“Tchiterine, it’s pointless to resist. You’ll sign the confession either here or in the Lubyanka. You’ll go on trial. You’ll be found guilty. You’ll die. Your generation must pass on now. That’s what history has written.”
The old man’s face had been greatly damaged by the punishment. It looked like a piece of mashed fruit, swollen and bruised and caked in blood. The blood was everywhere. He croaked something through his swollen lips.
“Eh?” asked Glasanov.
“Fuck Koba,” said Tchiterine, somehow, and Comrade Bolodin hit him a cruel, powerful blow in the side. Of the many, this was perhaps the most devastating, for it ruptured the old man’s appendix. In his bounds, Tchiterine commenced to struggle as the pain and numbness rocketed through him. In time he lapsed into a waxen coma. His breathing was imperceptible.
“You hit him too much. Your zeal gets the best of you. Discipline. Remember, above all, discipline. Strength, passion, commitment, they are all fine and absolutely necessary. The great Stalin, however, says that in discipline lies the key to the future.”
“I apologize, comrade.”
“You Americans,” Comrade Glasanov said.
Comrade Bolodin’s true name was Lenny Mink, and his last fixed address had been 1351 Cypress Avenue in the Williamsburgh section of Brooklyn, but he was to be found more frequently at Midnight Rose’s, a candy store at Livonia and Saratoga streets, that served as the unofficial headquarters for his company, which went by the name Murder, Inc. He had left New York at the urging of certain parties, as police curiosity concerning his involvement with the deaths by shooting, bludgeoning, ice picking, and drowning of several witnesses due to deliver evidence against Lepke Buchalter had reached embarrassing proportions. Lenny, like his peers Pittsburgh Phil, Gangy Cohen, Pretty Levine, Jack Drucker, and his bosses Mendy Weiss, Dandy Phil Kastel, and Bugsy Siegel, killed people for two reasons: because he was good at it and because he was paid for it.
“Well, he’ll be out all night,” said Glasanov. “Get him back to his cell. Wash him off, clean him up. Get him some brandy. We’ll work on him some more tomorrow.”
“Yes, comrade,” said Lenny Mink, still in Russian.
“Tough old fellow,” said Glasanov. “They had to be in those days. He’s right, you know, what they did was extraordinary. Fighting the Okrana and the Cossacks and later the western armies and Kolchak. My God, they were tough.”
Lenny looked at the old guy. Yeah, tough. Tougher than any nigger, and when he was young, Lenny had fought a nigger for almost an hour down by the docks until both men had been too exhausted to continue and nobody took the kitty. Later, some whore used a razor on the guy.
“Be careful with him, now. Comrade Koba wants him back in Moscow, understand?”
“Yes, comrade.” Lenny kept his Russian simple and polite.
“I’ll be in my office. Wake me if anything occurs.”
Lenny, alone with the old man, reached into his pocket and removed a switchblade, popped it, and cut the bonds. The body fell; he caught it. Tchiterine had once been an important man, the Comintern agent in charge of imposing Party demands on the often unruly dockworkers’ unions in the port of Barcelona. Now look at him.
Lenny, six-three and well over two hundred pounds, had no trouble getting the old guy up in his arms. The American had a blunt, sullen, nearly handsome face, though it was pocked. He seemed to carry his big bones slowly and had a kind of cold force to him ? he liked to hurt people and people understood this of him almost instinctively, and tended to become uncomfortable in his presence, an effect he enjoyed. He had always had it. In fact, in his youth, in the Diaspora before he had come to America, his shtetl nickname had been “Cossack,” after the rumor that he’d been begotten, not by his nominal father, a butcher, but by a Russian raider in a pogrom.
He rarely spoke. He appeared to listen intently. People often considered him stupid, which was a mistake. He simply wasn’t clever with words, although he spoke imperfect versions of English and Russian, having learned the latter during a two-thousand-mile walk from Minsk to Odessa when he was eleven years old, a remarkable journey. He had made the trip on his own, after another pogrom, the one in which his mother and father and all his brothers and sisters had been killed. His best language was Yiddish, the language of his boyhood, although he was picking up Spanish rapidly. When he had presented himself at the International Brigade clearinghouse in Paris, in hopes of finding suitable employment in the natural venue for a man of his profession ? a war ? the NKVD had scooped him up. The NKVD had plans for Barcelona, and Lenny looked to be the perfect instrument.
He took old Tchiterine’s body into the harsh light of the newly wired bulbs and down the empty corridor of the prison, which at one time had been the novitiate’s wing of the Convent of St. Ursula. The place had been vandalized, as had all Church properties in the first crazed days of the July Revolution, and rioters had smashed everything and painted slogans everywhere. Shards of broken glass still lay on the floor. Yet the place also had a sense of newness to it; recently occupied by elements of the NKVD, which clearly needed both privacy and security, it had been painted roughly, rewired for electricity, patched, and repaired. It smelled of paint and new wood and also of piss and despair.
Lenny reached Tchiterine’s cell and set him on the bed. The old man breathed roughly. His swelling completely disfigured his face. Lenny covered his nakedness with a blanket. He went to a bucket, brought it over, and wet his handkerchief. He began to wipe the dried blood off the face. He’d really gone a little nuts there ? a problem of his. Sometimes he couldn’t hold on to himself. He just liked the way it felt when he hit people. Discipline, this Russian boss was always saying. Discipline was the secret of history. He actually believed that shit.
The old man moaned suddenly.
Lenny jumped.
“Ya!” he yelped in Yiddish. “You scared me, old man.”
One yellow eye came open. The other was swollen shut.
“You old
“I don’t feel so good in my gut,” he said.
“What’d you expect, from the smashing you got?”
“Help me,” the old man said then. “I can pay you.”
“Pay what? You got a treasure stuck up your old asshole? You’re making me laugh, you old putz.”
Lenny stood to leave. The old man looked like one of those bums you find on Seventh Avenue after the Harlem niggers got done rolling him: all beat to shit, beat to craziness, not good for nothing. Naked, shivering, in the straw, his face punched to shit. It made Lenny sick. He was so big once, this old man, and now look at him.
The old man fought to get a word out. It came in a whisper, racked and hoarse.
“Whaaaa?” said Lenny.
Lenny bent. Maybe the old guy had a stash somewhere.
The old man’s feeble hand flew up to Lenny’s shoulder. It felt like a perched bird.
“Save me, nu? Save an old Jew?”
“How much? Talk a figure.”
“Lots. Would I lie?”
“Everybody lies.”
“Where, up your asshole?”
“Gold, by the ton.”
“A ton of gold. In a mountain somewhere, no? Old putz, talking dreams.”
Lenny had an urge to kill him. Put the thumb to his throat, press it in; he’d be history in a second.
“In 1931, me, Lemontov, Levitsky, we worked in England as spies.”
“It’s old business.”
“Listen. Listen.”
“So fucking talk.”
“Levitsky found a student at a fancy university.”
