No, he isn’t a priest.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
They were seated at a thirty-foot T-shaped table in a massive room with lofty ceilings, Vlora at the center and head of the T, the Muslim and the one-eyed priest at the bottom. Clean-shaven and wearing an eyepatch now, the one-eyed priest was neatly dressed in brown tweed pants and a bright green lamb’s wool turtleneck sweater. Dragging on a loosely packed cheap cigarette, he looked aside and then blew out a ragged cone of smoke.
“Any priest,” he finished saying, “would have heard my confession.”
He angled a disapproving glance to the Muslim.
“You might have pulled your punches just a bit,” he said coolly.
He picked a bitter shred of tobacco from his lip.
The Muslim gave a diffident shrug and looked away.
“It’s my method,” said the Muslim.
“Some method.”
It had all been staged. The cell had been populated by actors.
“Don’t complain, you have your freedom for it,” Vlora told the priest. “Now what else? Any other impressions? Either one of you?”
“My pain,” the priest uttered remotely.
His faraway stare was fixed on a scratch mark vivid on the dark stained oak of the table. It resembled a tiny omega sign.
Vlora frowned. “Your pain?”
The priest looked up.
“Well, after all of these powerful blows I’d received I had this terrible pain in my head. It was constant. I couldn’t shake it. The fellow put his hand on my forehead and it vanished.” For a moment Vlora’s stare was blank; and then a corner of his lip sickled up in derision. “Do you still believe in magic, priest?” he spat. “You’re exhausted. Go home to your wife.”
Vlora’s words hid his bafflement, fear, and frustration. On the night before he’d thought of the ruse in the cell, he had dreamed once again of the banquet in Tirana, of Chi Minh and of a death, but now added to the scene was a spectral servant, a worker in the kitchen whose face was a blank. And then Vlora was back in the interrogation chamber, where the Prisoner was chained to a wall with his arms in the T of crucifixion, and “Angel,” the torturer, was in front of him, tilting a cup of cold water to his lips. “Elena,” the Interrogator called out to her, using her actual given name. She turned to him, smiled, and walked over to join him, and they quietly conversed, discussing the Prisoner in pleasant, easy tones. “Who is he?” the Interrogator asked her warmly, and she amiably answered, “Your rescuer.” The next instant Vlora found himself standing in the street staring down at the executed priest, his drenched and deluded oppressor in the rain, and when the dead man’s eyes opened wide to stare balefully back up at Vlora, he awakened with an inchoate new suspicion: Was the Prisoner another of those tiresome martyrs whose courage was inhuman enough to be hateful? Was the man who carried Selca Decani’s papers a priest who’d been trudging through the mountains of the north hawking Masses and forgiveness and a bread that was God while in the guise of a peddler of a crumbly white cheese? But then apart from the failure of the ruse in the cell, the theory that the tactic had been founded upon was soon utterly blasted, demolished, by receipt of a report from Security pathologists dealing with the scar on the Prisoner’s arm.
The area in question is thought to be the site of an operation that appears to have been logical, and therefore, most probably performed by plastic surgeons. The most obvious feature is the absence of structures, such as follicles of hair and sebaceous glands. As there seems to be a likely donor site with attendant slight scarring and depigmentation high on the Subject’s inner right thigh, the procedure is deemed to be a graft, a finding consistent with the grossly discernible scar where the grafted skin joins the pre-existing skin, and with the difference in texture between the skin at the site of the graft and the skin that surrounds it. Beneath the graft there is noticeable thinning of the superficial skin as well as scarring of the underlying tissues, with a few aggregations of inflammatory cells. In evaluating these data, there is probable cause, we conclude, to presume that the graft was meant to hide a vaccination.
Sitting in the chill of his office at daybreak, the Interrogator blinked at the final sentence. Hide a vaccination? Who would do such a thing? To what end? Frowning, he put the report aside, and while the pink and blue flowers in a glass on his desk breathed death, his mind made a puzzling, angry leap to his people’s old backwardness, to their illiteracy, to the blood feuds and infant betrothals and the terrified, shrieking children penned up in dark corners for the first twelve months of their lives lest the demons should see them and do them harm. This but one of the numberless crippling superstitions made to seem almost credible, almost sane, by belief in a suffering, bleeding God. Vlora glanced down at his hand atop the desk. It had curled itself tightly into a fist. He unclenched his fingers. They continued to tremble. He had been one of those children of the dark.
Vlora turned to look out at the morning street and the pewtery light of dawn seeping in, glowing softly on the fog enshrouding the city so that portions of buildings protruded here and there like gleams of ghostly rubble. Why had he thought of such things? he wondered. Vexed, he looked down at the pathology report: “. . . meant to hide a vaccination.” What could it mean? He didn’t know. But as he shifted his gaze to the photograph of his time-lost wife and child, he caught his breath at the sudden and disturbing recollection that it was not until after a scourge of smallpox had scythed through the land more than thirty-five years ago that the practice of infant vaccination had made its appearance in Albania. The Prisoner, a man in his forties, was born a few years before that time, and, if a native Albanian, could not have been vaccinated! . . .
Vlora shuddered. The room seemed colder. Who would have the need or even think of the need to conceal the telltale vaccination other than a formidable enemy agent on a mission of power and unthinkable menace? Vlora brooded on the blind man’s eerie report and the perfectly flawed Albanian dentistry; on the strangled dog in the wood and the spectral, unsettling Selca Decani. If the Prisoner wasn’t a foreign agent, Vlora concluded, then he must be a devil.
“Or both,” he murmured.
He’d once heard of such a legendary agent from Hell.
That night Vlora slept with the demons.
Then events took a turn that was wholly confounding. Early on the morning of April 3rd, cutting short his visit to an ailing father, there returned to Tirana from Beijing at Vlora’s urgent and imperative summons, a tall, gaunt Chinese Army medical officer, Major Liu Ng Tsu, a drug-hypnosis interrogation expert assigned as an adviser to Central Security. On the third and the fourth, Vlora briefed him and allowed him to study the written record. On the fifth there was action. The Prisoner, kept sleepless for thirty-six hours and deprived of water for twenty-four, was placed on his back atop a gurney cart, strapped down with leather restraints, and wheeled to a narrow, white-tiled room. Immaculately clean and brightly lit by surgical spotlights affixed to the ceiling, this was the so-called “Magic Room.” Here tricks could be played on top of tricks. First Sodium Pentothal was injected. After that the hypnosis began and the illusions: “Your hand is beginning to feel very warm,” recalcitrant subjects had often been told; this to convince them they had entered the hypnotic state and that further attempts at resistance were useless, when in fact the subject’s hand was responding to the current from a hidden diathermy machine. Or concealed holographic projectors were invoked: “Do you see the solid wall there in front of you?” “Yes.” “Look through it. You’ll see roses that are floating in midair.” These were the games. When they were done, methamphetamine was injected to create an irresistible, driving urge to pour out speech, ideas, and memories, giving the subject no time to think; and then there sometimes came forth, at the end of it all, a bruised and slurry thing called truth.
“Come, begin! What’s the problem?”
Exhausted and driven, impatient, consumed, Vlora glared
in consternation at Tsu, who was standing across from him at the gurney. Leaning down to inject the Pentothal, he had inexplicably hesitated: the syringe held poised in midair, he stood motionless, studying the Prisoner’s face.
Vlora looked worried. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
Tsu shook his head, remained still, then said, “Nothing.”
He bent lower and administered the injection.
“For a moment I thought I might have seen this man before.”
A polygraph expert shuffled into the room. Short and middle-aged with close-set eyes, he wore a threadbare suit several sizes too large so that the trousers bagged in folds at his feet. “I’m here,” he muttered sourly in greeting. Pulled away from his breakfast, sullen and begrudging, he noisily unfolded a metal table and chair and banged each of them down near the head of the gurney. After setting his polygraph machine on the table, he wired the Prisoner to the device, then settled into the chair looking wounded and abused. Snuffling, he slipped on his earphones and nodded, as he murmured in a tone of patient suffering, “I’m ready.”
“If you will help us just a little, you may drink this.”
Tsu held a frost-covered glass of iced water to the Prisoner’s cheek. “Fresh water from a spring,” he told the Prisoner amiably. “If you obey my next command you may drink it. All right? Nothing onerous. Just open your eyes.”
Vlora shook his head. “This will not work,” he said. “It won’t work.” Staring intently at the Prisoner’s face, an incredible and chilling suspicion had just occurred to him concerning the enigma’s identity.
The Prisoner opened his eyes.
Vlora took a quick step back from the gurney.
Propping up the Prisoner’s head with his hand, Tsu held the water to his lips with the other. “Just a sip or two for now,” he cautioned gently. Then he made a quiet promise: “More later.”
The Prisoner spoke. He said, “Thank you.”
Startled, Vlora flinched while Tsu met his look of amazement with a smile. And so began the series of steps and events that would lead to the belief that the Prisoner had weakened, an impression that would finally come to be viewed, when the annals of the “Magic Room” were completed, as surely its most incredible and lethal illusion.
All of the early moves were routine: the lights were dimmed down to a ghostly murk, the usual “road hypnosis” begun: the application of a steady, repetitive rhythm, in this instance an illuminated metronome blade which the Prisoner watched as it tocked back and forth. Such had always been shown to be highly effective against the desire not to be hypnotized and to retain one’s alertness of will. Then the favorite tricks of the room were invoked, and when persuaded that the spell had at last taken hold, Tsu followed by injecting the methamphetamine in a larger than usual dosage—6.4 milligrams per kilogram of body weight—needed for introverted neurotics. And then, in an ordinary, nondescript voice, and with flawless inflection of the language of the north, the Prisoner not only spoke but also answered all queries. It might have been better for his captors had he not.
Under questioning, the Prisoner repeated his claim to be Selca Decani, the peddler of cheese and the lover of Morna Altamori, explaining that, in fact, he had never died but had simply vanished, fled away to the West, the reports of his death a deliberate fiction contrived to protect Decani’s family from certain harassment by the State. His return to Albania had been prompted by his fear of the imminent death of his ailing mother. This, fundamentally, was Story Number One.
There were others.
Enemy agents of the deadlier class had been known to use drugs and hypnosis defensively with nefarious “pentothal blocks” so that the subject, under torture or if questioned by this method, would repeat a hypnotically programmed recitation. In the event that his questioners probed even deeper by attacking the block with more drugs and hypnosis, underneath the first story they might turn up a second, which, just as the first, had been scripted and implanted. A third such block had been found, it was rumored, in a rare if not mythical number of cases. Thus everything seemed to be running to form, every paranoid fear and suspicion confirmed when, under much deeper interrogation, the Prisoner’s story drastically changed. While retaining the carpentry of the first it differed in subtle but significant ways. This time the Prisoner admitted that Selca Decani indeed was dead, and that he himself was named Sabri Melcani and had years ago fled to Yugoslavia, and from there moved on to Greece, to escape a murder charge that had arisen from his actions in the course of pursuing a blood feud: hearing that the man he thought he’d killed had recovered and was happily walking the earth, Melcani felt compelled—“by the sting of conscience,” he said—to return and try again. This, in essence, was Story Number Two which, if left at that, might not have proved so upsetting, except that there were also Story Three, Story Four, and Story Five, while Story Six, to the fury and utter consternation of all, was a faithful repetition of Story Number One, thus announcing—provided the Prisoner could live through the added injections of the dangerous drugs—the prospect of an endless and fruitless cycle. Which was not, as it happened, the most appalling thing at all. This honor was reserved for the polygraph machine.
It corroborated all of the Prisoner’s stories.
At this juncture it was difficult to know where to turn, and so the natural direction, by default, and to the immense relief of anyone harboring a longing for the familiar, was directly and immediately into chaos as, desperate, Vlora embraced a new tactic that was neither in his nature nor his power to control. From beginning to end the scenario was Tsu’s.
It began very calmly. In fact, rather pleasantly. The Prisoner was taken to comfortable quarters where, after receiving medical attention, for seven days he was able to bathe, given food and drink and clean clothes, and was permitted to sleep in a downy bed undisturbed until he naturally awakened. In the meantime, Major Tsu had given strict instructions that no one in contact with the Prisoner was ever to speak while in his presence, either to him or to anyone else. On day eight, a Monday, action resumed. The Prisoner was escorted by four armed guards to the room with the T-shaped table where Vlora alone sat waiting for him. The black velvet drapes had been drawn aside from the great high windows along the east wall so that sunlight shattered down in smoky columns, trapping particles of dust and fear in their swirl. The Prisoner was placed near the bottom of the table by two of the guards, all of whom then exited the room and left him standing alone at the bottom of the T with his head bowed down and his hands held clasped in front of him as if gripped by invisible manacles. Music played softly through speakers in the walls and all the windows stood open so that one could hear traffic from the street far below. Now and then a child’s shout or silly laugh floated up.
“So here we are,” began Vlora in an ordinary way. “New surroundings are refreshing at times, a great tonic; they can pry us from our ruts, our fixed habits of thinking. By the way, do sit down if you like. Please be comfortable. Really. Never mind, then. Just as you wish. Incidentally, is the music to your liking? We can change it. Should I change it? It is Strauss. Very well, then, we shall leave it. In the meantime, let me tell you what is happening here. First, we thank you for those fascinating stories that you told us. I myself am a lover and avid admirer of any great work of the imagination. I’ve translated many of them into Albanian: Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and his Hamlet and Othello. Also Lady Inger of Ostrat by Ibsen. Don Quixote. Do you find that surprising? Yes, I did the work personally, it was when I was a teacher at college. They awarded me the “Partisan Star.” Well, never mind. I’ve been garrulous. Why is it that we always feel this gnawing necessity to justify ourselves to every stranger that we meet? Do you know what I’m talking about? Perhaps not. Well, that’s enough of that now. Back to business. Listen here, I want to tell you what we’ve come to. All right? We want to have a new relationship with you. The old one, you’ll admit, was unrewarding.” Vlora gestured down the length of the table to a tan wicker basket that was cra
mmed with fresh fruit. “Incidentally, try an apricot,” he offered. “They’re in season.”
Into the room now strode three torturers, all brutes of powerful build, including “Laugher,” who led them in. He was gripping a briefcase made of shining blue leather and the arm of a club-footed ten-year-old boy who was dressed in the olive drab denim of a prisoner. The boy’s hands had been tied in front of him and his arms were trussed to his sides. Arriving at a point that was midway along the table, Vlora’s son pushed the boy forward until he was captured, wincing and blinking, in a column of sunlight.
“Well now, yes, we’re all here,” began Vlora. “Very well, then, let’s not waste any time. This boy is a Gypsy, deformed from birth. In addition to the problem with his foot he has a paralyzed arm, the left, which is numb and completely insensitive to pain. He is also retarded, a mental defective, as well as being dumb and unable to speak. He murdered his parents in their sleep, an understandable action but not his prerogative. One could argue he is better off dead. But we aren’t going to kill him. No, not for us to judge. We may not do anything at all to him, in fact. It’s really all up to you.”
At a signal from Vlora, “Laugher” lifted the briefcase onto the table, snapped its locks, and withdrew from it a clear and colorless plastic bag at whose bottom was a drawstring made of leather. The boy’s eyes widened with fear and bewilderment as the bag was slipped over his head. Vlora glanced at his watch as if checking the time until his next appointment. “Suffocation is a horrible death,” he said casually. “Worse yet is to die in this manner many times; in fact over and over again without limit. Until you reveal your true name and your mission, plus the data that is needed to verify both, we intend to repeatedly bring this boy to the brink of death by suffocation. His fate is in your hands. But do not feel any pressure. By all means, take your time. As I said to you before, you have suffered enough.” One torturer tightened the drawstring and knotted it. Another put his arms around the boy and held him still, so that he stayed within the compass of the column of light as he wildly thrashed, his eyes bulging in terror and his mouth gaping open in a soundless shriek while through the speakers rasped the lilts of The Blue Danube.