The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 40

I had slept, despite myself, and when I was shaken awake, my hand went instantly to my pocket, feeling for the gun, imagining guards, soldiers, retribution. Instead a bright-eyed man with an almost spherical face and a grin that twitched the ends of his tiny ears with its enthusiasm stood over me. “You wanted to go to Pietrok-112, comrade? I’ll take you!”

His price was extortionate; his means of transport an ex-Wehrmacht staff car. It takes a great deal to surprise me, but I stared at this thing in astonishment. The metal around the doors and fender was rusted to a crinkled orange, the seats a tangled mess of springs and stuffing, re-upholstered with the remnants of old blankets, but the Nazi emblem was still clearly visible on the front and sides, and as I gaped the young man beamed with pride and exclaimed, “My father killed two colonels and a major, and didn’t even damage the paintwork while doing it!” He stood by the car, illustrating the momentous deed. “Bham! Bham, bham! Soft-nosed revolver bullets, that’s what it took. Three shots, three corpses. My dad was blown up by a tank in Poland, but he left us the car. You want a ride?”

As vehicles went, it wasn’t the most discreet I could imagine, but it was operational and heading where I needed to go.

“Thank you,” I mumbled. “It’ll be something new.”

On the journey to Pietrok-112 I sat in silence, huddled against the tearing wind, and considered my next move. I had come this far, as much for curiosity as any coherent plan of what I’d do when I got there. It was clear that the authorities would be on the alert for me, and I had neither the equipment for a discreet entry nor, I suspected, the luck left in me to deceive my way inside. The question was therefore increasingly becoming, was I prepared to die for my answer? Death in some form seemed likely, considering my circumstances, and I’d far rather a quick and easy death than a prolonged bout of questioning in the Lubyanka. It felt like an insufferable waste of time to die so young in this life, with all the tedium it entailed, and I was absolutely determined that I would not die prior to acquiring as much information as I could about Vitali Karpenko and Pietrok-112. A suicide mission then? Was that what this was going to become? I was prepared to go through with it as long as the information acquired appeared to outweigh the boredom death induced. I considered my situation and knew that emotionally I was already committed, even if intellectually the rationale was flimsy. It was an adventure, a dangerous, reckless, unwise adventure, and I had had so few of these in my time.

If Pietrok-111 was a one-horse town, Pietrok-112 was the glue factory where that horse went to die. A chain fence circled a low mess of cabins and rectangular concrete slabs, windowless, nameless, soulless. The road ran straight to a gate, where a sign proclaimed, PIETROK-112–PASSES MUST BE SHOWN. Two guards in militia uniform were huddled in a small white shed by the gate, listening to the radio. One of them scurried out as we approached, hailing us to stop. He seemed to recognise my driver, giving him a warm pat on the shoulder, but as he approached me, his expression hardened. His fingers tightened on the rifle strap slung across his back, and there was more than just routine caution in his voice as he barked, “Comrade! Your papers!”

Having embarked on a suicide mission, I decided to follow it through with aplomb. I got out of the car, marched straight up to the soldier and replied, “That’s comrade Captain, and you are?”

He stood to attention, looking as surprised as I was that this reaction, drilled into him during his training, had become such a physical instinct. The trick with a truly successful intimidation is not to rely on volume or obscenity, but to cultivate that quiet certainty which informs any listener that your people will do the shouting for you, should the moment come. “Where’s your commander?” I added. “He is expecting me.”

“Yes, comrade Captain,” he barked out, “but I need to see your papers, comrade Captain.”

“I am Mikhail Kamin, internal security.”

“I need to see your pa—”

“No, you don’t,” I replied softly. “You need to see the papers of farmers delivering grain, of commissars carrying last week’s mail, of petty officers who went on the piss last night. You need to see the papers of people who don’t have the big picture. What you do not need to see, my son,” translating the full meaning of “my son” from cockney gangster into Soviet paranoia is not as simple a linguistic adaptation as you might expect, “are the papers of a man who isn’t here. Because I’m not fucking here. Because if I was fucking here, you’d have one hell of a fucking problem, you see?”

The boy was almost shaking with the two conflicting terrors inside him–terror of the known retribution which would strike for disobedience of his superiors, terror of the unknown which would come from disobedience of me. I decided to sway the matter for him.

“I’m glad you’re doing your duty, son,” I added, resisting the urge to clasp him by the shoulder with a too-hard grip, “but your duty is, if you don’t mind me saying so, so far beneath the big picture right now that even thinking about it is giving me a squint. So why don’t you walk me to your commander like a good soldier and keep an eye on me, and I won’t have to stand around here freezing my fucking balls off in this fucking waste of a fucking place while the shit hits the fan. What do you say, lad?”

Translating the connotations of “lad”, as deployed in its most patronising form by red-faced landowners of an uncertain social class, was if anything an even more engaging linguistic challenge than “my son”. Sometimes, brute will is the way to deal with a problem, particularly when that problem has been trained from birth to respect the bullies who run the state. The guard knew that there was a security alert–of course he did, his voice as much as any other circumstance had told me as much–and was it therefore such a surprise that someone from the internal security services had turned up at his door to speak to the commander? Certainly no foreign agent would ask as much. Perhaps it wasn’t so implausible. Perhaps thinking was above his grade.

“Please come with me, comrade Captain!”

He even saluted as he let me into the compound.