wrapped tightly around his chest, realized that he must have at least one cracked rib.
“At last you have returned from the land of the dead. For a while there you had me worried.”
It was painful for Pyotr to turn his head. Every muscle in his body felt as if it were on fire. But his curiosity would not be denied, so he bit his lip, kept turning his head until a man came into view. He was rather small, stoop-shouldered. Glasses with round lenses were fitted over large, watery eyes. His bronzed scalp, lined and furrowed as pastureland, was without a single hair, but as if to make up for his bald pate his eyebrows were astonishingly thick, arching up over the skin above his eye sockets. He looked like one of those wily Turkish traders from the Levant.
“Semion Icoupov,” Pyotr said. He coughed. His mouth felt stiff, as if it were stuffed with cotton. He could taste the salt-copper of his own blood, and swallowed heavily.
Icoupov could have moved so that Pyotr didn’t have to twist his neck so far in order to keep him in view, but he didn’t. Instead he dropped his gaze to the sheet of heavy paper he’d unrolled. “You know, these architectural plans of my villa are so complete I’m learning things about the building I never knew before. For instance, there is a sub-basement below the cellar.” He ran his stubby forefinger along the surface of the plan. “I suppose it would take some doing to break into it now, but who knows, it might prove worthwhile.”
His head snapped up and he fixed Pyotr with his gaze. “For instance, it would make a perfect place for your incarceration. I’d be assured that not even my closest neighbor would hear you scream.” He smiled, a cue for a terrible focusing of his energies. “And you
Now Arkadin came into Pyotr’s field of view. At once he grabbed Pyotr’s head with one hand, dug into the hinge of his jaw with the other. Pyotr had no choice but to open his mouth. Arkadin checked his teeth one by one. Pyotr knew that he was looking for a false tooth filled with liquid cyanide. A death pill.
“All his,” Arkadin said as he let go of Pyotr.
“I’m curious,” Icoupov said. “How in the world did you procure these plans, Pyotr?”
Pyotr, waiting for the proverbial shoe to drop, said nothing. But all at once he began to shiver so violently his teeth chattered.
Icoupov signaled to Arkadin, who swaddled Pyotr’s upper body in a thick blanket. Icoupov brought a carved cherry chair to a position facing Pyotr, sat down on it.
He continued just as if he hadn’t expected an answer. “I must admit that shows a fair amount of initiative on your part. So the clever boy has grown into a clever young man.” Icoupov shrugged. “I’m hardly surprised. But listen to me now, I know who you really are-did you think you could fool me by continually changing your name? The truth of the matter is you’ve prodded open a wasp’s nest, so
He inclined his upper body toward Pyotr. “However much your father and I despise each other, we grew up together; once we were as close as brothers. So. Out of respect for him, I won’t lie to you, Pyotr. This bold foray of yours won’t end well. In fact, it was doomed from the start. And d’you want to know why? You needn’t answer; of course you do. Your earthly needs betrayed you, Pyotr. That delicious girl you’ve been bedding for the past six months belongs to me. I know you’re thinking that’s not possible. I know you vetted her thoroughly; that’s your MO. I anticipated all your inquiries; I made certain you received the answers you needed to hear.”
Pyotr, staring into Icoupov’s face, found his teeth chattering again, no matter how tightly he clamped his jaw.
“Tea, please, Philippe,” Icoupov said to an unseen person. Moments later, a slender young man set an English silver tea service onto a low table at Icoupov’s right hand. Like a favorite uncle, Icoupov went about pouring and sugaring the tea. He put the porcelain cup to Pyotr’s bluish lips, said, “Please drink, Pyotr. It’s for your own good.”
Pyotr stared implacably at him until Icoupov said, “Ah, yes, I see.” He sipped the tea from the cup himself to assure Pyotr it was only tea, then offered it again. The rim chattered against Pyotr’s teeth, but eventually Pyotr drank, slowly at first, then more avidly. When the tea was drained, Icoupov set the cup back on its matching saucer. By this time Pyotr’s shivering had subsided.
“Feeling better?”
“I’ll feel better,” Pyotr said, “when I get out of here.”
“Ah, well, I’m afraid that won’t be for some time,” Icoupov said. “If ever. Unless you tell me what I want to know.”
He hitched his chair closer; the benign uncle’s expression was now nowhere to be found. “You stole something that belongs to me,” he said. “I want it back.”
“It never belonged to you; you stole it first.”
Pyotr replied with such venom that Icoupov said, “You hate me as much as you love your father, this is your basic problem, Pyotr. You never learned that hate and love are essentially the same in that the person who loves is as easily manipulated as the person who hates.”
Pyotr screwed up his mouth, as if Icoupov’s words left a bitter taste in his mouth. “Anyway, it’s too late. The document is already on its way.”
Instantly, there was a change in Icoupov’s demeanor. His face became as closed as a fist. A certain tension lent his entire small body the aspect of a weapon about to be launched. “Where did you send it?”
Pyotr shrugged, but said nothing more.
Icoupov’s face turned dark with momentary rage. “Do you think I know nothing about the information and matйriel pipeline you have been refining for the past three years? It’s how you send information you stole from me back to your father, wherever he is.”
For the first time since he’d regained consciousness, Pyotr smiled. “If you knew anything important about the pipeline, you’d have rolled it up by now.”
At this Icoupov regained the icy control over his emotions.
“I told you talking to him would be useless,” Arkadin said from his position directly behind Pyotr’s chair.
“Nevertheless,” Icoupov said, “there are certain protocols that must be acknowledged. I’m not an animal.”
Pyotr snorted.
Icoupov eyed his prisoner. Sitting back, he fastidiously pulled up his trouser leg, crossed one leg over the other, laced his stubby fingers on his lower belly.
“I give you one last chance to continue this conversation.”
It was not until the silence was drawn out into an almost intolerable length that Icoupov raised his gaze to Arkadin.
“Pyotr, why are you doing this to me?” he said with a resigned tone. And then to Arkadin, “Begin.”
Though it cost him in pain and breath, Pyotr twisted as far as he was able, but he couldn’t see what Arkadin was doing. He heard the sound of implements on a metal cart being rolled across the carpet.
Pyotr turned back. “You don’t frighten me.”
“I don’t mean to frighten you, Pyotr,” Icoupov said. “I mean to hurt you, very, very badly.”
With a painful convulsion, Pyotr’s world contracted to the pinpoint of a star in the night sky. He was locked within the confines of his mind, but despite all his training, all his courage, he could not compartmentalize the pain. There was a hood over his head, drawn tight around his neck. This confinement magnified the pain a hundredfold because, despite his fearlessness, Pyotr was subject to claustrophobia. For someone who never went into caves, small spaces, or even underwater, the hood was the worst of all possible worlds. His senses could tell him that, in fact, he wasn’t confined at all, but his mind wouldn’t accept that input-it was in the full flight of panic. The pain Arkadin was inflicting on him was one thing, its magnification was quite another. Pyotr’s mind was spinning out of control. He felt a wildness enter him-the wolf caught in a trap that begins to frantically gnaw its leg off. But the mind was not a limb; he couldn’t gnaw it off.
Dimly, he heard someone asking him a question to which he knew the answer. He didn’t want to give the answer, but he knew he would because the voice told him the hood would come off if he answered. His crazed mind only knew it needed the hood off; it could no longer distinguish right from wrong, good from evil, lies from truth. It reacted to only one imperative: the need to survive. He tried to move his fingers, but in bending over him his interrogator must have been pressing down on them with the heels of his hands.
Pyotr couldn’t hang on any longer. He answered the question.
