The attraction had been the loneliness she’d felt in him, and a contradictory bowstring tension lying just beneath the surface of him. For his part: once, in a dreamy, faraway moment, he’d told her that she was the only real thing in his life right now, that sometimes he felt the entire world and his place in it were just an enormous fantasy. And now she’d been told that he was a foreign spy, which to Tassi had seemed like the greatest possible fantasy – at first. But that had been before they took her down into the Perchorsk Projekt.
Since then . . . everything had turned into a real fantasy, a horror story, a living nightmare.
Her father had been incarcerated in the cell next door to hers and she knew he had been tortured on a number of occasions. She’d heard it all coming right through the sheet-steel walls. The hoarse, terrified panting, the sharp slapping sounds, his anguished cries for mercy. But there’d been precious little of that last. Then, three days ago, there’d been one especially bad session; in the middle of it, at its height, the old man had screamed . . . and then, he’d stopped screaming – abruptly. Since when Tassi had heard nothing from him at all.
She couldn’t even bear to think what might have happened; she hoped the silence meant that her father was now in a hospital somewhere, recovering; she prayed that’s what it meant, anyway.
Almost as bad had been Major Khuv’s questioning. The KGB Major had not once laid a hand on her, but she’d had the suspicion that if he did he would hurt her terribly. The awful thing was that she didn’t have – didn’t know – anything to tell him. If she had then fear on its own would have obliged her to tell it, or if not fear certainly the desire to stop them hurting her father.
And then there had been the beast Vyotsky. Tassi hadn’t stood so much in fear of that one as in horror of him. And she had sensed – had known instinctively – that he enjoyed her horror, feeding upon it like a ghoul on rotting flesh! There had been little or nothing sexual about his treatment of her that time when he’d had her photographed naked with him. It had all been done for effect: partly to shame her, underline her vulnerability and make her feel the lowest of the low; partly to show her the power of her tormentor – that he could strip her naked, leer at her and paw her body, while she was incapable of lifting a ringer to stop him – but mainly to aid him in the mental torture of someone else. The sadist Vyotsky had told her that the photographs were for the ‘benefit’ of the British spy, Michael Simmons, whom she had known as Mikhail Simonov: ‘to drive the poor bastard out of his mind!’ Plainly the idea had delighted Vyotsky. ‘He thinks he’s so cool – hah.r he’d said. ‘If this doesn’t get him boiling, then nothing will!’
The KGB bully was quite mad, Tassi was sure. Even though he hadn’t been back to torment her for quite some time now, still she would freeze whenever she heard someone approaching the door of her cell; and if the footsteps should pause . . . then her breathing would go ragged at once, and her poor heart begin beating that much faster.
It had started to beat that way just a little while ago, but on this occasion her visitor was only Vyotsky’s superior officer, Major Khuv.
Only Major Khuv! Tassi thought, as the suave KGB officer entered her cell. That was a laugh! But she wasn’t even close to laughing as he cuffed her wrist to his own, then told her:
Taschenka, my dear. I want to show you something. It’s something I feel you really ought to see before I question you again at any great length. You’ll understand why soon enough.’
Stumbling along behind him, she made no effort to even guess where he was taking her. Essentially a peasant girl, to her the Projekt was a maze, a nightmare labyrinth of steel and concrete. Her claustrophobia had so disoriented her that she was lost from the first step she took across the threshold of her cell.