The Bourne Sanction (46 page)

He looked down, saw that the hand he held out in front of him was trembling. Turning away, he pressed it against the wall, as if the cinder block could absorb his unreasoning terror.

He started as the sound of the door being unlocked ricocheted around the small space. In came one of the
NSA
zombies, with dead eyes and dead breath. He put down the tray of food and left without even glancing at Tyrone, all part of the second phase of the plan to break him down: make him think he didn’t exist.

He went over to the tray. As usual, his food consisted of cold oatmeal. It didn’t matter; he was hungry. Taking up the plastic spoon, he took a bite of the cereal. It was gummy, had no taste whatsoever. He almost gagged on the second bite because he was chewing on something other than oatmeal. Aware that his every move was monitored, he bent over, spit out the mouthful. Then he used the fork to paw open a folded piece of paper. There was something written on it. He bent over further to make out the letters.
DON’T
GIVE
UP, it read.

At first, Tyrone couldn’t believe his eyes. Then he read it again. After reading it a third time, he scooped the message up with another bite of oatmeal, chewed it all slowly and methodically, and swallowed.

Then he went over to the stainless-steel toilet, sat down on the edge, and wondered who had written that note and how he could communicate with him. It wasn’t until some time later that he realized this one brief message from outside his tiny cell had managed to restore the balance he’d lost. Inside his head, time resolved itself into normal seconds and minutes, and the blood began once again to circulate through his veins. Arkadin allowed Devra to drag him out of the bar before he could demolish it completely. Not that he cared about the thuggish patrons who sat in stupefied silence, watching the mayhem he wreaked as if it were a TV show, but he was mindful of the cops who had a significant presence in this trashy neighborhood. During the time they’d been in the bar he’d noticed three police cruisers pass slowly by on the street. They drove through the sunshine down littered streets. He heard dogs barking, voices shouting. He was grateful for the heat of her hip and shoulder against him. Her presence grounded him, wrestled his rage back down to a manageable level. He hugged her more tightly to him, his mind returning with feverish intensity to his past. For Arkadin, the ninth level of hell began innocently enough with Stas Kuzin’s confirmation that his business came from prostitution and drugs. Easy money, Arkadin thought, immediately lulled into a false sense of security.

At first, his role was as simple as it was clearly defined: He’d provide the space in his buildings to expand Kuzin’s brothel empire. This Arkadin did with his usual efficiency. Nothing could have been simpler, and for several months as the rubles rolled in he congratulated himself on making a lucrative business deal. Plus, his association with Kuzin brought him a boatload of perks, from free drinks at the local pubs to free sessions with Kuzin’s ever-expanding ring of teenage girls.

But it was this very thing-the young prostitutes-that became Arkadin’s slippery slope into hell’s lowest level. When he stayed away from the brothels, or made his cursory weekly checkups to ensure the apartments weren’t being trashed, it was easy to turn a blind eye on what was really going on. He was mostly too busy counting his money. However, on those occasions when he availed himself of a freebie or two, it was impossible not to notice how young the girls were, how afraid they were, how bruised their thin arms were, how hollow their eyes, and, all too often, how drugged up most of them were. It was like Zombie Nation in there.

All of this might have passed Arkadin by with a minimum of speculation had he not developed a liking for one of them. Yelena was a girl with wide lips, skin as pale as snow, and eyes that burned like a coal fire. She had a quick smile and, unlike some of the other girls, she wasn’t prone to bursting into tears for no apparent reason. She laughed at his jokes, she lay with him afterward, her face buried in his chest. He liked the feel of her in his arms. Her warmth seeped into him like fine vodka, and he grew used to how she found just the right position so that the curves of her body meshed perfectly with his. He could fall asleep in her arms, which for him was something of a miracle. He couldn’t remember when he’d last slept through the night.

About this time, Kuzin called him into a meeting, told him he was doing so well he wanted to increase his partnership stake with Arkadin.

“Of course, I’ll need you to play a more active role,” Kuzin said in his semi-intelligible voice. “Business is so good that what I need most now is more girls. That’s where you come in.”

Kuzin made Arkadin the head of a crew whose sole purpose was to solicit teenage girls from the populace of Nizhny Tagil. This Arkadin did with his usual frightening efficiency. His visits to Yelena’s bed were as plentiful but not as idyllic. She had grown afraid, she told him, of the disappearances of some of the girls. One day she saw them; the next they had vanished as if they’d never existed. No one spoke of them, no one answered her questions when she asked where they’d gone. In the main, Arkadin dismissed her fears-after all, the girls were young, weren’t they leaving all the time? But Yelena was certain the girls’ disappearances had nothing to do with them and everything to do with Stas Kuzin. No matter what he said, her fears did not subside until he promised to protect her, to make sure nothing happened to her.

After six months Kuzin took him aside.

“You’re doing a great job.” A mixture of vodka and cocaine slurred Kuzin’s voice even further. “But I need more.”

They were in one of the brothels, which to Arkadin’s practiced eye looked oddly underpopulated. “Where are all the girls?” he asked.

Kuzin waved an arm. “Gone, run away, who the fuck knows where? These bitches get a bit of money in their pocket, they’re off like rabbits.”

Ever the pragmatist, Arkadin said, “I’ll take my crew and go find them.”

“A waste of time.” Kuzin’s little head bobbled on his shoulders. “Just find me more.”

“It’s getting difficult,” Arkadin pointed out. “Some of the girls are scared; they don’t want to come with us.”

“Take them anyway.”

Arkadin frowned. “I don’t follow you.”

“Okay, moron, I’ll lay it out for you. Take your fucking crew in the fucking van and snatch the bitches off the street.”

“You’re talking about kidnapping.”

Kuzin laughed. “Fuck me, he gets it!”

“What about the cops.”

Kuzin laughed even harder. “The cops are in my pocket. And even if they weren’t, d’you think they get paid to work? They don’t give a rat’s ass.”

For the next three weeks Arkadin and his crew worked the night shift, delivering girls to the brothel, whether or not they wanted to come. These girls were sullen, often belligerent, until Kuzin took them into a back room, where none of them ever wanted to go a second time. Kuzin didn’t mess with their faces, as that would be bad for business; only their arms and legs were bruised.

Arkadin watched this controlled violence as if through the wrong end of a telescope. He knew it was happening, but he pretended it had nothing to do with him. He continued to count his money, which was now piling up at a more rapid clip. It was his money and Yelena that kept him warm at night. Each time he was with her, he checked her arms and legs for bruises. When he made her promise not to take drugs, she laughed, “Leonid Danilovich, who has money for drugs?”

He smiled at this, knowing what she meant. In fact, she had more money than all the other girls in the brothel combined. He knew this because he was the one who gave it to her.

“Get yourself a new dress, a new pair of shoes,” he’d tell her, but frugal girl that she was, she’d merely smile and kiss him on the cheek with great affection. She was right, he realized, not to do anything to call attention to herself.

One night, not long after, Kuzin accosted him as he was leaving Yelena’s room.

“I have an urgent problem and I need your help,” the freak said. Arkadin went with him out of the apartment building. A large van was waiting on the street, its engine running. Kuzin climbed into the back, and Arkadin followed. Two of the brothel girls were being guarded by Kuzin’s pair of personal ghouls.

“They tried to escape,” Kuzin said. “We just caught them.”

“They need to be taught a lesson,” Arkadin said, because he assumed that was what his partner wanted him to say.

“Too fucking late for that.” Kuzin signaled to the driver, and the van took off. Arkadin settled back on the seat, wondering where they were going. He kept his mouth shut, knowing that if he asked questions now he’d look like a fool. Thirty minutes later the van slowed, turned off onto an unpaved road. For the next several minutes they jounced along a rutted track that must have been very narrow because branches kept scraping against the sides of the van.

At length, they stopped, the doors opened, and everyone clambered out. The night was very dark, illuminated only by the headlights of the van, but in the distance the fire of the smelters was like blood in the sky or, rather, on the undersides of the belching miasma churned out by hundreds of smokestacks. No one saw the sky in Nizhny Tagil, and when it snowed the flakes turned gray or even sometimes black as they passed through the industrial murk.

Arkadin followed along with Kuzin as the two ghouls pushed the girls through the thick, weedy underbrush. The resiny scent of pine perfumed the air so strongly, it almost masked the appalling stench of decomposition.

A hundred yards in the ghouls pulled back on the collars of the girls’s coats, reining them in. Kuzin took out his gun and shot one of the girls in the back of the head. She pitched forward into a bed of dead leaves. The other girl screamed, squirming within the ghoul’s grasp, desperate to run.

Then Kuzin turned to Arkadin, placed the gun in his hand. “When you pull the trigger,” he said, “we become equal partners.”

There was something in Kuzin’s eyes that at this close range gave Arkadin the shivers. It seemed to him that Kuzin’s eyes were smiling in the way the devil smiled, without warmth, without humanity, because the pleasure that animated the smile was of an evil and perverted nature. It was at this precise moment that Arkadin thought of the prisons ringing Nizhny Tagil, because he now knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was locked within his own private prison, with no idea if there was a key, let alone how to use it.

The gun-an old Luger with the Nazi swastika imprinted on it-was greasy with Kuzin’s excitement. Arkadin raised it to the height of the girl’s head. She was whimpering and crying. Arkadin had done many things in his young life, some of them unforgivable, but he’d never shot a girl in cold blood. And yet now, in order to prosper, in order to survive the prison of Nizhny Tagil, this was what he had to do.

He was aware of Kuzin’s avid eyes boring into him, red as the fire of Nizhny Tagil’s foundries themselves, and then he felt the muzzle of a gun at the nape of his neck and knew that the driver was standing behind him, no doubt on Kuzin’s orders.

“Do it,” Kuzin said softly, “because one way or another in the next ten seconds someone’s going to fire his gun.”

Arkadin aimed the Luger. The shout of the report echoed on and on through the deep and forbidding forest, and the girl slid along the leaves, into the pit with her friend.

THE
SOUND
of the bolt being thrown on the 8mm Mauser K98 rifle echoed through the Dachau air raid bunker. That was the end of it, however.

“Damn!” Old Pelz groaned. “I forgot to load the thing!”

Petra took out her handgun, pointed it in the air, and squeezed the trigger. Because the result was the same as what had happened to him, Old Pelz threw down the K98.

“Scheisse!” he said, clearly disgusted.

She approached him then. “Herr Pelz,” she said gently, “as I said, my name is Petra. Do you remember me?”

The old man stopped muttering, peered at her carefully. “You do look an awful lot like a Petra-Alexandra I once knew.”

“Petra-Alexandra.” She laughed and kissed him on the cheek. “Yes, yes, that’s me!”

He recoiled a little, put a hand on his cheek where she’d planted her lips. Then, skeptical to the end, he looked past her at Bourne. “Who’s this Nazi bastard? Did he force you to come here?” His hands curled into fists. “I’ll box his ears for him!”

“No, Herr Pelz, this is a friend of mine. He’s Russian.” She used the name Bourne had given her, which was on the passport Boris Karpov had provided.

“Russians’re no better than Nazis in my book,” the old man said sourly.

“Actually, I’m an American traveling under a Russian passport.” Bourne said this first in English and then in German.

“You speak English very well, for a Russian,” Old Pelz said in excellent English. Then he laughed, showing teeth yellowed by time and tobacco. At the sight of an American, he seemed to perk up, as if coming out of a decades-long drowse. This was the way he was, a rabbit being drawn out of a hat, only to withdraw again into the shadows. He wasn’t mad, just living both in the drab present and in the vivid past. “I embraced the Americans when they liberated us from tyranny,” he continued proudly. “In my time I helped them root out the Nazis and the Nazi sympathizers pretending to be good Germans.” He spat out the last words, as if he couldn’t stand to have them in his mouth.

“Then what are you doing here?” Bourne said. “Don’t you have a home to go to?”

“Sure I do.” Old Pelz smacked his lips, as if he could taste the life of his younger self.

“In fact, I have a very nice house in Dachau. It’s blue and white, with flowers all around a picket fence. A cherry tree stands in back, spreading its wings in summer. The house is rented out to a fine young couple with two strapping children, who send their rent check like clockwork to my nephew in Leipzig. He’s a big-shot lawyer, you know.”

“Herr Pelz, I don’t understand,” Petra said. “Why not stay in your own home? This is no place to live.”

“The bunker is my health insurance.” The old man cocked a canny eye her way. “Do you have any idea what would happen to me if I went back to my house? They’d spirit me away in the night, and that’s the last anyone would ever see of me.”