Klim bit his lips as he struggled not to give in to panic or to sickening, desperate misery. Perhaps, he really should try to kill himself.

Screwing up his eyes and squeezing his fingers together until they hurt, he prayed deliriously for a miracle. Now, looking back, all those quarrels with Nina and the jealous games he had played seemed ridiculous. He should have lived his life to the full and been glad of what he had. But now, it was too late.

Could he find within him the strength not to betray Nina? If Soviet intelligence found out she was staying with Seibert, they would hunt her down and kill her. There were any number of Soviet secret agents in Germany.

Klim remembered their house in Shanghai and the bathroom with the blue tiles. He pictured Nina emerging from the shower, shivering with cold, her dark curls dripping water. She threw on a white dressing gown and wrapped a towel around her head so tightly that it made her eyes slant upward. He said that it made her look Chinese, like Kitty, and Nina readily agreed.

The electric light flared on, and a hefty, clean-shaven guard with a fat, freckled face came into the cell.

“Rogov!” he shouted out, checking his list.

So, this was it. They had come for him.

Klim sat up slowly.

“Name and patronymic?” asked the guard.

“I’m a citizen of the United States,” Klim reminded quietly. “We don’t have patronymics on American documents.”

“Shut your mouth, scum! Leave your stuff and come out now.”

Klim’s heart was hammering in his chest. He felt as if he were about to have a heart attack. He put on his shoes and, for some reason, buttoned his shirt collar.

The freckle-faced guard shoved him in the back. “Hurry up!”

They went out into the corridor lined with rows of doors. A dim light filtered from the lightbulbs overhead, throwing crisscross shadows on the floor.

The guard gave curt instructions. “Straight ahead. Right. Right again.” Then suddenly he shouted, “Halt! Face to the wall.”

Two other guards dragged along a man, bloodstained and struggling. He had a rubber bulb in his mouth and kept bellowing something indistinctly.

“Come on now!” said Klim’s guard. “Straight ahead.”

Should I attack him? Klim wondered. It would surely be better to be killed for resisting the authorities than to endure hours of “socialist defense measures.”

“Halt!” shouted the guard.

They stopped outside a brown door.

“Knock.”

Klim closed his eyes for a moment.

“Knock, you bastard!”

This time, Klim knocked on the door.

“Yes?” came a male voice from inside.

“In you go,” the guard ordered.

As Klim entered the interrogation room, he saw Alov and felt himself grow weak with relief. This man would never torture him. Alov might be a fanatic and a scoundrel, but he was no cold-blooded killer.

There was also a typist in the room, sitting under a large portrait of Lenin—a plain, aging woman with a prominent forehead and a mouth that turned down at the corners. She looked at Klim with a weary, disinterested gaze and then adjusted the paper in her typewriter.

No, thought Klim, nothing terrible would happen to him here. They would never beat him in the presence of a woman, surely.

Alov blew his nose loudly into a handkerchief and gestured to a chair in the middle of the room. “Sit down.”

The chair was screwed to the floor, which was covered with battered yellow linoleum. Still, Klim said to himself, that doesn’t mean anything. It was the usual setup for an interrogation room.

Alov looked sick. His eyes were red-rimmed, and the skin under his nose raw. He patted at his pockets and then began opening each one of the desk drawers in turn. At last, he had found what he was looking for—a crumpled packet of filter-less cigarettes.

“Smoke?” he asked, holding the packet out to Klim. “No? Your loss. Now then, let’s try to wind up this business as quickly as we can so that we can all get home.”

The typist began to bang away at the typewriter. With a loud ding, the carriage of the typewriter shot back.

Alov set an envelope on the table. The address was in Klim’s handwriting. “London Central Post Office, for collection by Mr. Smith.” Judging by the stamp, the letter had been sent from Warsaw almost a year ago.

“Do you recognize this?”

Klim shrugged. “I don’t remember what it is.”

“The addressee of that letter never picked it up, so it was returned to the sender, Klim Rogov,” Alov said. “The letter was opened at the Soviet border, and what do you think was inside?”

Alov put his cigarette down on the edge of the ashtray, drew out several postcards from the envelope, and fanned them out. The cards all had holes punched right through them. One bore a portrait of Stalin with a hole straight through his forehead.

At last, Klim remembered. These were the postcards Kitty had been planning to hang on the tree as decorations. Last Christmas, without thinking, Klim had shoved them into an envelope and handed it to Oscar Reich.

“So, what do we have here?” asked Alov. “A former member of the White Guard, Klim Rogov, and his wife, Nina Kupina, were recruited by Chinese intelligence to carry out espionage and sabotage in the Soviet Union. They were given orders to assassinate Comrade Stalin, and we have this on irrefutable evidence.”

“That’s a lie!” Klim interrupted but stopped himself immediately. Here, nobody cared what was a lie and what was the truth. Alov knew quite well it was all nonsense. He was just showing Klim that he was in deep trouble and in it for the long haul.

“You know,” said Alov. “I have a neighbor who’s an expert in preparing skeletons for display. There are maybe ten people in the whole of the USSR with that level of knowledge. It’s quite a skill. First, you have to soak the body for a year to get the flesh off the bones. Then you use chlorine to bleach the bones and dry them out in the sun. And only then can you put the skeleton together, bone by bone. Would you like us to make you into a skeleton for the biology class? I shall make sure you’re put into the school at the orphanage—the one in which your Kitty will be sent. That might even be rather fun! Just think: your little girl will come into the classroom and see her father smiling at her.”

The typist gave a faint snort of laughter.

“Still, if Mr. Rogov will cooperate with us, there’ll be no need for skeletons,” said Alov amiably. “Let’s begin at the beginning. Who sent you to the Soviet Union?”

“I won’t say a thing until you call for Mr. Owen,” retorted Klim.

Alov looked at him for a long time with his blood-shot eyes before dissolving in a furious fit of coughing

“Damn it!” he shouted when he got his breath back. “Do you think I’ve nothing better to do than run around after you, you bastard? Guards!”

Two hefty men came into the room.

Klim tried to get up, but they twisted his arms and handcuffed them to the back of the chair.

Alov blew his nose again into his drenched handkerchief and turned to the typist. “Take this down please, Olga Rustemovna: Record of interrogation of a suspect—”

The carriage bell rang out again, and one by one, the metal letters stamped into the paper.

4

Whatever Galina tried to do, she never seemed to succeed. She had not even managed to commit suicide successfully.

She had been taken to the hospital to have her stomach pumped, and now, she lay for days on end in the general ward, recovering.

With her face to the wall, Galina tried not to think of anything, but the wretched thought kept coming back to haunt her. How was Klim and his Nina? How was Tata? Was anybody even feeding her?

At first, the other women on the ward had tried to speak to Galina, but soon, they gave up and left her in peace.

“She’s not quite right in the head, that one,” the patients explained to the young woman doctor who came to do the rounds of the ward.

“Now, now, what’s all this?” said the doctor reprovingly. “How are we feeling today?”

“Abandoned,” said Galina and immediately regretted it.

Hearing this, the young doctor called the ward sister and scolded her for neglecting her patients.


Alov came to see Galina only on her fifth day in the hospital. No sooner had he entered the ward than he began to yell at her, calling her a hysterical fool. “Was it because of me you took it into your head to take an overdose?”

The other patients listened with baited breath, intrigued.

Alov grabbed Galina by the arm. “I need you right away. The doctor has told me you’re quite capable of getting up on your feet. We’re off to the Lubyanka.”

Alov glanced around at the other patients and leaned in to whisper in Galina’s ear. “We’re questioning your Rogov, and he won’t admit to anything. Do you think you can help us break him?”

Galina stared at Alov, dumbstruck. Klim had been arrested? But he was supposed to have left the country!

Alov pulled the blanket off her bed. “Come on. Get dressed! We’re expecting a purge any minute. It would be good to have some positive results before it starts.”

They got into the waiting OGPU car. As it drove off, Alov explained that for forty-eight hours now, Rogov had been “on the conveyer belt”—this was the name for constant questioning during which a “client” was passed between interrogating officers without being given space to breathe or gather his thoughts.

“The bastard’s digging in his heels,” cried Alov with feeling. “What we need you to do is to squeeze out Nina Kupina’s address from him. You’re on good terms with him, aren’t you? Right now, the Mincing Machine is working on him. Then, you can come in and explain in a nice voice that things will be better for him if he gives us an honest confession.”

The Mincing Machine was the nickname of a pale, shapeless woman who worked in the OGPU. She had a habit of talking about lofty subjects, knew many poems by heart, and even lavished care on her appearance—plucking her eyebrows and dying her hair with henna. From time to time, she was brought down into the OGPU cells. Nobody was as efficient as she at unmasking enemies of the state.

“Is Rogov being beaten?” asked Galina in a quiet voice.

Alov shook his head. “No, not really. I decided against it for now. We might need him for a show trial.”

Galina looked at her reflection in the window. That small, hazy ghost was all that remained of her. She had long since died, and now, she was being carried back on the wind to the places she had haunted in her lifetime.

Alov was talking about the coming purge and of how he had been in bed sick with a temperature for several days and was without time to memorize the History of the Soviet Communist Party.

He too was like a ghost, thought Galina. A ball of dull, pulsing energy. In order not to fade away altogether, he needed to take energy from other people, and just now, he was sucking it from Klim and Galina.

Alov was overcome by another fit of coughing.

“Just look at me,” he muttered as he wiped away the tears. “I feel as if I’m being turned inside out, and I don’t have a single pill left. Listen, Pidge. If you talk Rogov around for us, I’ll ask Drachenblut to get you your job back. What do you say?”

Galina nodded indifferently.

The car drove into the inner courtyard and stopped outside the OGPU prison. Alov jumped down into the snow.

“Come on. Quickly!” he called to Galina. “I still need to look through the materials from the fifteenth Party Congress after this. My head’s like a sieve these days—I can’t remember anything.”

They walked through the yard and down into the cellar. The warden, a snub-nosed young man in an outsized peaked cap, followed after them.

“How’s the Mincing Machine doing?” asked Alov.

“She’s doing her best, the old battle-ax,” grinned the warden.

They turned into a side corridor. Now, Galina could hear the sound of a woman screaming out a torrent of shrill abuse.

Alov looked at Galina with consternation. “What’s got into you, Pidge? You’re shaking all over. Are you sick?”

The warden stopped outside the room from which the screams were issuing and opened the door.

“Could you bring some hot tea for Galina, here?” Alov asked him. “She’s out of sorts.”

The warden nodded. “I’ll see to it.”

Alov patted Galina on the shoulder. “All right, I’m off. Let me know if you have any luck.”