Kzine Issue 15 Read online

  “Then what? They smack you on the nose with a copy of Pravda? I don’t see any bruises on you. To me you’re just a paranormal stukach. Because of you, six of our agents have been captured. We don’t even know if any of them are still alive.”

  “You don’t see the bruises, because when they torture me they don’t leave any bruises.”

  “Oh? What do they beat you with, feather pillows?”

  He met my gaze. “They zap my balls with electric shocks. That way I’m presentable when they take me to Sheremetyevo Airport to read the arriving foreigners, to see who might be a spy.”

  I studied him. If the guy was acting, this was an Oscar-caliber performance. “Why should they torture you if they can read your thoughts by touching the stuff you handled? The way you did with the matryoshka you put in the dead drop for me.”

  “They could read my thoughts, if I let them. But I never told anyone except you that I can imbue objects with my thoughts. The KGB only knows that I can read people’s minds, thank God.” He crossed himself with his thumb, index and middle fingers touching, as if he was holding a pinch of salt.

  I wanted to tell him that I hoped the CIA would fry his balls to get the names of all the Soviet spies in the US, but I needed his cooperation to get him across the border and all the way to America. “Then why didn’t you just lie to the KGB when they had you read people?”

  “Because they would test me.”

  “Test you how?”

  “They’d have me read someone that they knew was a spy. And if I didn’t tell them all they already knew about this spy, they’d torture me. I never knew if the person they brought for me to read was a captured agent or a KGB officer pretending to be one, until I read him.”

  He leaned forward, clasped his head and rocked himself. “I hate myself for what I’ve done. I sent people to torture and death. But I couldn’t take the pain the KGB put me through if I didn’t cooperate. I was too weak to kill myself. Besides, my guards wouldn’t have let me.”

  It was tempting to believe him, but I still didn’t know if I should.

  “The worst of it, though, is reading people’s minds, especially when I go deep into their subconscious. It’s not too bad when I read them at Sheremetyevo Airport, because I just scan their surface thoughts to see if they might be spies. They hardly feel anything. But deep mind reading… I said it’s like rape, but it’s worse than that. The intrusion, the helplessness they feel when I do it to them. They all want to die rather than endure another moment of me in their heads.”

  He straightened, hands fisted in his lap, eyes searching for something in my face. “Do you understand what I’m saying? Does it even make sense?” Pea-sized tears rolled down his stubbly cheeks. His shoulders shook.

  I’d seen a lot of liars in my line of work. Hell, I was one, because that’s what an intelligence agent does. Some of us feel more comfortable when we pretend being someone else, because we spend so much time doing it. Our real identity makes us feel as if we are naked in public. This guy, though, I didn’t know what to make of him. And I needed to know, especially before I handed him over to the CIA where he could do unthinkable damage.

  “Do it to me,” I said.

  He blinked at me. “You mean, read you?”

  “Yes, do it. I don’t know how else to figure out if I can trust you.”

  He swiveled his head and put his right fist over his mouth. “No. You don’t understand what you’re asking me. I told you, it’s worse than rape. You have to believe me.”

  “Do it anyway. Let me worry about the consequences to me.”

  “Please, please don’t ask me to do this,” he whispered from behind his fist. “I never want to do this again to anyone,”

  “Do it, or I’ll let you out here, and you’ll be on your own.”

  He slumped, turned his hands palms up and studied them, as if he was trying to read his own fate.

  “Well? I don’t feel anything. I think you…” And then I felt his presence. It was as if someone split my skull open and was examining my gray matter cell by cell under a microscope. Memories flickered in my mind’s eye, raw and vicious in their details: the man I’d garroted in Cairo, only to find out later that he wasn’t a terrorist after all; the lies I’d told my wife; the kinky sex I’d had with a hooker in Brussels… I tried to suppress these thoughts, but there was nowhere I could hide from them. This was worse than being naked in public, worse than mere rape. The only privacy a person truly has is in his mind. If he loses that, he loses his identity, everything he is. I understood it, now.

  Kovalev was turning me inside out, stripping all the defenses I’d ever built up to protect my sanity. Memories of every rotten and immoral thing I’d ever done exploded in my mind like bombs. Shame twisted my guts.

  I hung my head to avoid seeing pity in Kovalev’s tearful eyes. I didn’t deserve anyone’s pity.

  His presence in my thoughts vanished. “Oh God,” he said in quavering voice. “I wish you didn’t make me do this. Please, we all do bad things. That is what being human means.”

  “It’s not your fault that I’m a bastard. You did only what I told you —” From the corner of my eye I saw his hand move in his lap. Behind it the crotch of his pants stood tented - the son of a bitch was having an erection! “You lying shit. You enjoy mind raping people. This whole thing was a performance to get us to trust you.” I pointed at his crotch. “You’ve also lied about the KGB torturing you. If they fried your balls, you wouldn’t have been able to have a hard-on.”

  Kovalev’s face stilled for a moment. Then he lifted his hands in a surrender gesture and grinned as if to say, “You got me.”

  I opened my mouth to call to Logan and Mulford to pull over.

  Kovalev struck at me like a suddenly uncoiled cobra. His hands fastened around my neck, choking off my cry of alarm. His grin spread. “There is another little trick that I do. And here it comes…” Pressure began to build within my skull. Pain pushed on my sinuses, inside my ear canals and behind my eyes. A grayish-red thought slithered into my awareness: I was going to die either from asphyxia, stroke or a brain aneurysm.

  Breathing was the first priority. I had to loosen the chokehold around my neck. But my arms couldn’t rise that far.

  Kovalev’s features blurred until he looked like his face was painted on a shrinking balloon. Another few seconds and I wouldn’t be able to think straight. I managed to lift my right leg. If I stomped it loudly enough, Logan and Mulford might hear me.

  The leg dropped. I wasn’t sure it made any noise. I couldn’t lift it back up.

  My whole body drooped. This wasn’t really a bad way to die. Just go to sleep and the pain would go away.

  In the gray sludge, one image rose: Tikhomirov’s battered face. Kovalev would go on to torture and kill more of our agents if I didn’t stop him. He’d get my gun and shoot Mulford and Logan in the back. Gun. I clenched my right hand into a fist and forced it into my coat pocket. The effort felt like lifting a fifty pound dumbbell.

  I groped the gun. Cold metal surfaces. Somebody must’ve removed the trigger.

  Someone was saying something to me. The language could’ve been Russian or maybe Polish. I didn’t know.

  My index finger slipped into the trigger guard and the trigger was still there. My aim wouldn’t be great, shooting through the pocket. I pressed the trigger, anyway, once, again, harder. The gun shot sounded far away.

  The pressure on my neck loosened. Someone yelled. I gasped air. It went down my throat like broken glass. The gray sludge receded. My vision returned by degrees. I recognized Logan’s face.

  “Are you all right?” Logan said and had to repeat himself twice before I could answer him.

  “No,” I croaked and broke into a coughing fit.

  Logan helped me sit up.

  Kovalev lay back, clutching a wound in his gut. Blood was streaming between his fingers. His cheeks and forehead looked frost-white.

  “What the hell happened?” Mulford yelled
from the driver’s seat.

  Logan handed me an open thermos with tepid coffee, and I took a painful gulp, which helped lubricate my burning throat.

  “Take us…” I said and coughed again. “Take us to the embassy. Will tell you there.”

  “What about him?” Logan pointed at Kovalev.

  “Stukach,” I replied. “KGB’s loyal dog. Always has been.”

  “Shouldn’t we bind his wound?” Logan said.

  I pressed two fingers to Kovalev’s left carotid artery. “Leave him. He’s a goner, anyway.” Even if we could save him, I wouldn’t turn him in to the CIA. I couldn’t afford to have Kovalev tell anyone about what he had read in my head. Besides, in the wrong hands, he would be the most dangerous weapon in the world. The “authorities” would use him to persecute people for thoughtcrimes, like in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. No one should have control over such power.

  FIVE MILES OUT OF PORT HURON

  by Jon Arthur Kitson

  From the Port Huron Daily Examiner, July 10, 1923:

  Word reached Port Huron Saturday morning of the tragic deaths of long-time St. Clair County Drain Commissioner Emmitt Large and his young assistant Howard Chase…

  * * *

  Emmitt Large said nothing to Howard Chase for the first five miles out of Port Huron. When he did finally speak he didn’t take his eyes off the road, or his hands off the steering wheel of the Chevrolet.

  “Stupid.” Large chewed a bit, properly tasting the next phrase before spiting it out. “Fucking stupid.”

  “I’m sorry.” Chase grabbed the dash harder than necessary as the car bumped over one of the left-over winter potholes dimpling Perimeter Road. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

  Large looked away from the road and at the younger Chase.

  “A week! You had a week to figure out what else to do.” Large pounded on the steering wheel. “For a whole damn week I thought you’d taken care of things—”

  “But I did—”

  “Bullshit! You didn’t take care of shit. And you just tell me now.” Now Large’s eyes left the road. “When it might be too late.”

  Chase opened his mouth, then decided not to bother; there was no reasoning with Emmitt Large when he got like this. Instead, he leaned against the leather seat and stared out the passenger window. Lake Huron reflected spikes of fresh sunlight through the trees.

  One week? He couldn’t believe it’d only been that long. It felt like he’d known Mara his whole life. Sure, he’d seen her around— coming out of the library, going into the general store— in the six months he’d been in town, but had they really only been spending time together for a week?

  Yeah, it must have been. Chase glanced at Large, then back out the window. He literally bumped into Mara after burning the rags he’d used to mop up the County Drain Office. She said how much she loved the smell of a campfire.

  “You see that there?”

  It took Chase a moment to realize Large had broken his silence. From behind the wheel, his wide chin jutted east.

  “What, the lake?”

  “Yes, the lake.”

  Chase moved his face closer to the glass. Through the trees, which had begun to thin, Lake Huron’s blue-gray water sparked. He turned back to Large.

  “What about it?”

  Large focused over the wheel. The road curved slowly west, away from shore. Color showed in his cheeks.

  “Why the hell didn’t you dump it there?”

  “At the pick-up?” Chase twisted and gave the lake a last look as it blended into a blurry emptiness between the shrinking trees. “What about the Canadians?”

  “The Canadians?”

  Large slowed the Chevrolet while giving his eyes a moment to froth at Chase. Then he looked beyond the younger man and smiled. Chase, confused for a moment, followed his gaze out the window.

  Three men, two gray, one liver-spotted and bald, sat around an upturned peach crate on the front porch of Reynolds General Store. They nodded at Large, who answered with a politician grin.

  “The Canadians—” Large didn’t stop smiling until they’d crossed the double set of freight tracks and out of Mander Corners. “—don’t give a damn what we do, as long as we keep buying their stuff.”

  “But—”

  “They don’t give a damn!” Large took a breath. “But the.. gentlemen.. on the other end, the ones who you better be praying to god haven’t made it to the drop-off point yet, they will give a damn.” He began to brake at a dirt crossroad—

  “It’s the next one,” Chase said and Large accelerated.

  “If they find something extra,” Large continued, “especially that kind of something extra, along with this week’s shipment, they are going to give many damns.” He slowed the car, turned down the two lane dirt opening spilling from the left. “And I’ll be damned if I’m going to be the one facing their wrath.”

  Chase’s eyes grew wide for more reasons than the sudden dimness of the leaf canopied road. “I still don’t know why you—” “Because it had to be done!” Flecks of spit hit the windshield and painted the corners of Large’s mouth. “You know that. If we wanted to stay in business, keep making money, it had to be done.” He pulled along the side of the road and turned off the engine. “I just hope you didn’t fuck it all up.”

  The gentlemen had been prompt. The culvert running under the road was empty. Everything, everything, was gone.

  Despite the heat —both from the advancing morning and the string of profanities Large threw at him while pacing the culvert, kicking at last fall’s dead leaves— Chase shivered. The cold planted itself in his belly as he climbed behind Large back up to the road and into the car.

  “Shit.” It came out of Large’s mouth as more of a dribble. He looked a foot shorter spinning the steering wheel, turning the car onto Perimeter Road.

  “Maybe it won’t be so bad,” Chase said. Still, he couldn’t help but think something that’d been at the back of his mind ever since Mara gave him that first kiss before she scooted into the church late for bible study; maybe he should start thinking about going straight. Finding a way to make a living where he never had to say: “They’re used to this sort of thing.”

  Large stared at him for a beat longer than comfortable. “And you find that reassuring.” His eyes darted back to the road, then to both sides and then behind. “When we get back to town I’m leaving. I suggest you do the same.”

  “Is that really necessary?” The car sped up, but that wasn’t why Chase grabbed the dashboard. “I don’t want to leave. Like you said, it had to be done. You.. we, were just tying up loose ends. Maybe they’ll appreciate that.”

  “Or maybe they’ll think we’re a couple loose ends— What’s that?”

  They careened past the first dirt road. Chase spun to catch a black bumper and pair of dusty fore-tires poking through the trees.

  “Just somebody out for a morning drive.” The truck, a Ford Model T with a paneled bed, pulled out and headed south behind them down Perimeter road. “Or making a delivery.”

  “Or waiting.” Their own car wobbled while Large stole a look back. “Waiting for us to drive by.” He stomped on the accelerator and the engine whined.

  “Why would they think we’d come back?” But the ball of ice that’d started at the culvert rolled into a boulder in Chase’s stomach. He squinted out the back window trying to sort the truck’s driver from the bouncing of the road. Didn’t they all have the same look? Beyond there being two people —men, from the blurry shapes— in the cab, he couldn’t discern anything else. But the truck was getting closer.

  He thought of Mara. And he thought of the cousin he was pretty sure he had who owned a hardware store up in Newberry. All the way in the Upper Peninsula would be far enough, wouldn’t it? Mara always said she loved it up north. And he also thought about how she was probably already waiting on his boarding house porch with a picnic basket of the blackberry jam sandwiches he’d told her he liked so much. “Don�
��t drop me off at my place.”

  “Your place?” Large’s eyes only darted at Chase. “You’re lucky I don’t drop you right here. Throw you to the wolves—”

  Large’s white knuckles didn’t leave the steering wheel and the car didn’t slow as it flew past the peeling white and black sign announcing Mander Corners, but the ice in Chase’s belly dissolved to steam. He spun, and although from the corner of his eye he could now make out the gray fedoras on the men in the quickly gaining truck, his stare pierced Large’s flesh.

  “You—” the death grip he already had on the dash held Chase in place as the car bumped over the first freight track, “—bastard. How about if I tell them,” he pointed out the back window, only glancing long enough to notice the truck had slowed, “you’re the one screwing everything up? I’m just the errand boy, remember? You’re the one in charge.”

  The car thudded onto the second line of tracks. Large’s foot slipped off the accelerator as he bounced high off the driver’s seat. Chase’s anger weighed him in place. The car slowed.

  “So let’s stop. And maybe it’ll be you who told me to ‘leave the body with the hooch and let the mob clean it up.’”

  “You son-of-a-bitch.” Large’s head snapped around. Chase watched first as his mouth, then his eyes grew big. “Shit!”

  Then Howard Chase heard the train.

  * * *

  …witnesses of the horrific accident at Mander Corners say it appeared the two men were deeply engaged in conversation and appeared not to notice the oncoming freight train. Mr. Large died instantly, while Mr. Chase died three hours later at St. Mary’s General Hospital. Dr. Daniel Joseph, head physician at St. Mary’s, speculates that although Mr. Chase’s injuries did not at first appear critical, there must have been undetected internal bleeding. “We patched him up and left him to rest,” Dr. Joseph told the Daily Examiner, “but an hour later it was discovered he had passed peacefully in his sleep.”

  This unfortunate tragedy is the second to strike the St. Clair County offices in a week. As of this printing there is still no word on the whereabouts of Frank Shubert, assistant to the County Clerk, who has been missing since earlier this week…