The First Billion

15

He came to.

The world was as he had left it, a dark, rank confessional, choked with the smoke of a hundred foul Russian cigarettes. He didn’t know how long he’d been out—if after the pain had become too much he’d slept, or if it was just a period of nonexistence, where everything inside you kept ticking but your brain shut itself off. His legs burned. The rope that tied him to the chair cut into his calves, restricting circulation. He had that tingly feeling in his toes you get when your feet fall asleep, but they’d been tingling like that all night, and now the tingling had sharpened, so that even though he hadn’t stood for hours, his feet screamed as if he were walking across a field of broken glass. His arms were where he’d left them, too, stretched taut in front of him, hands laid flat on a coarse plank, wrists secured by means of leather lanyards strung through the wood. His face throbbed. The right eye had swollen closed. He tried to open his eyelid, but nothing happened. Engine one, shut down and unresponsive.

Boris had left the left eye alone.

Boris from Metelitsa.

Boris, his unblinking Torquemada.

He was seated across the table, his posture rigid, his pale, soulless gaze alert, appraising, mocking, and finally condemning. The gaze never changed. It was the one constant in his swirling, unending nightmare, the hard blue eyes never leaving him even when the pain had become too much and his vision had gone blurry, and the scream had exploded inside him, and mercifully, oh God, yes, mercifully, he’d left the waking world.

Seeing him stir, Boris sat forward. He looked at him sadly and shook his head, as if saying, “One more hard case.”

“You call now?”

The voice was as dead as the eyes. It was not a request, nor a plea, nor a command. Slowly he unrolled the chamois leather case containing his tools.

Pliers.

X-Acto knife.

A vial of rubbing alcohol.

A roll of gauze.

A lamp hung above the table, the bulb weak, stuttering. A relentless, pulsating backbeat seeped through the walls, causing the lamp to sway as if they were at sea rocking on an easy swell. Somewhere above him, people were dancing. He thought of his children, children no longer, then pushed their faces from his mind. They did not belong here. He would not tarnish them with this filthy place.

The cone of light swung right, and he looked at the hand splayed on the coarse plank. It was hard not to think of it as another man’s hand. The thumb, raw, exposed, slick with blood, and lying next to it the thumbnail, extracted with a backstairs surgeon’s precision, broken into two rough-hewn pieces.

At some point, he’d taken a clinical approach to things. An objective view. The pain was his, no mistaking that: the shaft of fire bolting up his arm, the paralyzing scream starting far down in his belly, the cry desperate to escape, discovering the mouth stuffed with a rubber ball and secured with a length of duct tape. Yes, the pain was all his. But as the pliers dug deeper beneath the nail, as the X-Acto knife sliced away layer upon layer of stubborn connecting tissue, as Boris pulled and yanked and twisted, his apathetic, unshakable gaze never wavering, he’d given up the hand.

The beat from above grew louder. The walls quivered with the thud of the bass and he could make out patches of the music. “West End Boys.” Boris half sang a few words. Vest-ent boyz. He stopped and stared hard.

“You call?”

Grafton Byrnes listened to the music a moment longer, savoring it, knowing it to be the last taste of a sane universe. In the dark hours of his captivity, he had fashioned a plan, but it required patience. And patience meant more pain.

Eyes burning with defiance, he shook his head.

Boris reached for the pliers.