Pfefferkorn felt frayed. He was having a hard time keeping track of all the players. Worst of all—or best, he couldn’t decide—nobody had discerned the truth, which was that Dragomir Zhulk had been killed by a thriller that had just that morning hit number one on the best-seller list.

“Morning,” his media escort said. “Coffee?”

Pfefferkorn gratefully accepted the proffered cup and climbed into the waiting car.

An hour later he was sitting in the first-class lounge with the obituaries spread out before him, staring at the grainy image of the man he had murdered. Dragomir Ilyiukh Zhulk was wiry and bald, with small black eyes set behind efficient-looking steel-rimmed glasses. An engineer by training, he had studied in Moscow, returning to his homeland to help build West Zlabia’s nuclear power plant, for many years the world’s smallest working reactor, until an accident forced it to close. He had climbed the Party ladder, becoming first minister of atomic research, then minister of science, then deputy prime minister, and finally prime minister, a title he had held for eleven years. He was widely regarded as an unrepentant ideologue, a man for whom the fall of the Berlin Wall had proven only that the Russians were not fit to inherit the Marxist-Leninist mantle, and whose greatest vice, if it could be called that, was a passion for Zlabian poetry. He lived monkishly, shunning the large security force favored by his East Zlabian counterpart, a decision that had proven costly. His first marriage, to a schoolteacher, had ended with her death. Five years ago he had remarried, this time to his housekeeper. He left no children.

The flight to Los Angeles was called. Pfefferkorn walked to the jetway, discarding the paper in the trash.






52.






His Los Angeles reading was on the small side—a blessing in disguise, as Pfefferkorn wanted to get it over with as fast as humanly possible. Afterward, his media escort drove him to the restaurant Carlotta had picked out. He went straight to the bar to order a stiff drink. The television was tuned to images from the Zlabian front. Troops marched. Mini-tanks rolled. A commentator in a corner box was explaining that no fence separated East and West Zlabia, only an eight-inch-high concrete median strip running down the middle of Gyeznyuiy Boulevard. “You have to remember,” he said eagerly, “this is a conflict that has been raging in one form or another for four-hundred-plus years. Ethnically speaking, they’re one people.” The byline identified him as G. Stanley Hurwitz, Ph.D., author of A Brief History of the Zlabian Conflict. He appeared exhilarated by the carnage, as though he had been waiting all his life for his moment to shine. The anchor kept trying to cut him off but he went right on talking, citing lengthy passages of some little-known Zlabian poem that was apparently the source of all the fighting. Pfefferkorn asked the bartender to change the channel. The bartender found a baseball game. At the end of the inning, Pfefferkorn checked his watch. Even for Carlotta, thirty minutes was unusually late. He draped his jacket over the bar stool and stepped outside. Her home phone rang and rang. Her cell phone went straight to voicemail. He returned to the bar and asked for a third drink. He nursed it as long as he could bear before trying Carlotta again. There was still no answer. By this time he had been waiting for more than an hour. He paid his tab, apologized to the maître d’, and asked him to call a cab.






53.






Pfefferkorn stood at the mouth of the driveway to the de Vallée mansion. The gate was open. In all his visits he had never once seen it left that way. He leaned forward, his hands on his hips, and started to hike up. The driveway was steep. He began to pant and sweat. Why had he told the cabbie he would walk the rest of the way? Perhaps it was his mind’s way of slowing him down. Perhaps he already knew he did not want to know what awaited him. As he climbed higher, the thrum of the boulevard died away. All those trees and hedges and gates and heavy clay walls were there to maintain privacy and quiet. But they had another consequence. They ensured that nobody on the outside would hear you scream.

The second gate was also open.

He ran the last hundred yards, cresting the hill and sprinting for the open front door. He barged inside, calling Carlotta’s name. From a distant room came the dog’s crazed howls. Pfefferkorn ran, slipping on the polished floors. He made wrong turns. He backtracked. He stopped calling Carlotta’s name and called for the dog instead, hoping it would appear to lead him to the right place. The howling grew more urgent but no closer, and he ran from room to room, at last skidding to a halt in front of the ballroom. Frantic scrabbling, nails on wood. He threw open the double doors. The dog shot past, yelping. Pfefferkorn froze on the threshold, staring at the dance floor, at the glazy lake of blood and the human form heaped at its center.












THREE A NOVEL OF SUSPENSE






54.






“How did you know the victim?”

“He was Carlotta’s dance partner.”

“What kind of dance?”

“It matters?”

“We’ll decide what matters, Pfefferkorn.”

“Answer the question, Pfefferkorn.”

“Tango.”

“That’s a pretty sexy dance, huh, Pfefferkorn?”

“I suppose.”

“How long have you known Mrs. de Vallée?”

“We’re old friends.”

“‘Friends.’”

“Recently it’s become more than that.”

“Now there’s an image I didn’t need.”

“TMI, Pfefferkorn. TMI.”

“You asked.”

“What do you think of the victim?”

“What do you mean what do I think?”

“Were you close with him?”

“We didn’t fraternize.”

“That’s a big word, Pfefferkorn.”

“Don’t play games, Pfefferkorn.”

“I’m not playing games.”

“So you didn’t ‘fraternize.’”

“No.”

“Did you like him?”

“He was fine, I guess.”

“You guess.”

“What am I supposed to say? He worked for Carlotta.”

“Don’t lie to us, Pfefferkorn.”

“We’ll know if you do.”

“I’m not lying.”

“Someone’s doing sexy dances with my more-than-friend, I have an opinion.”

“Well I don’t.”

“You been drinking, Pfefferkorn?”

“I had a few drinks at the bar.”

“What kind of drinks?”

“Bourbon.”

“What kind of bourbon?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You like bourbon but not any specific brand.”

“I’m not a drinker. I asked for bourbon.”

“If you’re not a drinker how come you asked for bourbon?”

“I was in the mood for a drink.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Something bothering you?”

“Something you’re nervous about?”

“Something you feel guilty about?”

“Something you want to tell us?”

“You can tell us, Pfefferkorn. We’re on your side.”

“We’re here to help you. You can trust us.”

Silence.

“So that’s how it’s going to be, huh?”

“I’m doing my best to answer your questions.”

“We haven’t asked a question.”

“Which is why I’m not answering.”

“You always this sassy, Pfefferkorn?”

“I’m sorry.”

“What for?”

“Being sassy.”

“Anything else you’re sorry for, Pfefferkorn?”

“Anything else on your mind?”

“On your conscience?”

“Anything else you’d like to share?”

“I’ll tell you whatever you’d like to know.”

“Let’s cut the baloney, Pfefferkorn. Where’s Carlotta de Vallée?”

“I told you. I don’t know. I came to look for her and I found . . . that.”

“You don’t want to tell us what you found?”

“. . . it was horrible.”

“You think so?”

“Of course I do.”

“You didn’t have anything to do with it?”

“What? No.

“There’s no need to get touchy, Pfefferkorn. It’s just a question.”

“Do I look like the kind of person who could do that?”

“What kind of person do you think does that?”

“Someone obviously very disturbed.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You’re telling me you don’t find it disturbing?”

“Where’s Carlotta de Vallée?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you take a break and think about it.”

Alone in the interrogation room, Pfefferkorn shut his eyes tightly against the image of Jesús María de Lunchbox’s mutilated corpse. He wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to eat rigatoni again. Just as he was starting to feel better, the door swung open and the detectives reentered. Canola was a smiling black man with large, feminine sunglasses. Sockdolager was white and unshaven. His shirt wasn’t rumpled, but only because his paunch was straining it so hard.

“Okey-dokey,” Canola said. “Let’s try this again.”

Pfefferkorn surmised that the purpose of asking the same questions over and over was to trip him up. For a fifth time he narrated the events of the evening. He described his concern upon finding the gates open. He described the dog shrieking to be let out.

“You tell a good story,” Canola said. “No wonder you’re a writer.”

“It’s not a story,” Pfefferkorn said.

“He didn’t say it was untrue,” Sockdolager said.

“I was just complimenting you on your fine grasp of narrative structure,” Canola said.

He allowed himself to be questioned for several more hours before asking for an attorney.

“Why do you need an attorney?”

“Am I under arrest?”

The detectives looked at each other.

“Because if not,” Pfefferkorn said, “I’d like to go.”

“All right,” Canola said agreeably.

He stood up.

Sockdolager stood up.

Pfefferkorn stood up.

“Arthur Pfefferkorn,” Sockdolager said, “you’re under arrest.”






55.






Not wanting to frighten his daughter over what would surely turn out to be a giant misunderstanding, he used his call to phone his agent. Nobody answered, though, and after further processing he was shown to a cell occupied by a young gang member covered in tattoos.

“What about my phone call?” Pfefferkorn said to the guard.

“Ain’t my fault,” the guard said.

“But—”

The door slammed shut.

Pfefferkorn stood agape.

“Don worry, ese,” the gang member said. “You get use to it.”

Pfefferkorn avoided looking at his cellmate as he climbed up to the empty top bunk. He had a notion that it was unwise to stare at people in jail. They might take it the wrong way. He lay down and tried to think. His arraignment was scheduled for the morning. Where did that leave him for now? Locked up like some common criminal? What about bail? What about parole? What about time off for good behavior? He didn’t know how any of this worked. He had never been arrested before. Of course he hadn’t. He was a law-abiding citizen. He tossed and turned with indignation. Then he thought about Carlotta and his anger became anguish. Anything might be happening to her. If the police believed they had solved the case by arresting him, they were bringing her that much closer to death—if she wasn’t dead already. Time was slipping away. He felt as though he was buried up to his neck in sand. He moaned.

Ese. Chill out.”

Pfefferkorn clenched his fists to keep still.

A little later, a buzzer sounded.

“Chow time,” the gang member said.

The dining room walls reverberated hellishly with the noise of men eating and talking. Pfefferkorn took his tray and sat alone, slumped, his arms crossed over his chest. He needed to make that call.

“Not hungry?”

Pfefferkorn’s heart contracted unpleasantly as his cellmate sat down across from him.

“So, ese, what you do?”

Pfefferkorn frowned. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“No.”

“Then why you here?”

“I’m being accused of a crime I didn’t commit,” Pfefferkorn said.

The gang member laughed. “Hey, what a coincidence. Me too.”

He flexed one forearm, causing the Virgin Mary to shimmy lewdly. Gothic lettering spanned the hollow of his throat.

“Ese,” the gang member said, “you lookin at something?”

Pfefferkorn averted his eyes again. “No.”

The chow room clattered and boomed.

“You know what that means?” the gang member said.

Pfefferkorn nodded.

“Okay then,” the gang member said. He stood. “Eat up.”






56.






“Pfefferkorn. Derecho. Let’s go.”

“Rise and shine, ese.”

Pfefferkorn stirred. He felt god-awful. He’d spent most of the night awake. Rarely did the other inmates cease hollering and stomping, and anyway, he was too wound up from imagining Carlotta in various states of peril. He had nodded off shortly before daybreak. The color of the light told him it wasn’t much later than that now.

“Move it.”

Pfefferkorn and his cellmate stood in the corridor, facing the wall. The guards patted them down and escorted them out of the cell block toward the elevator.

“No talking,” a guard said, although nobody had said anything.

A van was waiting to transfer them to the central courthouse. They were shackled to their seats. The engine started and the van crept toward the security gate. The driver flashed a badge. The arm went up. They pulled onto the streets of downtown Los Angeles.

Pfefferkorn was immersed in one kind of anxiety, enough so that at first he did not realize the van had pulled onto the freeway. When he did notice, he was not in sufficient possession of his faculties to be surprised. Only after they exited the freeway and started driving uphill did it occur to him that they should have arrived at their destination some time ago, and a second kind of anxiety came to the fore. He couldn’t tell where they were, because the van’s back windows were blacked out, and the grate protecting the driver made it hard to see through the windshield. He glanced at his cellmate. The man appeared perfectly at ease. Pfefferkorn didn’t like it.

“Are we almost there?” he called.

Nobody answered.

The road got bumpy. Pfefferkorn glanced at his cellmate’s shackles. He reasoned that whatever was happening had to be happening to his cellmate as well—hence their common state of shackledness. He tried to make this make him feel better. It didn’t work.

The van pulled over. The driver got out and came around to open the back door. A blast of unfiltered sunlight caused Pfefferkorn to squint. What he saw did not compute. Instead of a parking lot or an urban street, there was barren hillside and a dirt road.

“Where are we,” he said.

The driver did not answer. She—it was a she—unlocked Pfefferkorn’s cellmate. Though Pfefferkorn was still half blind, he was able to detect a familiarity in her face.

“What’s happening,” he said.

“Relax,” Pfefferkorn’s cellmate said, rubbing his wrists. He no longer had a gangbanger accent. He got out of the van. The door closed. Pfefferkorn heard them talking. The gang member was complaining about being itchy. The driver murmured a reply and the two of them laughed. Pfefferkorn cried for help, his voice bouncing around the inside of the van. He jerked helplessly at his chains.

“You’re going to hurt yourself,” the driver said, opening the back door. The gang member was behind her, clutching something sharp and glinting.

Pfefferkorn slid away from them in terror.

“Take it easy,” the gang member said. His jail uniform was gone and his entire mien had changed. The driver was also out of uniform. With their youthful freshness, they could have been students of his. Then Pfefferkorn saw: they were students of his. The young man was Benjamin, author of the pretentious short story about getting old. Pfefferkorn didn’t remember him having so many tattoos. Then again, Pfefferkorn didn’t remember him being a gang member at all, so perhaps his memory was not to be trusted. The driver was Gretchen, she of the robots. She took the syringe from Benjamin, who cracked his knuckles and got ready to pounce.

Pfefferkorn pressed himself back into the unforgiving wall. “No.”

Benjamin tackled him and pinned his arms. Pfefferkorn fought. He had no chance.

“I have a family,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Not anymore,” Gretchen said.

The needle sank into his thigh.






57.






He was in a motel room. He knew this upon opening his eyes, before he had moved. The moldy air, the cottage-cheese ceiling, the line of gray light crossing it: these were proof enough. He rose up on his elbows. For a motel room, it was below average. The television set was bolted crookedly to the dresser. The carpet was mangy. The bedspread was a rough synthetic fabric printed with pink hibiscus blossoms as big as hubcaps. He was naked. The thought of that fabric against his skin gave him the willies. He leapt to his feet and was hit with a wave of nausea. He staggered to the wall and leaned against it, taking deep breaths until he could stand on his own.

He stepped to the window and drew back the curtain a few inches. His room was on the second floor, overlooking a parking lot. A search turned up neither telephone nor clock. The dresser drawers were empty, the walls bare. The nightstand contained a Gideon Bible. The television’s power cord had been snipped, leaving a quarter-inch stub. He checked the closet. It was without so much as a hanger. Another wave of nausea sent him running for the bathroom. He fell to his knees and vomited up a caustic orange stream. He sat back, hugging himself and shuckling, his body damp and quivering.

The toilet rang.

Pfefferkorn opened his eyes.

The ringtone was an irritating and ubiquitous thirteen-note ditty. Coming from within the toilet tank, it assumed an echoey, sinister quality.

I must wake up, he thought. I must stop this nightmare.

Everything continued to exist.

Wake up, he thought.

The toilet rang and rang.

He pinched himself. It hurt.

The ringing stopped.

“There,” he said. He felt that he had attained a small victory.

The toilet once again began to ring.






58.






A phone had been duct-taped to the underside of the tank lid. He peeled it free. The caller ID said WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO KNOW. He was afraid to answer but more afraid not to.

“Hello,” he said.

“Sorry it had to be this way,” a man’s voice said. “I’m sure you can understand.”

Understand what? He didn’t understand anything.

“Who are you?” he yelled. “What is this?”

“It’s not safe to talk over the phone. You need to get moving.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“You will if you want to live.”

“Goddammit,” Pfefferkorn said, “don’t you threaten me.”

“It’s not a threat. If we wanted to do something to you, we would have done it already.”

“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“It’s not about your feelings,” the man said. “It’s much bigger than that.”

“What is?”

“You’ll know soon enough. Now get moving.”

“I don’t have any clothes.”

“Look up.”

Pfefferkorn looked up. The bathroom ceiling consisted of foam tiles two feet square.

“You’ll find what you need in there.”

Pfefferkorn climbed onto the toilet and slid aside a ceiling tile. A plastic shopping bag fell out, hitting him in the face. He found brand-new khakis wrapped around a pair of white running shoes. One shoe held balled white gym socks, the other a pair of white briefs. Last, there was a black polo shirt. He held it up. It hung to his knees.

He heard the man talking and picked up the phone.

“—win any best-dressed awards, but it’ll do.”

“Hello,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Ready?”

Pfefferkorn pulled on the underwear. “I’m going as fast as I can.”

“Inside your nightstand is a Bible. Taped to page one hundred twenty-eight you’ll find three quarters.”

Pfefferkorn, one leg in the khakis, hopped to the nightstand. He was angry at himself for having missed the quarters. In unsticking them he took care not to tear the delicate paper. The verse revealed was John 8:32: “And ye will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

“In a minute you’re going to leave your room,” the man said. “Don’t do it yet. Down the hall to the left you’ll find vending machines. I want you to buy a grape soda. Is that clear? Once I hang up, this phone will cease to function. Drop it in the toilet tank before you leave.”

“But—” Pfefferkorn said.

He was talking to the air.






59.






The man had instructed him to go left, but Pfefferkorn turned right, toward the stairs, and went down to the first floor in search of a phone. There was movement in the window of the motel’s front office. He did not go in, concerned that the clerk might be in league with his abductors. He crossed the parking lot, hoping to get his bearings.

The motel was on the side of a freeway running through the desert. Baked earth kissed bleached sky. He could have been anywhere in the American Southwest. Setting out on foot was out of the question, so he waited, hoping to flag down a passing car. None came. He was left with two choices: solicit help from the clerk or obey the mysterious caller’s instructions.

A bell rang as he entered the office. A clock on the wall read six fifty-seven. Behind the desk, a small television set was tuned fuzzily to the morning news. Two well-formed people made light banter about a plane crash.

An obese young man emerged from a back room. “Can I help you.”

Pfefferkorn inferred from the clerk’s apathy that the fellow knew nothing of Pfefferkorn’s captivity. This was both encouraging and discouraging. On one hand, he could speak without fear of alerting the mysterious caller. On the other hand, everything he could think to say sounded insane.

“Would you mind please printing out a statement of charges?”

“Room number.”

Pfefferkorn told him. The clerk typed with two fingers. It looked as though the act required intense concentration. A graphic flashed on the television screen.


TOP STORIES


“Good morning,” the male anchor said. “I’m Grant Klinefelter.”

“And I’m Symphonia Gapp,” the female anchor said, “and these are our top stories. A renowned suspense novelist is sought by police.”

Pfefferkorn’s jacket photo appeared on the screen.

Pfefferkorn felt the blood leave his head. His knees began to jellify and he braced himself against the counter. Meanwhile the clerk was still typing, his tongue poking between his teeth.

“Following a daring jailbreak, best-selling author A. S. Peppers is wanted for questioning in connection with the brutal slaying of his Lambada instructor.”

Pfefferkorn listened as the news anchors cheerfully proceeded to implicate him in Jesús María de Lunchbox’s murder. The clerk finished typing and pressed a button. A printer whined. Pfefferkorn’s jacket photo was shown again, accompanied by the number for a tip hotline. A reward was being offered.

“Sad stuff,” Symphonia Gapp said.

“Indeed,” Grant Klinefelter said. “When we come back: more trouble on the Zlabian border.”

“And later: a local kitten does his part to win the war on terror.”

“Anything else?”

The clerk was holding out the statement. Pfefferkorn took it. The motel’s address was printed at the top of the statement. It listed a route number Pfefferkorn had never heard of, in a town he had never heard of, in a state adjacent to the one in which he had been abducted. The box marked NAME OF GUEST brought an unwelcome shock.

The room had been rented to Arthur Kowalczyk.

“Anything else,” the clerk said again.

Pfefferkorn shook his head absently.

The clerk lumbered out.

Pfefferkorn remained standing there, leaning against the counter, the jingle of the commercial fading away, the walls fading away, the dusty heat and the desert glare fading, fading away, everything canceling itself out. Only one sensation remained: a strange, nonphysical itch insinuating itself throughout his entire body, starting from his chest and spreading to the tips of his toes, the back of his throat, the hairs on the tops of his thighs. He was paranoid. It had happened that easily. Much like Harry Shagreen, or Dick Stapp, or any man ensnared in a tangled web of deception, treachery, lies, and intrigue, he did not know whom to trust. Unlike Harry Shagreen or Dick Stapp, Pfefferkorn had no experience upon which to draw. He headed back to the second floor.






60.






The vending machines were set in a nook around the bend in the hall. One sold snacks, another sold drinks, and a third dispensed ice. The sight of packaged food behind glass turned Pfefferkorn’s stomach. He fed the quarters into the drink machine and pressed the button for a grape soda.

The machine hummed.

A can banged into place.

Pfefferkorn waited. Was that it? He was now out of instructions, and he had spent all his money on a beverage he did not want.

He took the soda. The label read Mr. Grapey. The drink contained one hundred sixty calories, no fat, no cholesterol, fifty-three milligrams of sodium, forty-seven grams of sugar, no vitamins, look in your back pocket.

I’m hallucinating, he thought.

He rubbed his eyes.

The words remained.

He reached into his back pocket and removed a slip of paper the size and shape of a fortune-cookie fortune. On it were printed two words.


TURN AROUND


Pfefferkorn turned around.

Not three feet away, where ten seconds prior there had been nobody, a man now stood. Pfefferkorn could not fathom how he had gotten there so quickly and quietly. Yet there he was, a medium-sized man in a shapeless charcoal suit. Pfefferkorn could not tell his age, due to a full eighty percent of his face being hidden behind the largest, bushiest, most aggressively expansionist moustache Pfefferkorn had ever seen. It was a moustache with submoustaches that in turn had sub-submoustaches, each of which might be said to be deserving of its own area code. It was a moustache that vexed profoundly questions of waxing, a moustache the merest glimpse of which might spur female musk oxen to ovulate. It was a moustache that would have driven Nietzsche mad with envy, had he not been mad already. If the three most copiously flowing waterfalls in the world, Niagara, Victoria, and Iguazú Falls, were somehow united, and their combined outputs rendered in facial hair, this man’s moustache would not have been an inaccurate model, save that this man’s moustache also challenged traditional notions of gravity by growing outward, upward, and laterally. It was an impressive moustache and Pfefferkorn was impressed.

“I’m afraid you’ve been misinformed,” the man said.






61.






Moustaches or no moustaches, Pfefferkorn knew at once who he was talking to.

“Jameson?” Pfefferkorn asked. “Is that you?”

The moustaches moved in a disappointed way. “For the purposes of this operation,” Jameson said, “you should refer to me as Blueblood.”

Pfefferkorn followed him to a black coupe at the rear of the parking lot.

“Why are you wearing that ridiculous getup?”

“All information will be provided on a need-to-know basis.”

They peeled out onto the highway.

“Can I at least see some identification or something?” Pfefferkorn asked.

“Field agents don’t carry ID. My official picture wouldn’t match my face, anyhow.”

“I’m not sure why I’m supposed to trust you.”

“Have you seen the news? I cut you loose and you’ll either be in jail or dead by sundown. If not both. And sooner. So it’s in your interest to listen to me. But”—Jameson/Blueblood veered onto the shoulder and slammed on the brakes—“it’s your call.”

Pfefferkorn stared out at the shimmering blacktop. He had no food, no water, and no money. His clothes didn’t fit and he had a headache. He could run, but where? He could seek help, but from whom? There was a reward posted for his capture, and he was one of the most famous writers in the world. Not as high-profile as a movie star, perhaps, but still.

“Well?” Blueblood/Jameson said. “Do you accept?”

“Accept what.”

“Your mission.”

“How am I supposed to answer that? I have no idea what I’m committing to.”

Blueblood rooted around under his seat. “This might help.”

He tossed a manila envelope in Pfefferkorn’s lap. Pfefferkorn opened it and withdrew a photo. It was pixelated and blurry, a still taken from a video. It was what they called a “proof of life” picture. It showed a newspaper with yesterday’s date. The newspaper was being held up by Carlotta de Vallée. She was dirty. Her makeup was smeared. Her left temple was matted down with dark crust. She looked petrified. She had a right to be. There was a gun to her head.






62.






The safe house was a four-story log cabin on a private lake. Pfefferkorn clambered out of the seaplane and took in a lungful of piney air.

“Go on ahead,” Blueblood said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

Pfefferkorn walked up the dock toward the house. The front door opened.

“Howdy doody,” Canola said. “Glad you could make it.”

He ushered Pfefferkorn to an elegant room appointed with bearskin rugs and Craftsman furniture. A stag’s head hung over a stone fireplace roomy enough to spit-roast a yak. There was a stately grandfather clock and a long conference table polished to a mirror shine. If not for the presence of a bulletin board tacked with a map of the Zlabias and a ceiling-mounted projection screen, it would have made an appropriate setting for a state dinner party, especially one whose menu called for yak.

“Take a load off,” Canola said. “Op com will be by soon to brief you. Hungry?”

Pfefferkorn nodded.

“Sit tight.”

Pfefferkorn fiddled with the knickknacks on the mantel. Muted voices drifted down the hall. He tried to eavesdrop but got nothing.

Canola returned with sandwiches and ice water. “Lunch is served,” he said.

Pfefferkorn bit into an egg salad on seven-grain.

“Sorry about all the rough stuff,” Canola said. “You understand.”

Pfefferkorn, chewing, nodded. He didn’t understand, but he was beginning to sense that it was better for him to pretend he did.

Canola grinned. “I gotta say: you looked real scared when we cuffed you.”

A voice in the hallway said, “Did someone say lunch?” Sockdolager entered and spied the food. “Don’t mind if I do,” he said. He stuffed half a sandwich into his mouth and spun around a chair to sit backward, grinning through crumbs at Pfefferkorn. “What’s new, puddytat?”

“Everything,” Pfefferkorn said.

The “detectives” chuckled.

Pfefferkorn set down his sandwich and went to study the map. Together, the two Zlabias made a shape akin to a misshapen root vegetable. That both fit onto a single sheet of paper while yet maintaining enough fineness of resolution to label the individual streets spoke to how tiny the countries were—neighborhoods, really. Why was it that violence always burned hottest in cramped, obscure places? The dividing line, Gyeznyuiy Boulevard, cut clean up the middle of the map, ending at the top of the page in a plaza labeled, on one side, Square of the Location of the Conclusion of the Parade of the Commemoration of the Remembrance of the Exalted Memory of the Greatness of the Sacrifices of the Magnificent Martyrs of the Glorious Revolution of the Zlabian People of the Twenty-sixth of May, and on the other side, Adam Smith Square. Along the bottom edge of the map bulged a blank space marked Dzhikhlishkh Nuclear Exclusion Zone.

“It’ll all be on the exam.”

Pfefferkorn turned. The speaker was a young man with ash-brown hair neatly parted along the right side. He wore a bland suit and an understated necktie held in place by an American flag pin.

“For the purposes of this operation,” he said, “you can call me whatever you’d like, Dad.”






63.






“We downloaded this from the de Vallées’ home security system,” Paul said.

Pfefferkorn watched the computer screen. It showed closed-circuit footage of the ballroom. Carlotta and Jesús María de Lunchbox were dancing the tango. The video had no sound. It made them look like they were having very well-coordinated seizures. A minute or so into the video, they pulled apart with identical expressions of terror. Eight masked men rushed into the frame. Four of them grabbed Carlotta. Pfefferkorn was proud to see her fight like a champion. She could have been an actress in a silent movie, exhibiting “The heroine struggles courageously.” The men carried her off screen. Meanwhile the other four men were busy with Jesús María. Three of them restrained him while the fourth took out a boning knife.

Paul pressed pause. “I think you know what happens next,” he said.

Pfefferkorn was shaken. “Where is she,” he asked.

In answer to this question Paul closed the file and clicked on another. A new window filled the computer screen. The video was the source for the still photograph Blueblood had shown him. Carlotta was sitting in front of the same blank, scarred concrete wall. The same gun was to her head. She was holding the newspaper. She sounded scared but in control of herself. She repeated the date. She said that she was fine and being treated well. She said that she had been taken captive by the Revolutionary Movement of the Twenty-sixth of May. She said that in order to secure her safe return, the U.S. government would need to hand over the workbench. She said a few more things Pfefferkorn couldn’t make heads or tails of, either. Then she said something that stood his hair on end.

“The delivery must be made by American novelist Arthur Pfefferkorn. He must come alone. If anyone else comes, or if he fails to deliver the workbench, I will be—”

The image froze. Paul closed the window.

“Let’s not worry about that part,” he said.

If Pfefferkorn was shaken before, he was really quite badly shaken now. He was like a martini inside a rock tumbler being held by a detoxing epileptic standing on stilts atop a trampoline inside the San Andreas Fault. He stared at the blank blue screen, the afterimage of Carlotta’s face dancing before him.

“Tell me everything you know,” Paul said.






64.






Pfefferkorn told him everything he knew, starting with the theft of the manuscript. When he came to the part about the note from Lucian Savory, Paul said, “He’s a double agent.”

“You say that like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.”

“Don’t feel bad,” Paul said. “We only just found out about it ourselves.”

He clicked another file. Up came a photo of two men greeting each other.

“This was taken three weeks ago at Khlapushniyuiyk Airport, East Zlabia. I’m sure you recognize Savory.”

The sight of that bulbous forehead caused Pfefferkorn’s blood pressure to rise.

“Three guesses who he’s shaking hands with.”

The second man was hugely tall and broad as a bear. An entire carton of Marlboros jutted from one pocket of his tentlike sportcoat. In the background was a contingent of expressionless men armed with machine guns as well as a squad of improbably buxom women wearing the uniforms of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.

“I have no idea,” Pfefferkorn said.

“East Zlabian Lord High President Kliment Thithyich,” Paul said.

“The guy I shot?”

“You didn’t shoot him.”

“I didn’t?”

Paul shook his head.

“Thank God,” Pfefferkorn said.

“If I were you, I wouldn’t start congratulating myself just yet. You did kill Dragomir Zhulk.”

“Oh.”

Paul minimized the photo of Savory and Thithyich. “A lot of what Savory told you was true. The books were coded. Bill did work for us. And you were his intended replacement. But the part about Blood Eyes causing Kliment Thithyich to get shot was bullshit.”

“Then who shot him?”

“He did.”

“He shot himself? Why?”

“To create a pretext for invading West Zlabia,” Paul said. “He’s already filthy rich—casinos, mostly, plus some telecom and media—but control of the West Zlabian gas field would bump him up to the big leagues. He’s tried rallying international support for an invasion through more respectable channels. You might’ve noticed his campaign to promote awareness about West Zlabian human rights violations? It didn’t catch on. The opposite, in fact: Thithyich actually lost a few neutral-to-favorable percentage points, probably because, as our own polls indicate, ninety-six percent of people haven’t heard of either Zlabia, and eighty-one percent of those that have can’t tell them apart. You can imagine how antsy Thithyich must be getting if he’s willing to fake an assassination attempt. It hurts, getting shot in the ass.”

“Then why didn’t he invade?”

“Because he’s a chicken. Remember, before the Wall came down, we propped up guys like him as a bulwark against the Soviets. They have the most grotesque sense of entitlement. He was counting on our support as part of any offensive. We’ve since made it clear that we have no intention of getting involved in another war for the sake of lining his pockets.”

“So there was no code in Blood Eyes?

“There was, but it was a dummy—a call-and-response code. We wanted to test whether your name brand would have sufficient penetrance to be useful for future operations. And did it ever. Perfect score.”

“But I mangled it,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Mangled—”

“The flag. ‘In one fluid motion.’”

“That wasn’t the flag.”

“It wasn’t?”

“No.”

“Then what was?”

“‘Sank to his knees, gasping for breath.’”

It depressed Pfefferkorn to realize that he had let such a wretched cliché slip through the cracks. “How did you know I would take the manuscript in the first place?” he asked.

“We knew. We have a profile on you running back to the seventies. You were emotionally needy, financially strapped, alternately self-congratulatory and self-loathing, led to believe that your more successful friend held you to be the superior writer. It was the perfect storm of ego and greed. And, like I said, you showed big promise. We were all set to bring you in and give you the hard sell when forty percent of our covert network, including all of Zlabia, was scrapped due to budget cuts. Believe that? Thirty-three years of work—gone, overnight.” Paul shook his head forlornly. “Politics.”

“How does Blood Night fit into all of this?”

“Thithyich got wind of the cuts. From Savory, presumably. So he hurried up before our operatives in the field were recalled and had Savory slip you a doctored code—”

“Blood Night.”

“Right. Sayonara, Dragomir Zhulk.”

“Let me get this straight,” Pfefferkorn said. “Thithyich got Savory to get me to get my publisher to get your men to do his dirty work.”

“Give him points for creativity. We don’t communicate with the operatives directly. They only scan for the flags. There was no way for them to tell the difference between a real code and the doctored one. It was a masterstroke. With Zhulk gone, nobody’s driving the bus. There are at least half a dozen factions vying for control: the Party, sure, but also the anarcho-environmentalists, the Trotskyites, the Chomskyites, the nihil-pacifists, the open sourcers. It’s a total free-for-all. All the East Zlabians have to do now is pick their moment and they’ll waltz right across the border.”

Pfefferkorn massaged his temples. “So who kidnapped Carlotta?”

“That would be the May Twenty-sixers. West Zlabian counter-counter-revolutionaries. Third-generation hard-liners raised during perestroika on a steady diet of disinformation, believing themselves the last great hope for Communism and dissatisfied with what they perceive as Zhulk’s passivity, although ironically, it’s his propaganda machine that created them in the first place. They’ve seen Thithyich building up his forces and they’re spoiling for a fight. They’re also short on firepower. So that’s what they’re asking for.”

Pfefferkorn thought. “The workbench.”

Paul nodded. “Capital W. Encryption software. You plug in a source code and out pops a blockbuster thriller, complete with message. Our working theory is that the kidnappers came to the mansion looking for it. They didn’t find it, of course, because we erased it, remotely, after Bill died. So they took Carlotta instead.”

It dawned on Pfefferkorn that she had been at the house at his insistence. If he had allowed her to come to his reading, like she’d wanted to, she would be safe right now.

“We have to get her back,” Paul said. “She’s too valuable to leave out in the field.”

Pfefferkorn found it disturbing that such an accounting could be made at all. “She’s an agent, too.”

“One of the best. Co-architect of the original fictocryption program.”

“So you’re going to hand over the Workbench.”

“No way. Are you kidding? It would give them the capacity to generate an endless supply of encoded blockbuster thrillers. It would give them access to most of our worldwide covert arsenal.” Paul paused. “Including several dozen nukes.”

“Oh, God.”

“We’ll use a dummied version. It’ll produce authentic-looking novels but the codes will be gobbledygook. Your challenge is to sell the Twenty-sixers on it.”

There was a silence.

“Why do they want me?” Pfefferkorn asked.

“I was hoping you might be able to shed some light on that,” Paul said.

Pfefferkorn shook his head.

“It’s highly irregular,” Paul said. “You’re not a trained agent.”

“No kidding.”

“I’d much rather send a strike force.”

“I’d much rather you did, too.”

Pfefferkorn stared at the map, at its impenetrable combinations of consonants. “And if I say no?”

Paul did not reply. No reply was necessary.

Pfefferkorn looked at him. “Who are you.”

“I’m family,” Paul said.

There was a silence.

“Please tell me she’s not in on it, too,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Your daughter? No.” Paul put a hand on Pfefferkorn’s arm. “And let me just say, for the record, because I’m sure you’re wondering: I really do love her.”

Pfefferkorn said nothing.

“It didn’t start out that way, but I do now. And I want you to know that, whatever your decision, whatever the result, you have my word that she’ll be taken care of.”

Pfefferkorn regarded him skeptically. “You framed me for murder.”

“Just showing you what we’re capable of. In case you got cold feet.”

“You stranded me naked in a motel.”

Paul shrugged. “We had reward points that were going to expire.”

Pfefferkorn said nothing.

“Carlotta really does love you, too. I know what it must look like, but that’s the truth. One of the reasons we picked you as Bill’s successor was because you already had an established relationship with her.”

Pfefferkorn said nothing.

“It doesn’t have to be one or the other,” Paul said.

Pfefferkorn shut his eyes. He saw Carlotta fighting to save herself. He saw her beaten and thrown into a cell. He saw her forced to recite a speech. He saw her begging him to come alone. He saw her need, and her need was him.

He opened his eyes.

“When do we begin?” he said.






65.






His reeducation lasted eleven days and consisted of intensive cultural, linguistic, and tactical training. The goal was not merely to cram him with information but to give him the tools to process that information like a Zlabian would. To this end, a large staff was brought in. He was given weapons lessons (from Gretchen), acting and elocution lessons (from Canola), makeup lessons (from Benjamin), moustache lessons (from Blueblood), and so forth. Dozens more agents showed up for an hour or two to instruct him in some minor art before departing on the seaplanes that came and went round the clock. The safe house was a hive of activity, all of it centered on him and none of it with any regard for his comfort. He had never felt so important and yet so demeaned. He understood the need for his teachers to be hard on him. As a teacher himself he knew how much of what passed for education was wishy-washy navel-gazing designed to avoid, at all costs, damaging students’ self-esteem. That didn’t mean he enjoyed slogging through G. Stanley Hurwitz’s magisterial six-volume A Brief History of the Zlabian Conflict. Nor did it make any more palatable the endless variations on root vegetables and goats’-milk dairy, meals meant to accustom him to Zlabian cuisine. He wasn’t any less crapulous after swallowing vast quantities of thruynichka, the stupefying concoction made from root vegetable greens fermented in goat’s whey that he would be expected to consume as part of every Zlabian social interaction. He wasn’t any less sore after an hour of Sockdolager punting him around the karate studio.

Aside from the sheer stress of the routine, Pfefferkorn had to grapple with several nagging doubts. He did not doubt that his handlers were American. For one thing, they had demonstrated their power to manipulate the criminal justice system. And there were other, less overt signs. One night, for example, the safe house ran out of toilet tissue, and Gretchen commandeered a helicopter to go to Walmart. To Pfefferkorn, this incident, with its gloss of ultrasophistication overlying gross shortsightedness, embodied the Americanness of the operation. He knew he was on the same side as his native land. What he doubted, rather, was whether that was a virtuous place to be. He doubted the completeness of the information he was being given. Most of all, he doubted himself.

By far his least favorite part of the day was language class. His instructor was Vibviana, a pretty but severe West Zlabian defector. She explained that the agency had developed its methods based on developmental psychology research that pinpointed the years from birth to three as the critical period for language acquisition.

“To facilitate better, you must return please to frame of mind of young children’s.”

Twice a day, for two hours, Pfefferkorn became a Zlabian. In his first lesson he assumed the role of a newborn. He submitted to being diapered and burped while Vibviana, his fictive mother, sang him lullabies and told him stories based on the Zlabian national poem, Vassily Nabochka. Every successive lesson advanced him through one developmental year, so that by the end of the second day he was four years old and already well acquainted with the horrors of West Zlabian childhood. His fictive family, played by a rotating cast of agents, included a beloved and mentally retarded older brother, a crone of a grandmother, and countless aunts, uncles, cousins, and goats. Everyone lived under one tiny thatched roof, so that when Vibviana suffered at the hands of Pfefferkorn’s fictive father (a violent, alcoholic factory hand), Pfefferkorn was forced to sit in the corner and listen to the sounds of slaps, screaming, and broken crockery, followed by maudlin apologies and vigorous make-up sex.

It was not fun.

That was the idea, Paul said. The Zlabian psyche was steeped in abuse, degradation, and poor hygiene, and the sooner Pfefferkorn got used to it, the better.

Never before had he had so much one-on-one time with his son-in-law. In his daily policy briefings, Paul—or op com, as the other agents called him—shed his bumbling accountant’s façade, revealing himself as savvy, quick, and cynical, the kind of oversmart young patriot capable of smoothly steering his country into a disastrous foreign war. He had a way of talking around the issue that inspired confidence and dread in equal measure.

“You love her,” Pfefferkorn said.

Paul turned from the projection screen, which showed a timeline charting the ramifications of the 1983 West Zlabian currency devaluation. He stared at Pfefferkorn for a moment, then switched off the laser pointer. “I thought I made that clear.”

“I need to hear it again.”

“I love her.”

“How much.”

“Well, it’ll take me some time to prepare a full report.”

“You proposed to her after what? Three months?”

“Five.”

“And before that? How long was it in the works?”

“People get married for lots of different reasons,” Paul said.

Pfefferkorn said nothing.

“I love her,” Paul said, “with all of my heart.”

“How do I know that?”

“How did you know it before?”

“I didn’t,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Then you’re no worse off,” Paul said. “Better, in fact, because I’ve shown you my hand.”

Pfefferkorn said nothing.

“Don’t forget Carlotta,” Paul said.

“I haven’t forgotten her.”

“You’re doing this for her.”

“I know that,” Pfefferkorn said.

There was a silence.

“What really happened to Bill?” Pfefferkorn asked.

“Boating accident,” Paul said.

The grandfather clock chimed.

“Time for your language lesson,” Paul said. “Vibviana says you’re coming along nicely.”

The fourteenth year of Zlabian boyhood had been an annus horribilis in which Pfefferkorn’s beloved and mentally retarded older brother died of tapeworms, his pet goat was clubbed to death by an irate neighbor, he flunked his Vassily Nabochka qualifying exam, and he lost his virginity to an elderly prostitute who taunted him mercilessly after he ejaculated prior to entry. On the plus side, he had mastered the subjunctive.

“I feel hollow inside,” Pfefferkorn said.

“That’s the spirit.”






66.






The night before Pfefferkorn’s departure, the core members of the team threw him a graduation party. Vibviana played the accordion and sang folk songs taken from Vassily Nabochka. Sockdolager got thunderingly drunk and tried to kiss her. Pfefferkorn delivered him an elbow to the solar plexus that left the larger man sinking to his knees, gasping for breath. Everyone applauded and commended Pfefferkorn on the unified fluidity of his motions. Gretchen applied a sparkly gold sticker to his shirtfront. The sticker was in the shape of a shooting star and said SUPERSTAR!

The next morning he awoke to an empty house. It was his first moment of repose since his arrival, and it allowed him to reflect on the ordeal ahead. For all their efforts to prepare him, nobody, not even Paul, could predict with confidence what would happen once he crossed into West Zlabian territory. Pfefferkorn realized the hectic training schedule had served a dual purpose: first, to ready him for grueling undercover work in a burgeoning war zone, and second, to prevent him from dwelling on the fact that there was a strong chance he would not make it back alive.

He heard the drone of an approaching seaplane.

He took his wheelie bag and walked to the kitchen. He cupped his hands and drank water straight from the tap, possibly for the last time. He wiped his hands on his pants and headed down to the dock.

The seaplane nosed toward the surface of the lake, skipping twice before splashing down. As it drew near the dock, Pfefferkorn did not move to greet it. He was in no mood for air travel. He was frightened, lonely, and hungover. But these were not problems he could afford to admit. He had a mission, one demanding intestinal fortitude and stoicism. He stared hard at the sky. It was the hard stare of a man hardening himself to hard truths. He sensed changes, hard ones, taking place within his soul. He peeled the sparkly gold star from his chest and cast it, in a hard and masculine manner, into the wind. From this point on, he would have to earn his stripes. He grasped the handle of his wheelie bag and strode purposefully toward his destiny.












FOUR

(Welcome to West Zlabia!)






67.






Like an aging actress too proud to pack up the greasepaint, the Hôtel Metropole had hobbled along bravely in the service of increasingly ill-fitting roles. The kings and potentates who had inaugurated her beds had, over the last one hundred and fifty years, been steadily supplanted by a procession of apparatchiks, spooks, journalists, and johns, and the quoined limestone façade, once smart and coquettish, was now grim with soot. Nobody had informed the staff, who continued to wear their red melton jackets with indefensible dignity, addressing without irony the haggard tarts prowling the lobby as “madame.”

The desk clerk transcribed Pfefferkorn’s false passport number into the registry. “It is honorable to welcome you, Monsieur Kowalczyk.”

Pfefferkorn smiled somberly. At the far end of the desk, bluebottles mobbed a bowl of rotting fruit. He slung his jacket over his shoulder and swabbed his greasy forehead. If he ever wrote another thriller, he planned to make the travel scenes more realistic, with plenty of page space devoted to stale coffee and smelly upholstery. The past twenty-four hours had taken him through five different countries and as many security checkpoints. His disguise was working. At no point had he been subjected to more than a cursory inspection, and he had found it surreal to stand at a newsagent in Schiphol Airport, stroking his false moustache, gnawing a round of Edam, and reading about the manhunt still on for him, while a lady beside him reached for the rack of best sellers and selected a copy of that international blockbuster Bloed Ogen.

His back throbbed, he was jet-lagged, and he reeked, but he had made it.

The clerk eyed his wheelie bag. “You linger inside us for these two weeks, yes?”

“I travel light,” Pfefferkorn said, sliding a ten-ruzha note across the marble.

The clerk bowed. In an instant the money had vanished up his sleeve. He touched a bell and three bellhops materialized. They fought like dogs over Pfefferkorn’s wheelie bag until the desk clerk sent two of them packing in glum retreat.

The elevator car rose unhappily, stopping half a foot shy of the fourth floor. The bellhop jumped out and raced down the corridor, the wheelie bag bouncing wildly behind. Pfefferkorn followed, careful not to trip over the soiled ridges in the carpeting where it had pulled up from the floorboards. Radios and murmurs and oscillating fans could be heard. From the border a mile away came the stutter of automatic weapons.

Once inside the room, the bellhop made a show of adjusting the thermostat. The dial came off in his hand. He pocketed it and gave up trying to seem useful, waiting by the door until Pfefferkorn had located another ten ruzhy, at which point he smiled brownly and bowed his way out, leaving Pfefferkorn alone in the paralyzing heat.






68.






Pfefferkorn’s time on book tour had taught him that the comfort of an American hotel room arose out of a fantasy mutually agreed upon by hotelier and guest: you were the first person to stay there. The virginal linens, antiseptic artwork, and neutral color schemes were all designed to maintain this illusion, without which it would have been difficult to sleep.

The Hôtel Metropole made no such attempt to conceal its past. To the contrary: room 44 provided a rich historical document. The ceiling, dark and malodorous, attested to thousands of cigarettes. The bedspread showed a broad archipelago of stains, chronicle of many an unsavory act. The molding was Second Empire, the furniture was Constructivist, the carpet was shag, and the curtains were missing. Soft spots in the wallpaper told of listening devices put in and ripped out. He didn’t know what had caused the crimson blotch along the baseboard—it could have just as easily been the result of a rusty leak—but he suspected it had been left there as a rebuke to the chronically optimistic.

A picture of the late Dragomir Zhulk hung over the bed.

Pfefferkorn unpacked. Because the United States and West Zlabia had no formal diplomatic relations, he was traveling as a Canadian expatriate residing in the Solomon Islands. “Arthur S. Kowalczyk” was vice president of a small-time fertilizer distributor seeking bulk suppliers. His wheelie bag contained an assortment of business attire, pressed white shirts and pilled black socks. He hung up his blazer, arranged his shoes at the foot of the bed, and stowed his passport in the safe, which was a cigar box with a flimsy padlock. He stared edgily into the empty suitcase. Beneath its false bottom was a secret compartment containing two additional moustache kits. There was also a supplementary disguise: a traditional Zlabian goatherd’s costume of baggy pants, a peasant shirt, and brightly painted boots with curly pointed toes and six-inch heels. These items were not illegal, per se, but they were suspicious enough to merit concealment. The illegal items were in a second secret compartment, hidden beneath a second false bottom. There he had a roll of cash the size of a soda can and an untraceable cellular phone. Possessing either of these was grounds for immediate arrest and/or expulsion. But the truly risky stuff, the stuff that would get him killed outright, no questions asked, was hidden in a third secret compartment, located underneath a third false panel. Extra precautions had been taken. What looked like a bar of lavender-scented soap was an X-ray-impervious high-density dubnium polymer surrounding a flash drive with the dummied Workbench. What looked like a bottle of designer eau de cologne was an industrial-strength solvent powerful enough to strip the polymer away. What looked like a toothbrush was a toothbrush switchblade. What looked like a stick of deodorant was a stun gun, and what looked like a tin of breath mints held fast-acting poison pills for use in the event he was captured and facing the prospect of torture.

After ensuring that everything had survived the journey, he replaced the false panels and went to take a cooling shower. The water was foul and hot, the towels abrasive. Another picture of Zhulk hung over the toilet, scowling at Pfefferkorn as he stood before the cracked bathroom mirror, pressing the moisture out of his false moustache. It was medium brown, the color of his hair in his youth. In point of fact, it closely resembled the moustache he had kept in college. There was a reason he had shaved it off: it wasn’t a good look for him. Bill had the right amount of manly jowl to justify facial hair. Not him. He ran his fingers over it. It was dense, bristly, both of him and not. He appreciated the restraint Blueblood had shown in creating it.

While he waited to stop sweating, he surveyed the room’s remaining amenities. There was a lamp, a bedside clock, an oscillating fan, and a painted radiator gone piebald—the last of which would be useless for the next three months, minimum. If he was still here then, God help him. He made sure it was screwed tightly off, then switched on the fan. It was dead. He picked up the rotary phone and dialed zero. The desk clerk answered with a smarmy “Monsieur?” Pfefferkorn asked for a replacement fan and was told one would be brought without delay.

A clanking started up from inside the wall, near the headboard. It was a noise he was unfortunately well acquainted with: hot water pipes coming to life. In his old apartment building it had sometimes sounded as though his neighbors were having shootouts. Why a hotel guest would possibly want hot water on a day like today, he could not venture to guess. Then it occurred to him that all the hotel’s water was likely hot, whether guests wanted it that way or not. The clanking was loud and rhythmic. It made the picture of Zhulk vibrate and jump on the wall. To drown it out, Pfefferkorn aimed the remote control at the television. The screen filled with a stern young woman in an unflattering uniform, her tight hair topped with a majorette hat. She was standing in front of a paper weather map, barking the five-day forecast as she tacked up little paper suns. Her voice was even worse than the clanking, so Pfefferkorn muted her and lived with it.

In the top drawer of the nightstand he found the government-mandated copy of the West Zlabian edition of Vassily Nabochka. He sat down on the bed and leafed through it while he waited for his fan. The poem was familiar to him, having played a major role in his fictive life, as it did for every Zlabian. It told of the heroic quest of the disinherited Prince Vassily to find a magical root vegetable with the power to cure his ailing father, the king. The masterwork of itinerant bard Zthanizlabh of Thzazhkst, it reminded Pfefferkorn of the Odyssey crossed with Lear crossed with Hamlet crossed with Oedipus Rex, plus tundra and goats. The first two volumes of Hurwitz centered on a discussion of its history and symbolism, information essential for understanding the present state of affairs, as the Zlabian conflict traced its origins to a blood feud over the fictional protagonist’s final resting place. The East Zlabians claimed Prince Vassily was “buried” in the East. The West Zlabians claimed he was “buried” in the West. Because the poem was unfinished, there was little hope of resolving the dispute. Each side staged its own parade on the day it marked as the prince’s day of death. Often shots were fired or Molotov cocktails thrown across the Gyeznyuiy. And that was in times of peace. At its worst the conflict had pitted brother against brother, goat against goat. According to Hurwitz, an estimated one hundred twenty-one thousand lives had been lost over the years—an incredible number, given the size of the population as a whole.

Pfefferkorn glanced at the clock. It had been fifteen minutes and he still hadn’t gotten his fan. He called the front desk again. The clerk apologized and promised it would be there shortly. Pfefferkorn hung up, picked up the poem again, and began flipping to random pages. He admired and pitied a people so fiercely devoted to their cultural heritage that they would spend four centuries slaughtering themselves over fictional burial places. Such a thing could never happen in America, because Americans lacked a sense of investment in their own history. The entire American enterprise was based on jettisoning the past in favor of the Next Big Thing. He wondered if this might make an interesting premise for a novel. The clanking died down, leaving Zhulk’s picture askew. He didn’t bother to fix it. It was nearing eleven a.m., time for his first appointment. He turned off the television, got dressed, and hurried downstairs.






69.






As part of Pfefferkorn’s cover, meetings had been arranged with the government officials he would have needed to see had he truly been interested in exporting fertilizer. He stood among his fellow petitioners in the moldering hallway, waiting to be summoned by a squat woman more fit to guard the mouth of a cave. A one-armed Slav, his stinking greatcoat pinned at the shoulder and jangling with military decorations, whistled and smiled at the ceiling. The mewlings of a bundled child went untended by its vacant-eyed mother, eliciting clucks from a pair of babushkas fondling prayer ropes. Pfefferkorn wondered what business these folks could have with the second assistant to the deputy subminister in charge of animal waste. He had his answer when the troll lady appeared to crook a finger at him, and he gestured to the old soldier: You first. The Slav smiled, whistled, did not move. Nor did anyone else, and Pfefferkorn realized that he was the only one with an appointment. The rest had come inside to escape the heat.

“Comrade!” The second assistant to the deputy subminister in charge of animal waste greeted him with kisses that left wet trails in Pfefferkorn’s moustache. “Sit down, yes, please, sit down! I convey to you abundance wishes for prosperity and partnership between these our two nations. Yes, sit, please! No, I insist: I am standing. I sit too long, yes? It is not conducive for buttocks. What? Yes, yes. Please, enjoy. To your health. Thruynichka, ah? We say: first bottle for sick, second bottle for well, next bottle for dead, four for alive again. Ha? Ha? Ha! To your health. I am please to receive application for export of waste. To your health. Unfortunately, I must report: this application is incomplete. Yes, ten thousand apologies . . . to your health. There is lacking application fee, there is lacking documentation of statement of purpose, affidavit of disloyalty unaffiliation, many else. Process requires to initiate from top. Please refrain from sadness. To your health. What? No. Expedite is impossible, impossible. What? No. Impossible. What? Shall I consult? It is not impossible.” He pocketed the bribe. “To your health, ah?”

Pfefferkorn stumbled drunk into the burning noonday sun, negotiating fetid streets aswarm with dogs, cats, chickens, goats, children, factory workers, farmers, pickpockets, soldiers, and peasant women on prehistoric bicycles. Their motley faces told of centuries of invasion, subjugation, and intermarriage. Their eyes were narrow or round, ice-blue or muddy. Their complexions ran the gamut from saddle brown to translucent. Their bone structure was fine, it was rough-hewn, it was hidden beneath clumps of flesh or tenting skin drawn tight as a snare drum. So many faces, alike only in their fixed expressions of distrust and resignation. So many faces, but none the one he sought.

Carlotta, he thought, I’ve come for you.

One block on, a crowd had gathered to watch three men in shirtsleeves fixing a spavined haycart, dissipating disappointedly when the jack did not fail and nobody was crushed to death. He turned down an unpaved alley that opened onto a wide, potholed boulevard festooned with posters touting the virtues of manual labor. Thatch-roofed huts with crude goat pens and wilting garden plots abutted Soviet-era concrete block monstrosities. MINISTRY OF FACTS, Pfefferkorn read. MINISTRY OF MUSICAL EDUCATION, MINISTRY OF BOOTS, MINISTRY OF LONG-CHAIN CARBON COMPOUNDS. It was easy to identify the state’s priorities. The MINISTRY OF SECURITY was shiny and imposing, as was the MINISTRY OF POETRY. The lobby of the MINISTRY OF ROOT VEGETABLES was capacious enough to house a fifteen-foot fountain. In the cracked storefront of the vacant MINISTRY OF TRAFFIC CONTROL was a poster memorializing the martyred Zhulk, with the slogan THE REVOLUTION LIVES ON!

Though it was late afternoon by the time he staggered out of his next meeting, with the auxiliary advisor to the acting chief of the standards division of the Ministry of Volatile Mineral Colloids, the sun was still high in the sky, the heat as enervating as ever. Pfefferkorn eased himself down to the curb and put his head between his knees. With respect to thruynichka consumption, the auxiliary advisor to the acting chief of the standards division of the Ministry of Volatile Mineral Colloids made the second assistant to the deputy subminister in charge of animal waste look like a lightweight. Pfefferkorn had no idea how he was going to find his way back to his hotel. He decided to sleep on the sidewalk. It was roughly the same temperature outside as it was in his room. No harm done, he thought. He curled up. Inside of a minute a pair of soldiers was hoisting him to his feet, demanding his papers. He produced his tourist pass. They ordered him to the Metropole and, when he started off in the wrong direction, took him by the elbows and dragged him there. He reeled across the lobby, scattering a klatsch of aged hookers and crashing into the front desk hard enough to jar the portrait of Zhulk on the wall.

The desk clerk readjusted it. “Monsieur has had a pleasant daytime, I am hopeful.”

“Messages for me?” Pfefferkorn asked.

“No, please.” The clerk vacuumed the money up his sleeve, handed Pfefferkorn his room key, and gestured toward the dining room. “Please, monsieur must partake of evening buffet.”

Chinese businessmen were monopolizing the samovar. Eager to put something in his roiling stomach, Pfefferkorn browsed the offerings, settling on root vegetable cake with goat’s-milk cream-cheese icing, cut into two-inch cubes and distributed by a dour woman wearing rubber gloves. She refused to give him more than one piece. He started to reach for cash.

“Ah, friend, no, no.”

The speaker was a burly man in a grimy tweed sportcoat. In one hand he held a chipped plate piled precariously with root vegetable pierogi and smothered in a yellowish sauce. The other arm encircled a briefcase. He grinned, making three new chins. “Allow me.” He spoke to the cake lady in rapid Zlabian. Pfefferkorn picked out the words for “industrious,” “generosity,” and “honor.” The cake lady looked annoyed. All the same, she snatched Pfefferkorn’s plate and added a second hunk of cake, shoving it at him as though giving up a pound of flesh.

“You must know,” the man said, guiding Pfefferkorn to a corner table, “Comrade Yelena is perhaps the most duty-conscious woman in all of West Zlabia. She has been inculcated with the strictest principles. A double portion represents a desecration of all she knows.”

“How’d you change her mind?” Pfefferkorn asked.

The man chuckled. “First, I instructed her that it is not proper to work without a smile. Then I reminded her that the cake ration for tourists is set at two per day, and because you were not at breakfast, you are entitled. Next, I provided examples of our benevolent Party leaders going without in order to feed the hungry. Finally, I informed her that I would in any case donate my ration to you, so that you might enjoy the full warmth of West Zlabian hospitality.” The man smiled. He set his briefcase on the table, opened it, and withdrew two shot glasses, cleaning them with the corner of his coat. He uncapped a flask and poured. “To your health.”






70.






Fyothor was his name, and if his clout with the cake lady and the freeness of his speech were not enough to mark him as a ranking Party member, the cell phone was. It rang continually throughout their conversation, which lasted long after the restaurant had officially closed. Pfefferkorn tried to pace himself but Fyothor kept pulling flasks from his briefcase.

“To your health. But tell me, friend, your room is acceptable to you? The Metropole is the finest our humble nation has to offer. Not up to American standards, perhaps, but comfortable enough, I hope.”

“I’m not American,” Pfefferkorn said.

Akha, I beg forgiveness. So you said. Excuse me.” Fyothor answered his phone, spoke briefly, hung up. “My apologies. To your health.”

“You knew I wasn’t at breakfast,” Pfefferkorn said. “How.”

Fyothor smiled. “I am a man whose business it is to know such things. And besides, I was there, you were not. It is elementary logic, yes?”

“What is it you do, exactly,” Pfefferkorn said.

“You should ask instead what I do not do.”

“All right, what don’t you do.”

“Nothing!” Fyothor’s laughter rattled the silverware. “To your health, eh? This is the highest-quality thruynichka. You must be careful, friend. Most people make their own at home, it is like drinking bleach. My uncle is famous for his blend. Most of his neighbors are blind. To your health. Akha. Excuse me.”

As Fyothor took the call, Pfefferkorn downed the rest of his cake. It tasted vile but he needed to soak up some of the alcohol—to retake the reins of his mind. A man like Fyothor could have any of a hundred different motives. He might be angling for a bribe. He might be a standard-issue Party minder. He might be secret police. He might simply be a friendly fellow, although in Pfefferkorn’s estimation this was depressingly unlikely. Of greatest interest was the possibility that Fyothor was the point man Pfefferkorn was waiting for. If so, they both had to tread lightly. By law, membership in the May Twenty-sixers was illegal, making the exchange just as dangerous for them as it was for him. Should he be caught, the United States would disavow all knowledge of his existence and activities. He mentally rehearsed the identification codes.

Fyothor closed the phone. “Ten thousand apologies. This device . . . We have a word, myutridashkha. I believe in English you say ‘both a blessing and a curse.’ You understand?”

“Perfectly.”

“To your health. You know, this is a word with an interesting history. It comes from a name, Myutridiya.”

“The royal doctor,” Pfefferkorn said.

Fyothor’s mouth opened. “But yes! Friend, tell me: you know Vassily Nabochka?”

“Who doesn’t.”

“But this is wonderful! To meet a new person is rare. To meet a new person who is also a lover of poetry, this is like finding a diamond in the street. Friend, I am so joyful. To your health. But tell me: how is it that you have come to know our national poem?”

Pfefferkorn said that he was an avid reader.

Fyothor beamed. “To your health. You must know, then, the many idioms we take from the poem. We say, ‘Sluggardly, like the dog Khlabva.’”

“‘Happy, like the midget Juriy,’” Pfefferkorn said.

“‘Redder than the fields of Rzhupsliyikh,’” Fyothor said.

“‘Drunker than the farmer Olvarnkhov,’” Pfefferkorn said, raising his shot glass.

Fyothor threw back his shaggy head and roared with laughter. “Friend, you are a true Zlabian.”

“To your health,” Pfefferkorn said.

Fyothor uncapped a fourth flask. When he next spoke his voice was tremulous. “But you see, friend, here is the essence of our tragical national fate. Our wondrous heritage, it is also the cause of abominable bloodshed. If only the great Zthanizlabh of Thzazhkst had understood the dire consequences of leaving it in a state of incompleteness—but alas, we are doomed, doomed. . . .” His phone rang. He looked at it and slid it back in his pocket. “Akha. Let us speak of happier things. Tell me, friend, you come for business, yes?”

It was a credit to the thoroughness of Pfefferkorn’s training that, despite being sloppier than he had been since the Nixon administration, he was able to describe in pitch-perfect detail the purpose of his visit to West Zlabia, starting with his twenty-two years of experience in the fertilizer industry and ending with his visit to the auxiliary advisor to the acting chief of the standards division of the Ministry of Volatile Mineral Colloids.

Fyothor shook his head. “But friend, no! I know this man. He is a worthless fool, a lazy ignoramus whose only talent is for opening his palm. No, I insist, you must allow—” His phone rang. Again he returned it to his pocket unanswered. “My wife. Excuse me. But tell me: with whom do you meet tomorrow?”

Pfefferkorn named the functionaries he had appointments to see.

“Imbeciles, all of them. To speak with them is to spit in the ocean. You must allow me—akha.” Fyothor checked the caller. “Excuse me. My wife, again. Tha. Tha. Akha, ontheshki uithkh Dzhikhlishkuiyk, zhvikha thuy bhonyukhaya.” He snapped the phone shut and smiled sheepishly. “I regret that my presence is required at home. Thank you for a most enjoyable evening, my friend. To your health.”






71.






Whoever had searched Pfefferkorn’s room had made no effort to hide their work, throwing things around with such vigor that he assumed their real purpose was not to find contraband but to remind him of his vulnerability. If so, they were wasting their time. He already felt useless. He lurched about, picking up shirts, reinserting dresser drawers, smoothing the duvet. The contents of the topmost layer of his wheelie bag were dispersed, but the secret compartments had served their purpose: everything inside was untouched. With amusement he noticed that amid the chaos, the picture of Zhulk above the headboard had been straightened.

He felt in his pocket for the business card Fyothor had given him. It was printed in Cyrillic on thin paper. There was a name, a phone number, and two words. . “Private tour guide.” Sure, Pfefferkorn thought. He tucked the card toward the back of the room copy of Vassily Nabochka. He uncapped the bottle of water on his nightstand and took a long, silty pull. He felt restless. He wanted to go knocking on doors. How long before he found her? A couple of days, at most. But his hands were tied. He had a script to follow, one both maddeningly constrictive and maddeningly vague. Contact could come at any time—tonight, tomorrow, the next day. He unbuttoned his shirt and reached for the fan.

It was still dead.

He lifted the phone and dialed.

“Monsieur?”

“Yes, this is Arthur Pfe—Kowalczyk in room forty-four.”

“Yes, monsieur.”

“I asked for a new fan.”

“Yes, monsieur.”

“The one I have is still broken.”

“I am sorry, monsieur.”

“It’s very hot in here. Would you please send up another?”

“Yes, please, monsieur. Good night.”

“Eh, hang on there, speedy.”

“Monsieur?”

“Have there been any calls for me?”

“No, please.”

“I’m expecting one, so put it through, no matter how late it is.”

“Yes, please. Does monsieur require wake-up?”

“God, no.”

“Good night, please, monsieur.”

He hung up and went into the bathroom to splash water on his naked chest. Across the bedroom, the clanking pipes started up again, loud enough to rattle Zhulk’s picture in its frame. He had no idea how he was going to sleep, unless the fan covered up the sound.

He shut off the tap and walked to the open window, stroking his moustache and letting the poisonous night air dry him as he gazed out at the squatting skyline. Somewhere out there was Carlotta. He spoke her name and the wind carried it away.

A memory came to him, unbidden. It must have been soon after Bill and Carlotta got married. Pfefferkorn had just started teaching, and he and Bill were strolling around campus.

“Promise me something, Yankel.”

Pfefferkorn waved assent.

“You haven’t heard what I’m asking yet.” Bill waited for Pfefferkorn to pay attention, then said, “If anything ever happens to me, you’ll look after Carlotta.”

Pfefferkorn laughed.

“I’m not kidding,” Bill said. “Promise me.”

Pfefferkorn smiled at him quizzically. “What could happen to you?”

“Anything.”

“Like what.”

“Anything. I could get in an accident. I could have a heart attack.”

“At twenty-eight.”

“I won’t be twenty-eight forever. Two-way deal: I’d do the same for you.”

“What makes you think I’ll ever get married?”

“Promise me.”

“Sure, fine.”

“Say it.”

It wasn’t like Bill to be so vehement. Pfefferkorn raised his right hand. “I, Yankel Pfefferkorn, do solemnly swear that in the event you kick the bucket, I’ll look after your wife. Happy?”

“Very.”

Did he have any idea then what he had been agreeing to? If he had, would he have still agreed? He decided he would have. It wasn’t for Bill that he was here now.

Where was his fan?

“Yes, hello, this is Arthur Pfffkowalczyk in room forty-four. I’m still waiting for my fan.”

“Yes, monsieur.”

“Is it coming anytime soon?”

“Immediately, monsieur.”

The clanking continued unabated. Zhulk’s picture had rotated almost thirty degrees clockwise. Pfefferkorn took it down, concerned it would fall on him in the middle of the night.

One consequence of poor infrastructure was an electrical grid that functioned sporadically, and a corresponding lack of light pollution. Having lived in big cities his entire life, he was unused to such brilliant skies, and he watched, dizzily transfixed, as the clouds scudded offstage, and he was treated to a spectacular display of shooting stars.






72.






“Rise, citizens of Zlabia.”

The voice was deafening, right there in the room with him, and Pfefferkorn scrambled out of bed, getting tangled up in the sheets and pitching face-first into the wall. A supernova flared inside his skull. Down he went, cracking his head a second time on the corner of the nightstand.

“Rise to productivity in the name of national greatness.”

Through streamers of color and blobs of pain he saw the woman in the majorette hat. She was upside down, grainy, shouting at him in Zlabian.

“Tuesday, August ninth, will be an auspicious day for the advancement of our collective principles. You are encouraged to enjoy the weather, which will continue to be exceedingly pleasant, with an extremely comfortable high of twenty-two degrees.”

He couldn’t remember leaving the television on. He pulled himself to his feet and tried to switch it off, to no avail: the woman’s face remained. The mute button was similarly ineffective.

“Through the generosity and wisdom of our beloved and benevolent Party leaders, the price of root vegetables remains well within reach of all citizens. . . .”

She began to list other available goods, her voice booming from the screen but also through the walls, floor, and ceiling. He raised the window sash. Loudspeakers crowned all the buildings. Down below, the street traffic had come to a complete standstill, everyone from old women shouldering wicker baskets of root vegetables to young boys driving posses of goats standing at attention. Pfefferkorn looked at the clock. It was five a.m.

“Remember to bring your allotment card to your neighborhood disbursal station.”

On-screen, the woman opened a pocket-sized book. The people in the street did likewise.

“Today’s reading will be the fourth stanza of the fifteenth canto.”

She proceeded to read aloud a passage from Vassily Nabochka. The people followed along in an undertone, their collective murmur like a gathering storm. The reading ended and everyone put their personal copies away.

“Rejoice in the lofty heritage that is yours, citizens of Zlabia.”

Everyone sang the national anthem.

There was a brief round of applause. Activity resumed. The woman in the majorette hat was replaced by a static image of the West Zlabian flag, backed by accordion music. Pfefferkorn hesitated before reaching to switch it off, half expecting a hand to reach through the screen and slap him on the wrist. His ears were ringing, his head pounding from hangover and impact. He was also sleep-deprived. He distinctly remembered giving up on getting his fan at about one a.m. Between the heat and the pipes, he couldn’t have gotten more than a few precious hours. It was a bad way to start the day. He needed his wits about him. He needed to keep his head in the game. He used the bedsheet to sponge the sweat from his body, got dressed, and went downstairs to find some coffee.






73.






He stopped at the front desk. A new clerk was on duty.

“Good morning, monsieur.”

“Yes, hi, my name is Arthur. Kowalczyk. In room forty-four.”

“Yes, monsieur.”

“I asked last night for a fan.”

“There is fan in room, monsieur.”

“It’s broken.”

“Monsieur, I am regretful.”

Pfefferkorn waited. The clerk grinned inanely. Pfefferkorn dug out a ten-ruzha note. The clerk took the money with the same practiced motion as his predecessor. He bowed.

“Monsieur will please to partake of breakfast buffet,” he said unctuously.

Pfefferkorn stepped inside the restaurant. Intent on finding the coffee urn, he did not notice Fyothor sneaking up from behind to poke him in the ribs.

“Greetings, friend! How was your night? Yes? And how did you like our morning exhortations? Very inspiring, yes? Although, between you and me—twenty-two, my arse. Already the thermometer is pushing thirty and it’s not even half past six. Twenty ruzhy says we hit forty by noon.”

They went down the line together. There were two options: last night’s pierogi and a chafing dish of gruel, both dispensed by the indomitable Yelena. There was no coffee, just sour brown tea.

“You didn’t take any of the sauce,” Fyothor said, waving at Pfefferkorn’s plate as they took the same corner table. “The sauce is what makes the dish.”

Pfefferkorn, remembering a formula from long ago, said, “Forty degrees—that’s over a hundred, Fahrenheit.”

“One-oh-five, I think.”

Pfefferkorn groaned and pushed away his steaming bowl of gruel.

“But friend, this is delicious.”

“What is it.”

“We call this bishyuinyuia khashkh. It is like your oatmeal.”

“Doesn’t smell like oatmeal.”

“It is made with root vegetables,” Fyothor said. “And goat’s milk.”

“Goatmeal,” Pfefferkorn said.

Fyothor laughed and thumped him on the back. “Akha, good one, friend. To your health.”

“I’ll stick with tea, thanks.”

“I understand. But as our most insightful Party leaders say, let nothing go to waste.” Fyothor winked and reached for Pfefferkorn’s shot glass. “To your health. Surely it is fate that we meet again, yes?”

Pfefferkorn didn’t know what to say to that.

“I have taken the liberty of making some phone calls on your behalf,” Fyothor said.

Pfefferkorn was nonplussed. “Is that right.”

“Take it from me, friend. We say: ‘A man cannot cut his own hair.’”

Pfefferkorn recognized the adage as having its origin in an episode of Vassily Nabochka wherein the prince attempts to cut his own hair, the moral of the story being: sometimes it’s better to ask for help. Although Fyothor’s interference made him uneasy, Pfefferkorn saw no choice but to play along. Any sensible foreigner looking to do business in West Zlabia would be grateful for an inside track. Declining one would be the fastest way to blow his cover. And Fyothor literally kept him close at hand, taking him around the waist as they rose from the breakfast table.

“Stick with me, friend, and you will have more shit than you know what to do with.”

Their first stop was the Ministry of Media Relations. Nobody said a word as they cut to the front of the line. Fyothor entered the co-sub-undersecretary’s office without knocking and launched into a stirring discourse on the importance of fertilizer to the people’s revolution. Here, he said, holding up Pfefferkorn’s arm, was a comrade from overseas who could do much to advance the collective principles by demonstrating to the world at large the innate superiority of West Zlabian goats, proven by science to produce waste with a nitrogen concentration higher than that of any other goats in the northern hemisphere. To substantiate this point he waved an article torn from that morning’s sports section. The co-sub-undersecretary nodded, hmmed, and finally concurred that Pfefferkorn’s was indeed a worthy project. He promised to write a memo to this effect. They toasted to mutual cooperation, and Fyothor and Pfefferkorn departed.

“That was fast,” Pfefferkorn said. The idea that they might accomplish his stated goal troubled him, as he had no idea what to do if someone actually offered to sell him a large quantity of fertilizer.

“Akha,” Fyothor said. “The man is an ass. He has forgotten us already.”

A similar scene played itself out four more times before noon, as they whipped through the Ministry of Fecundity, the Ministry of Objects, the Ministry of Nautical Redistribution, and the Ministry of Resealable Barrels. Everywhere they went, Fyothor was received with kisses, and he was frequently stopped on the street by people wanting to shake his hand. Upon learning that Pfefferkorn was with him, they shook Pfefferkorn’s hand as well. Pfefferkorn felt as though he was back in high school and had somehow fallen in with the star quarterback.

“You remind me of someone I used to know,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Yes? This person is a friend of yours, I hope?”

“He was.”

Lunch was taken standing, at a stall in the market occupying the Square of the Location of the Conclusion of the Parade of the Commemoration of the Remembrance of the Exalted Memory of the Greatness of the Sacrifices of the Magnificent Martyrs of the Glorious Revolution of the Zlabian People of the Twenty-sixth of May. The heat was ferocious, and many of the vendors had rolled up their goods and retreated to the lobby of the nearby Ministry of Flexible Ductwork. The valiant few that had not were flogging a limited assortment of diseased-looking produce. It seemed that “knobby and covered in dirt” was in season. There was no meat save goat offal that had acquired a thick carpet of flies. While Pfefferkorn wanted to disconnect these nauseating sights from his bowl of stew, there was no denying their common pungency.

On the East Zlabian side of the square was another market, this one colorful and festive. An accordion band played covers of American Top 40. There were rides. There was Bop-a-Goat. There was a petting zoo. There was a booth where you could get dressed up as a character from Vassily Nabochka and have your picture taken. Above all there was food. Clean booths displayed a rainbow of produce, lacquered pastries, satiny chocolates, fresh fish on ice. Pfefferkorn stared at a sign in Cyrillic for a long time before deciphering it as “FUNNEL CAKE.” It was an awesome display of plenty, making it all the more baffling that the entire scene was devoid of patrons. Indeed, this seemed to be the case as far as he could see into East Zlabia: aside from the accordion band, the vendors, and roving packs of well-equipped soldiers, the place had the eerie tranquility of a film set. Here, no teeming masses filled the sidewalks. Luxury cars were parked but nobody was driving. There were cafés, teahouses, bistros, boutiques—all deserted. The picture was so bizarre that Pfefferkorn was unconsciously drawn forward.

“Turn away, please?”

Fyothor had spoken with uncharacteristic urgency and without looking up from his own bowl of stew. It was then that Pfefferkorn noticed a ragtag group of West Zlabian soldiers observing them.

“Come,” Fyothor said, discarding his half-finished stew. “We will be late.”






74.






In fact, they were nowhere near late. Fyothor’s line-jumping had given them three hours to kill before their next appointment, so he had decided to add in a few extra stops.

“You are a tourist,” he said, kneading Pfefferkorn’s shoulders tenderly. “You must tour.”

At the interactive section of the Museum of Goats, Pfefferkorn managed to eke out a half-cup of milk. He was proud of himself until he saw the bucket-plus produced by a four-year-old girl with huge, callused hands. At the Museum of Peace he read an account of the Cold War exactly the opposite of the one he knew. At the Museum of Concrete he learned about the building of the museum itself. By dinnertime, he was ready for cake.

His room had once again been tossed.

The picture of Zhulk had been straightened.

The fan was still kaput.

“Yes hello, this is Arthur Kowalczyk in room forty-four. Where’s my fan?”

“Monsieur, fan is in room.”

“The one I have is broken, so either you didn’t replace it like I asked or somebody’s been buying off the back of the truck.”

“Monsieur, I am sorry.”

“I don’t want apologies. I want a new fan.”

The pipes began to bang.

“Hello?” Pfefferkorn said. “Are you there?”

“Yes, monsieur.”

“I’m tired of calling down. Please send me a fan. A working one. Right away.”

He hung up before the clerk could reply. He moved around the room, restoring it to order, stripping off his clothes as he went. The banging was getting louder. He began to question his original hypothesis. For one thing, he was fairly certain that what made hot water pipes clank was the temperature differential between the water and the pipe. Hot water caused the cold metal to expand, which in turn caused the characteristic ticking. But it was so hot in West Zlabia that he couldn’t imagine the differential to be more than a few degrees: not enough to produce sound, and certainly not enough to produce the ear-splitting racket he was hearing. Another reason to doubt the hypothesis was that in his experience, clanking pipes tended to speed up and then taper off. The noise coming through his wall was following a different pattern. It was steady and insistent, more indicative of, say, the feral urgency of a headboard knocking against plaster. It would be just his luck, wouldn’t it, to be stuck next to a honeymooning couple.

He waited for the fan to be delivered, and when it wasn’t, he called again.

“Immediately, monsieur,” the desk clerk said.

The clanking kept on going. Zhulk’s photo was jumping all over the place. Pfefferkorn stood on the bed and took it down. Then he pounded angrily on the wall.

“It’s late,” he said.

The clanking ceased.

At midnight he gave up waiting. He threw back the duvet and lay on the sheet, basking in the silence, aware that five a.m. was just around the bend.






75.






The next morning, following the forecast and public reading, he went straight to the front desk. The clerk from the first day was back on duty. Pfefferkorn made sure to tip him in advance.

“Monsieur will to partake of breakfast buffet.”

“In a minute. First things first. I need to change rooms, please.”

“Monsieur, there is problem?”

“Several. I’ve asked for a new fan at least ten times. How hard could that possibly be? Apparently very hard. So I’d like a new room.”

“Monsieur—”

“And the couple next door to me is making a tremendous amount of noise. They sound like a pair of oversexed gorillas.”

“Monsieur, I am regretful. This is impossible.”

“What is?”

“Rooms cannot be exchanged.”

“Why not?”

“Monsieur, there is no availability.”

Pfefferkorn looked at the back wall, where they hung the keys. “What are you talking about? I can see for myself there aren’t more than ten guests in the whole place.”

“Monsieur, reassignment of rooms requires six months’ notice.”

“You can’t be serious.”

The clerk bowed.

Pfefferkorn took out a ten-ruzha note. It disappeared up the clerk’s sleeve but the clerk did not otherwise move. Pfefferkorn gave him another ten ruzhy. Still nothing. He gave him ten more and then he threw up his hands and walked across the lobby to the restaurant.

“Friend, good morning. But what is the matter?”

Pfefferkorn explained.

“Akha,” Fyothor said, knitting his brows, “yes.”

“It’s really true that I can’t get another room for six months?”

“That would be soon, friend.”

“Jesus.”

“Have no fear,” Fyothor said. “Today we are going to have some real fun.”

“I can’t wait.”

They made the rounds. Meeting after meeting ended identically: with promises of memos, sweltering embraces, and thruynichka. Between appointments they took in the sights. There were more museums, more memorials. Virtually every street corner featured a sign commemorating some momentous event of the people’s revolution. On the few unclaimed corners, metal plaques had been set into the earth:

THIS SPOT RESERVED FOR FUTURE HISTORICAL EVENTS.

They stood before a seedy-looking building.

HERE THE PEOPLE’S REVOLUTION FOREVER IMPROVED THE LOT OF THE ZLABIAN WOMAN

They entered the strip club and sat down. A waitress pecked Fyothor on the cheek and set down a bottle of thruynichka. Techno music beat relentlessly.

“You enjoy breasts?” Fyothor shouted.

“As much as the next fellow,” Pfefferkorn shouted back.

“I come here every day,” Fyothor shouted.

Pfefferkorn nodded.

“It is different from America, yes?” Fyothor shouted.

“I’m not American,” Pfefferkorn shouted back.

It was different: both the patrons and the strippers were in equal states of undress.

“This is our collective principle of equality,” Fyothor shouted. “Every article of clothing the woman removes, the man must do the same. Fair, yes?” He tucked a five-ruzha note inside the G-string of a writhing woman and started unbuttoning his shirt. “To your health.”

The highlight of any West Zlabian vacation was a visit to Prince Vassily’s grave. Pfefferkorn, expecting grandeur, was surprised by the spot’s humility. Tucked in among a busy thoroughfare was a small brick plaza, at the center of which stood a raggedy tree.

HERE LIES IN ETERNAL SLUMBER

THE GREAT HERO

FATHER AND REDEEMER OF THE GLORIOUS ZLABIAN PEOPLE

PRINCE VASSILY

“HOW LIKE A ROOT VEGETABLE SWELLS MY HEART TO GAZE UPON THY COUNTENANCE

HOW LIKE AN ORPHANED KID GOAT DOES IT BLEAT FOR THY LOSS”

(canto cxx)

Fyothor bowed his head. Pfefferkorn did likewise.

“Next month we celebrate the fifteen-hundredth anniversary of the poem. The festivities will be unforgettable.” Fyothor smiled slyly. “Perhaps you will extend your stay, yes?”

“One day at a time,” Pfefferkorn said.

En route to the Ministry of Double Taxation they passed a throng of people waiting to enter a dilapidated wooden shack.

“The home of our dearly departed leader,” Fyothor said.

Pfefferkorn tried to appear appropriately respectful.

“Come,” Fyothor said, and began bushwhacking to the front of the line.

The interior of the hut was easily twenty degrees hotter than it was outside. The furniture had been cordoned off and easels set up with photographs of Dragomir Zhulk orating, scowling, saluting. People used clunky Soviet-era twin-lens reflex cameras to photograph the desk, still set with Zhulk’s fountain pen, datebook, and a dented tin mug with an inch of tea left at the bottom. A spotlit glass case housed his well-used copy of Vassily Nabochka. Soldiers lined the perimeter of the room, using their Kalashnikovs to jab at the visitors and hasten their circuit around the rope protecting the room’s centerpiece: a burlap-lined coffin, inside which Zhulk’s embalmed body lay in state. Pfefferkorn blinked the sweat out of his eyes and stared. He felt himself going tingly and light-headed. Here was a man he had killed.

A soldier shoved him with the butt of his gun and told him to move along.

Out in the street, Fyothor was adamant. “Enough death for one day,” he said.

They skipped their meeting and went back to the strip club.

The schedule repeated itself for several days running. Following a restless night spent sweating into his sheets, banging the wall, and plugging his ears with toilet tissue, Pfefferkorn would be shouted awake at dawn. The woman in the majorette hat would declare that the weather would be pleasant beyond compare, that the price of root vegetables had reached an all-time low, that miraculous advances had been made by the Ministry of Science, that the East Zlabian aggressors had been repelled and were cowering in fear. It was unclear to Pfefferkorn whom these lies were intended to fool. Still, he began to enjoy the pageantry of it. He read along from Vassily Nabochka. He sang the anthem lustily while he shaved around his moustache. He had just about forgotten it was fake.

Having established him as a friend of Fyothor’s, Yelena took more of a shine to him. She never gave him more than his ration, but she did it with a hockey linesman’s gappy smile.

He spent close to every waking moment with Fyothor. It was clear enough to Pfefferkorn that he was being watched, but as he didn’t see what he could do about it, he tried to spin it for the best.

“You know all these people and you can’t get me a new hotel room?”

“Some things are beyond even my power, friend.”

In the evenings they would dine together in the restaurant, talking about literature and polishing off several bottles of thruynichka. Then Fyothor would head home to his wife and Pfefferkorn would stop by the front desk to check for messages. The clerk would say there were no messages. Pfefferkorn would ask for a new fan. The clerk would promise it immediately.

Up the ancient elevator Pfefferkorn went, down the whispering hallway, past mumbling rooms, rooms full of ghosts, rooms more men had entered than left.

Stretched out on his bed, listening to the honeymooners getting to work, he reflected on the similarities between spying and writing. Both called for stepping into an imagined world and residing there with conviction, nearly to the point of self-delusion. Both were jobs that outsiders thought of as exotic but that were in practice quite tedious. Both tested one’s ability to withstand loneliness, although Pfefferkorn decided that in this respect, spying was harder, because it demanded that the spy resist, at every moment and with all his power, the human instinct to trust. One of life’s minor consolations was the presumption that you could ask most strangers most questions and get an honest answer most of the time. Not always, of course, but often enough. Absent that, conversation became an exhausting, depressing labor, more so in the face of the sort of unflagging cheer Fyothor threw at him. Pfefferkorn felt like he was being forced to stand on one foot for hours on end. He thought of all the faceless men and women doing their duties in hotel rooms the world over. He admired them. He felt for them. He wished them well. Their loneliness was his, and his theirs.

And he thought of Bill. In reevaluating their relationship Pfefferkorn had seen himself as the survivor of a house fire, returning to pick through the ash. There might be one or two scraps of authentic friendship, but they were buried under so much falsehood that it seemed wiser and less pathetic to let them go. But perhaps Paul had been right when he said that it didn’t have to be one or the other. Now that Pfefferkorn was a spy, he understood. He remembered Bill’s copy of his novel, the dense scribblings in the margins. What else could that be but love? He was almost afraid to accept this, because if Bill truly had loved him, the pain he must have endured in deceiving Pfefferkorn all these years was unimaginable. Heroic, even.

The clanking got louder.

Pfefferkorn turned on the television and put the volume way up.

There were three channels. Channel one was the flag. Channel two aired round-the-clock footage of Party rallies and speeches. For entertainment, it was hard to beat channel three. Pfefferkorn watched a soap opera about goatherds. He watched the news, anchored by the woman in the majorette hat. Like the rest of West Zlabia, he was waiting for the game show that came on at nine. The national curriculum included poetic composition, and teachers nominated their best students to appear before a panel of celebrity judges, who would then proceed to tear the poem apart mercilessly, reducing the student to tears and bringing burning shame upon him, his family, and their entire neighborhood. To be humiliated in this way was considered a great honor, and The Poem, It Is Bad! was the second most popular show on West Zlabian TV, its ratings topped only by those of the show that followed, a live broadcast of the teacher being flogged.






76.






“Rise, citizens of Zlabia. . . .”

Pfefferkorn opened the dresser. The day’s itinerary included a visit to a goat farm on the outskirts of town, which seemed as good an occasion as any to use his one polo shirt. Still coursing with sweat, he unwrapped his towel and pressed it to his face. When he took the towel away from his face he saw that his moustache had come off in his hands.

There was no cause for panic. He had been in West Zlabia for a week, and the epoxy was supposed to last ten to twelve days. Constant perspiration had likely hastened its dissolution. He picked the old moustache out of the folds of his towel and flushed it down the toilet. He put his wheelie bag on the bed, pried up the first false bottom, removed one of the moustache kits, tore it open, and dumped its contents across the bedspread. Swatches of fake hair in a wild multitude of sizes, shapes, colors, and textures spilled out. It looked like a caterpillar pride parade. He selected two pinkie-length pieces in a medium brown and carried them into the bathroom along with the thimble-sized tube of adhesive and the instruction sheet.

Superficial identity alteration package (male)

1. Choose the part which is sorted appropriately of the hairpiece at size.

2. In order to meet to the most desirable size, carve the hairpiece

3, Solicit moisture with the surface area of the face where the hairpiece will have in application.

4. Using the cotton stick, solicit Mult-E-Bond™ in verso of the hairpiece to receive the influence which ties on with moisture.

5 Solicit the hairpiece, maintain for thrity second..

6. You look so good!

He didn’t remember the process being quite so esoteric. Then again, Blueblood had been there to help. Flummoxed, he turned the page over.

MADE IN INDONESIA

There was a knock at the front door.

“Good morning, friend!”

What was Fyothor doing here? Breakfast didn’t start for another half hour. Pfefferkorn poked his head out. “Just a minute,” he called.

He ducked back into the bathroom. He uncapped the tube of adhesive, squeezed a dollop onto his fingertip, and put his finger to his lip, instantly fusing the two surfaces together.






77.






It was ugly. His left middle finger was stuck to his upper lip midway between the left corner of his mouth and his philtrum. The angle of contact was particularly grievous. Had the finger been pressed down at twelve o’clock, he might have been able to pass off the pose as one of contemplation. As it was, the finger was between nine and ten o’clock, making it look like he was about to excavate a booger. He dashed to the bed and combed through the pieces of facial hair.

Next door the banging started up, steady as a metronome.

“Really?” he yelled. “Now?”

“What?” Fyothor called.

“Nothing.”

He found what he was looking for: the enclosed Q-tip, or what the instructions called a “cotton stick.” In his haste, he had forgotten all about it. Knowing where he had gone wrong didn’t get him any closer to fixing the problem, though. At present he was holding his own face, and Fyothor was tapping at the door, and the lovebirds were going at it like a pumpjack.

“I apologize for the rude awakening,” Fyothor called, “but today we must stick to the schedule.”

“I’ll be right there.” Pfefferkorn raced back to the bathroom, threw on the hot water, and stuck his head under the tap, without effect. Despairingly he stood up, wet all over again. There was a way to dissolve the epoxy, he knew. Blueblood had told him. The banging was driving him crazy and making it hard to concentrate.

“I recommend closed-toe shoes,” Fyothor called.

“Right-o,” Pfefferkorn called.

He remembered: a solution of saltwater, twenty-two percent by weight. Simple enough, except that he had yet to see a saltshaker (or any normal condiment, for that matter) anywhere in West Zlabia. A bit of ketchup would do wonders for root vegetable hash, he thought. Then he told himself to focus. He needed salt water. He could cry. He dug deep for the saddest memories he had. He thought of his father. He thought of all his failures. It was no use. Shortly after his life had taken a turn for the better, he had worked to put his misery behind him. Instead he imagined awful things that might yet happen. He pictured Carlotta in her cell. He pictured himself getting treated for cancer. With distaste, he pictured his daughter . . . but his brain refused to go there, and his eyes remained dry as toast.

“The driver is waiting. We can still beat the traffic.”

“On my way.”

He tugged at his lip again. He was stuck fast, his options dwindling. What distinguished men like Harry Shagreen and Dick Stapp, he thought, was their monomania. They did whatever it took—anything at all—for failure was not an option. He gripped his left wrist with his right hand, took a deep breath, and yanked as hard as he could, spinning himself around and landing in the shower with a crash.

“Friend? Is everything all right?”

“Fine,” Pfefferkorn said weakly. He had been somewhat successful. His finger did feel looser. He climbed out of the shower, took hold of his hand, and braced himself for another go.

In retrospect he would not be able to decide which was worse: the pain or the wet, ripping sound. It took all his willpower not to scream. He bent over, silently heaving, his eyes finally (and pointlessly) blurring, blood dripping from his lip onto the tiles. He wasn’t finished, either. The very tip of his finger was still attached. With a grunt he pulled it free. He wadded toilet tissue against his bleeding face.

“The early goat gets the peels,” Fyothor called.

Pfefferkorn used the Q-tip to apply a fresh coat of adhesive. It stung going on, and he realized he had smeared an assuredly toxic substance directly into his bloodstream. The epoxy worked like a chemical cauterization, coagulating the blood on contact. With trembling hands, he pressed the two matching pieces of moustache to his lip. He held them in place for a ten count, then tested each side with a gentle tug. The right side was fine. The left side yodeled with pain, but it, too, remained secure.

He ran to the bed, swept the spilled moustaches into the wheelie bag, replaced the first false panel, zipped the bag up, and threw on his clothes. By now Fyothor was pounding loud enough to compete with the pipes.

“Must I break down the door?”

“Ha ha ha ha ha.”

Pfefferkorn ran back to the bathroom for one final mirror check and recoiled.

He had glued his moustache on upside down. Instead of following the downward curve of his upper lip, it shot upward, like a set of surprised eyebrows. Seeing this did in fact surprise him, and when his actual eyebrows went up, he seemed to have two sets of surprised eyebrows, one above his eyes and the other above his lip. “I didn’t expect this,” the top of his face seemed to be saying. “Me neither,” the bottom half seemed to be agreeing, “any of it.” He tried to bring his moustache back into alignment by frowning, hard. It worked, sort of. Assuming he could keep it up all day long, Fyothor might not notice anything amiss.

“I am counting to three. One.”

Still frowning, Pfefferkorn ran from the bathroom.

“Two—”

Frowning, he threw open the door. Fyothor was waiting, smiling, his big hand raised with two fingers up. Pfefferkorn then saw himself in his mind’s eye, frowning and staring back fearfully. It wasn’t very convincing. As if to confirm this, Fyothor’s smile faltered—the tiniest flicker imaginable, but more than enough for Pfefferkorn to know that the jig was up. His cover was blown. He was a dead man. With any luck he could get to his weapons. He was reasonably adept with the toothbrush knife. The deodorant stun gun was neater but more cumbersome, as it entailed the added step of removing the cap. He wasn’t sure it would work on a man of Fyothor’s girth, either. He decided to go with the knife, cleanup be damned. As he had been trained to do, he visualized himself diving to the floor, rolling to the closet, grabbing the bag, opening the zipper, flinging aside the first false panel, flinging aside the second false panel, flinging aside the third false panel, seizing the toothbrush, flicking open the blade, driving it home. It was a lot to contend with. Still frowning, he started to move backward. Fyothor smiled wider and took him firmly by the arm.

“We will be late,” he said, drawing him toward the elevator.






78.






Frowning for hours at a stretch was more physically taxing than Pfefferkorn would have guessed. As they squelched through the goat stalls, ankle-deep in muck, his face pulsed hotly with exertion. He was distracted, too, by something that had escaped earlier notice: the pad of his left index finger was totally smooth, having gained a thin new layer of skin, grafted there from his upper lip. In theory he could commit a crime without leaving prints, provided he just used that one finger. Fleetingly he wondered if this might make an interesting premise, not for a novel, perhaps, but for a screenplay. Then he refocused on frowning.

At the end of the tour, he received a parting gift, three vials of nutrient-rich animal waste.

He and Fyothor stood under a tree by the side of the road, waiting for the driver to return and take them back to town. On another day, Pfefferkorn might have found the smell of hay and the clang of neck bells relaxing. Still frowning, he remarked upon the resemblance between the farm’s interim ancillary director of droppings and the tertiary auditor-adjutant of the Ministry of Gas-Emitting Semisolids, with whom they had met the previous day.

“Cousins,” Fyothor said.

Pfefferkorn raised his eyebrows—his real ones—at this frank admission of nepotism.

“We are all related. Geography is destiny, yes?” Fyothor gestured to the steep hills that bounded the Zlabian valley, cupping its inhabitants in uncomfortably close proximity. “In this light, our tragic history appears even more tragic. We harm no one but ourselves.”

Pfefferkorn, still frowning, nodded.

“As I said, it is a rare honor to meet someone new.” Fyothor patted Pfefferkorn’s shoulder and left this hand there, as though Pfefferkorn was a wayward child. Pfefferkorn’s heart hiccuped. Before he could think of something to say, the troika appeared in a slowly churning cloud of dust. It came to a halt and they climbed aboard. Fyothor murmured to the driver and handed him some notes. The driver nodded. Rather than execute a three-point turn to take them back toward the city center, he cracked his whip and the troika began to inch forward.

Pfefferkorn’s frown was now genuine. “Where are we going?”

“It is a lovely day, yes?” Fyothor said. “Let us enjoy it.”

They rumbled alongside fields amok with clover. Sunlight enameled the languishing carcasses of Soviet tractors. Soon the space between farmhouses lengthened, as pitted asphalt turned to dried, rutted mud, and the whirr of insects rose high enough that Fyothor had to bellow to be heard. Pfefferkorn wasn’t listening. The thought of being outnumbered and outweighed, with only his fists and feet for weapons, had him in such a state that for a moment he neglected to frown. He felt the ends of his moustache turning skyward and brought them back down.

They came to a fork in the road. A corroded sign indicated three kilometers to the ruined nuclear reactor. The driver took the other, unmarked road. Pfefferkorn stirred.

“It is not far,” Fyothor said.

Up ahead, a line of trees demarcated the northern edge of the Lykhabvo Forest, off-limits to tourists and locals alike as part of the exclusion zone. Fyothor had the driver pull over. He handed him a few more notes and told him to wait.

“Come,” Fyothor said, putting his arm around Pfefferkorn’s waist and marching him into the woods.






79.






The effects of high-dose radiation were evident all around them. Oaks and maples bore asymmetrical leaves the size of guitars. Psychedelic ferns genuflected in the breeze. Nine-toed squirrels with patchy fur scampered over boulders blackened by lichen. Beneath the smells Pfefferkorn associated with a normal forest (sweet decaying vegetation, savory sunlit rock) lay an unnatural, chemical base note. He could get cancer just by being here. But that concern was overridden by a more pressing one. He and Fyothor were alone.

“Pretty, yes?”

Pfefferkorn, frowning, did not reply. He was trying to figure out why Fyothor had left the troika driver behind. If two men went into the forest and only one emerged, that demanded an explanation—unless it was the expected outcome. So the driver had to be in on it. But then why trade four arms for two? The answer must be that Fyothor didn’t consider Pfefferkorn dangerous. This had to be counted as an advantage, albeit a slight one that might not hold much longer. The sooner he acted, the better. He spied a half-buried stone with a sharp edge. He visualized himself diving to the ground, rolling toward the stone, prying it up, and using it—all before Fyothor had a chance to react. Too many potential snafus, he decided. He didn’t know how big the hidden part of the rock was. It might not come up easily or at all. He passed. They walked on, following a widening creek. Fyothor, his hand around Pfefferkorn’s waist, was talking about the hardships he had endured growing up, a large family and a tiny hut. There was no word for privacy in Zlabian, did Pfefferkorn know that? Pfefferkorn, still frowning, scanned the forest floor. It was spongy with mutant foliage, pine needles as long as pool cues curling in piles. There were countless broken branches, any one of which would have made a decent club had he stopped to pick it up. He waited for his training to kick in. Yet his body was rubbery and accepting as Fyothor urged him on. Muscle memory, Pfefferkorn shouted to himself. Solar plexus! Pressure points! It was awful, being jostled along toward death like a rag doll.

The creek fed a murky pond. At long last Fyothor released him and walked to the water’s edge, standing with his back turned, looking out. Now or never, Pfefferkorn thought. He crouched noiselessly and pulled a stone from the mud. It made a sucking sound but Fyothor did not notice. He was talking about coming to this spot as a boy, pouring out his troubles to the fish and the trees. He had not visited in years but he felt happy to be here now with Pfefferkorn, his friend. Sockdolager had said that the right place to inflict blunt-force trauma was at the temple, with its abundance of blood vessels and nerves. The important thing was to commit. A pulled punch was worse than no punch. Pfefferkorn rolled the stone in his hand. All the moisture in his mouth seemed to have been redirected to his palms. He was thinking of his one experience inflicting violence on another living being. His old apartment had mice. Usually they were clever enough to skirt the glue traps he put out, but one evening while reading he heard a series of frenzied squeaks. He went to the kitchen and found a mouse stuck by its hind legs. It was trying to pull itself across the linoleum by its front paws. He had given up on ever catching any mice and so had no plan for what to do if he did. He’d heard of people drowning them in a bucket of water. To him that sounded sadistic. He gave it some thought, then picked up the trap by the other end and put it in a shopping bag. He tied the bag shut and took it down to the street. The bag twitched and squeaked. He untied the handles and looked inside. The mouse was going berserk, like it knew what was coming. Pfefferkorn thought of removing it and setting it free but he was afraid of ripping its legs off. So he just looked at it for a long minute as it shrieked and clawed at the plastic. At times like that he wished he had become an electrician or a bus driver. Real men did not stand around, staring dumbly into a shopping bag. They knew what to do. But did the job make the man or vice versa? He retied the bag, lifted it high in the air, and smashed it against the curb. There was a crunching sound but he could still feel the mouse squirming. He smashed the bag again. The squirming stopped. He gave the bag one more whack and dropped it in the sidewalk bin before running upstairs to take a shower. Then as now his whole body shook. He broke the problem down into steps. He visualized. The problem with visualization was that, done well, it made the task ahead more concrete and divisible but also intensely tangible and gruesome. He was feeling the stinging reverberation in his palm as the rock made contact with Fyothor’s skull. He was seeing the bloom of blood and hearing a sound like a fistful of potato chips being crushed. He swallowed back acid and tightened his grip. He supposed he had killed plenty of spiders in his day, too, but they didn’t count. He stepped forward. Fyothor turned and saw what was happening and smiled knowingly and said “Ah yes” and with breathtaking speed his hand darted out and snatched the stone away. Pfefferkorn wheeled backward and dove to the ground, rolling with his arms clamped around his head for protection. He ended up crouched behind a log, poised and ready for action. But Fyothor was not charging him or taking out a gun. He was staring at him in unadulterated confusion. Pfefferkorn stared back. There was a silence as they stared at each other. Fyothor shrugged and wound up and sent the stone skimming across the pond. It bounced three times before sailing into the bushes on the far bank. He picked up another stone and offered it to Pfefferkorn. “Your turn.”

Pfefferkorn did not move.

Fyothor shrugged again and skimmed the second stone. “Akha,” he said. “Very poor. When I was young . . . pip, pip, pip, seven times or more.” He extended his arm along the imaginary trajectory. Then he addressed Pfefferkorn with a look of concern. “How is your lip?”

The back of Pfefferkorn’s neck prickled.

“To continue making that face for so long must be tiring. Certainly, there is no need to perform on my account.” Fyothor smiled faintly. “I can see the glue where it pushes out.”

Pfefferkorn said nothing.

“There have been others like you, before. None of them have survived.”

There were no other rocks within easy reach.

“You have secrets. I understand. Who among us does not? Who among us does not suffer because of them?”

There were no broken branches, either.

“You may speak freely. There are no listening devices here, I can assure you.” Fyothor paused expectantly. “Very well. This is something I understand, to be afraid to speak. We Zlabians understand it too well. But you must believe me, friend: the burden does not get lighter with time. It gets heavier. I know, because I am fifty-five years old and my own burdens are so heavy that often I feel I cannot go on. I think, sometimes, that I would like to sit down forever, to let the dust and the cobwebs cover me over. I might become a little mountain. I would like this very much. Mountains feel nothing, yes? Because I know that change will not come for me. I know this. Perhaps, though, if I become a mountain, others will climb upon me and stand upon my shoulders, and from there they will look into the future.”

There was a silence.

“No listening devices,” Pfefferkorn said.

“None.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I am sure.”

There was a silence.

“A tour guide,” Pfefferkorn said.

“In my spare time.”

“And in the rest of your time.”

Fyothor bowed. “I am but a humble servant of the Party.”

“Serving in what capacity.”

“Executive director for electronic monitoring,” Fyothor said. He bowed again. “Ministry of Surveillance.”

There was a silence.

“I see why you’re so popular,” Pfefferkorn said.

“I have thousands of friends,” Fyothor said. “Not one of them likes me.”

He looked out at the water.

“I know how it feels to live with your tongue pressing at the back of your teeth. I believe, friend, that my form of service to the state was not an accident but the work of a God with a sense of humor. Yes? The man with secrets, he lives by destroying others through their secrets. This is a constant punishment for me.” He looked at Pfefferkorn. “Please speak.”

“And say what.”

But Fyothor did not answer. He turned away again.

“It would be easy for me to turn you in,” he said. “I could have done it at any time.”

Pfefferkorn said nothing.

“Do you believe I would do such a thing?”

There was a silence.

“I don’t know,” Pfefferkorn said.

Fyothor bowed his head. “You cannot know how sorry I am to hear that.”

There was a silence.

“What do want from me?” Pfefferkorn asked.

“Give me hope,” Fyothor said.

There was a silence.

“How,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Tell me it would be better for me elsewhere.”

Pfefferkorn said nothing.

“Tell me about America,” Fyothor said.

There was a long silence.

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Pfefferkorn said.

Fyothor’s shoulders sagged. He went ashen. It was as if his soul had been siphoned off.

“Of course not,” he said. “My apologies.”

Silence.

The cell phone squawked. Pfefferkorn flinched but Fyothor did not move. The phone rang six times and stopped. Then it started up again. Wearily Fyothor reached into his pocket.

Tha. Okay. Okay. Tha.” He closed the phone. “I regret that my wife requires my presence at home.” His voice had taken on a new quality, a listless formality. “My apologies.”

He bowed and turned and walked back into the forest.

A moment later Pfefferkorn followed, trailing at a slight distance.

They remained silent throughout the long, bumpy ride back to town, and when they got stuck in traffic, three blocks from the hotel, Fyothor instructed the driver to take Pfefferkorn the rest of the way and started to slide out of the seat.

“What about you,” Pfefferkorn said.

Fyothor shrugged. “I can walk.”

“Oh,” Pfefferkorn said. “Well, then, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow, I am sorry, I have appointments I must keep.”

It was such an obvious lie that Pfefferkorn saw no point in arguing.

“All right,” he said. “Another time, then.”

“Yes, another time.”

“Thank you,” Pfefferkorn said. “Thank you very much.”

Fyothor did not reply. He lowered himself to the sidewalk and walked off without a backward glance, weaving through the crowds and soon becoming lost to sight.






80.






The restaurant was quiet, unoccupied except for one drunk colonel and Yelena. She did a double take as Pfefferkorn approached the buffet, his plate out for the last remaining pierogi. Aware of her staring at his moustache, he frowned decisively, took his sorry dinner, and dragged himself to the corner booth. He sat down in a daze and began breaking the pierogi into tiny pieces to make it last longer. In a world where nobody could be trusted, he had done the right thing. He had followed his orders. Believe no one. Deny everything. In a world where nobody could be trusted, certain events followed logically. He had rejected the overtures of a powerful man, who would now feel vulnerable for having made those overtures, and furious at having had them rejected. In a world where nobody could be trusted, payback would be forthcoming. Pfefferkorn knew he ought to be afraid. He ought to be in his room right now, throwing all his things in a bag and formulating plan B. In a world where nobody could be trusted, a van was being started up somewhere across town. In a world where nobody could be trusted, that van would pull out of an underground parking garage and head for the Metropole. Its occupants would be heavies in leather jackets. They would file out of the van and into the hotel lobby. They would enter the restaurant and grab Pfefferkorn in full view of everyone and drag him out to the van and toss him in back and hog-tie him and imprison him in a dank basement and strap him down and visit upon him unspeakable bodily desecrations. In a world where nobody could be trusted, the only reasonable choice was to run. In a world where nobody could be trusted, the clock was ticking, the sand was falling, the die had been irretrievably cast.

Who in the world wanted to live in a world where nobody could be trusted?

In place of fear he felt a profound sense of loss. A stranger had come to him, desperate for hope, and he had looked away, because those were his orders. A world where nobody could be trusted was a miserable world. He felt the loneliness of the spy, and he felt anger. He had done what needed doing and he hated himself for it. The squalidness of the room, previously obscured by Fyothor’s vitality, seethed forth. The walls crawled with vermin. The carpet festered with more. The table was sticky and gouged. It was not the same table it had been for the last week. Before it had been their table. Now it was his, and it disgusted him. He pushed the pierogi away. He hated his handlers. He hated everything about this mission. If he had any sense at all that he was getting closer to Carlotta, he might have consoled himself. But nothing was happening. It was like he was the lead role in some insipid student-written play. He felt his humanity leaching out into the stuffy night air. He swirled his teacup and stared dejectedly into the vortex. His mouth hurt from frowning all day. He had been doing his best to obey Paul’s instructions. He had been focused, he had not let emotions cloud his judgment, he had kept his eyes on the prize. Now he gave himself over to wallowing. He let melancholy and frustration wash over him. He missed Carlotta. He missed his daughter. He didn’t care what his country needed. He just wanted to go home.

Across the restaurant, the colonel’s head hit the table with a thunk, interrupting Pfefferkorn’s gloomy reverie. Loud snoring commenced. The kitchen doors swung wide and Yelena emerged holding a doggie bag, its neck rolled tightly and stapled shut.

“Hungry,” she said in English, holding the bag out.

Apparently Fyothor’s lecture on providing for the needy had taken root. Pfefferkorn was touched. Though he had no appetite, for politeness’s sake, he thanked her and moved to accept.

She moved the bag out of reach. “Hungry,” she said again.

The colonel snorted and shifted. Yelena glanced at him, then at Pfefferkorn, her eyes imploring.

Hungry.

A gear clicked.

Pfefferkorn remembered.

“I am satisfied, thank you,” he said. He spoke automatically, his voice rising. “But perhaps I will take this for later.”

“Later,” Yelena said. She left the doggie bag on his table and went about tidying up.

He tucked the bag under his arm and made his way carefully across the lobby. The desk clerk saw him and called out, “No messages, monsieur.”

But Pfefferkorn already knew this. He skipped the elevator, taking the stairs two at a time.






81.






He locked himself in the bathroom and put the doggie bag on the counter, wiggling his fingers in anticipation. He pried open the staple and unrolled the bag. Inside was a foam box. He took it out and opened the lid. Inside was a napkin tied like a hobo’s bundle. Delicately he undid the knot and pulled back the edges, ready for an electronic key or a microchip. That was what he expected, anyway, and he blinked in disbelief at a pale wad of doughy pastry. No, he thought. No, no. He’d practiced the exchange with the training staff until it was hardwired in his brain. Hungry. I am satisfied, thank you, but perhaps I will take this for later. Later. That was the code, word for word. This had to be it. Why else would Yelena refuse to hand over the bag until he reciprocated? Why had she picked tonight, of all nights, unless it was because Fyothor’s absence permitted her to act unobserved? But then where was his microchip? He prodded the dumpling. He’d been fed one like it at the safe house. To him it had tasted just as bland as any other example of Zlabian cuisine, but Paul said it was considered a delicacy. Pya-something. Pyatshellalikhuiy. “Little parcel.”

At once the answer hit him and he felt incredibly thick. He broke the dumpling open and began to pick through its contents. He was looking for a microchip. He was looking for an ear transmitter. He found neither. He found bits of diced root vegetable and gray flecks of herb suspended in a starchy goo. He flattened the exterior dough and held the pieces up, hoping beyond hope for instructions written on their insides. But he found nothing. It was a dumpling and nothing more. Disappointed, he moved to throw it away, pausing as his stomach let out a growl. He’d eaten nothing today and a week in West Zlabia had taught him never to turn down food. He stuffed a piece of the dumpling in his mouth and carried the rest to bed, switching on the television in time to catch the theme song to The Poem, It Is Bad!

It was an interesting episode. The student poet had reinterpreted the one hundred tenth canto of Vassily Nabochka, popularly known as the “Love Song of the Prince,” in which the protagonist reflects on what he has forsaken in order to undertake his quest: the love of a beautiful maiden—a moment pregnant with irony, as the reader has been privy to scenes showing the maiden to be a nasty piece of work, poisoning the king and plotting to do the same to the prince upon his return. Pfefferkorn groped on the nightstand for the room copy so he could follow along for comparison. He opened to the back of the book and Fyothor’s business card fell out onto his chest. He picked it up and stared at it regretfully. The name, the number. Private tour guide. After a moment he took it to the bathroom and tore it into dozens of tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet. He watched them spin and disappear. He got back into bed.

The student poet had taken liberties with rhyme and meter, but his boldest stroke was spicing the prince’s tone with cynicism. While this choice diminished the dramatic irony somewhat, it gave nuance to a character who often came across as a Goody Two-shoes. Pfefferkorn approved. A little edge went a long way. A character didn’t have to go around like Dick Stapp or Harry Shagreen, pulverizing fingers and snapping vertebrae at the slightest provocation, to be interesting. He put the last piece of pyatshellalikhuiy in his mouth and wiped his palms on the bedspread. How anything so dense and gluey could be a delicacy escaped him. He yawned. It was only twenty after nine but he felt sleepy. The panel of judges was going ballistic. They seemed to feel that the national poem made a bad platform for experimentation, and they laid on a critique so vicious that the camera zoomed in to show a spreading stain near the student’s crotch. Pfefferkorn disapproved. Never had he let a workshop get so out of hand. The closing theme played. Another yawn came on, a huge one that sucked all the air from the room. He got up to use the bathroom but his feet missed the floor somehow and he ended up flat on his face on the carpet. He waited for himself to stand up. New theme music played. Stand up, he told himself. His body wouldn’t listen. His arms said to leave them alone. So did his legs. It was as if he had four surly teenagers for limbs. He knew how to deal with that. He had raised a daughter. He pretended not to care. It was going fine until he noticed the room dimming. On-screen a teacher was being flogged. He saw her at the end of a narrow, shrinking tunnel. Her screams came tumbling toward him across an abyss. It was thankless work, teaching.

Moments before he blacked out, he remembered why pyatshellalikhuiy were so treasured. The recipe called for wheat flour, a rarity in West Zlabia. Practically the only way to get some was to smuggle it across the border from the east, a crime that carried the death penalty. As he heard the fading sound of a key in the door, he was thinking that it wasn’t worth the risk.






82.






He awoke in darkness. His hands and feet were bound. His mouth was full of cloth. His groin was clammy. He felt forward momentum in his bowels and rattling in his joints. He heard the modulating pitch of a shifting transmission. The heat was suffocating and the air suffused with mildew. He could state with confidence that he was tied up in the trunk of a car. Hysteria clutched at him. His throat started to close up. He bucked and thrashed around and ended up banging his head hard enough to subdue himself. He commanded himself to be rational. What would Dick Stapp do? He would lie still and conserve energy. What about Harry Shagreen? He would count turns. Pfefferkorn lay still, conserving his energy and counting turns. He determined that his right shoulder was up against the rear of the trunk. Hence pressure on top of his head meant a right turn. Pressure on the soles of his shoes meant left. He soon became attuned to changes in the elevation: the rightward jolt that indicated uphill, the gentler leftward yaw for down. They drove for what seemed like hours, making what seemed like a thousand turns. The car had rotten suspension. It hit a pothole and he was tossed against the roof of the trunk, landing painfully and losing count. The third time it happened he gave up counting and gave in to despair. All the turns in the world would tell him nothing if he didn’t know the starting point and what direction they had set out in. Nor did he have any idea how long he’d been passed out. He knew nothing, nothing at all, and to be confronted by his ignorance sparked a new fit of rage. He thrashed and bucked and rolled and kicked and screamed and gnawed at his gag, rivers of spit running down his neck.

The car slowed.

It stopped.

Doors opened.

Humid night air kissed him.

He put up no fight as they removed the blindfold. The orange glow of a highway sodium vapor lamp haloed four faces. A fifth face appeared, close enough to eclipse the light. The fifth face had two crinkly eye sockets, two thin bloodless lips, a bulbous pate like an overfilled balloon. It smiled, showing unnaturally even teeth. Pfefferkorn could tell they were dentures.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” he said, or tried to say. He was still gagged.

“Hush,” Lucian Savory said.

He shut the trunk.












FIVE

(Welcome to East Zlabia!)






83.






“You look good,” Savory said. “Have you lost weight?”

Pfefferkorn couldn’t answer. He was still gagged. The henchmen—he’d never before had occasion to use the word, and despite his abject state he could appreciate its aptness, for the four apes dragging him across the parking garage and into the elevator carried an unmistakable air of henchiness about them—smirked.

“The hell happened to your face, anyway? You look like Salvador Dalí with a cattle prod up his ass.”

The elevator doors closed and they began to rise.

Savory sniffed. He frowned. “Christ,” he said. “You pissed your pants, didn’t you.”

Pfefferkorn grunted.

“Give him yours,” Savory said.

One of the henchmen unhesitatingly removed his fatigue pants. The other three stripped Pfefferkorn from the waist down. Two of them lifted him like an infant while the third slid the dry fatigues on. The donor remained standing in his underwear.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” Savory said. It was unclear whom he was addressing.

The car went up, up, up.

“Here’s some advice, free of charge,” Savory said. “Try not to look so damned sullen. He hates that.”

Pfefferkorn was unaware of looking sullen. He wanted to grunt “Who’s ‘he’?” but the elevator dinged and the doors opened onto the grandest living room he had ever seen—it made the de Vallées’ house look like a Motel 6—and he knew the answer.

The henchmen carried him through an ornate wooden door and into a maze of corridors lined by armed guards.

“Don’t slouch,” Savory said. “Posture’s a big deal to him. Don’t fidget or stare. Speak only when spoken to. And if he offers you a drink, take it.”

The final door was made of steel. Savory swiped a keycard and pressed a code. A moment later there was a click, and Pfefferkorn was brought inside.






84.






None of the photographs Pfefferkorn had seen did justice to Lord High President Kliment Thithyich in the flesh. A photo failed to convey the way his hands made toys of everyday objects. It failed to capture the voice that came at Pfefferkorn like a gale wind. It did not account for his fondness for air quotes.

“The real problem with Communism has nothing to do with ‘civil rights,’ or the gulag, or breadlines. It’s got nothing to do with ‘history’ or ‘destiny’ or anything like that. It’s got nothing to do with Stalin, and it’s certainly got nothing to do with Dragomir Zhulk, who, politics aside, I thought quite highly of. We are ‘family,’ after all, not close but eleventh cousins or something like that. Spend enough time jousting with a bloke of his capabilities, and you’re bound to develop a measure of respect, if not for the content of his thoughts then for the way they’re phrased. Understand: I’m not saying I approve. The man was a bona fide ‘head case,’ and the methods they use over there are just too too much. You’ve never had to experience scrotal electroshock, but let me tell you, from what I’ve heard, it’s the very ‘definition’ of unlovely. So, yes, a raving sociopath he may have been, but there’s no denying he was good with the old rhetoric, and I admired him for it. Nor am I ashamed to admit that I’ve learned a few things about rallying the ‘people’ and whatnot from watching him work. So it’s not a ‘vendetta’ or anything like that. People have this image of me as ‘ruthless,’ ‘sadistic,’ ‘incapable of forgiving the tiniest slight,’ what have you. I’m not in a position to say whether there’s any merit to that. What I can tell you with perfect honesty is that my pet peeves have nothing to do with my reasoned opinion on the matter. I’m a rather ‘left-brained’ sort of fellow, you see, and I’ve given this a lot of thought. You might call it my ‘life’s work.’ In that sense, I suppose it is personal, insofar as I was born poor—and I’m not using that term the way Americans do, saying ‘poor’ when what you really mean is ‘not rich.’ You lot have no concept of what it is to go without the basics. Take an uneducated black from the Deep South in 1955 and drop him down with just the change in his pocket in the middle of the Gyeznyuiy and he’s going to be bathing in goat’s milk and wiping himself with silk. Here, being poor means something. My father toiled nineteen and a half hours a day in the fields. My mother’s hands were perpetually bloody from scrubbing dishes and poking herself with knitting needles. She did that habitually, stab herself. Not just knitting needles, anything within reach: diaper pins, rusty bolts, sharpened root vegetables. I never quite got what she was trying to ‘tell me,’ mutilating herself like that, but I’m fairly certain it had to do with not being able to afford to go to the movies. There I was, a ‘barefoot boy,’ asking myself: ‘Why? Why must it be this way?’ Years passed before I understood that the answer is in our ‘cultural DNA.’ It’s the same answer to my original question. What’s the real problem with Communism? And why are we as a people so susceptible to it? Two sides of the same coin. Want to guess? No? I’ll tell you why. Because the average Zlabian, like Dragomir, and like the Communist system in general, doesn’t know how to have any goddamned fun.”

The sumptuous wingback chair to which Pfefferkorn was cuffed had been specially modified for that purpose, with two thick iron hoops drilled into its arms, and ankle chains that prevented him from lifting his feet more than six inches off the ground. The lord high president was not thus constrained. His custom-made size-twenty-two goatskin boots landed on his George II desk with a mighty crash.

“That’s all people really want,” he said, shifting his seismic bulk and sipping from a generous pour of fifty-five-year-old single malt scotch. “To enjoy themselves. And why shouldn’t they? But that’s not the way the Zlabian thinks. It’s always ‘suffering this,’ ‘shame that.’ Or it was, once upon a time. I’ve done my damnedest to change that around here. It’s much more about psychology than economics. Take that TV show they love, the one with the crying poets. I’m proud to say that on our side of the boulevard, it wouldn’t fly. Now, we want winners.”

Savory, standing by the jukebox, nodded. The ten security guards did not move a muscle.

Thithyich fished an extra-long Marlboro out of the carton in his coat pocket. He pressed a button on his desk and an eight-foot jet of flame roared from the wall, narrowly missing his face and incinerating the cigarette by half. He dragged, blew, tapped a diamond-studded ashtray shaped like a roulette wheel. “We as a people have had it rough. No argument there. At some point, though, you have to take responsibility for yourself. That’s the beauty of a free market: it has no memory, neither for your successes nor for your failures. Merciless, but in a way also very forgiving. God, I’m peckish. Where are they?”

On cue, the door opened and fifteen bikini-clad women with global breasts bore in sterling-silver trays laden with food. They set them on the sideboard, kissed the president on the cheek, and left. Pfefferkorn could smell smoked fish and freshly made blini. One of the security guards loaded up a plate and placed it in Pfefferkorn’s lap. A second guard kept his rifle trained on Pfefferkorn while a third removed his gag and unlocked his hands. Thithyich watched him eat with a placid smile.

“Good, isn’t it? Better than ‘root vegetable this,’ ‘goat milk that.’”

“Thank you,” Pfefferkorn said. He didn’t see any sense in antagonizing the man.

“My pleasure. Drink?”

Pfefferkorn would have accepted even if Savory hadn’t told him to.

“This is the stuff,” Thithyich said, pouring. He held the tumbler out and a guard took it and held it under Pfefferkorn’s nose so Pfefferkorn could appreciate the aroma.

“Peaty,” the president said. “Yet smooth.”

Pfefferkorn nodded.

“Cin cin,” the president said.

Compared to thruynichka, the scotch went down like cream.

“Try the gravlax,” Thithyich said. “It’s house-cured.”

“Delicious,” Pfefferkorn said.

“I’m so glad. A little more, perhaps?”

Pfefferkorn handed the guard his empty plate. “Thank you,” he said, although he was feeling rather craven for taking seconds.

Thithyich stubbed out his cigarette. “And your trip? I hope it wasn’t too hard.”

Pfefferkorn shook his head.

“Lucian went easy on you, I hope.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Pfefferkorn saw Savory smiling at him in a threatening way.

“I feel like I’m on vacation,” Pfefferkorn said.

A guard handed Pfefferkorn a new plate. There was caviar and crème fraîche and capers and delicate matjes herring in a light tomato sauce.

“Well, good, good. It’s a matter of principle that you be comfortable and entertained.” Thithyich took out another cigarette and stuck it between his lips. “Everyone deserves a taste of what this world has to offer.” He summoned the jet of flame and sucked in smoke. “Not least those soon to depart it.”






85.






Pfefferkorn paused, an unchewed piece of herring in his mouth. He swallowed it down whole and wiped red sauce from his lips. “Beg pardon?”

Savory was grinning.

“You’re going to kill me?” Pfefferkorn said.

“You can’t honestly be surprised,” Thithyich said. “Not after all the inconvenience you’ve caused me. It was no simple matter, kidnapping Carlotta de Vallée, and for you to start running around, playing the ‘hero’—”

“Hold on,” Pfefferkorn said.

Everyone winced.

There was a long silence.

The president smiled.

“Please,” he said. “Go right ahead.”

“I—eh. Eh. I thought the May Twenty-sixers kidnapped Carlotta.”

“They did.”

“But you just said you kidnapped her.”

“Indeed.”

“I’m sorry,” Pfefferkorn said. “I don’t follow.”

“I am the May Twenty-sixers,” Thithyich said. “I created them out of whole cloth. Remember, I’m trying to provoke a war here. What better way to do that than to fan the flames of revanchism? The May Twenty-sixers’ raison d’être is to reunify greater Zlabia under true collectivist rule by any means necessary. It’s expressly stated in their manifesto, which I wrote in the bathtub. Lucian, the relevant part, please, from the preamble.”

Savory pressed keys on his smartphone and read aloud. “‘Our raison d’être is to reunify greater Zlabia under true collectivist rule by any means necessary.’”

“What have you done with her?” Pfefferkorn asked.

“She’s being held at May Twenty-sixer headquarters in West Zlabia,” Thithyich said.

West Zlabia.”

“Naturally. If I put the headquarters here, it would be rather obvious who was ‘pulling the strings,’ mm? I give my orders through an intermediary. Besides, nothing lends a fake West Zlabian counter-counter-revolutionary movement verisimilitude like having it staffed by genuine West Zlabian counter-counter-revolutionaries. Fabulously committed bunch, they are. Trained from birth to embrace fervent dedication to unattainable goals. God bless the Communist school system.”

“You’re barking up the wrong tree, provoking a war,” Pfefferkorn said. “The U.S. won’t get involved.”

“Bosh. They’d much rather that than the alternative, which is that the West Zlabians give the gas up for pennies on the dollar to the Chinese.”

“It didn’t work the first time,” Pfefferkorn said.

“What first time?”

“When you faked your own assassination attempt.”

“That’s what your people told you.”

Pfefferkorn nodded.

“And you believed them.”

Pfefferkorn nodded again.

“Do you have any idea how much it hurts to get shot in the buttocks?”

“No,” Pfefferkorn admitted.

“If you did, you’d know that that’s utter claptrap. I never shot myself.”

“Then who did?”

“You did. Well, your government, really. They’re the ones who planted the book for you.”

Pfefferkorn was confused. “Which book.”

Thithyich looked at Savory.

Blood Eyes,” Savory said.

“That’s the one,” Thithyich said. “Smashing title.”

“Thank you,” Savory said.

“That’s impossible,” Pfefferkorn said. “Blood Eyes had a dummy code.”

“My buttocks beg to differ,” Thithyich said.

“But they’re your allies.”

“My buttocks?”

“The U.S.”

“‘On paper,’ perhaps, but you know as well as I do how much that’s worth.”

“You just said they would support you in the event of an invasion.”

“Certainly.”

“Now you’re telling me they tried to kill you.”

“Yes.”

“That doesn’t strike you as contradictory?”

Thithyich shrugged. “Politics.”

“I don’t know why I should believe you.”

“What reason do I have to lie?”

“What reason did they have to lie?”

“Plenty. They were indoctrinating you. It wouldn’t have done to admit that they engage in covert acts of cold-blooded political murder, now, would it? They much prefer that people think of them as the ‘good guys.’ In any event, Lucian intercepted the code shortly before it came off, and I was able to escape with minor injuries. But the whole experience set me thinking. You lot have been meddling with our affairs for nigh on forty years. High time for a taste of your own medicine, don’t you reckon? Hence . . . what’s it again?”

“Blood Night,” Savory supplied.

“That’s the one,” Thithyich said. “Bang-on title.”

“Thank you,” Savory said.

“Let me get this straight,” Pfefferkorn said. “You got Savory to get me to get my publisher to get American secret operatives to kill Dragomir Zhulk.”

“Yes, yes, yes, and no.”

“No to which part.”

“The last bit. About killing Zhulk. I’m afraid you’ve been misinformed. Blood—damn it, I’m at sixes and sevens, here.”

“Night,” Savory said.

“Bang-on. Blood, et cetera, the second one—that contained a dummy code.”

Pfefferkorn stared. “A dummy code.”

“Well, we couldn’t possibly plant a real code. We don’t have the Workbench.”

“But why would you give me a dummy code?”

“To disrupt the pattern of transmission and create confusion.”

“Then who killed Zhulk?”

“Made to guess, I’d say it was your government as well. They’re not big fans of his.”

“But how? According to you, Blood Night was dummied.”

“My goodness, man, you’re not the only blockbuster novelist out there. The order to kill Dragomir could have been in any one of a dozen beach reads.”

Pfefferkorn massaged his temples.

“Take your time,” Thithyich said kindly. “It’s very complicated. More caviar?”

“No, thanks,” Pfefferkorn said. “Why did you have the May Twenty-sixers kidnap Carlotta?”

“Well, the idea was that getting ahold of the Workbench—or I should say, rather, a dummied version of the Workbench, because it should be obvious to anyone who gives it five seconds of thought that your government would never give them the real Workbench, although thankfully we can count on our friends across the border not to give it five seconds of thought—would give the May Twenty-sixer rank and file enough confidence to support a preemptive strike against me, and that’s all the excuse I need to steamroll them.”

“My understanding was that you could steamroll them right now,” Pfefferkorn said.

“True. But it’s better if they move first. Nobody likes a bully. And it’s nice to have the support of the international community. It’s very ‘in,’ geopolitically speaking. Anyway, so far, so good. I’ve had my intermediary suggest that a good time to invade would be right after their fifteen-hundredth anniversary festival. You know, swept along by a ‘tide’ of nationalist fervor and so forth. Fingers crossed, we should be able to get things into full swing by the first week of October.”

“I still don’t see why you have to kill me.”

“You didn’t let me finish what I was saying. One of the hallmarks of a successful businessman is his ability to assimilate new information and make creative use of adversity. Don’t feel bad about being caught. No way you could’ve anticipated it, because while I knew you were in town, of course, it never occurred to me to pick you up until Sunday. I made what you Americans call a ‘game-time decision.’” Thithyich stubbed out his cigarette. “Getting shot was uncomfortable enough, but the damage from a public-relations point of view has been much worse. In my universe, you see, the most valuable asset is respect. I can’t take what people say about me lightly. I can’t have people saying, ‘Thithyich is vulnerable, he’s gone soft. . . .’ It’s bad for business. What’s bad for my business is bad for the economy and therefore bad for the whole country. People know I’ve been shot. They know no one has been punished. It’s created all sorts of stickiness vis-à-vis my ‘ruthless’ image. Really, I’ve been terribly put out. I’ve gone so far as to hire a consulting firm, which ought to tell you a lot, because normally I hate that sort of thing. The groupthink makes my skin crawl. I have to say, though, I was impressed with the clarity of their findings, and while I’m sure you won’t be thrilled with their recommendations, they were unequivocal: the best way for me to revive my ‘bloodthirsty’ persona, or whatever, is to demonstrate that I’m just as capable of lashing out with indiscriminate violence as I ever was. They project a five-to-ten-point bump with a public execution. But here’s the interesting twist: executing a famous or prominent person gives an extra two to three points. I suppose it has to do with perceptions of power and so forth, i.e., ‘a famous person is powerful, therefore the person who kills the famous person is perforce more powerful.’”

“I’m not famous,” Pfefferkorn said. “I’m not prominent.”

“My dear sir, you most certainly are. At the moment, you’re the hottest writer around.”

“Nobody cares about writers,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Zlabians do,” Thithyich said. “Literature has been powering our ethnic strife for some four centuries. Ah—ah—please. No whining. I understand why you’d find these conclusions disagreeable, but data are data, n’est-ce pas? It’s nothing ‘personal.’ So, right. I do hope you can manage to enjoy yourself a bit today, because tomorrow you will be shot, publicly. Apologies for the short notice. Have a pleasant day.”






86.






Pfefferkorn was driven to death row in a metallic purple limousine. They took the scenic route. Savory rode along to point out East Zlabia’s many attractions. Old Town had been restored to its former glory, with brand-new artificially weathered cobblestones and new cornices and gargoyles for the cathedral. Everything was nightmarishly quaint. There was nobody strolling. Nobody was throwing coins into the fountains. The limo cruised past lush public parks filled with blemish-free flowers. Nobody was sunbathing. Nobody was tossing the Frisbee around. They passed the opera house, the museum of modern art, ZlabiDisney, the shopping district—all empty. It was as if a neutron bomb had fallen, leaving a perfect stillness, perfectly chilling.

Just as Pfefferkorn was about to ask where everybody was, the limo turned the corner onto what could be described only as the Las Vegas Strip unfettered by good taste. The chauffeur slowed to five miles per hour, allowing Pfefferkorn to drink it all in. He counted eleven separate casinos. There was an Oliver Twist–themed one. There was a Genghis Khan–themed one. There was a Las Vegas–themed one, its frontage occupied by a one-eighth scale model of the Strip. Next door was a casino whose theme was the very street they were driving on, its frontage occupied by a one-eighth scale model of everything around them, including a one-eighth scale model of the Las Vegas–themed casino complete with a one-sixty-fourth scale model of the Las Vegas Strip and adjacent to a one-eighth scale model of the casino on which the model was located that in turn featured a one-sixty-fourth scale model of the street they were driving on that in turn featured a one-five-hundred-twelfth scale model of the casino on which the model of the model was located. Pfefferkorn assumed there were further models embedded in that model. He wasn’t close enough to tell, and his sight line was then blocked by a seventy-foot-high LED marquee touting an upcoming performance by a 1970s rock supergroup he had thought defunct.

It was a lively scene, made more so by the presence of what appeared to be the entire population of East Zlabia. For the most part they looked like their cousins across the border, except more obese. They were snacking and sipping soft drinks, pushing strollers and leaving junky compact cars at any of the myriad valet stands. Outside the Amazon jungle–themed casino, they applauded and snapped pictures as a team of pink dolphins broke the hypnotic blue of an artificial lake to execute a precisely choreographed midair pas de deux.

The largest casino was at the end of the street. It had a Vassily Nabochka theme. A massive gold statue of the prince stood out front. He was holding a root vegetable in one hand and a sword in the other. Though the iconography made it clear who he was, his face had been cast to resemble Kliment Thithyich’s.

The limo pulled up. Valets rushed to greet it. Pfefferkorn was escorted inside at gunpoint and guided through a bleeping, blooping field of slot machines to the shopping promenade. Savory led the way. They entered a men’s haberdashery done up in dark wood and brass railings. Pfefferkorn was handed a binder of sample fabrics and made to stand on a wooden box. A tailor appeared and began taking his measurements.

“Pick a good one,” Savory said. “It’ll be in the photos.”

Pfefferkorn selected an understated blue. The tailor nodded approvingly and rushed off.

In the meantime Pfefferkorn was taken to the spa. He got a hot-stone massage at gunpoint. He swam a few laps in the saltwater pool, also at gunpoint. His moustache came off, revealing a semi-hardened scab. He left the moustache floating on the surface of the water.

Back to the haberdashery they went. He stood up on the box for a fitting. The tailor slashed at him with chalk.

“Have you ever had a suit made before?” Savory asked.

Pfefferkorn shook his head. “I’ve never had a hot-stone massage, either.”

“First time for everything.”

The tailor promised the finished product by morning.

Their last stop was the casino courtyard, wherein a magnificent black granite plaza surrounded a runty tree.

HERE LIES IN ETERNAL SLUMBER

THE GREAT HERO

FATHER AND REDEEMER OF THE GLORIOUS ZLABIAN PEOPLE

PRINCE VASSILY

“HOW LIKE A ROOT VEGETABLE SWELLS MY HEART TO GAZE UPON THY COUNTENANCE

HOW LIKE AN ORPHANED KID GOAT DOES IT BLEAT FOR THY LOSS”

(canto cxx)

Pfefferkorn and Savory bowed their heads.

“All right,” Savory said. “Party’s over.”

They got into an elevator. One of the guards pushed the button for the thirteenth floor. Beside it was a little placard.

13: EXECUTIVE LEVEL / HONEYMOON SUITE / DEATH ROW






87.






Pfefferkorn’s death-row cell featured movies on demand, a bidet, multizone climate control, and seven-hundred-thread-count bedding. For a man about to be publicly shot, he didn’t feel afraid. Nor was he angry, at least not at Thithyich, who after all was a barbaric, unhinged autocrat acting on the advice of an expensive American consulting firm. Mostly he was disappointed in himself. He had failed the mission, and by extension Carlotta, his daughter, and the free world.

This was the part of the story where he applied his ingenuity to escape from a life-threatening situation. Now that he was in such a situation, he appreciated how asinine a trope it was. In real life, evil captors did not forget to lock the door. They didn’t accidentally leave out an assortment of parts that cleverly combined to form a working crossbow. Lying on his comfy sheets, he ruminated on the phrase “action hero.” It didn’t mean merely that the hero underwent a series of exciting events. It meant that the hero was active—that is, he did something. But what could an action hero do when there was nothing doable? Did the fact that he wasn’t attempting to escape mean that he wasn’t a hero, or that the concept of action heroism was inherently far-fetched? He decided it was both. He might not be able to escape, but he doubted that anyone else could, either. Still, his passivity did make him feel guilty, as though it was morally incumbent upon him to fight back. He could kill himself. That would show Thithyich. His first thought was to hang himself with his bedsheet, but the walls of the cell were made of a smooth plaster inhospitable to nooses. He examined the bedframe, hoping to take it apart and use a piece to slit his wrists. The screws were tight, meant to resist just that sort of mayhem. The television was set into the wall and covered with a thick layer of Plexiglas. The minibar held pretzels, Baked! Lay’s, SunChips, golden raisins, two ingots of Toblerone, six-ounce cartons of orange and cranberry juice, cans of Coke and Diet Coke, and plastic mini-bottles of scotch and vodka. With luck he might be able to snack himself to death, but more probably he would go to his fate with heartburn. Suicide was out.

He rummaged around in the desk. Beneath a leather-bound copy of the East Zlabian edition of Vassily Nabochka, he found a small pad of paper with the casino insignia at the top. A golf pencil had rolled to the back of the drawer. He sat down and started to write.

It was a purely symbolic form of resistance—he did not expect anything he wrote to leave the room—but he felt compelled to give it his all. Sweetheart he began. He used metaphors, he used similes, he made allusions. He stopped and reread. Overall, the tone was self-conscious, as though he was trying too hard to ingratiate himself to an audience of strangers. He threw the page away and started over, beginning with a story from his own childhood. He wrote for an hour before going back to assess his progress. Again, it was all wrong. It wasn’t about her or how he felt about her. He tried again and again. Nothing worked. A significant pile of paper accumulated on the floor of the cell. Soon enough he ran out. He banged on the cell bars until the guard came. He asked for more paper. It was brought. He wrote through that whole pad, and when he still failed to express himself adequately, he called for and was brought a third pad. His pencil snapped. He still hadn’t written anything he could live with. He decided to stop. Then he changed his mind. Then he changed it back. It was four forty-eight in the morning. He could no longer think clearly. It was coming now, fear. He curled up on the floor and held himself. He wasn’t ready to give up on life. He still had so much to do. He wanted to see his daughter happy in her new house. He wanted to see her children. He wanted to hold Carlotta one more time. Would he ever feel ready to die? Could a man know that he had accomplished as much as he ever would? He believed he had more in him. He always would. He could be on death’s door and still he would be reaching. No matter what the world said, he would always believe that the best of him was yet to come.

The cell door slid open. A guard wheeled in a room-service cart. He paused briefly to stare at Pfefferkorn, lying fetal on the floor. Then he set the cart up and left.

Gradually the light in the room increased. The cell turned pink and purple and gold. The sun was a herald. The day was catching up with him. Nothing could not stop it. Pfefferkorn sat up. He was going to die today. Suddenly he felt ravenous. He attacked the food. There were croissants, half a grapefruit, Danish, coffee, a panoply of fancy jams and jellies, and an egg-white timbale in the shape of a Calabi-Yau manifold.

Everything was delicious.

The bathroom was stocked. Pfefferkorn took a shower. He shaved with an electric wet/dry shaver. He brushed his teeth and rinsed his mouth with mouthwash. He applied talcum powder and swabbed out his nose and ears. A card on the sink informed him that in order to protect the environment, a towel back on the rack would be reused, while a towel on the floor would be replaced. He dropped all the towels on the floor, including the clean ones.

His new clothes had arrived while he was showering. Everything had been laid out for him on the bed. In addition to the suit there were fresh socks and broadcloth boxers, a bright white shirt and a canary yellow necktie. Pfefferkorn pulled the pins from the shirt and put it on. The polished cotton felt good against his skin. He took the suit out of its garment bag and stepped into the pants. They fit perfectly, enough so that he didn’t need the crocodile-skin belt. He put it on anyway. The soles of the penny loafers were slippery, so he scuffed them up with a disposable emery board from the bathroom. He tied the tie, taking time to get the knot right. He held up the jacket. The lining was burgundy. The label read . He shrugged the jacket on and tugged it straight. It was snug but not overly so. He folded the white handkerchief and tucked it neatly in the lapel pocket. He went back to the bathroom and reordered his hair in the mirror. He put some petroleum jelly on his upper left lip. Except for the scab, he didn’t look too bad, and even that looked better than it had the day before. He examined himself in profile. He buttoned the suit and felt something poke him in the ribs. He patted himself down. He unbuttoned his suit. He reached into the left inside pocket and took out a piece of paper. He unfolded it. He read it. It was a list of instructions on how to escape.






88.






Pfefferkorn escaped.






89.






Stumbling from the freight elevator in the casino’s parking garage, his hair wild and his shirt torn, he saw the Town Car with the tinted windows. Two men were waiting by the rear of the car. One was blond and the other was bald. They were both dressed in black. Pfefferkorn sprinted toward them and got into the popped trunk.

The ride this time was more comfortable than it had been coming into East Zlabia. For one thing, the Lincoln’s trunk was roomier. Also, he wasn’t tied up or gagged. All the same, he had no idea who his rescuers were or where he was going. He decided to be positive and assume that the Americans had come to exfiltrate him. He bumped along. He felt the road deteriorating, as if they were headed into the countryside. He counted turns. He waited patiently. The ride went on and on. The stuffiness was like a scarf being drawn tight around his neck. He felt his brand-new suit becoming soaked with sweat. He felt the old familiar hysteria. He flailed and pounded the roof of the trunk.

The car slowed.

It stopped.

Doors opened.

The trunk swung open. Pfefferkorn blinked up at the two men in black. The blond man was holding a wad of cloth. There was also a third person. He must have been waiting in the backseat of the car when Pfefferkorn got in.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Hush,” Savory said.

The blond man pressed the cloth into Pfefferkorn’s face.












SIX

(Welcome [Back] to West Zlabia!)






90.






Pfefferkorn fought off his attackers in a series of fluid motions, landing blows to their solar plexuses that left them sinking to their knees, gasping for breath. He heard the satisfying crunch of bone as Lucian Savory’s bulbous forehead caved under a fearsome barrage of elbows and karate chops. He grabbed Savory around the neck and wrung him like a chicken on the eve of Yom Kippur. It felt wonderful. Savory turned five different shades of blue. It was beautiful. Pfefferkorn closed his eyes and reveled in the feel of the old man’s pulse fading beneath his fingers. He kept compressing Savory’s neck, smaller and smaller, until it seemed as though he had squeezed all the blood and bone and neck meat out of the way and was clutching empty skin. He opened his eyes. He was wringing his pillow wrathfully. All the stuffing had been forced out to the sides. He released it and fell back, panting.

His new cell was spartan and chilly. It was made of solid concrete, painted lint gray. He was lying on a mattress on the floor. The mattress was narrow and sharp with twigs. The blanket covering him was made of a coarse goathair. There was a formidable steel desk. There was a wooden desk chair. A drain was set into the floor near the toilet. There was no bidet. The ceiling was high. There were no windows. A fluorescent tube provided the light.

He kicked off the blanket. His custom-made suit was gone, replaced by thick woolen trousers and a scratchy T-shirt. Instead of his penny loafers he wore straw slippers. There was a leg cuff around his left ankle. It was connected to a heavy chain. The chain ran across the floor and attached at the other end to the foot of the desk.

“Sir, good morning.”

The man standing outside his cell was bald and sunken-cheeked. He wore an austere suit and steel-rimmed glasses, and his voice—clipped but clear, accented but precise—marked him as a man of worrisome efficiency. His eyes were black and cold, like twin camera lenses, or a chocolate-covered Eskimo. He bowed deeply.

“Sir, it is an honor to make your acquaintance,” Dragomir Zhulk, the dead prime minister of West Zlabia, said.






91.






“You are surprised. Sir, this is understandable. I, the individual, am dead, or so you have been led to believe. It would be surprising to most people, even a man of your powerful imaginative gifts. Sir, pertinent background information will ameliorate the expression of wonderment that I, the individual, observe in your face.”

Dragomir Zhulk’s version of events differed drastically from both Kliment Thithyich’s and the Americans’. According to Zhulk, the Party had been running the show all along. Everything that happened—from the publication of Blood Eyes to Pfefferkorn’s recent stint on death row—was designed either to advance Party aims or to underscore the inherent incompetence and inferiority of the capitalist system.

The Party, he said, had planted the assassination code in Blood Eyes, thus exploiting the capitalist system by tricking it into killing Kliment Thithyich, who after all was himself a tool of the capitalist system. That the assassination had failed proved nothing, because anything the capitalist system did must by definition fail, and so while the superficial objective—namely, Thithyich’s death—had not been achieved, the underlying ideological objective—namely, a demonstration of the inherent incompetence and inferiority of the capitalist system—had.

“QED,” Zhulk said.

Blood Night was also the Party’s handiwork. It contained a dummy code designed to disrupt the capitalist system’s transmission sequence, thereby creating confusion. The Party had then carried out the assassination of a man dressed up to look like Zhulk.

“The reason for this is self-evident,” Zhulk said. “The Party wished to give the appearance that I, the individual, was dead. This has enabled me, the individual, to engage in covert activities free from capitalist scrutiny. The comrade who volunteered his life for this purpose has been accorded appropriate honor in death.”

As for the May Twenty-sixers, the movement was not a splinter group at all but a top-secret elite unit of the Party whose ostensible illegality was an ingenious ruse designed to exploit the inferior intellect of capitalist aggressors. “You object: ‘Kliment Thithyich has informed me that he is the leader of this movement.’ Sir, this is incorrect. The ruse he claims as his own is in fact a counter-ruse. The Party has allowed him to believe this, so that the Party may obtain information about his nefarious capitalist designs. Sir, do not be fooled. Many of his most trusted agents in truth work to advance the cause of the Party, including the man you know as Lucian Savory. Sir, everything has gone according to the plan. Soon national destiny shall be achieved in accordance with the principle stated in preamble to the manifesto of the movement of the glorious revolution of the Twenty-sixth of May, which I, the individual, humbly penned at a desk provided by the Party, namely, the reunification of greater Zlabia under true collectivist rule by any means necessary. Sir, it is for this purpose that your government has sent you. QED.”

“I don’t have it,” Pfefferkorn said, or cut in, or interjected, or managed to say.

“Sir?”

“I don’t have it. The Workbench. I don’t know where it is. It was in my suitcase but I lost it when I was kidnapped.”

“Sir, you have been misinformed.”

“I don’t have it. You may as well kill me and get it over with.”

“Sir, you are mistaken. There is no Workbench.”

“At least let Carlotta go. She’s of no further use to you.”

“Sir, you are not listening.” Zhulk began to pace agitatedly in front of the bars. “Your government has misled you. This is not surprising, for the capitalist system is inherently depraved. It is rapacious and bellicose, an abhorrent monster of gluttonous imperialism gorged on materialism and overconsumption. The terms of the deal, sir, do not include carpentry. The terms of the deal, sir, concern you.”

“Me?”

“Sir, yes.” Zhulk plunged his hand inside his coat and withdrew a small hardcover book. He held it up for Pfefferkorn to see, like a hopeful suitor bearing flowers.

The book was covered in a protective plastic wrapper. The jacket was blue with yellow lettering and a drawing of a tree. Pfefferkorn’s own copy, back on the mantel in his apartment, was in far worse shape, and he needed a moment to fully recognize the thing in Zhulk’s hands as a mint-condition first edition of his first and only novel, Shade of the Colossus.

The prime minister smiled shyly. He bowed.

“I, the individual,” he said, “am such a very big fan.”






92.






“As a child I dreamed of becoming a writer. My father did not approve. ‘These are not the ambitions of a man,’ he told me. He liked to beat me with a rake, or sometimes a trellis. When he was in a bad mood, he would pick up my infant sister and use her to beat me. He called this ‘saving time.’ Often I prayed for his death. Yet when it came I was heartbroken. Who can understand love?”

He sounded far away. Pfefferkorn noticed that he had dropped the “I, the individual.”

“Alas, I did not become a writer. I became a scientist. I subjugated myself for the sake of serving the Party. Literature was not needed, nuclear power was needed. Still, my greatest pleasure was reading. While a student in Moscow I happened to come upon your book. Sir, I was captivated. I was captured. I was ensnared and entranced. This story of a young man whose father ridicules his attempts to find meaning in art—this story was my story. Hungrily I awaited the sequel. I wrote letters. I was informed that no such book existed. Sir, I was bereft. Long after my return home, I grieved. I grieved more than I was to grieve the loss of my first wife, who I regret to say was unloyal to the Party and required removal. Sir, I made further inquiries. Concomitant with my increasing authority within the Party I ordered an overseas investigation. Sir, I was disappointed to learn of your struggles. Here we find the clearest condemnation of the capitalist system. A writer of your extraordinary gifts should be honored and extolled. Instead he languishes in obscurity. Sir, tell me: is this just? The answer must be no.

“Sir, I then resolved to correct this injustice.

“Patiently I worked, and the will of the Party dictated that I should rise to my present position, allowing me to fulfill this resolution of so many years. Sir, I must tell you that I have come to rescue you. Do not thank me. Sir, you will admit the essential baseness of the American capitalist system, a system so ignoble that it would fritter away its greatest living artistic treasure in exchange for partial access under favorable terms to our natural gas field. Be not surprised that your government has betrayed you. The capitalist system is incapable of recognizing true value.

“Sir, the Zlabian people are different.

“Sir, the Zlabian people are by nature symbolic. They are aesthetic. They are poetic. Hence reunification is not strictly a matter of correct economic and military policy. It cannot be achieved merely by collectivizing root vegetable production. It cannot be won with guns and bombs alone. True reunification requires that we overcome the conflict which has long rent us asunder. Sir, there are no accidents. Sir, you have been rescued so that you may realize your fullest potential and in doing so enable the Zlabian people to realize ours. Sir, it is with a most vital, historical task that I, the individual, now charge you. Sir, you must beat the rhythm to which our great army will march to victory. You must apply the healing balm that will then seal the wounds of ages. You must sing the songs that will reconcile divided families. It is you, sir, that will bring our glorious people together. Others have tried before and failed. But sir, others were not the author of a great novel. It is you, sir, who will fulfill our national destiny. It is you. Sir, you must take up your pen. You must finish Vassily Nabochka.”






93.






“I think you’ve got the wrong guy,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Sir, this is incorrect.”

“Trust me. I’m a lousy poet.”

“Sir, your novel contains any number of passages of such surpassing beauty as to cause aches in the joints and chest.”

“Take an aspirin,” Pfefferkorn said.

Zhulk smiled. “What wit,” he said. “Surely you will exceed all expectations.”

“Where’s Carlotta? What have you done with her?”

“Sir, the question is not convenient.”

“Is she here? Where am I?”

“Sir, this is a place of maximum quietude, encouraging to literary pursuits.”

“I won’t do it. I refuse.”

“Sir, your reaction is understandable. The task of completing the great poem would daunt even the most capable writer.”

“It has nothing to do with the poem. I don’t care about the poem.”

“Denial is understandable.”

“It’s not even that good. Do you know that? It’s long and boring. All that tundra?”

“Sir, this attitude is not convenient.”

“Convenient for whom?”

“Sir—”

“All right. All right. Answer me this: it’s your national goddamned poem, right? Then how can a non-Zlabian finish it?”

“Sir, this observation is understandable. I, the individual, was given pause by the same concern. However, the problem has been removed. A thorough investigation has been done into the matter by the Ministry of Genealogy, and conclusive proof adduced showing the presence of one C. Pfefferkorn, chair maker, in the royal census of 1331. Additionally, your physiognomy is suggestive of native origins.”

Pfefferkorn stared. “You’re out of your fucking mind.”

“Sir, this is incorrect.”

“I’m Jewish.”

“Sir, this is immaterial.”

“My whole family is. Ashkenazi Jews from Germany.”

“Sir, this is incorrect.”

“And Poland. I think. But—but—look, I know for a fact that there is no Zlabian in me.”

“Sir, this is incorrect.”

“I’m not going to argue with you about this.”

“It is the will of the Party that the work be completed in advance of the festival to commemorate the poem’s fifteen-hundredth anniversary.”

“Hang on a second,” Pfefferkorn said. “That’s next month.

Zhulk bowed. “I, the individual, leave you to great thoughts.”

He walked away.

“Wait a minute,” Pfefferkorn yelled.

A door opened, closed.

Pfefferkorn lunged for the bars. The chain around his ankle bit, jerking his leg out from under him. He fell, hitting his head on the floor.

Silence.

He lay there for a while, contemplating this latest turn of events. Then he got up. He grasped the chain and leaned back with all his might. The desk did not budge. He walked out the length of the chain and paced out his maximum circumference. It encompassed the toilet and the mattress. Other than that, he was going nowhere.






94.






Zhulk returned not long after. He was not alone. The surroundings would seem to preclude maid service, but sure enough, the woman following him was dressed in a black polyester dress, a limp white headband, and a white apron gone gray with numerous launderings. The dress had seen better days. Its seams were puckered. The maid herself was a stout, sallow creature, with swollen calves and a broad, flat backside. Her eyes were droopy. The backs of her hands were flaky from washing dishes. She was carrying a tray of food. She seemed unhappy to be there. Pfefferkorn could more or less see the rain cloud over her head. She unlocked the cell door, crossed to the desk, put the tray down, and started to walk out.

Zhulk clucked his tongue at her. She paused and turned to face Pfefferkorn.

Pfefferkorn had never imagined how much venom could be packed into a single curtsy.

She stepped out of the cell. Zhulk spoke harshly to her and she trudged out of sight. A moment later, a door opened and closed.

Zhulk gestured to the food. “Sir, please.”

Pfefferkorn peered at the tray. Its contents confirmed that he was back in West Zlabia. There was a charred puck of root vegetable hash, a cup of brown tea, and a small pat of goat’s-milk butter whose barnyardy aroma caused him to retch.

“I’ll pass,” he said.

“Sir, this is unacceptable. Food represents labor, and labor represents the will of the Party, and what the Party wills cannot be denied.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Sir, this is incorrect. Article eleven of the principles of the glorious revolution dictates that nothing exists except for that which is necessary. Sir, I, the individual, have already eaten my lunch. Hence the need for this food cannot reasonably be ascribed to me, the individual. Therefore you, sir, must have need of this food. If you did not, then the food would exist without its being necessary, and clearly this cannot be true, for the principle just stated. Therefore, either this food is an illusion or you must need it. But this food is not an illusion. Sir, it is plainly there. Therefore you must need it. QED.”

Pfefferkorn, mindful of the phrase “scrotal electroshock,” sat down in the wooden desk chair. He picked up the puck of hash. He spread the butter across it and shoved the whole thing into his mouth. It tasted like scarcity. He got it down as fast as he could and chased it with the tea. He sat back, wishing he had something to chase the tea with. His chest hurt. It was too much food to take in at once and he could feel its mass exfoliating the interior of his gullet. He had a premonition that he would soon be tasting it in reverse.

“Sir, the Party salutes you,” Zhulk said.

A door opened and closed. The maid staggered into view, pushing a wheelbarrow full of books and papers. Zhulk held open the cell bars for her and she carted the wheelbarrow in. She set it down near the desk and began unloading it.

“Sir, you will find these items inspiring.”

The books were old and musty, with broken spines and dangling covers. There were a lot of them, and the maid was perspiring lightly by the time she finished. She took the empty tray, curtsied to Pfefferkorn, and exited the cell.

“Sir, it is the intention of the Party to provide you with all that you require, within reason. Please state any additional needs and they will be seen to.”

There was a silence.

“I could use a shower,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Very good,” Zhulk said. He spoke harshly to the maid, who trudged off again. “My wife will accommodate this request as soon as possible.”

“Your wife?”

“A proud and humble servant of the Party,” Zhulk said. “No different from any other comrade of the revolution.”

“Right,” Pfefferkorn said.

Zhulk bowed. “If there is nothing further, sir, I, the individual, shall leave you to great thoughts.”






95.






He had been given eleven reams of writing paper, an assortment of the finest West Zlabian leakproof ballpoint pens, four different linear English translations each of the West Zlabian edition of Vassily Nabochka, a compendium of errata, a Zlabian-English dictionary, a Zlabian rhyming dictionary, a Zlabian thesaurus, the complete Encyclopædia Zlabica, a bundle of maps as thick as a phone book, a copy of the Party writings, D. M. Piilyarzhkhyuiy’s seventeen-volume history of the Zlabian peoples, an anthology of Marxist literary criticism, and reprints of Zhulk’s speeches dating back to 1987. There were several photo albums filled with picture postcards of the local countryside. There was a calendar, a freebie distributed by the Ministry of Sexual Sanitation. Each month highlighted another venereal disease. Zhulk had circled three days in red. The first was that day’s date. Pfefferkorn counted twelve more days of chlamydia before the clap rolled around and the countdown to the festival began. The thirteenth was opening night, and the Friday prior was labeled final deadline in Zlabian.

Twenty-two days.

He tossed the calendar down and picked up a plastic-wrapped copy of the East Zlabian Pyelikhyuin. He couldn’t understand why Zhulk would provide him access to capitalist media. He tore open the plastic and unfolded the paper.

EXTREMELY FAMOUS AND VERY PROMINENT AUTHOR EXECUTED

According to the article, the mood at the Kasino Nabochka had been uplifting. The Cirque du Soleil theater had been filled to capacity with people eager for the first public execution in more than a year. Face value of a ticket was US$74.95, but scalpers had been asking as much as four hundred a pop. The festivities kicked off with a rousing speech by Lord High President Kliment Thithyich. He promised the same bloody fate to anyone who dared cross him. Next there had been a dance performance by his entourage. In honor of the proceedings, the ladies wore special black “Grim Reaper” miniskirts and twirled neon sickles. The president had then decreed a weeklong reprieve from interest on all gambling debts owed to him. Seeing as how most of the populace was cripplingly in hock, this announcement elicited enthusiastic cheers. A T-shirt cannon was fired, and at last, the execution got under way. Notorious American hack thriller writer and international fugitive from justice A. S. Peppers was brought out hooded and handcuffed. He was made to kneel. The president asked if he had any last words. Peppers shook his hooded head, and the president made a joke about not having such a big vocabulary after all. Laughter and jeers flew at the condemned man. Thirteen sharpshooters took up positions. They raised their rifles. At the president’s command, they fired. Peppers’s bullet-riddled body was removed, the T-shirt cannon brought out once more, and accordion music played.

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