The Domino Game (18 page)

“I am advised that this tendering of evidence concludes the prosecution’s case and we are now ready to hear the defense. Are there any witnesses the defense wishes to call?”

Nikolai leaned towards his attorney, whispering in the man’s ear. The lawyer turned slightly, a sharp restricted movement. He started to respond with a dubious look then his eyes found his client’s and he noticed something in them he hadn’t seen before. Something that caused him to think again. He turned aside, studied the table for a moment, then pushed back his chair and climbed uncertainly to his feet.

“Your honors.” The room was silent. This was apparently an unexpected and unwelcome deviation from the script. The young man cleared his throat and, spinning a nervous glance towards his client, started again.

“Your honors, if it pleases the court, the defense does have one witness it wishes to call.” He glanced at Nikolai, again. Licked his lips.” The defense wishes to call to the court Mr Jack Hartman, Political Officer of the Embassy of the United States.”

Nikolai’s eyes travelled between the bench and the prosecutor, watching for the reaction. The three judges exchanged glances, their president taking the lead, silently addressing the prosecutor with raised eyebrows. The prosecutor was a tall, narrow-faced man, expensively groomed, dressed in an elegant charcoal suit. He nodded and took his time, removing his glasses and allowing an expression of patronizing amusement to unroll across his features. Finally his long limbs unfolded from his chair and he rose to his feet, ignoring Nikolai and his lawyer, speaking directly to the bench.

“Regrettably, your honors, I do not believe that will be possible since I am advised that Mr Hartman was called back to the United States several days ago.” He turned to the defense table with the outline of a smile and blinked slowly. “Permanently I understand, your honors.”

After that, who else was there to call? Who could help him now?

This wasn’t about Nikolai’s record or character, or even about Ivankov now, for that matter. Through a finely tuned process it had all been reduced to one simple concept: an officer of the FSB cutting a deal to sell sensitive information to a representative of a foreign power. A difficult charge to defend since, in essence, it was true. And now impossible to put into any mitigating context when Jack Hartman himself – the apparent source of the evidence against Nikolai – had gone… Left the country.

So there was no point, now.

No point in calling Vari since even if he was the friend Nikolai had always believed him to be, by telling the truth Vari would merely be confirming the prosecution’s charges and implicating himself in the process. And if he wasn’t? If Vari had somehow been involved in all that had happened, then calling him as a witness for the defense would be ridiculous.

Neither, Nikolai reasoned with himself, was there anything to be gained by involving Natalia, despite how desperately he wanted to see her, since her evidence would only make things worse for both of them. And as for taking the stand on his own behalf, what could that achieve?

There was nothing that could possibly change the predetermined outcome. He realized that now.

So, when the troika of judges retired and returned again less than ten minutes later to announce their verdict, their unanimous declaration of his guilt came as no surprise to Nikolai. But nothing in the world could have prepared him for the shock of what had followed.

At first he thought he had misheard the words.

The accused, Nikolai Aven, having been found guilty of the crime of treason against the Russian Federation, is hereby sentenced by this court to a term of imprisonment of no less than twenty years, this sentence to be served in a labor facility controlled by the Main Directorate for the Execution of
Punishments.

Then he realized he hadn’t and his breath and knees faltered together as the strike of the chief judge’s gavel rang in his ears.

15

From the court
they took him by closed wagon to a processing facility near Lukhovitsy on the south-eastern fringe of the city. It was a modern complex, newly constructed by the post-Soviet regime as a showplace for the commitment to reform. A place where the human rights activists could be taken for morning tea to satisfy their need to know that their efforts were making a difference. It was clean and tidy and it had modern recreational facilities and a library and accommodation struck at four to a cell. A place from which Nikolai found it almost possible to believe that there may be a way back.

At the time of his arrival he had still been in shock and denial, following orders in a daze; still trying to make himself believe that his arrest and imprisonment must surely have been just a warning, that any moment someone would arrive to announce that it was over and that he was to be set free… that now he had learned his lesson his life would be returned to him and everything would be exactly as it had been before. But no one came and after a week the horror of the reality began to settle deeper and that was when they allowed him to use the telephone. Ridiculous and pathetic as it was, by then he could barely contain his excitement at that one simple concession.

His fingers shook and stumbled across the dial as he called Natalia and waited. Waited until the tone rang out and all that was left was a hollow silence.

Panic gripped him then. The kind of panic that he imagined might consume a sailor tossed overboard in a storm, struggling against the swells as his ship sailed on without him, its outline growing ever more distant against a darkening sky.

He tried to settle his fear. Tried to convince himself that Natalia might be anywhere. Shopping, taking Larisa to school, visiting friends. But the very concept that such normality might still exist in another world from which he was now so impossibly isolated only terrified him more. He hung up and called again. Then again and again until his time was up and the guard moved him on and it was at that moment that the true despair and hopelessness took hold.

He was at Lukhovitsy for a month in all.

During that time he was allowed no visitors and received no mail and though he tried the same number every week, the telephone was never answered. Natalia was no longer there.

From Lukhovitsy he was moved to a prison at Samara, six hundred kilometers west of Moscow. At the time he was still numb, watching what was happening unfold around him as if he were a spectator, yet understanding within himself that the parameters of his world had been redefined. Forever.

Samara was a different type of place entirely. The kind of hellhole that up until then Nikolai might only ever have imagined in his worst nightmares. But for all its ugliness and brutality, he had Samara to thank for his awakening.

The battered gray bus that carried him there held a dozen prisoners in all, each chained to a separate seat beside a barred window, all of them watched over by a brace of guards who sat at the back for most of the journey, joking and playing cards, once in a while wandering the aisle to give their charges a cursory inspection.

It was late June now. Russian summer. A season as harsh and cruel in its own way as winter but, by comparison, mercifully short. Outside, Nikolai guessed, it was well over ninety degrees, which meant it was probably a hundred and twenty inside the sealed steel capsule. Their transport had been equipped with air vents of a fashion – crude, mesh-covered openings above each window – but they did nothing to dispel the nauseating stench of sweat and diesel, just made it easier for the acrid smoke from the forest fires to find its way inside. In an uncharacteristic gesture of humanity the guards at Lukhovitsy had let Nikolai keep his wedding band and the watch Natalia had given him for his last birthday. He used the timepiece now as his only amusement, counting off the hours of the journey, watching the names of the towns and villages on the road signs and applying a process of elimination to calculate their final destination.

When they reached Samara they bypassed the town and continued along the highway for a while before swinging left into an unmarked bitumen cleft between tight rows of dense, green firs. Almost instantly the blazing afternoon sun succumbed to the forest and the temperature within the cabin mercifully plummeted. They were travelling through a thick, cool glade now, towards a vertical shaft of light at its end; a light that grew broader and brighter as they drew closer until finally the bus shed the forest and emerged onto a vast cleared plain that seemed to go on forever. At its center lay a huge, sprawling complex: an ugly collection of structures staked at their perimeter by a massive wire fence, punctuated at intervals by thrusting towers of steel. Beyond the inner walls tall chimneys of brick pumped steam and smoke into an endless blue sky, leaving it smeared with a heavy gray cloud that hung above the compound. An unsettled murmur ran through the bus as it rumbled towards the barrier gate. Nikolai ignored the other prisoners and sat watching silently through the grime-smeared windows, looking past the fence to the main building, drawn to it by a curious fascination.

It seemed strangely ornate for a prison.

It was built of dark brick, almost gothic in design, three stories for the most part, but with towers at either side that rose higher again, capped with steep tent roofs of somber tile. Built, probably, in one of the later decades of the last century since it displayed the flourish that by then had become the standard for Tsarist public works. The cheaply constructed blockhouses beside and beyond the main structure told their own tale of its expansion and evolution. They were later additions, from the 1920s, Nikolai guessed, when the zealousness of Lenin’s Chekha made prison construction Russia’s major industry, and then from the ‘30s, when Stalin’s paranoia bred a reign of mass terror rising to a crescendo of purges that, at its peak, had resulted in an incredible ten million Russian citizens being imprisoned at the one time, most of them guilty of nothing. Taken in the night from their families and their homes, torn away from their lives and removed to places like this for no other reason than that someone with power had perceived them as a possible threat.

It had taken decades for the horror of what had happened to be revealed and acknowledged, and even now the Russian people remained dazed by the truth, but at least it was over. That was what they believed, and Nikolai had believed it, too – that it was over and it could never happen again. But they were wrong. Despite Russia’s rebirth. Despite the communists being swept from power and the monuments to Lenin and Stalin being torn down and sold for scrap. Despite
glasnost
and
perestroika
and Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and shopping malls and rock concerts in Red Square, the hearts of the powerful in Russia were as dark and intransigent now as they had ever been.

It could still happen. Nikolai Aven knew that now.

He was separated from the other prisoners with whom he had made the journey and installed in one of a dozen blockhouses in the eastern sector, single level masonry structures that formed open squares around grim and barren concrete yards. Each of the four wings was divided into five common cells measuring six meters by ten. Those prisoners who were awake in the cell to which they led him paused to inspect Nikolai with silent suspicion as he arrived. There were a dozen of them in all, seated on benches around a wooden table, a group of four at the center engrossed in a game of cards, the rest clustered around watching in the light of the single hanging bulb. No one spoke. Gradually they turned their attention back to their game, leaving Nikolai to survey the surroundings.

The floor was sheathed in linoleum in a pattern of green and black harlequin squares that seemed curiously fashionable in a dated way. To left and right the longer walls were painted in a vapid, institutional green and hung with a double tier of bunks fashioned from sections of steel pipe. Nikolai counted them. Twenty single bunks, all but two occupied. Thirty inmates including himself. His gaze tracked across to the window at the center of the courtyard wall. It was barred inside, shuttered outside, with the steel mesh and iron louvres they called muzzles and lashes, devised to stop any communication between neighboring cells. At either side of the window there were shelves for dishes, the bench below stopping a meter short of the walls at either end, leaving space for a trough and tap on one side, a filthy toilet pedestal at the other. Nikolai had been in the cell for less than a minute and already the heat was unbearable, the air so suffocatingly thin that the flame of a match would hardly have survived, the stench so foul that it turned his stomach.

The guard who had led him there had been standing behind him, watching his reaction with amusement. Now he dropped a thin bundled mattress at Nikolai’s feet and clapped a hand on his shoulder.

“Welcome to Samara, my friend,” his lips curled in a cruel grin, his fingers digging deep into Nikolai’s flesh. “Say hello to your new life.”

With that he left, the heavy steel door ringing closed behind him.

Nikolai studied the seated men again, wondering who they were and what had brought them here. What
they
were guilty of.

A few of them – the younger ones, mainly – seemed over animated, buoyed by an exaggerated bravado. Drugs, Nikolai presumed. Worse in prison than anywhere. The older ones paid them no attention. Those who were in the game playing out their hands in studied concentration; those who weren’t, following cards and expressions. All of them ignoring him. He was the newcomer, his presence uninvited and unwelcome, a disruption to the balance of the community. He would be tolerated only because they had no choice in the matter but he would pay a price for the inconvenience of his arrival, Nikolai knew sufficient about the prison world to understand that. Strangely that knowledge had little to do with the FSB; it was just a part of being Russian. Almost as natural as drinking vodka or understanding the language. During the communist era one in every six of the population had been in jail at some stage, so everyone knew someone who had done time. It was inevitable. And all those who had been inside had their stories to tell which meant that the average Russian knew more about life in prison than life in a foreign country, or even a university for that matter. Absurd perhaps, but prison had become an intrinsic part of the culture.

Nikolai knew where he fitted in. He was what they called a
cookie
– a first timer – which meant he would be subjected to derision and humiliation unless and until he could establish respect. The fact that he had worked for the FSB would, when it became known, only make things worse, particularly if the other prisoners suspected him of being a spy, in which case his fate would be as inevitable as that of a dog tossed into a pit of snakes.

So Samara, in its own brutal way, had awakened him since it was while he was standing there, at the threshold to his cell, that Nikolai had suddenly recognized that his worst nightmare had become a reality, that what remained of his existence had been abruptly shifted sideways into another dimension and that this, and nothing else, was now his life. What astonished him was the unsettling ease with which that understanding descended and the strange calmness with which he accepted it. It was almost as though he had been genetically programmed to expect this moment and now that it had come the fear and dread he had anticipated fell away, leaving in their place a single instinctive resolve.

To survive.

To survive whatever that might take, since only through survival would it ever be possible for him to find his way back.

The place they gave him for his mattress was in the corner between the bench and the toilet pedestal. The man who issued him his directions was short and thin, with a suspicious eye. Not a leader, Nikolai observed, since he had been called into service by the card players and discreetly issued his instructions. It was a deliberately impossible position that put Nikolai always in someone else’s way, but he accepted it without complaining, taking what sleep he could and otherwise keeping to himself, observing the human structure of the cell and listening. Always listening.

Learning the prison language was the first step. It was known as
fenya,
a cynical and coarse dialect that viewed the world from the prisoner’s perspective.

The prison aristocracy were known as the
Blatnyie.
The
thieves in
law.

There were three of them in Nikolai’s cell. Three of the four card players. Older men with connections, experienced and wise in the ways of the system. The
Blatnyie
were the informal leaders who took it upon themselves to manage the interests of the other prisoners, all the while making sure their own interests were looked after first. They controlled the illegal traffic of goods in and out of jail – vodka, food, drugs and clothes one way; money and messages the other – taking orders, buying and selling, paying off the guards and settling disputes, pocketing a fee on every transaction.

Next came the prisoners who sought no power but honored the unwritten Prison Code, refusing to collaborate with the authorities. They were known as
Men,
servants to no one. There were nine in Nikolai’s cell. Ten if he included himself.

After that the rest of the prison population fell into one of the two inferior classes. Inmates who sought favor with the prison authorities or refused to abide by the Prison Code were labelled
Goats
. The
Lowered Downs
were beneath them again, the lowest caste in prison society. Once an inmate fell into this category that was it: there was no way back. It was a stain he would carry for the rest of his life, inside jail and out.

The
Lowered Downs
had their own separate places and kept to themselves, shunned as though they bore some deadly communicable disease. These were the untouchables, the dregs of the prison world: cheats, the prison thieves, passive homosexuals and those who committed crimes that even the members of the Thieves’ World – the
Vorovskoy Mir –
regarded as abhorrent. There were seven
Lowered Downs
in Nikolai’s cell. Eight if this was where they decided to place him, since that was the usual fate of any former security officer who stumbled into this parallel world. There would be no rush to judgment, however. The
Blatnyie
would take their time and watch him, weigh his character and value first before making their decision.