Tatiana and Alexander: A Novel(17)

Ouspensky and Maikov stared at him. "And you know this how?"

Alexander shrugged. "Because I, being fourteen, escaped through the window before they had a chance to catch me."

They heard someone coming and fell quiet. Alexander stood up, and as the door was opened, Alexander said to Maikov, "Corporal, imagine your old life is gone. Imagine they've taken from you all they can and there is nothing left--"

"Come, Belov, let's go!" shouted a stout man with a single-shot Nagant rifle.

"It's the only way you will make it," Alexander said, stepping out of the cell and hearing the door slam closed behind him.

He sat in a small room in the abandoned school, in a school chair, in front of a table that was in front of a blackboard. He thought at any minute the schoolmaster was going to come in with a textbook and proceed with the lesson on the evils of imperialism.

Instead two men came in. There were now four people in the room, Alexander in the chair, a guard at the back of the class and two men behind the teacher's table. One man was bald and very thin with a long, thoughtful nose. He introduced himself kindly as Riduard Morozov. "Not the Morozov of this town?" asked Alexander.

Morozov smiled thinly. "No."

The other man was extremely heavy, extremely bald and had a round bulbous nose with broken capillaries. He looked like a heavy drinker. He introduced himself--somewhat less kindly--as Mitterand, which Alexander found almost humorous since Mitterand was the leader of the tiny French "Resistance movement in Nazi-occupied France.

Morozov began. "Do you know why you're here, Major Belov?" he asked, smiling warmly, speaking in polite, friendly tones. They were having a conversation. In a moment Mitterand was going to offer Alexander some tea, maybe a shot of vodka to calm him. Alexander thought of it as a joke, but oddly, the bottle of vodka actually did materialize from behind a desk, along with three shot glasses. Morozov Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

poured.

"Yes," Alexander said brightly. "I was told yesterday I'm getting promoted. I'm going to be lieutenant colonel. And no, thank you," he said to the drink being offered to him.

"Are you refusing our hospitality, Comrade Belov?"

"I am Major Belov," Alexander said, standing up and raising his voice to the man in front of him. "Do you have a rank?" He waited. The man said nothing. "I didn't think so. You're not wearing a uniform. If you had a uniform to wear, you would be wearing it. Now, I will not have your drink. I will not sit down until you tell me what you want with me. I will be glad to cooperate in whatever way I can, comrades," he added, "but don't sit there and insult me by pretending we're the best of friends. What's going on?"

"You're under arrest."

"Ah. So no promotion then? It only took you since four this morning. Ten hours. You have not told me what you want with me. I don't know if you know yourselves. Why don't you go and find someone who can actually tell me? In the meantime, take me back to my cell and stop wasting my time."

"Major!" That was Morozov. The voice was less kind. The vodka, however, had been drunk by both men. Alexander smiled. If he kept them in the classroom drinking, they'd be leading him to the Soviet-Finnish border themselves, talking to him in soft English. They called him major. Alexander understood the psychology of rank extremely well. In the army there was only one rule--you never spoke rudely to your superiors. The pecking order was precisely established. "Major," Morozov repeated. "Stay right here."

Alexander returned to his chair.

Mitterand spoke to the young guard by the door; Alexander didn't hear the individual words. He understood the essence. This was not only out of Morozov's hands, this was out of his league. A bigger fish was needed to deal with Alexander. And soon the fish would be coming. But first they were going to try to break him.

"Put your hands behind your back, Major," said Morozov.

Alexander threw his cigarette on the floor, twisted his foot over it, and stood up.

They relieved him of his sidearm and his knife and pillaged through his rucksack. Having found bandages and pens and her white dress--nothing worth removing--they decided to take Alexander's medals off his chest, and they also tipped his shoulder bars and they told him he was not a major anymore and had no right to his title. They still hadn't told him the charges against him, nor had they asked him any questions.

He asked for his ruck. They laughed. Almost helplessly, he glanced at it once, in their hands, knowing Tatiana's dress was there. Just one more thing to be trampled on, to be left behind.

Alexander was taken to a solitary concrete cell with no window, no Ouspensky, no Maikov. He had no bench, he had no bed, and he had no blanket. He was alone, and his only sources of oxygen came from the guards opening the door, or from opening the sliding steel reinforced window on the door, or from the peephole they peered at him through, or from the small hole in the ceiling that was probably used for poison gas. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

They left him his watch, and because they didn't search his person they did not find the drugs in his boots. He had a feeling the drugs were not safe. But where to put them? Slipping off the boots, he took the syringe, the morphine vial and the small sulfa pills and stuffed them in the pocket of his BVDs. They would have to search more thoroughly than they usually did to find them there.