“Yes, sir.”
“I am told you are among our less incompetent assets in the Volchansk region. Is that true?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“At last, someone who tells the truth.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What’s the weather like in Eldár Forest?”
“It is … it’s sunny. And cold.”
“That’s what the meteorological report states. I’m glad that the meteorologists are honest, at least for today.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where are you this very moment?”
“The cabin of an abandoned logging truck. Three kilometers from the village proper. Sir.”
“Good. You are speaking with me rather than the cuckolded captain because a situation has arisen of the utmost importance. Since the captain can’t solve the case of his missing wife, who disappears into my bed each Thursday, I wouldn’t trust him with this. You see, the ballistics report has come back on a gun used in the assassination of an FSB colonel last year.”
“Last year?”
“Yes. A year to get a simple ballistics report. It’s December 2004, and it’s just come in. When I was last in Moscow I read that Chinese assembly plants can produce a new car in a few hours. And it takes a year for us to produce a ballistics report that connects the bullet in the head of an FSB colonel to the gun lying meters away.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The report has come back, and I want you to find where the gun came from.”
“Pardon me, sir?”
“Did you break wind?”
“No, sir.”
“Then don’t waste a request for my pardon.”
“Yes, sir. It’s just that I’m not sure how I’ll find the origin of a gun fired a year ago.”
“It’s one of those needle-in-a-haystack situations, is it?”
“With all respect, sir, it’s a needle in a needle-stack.”
“On that account, you’re in luck. It’s one of your needles.”
“You must be mistaken. I haven’t run so much as a toothpick in the past two years. Ask the captain, sir.”
“How about I ask his wife instead. No, I’m not concerned about what you claim not to be selling, but rather about what you’ve already sold. You see, the serial number on the Makarov pistol used to kill the colonel in December 2003 corresponds sequentially with the serial numbers of the Makarov pistols found in the back of your truck when our brave lads ambushed you and took you to the Landfill in January 2002.”
Silence.
“Are you still there?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Sir.”
“This puts us in a rather difficult situation. In seeking information on the supplier of a gun used to assassinate an FSB colonel, we are immediately led to a person whom we pay to provide us with just that information.”
“I swear I had nothing to do with it, sir. Who was the assassin, sir?”
“A Black Widow. A shahidka. A separatist trained and sent by those animals in the mountains.”
“Was she taken alive … sir?”
“The shahidka was detained at a filtration point. Cleverly, she seduced the colonel, a man, I am told, so very well endowed that only the cavernous cunt of a Chechen has the latitude to accommodate him. No doubt hearing of the colonel’s great girth, the shahidka used her powers of seduction. When they were alone, she shot him.”
“But, sir, why wasn’t she checked for weapons?”
“If you still had a pair of stones between your legs, you would know that the average cunt of your womenfolk is capacious enough to conceal a rocket launcher. The colonel was a fool, no doubt, but nonetheless, he was still a colonel.”
“Yes, sir, but wouldn’t it be more prudent to trace the shahidka, rather than the gun?”
“A gun can be identified more easily than a person. There is a lesson in that.”
“But the shahidka …”
“Irrelevant.”
“I’ll do what I can, sir.”
“No, you will not do what you can do. You will do what you are told.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Numbers are the amoral language of absolute truth. These serial numbers do not lie. At some point you were in possession of that Makarov, and I will know the name and location of the next hands who held it. I was promoted to replace the departed colonel. I now hold his rank and command, and so, understandably, it is my chief priority to kill the architects of his assassination. Should I fall victim to a similar fate, and should the cuckolded captain be given my rank, I truly fear the fate of the Russian nation.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I see from your file that you have a father.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And he lives with you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He turned seventy-nine this year?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He survived the Great Patriotic War?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And the deportations to Kazakhstan?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And eleven years there on the steppe?”
“Twelve, sir.”
“And you would like him to see his eightieth birthday?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then give me names, Ramzan.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Or I’ll sew your stones back on just to chop them off twice.”
The Landfill filtration camp was so named for having been built, or rather sunken, into the site of a partially constructed garbage dump. Once, when Ramzan passed the site as a younger man, he watched a brontosaurial backhoe bite into the soil and scoop out a bathtub’s worth of loose earth. But after the collapse, and the subsequent wars, plans to finish the landfill were postponed then abandoned completely. Only two of the eight proposed pits, each twenty meters deep, with the surface area of a soccer field, had been excavated. The concrete and plastic foundation, which would have trapped runoff effluvia, was never installed, and so rain and snow dissolved into a knee-deep sludge at the bottom of the two earthen pits. When Ramzan was taken there in the first war, he spent three days in Pit A before two guards lowered a sixty-rung ladder, doused his feet and legs in frigid water, and led him to the two-story white building whose entranceway still bore the sign REFUSE DISPOSAL ADMINISTRATION. Petitions calling to fill in the pits circulated after the first war. An unfortunate group of sixteen women widowed by the Landfill shoveled for a month, but failed to visibly alter the swampscape. Ultimately, the symbolic benefit of filling the two pits didn’t hold up to the actual benefit of rebuilding roads, houses, schools, power plants, refineries, and hospitals. No one imagined the pits might again be used. No one imagined there would be a second war.
But there was a second war, and now, in January 2003, having encountered the lost Federal patrol, Ramzan was imprisoned for the second time. He spent eleven days belowground, this time in Pit B, while Dokka was taken to Pit A. At the very least his ears would receive a welcome rest. He descended the now-rusty sixty-rung ladder and the guard shook him from it before he reached the final rungs. The sludge had frozen to a snowy dampness that only reached his ankles. The pit held two dozen others. Over the coming days, he would pray to the sky with them all, but only his conversations with the blue-eyed imam would remain etched in his memory. The guards lowered food and fresh water in tin pails attached to yellow cords that came irregularly, sometimes five in a day, sometimes one, sometimes in the middle of the night when the men would wake, gather, and divide the provisions. The one thing the pit had no shortage of was space. Ramzan spent the daylight hours walking alongside its walls, wondering if somewhere the Feds had a modern prison, with electricity, bunks, cells, and roofs, in which they housed not prisoners but banana peels, and potato skins, and broken shoelaces, and apple cores, and last year’s calendars, and deflated tires, and balled-up paper, and used tissues, and cigarette butts, and the last worthless slivers of bar soap. Some compassionate guard, whose soul the imam would teach Ramzan to honor, had tossed in thin wooden planks, and a sidewalk the width of a balance beam stretched around the pit’s perimeter. The names and villages of captives were carved into the clay walls. Men packed snow on the walls as far up as they could reach to moisten the clay, and after a few minutes scraped it off and identified themselves in block letters drawn by stick or finger. Information the Feds would torture them for was written here on the walls for all to see. It was well understood among the men that the Feds had as much sense as two bricks smashed together. It was also understood that pain, rather than information, was the true purpose of interrogation.