Chair bolted to the floor, IV drip feeding me the nutrients I would naturally refuse to take. Padded door, guards outside. They were the weakest link. Vincent, in refusing to participate in what would happen next, had left the process open and exposed to manipulation. I had no doubt that he’d ordered the guards not to speak to me, but sometimes even an under-rewarded soldier of the USSR has to take the initiative.
I tugged and writhed against the needle in my hand until at last I managed to pull it free, lacerating the skin across the top of my hand in a great jagged red stripe. I didn’t call out, didn’t say anything, but let the blood run in great crimson stains over the white padded floor, infusing the cloth with glorious technicolour. The strap across my skull made it impossible for my head to hang, but I closed my eyes and waited with what I hoped was my greatest faraway look. It took the guards shamefully long to check on me and see the blood still dribbling down the chair. They burst in at once, and then an embarrassing conversation took place as to what they should do, and whether to get help.
“Is he unconscious?” asked one. “How much blood has he lost?”
The elder and, I hoped, the senior, inspected my hand. “It’s a surface wound,” he exclaimed. “He’s pulled out the needle.”
I opened my eyes and was satisfied to see the man jump back in alarm. “Gentlemen,” I said, “I imagine you’re under orders not to communicate with me, so let me be blunt and to the purpose. I know you all, I know your names, your ranks, your histories and your homes. I know that you, Private, still live with your mother and you, Sergeant, have a wife in Moscow who you haven’t seen for three and a half years, and a daughter whose photo you proudly carry in your pocket and show to all in the canteen every dinner break without fail. ‘She is my diamond,’ you explain. ‘She is my wealth.’ I have a question for you–just one question, and it’s this–do they know nothing? Absolutely nothing about what you do? It’s very important you think about this, very important you consider every aspect of every conversation you’ve ever had with them, for if they know anything, anything at all which could compromise this facility, then of course, gentlemen, they will be next. Your wife, your mother, your daughter–they cannot know a thing. Not even a whisper. That’s all I wished to say, and now if you wouldn’t mind applying a plaster to my hand, I’ll get on with the business of awaiting my torture and inevitable execution, thank you.”
They left in a hurry and didn’t bring me a plaster.
It may have been twenty hours later, it may have been two, and Vincent was back. The sergeant from before stood in the doorway as he talked, watching me nervously over his employer’s shoulder.
“Have you considered?” Vincent asked urgently. “Have you decided?”
“Of course I have,” I replied lightly. “You’re going to torture me, and I’m going to tell you an endless series of whatever it is I think you want to hear, to make you stop.”
“Harry,” urgency, desperate and low in his voice, “it doesn’t have to be this way. Tell me your point of origin and no harm will come to you, I swear.”
“Have you considered the point of no return? That moment when the damage you’ve done to my body is so great that I no longer care, nor consider it worth my while, to say anything at all? You must be hoping that you won’t reach that moment before you break my mind.”
He leaned back, face hardening at my words. “This is your doing, Harry. This is something you’re doing to yourself.”
So saying, he left me. The sergeant stayed in the door, and for a moment our eyes locked.
“Nothing at all?” I asked as the door swung shut.
They began only a few minutes later. To my surprise, they opened with chemicals and a twist on the usual theme of the same, a partial paralytic, locking my diaphragm in place so I choked and suffocated, the air turning to lead in my lungs, blood and head. Some movement was still possible, the dose cleverly judged, so for an hour, maybe more, maybe less, I sat gasping and gaping for air, the sweat running down my face and spine, vision on the edge of darkness but not quite going over. Vincent had hired a professional. A small man with a neat moustache, he had his tools laid out–always for my scrutiny–on a tray before him, and like an athlete in training gave some time for rest between each new application of pain. At the end of every rest he asked the question “What is your point of origin?” and waited patiently for me to reply, shaking his head sadly when I refused to do so. Next up was physical nausea, causing cries not so much of pain but of an animal trapped in its own carcass, of heat upon heat upon heat, of a twisting, a shrinking, a narrowing of the senses until all I could perceive was my own hideously sane delirium.
And there was the sergeant in the door, watching, always watching, and when the torturer took a break to get himself a glass of water, the sergeant came in and took my pulse, looked into the pupils of my eyes and whispered,
“She knows I took the train to Ploskye Prydy, the end of the line. Is that too much?”
I just smiled at him and let him answer the question for himself.