The Last Theorem

13 A CONVENIENT PLACE FOR QUESTIONING

Beginning to end, Ranjit was in the hands of the interrogators for just over two years, but it was only in the first six months that much actual interrogation went on. His stay, however, was not at any point comfortable.

Ranjit’s first inkling that this would be the case was when he was blindfolded, gagged, and handcuffed to a seat in the judging officer’s helo before it took off. Where he was then flown to he could not say, although it took less than an hour to get there. Then, still blindfolded, he was helped down the steps to some sort of paved surface and then was walked twenty or thirty meters to some other steps, these going up into some other aircraft. There he was cuffed once more to his seat, and then the new plane took off.

This one wasn’t a helicopter. Ranjit could feel the bumps in the runway as the aircraft gained speed, and then the sudden transition to bumpless free flight. It wasn’t a short flight, either, and it certainly wasn’t a sociable one. Ranjit could hear the aircrew talking to one another, though in what language he could not say, but when he tried calling out to let them know he needed to go to the bathroom, the answer he got was not in words. It was a sudden, hard blow to the side of his face, unexpected and unbraced-for.

Nevertheless they did, ultimately, let him use the plane’s little toilet, though still blindfolded and with the door kept open. They fed him, too—that is, they opened his seat’s tray and put something on it and ordered, “Eat!” By feel he determined that it was some kind of sandwich, possibly cheese of an unfamiliar variety, but by then it had been nearly twenty hours since Ranjit had had anything to eat and he devoured it, dry. He did take a chance to ask for water, and got a repeat of the blow to the side of the head.

How long they flew, Ranjit could not say because he drifted off to an uneasy sleep, waking only when the jittery bouncing of the aircraft told him they were landing, and on a much worse runway than before. He didn’t get the blindfold removed. He did get helped out of the plane and into some kind of vehicle, in which he was driven for more than an hour.

He wound up being led, still blindfolded, into some sort of building, down a hall, and into a room where his captors sat him down. Then one of them spoke to him in a gruff, accented English: “Hold out hands in front of you. No, with palms up!” And when he did, he was struck on the palms with something brutally heavy.

The pain was sharp. Ranjit couldn’t help crying out. Then the voice again: “Now you tell truth. What is name?”

That was the first question Ranjit was asked under duress, and the one asked most often of all. His questioners did not choose to believe the simple fact that he was Ranjit Subramanian, who chanced to be wearing some garments belonging to somebody else, whose name, as shown by the labels stitched to the garments, was Kirthis Kanakaratnam. Each time he gave the truthful answer, they exacted the penalty for lying.

This was different for each of the questioners. When it was the stubby, sweaty man named Bruno asking the questions, his favorite weapon for gaining truth was a length of electrical cable, four or five centimeters thick and capable of inflicting extreme pain wherever it was employed. Alternatively Bruno would give Ranjit a violent open-handed slap on his bare belly; this was not only painful, it made Ranjit wonder every time it was applied if it might not be rupturing his appendix or spleen. But there was something comforting about Bruno’s technique. No fingernails were extracted, no bones broken, no eyes gouged out; it seemed, hopefully, to Ranjit that they were not doing anything that would leave a permanent mark, and what that suggested to Ranjit was that they might ultimately be planning to let him go.

That hope, however, didn’t last. It vanished when, one day, Bruno exasperatedly threw his electrical cable across the room, grabbed up a short wooden club from the table of useful implements, and repeatedly smashed Ranjit across the face with it. That cost Ranjit a black eye and a knocked-out front tooth, as well as most of his tenuously held hope for ultimate release.

The other main torturer was an elderly man who never gave a name but had one eye always half-closed. (Ranjit thought of him as “Squinty.”) He seldom left a mark on Ranjit, and he was curiously reassuring in his conversation. On the very first day Ranjit met him, Ranjit held by two powerful assistants flat on his back, Squinty held up a square of cloth. “What we will do to you now,” he warned politely, “will make you think you are going to die. You won’t. I won’t let that happen. Only you must answer my questions truthfully.” And then he spread the cloth over Ranjit’s face and poured cold water over it from a metal pitcher.

Ranjit had never experienced anything quite like it. The effect wasn’t so much pain as brutalizing, incapacitating terror. Ranjit had not failed to hear and understand that Squinty had promised he wouldn’t die of this experience, but his body had understandings of its own. It knew that it was being terminally, lethally drowned, and it wanted the process stopped at once. “Help!” Ranjit cried, or tried to cry. “Stop! Let me up!” And all that came out was a bubbly, choky splatter of watery parts of sound, none of them like any English words—

The trickle of poured water stopped, the cloth was pulled off his face, and Ranjit was lifted to sitting position. “Now, what is your name?” Squinty asked politely.

Ranjit tried to stop coughing long enough to get the words out. “I’m Ranjit Sub—” he began, but he didn’t even finish saying his name before his shoulders were slammed back onto the floor, the cloth was over his face again, and the terrible pouring of water began once more.

Ranjit managed to hold out four times more before the heart was gone out of him, further resistance was impossible, and he gasped and managed to say, “I’m whoever you want me to be. Just stop!”

“Good,” said Squinty encouragingly. “We are making progress, Kirthis Kanakaratnam. So now tell me, what country were you working for?”

There were, of course, many other ways of making a subject become cooperative, but, of course, none of them produced any truthful confessions from Ranjit since he had no crimes to confess.

This exasperated his interrogators. The one he called Squinty complained. “You are making us look bad, Ranjit, or Kirthis, or whoever you are. Listen to me. It will go easier for you if you just stop denying you are Kirthis Kanakaratnam.”

Ranjit tried taking the advice. Then it did go easier, a little.