Legends

“It is a statement of fact,” the interrogator replied evenly. “According to our register, you met Samat Ugor-Zhilov shortly after arriving in Moscow to work for the Polish tourist bureau. You were taken by this same Samat Ugor-Zhilov to meet his uncle, who was living in the former Beria dacha in Prigorodnaia. In the four months that followed your initial visit to Prigorodnaia, you spent a great deal of time as a guest at the dacha, sometimes remaining there the entire week, other times going out for four-day weekends. The ostensible reason for the visits was that you were going to teach conversational Polish to Samat’s mother, who lived in the dacha. Your superiors at the Polish tourist bureau did not complain about your prolonged absences, which led us to conclude that the tourist bureau was a cover. You were obviously a Polish national, though we suspected you had spent part of your life abroad because our Polish speakers who listened to tapes of you talking with your coworkers in Moscow identified occasional lapses in grammar and antiquated vocabulary. You spoke Russian—I assume you still do—with a pronounced Polish accent, which suggested you had studied the Russian language from Polish teachers in Poland or abroad. So, gospodin Kafkor, were you working for Polish intelligence or were you employed, with or without the collaboration of the Poles, by a Western intelligence service?”

Martin said, “You are mistaking me for someone else. I swear to you I don’t remember any of the details you describe.”

The interrogator opened a dossier with a diagonal red stripe across the cover and began leafing through a thick stack of papers. After a moment he raised his eyes. “At some point your relationship with Samat and his uncle deteriorated. You disappeared from view for a period of six weeks. When you reappeared, you were unrecognizable. You had obviously been tortured and starved. Early one morning, while road workers were paving the seven kilometer spur that led from the main Moscow-Petersburg highway to the village of Prigorodnaia, two of the Oligarkh’s bodyguards escorted you across the Lesnia in a rowboat and prodded you up the incline to a crater that had been gouged in the spur by a steam shovel the previous day. You were stark naked. A large safety pin attached to a fragment of cardboard bearing the words The spy Kafkor had been passed through the flesh between your shoulder blades. And then, before the eyes of forty or so workers, you were buried alive in the crater—you were forced to lie in fetal position in the hole, which was roughly the size of a large tractor tire. Thick planks were wedged into place above you, after which the road workers were obliged to pave over the spot.”

Martin had the unnerving sensation that a motion picture he had seen and forgotten was being described to him. “More water,” he murmured.

Another glass of water was placed within reach and he drank it off. In a hoarse whisper Martin asked, “How can you know these things?”

The interrogator twisted the arm of the lamp so that the light played on the top of the desk. As the interrogator set out five blown-up photographs, Martin caught a glimpse of Kafkor’s Canadian passport, a wad of American dollars and British pounds, the picture postcard that he’d swiped from the door of the dacha in Prigorodnaia, along with his shoelaces. He scraped his chair closer to the desk and leaned over the photographs. They were all taken from a distance and enlarged, rendering them grainy and slightly out of focus. In the first photograph, an emaciated man, completely naked, with a matted beard and what looked like a crown of thorns on his head, could be seen stepping gingerly through the shallow slime onto dry land. Two guards in striped shirts followed behind him. In the next photograph, the naked man could be seen kneeling at the edge of a crater, looking over his shoulder, his eyes hollow with terror. The third photograph in the series showed a thin figure of a man with a long pinched face, a suit jacket draped cape-like over his shoulders, offering a cigarette to the condemned man. The fourth photograph caught a heavy set man with a shock of silver hair and dark glasses in the back of a limousine, staring over the tinted window open the width of a fist. In the last photograph, a steamroller was backing across the glistening tarmac, raising a soft fume. Workers leaning on rakes or shovels could be seen staring in horror at the scene of the execution.

“One of the workman on the road crew, the ironmonger in point of fact, was employed by our security services,” the interrogator said. “He had a camera hidden in the thermos in his lunch box. Do you recognize yourself in these photographs, gospodin Kafkor?”

A single word worked its way up from Martin’s parched throat. “Nyet.”