Nano

CHAPTER 53

Pia had spent the day mostly sleeping in bed, a real bed, not the filthy mattress on the floor of the dungeon where she had talked to Berman. After being examined by the doctor, two men wearing fatigues and surgical masks had moved her to a small, utilitarian bedroom up some cement steps leading out of the basement and along a corridor with the lowest ceiling Pia had ever seen. Even she had had to hunch down while she walked. There was one unadorned lightbulb in the middle of the featureless ceiling.

Pia felt groggy and out of it. She had lost track of time and was unsure of where she was until her mind cleared. Halfway along the route from the basement cell there had been a small window, and Pia had caught a glimpse of some trees and a garden. It had been raining outside, and it looked gray. At the time she had questioned where it could have been. Could it be Colorado? But the trees looked wrong. And it was too green. Berman had said something about being in London. Is that where I am? she wondered.

The two men had shackled Pia to the metal-frame bed in the room. There was no furniture or windows, and the door was of heavy steel. This was another cell, only less humid than the cellar. Pia was livid with Berman for putting her in this position. She saw there was a bedpan she was going to have to use. She felt humiliation along with her anger. She was being kept like an animal.

After a few minutes of being awake, the door opened, and the Chinese doctor came back.

“Do you speak English?” she asked. The man looked at her with a blank expression. He was indeterminately middle-aged, with a puffy, doughy, expressionless face.

“If you’re a doctor, whatever happened to ‘Do no harm’? Tell me that.”

The doctor looked down, and Pia imagined she was about to be injected again with whatever they had been using to knock her out. He grasped her arm.

“No, you don’t!” she screamed. “I don’t want to be drugged again. Leave me alone, you asshole.” Pia squirmed out of the man’s grasp and screamed and shouted at him. He didn’t try to restrain her nor say anything, he simply rapped on the door and stood aside as two Chinese guards came into the room.

“Leave me alone! I demand that you tell me where I am. Where’s Berman? I want to talk to him.”

Pia cried out in pain and one of the guards grabbed her roughly by her bad arm. In the confined quarters of her small room, it took only seconds for Pia to be thoroughly restrained.

The doctor held his hands out to show he wasn’t carrying a needle, and examined Pia’s arm.

“You’re another Nazi experimenter, like Berman. I know you can understand me. You are not going to get away with this. They’re going to get you, too.” The doctor gazed at Pia without a single facial muscle contracting. She couldn’t even tell if he blinked. Without a word, he left, along with the guards.