People Who Walk In Darkness

and waited.

An hour later, the policeman led all three of his prisoners into the stone shack that served as the local police station. The shack, with temporary cells in the rear, was at least a century old. Not a single renovation had ever been done.

It was not the policeman’s job to talk to the prisoners. He was just there to catch them, turn them in, and go home while the KGB decided what to do with traitors to the Revolution.

And then, within an hour after he had caught the thieves, she appeared.

The policeman did not know how the woman found it. Somehow people knew. Someone would see an arrest taking place or hear a name mentioned by a clerk who worked in Petrovka, or a talkative young jail guard. No matter. She found out.

She was pretty, with healthy country skin and corn blond hair. She had been sitting, waiting, worried about her husband, the man who had tripped over the coil of wire, when she had found out what happened.

Relatives were not allowed into the police station. This was a place of little hope and the province of those who had learned indifference.

She confronted him when he stepped out of the police station into the early morning light. “What has happened to my husband?”

And that was how it had begun.

The policeman never denied to himself, and he could not hide it from his wife, that if ever he were to suffer a downfall, it would be because of a woman or women. He could not help it. In spite of his less-than-handsome features and bulky frame, there was something comforting about him, something sad and peaceful. He recognized this and let it happen.

And that was how it had happened this time.

Her name was Klara. She was a Pole. She did not love her husband, never had, but he had promised the pretty young girl security and love. He had delivered neither. It was not that he did not want to. He was simply incapable of doing more than being a full-time laborer and a part-time thief.

Klara worked in a glass factory, in terrible heat, for little pay. Now her husband was in jail. That would end his income. She might have to go back to Poland, to a family that did not want her and could not afford to have her.

So the policeman and the factory girl became lovers. It lasted for five months. Her husband went to a Gulag. The policeman helped her even though he had little money and a family of his own.

And then she became pregnant.

And that was how Fyodor Andreiovich Rostnikov, half brother of Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, was born.

James sat at the table, a blue metal cup of stale, cold coffee in front of him with a dent in its lip. On the side of the cup was an emblem. It looked a little like a coat of arms. He was curious, but not enough to ask Vladimir Kolokov, who sat across from him.

The table was planked wood with rickety legs. Every time James lifted his heavy arms or dropped them back on the planks, the legs of the table rattled against the uncovered concrete of the floor.

“Tell me,” said Kolokov, examining him, “are you smart?”

Wanting to stay alive and hoping for an opportunity to escape before the day of the exchange, James calculated and easily came to the conclusion that he should say, “I’m very smart.”

Kolokov grinned. It was the right answer. A moderately clever man would have said that he was dumb, stupid, perhaps the most densely stupid creature that ever placed foot inside of Russia. A truly smart man would realize, as James did, that the possible path to some hope of survival lay in pretending to be a fool who thought himself smart. James had learned well from his six years working with these strange people, the Russians.

“Very smart,” Kolokov repeated, looking at the bald man, named Pau, who was the only other person in the very dark, windowless room.

An incongruous floor lamp, heavy wrought iron with elaborate glass panels, provided illumination and something at which to glance.

“The clothes fit you,” said Kolokov.

James looked down at the shirt he was wearing. One of the other Kolokov men, Bogdan or Alek, had given James these clothes, told him to strip and dress. The rough, warm, long-sleeved khaki shirt did fit, as did the badly faded jeans whose legs had to be rolled up. He had been given no belt.

James ached. His face, neck, head, arms, body, and legs all ached in various degrees of pain that worsened when he moved. James used two hands to drink from the blue metal cup.

“You understand that I had to kill your friends?”

James nodded.

“And I’ll have to kill you if you lie to me?”

James didn’t respond.

“That was a question.”

James nodded. And then he decided. There was really no hope in playing the fool. There might be something for him in engaging the man in conversation, flattering him. What he would really have liked to do was throw the remaining coffee in the Russian’s white, smirking face and then shove the cup in a sharp thrust against his nose. That would have been suicidal, but that’s what he wanted to do. Instead, he said, “Why did you need to kill them?”

Kolokov’s mouth opened slightly, and then closed as he smiled. The black man had said this in perfect Russian, and had said it without a trace of the fool.

“I need two things,” said Kolokov. “I need to feel danger, physical, immediate danger, for me or for others created by me.”

“It’s a need?” asked James calmly.

“A need,” Kolokov said. “I am definitely a borderline psychopath. At least that is what the psychiatrist at the prison said before I gouged her eyes out.”

“You didn’t gouge her eyes out,” said James.

Kolokov regarded his prisoner very seriously now.

“No, I did not, but I wanted to. The way you want to gouge my eyes out right now. Calling me a psychopath gives my actions a name, but a label explains nothing.”

Kolokov leaned back, reached into his shirt pocket, removed a package of American cigarettes, put them on the table, and didn’t open them.

“You smoke?”

“No,” said James.

“Suit yourself.”

Kolokov opened the package, removed a cigarette, and lit it.

“You need money,” James said.

“I’ll amend that. I want money. I want to be rich. I want things. I want people to do things to, to do things for. I want a very big bathtub with constant hot water, steaming water, clear, clean water.”

“Women?” asked James.

“When I want them.”

“Yes.”

“You understand all this?”

“Yes,” said James, forcing a smile with bruised puffed lips.

James was thinking of a home and family he would probably never see again. Well, that was premature. Kolokov leaned forward across the table and whispered, “I’m surrounded by fools. That doesn’t mean I’d want someone like you with me. Too smart. Can’t trust people like you, but I do like matching wits with them.”

“Honduras,” came the voice of the bald man.

Kolokov turned toward him and said, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Honduras,” the man repeated.

“Does something go with that observation?” asked Kolokov.

“Remember Honduras,” said the bald man.