Death Is My Comrade by Stephen Marlowe

Author:Stephen Marlowe [Marlowe, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gold Medal
Published: 1960-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

The building brooded over a low hill not far from the center of Moscow. They took me there in the police van that arrived five minutes later. The street might have been Lubianka Street; the hill, Lubianka Hill; the squat, fortress-like building, Lubianka Prison. I don’t know. Nobody told me.

Three of them kept me company in the rear of the van. One was the militiaman I’d hit with the machine pistol. He held a handkerchief to his face. He stared at me steadily, his eyes like chips of stone.

The van rolled through a gate, the gate clanged shut behind us, and we came to a stop in the courtyard of the building that might have been Lubianka Prison. The wire-mesh rear doors of the van opened. One of the militiamen climbed down. The second motioned to me with his machine pistol. The one with the handkerchief stood behind me. As I started to climb down, something struck my back. I landed on my hands and knees on the cobblestones. The militiaman with the handkerchief came down cat-quick and kicked me, his heavy boot catching the right side of my rib cage. I rolled over. One of the other militiamen said something. I got back to my feet and they marched me inside the building.

Two of them waited with me in a damp, stone-walled room on the lower floor of the building. There was a single small window, high up, with three vertical bars. There were three chairs, and a wooden table with a telephone on it. A large portrait of Lenin hung above the table.

They examined my passport and visa there, and did not return them. The phone rang and one of them answered it. He spoke briefly and gravely, then hung up and left the room with my papers.

“Hold it,” I said, not very earnestly. I took a step after him. The other one motioned me to a chair with his machine pistol. I sat down.

Time dragged itself by like a gut-shot animal.

At one o’clock I went to the window and looked out at darkness, wondering how soon it would be light. There was very little night in Moscow in June. At twenty after one the phone rang again. My guard picked it up, said “Da” three times and hung up. At one-thirty I heard footsteps outside.

The door opened. The man who opened it filled the doorway, head not quite brushing the ceiling, shoulders just missing the doorjamb on either side. He was Boris. He stepped aside. Comrade Plekhanov shuffled apologetically into the room. He was wearing a blue serge suit this time, as ill-fitting as the gray one. He had my passport in one hand and a file folder in the other. He sat down behind the table. He looked like an apologetic basset hound.

Boris, standing with his back to the door, looked like the door.

“Mr. Drum,” Comrade Plekhanov said, “what am I going to do with you?”

“You can start by giving me back my passport,” I suggested hopefully.

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