"We need you to answer certain questions. But not here. At a place
where it's quieter."
The two men were loitering closer now, only a few feet away, one on
each side of the table. The first was overweight, with bushy eyebrows
and pockmarked cheeks. He could be Ukrainian. The other was medium
height, wearing a cheap polyester suit, balding and sallow. Neither
looked as though he had smiled in the last decade.
"Where do you want to go?"
"We will take a stroll in the park." She gestured toward Amalias
Avenue. On the other side was Ethnikos Kipos, the National Garden. Then
she smiled again. "We thought you would like to take the morning air."
She rose, purse in hand, and tossed a wad of drachmas onto the wooden
table. The coffee drinkers around them did not look up from their
newspapers and tourist maps.
As they made their way past the Olympic Airways office on the corner
and across the avenue, she said nothing. Her silence is deliberate, he
told himself, part of a trick to unnerve me.
It was working. He was learning something about himself he'd never
before known. He was learning he was a coward.
That was the reality. He wouldn't hold out. He'd tell them everything
he knew, because they would hurt him badly. He couldn't bear pain; they
probably knew that. And then they'd kill him anyway because he couldn't
tell them the one thing they wanted to know. He didn't know it himself.
Viktor Fedorovich Volodin realized he was about to die. All the years
of pointless intrigue in the party, the fudging of production figures,
the father-in-law who'd made his existence wretched, it all added up to
a lifetime of nothing but misery, with the payoff a bullet. Rasstrel, a
KGB execution.
They were entering the national garden, a mirage of green in the desert
of asphalt and cement that is central Athens. Its informal walkways
were shady lanes of quiet and cool that seemed miles away from the
smoke and glare and heat of the avenues.
Finally she spoke. "We're running out of time, and patience, Viktor
Fedorovich. Let's start with the money. Where have you deposited it?
Next, we want to know the names of everyone--"
"It--it's--I don't know where it is now."
"You're lying." She did not break her pace. "The time for that is
over."
"But I don't have it. Someone else--" He heard himself blurting out the
truth. "He's in charge of everything."
"You are lying, again. You are the one who embezzled the funds." She
was walking by his side as they entered a secluded alleyway of hedges,
the other two trailed only inches behind. There was no escape. "The
criminal is you, Viktor Fedorovich."
"No, he--I--I don't know anything." How true was that? he asked himself.
He knew where the money was supposed to go, but he didn't know what it
was for, at least not specifically. That part had been classified. He
had the small picture but not the big one.
"If you know nothing, then telling us everything you do know should not
take very long." The calm, the assurance in her voice sent chills
through him. He knew he would talk and they knew it too. "However, the
more you have to say, the longer we can linger."
The early morning park, with its manicured footpaths and wandering
cats, was empty except for a few gardeners trimming hedges, watering
the grass, collecting loose papers. The sounds of the avenue were
rapidly receding. Now the two men had moved directly alongside, one by
each arm. He realized they were both taller than he was, and they
smelled.
"Wait. I don't know where it's deposited now; I wasn't supposed to
know. But there's still time. I can help--"
They were entering a long arbor, a high trellis bright with obscuring
red flowers, when the first blow came into his left side, directly in
his kidney. He groaned and sagged, breath gone, while the man on the
right slipped an arm around and held him erect.
"Yes, Viktor Fedorovich," the woman continued tonelessly, "you will
help us, because you will want to die long before we let you. So, shall
we try again? Where is the money?"
"It's . . . I don't know, exactly. But--"
He gasped and sagged again as another blow came. Already he wasn't sure
how much more pain he could tolerate. How long before he would just
blurt out everything he knew?
A third blow, and his knees crumpled. He had never known the meaning of
pain, or fear, until this moment.
Why not just tell them? his frightened mind was pleading. Alex has
already set it up with the American.
"You are worse than a mere criminal," she went on, dark eyes filling
with anger. "You are a traitor. You will tell us every detail of your
involvement, from the very beginning."
How much did they really know? he wondered. Were they bluffing?
They were bluffing, he quickly concluded. Otherwise she wouldn't be
asking him things she should already know.
If you talk, you'll jeopardize everything. The most important thing now
is to keep KGB from discovering the scenario. If they do, they still
could stop it.
Of course they were alarmed. They should be. In the New Russia being
born, there was no place for them.
But I can't endure pain. I'll talk if there's pain.
He felt a surge of resolve. Whatever else happens, he told himself, I
won't be the one responsible for making it fail. I can't let them know
any more than they do now. I've--
Another blow struck him in the side and he felt his knees turn to
butter. None of the gardeners in the park seemed aware that a man was
about to be beaten to death. To them the four foreigners were merely
huddled together as they strolled, enjoying the dubious beauty of
modern Athens.