Potboiler

The ride this time was more comfortable than it had been coming into East Zlabia. For one thing, the Lincoln’s trunk was roomier. Also, he wasn’t tied up or gagged. All the same, he had no idea who his rescuers were or where he was going. He decided to be positive and assume that the Americans had come to exfiltrate him. He bumped along. He felt the road deteriorating, as if they were headed into the countryside. He counted turns. He waited patiently. The ride went on and on. The stuffiness was like a scarf being drawn tight around his neck. He felt his brand-new suit becoming soaked with sweat. He felt the old familiar hysteria. He flailed and pounded the roof of the trunk.

The car slowed.

It stopped.

Doors opened.

The trunk swung open. Pfefferkorn blinked up at the two men in black. The blond man was holding a wad of cloth. There was also a third person. He must have been waiting in the backseat of the car when Pfefferkorn got in.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Hush,” Savory said.

The blond man pressed the cloth into Pfefferkorn’s face.

SIX

(Welcome [Back] to West Zlabia!)

90.

Pfefferkorn fought off his attackers in a series of fluid motions, landing blows to their solar plexuses that left them sinking to their knees, gasping for breath. He heard the satisfying crunch of bone as Lucian Savory’s bulbous forehead caved under a fearsome barrage of elbows and karate chops. He grabbed Savory around the neck and wrung him like a chicken on the eve of Yom Kippur. It felt wonderful. Savory turned five different shades of blue. It was beautiful. Pfefferkorn closed his eyes and reveled in the feel of the old man’s pulse fading beneath his fingers. He kept compressing Savory’s neck, smaller and smaller, until it seemed as though he had squeezed all the blood and bone and neck meat out of the way and was clutching empty skin. He opened his eyes. He was wringing his pillow wrathfully. All the stuffing had been forced out to the sides. He released it and fell back, panting.

His new cell was spartan and chilly. It was made of solid concrete, painted lint gray. He was lying on a mattress on the floor. The mattress was narrow and sharp with twigs. The blanket covering him was made of a coarse goathair. There was a formidable steel desk. There was a wooden desk chair. A drain was set into the floor near the toilet. There was no bidet. The ceiling was high. There were no windows. A fluorescent tube provided the light.

He kicked off the blanket. His custom-made suit was gone, replaced by thick woolen trousers and a scratchy T-shirt. Instead of his penny loafers he wore straw slippers. There was a leg cuff around his left ankle. It was connected to a heavy chain. The chain ran across the floor and attached at the other end to the foot of the desk.

“Sir, good morning.”

The man standing outside his cell was bald and sunken-cheeked. He wore an austere suit and steel-rimmed glasses, and his voice—clipped but clear, accented but precise—marked him as a man of worrisome efficiency. His eyes were black and cold, like twin camera lenses, or a chocolate-covered Eskimo. He bowed deeply.

“Sir, it is an honor to make your acquaintance,” Dragomir Zhulk, the dead prime minister of West Zlabia, said.

91.

“You are surprised. Sir, this is understandable. I, the individual, am dead, or so you have been led to believe. It would be surprising to most people, even a man of your powerful imaginative gifts. Sir, pertinent background information will ameliorate the expression of wonderment that I, the individual, observe in your face.”

Dragomir Zhulk’s version of events differed drastically from both Kliment Thithyich’s and the Americans’. According to Zhulk, the Party had been running the show all along. Everything that happened—from the publication of Blood Eyes to Pfefferkorn’s recent stint on death row—was designed either to advance Party aims or to underscore the inherent incompetence and inferiority of the capitalist system.

The Party, he said, had planted the assassination code in Blood Eyes, thus exploiting the capitalist system by tricking it into killing Kliment Thithyich, who after all was himself a tool of the capitalist system. That the assassination had failed proved nothing, because anything the capitalist system did must by definition fail, and so while the superficial objective—namely, Thithyich’s death—had not been achieved, the underlying ideological objective—namely, a demonstration of the inherent incompetence and inferiority of the capitalist system—had.

“QED,” Zhulk said.

Blood Night was also the Party’s handiwork. It contained a dummy code designed to disrupt the capitalist system’s transmission sequence, thereby creating confusion. The Party had then carried out the assassination of a man dressed up to look like Zhulk.