The Soul of Viktor Tronko (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by David Quammen

  Are you calling from Washington? was the question.

  No, but I’ll be there tomorrow, was what Kessler answered.

  Don’t come down on my account, said Roger Nye, although Kessler to the best of his recollection had not mentioned where he was.

  There is only one exit for the town of Strasburg. Kessler takes it and then pulls aside on the gravel shoulder, consulting the directions in his notebook. He continues. A half mile on he passes the No Frills Food Warehouse, as promised, and comes to a T-junction, with gas stations on two corners and a road sign pointing left for the village of Lebanon Church. Kessler goes right. He drives slowly along the commercial drag of downtown Strasburg, all three blocks of it. He takes note of Pangle’s Barbershop and then the Hi Neighbor! Restaurant, a storefront café with yellow curtains and a pillared balcony and a wrought-iron bench out front. Nye or the Nye ancestors seem to have picked a cozy town. Farther up the hill he moves through a zone of grand old clapboard homes left behind by the founding families, then again out into countryside. The road swings around south, climbing higher along a ridge slope, with the waters of the Shenandoah River now below on the left, a pretty trickle winding among bare trees. Kessler glances at the odometer. He passes the Old Mill Steakhouse, as promised. Parking lot empty and windows frosted, it has either closed for the season or failed, though the little mill wheel is still functional, turning slowly on an afternoon’s meltwater drippings. Kessler is glad for the break in weather, this gleaming and hopeful February day. He will not take it amiss, however, if Roger Nye (unlike his old boss) prefers to be interviewed indoors. Almost exactly at two miles from town Kessler spots the turnoff ahead and slows.

  The green sign gives a county road number. The other sign says FISHER’S RUN, as promised. Kessler heads up the ridge slope on this little road.

  The directions seem to be good—meaning that Roger Nye is a precisely observant fellow who can communicate when he wants to, meaning in turn that perhaps Kessler has come to the right place.

  He winds uphill watching for a granite cutbank and, after another bend, sees the cutbank just as described. Beyond it he sees the stonework trestle. Kessler drives under the trestle and then pulls aside, onto an eddy of brown grass. He parks there in front of the other car. He gets out and walks back. Roger Nye is seated behind the wheel.

  Kessler has a sudden bad moment, expecting to find Nye dead: bolt upright, seat belt fastened, eyes aglaze, shot through the heart. But the bad moment passes. This seems to be merely the man’s customary expression. He shakes hands with Kessler through the car window.

  “Not here,” says Nye. “We’ll go on up to the house.”

  “Fine. Shall I follow you, or leave mine where it is?”

  “Bring it,” says Nye.

  Now, following at a distance behind Nye’s aging Ford, Kessler pays less attention to landmarks. He becomes almost unaware of mileage and turns. He is thinking instead about what he has come out here to ask Roger Nye, and about the elaborately disingenuous preliminaries that may be needed to lead up to it. He wants to take Nye off guard but not shock him badly. He wants the interview to move toward an unexpected but ineluctable point, bearing Nye along, on a swell of memory and frustration and bitterness. Then he wants to say: Is it true that Mel Pokorny was Dmitri? I have good reason to think so. Is that why he finally had to die? But how do you lead up to such questions? What can be done to extract a truthful answer? What sort of man is Roger Nye these days, and how is he going to react? Kessler is still frantically thinking out strategy. They cross a culvert and creep through a backwoods hamlet of five or six houses and drive on. Keeping the Ford in view, Kessler might as well be in a trance. He registers nothing but a pressed-tin sign on the side of a small grocery, the sign’s paint fading gray from age and weather. WE GIVE FAMILY STAMPS, it says. His brain is full.

  And it is exactly this deep concentration that allows Kessler to be so heartbreakingly stupid.

  For several more miles they continue alongside a creek, presumably the one known hereabouts as Fisher’s Run. Farmhouses spaced widely, browned bottomlands and leafless woods, no other vehicles meeting them on the gravel, and Kessler has time to grow curious again about the hermit’s retreat in which Nye has chosen to take his retirement. Then he sees the Ford’s brake lights come aglow.

  Nye turns, coaxing his car up a steep lane to the right that proves, when Kessler tries it, scarcely better than a jeep trail. Kessler climbs for a hundred yards at a bad angle, all in first gear, and then lurches off into a horseshoe driveway that is muddy and weed-grown but at least flat. Nye is there, standing beside the Ford.

  He is taller than he seemed at first glance, and older than the mental image Kessler had of him: a thin erect patrician in his late sixties, with stone-gray eyes and a severely trimmed stubble of white hair, a man of corporate bearing who looks slightly incongruous wearing jeans and a plaid flannel jacket. The boots are well broken in. The hands, as Kessler noticed back at the trestle, are slender and steady and unbent, but carry liver spots.

  The house itself seems another odd match. Kessler expected something much finer. He takes care not to show his reaction but the place seems to him dreary at best, ramshackle, tawdry. Almost pathetic, in fact. If Nye’s old colleagues imagine that he withdrew to a baronial estate, they would be shocked by the reality. It is just an old two-story clapboard of the family farm type with defeated paint and ragged shingles and blank, disconsolate windows. The yard has been vanquished by an insurrection of thistles. There is a rusty burn barrel. The porch sags. The concrete stoop is crumbling and to each side sits a smallish cast-iron lion, gazing off toward some sorry dream of grandeur. The lions look ridiculous. Kessler wonders, with some pity, whether Nye found them himself in a junk shop or they came with the house and Nye just doesn’t notice or care. Tact prevents Kessler from asking.

  “We’ll have privacy,” says Roger Nye.

  “I appreciate it.”

  Kessler follows him up the steps. Nye unlocks the door and stands aside. At least the locks are new, Kessler notices. Maybe Nye has a security fetish, last remnant of his old career. Or maybe, give him a chance, he is gradually fixing the place up. Kessler walks in to find nothing but bare hardwood floor coated thickly in dust, naked lath showing on one wall, and a derelict reading chair pushed into a far corner, and only at that moment does he grasp that it is all very wrong.

  But of course he is too late. Not even close. He turns. The wave of nausea is like what he felt in Gondelman’s tower, except now much worse.

  Roger Nye is holding a gun. Kessler hates himself.

  It is a sizable automatic, maybe a .45, and the thought dances into Kessler’s brain that possibly this is the very weapon that killed Pokorny. He manages to restrain himself from raising that question, which might only be suggestive and fatalistic. The gun looks strange, but no less terrible, held in a gracile hand that happens to be spotted with age. Kessler realizes his bladder has leaked. It only makes him more scared.

  “We’ll go back here,” says Nye, pointing.

  “Do I put my hands up?” Oh Christ oh lord, not like this. Not in a sad-ass little house on a back road where they won’t even find my body until the beetles have been all in and out.

  “I really don’t care,” says Nye.

  With bovine docility Kessler walks down a corridor toward back bedrooms. Meanwhile his mind crackles with desperate disorder. No, this is wrong, I should do something. Shouldn’t make it easy for him. Resist. He’s going to execute me, the bastard. Or maybe not. Maybe not. At what point, dammit, does sheer suicidal panic become appropriate? At what point do I have no more to lose? I’d rather go out stupid and wild than compliant and simpering, Kessler thinks. Rather make a run or try to fight or dive through a window or even just wave my arms and scream angry things. Any of those is better than letting the man just put that muzzle against my neck and fire, Kessler thinks. But when? W
hat’s the last possible chance? Do I get a goddamn moment’s warning? Kessler comes to a doorway. The room beyond is dark. He stops. This is the moment, he thinks.

  “Go on,” says Roger Nye from a dispiriting ten feet behind. Kessler could never reach him with the fanciest karate move, even if he were trained for this nonsense.

  “Go into the room,” Nye says precisely.

  Kessler complies.

  He hears a door grind shut sonorously, and then he is in total blackness. He waits. He expects to be dead within five seconds. But there is no sound except the wheeze of his own breathing. He waits. After an endless half minute he becomes aware that he is alone. Nye has left himself on the far side of the door.

  Kessler reaches out. When he feels the rough concrete of the wall, he understands where he is.

  29

  THE MAN WHO calls himself Max Rosen knows the way. He has been here before, after all. That was only last weekend, when he went up and left the note for Kessler and then retired out to the scaffold to wait.

  This time he prefers not to expose himself by passing through the lobby and the bar and then climbing the stairs. The bar is teeming with people at this hour on a Friday night. He prefers to stay clear of it. But in fact the traffic of strangers back and forth through the lobby, the festive confusion, helps him. Having ascertained that Kessler is using the same room as before, he sets the ledger carefully back into place by the switchboard and leaves again before the woman in the shabby sweater can return from her errand.

  He walks down N Street toward Connecticut Avenue, makes a right turn and then another, comes back up the darkened alley. He avoids the construction site and the scaffold this time; he avoids that end of the alley altogether. Instead he finds an aluminum shed that puts him within reach of the fire escape on the back of a building adjacent to the Tabard. He climbs the four stories to that building’s roof, which leaves only a little scramble up the copper mansard. But the slope is steep, so the little scramble is more than a little problematic. He requires the aid of a piece of lumber, a length of dirty two-by-four scrounged from a corner of the rooftop. Balancing on one foot with the board for a stilt, his belly flat to the copper slope, like a snake climbing glass, he gets another four feet of reach. Which is enough. He pulls himself up onto the Tabard. By now his lungs are raw and he is spitting nicotine-flavored phlegm. Fortunately the hatchway to the stairs is still unlatched.

  He lets himself into Kessler’s room, as before, with a simple lock blade. But this time he sits down to wait.

  Only a very dim glow leaks in through the window from N Street. In the darkness he cannot find an ashtray, so he gropes quietly around the porcelain sink, which shows itself as a faint lambent shape, and comes up with a water glass. The man who calls himself Max Rosen does not want to turn on a light. He smokes the first cigarette while his lungs are still sore from the exercise.

  30

  HOURS PASS. Kessler doesn’t know how many hours because as usual he isn’t wearing a watch. Anyway he would need a luminous dial; his cell is still dark as blindness. Lots of hours, is how many, and they have gone by very damn slowly. It must be well on into the middle of the night. His ass hurts from sitting on the slab. Under the rank bandage his forearm hurts too, throbbing and pulsing, with occasional sudden rips of acute pain that travel straight up through the shoulder and into the back of his brain. Maybe that’s part of the healing process for a bad cut. On the other hand, God knows what could be growing in there by now. Kessler was busy, Kessler was stubborn, Kessler did not take his antibiotic. Now Kessler is cultivating a microbial experiment in the warm pink agar of his own muscle. But no sense in worrying over the arm, since it may be moot. Kessler right now would jump at a chance to walk away from all this as an amputee. Roger Nye hasn’t yet reappeared.

  Possibly Roger Nye doesn’t intend to.

  Possibly the front door of the house is locked and the man is gone and Kessler has already been permanently entombed. Nothing left but to wait awhile, then die and then rot. No one in the world (he has realized with a disheartening shock) knows even vaguely where Kessler is. No one except Nye and whatever accomplices there are, if any. Worse still, no one is likely soon to wonder. A child who has gotten himself locked inside a junkyard refrigerator has better prospects—at least someone will come looking. Then again, a child locked in a refrigerator hasn’t been quite this dumb. Kessler is trying to stay calm.

  He has explored the room thoroughly, groping his way four times around the walls, crossing the open floor with cautious steps, then crossing again on hands and knees. The good news is that there seem to be no vermin; he hasn’t set his palm down on a scorpion or a centipede or felt the skittering bump of a rat. Evidently this place has been sealed too tightly for vermin. Nothing to tempt them here anyway. Viktor Tronko has been gone for thirteen years and Kessler detects no sign of any more recent inmates. The walls are lined with concrete, sure enough, extending at least beyond his reach and probably straight to the ceiling. The floor also is concrete. The door is a sheet of steel, heavy, windowless, and Kessler has derived neither response nor solace from whomping his fist on it. He has found no drains, no bricked-over windows, no ventilation grates. He has found nothing, period, except an old cot that lay overturned near the center of the floor. At first, in the dark, he couldn’t make out what this thing was. Then he got it onto its feet. Ah yes, the prisoner’s cot, of course. Several hours later, when he was ready to try sleeping, he groped back to it, brushed it off, and lay down. The canvas split, opening like a zipper. Very low comedy, and in the jumble his injured arm took a painful mashing. Kessler untangled himself, stood up in rage, and heaved the cot at a wall. Then with a second thought he retrieved it, methodically stepped off his line of aim, and threw the cot at the steel door. A dull thunk sort of sound, like the tap of a wood spoon on a cast-iron skillet. It also seems clear that he will not dig his way out with a Swiss Army knife.

  He has emptied his bladder twice into a chosen corner. He hopes that the floor is level enough so that his piss won’t flow back to where he sits and, cruel indignity, soak his rump. He doesn’t care if it flows down the other way and leaks out under the door. Let it. Kessler has passed beyond embarrassment into a starker range of the emotional spectrum. He wants water badly. He hasn’t thought about food. But he wants water. He has been cold all day, all evening, all whatever, with the concrete sucking his warmth away, sucking it down into the unplumbable frozen indifference of the earth itself, and as night or whatever advances he is getting still colder. Unheated for thirteen years (and longer, come to think, since Tronko got no heat either), this cube of concrete holds the chill like an icebox. It could sap away every erg of Kessler’s bodily heat and not raise its own temperature a degree. The only way to keep warm is to minimize contact. With the cot torn, that means standing up.

  So he stands. He paces back and forth, beating the chill but making himself only more thirsty. He pounds again on the door. No whisper of a hint that anyone hears. He stands. He leans. He would very much like to sleep.

  A little sleep would make the time pass more quickly. Of course Kessler still doesn’t know for sure whether he wants the time to pass quickly. He may have too little left, not too much. He doesn’t know whether he has anything to anticipate—a fresh phase of tribulation, a challenging new danger—besides his own slow but too proximate end. Doesn’t know whether he should kill these hours or better treasure them.