Novak shuffled into the room and seated himself. Beaming.
Imre focused somewhere beyond the man’s shoulder, clasping and unclasping his hands and fighting the urge to sit upon them to hide his frightened fingers.
He’d told himself not to be afraid. He was dying anyway, no? Soon he would lose everything he had to lose. If some parts, like fingers, for instance, died sooner, what of it? The pain would soon be behind him.
His efforts were futile. He could not talk himself out of the fear.
Imre was grateful, at least, that he was not wearing his spectacles. Only one lens was still intact. The other had been shattered in the second beating. Having one corrected eye and the other blurred gave him a blinding headache. Since the last thing he needed was more pain from any quarter, he had given up on the glasses altogether, and hidden them under his mattress. Thus, he could not see the hideous details of Novak’s face, the feverish glow of those jaundiced, bulbous eyes, only a malevolent blur.
Although he smelled the stench of the man’s breath all too well.
“I have been thinking about you a great deal, Imre.” Novak had the air of a man conferring an honor. “I believe you and I have something in common.” The man’s voice was pleasant, chatty.
God forbid, Imre thought, dropping his gaze to his twitching fingers. He willed them to lie still, to not draw attention to themselves.
“I can see by your color, your thinness, that you are being consumed by some wasting disease,” Novak said. “Cancer?”
Surprise betrayed Imre into looking up and meeting Novak’s eyes.
He dropped his gaze just as quickly, but Novak chuckled, pleased.
“I thought so. Liver, stomach, brain? Not long for you now, is it? I can feel it on you, Imre. How ironic for Vajda, is it not? Working so valiantly to save the life of a dying man. How long did they give you?”
Imre tried to swallow, but his throat was too dry. He began to cough, and once he started, he could not stop.
“Not long, no?” Novak laughed again. “Three months? They like to say three months. It’s their standard phrase. That’s what they told me seven months ago, but I live on, see? Rotting from within, true, but here I am. The pleasure I will take in this woman’s death will grant me another month, at least. These punishments charge me like a battery. Would you like to participate? It might have the same effect upon you.”
Imre looked up at him once again. “No,” he said hoarsely.
Novak blinked and smiled, pleased to have dragged another response out of him. “Then you can be a spectator when the time comes. It won’t be long. Vajda works fast. He has always been efficient.”
Imre grasped the edge of the bed. Horror darkened his vision. Faintness threatened. He teetered, on the brink of that long, dark fall.
“Poor man,” Novak crooned. “I feel for you, being old and infirm myself. The pain is terrible, no?” He dug in his pocket and took out a vial of capsules. He rattled them, then opened the bottle and shook one of them out into his hand. “Powerful slow-release opiates. Shall I give you one? I won’t leave you the whole bottle, because you would gobble them all at once, naughty fellow. But I will give you this pill, if you would just explain one thing that continues to puzzle me.”
He waited for Imre to reach for the pill, to beg, to ask what the one thing that puzzled him was. But Imre could not have spoken if he wanted to. He was frozen. Fear had turned him into a pillar of salt.
Novak’s eyes squinted to bright, wrinkled slits. “I wish to know how your catamite remained so devoted to you. When I was young, a man made me his pet in exchange for food and shelter, just as you did for Vajda. Do you know what I did to him when I was older?”
Please. No. Do not tell me. Imre closed his eyes, summoned up a deafening mental rendition of Bach’s first Brandenburg Concerto to drown the words out.
Novak’s voice cut through the music like a hot knife through butter. “I removed his skin strip by strip,” he said, almost tenderly. “Perhaps I shall do that to the woman. Let us make a tally, Imre. From now on, for every question that you disdain to answer, I tear off a shred of her skin. While you watch.”
He laid the pill on the blanket that covered Imre’s cot and stood.
“Take it,” he said magnanimously. “I can be reasonable, if you are reasonable with me. I am alone, as you are. We could have such interesting conversations if you would lower yourself to speak to me. We are just two old men, after all, facing the same ultimate fate. I am so curious about you. Vajda got his culture and sophistication from you, no? In fact, thanks to you, he became too good to work for the likes of me.” He laughed and patted Imre’s shoulder.
Imre flinched.
“I do hope that Vajda succeeds in bringing the woman to me,” Novak mused. “I will conduct the punishment upon you, if I must, but to be quite truthful…torturing a wretched old man who is already wracked with pain is much less satisfying. Pain is so familiar to you already, you see. The experience falls a bit flat. But do not fear. I am sure my András could wring a lively response, even out of a dying wreck like you. He is so talented. You will see, you will see.”
Imre squeezed his eyes shut. Tears slipped down against his will.
One of Novak’s men opened the door, the other folded up the chair. They waited until the boss shuffled out.
“Enjoy the pill, Imre.” Novak’s taunting voice floated through the door as he retreated down the hall.
The door clanged shut, the lock rattled. He was alone again.
The rictus melted. A long, violent palsy of terror shook him.
When the worst of it had passed, he took the pill and slipped it under the mattress. He might well need it more later than he needed it now.
His fingers brushed against the metal frame of the broken eyeglasses.
He pulled them out. Then he loosened the largest unbroken shard of the shattered lens, and pried it carefully from the frame. The glasses were old, made of real glass, not plastic, and the shard was thick, a rough triangle that came to a jagged, sharp point. He pressed it to the pad of his thumb.
A dark drop of blood welled up.
Imre sat motionless for hours, staring fixedly at that shard of glass until the lights snapped off, leaving him in inky darkness.
Chapter
14
Tam sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the blank wall, eyes frozen wide. It made no difference if they were open or closed. She could not block out the images from inside her head. Nor the sounds. She had tried, but rifle fire kept cracking endlessly in the distance. Harrowing screams kept floating up from the dreaded basement cells of Sremska Mitrovica. The cells where the torturers did their work.
She wanted to clap her hands over her ears, but that was problematic, since the sound issued from inside her own head. She kept her hands wound tight, white-knuckled, into the bed covers. Hanging on to her present reality. This expensive, clean, safe hotel room. She was at the Huxley, with her daughter, surrounded by friends. She was not jammed in a moaning crowd of sweating bodies. The misery, the stench, the lice. Packed together too tightly even to lie down on the floor.
Rachel slept, finally, in the bed behind her. Coaxing the over-stimulated little girl to go down after she’d played with Sveti and the other little kids all evening and then overdosed on the chocolate wedding cake had been the usual three-ring circus. Even so, tonight, Tam was not grateful to be left alone with the contents of her own mind.
Amazingly, tonight she would have gladly traded the quiet