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.
“C
in 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.”
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