Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (42 page)

In any event, he was too sick when he regained consciousness to either thank or castigate her. The sickness he could deal with himself, dragging himself back to the bed, hair translucent with perspiration, eyes dark but no longer hollow. He was too weak to order her away from him, and for that she was grateful.

She lived a strange life that next week, slipping in and out of the cottage that she shared with Rose, pretending to go to sleep in her own bed, only to slip into the moonlit shadows and onto the long sandy road to that other cottage after dark, for she would not leave Jamie for more than a few hours at a time. Rose, thankfully, fell into an alcoholic stupor early in the evening and as long as Pamela made a show of going off to bed, barefoot and clad in her nightgown, she never checked further.

Jamie, without much choice in the matter, left the door unlatched for her. Stripped down to his essentials both mentally and emotionally, he gave no time to remonstrating with her, for he sensed, she thought, how little good it would do him.

The nights were the most difficult for him. That was clear. As though the darkness itself came and sat upon his shoulders, a great and weighty bird of prey, waiting to clutch and claw at his brain. And so from dusk to dawn she read to him, curled in the tatty chair that she had pulled to the foot of his bed. She read the books from which he had read to her and many others besides, songs both of innocence and experience, books of dry wit, and books of fulsome beauty. She read poems from other ages more golden than this one, but just as fraught with all the foibles of man and womankind.

In this manner, over the course of that week, she put her hand in his and drew him step by step away from the lip of the abyss. And so it was that a friendship whose bonds had been forged in the darkest of hours was woven into an unbreakable pattern.

Part Five
Back in the USSR
Russia – March-August 1973

Chapter Twenty-eight
March 1973
The Frozen Forest

His Lordship James Stuart Kirkpatrick
was about as far from the glamorous world of high finance and corporate piracy as one could get and still be on the same planet within which he had once moved.

He was, to put it succinctly, at the arse end of the world, in a prison camp where he was being held against his will for sins he wasn’t aware of committing. This was where he had awakened after the furious scuffle and world-eclipsing blow to the head. He had not seen Andrei since that morning. He had no idea if he was alive or dead, injured or himself imprisoned.

The Soviet euphemism for this state was Repressed in the Second Category. Repressed in the First Category meant you were no longer breathing. He wondered what they would call his first week of incarceration, when they had not allowed him to sleep, questioned him under bright lights all night and then left him to sit on a stool during the day, kicking him if his eyes closed. He was given a minimum of water and an occasional heel of bread to eat—just enough, he supposed to keep him from fainting. Torture was hampered, after all, by an unconscious victim.

He was all too well aware how much worse it might have been. He had heard tales of the tortures the secret police were capable of dishing out. They had tried a few on him, from soft-voiced persuasion of the ‘if you just tell us what we want to know, we’ll feed you, you can rest and then you can go home’, to screaming in his ears at the top of their voices about making his death long and painful, using the sudden reversals of tone to unbalance him. But they hadn’t gone further and, beyond the bruises and cuts he had sustained, they hadn’t used pain as a means to pry a confession from him. He knew how it might have been, and felt fortunate not to have had that sort of wreckage inflicted upon him—removal of fingernails, immersion in acid, strait-jacketing and something called ‘bridling’ where they put a rough length of toweling in a man’s mouth, pulled the ends over his shoulders and tied them to his ankles so that he was arched in agony for days, often until his spine snapped. These were only things he knew about, for there was no limit, apparently, to the lengths a well-fed, rested man could go to in the name of getting information out of another.

They had seemed to believe he was a spy who had infiltrated the Soviet Union to make contact with Andrei, one of their most eminent scientists, in an effort to convince him to defect so that the West might plumb his brain and steal the secrets of Soviet advancement. His spying, they said, went back to his and Andrei’s shared years at Oxford. He was, they seemed to believe, an agent of the British government, in league with the Americans.

He had the sense, even as his interrogators alternatively yelled and coaxed, kicked and stroked his psyche, that there was far more going on here than he was aware of. He wondered what the hell Andrei had done, what plans had been made, what contingencies put in place, before he tipped that goddamn chess piece over on the board.

They had put literally hundreds of pictures on the table in front of him, grabbing his hair and forcing his head down to them until the images blurred beyond recognition. It was years of him and Andrei, the annual meetings on the border, the travels they had taken to various places around the globe. More than a few made him recoil, for they had been taken at very private moments with various women. He had been nauseated after that, wondering if any moment of their friendship had been free of the stain of surveillance. There were, he had to admit, some photos that compromised his protests of innocence—with the British Foreign Minister, with various high-ranking politicians both British and American. Useless to try to explain that he himself was a politician and these people were in his natural milieu as a man of wealth and head of a company with far-flung interests.

Then the bald man with the badly scarred face who had been his main interrogator slid a picture of Pamela in front of him and said, ‘She is spy too.’ It hadn’t been a question, but Jamie had denied it nevertheless. She was safe in Ireland. They could not touch her there. At least he prayed they could not. The picture had been taken outside his own home, when the two of them had been working in the garden together, in those autumn days while she had waited for Casey. Still, the idea of them watching her made his blood thick with rage.

When they had not received the answers they wanted, they had become more inventive. Time had stretched itself out to unbearable lengths, the nights as long as a month. But he did not have the answers within him and could not give them what he did not have.

He had been dumped in the camp, secured behind machine guns and high, barbed wire tipped fences after a full two weeks of ‘persuasion’. By that point, he could hardly tell up from down and thought he might well die if he wasn’t allowed to sleep.

It took time to get his bearings. He had needed sleep first, and food, and then to get through the shock of what had happened. He wasn’t a big enough fool not to have a realization at the back of his mind that this was always a threat, that both he and Andrei had known they were playing with fire. Still, the reality was far different from the most vivid of imaginings.

There had been no way to tell where the camp was, for he had been unconscious for the duration the journey. As best as he was able to make out, they were some distance south of the Karelian Isthmus—and not so far from the border then, leastwise not as the crow flew. The Karelian Isthmus was originally Finnish Territory, but Finland had lost part of it to the Soviets during the four month Winter War that began in November of 1930. The closest city was Leningrad, formerly St. Petersburg, the Venice of the East, raised from bog and forest by Peter the Great. But ‘close’ in Russian terms was measured in hundreds of miles across unforgiving terrain and weather that could turn on a dime from blisteringly hot to a cold that could shatter bones.

The camp had been built around the remnants of an ancient monastery. The chapel had been all but destroyed under the godless regime of the Soviets, but the huge bell tower that rose from one corner still loomed over the camp like a dark specter. The monastery was hollow, some walls entirely gone, leaving behind cobwebbed cells through which the wind howled on chill nights.

He and Andrei had played their game one time too often. Knowing the risks, he had played the fool to a very high cost. Because one day you could be anchored securely in the world with home and friends and family, anchored by love and tradition and familiar roads and pathways both literal and figurative, and then the next day, without warning to either yourself or those who loved you, you could vanish like smoke upon the air, leaving no trace in your wake. It wasn’t as though this was a thing peculiar to Russia, for every country, every town, every lonely forest road had that same ability to swallow people whole, telling no tale on its unmarked ground, in its silent buildings. But Russia had swallowed millions entire, held the bones and mute cries of untold numbers who would never be found, who would sink into the soil, whose bones would become porous sieves and leave no trace for those who might one day seek answers.

It was how he felt himself, porous, made of some amorphous material, as though he were slowly ceasing to exist in the real world. Locked away here, surrounded by a dark fairytale wood, as though he and all who lived here were under the enchantment of a dark sorcerer. Except this was Russia, and therefore the fairytale would not have a happy ending.

His one stroke of luck was the sort of camp to which he had been assigned. It was a logging camp, immured in the dense boreal forests that covered northern Russia. Many years before, Jamie had spent a summer working in the coastal forests of British Columbia. It had been hard, dangerous work, and he had loved every minute of it. He was no stranger to hard work, had found in the past it served the dual purpose of keeping his spirits on an even keel and allowing him to escape the mind for the brute pleasures of the body. He had always been an avid sportsman as well, so that his muscles and flesh were not averse to hard, long hours. Here in the prison camp he spent twelve hours of his day in the forest, felling trees by hand, partnered with an old man who wielded a crosscut saw like it was a tinker toy. He kept up that first day through sheer stubbornness, his muscles screaming in protest and his flesh exhausted beyond comprehension. At least he knew the work. Still, it had taken two weeks of cutting above quota to gain even a nod from the old man.

The old man was also his bunkmate, along with a Georgian dwarf named Shura and a man named Volodya, who reminded Jamie forcibly of the dormouse in Alice, if the dormouse had been a clerkish entity of the Soviet Empire. They had all eyed him with great suspicion, as well they might, and had been doubly disturbed when they discovered that his ability to speak Russian was the equal of theirs.

The huts in which the prisoners were housed were long, low buildings built of native logs, roughly hewn, chinked with moss and settling into the soil. He had been put into one of the smaller buildings, meant to contain eight inmates. There were only four of them on bunks that were nailed to the walls and fitted with thin mattresses that must have been there since the ‘30s. A cast-iron potbellied stove sat at the center of the hut, it too a relic of days gone by.

It was here he had awakened after being thrown into the back of a truck—to find that two days had melted away. This information was received from the dwarf, who upon his awakening was standing over him with a cup of hot tea. Jamie drank it gratefully and would have even had he suspected it contained arsenic. It wasn’t any sort of tea he was familiar with, but it had been hot and fragrant and warmed the ice that had settled in his core. It had also eased the pain in his legs and arms, which made him think it was medicinal in purpose.

Shura was the first to speak to him, and Jamie realized quickly that it was more because Shura could not keep his tongue still than from any trust of the stranger in their midst. Shura’s coloring was classic Georgian: black hair, black eyes, swarthy skin. His nature was pure Georgian too, filled with music and merriment. His was a soul that not even the camps could break. Through Shura he learned who ran the camp and who the real power was, he learned what to expect, what would earn extra rations of food and what would bring punishment down on his head like a hammer. According to Shura, the power did not lie with the camp administration, but in another direction altogether.

“Is not the camp commanders that run this place. It is Gregor. He is
vor y zakone—
are you knowing this term?”

“Thieves in law,” Jamie had said, nodding his head to keep Shura on the conversational track.

“Yes, he is real power here. Gregor says jump, we all take off our shoes and ask how high and for how long—except Nikolai—Nikolai is exception to every rule here in camp. He has been here so long he has no memory of life before, and he is hard like Siberian ground. Gregor fears no one, but he respects Nikolai and keeps his distance. The camp governor and guards fear Gregor too and so they do as they are told.”