that. His mind, then—and his complete loathing for Beria and what he stood for, his opportunity to turn that loathing into action, these were medicine no hospital staff could duplicate.

Skinner did not permit Rashevsky’s body to sag to the floor. He caught the huge man under his armpits, spun him around, held him up against the edge of a desk. With his free hand he tore Rashevsky’s pistol from its holster. “Sit right where you are, Beria,” he said, “or I’ll kill this man.”

Smiling, Beria shrugged. “I assure you, he is replaceable. Go ahead, kill him if it will make you happy. You still won’t get out of here. But I am surprised at Colonel Rashevsky, really surprised.”

From the doorway, a guard peered into the room. Skinner snapped off a shot, but the bullet plowed harmlessly into the wall and the guard ducked out of sight.

“He’ll be back,” Beria promised softly.

From somewhere, an alarm bell clanged loudly. In a moment. Skinner heard the grating of machinery. A thick slab of steel slid down from the ceiling, clanked against the floor, cutting off the doorway.

“You see,” said Beria, “you’re trapped.”

“So are you.”

SKINNER let Rashevsky fall. When the man began to squirm around on the floor, Skinner bent over him, applying the butt of the pistol quite unemotionally to his skull. Rashevsky groaned again and was still.

A buzzer sounded on Beria’s desk.

“My phone,” he said.

“Go ahead, answer it.”

“Hello? Yes, yes. Of course. Hold on—”

“What is it?” -

“This building is sectioned off into steel compartments. We’re in one now, Mironov. Do you mind if I call you Mironov, not knowing your real name?”

Damn the man—he was all iron nerves and composure!

“As I was saying, we’re blocked off. They want to know if they should fill the chamber with tear-gas.”

“It’ll get you too.”

“My dear Mironov, don’t you think I know that? Tear gas never killed anyone. But it will, render you quite harmless, and—”

“Tell them that at the first trace of tear gas I’ll put a bullet through you.”

Beria paled slightly, spoke into the phone.

Skinner grunted, said, “Now tell them this! I’m going to take Rashevsky’s belt and tie your hands behind your back. I’m going to walk out of this room with you in front of me. Oh, they can get me from behind, I know that. But they won’t kill me so quickly that I won’t have time to take you with me. Is that clear? Tell them to give me thirty seconds, then to remove that steel door. Tell them we’re coming outside. Tell them that if anyone out there makes a hostile move, I’ll also kill you. Go ahead, talk!”

Beria relayed the message into his phone muttered to Skinner: “You’ll never get away with it. Where in Moscow can we go?”

“You let me worry about that.”

Skinner removed, Rashevsky’s leather belt, worked deftly,and quickly with it, securing Beria’s hands behind his back, prodding him to his feet.

Again, the clanking of machinery. The metal door scraped on its runners, slid up into the ceiling.

Skinner pushed the chief of the M.V.D. ahead of him into the corridor.

UNIFORMED men stood all along their path in the corridor, grumbling among themselves. Once or twice they blocked the way, made threatening gestures, but Skinner prodded his captive ahead of him with the pistol. The little knots, of soldiers dispersed to let them through, but Skinner could almost feel the eyes boring into the small of his back, and more than once he expected the jarring impact of a bullet in one final flash of pain before he stopped feeling anything.

They took ah elevator down, and here again anything could happen. One flick of a switch and the soldiers could trap them helplessly in the shaft.

Nothing happened. The door slid soundlessly open on the ground floor, and the American stalked out into a big hall with Beria. More guards. Fifty. A hundred. Skinner let them see him flick the automatic off safety, then he headed for the door.

He opened it—and got a surprise.

Winds howled furiously through Lubianka Street, snow fell in great blinding flurries. The wind piled huge banks of it high against the brick walls. The Russian Winter…

Skinner gestured to a captain with his free hand. “You! Bring winter garments for two. Hurry!”

Beria yawned. “Just where do you think you can go? That snow is three feet deep.”

He couldn’t answer that one, Skinner knew. A car would not get far, sinking down to, its fenders in that fresh-fallen snow. On foot then? Where? He could Beria with him to Sonya and Tumanov, but then what? He’d leave a trail that any doddering old peasant could follow, let alone the M.V.D.

“Stop wracking your brain,” Beria advised him. “It is all so futile anyway. Mironov, if I were to tell you something, if I were to tell you what I believe you crossed our frontier to find out, you would then see what I mean.”

It sounded like a dodge. Beria might be grasping at straws to save his neck. Still…. Skinner shrugged.

“Go ahead, talk. But make it fast, because when that man comes back with our coats, we get the hell out of here.”

“Precisely at noon tomorrow,” Beria said, “the United States of Arrierica will be destroyed.”