The Breath of Suspension (36 page)

Solomon stared at him in horror, for this man was older than he was himself, not at all the young man who had trapped him on the
Dagmar
of Lübeck. Tarkin’s once-red hair was white, and stood out in all directions. Solomon grabbed his hand roughly. Despite his sedation, Tarkin winced. “Where did you get this, Andy?” The gold ring on Tarkin’s finger was a convenient focus for his rage.

Tarkin grinned weakly, but with triumph. “You don’t really want to know. Believe me, you don’t.”

“I’m tired of people telling me what I don’t want to know,” Solomon said, injecting Tempedrine into Tarkin’s carotid artery along with a synaptic impeder, to lower temporal inertia. It was hard to haul someone else through Time, impossible if they were not properly conditioned. The human mind, the only device capable of traveling through Time, tends to want to stay in its own time.

They left together, as if they were old friends, Solomon laughing and singing, Tarkin limp, stumbling. “Too much to drink, Billy,” Solomon said for the benefit of the others in the bar, who paid no attention. “I told you, but you just wouldn’t listen... time to go home.”

“Time,” Tarkin muttered. “Time.”

The back alley was a good place to leave from. A few prostrate bodies were scattered here and there, drunk or drugged, of no more account than the lampposts or the complaining cats. Solomon lowered Tarkin to the ground.

“Ssso how’s th-the sailor?” Tarkin said, slurring. “I gave up trying to kill you after the
Dagmar
, you know. I figured you’d come to me, in the end. I was right.” He dropped his head suddenly to the bricks of the alley with a hollow crack. Solomon checked his skull. He hadn’t fractured it, but there would be a big bump tomorrow. What was Russian for “bump”? The language came hard now, but soon it would be almost impossible to speak or think anything else. Ah, yes.
Shishka.
That would do as well as anything.

“Now let’s find a few things out,” Solomon said. He whispered the words of release, and the alley was empty.

Colonel Fedoseyev leaned forward in his chair, resting his chin on his hands, and stared at prisoner Shishkin with loathing. It was only the fourth day of the interrogation, but he was already bone-tired. Must be getting old. He’d once been able to run a seven-day conveyor almost single-handed, and now look at him. His eyes were gritty, and each breath took a conscious effort. Damn,
he
wasn’t the one sitting in the middle of the room on a hard wooden stool.

The cut-crystal decanter, carefully polished, filled the room with sparkles when he poured himself a glass of water. He didn’t want a drink, but the prisoner, fed on salty food and deprived of water, certainly did. Was he even watching? Fedoseyev forced himself to swallow the tepid flat liquid with every sign of satisfaction, smacking his lips. He felt bloated. He wanted to lie down and sleep a thousand years.

Water dribbled from the glass and made another dark spot on the tattered green baize of the desk, the color picked because it showed off gold. The Soviet State
needed
gold. “Let’s give it another try, shall we?” Fedoseyev said heavily. “The name of the jeweler, and his current whereabouts. Then you can have a drink of water and some sleep.” Sleep! “Just don’t give me any more
Arabian Nights
stuff. I’m not an idiot.”

Shishkin didn’t look as if he had heard. The parasite! He just sat there, babbling nonsense. Fedoseyev had heard whispers that they were raising desperately needed foreign exchange by selling Rembrandts from the Hermitage to the millionaires of the West. And bastards, greedy bastards everywhere, were hoarding gold. The word had come down through the OGPU, the secret police: get it! Get the gold. Sweat them! Squeeze them! The nation needs it! So Shishkin, his white hair sticking out in every direction, sat slumped in the interrogation room like some pale insect and tired Fedoseyev by telling him everything but what he wanted to know.

He pushed his chair back and walked around the desk. His boot heels clicked on the elaborate parquetry, now deeply scratched. The room had once been part of the Office of Textiles. Darker blue squares on the patterned wallpaper still showed where framed swatches had hung. Plaster cherubs, chipped and dusty, blew trumpets at the corners of the high ceiling.

It was a good one, no windup, no warning at all. The prisoner’s face jerked sideways and he gasped. The smack of the backhanded slap filled the room for an instant and was gone. Captain Solomonov, silent at his secretary’s desk with his pen, inkwell, and notebook, looked up from his writing, his lean high-cheekboned face carefully expressionless. There was a little blood at the corner of the prisoner’s mouth, just a bead.

Fedoseyev squatted, a huge bear of a man, took the prisoner’s hand, and stared him in the face. Shishkin looked back intently, like a stranger watching an unfamiliar game, failing to puzzle out the rules that governed its play. “Gold is not a solitary beast like an eagle.” Shishkin’s face tightened as Fedoseyev twisted his hand. “No. It is a herd animal. Like cows. Like sheep. So.” He twisted farther. “Where are this one’s brothers? And where is the shepherd?” The ring on the prisoner’s finger glinted up at him.

In spite of himself, Fedoseyev admired it for an instant. It was a snake biting its own tail, the shimmering intricacy of the pattern of scales definitely oriental. Its eyes were green jewels. No wonder the prisoner made up such fanciful stories. But it was gold, rich and heavy, and it was not more than a dozen years old, though it looked slightly melted, as if it had been through a hot fire.

Shishkin’s body began to shake, and he sobbed. “I’ve told you,” he whispered in his poor Russian. “It was made for me, to give to someone I loved. Long ago in... in—”

“In wondrous Araby?” Fedoseyev roared. “Scum! I’m tired of your fairy stories.” He turned and stared out of the window, running his hand over his shaven scalp. The Kremlin towers loomed to the left against the darkening sky. Decent red stars were only now replacing the Imperial two-headed eagles that had continued to top them for the dozen years since the Revolution. What the hell was wrong? The man had obviously broken completely. He eagerly babbled details, complete descriptions of the jeweler, his habits, his place of work. If his mother had made the ring, Shishkin would have turned her in. Why then was everything he said obvious nonsense? The ring was real. So, therefore, by logical operations Fedoseyev had forgotten since school but was sure still applied, was the jeweler. Only he sold earrings to the wives of Party officials and lived in some sober city in Soviet Central Asia, not Baghdad, or Aleppo, or whatever it was he claimed. Fedoseyev didn’t like interrogating lunatics.

He squinted over at Solomonov, who sat attentively, pen ready on paper. Solomonov had brought the prisoner in himself and seemed to cherish a particular interest in him, writing every detail of his impossible ravings down in his notebook. A personal concern, Fedoseyev thought, from the village in which they had both grown up, or from the Gymnasium. An officer in the OGPU was well placed to pay off old scores.

With sudden irritation Fedoseyev reached over, twisted the prisoner’s arm behind him, and removed the ring. It slipped off with surprising ease. When he released him, Shishkin slumped back onto his stool and stared off at nothing.

“The caravans leave Aleppo in the winter,” Shishkin said. “I saw it... the mosque of Jami Zakariyah gleamed blue. The man from Bukhara made her a ring of finest gold... I loved her, I thought he had burned her, he who had been my friend... I’ve guarded her for all these years.”

Shishkin had reached a state in which the term “interrogation” was meaningless, and Fedoseyev suddenly lost all interest in continuing. It was only 1930, after all. Fedoseyev and his kind were still moving inch by inch into savagery, like a man lowering himself into a hot bathtub. Ten years later such considerations would have seemed foolish, and Fedoseyev would have known that every interrogation was a torture session from start to finish, with information being an irrelevant by-product, but ten years later Fedoseyev would be lying in the gold fields of the Kolyma, frozen to death, having been arrested and interrogated in his turn.

He patted Shishkin on the back. “Had an old biddy in here the other day,” he said, confidingly. “Country girl, thought herself smart. Held on a day and a half, then gave it up. Smart girl. Hid it inside the privy.
Down
inside. A real mess. That’s capitalism for you. Two hundred counterfeit rubles, brass covered with gold. You should have heard her spit. The lice! The lice! You were right to shoot them!”’ He chuckled at the memory, stopped short.

He sat down at his desk, pulled out a sheet of paper, and signed it. Without a word he pushed it toward Shishkin, who, after a moment’s incomprehension, also signed it. It was thus that prisoner Shishkin found himself sentenced to ten years in the corrective labor camps, under Section 10: Anti-Soviet Agitation.

Fedoseyev tossed the ring into the air. It twirled and glittered, then vanished into his immense hand. Fedoseyev was fed up with the whole thing. He was a brutal man but not an acquisitive one, showing the selectivity of vices as well as virtues, so he tossed the ring to Solomonov, who, surprised, caught it clumsily.

“Take him downstairs,” Fedoseyev said. “He goes on the next transport.” He looked out of the window. Snow had started sifting down from the sky that afternoon, and the dimly seen roofs beneath the window were already blanketed in white.

Solomon saluted the OGPU colonel, who ignored this bit of military precision, and led Andy Tarkin out of the interrogation room. They walked through long halls lined with interrogation rooms and holding cells. Solomon whistled tunelessly and tried to ignore the presence of his prisoner, that antisovict parasite. It was good to be wearing the blue shoulder boards of the OGPU, watching officers of the Red Army act deferential, and full professors at Moscow University look frightened. It was good to be finally getting some respect... what the hell was he thinking? Solomonov...
Solomon
glanced over at the still-expressionless Tarkin and tried to control his thoughts. He thought about the three-day interrogation and wondered who the next criminal would be—no, dammit, he was
leaving
, not staying here in Moscow in 1930. He was going to Aleppo, to that time that the interrogation had revealed. Maybe there he could sort out his thoughts. Too much Tempedrine wasn’t good for you. It really wasn’t.

He led Tarkin down the broad stairs, brass rods attempting to hold down a long vanished carpet, and turned him over to the lieutenant at the desk, along with the paper with the sentence. He left him there to vanish into the empire of the corrective labor camps. He doubted that the elderly Shishkin would survive the first year of his ten-year sentence. Solomon strolled down the marble-floored hallway, turned a corner, and disappeared.

The lieutenant filled out the proper paperwork. Prisoner Shishkin was sent to a cell in Butyrki Prison. After a month in a cell with forty other prisoners, he was taken, at night, by Black Maria, to the Kaluga Gates Transit Prison on the outskirts of Moscow. After two weeks, he was put aboard a train heading east, toward his eventual destination, Sovetskaya Gavan, on the other side of the Soviet Union. The journey would take several months. The train was stopped on a siding near Irkutsk for a week and a half, and when they were ready to move again and mustered the prisoners in order to unload the bodies of those who had frozen in the unheated cars, no trace of prisoner Shishkin could be found. The other prisoners were beaten, but no one could even remember what Shishkin had looked like. The guards put their heads together, and prisoner Shishkin vanished from their records as thoroughly as he had succeeded in vanishing from the boxcar, and their time.

“Pull out my soul, O Lord,” Abdullah Ibn-Umar al-Bukhari whispered to himself as he drew the gold wire through the iron die, reducing its diameter yet again, “until I am infinitely long, and lost in thinness.” The wire was now the thickness of a grass stem, suitable for making earrings, but al-Bukhari was not planning to stop until it was barely less fine than human hair, for he had more delicate work in mind. “Step by step our fineness increases, but we never manage to approach Thee, O Allah.” With a sharp knife he shaved the first inch of wire, then put it into the next smaller hole on the die. He took the end in his tongs and pulled again. “Take the metal away, and we do not exist, but are of Thee, O Lord.” Muscles stood out in his bare shoulder and arm.

The world was a crystal that sang as it was stroked by the hand of Allah. Men cupped their ears, but heard nothing but whispers and echoes. As he worked, al-Bukhari heard ominous noises, the sounds of crashing waves, dying men. Echoes distort and transform, turning good into evil. The gleaming wire was a golden snake, writhing in agony, twisting itself around the sphere of the Earth until it could take its tail in its own jaws, starting flames with the rubbing of its belly. He smelled the acrid stink, tasted bitter gall at the back of his throat. He stopped pulling, and put his hands over his eyes. He felt the flames of burning and heard the screaming of a horse. A man’s soul was consumed by the flames, leaving ashes. It was bad this time. “O Lord, Thy visions tear like Greek lances through my heart.” And suddenly, all was clear, and the wire was wire, simple gold. He picked up the tongs and resumed his task.

“Excuse me.” At the front of al-Bukhari’s shop stood a tall man, with a strong jaw and high cheekbones, in the garb of a traveling merchant. His eyes glowed with pain and rage, of guilt and hatred unsatisfied, or so al-Bukhari imagined. He felt that the man had just come from committing a terrible act. Al-Bukhari’s first wife Fatima was a sensible woman who had often urged him to curb his fantastic visions. He always promised her, and always broke his promise. He could not explain to her that they came from outside their time, because he did not know this himself. Al-Bukhari felt a moment of fear, not for himself, but on the stranger’s account. The man carried a heavy load, and his soul wobbled, splay-footed, like a camel about to collapse. “I am called Suleiman Ibn-Mustar,” the stranger said. “May we speak?”