i ab1ba6804af0d568 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub

19

Gideon was numb with fear as the car crossed Red and Revolution squares, then climbed the hill toward Lubianka Square. His vision crumpled as five mountainous storeys of grey granite and three of yellow brick overshadowed the car, which turned through a side gate into Lubianka Prison.

His mind kept working. He thought remorsefully of his brother, whom he had not seen for almost ten years and whom he had not telephoned since 1935. Surely Samuil had understood that it was risky for them to be in contact? But where was he now?

Gideon remembered his brother at the mansion on Greater Maritime Street, in that study crammed with Edwardian bric-a-brac, clanking on his Trotting Chair. How could it be that he had ceased to exist?

Without even thinking, Gideon bowed his head and whispered the Kaddish for his brother, amazed he could even recall that old Jewish prayer for the dead…Facing death, one returns to childhood, to family. Gideon realized that he loved his daughter Mouche more than anyone in the world. Will Mouche understand me, remember me, after I get the seven grams in the back of the neck? he wondered. The pain in his chest was unbearable. He was almost weeping with fear.

“Here we are!” The young man smiled at Gideon. He did not treat Gideon like a prisoner.

On the contrary, a uniformed Chekist—as all secret policemen were known, in honor of Lenin’s “knights of the Revolution,” the Cheka—opened the door and helped him out of the car.

Well, I am a literary celebrity, Gideon thought, reviving a little. There was no tonic like fame.

He noticed the many Buicks and ZiSes parked there. This was not the courtyard where they brought new prisoners.

Gideon was guided through double wooden doors into a marble hall and then a wood-paneled corridor with a blue carpet runner along the middle. Officers in NKVD uniform, and secretaries, bustled about. It was like any other state office. Gideon was relieved they were not taking him to the Internal Prison but he kept searching his mind for the meaning of this summons. What had he written recently? What had he said? What was happening in Europe that could involve him? He was a Jew and they had just sacked Litvinov, the Foreign Commissar, and also a Jew. Were Jews going out of favor? Was the USSR moving closer to Hitler?

If I am going to die, have I fucked enough women? Gideon thought suddenly. Never enough! Heartburn pierced his chest and he gasped.

“This is my office,” said the young man, his pompadoured hair rising in a perfectly formed wave over his pink forehead. “I’m Investigator Mogilchuk of the Serious Cases Section, State Security. Are you all right? Here!” He offered Gideon a pillbox. “Nitroglycerin? You see, I was expecting you.”

Gideon swallowed two pills, and the pain in his chest diminished.

A busty freckled redhead with a slit up the side of her dress sat typing in the anteroom.

Even here his mind wandered up her skirt for that delicious first touch of the new…There were flowers on her desk.

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