“This has, in some ways, been the most vexing investigation of my career,” Shpak announced. He was seated on a leather armchair, placed on a Persian rug directly on the ice covering the Ural River. He wore that heavy wool overcoat, but there was not really a need for it; they were sheltered in a spacious ice-fishing shack, almost a dacha on skids, and Shpak had stoked its pot-bellied stove until it glowed. Aurora could feel its warmth on her exposed skin from two meters away. “Oh, not because of you, Comrade Aurora. You’ve been cooperative, if somewhat rambling. But that’s in the nature of your story—you really have been all over the place.”
Aurora was doing her level best to make eye contact and pay attention, but circumstances were making that difficult. She was flat on her back, stark naked, on an old steel bed frame, to which she was being lashed down with bedsheets torn into strips.
“I am being pressed to deliver results quickly—far more quickly than I consider to be good practice. When we began our series of conversations, I assumed that I would detain you for months, perhaps years. Instead, results are demanded within days. Hours, even! Important visitors are in town. They want this all wrapped up before they leave.”
Shpak was being assisted by two men and a woman. At the beginning the men had been involved in holding Aurora down to the bed frame. Once she had been partially immobilized, they had turned their attention to other tasks. The woman was still circling around her, pulling strips of linen out of a sack and using them to lash down an elbow here or an ankle there. But one of the men was operating a handsaw, using it to widen the hole in the ice while the other was fussing with a block and tackle. Having satisfied himself that this was firmly anchored to the ice house’s roof beam, he began to fashion a Y-shaped arrangement of ropes connecting it to the corners of the bed frame near Aurora’s shoulders.
To either side of Shpak’s chair was a low table fashioned of cedar planks in a rustic style. The one on his left supported all of his notebooks. The table on the right was for his pipe, ashtray, and tobacco. As well there was a pocketknife with its blade exposed.
“These are the kinds of men who simply will not believe in the veracity of a report unless technical methods have been used,” Shpak continued. He was stuffing some loose tobacco into a pipe, but glanced up from that for a moment at the block and tackle. “All quite normal. Easily done. But there is a complication in your case, which is that, in the unlikely event it does not culminate in your summary execution, you’re to be delivered unblemished, in the full glory of your young womanhood. My instructions as to that could hardly have been more explicit. So I had to ask myself, what is a technical method that is severe enough to lend credibility to the report without inflicting visible damage?” He struck a match and spent a few moments puffing fire into his pipe. “I hope you appreciate the ingenuity I have shown in finding a way to meet all of these requirements: speedy results, extreme rigor, no marks.”
The woman seemed to have too much time on her hands, or perhaps she was worried that if she didn’t do her job thoroughly enough Shpak would use technical measures on her. Aurora’s wrists were already strongly bound to the bed frame, but now the woman was winding strips of linen between her fingers and lashing those down too.
“What is it you want to know?” Aurora asked. “I’ve always answered all of your questions.”
A curious feature of ice-covered lakes in winter was that they emitted noises: groaning, rumbling, and even cracking sounds as the ice slowly heaved. It was distracting—even alarming—at first and then you got used to it. Shpak paid as little attention to Aurora’s question as he did to the sounds of the ice. He was being interrupted from time to time by the men working on the rigging, who wished to draw his attention to certain details or to make sure everything was being done to his satisfaction.
In a strange way, the situation actually became boring once she could no longer move.
Who were these important men—men Shpak was obviously afraid of—who wanted results within hours?
During his visit to the jail last week, Fizmatov had mentioned that Sergo Ordzhonikidze would be visiting town in a few days. The head of the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry, and the ultimate boss of Magnitogorsk, unless you counted Stalin himself. Like Stalin, he was a Georgian. He was in the habit of swinging through Magnitogorsk from time to time to inspect the facilities and pin medals on hero workers.
Important visitors are in town. They want this all wrapped up before they leave. Shpak had definitely been speaking in the plural. It wasn’t just one visitor. There must be other people traveling with Ordzhonikidze. Including at least one person who would actually care about Aurora and her story—care enough to put pressure on Shpak. But why would anyone care?
The preparations were nearing completion. No one did so much as glance at Aurora for about a quarter of an hour as everything was squared away. The man who had been doing the rigging pulled on the rope that snaked through the block and tackle, taking up slack until the bed frame began to rise up off the ice. Aurora felt herself angling up to vertical. Finally the foot of the frame lifted off and she began swinging free. She pendulumed once, twice across the gaping hole in the ice and then came to a stop directly above it as several hands reached out to check the swinging. Then she began to spin around as the rope unwound under her weight. While she was coming into equilibrium, the rigger fussed with a final detail. A hand-cranked winch had been crudely lashed into place atop the massive table to Shpak’s left. He got the end of the rope fastened to it and then devoted a few moments to showing Shpak how the device worked: how to crank rope in, raising Aurora higher toward the roof beam, and how to let it out, dropping her toward the black water below.
Then all of the assistants tromped out, leaving Shpak and Aurora alone together. “Another great advantage: privacy,” Shpak said. “My office, the interrogation rooms, the holding cells below, those are all bugged. Not this place. No wires, no electricity, no connection to anything save the ice on the river.”
He set his pipe down on the ashtray, then reached out and casually picked up the pocketknife. He twiddled it between his hands for a few moments while eyeing the stretched rope coming out of the winch. “Usually the vysshaia mera is a bullet to the head,” he said. The Supreme Measure of Social Defense. “I needn’t even waste a bullet on you. A single swipe of the blade and you simply disappear.”
“What is it you want?” Aurora asked. “All you have to do is tell me. None of this is necessary.”
“I’ll be the judge of what’s necessary,” Shpak said sharply. He slapped the knife down on the table and began turning the crank. The bed frame sank until Aurora’s legs were immersed in the water up to the knees. The pain was nauseating.
“How,” Shpak asked, as he slowly turned the crank and the water climbed up her thighs, her belly, her breasts, her neck. “How did you know that we were so interested in balloons?”
That final word was the last thing she heard before her ears went under the water.