Shibumi (22 page)

“Sure,” the civilian said. “And I suppose you’re going to deny that your father was a Nazi?”

“He might have been. From what I understand, he was stupid enough. I never met him.”

Diamond nodded. “So what you’re really saying, Nicholai, is that the bulk of our accusations are true.”

Nicholai sighed and shook his head. He had worked with the American military mentality for two years, but he could not pretend to understand its rigid penchant for forcing facts to fit convenient preconceptions. “If I understand you, Major—and frankly I don’t much care if I do—you are accusing me of being both a communist and a Nazi, of being both a close friend of General Kishikawa’s and his hired assassin, of being both a Japanese militarist and a Soviet spy. And you seem to believe that the Russians would arrange the killing of a man they intended to subject to the indignities of a War Crimes Trial to the end of garnering their bit of the propaganda glory. None of this offends your sense of rational probability?”

“We don’t pretend to understand every twist and turn of it,” Major Diamond admitted.

“Don’t you really? What becoming humility.”

The civilian’s grip tightened painfully on his shoulder. “We don’t need wise-assed talk from you! You’re in heavy trouble! This country is under military occupation, and you’re not a citizen of anywhere, boy! We can do anything we want with you, with no interference from consulates and embassies!”

The Major shook his head, and the civilian released his grip and stepped back. “I don’t think that tone is going to do us any good. It’s obvious that Nicholai isn’t easily frightened.” He smiled half shyly, then said, “But still, what my associate says is true. You have committed a capital crime, the penalty for which is death. But there are ways in which you can help us in our fight against international communism. A little cooperation from you, and something might be arranged to your advantage.”

Nicholai recognized the haggling tone of the marketplace. Like all Americans, this Major was a merchant at heart; everything had a price, and the good man was he who bargained well.

“Are you listening to me?” Diamond asked.

“I can hear you,” Nicholai modified.

“And? Will you cooperate?”

“Meaning sign your confession?”

“That and more. The confession implicates the Russians in the assassination. We’ll also want to know about the people who helped you infiltrate Sphinx/FE. And about the Russian intelligence community here, and their contacts with unpurged Japanese militarists.”

“Major. The Russians had nothing to do with my actions. Believe me that I don’t care one way or the other about their politics, just as I don’t care about yours. You and the Russians are only two slightly different forms of the same thing: the tyranny of the mediocre. I have no reason to protect the Russians.”

“Then you will sign the confession?”

“No.”

“But you just said—”

“I said that I would not protect or assist the Russians. I also have no intention of assisting your people. If it is your intention to execute me—with or without the mockery of a military trial—then please get to it.”

“Nicholai, we
will
get your signature on that confession. Please believe me.”

Nicholai’s green eyes settled calmly on the Major’s. “I am no longer a part of this conversation.” He lowered his eyes and returned his concentration to the patterns of stones in the Gô game he had temporarily frozen in his memory. He began again considering the alternative responses to that clever seeming
tenuki.

There was an exchange of nods between the Major and the burly civilian, and the latter took a black leather case from his pocket. Nicholai did not break his concentration as the MP sergeant pushed up his sleeve and the civilian cleared the syringe of air by squirting an arcing jet into the air.

When, much later, he tried to remember the events of the subsequent seventy-two hours, Nicholai could only recall shattered tesserae of experience, the binding grout of chronological sequence dissolved by the drugs they pumped into him. The only useful analogy he could devise for the experience was that of a motion picture in which he was both actor and audience member—a film with both slow and fast motion, with freeze frames and superimpositions, with the sound track from one sequence playing over the images of another, with single-frame subliminal flashes that were more felt than perceived, with long stretches of underexposed, out-of-focus pictures, and dialogue played under speed, mushy and basso.

At this period, the American intelligence community had just begun experimenting with the use of drugs in interrogation, and they often made errors, some mind-destroying. The burly civilian “doctor” tried many chemicals and combinations on Nicholai, sometimes accidentally losing his victim to hysteria or to comatose indifference, sometimes creating mutually cancelling effects that left Nicholai perfectly calm and lucid, but so displaced in reality that while he responded willingly to interrogation, his answers were in no way related to the questions.

Throughout the three days, during those moments when Nicholai drifted into contact with himself, he experienced intense panic. They were attacking, probably damaging, his mind; and Nicholai’s genetic superiority was as much intellectual as sensual. He dreaded that they might crush his mind, and hundreds of years of selective breeding would be reduced to their level of humanoid rubble.

Often he was outside himself, and Nicholai the audience member felt pity for Nicholai the actor, but could do nothing to help him. During those brief periods when he could reason, he tried to flow with the nightmare distortions, to accept and cooperate with the insanity of his perceptions. He knew intuitively that if he struggled against the pulsing warps of unreality, something inside might snap with the effort, and he would never find his way back again.

Three times during the seventy-two hours, his interrogators’ patience broke, and they allowed the MP sergeant to pursue the questioning in more conventional third-degree ways. He did this with the aid of a nine-inch tube of canvas filled with iron filings. The impact of this weapon was terrible. It seldom broke the surface of the skin, but it crushed bone and tissue beneath.

A civilized man who could not really condone this sort of thing, Major Diamond left the interrogation during each of the beatings, unwilling to witness the torture he had ordered. The “doctor” remained, curious to see the effects of pain inflicted under heavily drugged conditions.

The three periods of physical torture registered differently upon Nicholai’s perception. Of the first, he remembered nothing. Had it not been for his right eye swollen closed and a loose tooth oozing the saline taste of blood, the thing might never have happened. The second beating was excruciatingly painful. The combined and residual effects of the drugs at this moment were such that he was intensely aware of sensation. His skin was so sensitive that the brush of his clothes against it was painful, and the air he breathed stung his nostrils. In this hypertactile condition, the torture was indescribable. He yearned for unconsciousness, but the sergeant’s talents were such that he could deny blissful emptiness forever.

The third session was not painful at all, but it was by far the most frightening. With perfect, but insane, lucidity, Nicholai both received and observed the punishment. Again, he was both audience and actor, and he watched it happen with only mild interest. He felt nothing; the drugs had short-circuited his nerves. The terror lay in the fact that he could
hear
the beating as though the sound were amplified by powerful microphones within his flesh. He heard the liquid crunch of tissue; he heard the crisp splitting of skin; he heard the granular grating of fragmented bone; he heard the lush pulsing of his blood. In the mirror of the mirror of his consciousness, he was calmly terrified. He realized that to be able to hear all this while feeling nothing was insane, and to experience anesthetized indifference to the event was beyond the verge of madness.

At one moment, his mind swam to the surface of reality and he spoke to the Major, telling that he was the son of General Kishikawa and that they would be making a terminal error not to kill him, because if he lived, there was no escaping him. He spoke mushily; his tongue was thick with the drugs and his lips were split with the beating; but his tormentors would not have understood him anyway. He had unknowingly spoken in French.

Several times during the three days of interrogation the handcuffs that bound his wrists behind him were removed. The “doctor” noticed that his fingers were white and cold with lack of circulation, so the cuffs were taken off for a few minutes while his wrists were massaged, then they were replaced. Throughout the rest of his life, Nicholai carried shiny tan bracelets of scar from the handcuffs.

During the seventy-third hour, neither knowing what he was doing nor caring, Nicholai signed the confession implicating the Russians. So lost to reality was he that he signed it in Japanese script and in the middle of the typewritten page, though they had tried to direct his trembling hand to the bottom. So useless was this confession that the Americans were finally reduced to forging his signature, which of course they might have done at the outset.

The final fate of this “confession” is worth noting as a metaphor of intelligence-community bungling. Some months later, when American Sphinx people thought an opportune time had come to make a threatening shot across the bow of their Russian counterparts, the document was brought to Colonel Gorbatov by Major Diamond, who sat in silence on the other side of the Colonel’s desk and awaited his reaction to this damning proof of active espionage.

The Colonel glanced over the pages with operatic indifference, then he unhooked his round metal-rimmed glasses from each ear and polished them between thumb and finger with excruciating care before threading the temples on again. With the bottom of his spoon, he crushed the undissolved lump of sugar in his teacup, drank off the tea in one long sip, then replaced the cup exactly in the center of the saucer.

“So?” he said lazily.

And that was all there was to that. The threatening gesture had been made and ignored, and it had not the slightest effect on the covert operation of the two powers in Japan.

For Nicholai the last hours of the interrogation dissolved into confusing but not unpleasant dreams. His nervous system was so shattered by the various drugs that it functioned only minimally, and his mind had recoiled into itself. He dozed from level of unreality to level of unreality, and soon he found himself walking along the banks of the Kajikawa beneath a snowfall of blossoms. Beside him, but far enough away so that General Kishikawa might have walked between them, had he been there, was a young girl. Though he had never met her, he knew she was the General’s daughter. The girl was talking to him about how she would marry one day and have a son. And quite conversationally, the girl mentioned that both she and the son would die, incinerated in the firebombing of Tokyo. Once she had mentioned this, it was logical that she should become Mariko, who had died at Hiroshima. Nicholai was delighted to see her again, and so they played a practice game of Gô, she using black cherry petals for stones, he using white. Nicholai then became one of the stones, and from his microscopic position on the board, he looked around at the enemy stone forming thicker and thicker walls of containment. He tried to form defensive “eyes,” but all of them turned out to be false, so he fled, rushing along the yellow surface of the board, the black lines blurring past him as he gathered momentum, until he shot off the edge of the board into thick darkness that dissolved into his cell…

…Where he opened his eyes.

It was freshly painted gray, and there were no windows. The overhead light was so painfully bright that he squinted to keep his vision from smearing.

Nicholai lived in solitary confinement in that cell for three years.

The transition from the nightmare of interrogation to the years of solitary existence under the burden of “silent treatment” was not abrupt. Daily at first, then less often, Nicholai was visited by the same fussy, distracted Japanese prison doctor who had confirmed the General’s death. The treatments consisted only of prophylactic dressings with no cosmetic efforts to close cuts or remove crushed bone and cartilage. Throughout each session the doctor repeatedly shook his head and sucked his teeth and muttered to himself, as though he disapproved of him for participating in this senseless violence.

The Japanese guards had been ordered to deal with the prisoner in absolute silence, but during the first days it was necessary that they instruct him in the rudiments of routine and behavior. When they spoke to him they used the brusque verb forms and a harsh staccato tone that implied no personal antipathy, only recognition of the social gulf between prisoner and master. Once routine was established, they stopped speaking to him, and for the greater part of three years he heard no other human voice than his own, save for one half hour each three months when he was visited by a minor prison official who was responsible for the social and psychological welfare of the inmates.

Almost a month passed before the last effects of the drugs leached from his mind and nerves, and only then could he dare to relax his guard against those unexpected plunges into waking nightmares of space/time distortion that would grip him suddenly and rush him toward madness, leaving him panting and sweating in the corner of his cell, drained of energy and frightened lest the damage to his mind be permanent.

There were no inquiries into the disappearance of Hel, Nicholai Alexandrovitch (TA/737804). There were no efforts to free him, or to hasten his trial. He was a citizen of no nation; he had no papers; no consulate official came forward to defend his civil rights.

The only faint ripple on the surface of routine caused by Nicholai Hel’s disappearance was a brief visit to the San Shin Building some weeks later by Mrs. Shimura and Mr. Watanabe, who had spent nights of whispered conversation, screwing up their courage to make this hopeless gesture on behalf of their benefactor. Fobbed off on a minor official, they made their inquiries in hushed, rapid words and with every manifestation of diffident humility. Mrs. Shimura did all of the talking, Mr. Watanabe only bowing and keeping his eyes down in the face of the incalculable power of the Occupation Forces and their inscrutable ways. They knew that by coming to the den of the Americans they were exposing themselves to the danger of losing their home and the little security Nicholai had provided, but their sense of honor and fairness dictated that they run this risk.