House Haunted (32 page)

Amazing
, Viktor thought, tapping the dull green concrete wall, the ceiling, with his cane.
Absolutely amazing.

But in forty years, working for the people he worked for, he had seen things nearly as strange.

There was nothing to do but go on.

At his own pace, he followed the bearish soldier. He heard faint sounds up ahead, a door opening, closing. Another, familiar sound, between the opening and closing, which his mind did not solidify because of its brevity. He walked on.

The slope in the hallway gradually diminished, disappeared. The walls changed. They were no longer dull green; there was paneling covering them now, a rich, deep cherry shade. The bare floor changed to gray shag carpeting. There were more lights, the feeling of being in an entranceway rather than an endless hall.

He came to a door.

Two doors. He had seen their kind before, in America. The doors and the fleeting sound he had heard linked momentarily, dissolved into failed memory. The doors were tall and wide, with a curtained round window set in each.

He put his cane against the door on the right, pushed at it. It swung inward, and at that moment he knew the sound and the kind of doors they were.

He pushed the door all the way open and walked forward cautiously into darkness. He heard a ratcheting sound off to his right. Suddenly, a beam of light stabbed the darkness past him and illuminated a movie screen set above a small stage. In the silvery radiance he saw rows of movie theater chairs, their seats sprung up. The theater was empty. The screen continued to show bare whiteness. Then, just as a countdown of numbers began on the screen, some in circles and some upside down, denoting the beginning of a picture, he saw, out of the corner of his eye, off in the back corner, a gray puff of smoke, heard a voice call him.

“Come here—sit next to me.”

The voice held lazy command. On the screen, a black-and-white globe of the world appeared; around it flew an airplane with a propeller on its front. Viktor walked through the beam, was blinded by it.

“Hurry, you'll ruin the picture,” the voice in the back said.

Viktor ducked under the low beam of the light. As he reached the darkened back corner, he felt a large hand take cold of him and press him into a seat.

He turned to see the face that possessed the hand, but between the natural darkness of the corner and the weak glare from the distant black-and-white film, Viktor could not make out the features.

“Watch the screen,” the voice scolded. “The film is beginning.”

The credits, which Viktor had paid no attention to, rolled off, and the movie began.

Viktor stared at the screen. He listened to the booming, hearty laughter of the figure in the seat next to him. He studied the screen and realized what he was watching. It was Laurel and Hardy film. Stan and Ollie had fooled their wives into thinking they were going on a cruise for Ollie's health. In fact, they were attending a convention. An actor on the screen, whom Viktor recognized as another great comic, Charley Chase, bedecked in fez and smoking a cigar, held a crowd of conventioneers enthralled with his trick of dropping a wallet and then whacking anyone who bent to pick it up with a wooden paddle. Ollie, naturally, became a victim.

Viktor knew the sequence and the film well. Before long, he was laughing as loud as the man in the seat next to him. Later in the film, Stan and Ollie have been photographed by a newsreel camera while marching in a parade with their fellow conventioneers, known as Sons of the Desert. The film is then seen by their worried wives, who have found that the ship they were supposed to have been on for Ollie's health has gone down at sea.

The man next to Viktor, watching Stan's innocently, naively smiling face while their wives register shock and then vengeful anger, burst into coughing paroxysms of laughter, hitting his knee with loud slapping sounds in the dark, barely able to catch his breath.

“Are you all right?” Viktor whispered, doubtful whether the man's fit was still laughter or a fight for breath.

“Yes, yes,” the figure laughed, smacking Viktor once on the knee before bursting into a fresh bout of uncontrollable mirth. “Oh, I tell you, these men are geniuses!”

Viktor, again caught in the mood of the classic picture, following the subtitles with keen interest, had to agree.

After much laughter, the film was over. Viktor watched “The End” flash. The screen then went dark. Viktor waited for lights to come up.

Nothing happened. The figure next to him had gone silent. Viktor felt alone in the dark. For a moment his eyes saw nothing. He thought he might once again be afloat in the space continuum, to be relocated who knew where. Perhaps he was heading back to the house in New York State. Perhaps on some further bizarre adventure.

But then his eyes adjusted. He saw the dark outline of the rows of seats in front of him, heard the man in the seat next to him shift and cough.

A small square of light went on behind him. Viktor turned to see a bulb shining within the projection room. A figure was moving in there, eclipsing the movie projector and then moving away from it again.

“What are we to have next?” the man beside Viktor called out, impatiently.

The figure in the booth, backlit, once again walked in front of the projector. “I have managed to obtain
Gone With the Wind
.”

“Ah.” The man beside Viktor lost his impatience. “Excellent. But let's finish with this piece of business first, shall we, Alexi?”

“Of course,” the man in the projection booth answered. Viktor heard a door open in the back. He saw a shaft of light cut off as someone entered the theater. A flashlight went on, bobbed toward them. The man holding it stopped at their row, counting to himself, and attempting to enter, bumped on the aisle seat. He gave a low curse.

The man next to Viktor chuckled. “Come along, Alexi.”

“Yes.”

The flashlight steadied on the floor. Viktor watched the figure approach. It stopped when the flashlight found his shoes in their beam. The man holding it cleared his throat.

The man sitting next to Viktor said, “Go ahead, Alexi.” The man holding the flashlight angled it up across Viktor's Face to hold it under his own. It gave him a ghoulish appearance, lighting his face from below. But Viktor knew

It was the hairy man who had met Viktor outside in Red square and brought him here.

“Hello, again,” Alexi said to Viktor, tilting the flashlight beam down directly into his face.

Viktor winced and turned toward the man sitting in the seat next to him. He saw the man's face, in faint illumination. He gasped.

“Shall I take him now, Premier?”

Joseph Stalin, looking boredly ahead toward the movie screen, seemingly lost in thought and slitting his eyes slightly against the beam of the flashlight, nodded.

“Here, Premier?”

Stalin turned his hawk's eyes on Alexi. Viktor felt the man stiffen. Suddenly Stalin's attention waned; he turned disinterestedly toward the screen again. “Yes.”

The man with the flashlight fumbled through his clothes.

The beam of the flashlight was raised into Viktor's face again. He felt something heavy and cold placed in his lap. “Pick it up,” Alexi said coldly.

Viktor put his hand on the object and pulled away from it. A pistol. He had not held a gun in twenty years.

“Put it in your hand and lift it,” Alexi ordered.

Viktor sat frozen; suddenly he felt Stalin's large hand on his own, the same one that had slapped the premier's knee in humor during the movie. Stalin's hand patted his.

“Pick up the pistol like Alexi told you,” the premier said quietly.

Nearly immobile with terror, Viktor turned to look into the face that had stared out at him from history books since he was a child. He was only twenty-four when Stalin died; when Stalin was still alive, his mother had scared him to bed with threats of the ogre getting him. The ogre had gotten enough of them. Viktor's uncle had been caught dead in one of the purges; another uncle had died in Siberia twenty years after being sent there for an infraction that no one, including the men who had dragged him away one night from his home, where he had been reading his paper, had ever been able to articulate. Viktor had had nightmares involving that face until he was in his thirties; in the KGB, there were stories that constantly floated, mostly by the old-timers ready to quit and anxious for any kind of attention at all as they sat behind their desks, about the atrocities Stalin himself had privately committed—the electricity in women's vaginas, the ritual unmanning of boys he had tired of. The stories were endless. Whatever truth they held was superseded by the need these old-timers had of expressing in some way the absolute terror that had reigned during those times. It was not bureaucracy, the stodgy powerful beast that could grind you up in its machinery but do it impersonally—that came later. It was much worse—a constant, gnawing paranoia, a perpetual state of war in which no one was safe from foe, friend, even family. It was not angst and desperation that had ruled Mother Russia during those years, it was pure chemical terror, wielded by this man sitting next to him, this vicious fox, murderer of Trotsky, murderer of the Revolution itself. They had taught many versions of this man in the history books over the years; it was even said that he was as much wildly loved as feared and hated. But no one, not those old men in their fanny-worn chairs, nor the prisoners, nor the men, like Khrushchev, who had placed themselves well by managing to avoid his eye, no, no one Viktor Borodin had ever spoken to, or witnessed testimony from—even those who had professed love—had ever spoken of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, the son of a peasant from Georgia who had grown up to become Joseph Stalin, in terms that didn't contain the word fear.

Victor Borodin felt that fear now. The man was godlike with it. He was plain enough looking, his flat face, piggish eyes, and full, florid mustache unremarkable separately; his plain dress, the drab olive coat buttoned to the neck—all of this unremarkable in part, but devastating in total. There had been similar stories, which Viktor had been more inclined to believe were folklore, of the power of Rasputin. Rasputin would have wilted like a cold rose had he ever met this man.

“Viktor Borodin,” Stalin said, his hand still on Viktor's awn, now pressing Viktor's fingers around the handle of the gun. “I want you to lift this gun and put it in your mouth.” His slitted eyes looked somehow huge, piercing him with a light more powerful than the flashlight beam. “You have been judged, Viktor Borodin, and you have been sentenced. Believe me, there is no reprieve.”

To Viktor's great surprise, he found himself lifting the pistol. His hand trembled. Stalin's hand steadied him.

“Put the gun in your mouth and pull the trigger.”

The man was like a cobra. Viktor Borodin, even as the land followed Stalin's instructions, brought the gun to his south, set it inside (it was cold, radiated cold even before it Ruched his tongue; he thought of tongue depressors, the cold breast of a spoon bringing cough medicine into his throat), thought about whether all of this was really happening. He wondered if he really could have traveled in time as well as space.

Even as he thought these things, staring into the blank, commanding face of Joseph Stalin, he pulled the trigger and found that what he experienced was real.

Outside the house, when Mikhail, Borodin's driver, heard the single shot, his first impulse was to find a phone and call for instructions. Then another thought penetrated his brain. If he called in to tell them he had let Comrade Borodin go into the house alone, a house where a dangerous enemy of the state was known to be, a desperate man, it would be, as Comrade Borodin might say, “his ass.”

Mikhail opened the front passenger door to the limousine and flipped down the door on the glove compartment. He pulled on the plastic map shelf, and it popped out, revealing a lit well behind it.

Mikhail reached into the well and brought out a Kolnokov automatic pistol. He checked the clip, reached back into the well and produced a second clip, which he put into the pocket of his coat.

He slammed the car door and walked to the front door. He listened against it, heard nothing, stepped back to kick it in.

It opened on its own. Mikhail immediately slid to the side, cocked gun before him. He heard nothing. He waited a long time, then edged around, taking in larger and larger portions of the front inside hallway with his eyes. It was seemingly empty.

“Comrade Borodin?” he called into the hallway. Someone moved out beyond the hallway; the house was damnably dark inside.

“Comrade?”

No answer.

In a quick, almost catlike movement, Mikhail was inside the house.

And falling.

Somewhere above him, he heard the front door close. He began to scream. Darkness below him turned into great height. He felt the air of the upper atmosphere rushing past him, throwing him downward toward the farm-checkered, colored landscape thousands of feet below. He heard the prop-roar of a plane; just droning away into the distance toward the horizon was the trainer he had been pushed out of. He remembered this scene; he was making his first jump, had been scared, and the instructor, a brash fellow his own age who would be killed a month later on a routine jump of his own, had called him a coward and shoved him through the opening, laughing down to him that he would either use his parachute or die not using it.