The Fixer (17 page)

  “Neither would I,” said the fixer. “It’s not in my nature, whatever else is.”

  “The weight of the evidence is against you.”

  “Then maybe the evidence is wrong, your honor?”

  “Evidence is evidence, it can’t be wrong.”

  Grubeshov’s voice became persuasive. “Tell me the honest truth, Yakov Bok, didn’t the Jewish Nation put you up to this crime? You seem like a serious person— perhaps you were unwilling to do it but they urged it on you, made threats or promises of certain sorts, and you reluctantly carried out the murder for them? To put it in other words, wasn’t it their idea rather than yours? If you’ll admit that, I’ll tell you frankly—I’ll put it this way —your life would be easier. We will not prosecute to the full extent of our powers. Perhaps after a short while you will be paroled and your sentence suspended. In other words, there are ‘possibilities.’ All we ask is your signature—that’s not so much.”

  Grubeshov’s face glistened, as though he were making a greater effort than was apparent.

  “How could I do such a thing, your honor? I couldn’t do such a thing. Why should I blame it on innocent people?”

  “History has proved they are not so innocent. Besides I don’t understand your false scruples. After all, you’re an admitted freethinker, this admission occurred in my presence. The Jews mean very little to you. I size you up as a man who is out for himself, though I can’t blame you. Come, here is an opportunity to free yourself from the confines of the net you have fallen into.”

  “If the Jews don’t mean anything to me, then why am I here?”

  “You are foolish to lend yourself to their evil aims. What have they done for you?”

  “At the very least, your honor, they’ve let me alone. No, I couldn’t sign such a thing.”

  “Then keep in mind that the consequences for you can be very grave. The sentence of the court will be the least of your worries.”

  “Please,” said the fixer, breathing heavily, “do you really believe those stories about magicians stealing the blood out of a murdered Christian child to mix in with matzos? You are an educated man and would surely not believe such superstitions.”

  Grubeshov sat back, smiling slightly. “I believe you killed the boy Zhenia Golov for ritual purposes. When they know the true facts, all Russia will believe it. Do you believe it?” he asked the guards.

  The guards swore they did.

  “Of course we believe it,” Grubeshov said. “A Jew is a Jew, and that’s all there is to it. Their history and character are unchangeable. Their nature is constant. This has been proved in scientific studies by Gobineau, Chamberlain and others. We here in Russia are presently preparing one on Jewish facial characteristics. Our peasants have a saying that a man who steals wears a hat that burns. With a Jew it is the nose that burns and reveals the criminal he is.”

  He flipped open a notebook to a page of pen-and-ink sketches, turning the book so that Yakov could read the printing at the top of the page: “Jewish noses.”

  “Here, for instance, is yours.” Grubeshov pointed to a thin high-bridged nose with slender nostrils.

  “And this is yours,” Yakov said hoarsely, pointing to a short, fleshy, broad-winged nose.

  The Prosecuting Attorney, though his color had deepened, laughed thinly. “You are a witty man,” he said, “but it won’t do you any good. Your fate is foreseen. Ours is a humane society but there are ways of punishing hardened criminals. Perhaps I ought to remind you—to show you how well off you are—how your fellow Jews were executed in the not too distant past. They were hanged wearing caps full of hot pitch and with a dog hanging beside them to show the world how despised they were.”

  “A dog hangs a dog, your honor.”

  “If you can’t bite don’t show your teeth.” Grubeshov, his neck inflamed, slashed the fixer across the jaw with a ruler. Yakov cried out as the wood snapped, one piece hitting the wall. The guards began to beat his head with their fists but the Prosecuting Attorney waved them away.

  “You can cry to Bibikov from now to doomsday,” he shouted at the fixer, “but I’ll keep you in prison till the flesh rots off your bones piece by piece. You will beg me to let you confess who compelled you to murder that innocent boy!”

  2

  He feared the prison would go badly for him and it went badly at once. It’s my luck, he thought bitterly. What do they say?—”If I dealt in candles the sun wouldn’t set.” Instead, I’m” Yakov Fixer and it sets each hour on the stroke. I’m the kind of man who finds it perilous to be alive. One thing I must learn is to say less—much less, or I’ll ruin myself. As it is I’m already ruined.

  The Kiev Prison, also in the Lukianovsky, was a high-walled old gray fortress-like building with a large interior muddy yard, strewn on the iron gate side with junk piles—a broken wagon, rotting mattresses, blackened boards, barrels of rubbish, rock and sandpiles where prisoners sometimes worked with cement. A clear area between the administrative offices on the west and the main cell block was the promenade grounds. Yakov and his guards had got to the prison on a trolley, a ride of several versts from the District Courthouse where he had been in jail until then. At the prison the fixer was greeted by the cross-eyed warden, “Hello, blood-drinker, welcome to the Promised Land.” The Deputy Warden, a lean, narrow-faced man with depthless eyes and a four-fingered right hand, said, “Here we’ll feed you flour and blood till you shit matzos.” The sub-officials and clerks rushed out of their offices to see the Jew, but Warden Grizitskoy, a man of sixty-five, with a limp yellowish gray beard, a khaki uniform with gold epaulets, and a visored cap, shoved open a door and led the fixer into an inner office, where he sat down at his desk.

  “I don’t want your kind here,” he said, “but I have no choice in the matter. I’m the Tsar’s servant and follow his orders faithfully. You are the lowest of Jewish scum —I’ve read of your deeds—but nevertheless a charge of his Imperial Majesty Nicholas the Second. So here you’ll stay till they tell me otherwise. You’d better behave yourself. Follow the rules and regulations and do as you’re told. Quickly does it. Under no circumstances are you to attempt to communicate with any person outside this prison unless I authorize it. If you make trouble you will be shot in your tracks. Understood?”

  “How long must I stay here?” Yakov managed to ask. “I mean considering I haven’t yet been tried.”

  “As long as the proper authorities deem necessary. Now keep your questions to yourself and go along with the sergeant. He will tell you what to do.”

  The sergeant, a man with drooping mustaches, led the fixer down the corridor past some dingy offices from whose doorways the clerks were staring out, to a long room with a counter and several benches where he was ordered to undress. Yakov changed into a sack-like white jacket, smelling of human sweat, and a pair of shapeless linen trousers. He was handed a shirt without buttons and a worn greatcoat that had once been brown and was now gray, to sleep in or under at night. As he was pulling off his boots to change into a pair of stiff prison shoes, a wave of oppressive darkness swept over him. Though he felt like fainting he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.

  “Sit down in that chair for your haircut,” the sergeant ordered.

  Yakov sat down in a straightback chair, but as the prison barber was about to crop his hair with a pair of large clippers, the sergeant, checking his official paper, stopped him.

  “Never mind that. The orders say let him keep his head of hair.”

  “It’s always like that,” said the barber, incensed. “These pricks are born with privileges.”

  “Cut it off!” shouted Yakov, “cut off my hair!”

  “Silence!” ordered the sergeant. “Learn to follow orders! Move on!”

  He unlocked a metal door with a large key and followed the fixer down a dimly lit dank corridor to a large crowded cell with a barred grating on one side, and a wall on the other containing two high small dirty windows through which little light penetrated. A smelly urinal, no more than an open drain, ran along the rear wall of the cell.

  “It’s the thirty-day cell,” said the sergeant. “You stay here for a month and either you go on trial or they transfer you elsewhere.”

  “Where elsewhere?”

  “You’ll find out.”

  Wherever it is what difference does it make? the fixer thought blackly.

  The noise in the cell quieted as the door clanked open, and the silence deepened as though a quilt had been thrown over the prisoners as they watched Yakov enter. After the door shut behind him they began talking and moving again. There were about twenty-five men in the room, their searing stench in the almost airless cell nauseating. Some sat on the floor playing cards, two men danced closely together, a few wrestled or sparred, fell over each other, got kicked and cursed at. An old fanatic jumped repeatedly from the seat of a broken stool. A man with a sick sunken face hammered his shoe with the heel of another. There were a few benches and tables in the cells but no cots or mattresses. The prisoners slept on a low wooden platform along the outer wall, raised a centimeter from the damp filthy floor. Yakov sat alone in the farthest corner, reflecting on his wretched fate. He would have torn out fistfuls of his hair but was afraid to be noticed.

  3

  A guard with a gun outside the grating shouted “Supper!” and two other guards opened the cell door and delivered three steaming wooden pails of soup. The prisoners ran with a roar to the pails, crowding around each. Yakov, who had eaten nothing that day, got up slowly. A guard handed out a wooden spoon to one prisoner in each group around the three pails. Sitting on the floor before his pail, the prisoner was allowed to eat ten spoonfuls of the watery cabbage soup, thickened with a bit of barley, then had to pass the spoon to the next one in line. Those who tried to take extra spoonfuls were beaten by the others. After each prisoner had had his quota, the first began again.

  Yakov edged close to the nearest pail but the one eating the soup, a clubfoot with a scarred head, stopped spooning, reached into the pail, and with a shout of triumph plucked out half a dead mouse, its entrails hanging. The prisoner held the mouse by the tail, hastily spooning down the soup with his other hand. Two of the prisoners violently twisted the spoon out of his hand and shoved him away from the pail. The clubfoot limped over to the men at the next pail and dangled the mouse in front of their faces, but though they cursed him into the ground no one left the pail. So he clumsily danced around with his dead mouse. Yakov glanced into the second pail, already empty except for a few dead cockroaches floating at the bottom. He did not look into the third pail. Nor did he care for the colorless tea that was served in tin mugs without sugar. He had hoped for a bit of bread but was given none because his name had not been entered on the bread list by the sergeant. That night when the other prisoners were snoring side by side on the platform, the fixer, wrapped in his greatcoat, though it was not a cold night, walked back and forth the length of the cell in the thick dark until the nails in his shoes bit into his feet. When he lay down exhausted, covering his face with half a sheet of newspaper he had found in the cell, to keep off the flies, he was at once awakened by the clanging bell.

  At breakfast he gulped down the weak tea that smelled like wood rotting but could not touch the watery gray gruel in the pails. He had heard the wooden pails were in use in the bathhouse when they were not filled with soup or gruel. He asked for bread but the guard said he was still not on the list.

  “When will I be?”

  “Fuck you,” said the guard. “Don’t make trouble.”

  The fixer noticed that the mood of the prisoners to him, neutral to begin with, had altered. The men were quieter, subdued. During the morning they congregated in groups close to the urinal, whispering, casting glances at Yakov. The clubfoot from time to time appraised him with shrewd and cunning eyes.

  Yakov felt icicles sprout in his blood. Something has happened, he thought. Maybe somebody told them who I am. If they think I killed a Christian boy they might want to kill me.

  In that case should he cry out to the guard and ask to be transferred to another cell before they murdered him in this? And if he did would he live long enough to get there? Suppose the prisoners rushed him and the guards made no move to defend him?

  During the morning “promenade,” the ten-minute exercise break when the men marched in double lines of twelve around the yard, ten paces between each group, as armed guards, some with coiled bullwhips, stood at the foot of the high thick walls, the clubfoot, who had slipped into line next to Yakov, said in a whisper, “Why isn’t your head shaved like the rest of us?”

  “I don’t know,” Yakov whispered. “I told the barber to go ahead and do it.”

  “Are you a stool pigeon or squealer? The men are suspicious of you.”

  “No, no, tell them I’m not.”

  “Then why do you sit apart from us? Who the hell do you think you are?”

  “To tell the truth my feet hurt in these shoes. Also it’s my first time in prison. I’m trying to get used to it but it’s not so easy.”

  “Are you expecting any food packages?” asked the clubfoot.

  “Who would send me packages? I have nobody to send me a package. My wife left me. Everyone I know is poor.”

  “Well, if you get one, share and share alike is my motto. That’s the rule here.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  The clubfoot limped along in silence.

  They don’t know who I am, Yakov thought. From now on I’d better be sociable. Once they find out it will be blows, not questions.

  But when the prisoners had marched back into the cell there were whispered arguments among them, and Yakov, remembering how he had been beaten in the District Courthouse cell, felt himself sweating hotly.

  Afterwards, another prisoner, a tall man with humid eyes, detached himself from a group of others and approached Yakov. He was heavily built, with a pale hard intense face, an almost black neck, and thin bent legs. He walked forward slowly, oddly, as though afraid something might fall out of his clothes. The fixer, sitting on the floor with his back to the wall, scrambled up quickly.