Legends

At some point the truck must have turned off the ring road onto a main artery because Martin could sense that it was caught in bumper to bumper traffic. Horns shrieked around them. When the truck swerved sharply, Martin could hear the screech of brakes and drivers shouting curses. The two jailers, their eyes fixed on the prisoner, seemed unfazed. After twenty or so minutes the truck descended a ramp—Martin could tell by the way the motor sounded that they were indoors—and then backed up before coming to a stop. The civilians threw open the rear doors and, gripping Martin under his armpits, hauled him onto a loading ramp and through swinging doors down a long corridor to a waiting freight elevator. The two grilled gates slid closed and the elevator started grinding noisily upward. The doors on the first five floors were sealed shut with metal bars welded across them. On the sixth floor the elevator jerked to a halt. Other civilians waiting outside tugged open the double gates and Martin, surrounded now by six men in civilian suits, was escorted to a holding room painted glossy white and saturated in bright light. The handcuffs were removed from his wrists, after which he was stripped to the skin and his clothing and his body were meticulously inspected by two male nurses wearing white overalls and latex gloves. An overripe doctor in a stained white smock with a cigarette bobbing on her lower lip and a stethoscope dangling from her neck came in to examine Martin’s eyes and ears and throat, then listened to his heart and took his blood pressure and probed his cracked ribs with the tips of her fingers, causing him to wince. As she went through the motions of checking his health, Martin was more distressed by his nakedness than his plight. He concentrated on her fingernails, which were painted a garish phosphorescent green. He caught the gist of a question she posed in Polish; she wanted to know if he had ever been hospitalized. Once, he replied in English, for a shrapnel wound in my lower back and a pinched nerve in my left leg, which still aches when I spend too much time on my feet. The doctor must have understood his response because she ran her fingers down the length of the back wound, then asked if he took any medication. From time to time an aspirin, he said. What do you do between aspirins? she asked. I live with the pain, he said. Nodding, the doctor noted his response and checked off items on a clipboard and signed and dated the form before handing it to one of the civilians. As she turned to leave, Martin asked if she was a generalist or a specialist. The woman smiled slightly. When I am not freelancing for the Service, I am a gynecologist, she said.

Martin was ordered to dress. One of the civilians led the prisoner to a door at the far end of the room and, opening it, stood aside. Martin shuffled into a larger room (once again the laces had been removed from his shoes, making it difficult to walk normally) filled with sturdy furniture, hand-me-downs, so he surmised, from the days when Stalin’s KGB ruled the roost in what was then called the Soviet Union. A short, husky middle-aged man wearing tinted eyeglasses presided from behind a monster of a desk. The man nodded toward the wooden chair facing the desk.

Martin gingerly lowered himself onto the seat. “Thirsty,” he said in Russian.

The interrogator snapped his fingers. A moment later a glass of water was set on the desk within reach of the prisoner. Holding it in both hands, he drank it off in several long gulps.

“I am a Canadian citizen,” Martin announced in English. “I insist on seeing someone from the Canadian embassy.”

Behind the desk, the civilian angled a very bright light into Martin’s eyes, forcing him to squint. A husky voice that was perfectly harmonious with the huskiness of the civilian drifted out of the blinding light. “You are voyaging under a passport that identifies you as Kafkor, Jozef,” the interrogator said in excellent English. “The passport purports to be Canadian, though it is, as you are no doubt aware, a forgery. The name on it is Polish. The Russian Federal Security Service has been eager to get its hands on you since your name first came to our attention. You are the Kafkor, Jozef, who was associated with Samat Ugor-Zhilov and his uncle, Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov, better known as the Oligarkh.”

“Is that a question?” Martin asked.