Nefski drew the blackout curtains but not because of any imminent threat of an air raid on Port Baikal. The blizzard sweeping down the 390-mile-long lake, though abating, was still wrapping Irkutsk, further west from Port Baikal at the mouth of the outflowing Angara River, in thick, protective sheets of white. It would make even instrument flying for the Americans difficult, if they were so foolhardy as to try anything — particularly over the heavily defended eastern perimeter of the lake.
In any event, Nefski welcomed the overcast for another reason: the room assigned him by the local authorities for the interrogation was on the ground floor of the old Port Baikal library, and, as such, anyone passing by could see in unless the drapes were closed. And the room was stuffy, overheated, the result of the ample electricity produced by the hydroelectric dam further up the ice-free stretch of river that flowed westward toward Irkutsk. He wanted a cold room, for cold, hunger, isolation had, in Nefski’s long experience of interrogating prisoners, been the most reliable trinity when it came to extracting information. Given his choice, he’d choose isolation above everything else, and for this reason he’d regretted having put her among the other prisoners during the withdrawal from Khabarovsk; it had broken her weeks of solitary. While she hadn’t been allowed to speak to the other prisoners on the train, their very presence and the fact that the Siberians were retreating from Khabarovsk had given her new hope, her wild, defiant eyes fiercer than ever on the edge of starvation, stoking her fire of resistance.
Nefski pushed away the gooseneck lamp the corporal here at Port Baikal had turned on Alexsandra in his usual inept attempt to equal Nefski’s record for “confessions.” Not wanting to show she was grateful in any way, she shifted her head only slightly, as if the bright light had not been at all uncomfortable. Nefski waited — he had no intention of hurrying it. That was the problem with so many interrogators, like the buffoon of a corporal who was now ogling the Jewess from his post by the closed door. The younger KGB recruits wanted everything done yesterday — all the information to come at once, in a torrent. On the other hand, the Zampolit had a point: time was pressing.
Though he knew she didn’t smoke, Nefski offered her a cigarette to demonstrate goodwill — the fact that he was willing to be civil about it. Or else. He was determined not to let a woman — a Jew at that — put it over him, for though he was a full colonel, having distinguished himself in the regular army’s Maskirovka, or camouflage, units from which he’d gone on to KGB border-troop rank and then to Khabarovsk, he was laughed at behind his back because of his wife. He knew the corporal and other junior NCOs enjoyed their jokes at his expense around their samovar of a morning. They called her the “T-85.” There was no such tank, the eighty-five centimeters, or thirty-four inches, said to be the size of her neck. With a neck like that, it was said that she was worth two 152-millimeter howitzers. Just let her loose in the Thirty-first’s spearhead and let her run at tanks. It would be the end of the Americans.
It wasn’t funny to Nefski. In his late fifties, his sexual appetite hadn’t abated, but his wife’s had. She had become more interested, it seemed, in the Japanese and Chinese delicacies that he had been able to “acquire” from ship’s captains whose vessels had docked at Vladivostok. He had thought of using the promise of the expensive clothes and other bric-a-brac he could weasel or threaten from the merchantmen of the ports in his old jurisdiction, and it might have bought him her favor. But she was so enormous, so off-putting, he had ceased trying, encouraging the worst of the rumors he’d overheard, namely that he couldn’t do it anymore because he’d lost it — that search parties had failed to find it in her taiga.
Nefski’s face reddened at the very thought of the humiliation he was suffering. No one, of course, would dare hint at his nickname of “Limp Dick” to his face. If they had, he would have had them shot on “corruption” charges — he had enough evidence among his “forbidden imports.” Or he could have sent them to one of the perms, the far-flung Siberian labor camps that had been reopened after Gorbachev’s idiot regime.
He drew heavily on his Winston, the thought of having his detractors put in a shizo, the four-by-eight punishment cell, more and more appealing. No blankets, with a hard fir plank for a bed and the steel-grated light that was left on twenty-four hours a day. If they broke the forty-watt bulb — another month. Then let them joke about Colonel “Limp Dick.” He felt his erection throbbing. Like him and the corporal, the Jewess was perspiring heavily in the overheated room, her sackcloth prison dress sticking to her like wet brown paper, her nipples tantalizingly outlined but not clearly visible, sweat trickling down the alabaster whiteness of her throat, disappearing between her breasts, her dress also clinging to her thighs. The comparison between her and his wife was like that between two entirely different species. “Whom,” he asked her quietly, “did you give the photographs to at Irkutsk?” He was staring at her, the bluish-gray cigarette smoke wafting idly above him before being caught in the sultry currents of the stuffy room.
“What photos?” she shot back innocently.
“Not their actual name,” he said amicably. “I don’t expect that. A description of who it was. Man? Woman? How old?”
“I don’t know anything about photographs.”
Nefski indicated the small, narrow, black bench by the door, where overdue borrowers of state-approved books had once sat obediently before being summoned by the librarian to give good reasons why they should not be fined. “Tie her down,” he told the corporal. “On her back.”
She sat up rigidly, the hatred in her eyes shot through with fear.
Nefski called in two more guards. It was astonishing how strong even half-starved prisoners were when their fear overtook them. Besides his subaltern needing help, Nefski reasoned that with three other men as witnesses, it would put an end to Colonel “Limp Dick” talk.
She fought violently as they tussled with her. She didn’t scream, not once, but was huffing and puffing like a dumb animal who knew instinctively it was destined for the chopping block.
“No,” said Nefski, “leave her head free.” He would pull her long, black hair down behind her with one hand, kissing her neck and squeezing her breasts with the other. Suck them.
After they tied her down, her breathing became even more rapid as she made futile attempts to loosen the binding tape. Nefski took the long pair of scissors from a plastic stand on the blotter and, walking over, straddled the bench. Looking down at her, he took the scissors and slit the dress open. The three other KGB men were fixed where they stood by her saturnine beauty, the subaltern so aroused he was squeezing his tongue hard between his nicotine-blackened teeth. Nefski tossed the scissors back on the desk, spat into his right hand, and wiped his hand between her legs, then did it again and again until he thought she would be wet enough. He undid his belt and unzipped his fly, letting his trousers fall down to the bench as he lowered himself onto her. She started to whimper, and he slapped her hard, snapped his fingers for one of the men’s handkerchiefs, and stuffed it in her mouth. As he entered her they saw her stiffen, but Nefski only pushed harder, and the subaltern, trembling with envy, saw his chief’s eyes close in ecstasy, one hand clasping one of her breasts, the other wrapped in her hair, jerking her head down hard on the bench.
After, breathless, exhausted, he stepped back, almost stumbling, telling the others it was their turn for sverkhurochnye chasy— “overtime.” It was a good joke, he thought, and, more importantly, it would assure their silence.
None of them knew the rape would change the course of the war.