The Russian

by Saul Herzog

  The president watched his every move, his thick mane of white hair, his face, covered in coarse, unnaturally white stubble.

  Just looking at him made the president’s skin crawl, and it was the eyes that were the worst.

  Were it not for the medical condition, they would have been blue. But they’d been stripped of so much pigment they appeared more red. Not just bloodshot, it wasn’t just the whites of the eye. It was the actual iris.

  Those beady red eyes kept the president up at night, but there was something even darker about Medvedev, and that was the source of his second nickname.

  To those who knew of his origins, of his pathological inability to form human relationships or feel any sort of empathy, Mikhail Medvedev would always be known as the Orphan.

  There was only a handful of people who knew him by that name, and none of them, not the other directors of the Dead Hand, or even the president himself, used it to his face.

  Medvedev came from a dark chapter in Soviet history, a place that, even during the worst years of the Stalinist purges, was spoken of in hushed tones.

  That place was the Dom Rebyenka, otherwise known as the Child’s House, and it was from this abyss that Medvedev, the Orphan, had slithered.

  His very existence put the lie to the claim that the USSR had ever been a socialist paradise.

  Mikhail’s Child’s House was Volgograd State Orphanage 161.

  At the time of his birth, there were many reasons a child might end up in such a place. It could be as simple as both parents being dead, although there were better places to send such a child. It was more likely they were dissidents, accused of subversion, and as such, undeserving of the privilege of parenthood.

  But in Mikhail’s case, it was the fact he’d been deemed hopelessly and irredeemably defective.

  The Child’s House was a crime, a violence, a blot on the nation that was so shameful the government still refused even to admit it had existed.

  Mikhail was brought to 161 from the maternity ward of the nearby children’s hospital. Located in the same compound, the two buildings were separated by scarcely a hundred yards. In that distance, all the laws of man and nature ceased to apply, as if the two facilities were located in different universes, created by different gods.

  Mikhail grew up knowing nothing of the world beyond the walls of his ward other than what he could see through a small, barred window.

  His mother, a seventeen-year-old factory worker, suffered chemical poisoning during her pregnancy. When Medvedev was born, he looked so unnatural that the nurses thought they were being kind when they refused to let her even see him.

  He was taken directly from the mess between his mother’s legs to the defectology lab at the hospital’s eugenics department. There, a ruling was made on sight, and a two-page form was completed in triplicate by the lab nurse.

  This brief document was enough to commit Mikhail to the Child’s House for what was expected to be the entirety of his natural life.

  The president first met Medvedev many years back when he was still on his rise to power. After the meeting, he immediately ordered up his file. He’d been told the basic outlines of it before, everyone he hired was thoroughly vetted, but when he met the man face to face, he knew he had to see the file with his own eyes.

  And it proved to be a rabbit hole. He read it a dozen times, then ordered up more documents, juvenile criminal reports, two unsolved murder cases, and even old tapes of state-made films documenting the practices in the Child’s Houses.

  He wanted to understand everything he could about this man before bringing him into the nest. He saw in him a unique tool, with the potential to be uniquely useful in his rise to power.

  His curiosity in Medvedev became a compulsion, a morbid addiction. For some reason, he couldn’t stop ordering more documents.

  It was like staring at the sun.

  One of the government films had been made right there in Orphanage 161. It depicted row upon row of nurses, working like assembly-line workers, picking up babies with machine-like efficiency, taking off their diapers and replacing them with fresh ones before putting them back in their identical metal cots.

  The president watched the film over and over. Late at night, when he was supposed to be sleeping, he was watching the tape, rewinding it, watching it again.

  The nurses didn’t coo. They didn’t sing. They didn’t smile or laugh or speak to each other. And the babies, one of which must have been Medvedev, didn’t laugh or coo either.

  In one scene, he caught a glimpse of a specially built attachment on the side of each cot, a pair of metal prongs with rubber covers.

  A formula bottle was placed on the prongs and held at an angle so that the babies, no matter how young, learned for themselves to suck the nipple.

  As they got older, the feeding method didn’t change.

  The food changed, but not much, so that by the time he was four, Mikhail was sucking a gray-colored gruel from the same bottle, the nipple of which had been snipped to allow bigger chunks of food to pass through.

  Mikhail spent the first years of his life entirely confined to his steel cot. Seasons came and went, but he remained, lying on his back, staring at the ceiling and sucking on the rubber nipple like a piece of livestock in a production facility.

  The president remembered the first time he saw the American movie, The Matrix, and thought the directors hadn’t been so very imaginative as they were given credit for.

  Mikhail was walking from his limousine to the steps of the palace, and at the foot of the steps, looked up at the president’s window, as if he sensed him standing there, and gave him a perfunctory salute.

  The president let go of the curtain, blocking the view.

  Mikhail was a strong man, powerfully built, but his muscles never formed correctly. Lying on his back for years, he never learned to walk. As he made his way to the steps, his gait was more hobble than walk. He shuffled, or rather lumbered, like a bear.

  The new Volgograd Children’s Hospital was in the same compound as Orphanage 161, and as he grew older, Mikhail stood on his cot and looked out a fourth-floor window, fitted with prison bars, and watched the children play.

  He never knew or even thought to question why he was not among them. He was so divorced from the reality of his existence that to his malformed mind, they were as different from him as the cockroaches beneath his cot.

  They were what they were, and he was what he was.

  The state health officials came to the same conclusion.

  Even though the Children’s Hospital was one of the best in the country, Mikhail could never be brought there, no matter how sick he became.

  It was as if he was a different species.

  When he got sick, or agitated, or hysterical, he was given an adult dose of the strongest tranquilizers available in the Soviet Union.

  For six years, he lay in his cot and watched the children around him slowly lose their minds. They rocked back and forth incessantly, shouted gibberish, smacked their fists in their faces, or smashed their faces against the steel frames of the cots.

  Many died of self-inflicted wounds, and when they did, their non-human status was reconfirmed by the fact that no death certificates were issued. No coroner’s report was requested. The bodies weren’t brought to the funeral home. Rather, they were incinerated without ceremony in the same furnace used for the hospital’s hazardous waste.

  There was a sound at the door, and the president turned.

  “Mr. President,” Medvedev said, knocking the door aside as he burst in. “The assassin fucked up. Tatyana Aleksandrova is still alive.”

  The president recoiled at the sight of Medvedev. It was the same every time. No matter how often they met, he never got used to it.

  As Medvedev hunched under the door, habitually used to ducking his head, the president found it hard to concentrate. He could think only of the things he’d read in Medvedev’s file.

  It was with Medvedev that he learned it
was possible to know too much about a man. There was a limit to what could be gained. At a certain point, the information became a distraction, a fog that hid more than it revealed.

  The only thing the president needed to know about Medvedev was whether he’d remain loyal. And all the orphanage reports in the world didn’t answer that question.

  Would the fact he’d spent all those years in a cage make him obedient?

  He didn’t know. What he did know was that he would never underestimate Medvedev. This was the child that survived when all around him were bashing their heads in.

  When they lost their minds, succumbing to the drone of the ward, yelping a gibberish unintelligible even to themselves, Mikhail learned to speak.

  He learned how to get out of that place, to rise to the top, to hunger for power.

  The president hated to admit it, but the man scared him.

  “Which assassin did you use?” he said.

  Medvedev was cagey. He hated to report failure.

  “Genadi Surkov.”

  “He’s a competent man,” the president said.

  “Well, he’ll be sucking the end of a gun soon enough,” Medvedev said. “I’m going to put my best man on it, Sergey Sergeyevich.”

  “I don’t care who you put on it,” the president said, “I want Tatyana Aleksandrova dead.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  The president sighed. Medvedev was so obsequious now. So deferential. So obedient. It was hard to imagine he’d ever turn against his master.

  But then, those were the ones you had to watch most closely.

  According to Medvedev’s file, it was a nurse named Yanina who marked the turning point in his life.

  She spoke to him. She gave him a book from her home.

  It wasn’t kindness that motivated her, at least not any kindness that would be understood outside the four walls of that orphanage.

  In fact, it turned out she was something of a sadist. But to Medvedev, she was everything.

  Years later, when she’d had four children of her own, none of which survived past infanthood, she was convicted of child abuse and sent to prison for life.

  Medvedev’s file showed that in the orphanage, she’d made a practice of smacking him on the mouth with the sole of her plastic slippers until his lips bled.

  She dosed him with tranquilizers and knocked him around the ward, telling him if he could stand up straight, she’d stop beating him.

  She jabbed so many unsanitized needles in his feet and hands that he almost died of Hepatitis B.

  But when the president asked Medvedev to serve him, to become one of his most intimate, trusted allies, to help him secure absolute power over every aspect of the Russian state, the only thing Medvedev asked in return was that Yanina be granted a pardon for her crimes.

  The president granted the request and watched carefully to what happened next. If Medvedev killed Yanina, if he tortured her and had her thrown into the river as he had with countless others, it would be a clue to the inner workings of his mind. It would speak to his future, and to whether he would one day turn on his master.

  But Medvedev didn’t have Yanina killed.

  Instead, he installed her in one of the most expensive mansions in Moscow, a fifty-hectare estate that included stag hunting grounds and a garden famous among horticulturalists. He bought her jewels and diamonds and the most expensive clothes her corpulent frame could carry. He gave her a tiara that had once belonged to the tsarina and had the occasion marked by a spectacular ball, inviting hundreds of the most important people in the country.

  And when the president finally succeeded in getting surveillance cameras installed in the mansion, the tapes showed the most masochistic sexual displays imaginable. Medvedev worshipped Yanina. He licked the soles of her leather boots. She made him wear a dog collar and eat his food from a dish on the ground.

  She whipped him until his back was a shredded, bloody mess.

  But just as with the reports from the orphanage, the president couldn’t look away. He couldn’t bring himself to delete the tapes or remove the cameras, and there were nights when he found himself in his secure room, logging into the surveillance system and having a technician patch him through to a live feed of Yanina’s dungeon.

  Medvedev had the soul of a slave.

  The president lay awake at night thinking about this man, this hound he’d brought into his service, about what his existence meant, what it said about God, and human nature, and the limits of what might one day come for him out of the darkness.

  If Medvedev existed, others like him must also exist. And if monsters were out there, it was best to have one of his own on a leash.

  “You kept me waiting,” he said.

  Medvedev’s eyes narrowed. He was always calculating, like a lizard.

  He never knew what people meant. He couldn’t understand nuance. He lacked intuition of any kind.

  He was a man who saw the world solely as cause and effect. To him, there was no why. Things either happened, or they did not. He had no conception of other people’s motives, of how they felt, or how that might influence their actions.

  And yet, his predictions on human behavior were prophetically accurate. Maybe his way of looking at the world was better. To him, people were insects, cockroaches, and could be predicted as easily.

  “I’m sorry,” Medvedev said.

  The president threw his cigar in the ashtray. The sooner this meeting was over, the sooner he could forget about Medvedev.

  “Take a seat,” he said.

  Medvedev eased himself into the chair opposite the desk. It creaked under his weight, and the president wondered if it would hold him.

  “I had the meeting with Liu Ying,” Medvedev said.

  He took some photos from his briefcase and slid them across the table. The president looked at them. They were black and white surveillance images of the US embassies in Moscow and Beijing.

  “So he agreed?” the president said.

  “He said China is ready to start flexing its muscle,” Medvedev said.

  “This is more than muscle-flexing,” the president said. “This could unleash a nuclear war.”

  “Ying said the time has come for the American sun to set, and a new sun to rise in the East.”

  “But are they willing to commit?” the president said. “Are they willing to carry out this plan?”

  Medvedev picked up one of the photos. It was of the embassy in Beijing.

  “I gave him this very photo,” Medvedev said, “and asked if they were ready to go all the way.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He wrote down a date and time and said it would be the biggest explosion in China since the second world war.”

  “And he has Beijing’s backing?”

  “He said the government was united behind him.”

  “We’re going to need some sort of guarantee,” the president said.

  “Of course, sir.”

  This plot was risky. It had the potential to blow up in their faces, to drag them into a war with America they couldn’t win, but if it worked, it would change everything.

  Naturally, Medvedev had calculated all the angles in his lizard brain. He’d decided that there was no way America would go to war with Russia and China simultaneously. Not over two buildings, no matter how much symbolism they carried. To Medvedev, it was nothing more than a simple cost-benefit analysis. With the withdrawal of US marines and the contracting out of embassy security, the time was ripe for an attack of this nature.

  Vladimir knew the truth was more complicated.

  “You realize you have blind spots,” he said to Medvedev. “When it comes to calculating human nature, to predicting how ordinary people will react to things, you’re not normal.”

  “I understand that, sir.”

  “You don’t see the world the way other people do.”

  “You are correct, sir. But just because I see the world differently, doesn’t mean I’m n
ot right.”

  The president nodded. He knew that was true. It was the only reason he’d even given his permission to approach the Chinese. Liu Ying set the agenda of the Chinese Central Committee. If he said Beijing was going to do something, he had the power to make it so.

  Unless he was lying.

  “There are two things we need to worry about,” the president said.

  “The Chinese,” Medvedev said, “and the Americans.”

  “Let’s start with the Chinese.”

  Medvedev pulled another photo from his briefcase. It was of a young Chinese girl in a school uniform. She was walking on a street with a backpack on her shoulders.

  “Who’s this?” the president said.

  “This is Liu Ying’s daughter.”

  The president’s blood ran cold. He couldn’t show it, he couldn’t let Medvedev see him falter even for a second, but if he was about to say what the president thought he was going to say, then this operation was locked in. There could be no turning back.

  “You’ve kidnapped her,” the president said.

  “We’re afraid the Chinese won’t hold up their part of the bargain,” Medvedev said. “If we blow up the embassy in Moscow, and they don’t do exactly the same thing in Beijing, we’re fucked.”

  “We’re not just fucked,” the president said. “It could be the end of our country.”

  “Which is why we need to make sure Ying isn’t planning any surprises.”

  “When did you take the girl?”

  “While he was in Moscow, playing with Russian strippers and getting so drunk he barely made it back to his hotel room.”

  “Where is she being kept?”

  “Somewhere safe.”

  “Not our embassy?”

  “Of course not, sir. A hotel room in Beijing. We were very careful. You have complete deniability.”

  “We’ll see how much good that does me if something goes wrong,” the president said.

  “Nothing will go wrong, sir.”

  “Like nothing went wrong with Tatyana Aleksandrova’s assassination?”

  Medvedev looked down.

  “I never gave you permission to do this,” the president said.

  “Sir, you told me to secure Ying’s agreement.”