“How many teaspoons?”
“Two,” she said, just as though she were back at home.
He had a meaty, striking if not exactly handsome face. His shirt was buttoned up to the neck this time.
“You’ve made progress.”
Florence couldn’t tell if this was a question or praise. “Yes,” she said. “He’s been eating. In a few days, I believe he’ll have much of his strength back.”
“We’ll resume questioning tomorrow.”
“No.” She’d spoken before she could stop herself.
Kachak blinked. “No?”
“I only mean,” she corrected, “I don’t think he’ll give in under strain. He hasn’t before. And he still insists that his request to alert the American government be carried out.”
“I see,” said Kachak. “So he’s found himself an advocate.”
She felt her two frostbitten fingertips begin to throb. Or was it only her fear? “I am nothing more than an interpreter,” she said.
“Is that what you are?” He was staring at her, one of his abundant eyebrows lifted challengingly. He slid a cigarette from his front pocket without taking out the pack and lit it. “I have a dozen interpreters here. I have enough Ivan Ivanoviches to translate all of Shakespeare.” He took a small drag to get the cherry glow going, then let the smoke out silently through his nose. His eyes were not telling her what he had; they were asking what she had.
And still she had nothing.
Or did she?
She had once, so long ago, studied mathematics, logic. All she’d retained from that now was a single insight: a negative outcome could be as useful to a problem as a positive one. Florence experienced this knowledge so fleetingly she did not even recognize it as a thought. But she said to Kachak: “It seems to me that Robbins’s conditions have changed. It’s true that his request to have his government alerted remains unaltered, but he is no longer asking to be reunited with the other Americans.”
Kachak let the smoke drift out of his mouth and nose. He was listening. “He is in no position to be making any demands.”
“Perhaps not. But I suspect his earlier request to be reunited with his fellow officers had to do with his isolation. Solitary confinement will make a man desperate for any contact with human beings.”
“And what do you suggest?”
“Just to keep him talking…”
“With you?”
“Yes, for the time being. He badly wants someone to talk to. I sense this.”
Kachak gazed up into the vaulted ceiling and smiled. “?‘And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat….’?”
He gave her until the end of the week.
—
Her association with the criminal world—even if it was the imaginary criminal world of America—had been useful in the camp, too. She was, of course, still a “fascist,” but when word got around that she was a bootlegger’s daughter, she was told to come to the barracks occupied by the blatnye, where the criminal women reclined on their bunks, undressed to their dirty bras in a barracks made cozily warm by fires or stoves stoked regularly by their court of prisoner-lackeys—civils or politicals like herself—who served the criminals’ every whim in exchange for a crust of bread or some protection. She was asked if she’d ever met Bonnie Parker. Or seen Al Capone. Somehow, the legends of these felons had made their way here without losing any of their glamour. She admitted frankly that she’d never seen any of these criminals face-to-face but related the stories she’d read in the papers, describing the string of heists and murders pulled off by Bonnie and Clyde as they darted around the country in stolen cars. With as much detail as Florence could recall after twenty years, she retold of the bloody battles between the Italian gangs of Capone and the Irish gangs of Bugs Moran, and how Capone’s men, luring the Irish crew to a warehouse full of cut-rate Canadian whiskey, unleashed a hail of bullets and then escaped in the guise of policemen—staging the massacre on the American holiday celebrating love.
After that, she was invited back to tell them about other gangsters, John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson. The half-undressed dyevkas listened while they slapped cards on their greasy pillows or picked lice out of their armpits like monkeys and tossed them to crackle in the fire. The guards, tenderly or sardonically, called them “girls,” and some of them indeed had the bodies of girls, and the faces of old women. They’d sometimes interrupt Florence’s stories with profanity-laced commentary of their own, spoken in shouts, of which Florence understood hardly a word. Outside, she was more or less left alone, for she had entered the dubious ranks of the camp’s “novelists”—the ones who entertained the criminals with recitations of the great classics, Dumas or Dostoyevsky. In her case, though, the “novels” were really double features she had seen years ago, with Sidney, at the Brooklyn Paramount or the RKO Albee—Tarzan, Mantrap, Flesh and the Devil, The Public Enemy—gangster films and sappy romances that the criminals ate up in equal measure. Half the time she had to improvise the plot, composing the script as she went along, just as she was doing now with Robbins and Kachak, adding colorful touches that might entertain or please in the moment.
When she wasn’t with Robbins, Florence stayed in the infirmary, firing the stoves, washing latrines, swabbing blood from the floor—the privileged, easy duties she would never have been given in the women’s camp. She was almost sure that once they’d used her up as a translator, they would pin another ten years on her for “fraternizing with the enemy.” Or simply shoot her. She did not care. As long as she was kept in soft work and fed eight hundred grams of bread a day, with some soup and fish on the side, as long as she could stay warm and not be out in the frozen woods, she would do whatever was asked.
—
“YOU’RE LOOKING FINE, MISS FEIN,” Robbins said unexpectedly almost two weeks later. He knew her by her maiden name. “Got a little color back in your cheeks.”
Florence could feel her forehead flush. She had an urge to tell him it was all thanks to him. He had bought her a month of life, at least. Instead, she said, “You didn’t tell me how old you were.”
“I’m thirty-four. Maybe thirty-five by now. Hard to tick off time where there ain’t no calendars or windows.”
“Not so young for your common air force pilot.”
“Oh, I see what you’re thinking. They told you I’m a spy. Well, I ain’t no more a spy than you are a lumberjack. It’s not my first barbecue, is all.”
“You were a flyer in the last war?”
“The 254th Fighter Division,” Robbins said with some pride. He was cleaning out the remains of his bowl with the bread, strong enough to eat on his own now.
“Must have really liked all that fighting to volunteer again,” she said.
“Who said I volunteered?”
“Didn’t you?”