“I got no business with traitors,” Robbins said, louder this time, but still without looking at her.
“That’s where you’re wrong, Captain. Neither of us is here on our own recognizance.” The story she told him then was one she’d told before. Her daddy had been a bootlegger during Prohibition. Being a stubborn man, and a greedy one, he never got with the county program by letting the police in on a cut of his profits. He was arrested and sentenced to an unjust term, but somehow managed to escape with the aid of his criminal friends. He’d been born in Russia, and was given citizenship on his return here, before calling for his wife and daughter to join him. “I was nothing but a babe. Turned seventeen on the ship,” Florence said. This story had served her well. She’d concocted it in prison, where she’d quickly wised up to the fact that the most reviled and punished group—among not just prisoners but also warders and interrogators—were the true believers. A special contempt was reserved for these earnest adherents, always the first to lose their grip on reality and start scratching at the walls. To admit that she had come to Russia voluntarily, out of political sympathies, would have been as suicidal as admitting she’d worked for the secret police. The truth was so ludicrous, Florence couldn’t even believe it herself anymore.
“My daddy used to say he wished he’d stayed in prison in America,” she now said to the prostrate body beside her. “Would’ve been no different than here, except with better food.”
He made a noise that sounded like a grunt. Or was it a laugh? Florence looked down at the tray. The bread was still there, and the sugared tea, getting cold. “Well, Mr. Robbins. If you’re not going to touch this sumptuous meal, I might have to. Even if they do accuse me of being in cahoots with a real live spy.”
“I ain’t any kind of spy. I am an air force officer.”
He’d spoken in a quiet but resolute tone of voice. Florence looked at the spot where his skeletal shoulder suggested itself through his tunic shirt. “Then how did you get here?”
He turned, rolling slightly over on his pallet. His eyes were gray-blue and redshot. They burned with rage. “How’d I get here? You playing me for a fool, lady? There’s a war on.”
Her eyes widened. It was true, then.
“So it’s happened? America has dropped the bomb at last,” she whispered. “Oh mercy.”
Robbins studied her for a moment—some kind of mordant delight dancing in his eyes. Florence sensed they were reacting to something in her face, some magisterial ignorance on her part.
“Shit—you really don’t have any idea, do you?”
She stared at him.
And for the first time that she’d seen, he laughed, helplessly, each gasp swallowing up the next as if he were struggling for air.
—
She’d been led out by the guard then, but she learned from the doctor that, except for the overturned soup, Robbins had eaten what she’d brought him. So the commandant, in spite of himself, was persuaded to let Florence back in the following day instead of the force-feeding team. Unbeknownst to her, Robbins had refused to touch any food unless she brought it. Though giving in to such a request caused the commandant inexpressible indignity, he had no choice. Florence had no way of knowing this, but Kachak had already taken a great personal risk in not handing the pilot over to MGB headquarters in Moscow. Beria would look the other way only as long as it served him. And if Kachak produced no results or, worse yet, let the man die on his watch, his earlier “insubordination” would be rapidly uncovered, and his exile in Perm, such as it was, would last a very long time indeed. Or be served out on the other side of the barbed-wire fence. Such things were known to happen.
Kachak had taken this gamble knowingly. In Moscow he’d tortured confessions out of hundreds of people. But this was different—not the usual “stitch work” of writing up the right version beforehand and having the prisoner corroborate it while his fingernails were being pulled off. Getting a real confession—real intelligence—now, that was a more delicate operation. Kachak had no idea what he was hoping to find; he didn’t know a thing about gyros or radars or optics. Whatever the pilot confessed would have to be intelligible to the brains up at the MiG Aviation Design Bureau, with their plagiaristic lust for the F-86’s technology. It would have to be solid, verifiable, not the usual bullshit. Kachak didn’t approve of this Robbins, lying on his cot like a dying king and giving him orders. But he’d have to stick to soft tactics until the time came again for hard ones.
Inside his monk’s cell, Robbins allowed himself to be fed by the old woman’s hand. Spooning pea porridge into his mouth, Florence could not prevent herself from staring at the prisoner’s bristle-covered chewing cheeks, the rise and fall of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed. It was the cruel irony of recovery that the more she herself was fed at the infirmary, the more she wanted to eat.
“How old are you anyhow?” Robbins said, as if he’d been holding the question in for a while.
“Forty-one.”
His face got cloudy. He didn’t try to suppress his shock. Florence tried to guess from his expression how old he’d thought she was. Fifty? Maybe sixty.
“Jeez.” He was looking at her hands, their gray scaly skin. The blistered, frostbitten tips of her middle and ring fingers had darkened and thickened while she’d been at the infirmary. She still had some trouble bending them. “What’ve they got you doing?”
“Sawing trees in the forest, most of the time. Carrying wood.”
“You don’t look like you could pull a twig.”
Florence shrugged.
“And you mean you really didn’t know about this war?”
“I hardly know what month it is.”
“Well, it ain’t like a real war anyway, more like a knife fight where you’ll swipe at your opponent’s arms and legs all day without being allowed to stab him in the vitals.”
She did not exactly understand what he meant. Robbins still sounded delirious from his exhaustion and depletion. Florence glanced toward the bars in the door. The guard wasn’t visible. “You said there were other American officers with you…,” she whispered.
“Five of us. Two other guys from Korea. Two from East Berlin. They were stationed there. Not POWs like us—kidnapped by your secret police. One guy they just picked up in a bar in the eastern zone, visiting his girl. Stuffed him in a car, and that was it for him. They claim we’re all spies. It’s against every international law. POWs they’re supposed to declare to our countries. But no one knows we’re here.”
She scraped up the last spoonful of porridge and fed it to him. “The commandant won’t allow me to meet with you alone for much longer, Captain.”
“It’s Henry.”
“I need to tell him something.”
“You can tell him I got nothing to say to him until my government is informed of my status as a Prisoner of War in the U.S.S.R.”
—
“Sugar?”
“Please.” She was stunned to be sitting across the desk from Kachak, to have him offering her tea.