When tortured, every person has a breaking point, an edge at the end of consciousness beyond which they’re lost. A good torturer knows this and tries to keep you on the safe side of the chasm. They can’t use you when you break.
When tortured, there are two types of people. Those who crack before getting to the chasm, and those who can try and ride the line that separates tortured sanity from madness, those who find within themselves a core of--of stubbornness, perhaps--that makes them try and defy the torturer until they are beyond the chasm, at which point they are no longer useful as information sources--or anything else.
A good torturer knows this.
I was sitting in a small, windowless room. Sitting on a metal chair, my hands and feet tied to the chair with rough, metal wires that dug into the flesh. There was a bucket of water in the corner.
“Pochemu Vy napadali na avtomobil?” She was in her middle thirties, white lab coat and soft, German-made shoes that must have cost a month’s salary for the average comrade.
Why were you attacking the car?
“Ja ne ponimaju.” I tried to sound frightened, which wasn’t difficult. She was a professional, and they are the people we usually encounter if we’re unlucky enough, or stupid enough, to fall into the hands of the opposition--at that level you don’t get many amateurs.
I don’t understand.
They didn’t know who I was, and it would take them too long to connect Marija Zita with Anna Krojer; as far as she was concerned, I was a Serb student who’d suddenly gone a little crazy, but they were taking no chances, and I was counting on that to get me into Lubyanka, and it had worked, and now came the hard part.
Someone somewhere flipped a switch and I was dying, the current tearing through my flesh like a shoal of piranhas swimming in my blood, and I screamed.
She must have switched it off because the pain was gone as suddenly as it had appeared, and she regarded me with an expression that said, quite clearly: you’re not getting out of here alive unless you satisfy my curiosity, which is considerable.
“Chego angely bojatsja?” I said to her, and I saw her flinch. What do angels fear?
She blinked twice, and then she left me there and locked the door and I was left in the cell, breathing, relaxing the muscles, trying to get rid of the taste of bile in my mouth.
What do angels fear, I’d asked her, and I’d seen the question penetrate. It had been the wriggling worm at the end of the hook and she had taken it.
I waited. There was no sound in that place, and yet it seemed to me I could, if not hear, nevertheless feel the world around me, a dark, pervasive presence that infused the silent walls with an unnatural menace.
A darkness deeper than the absence of light detached itself from the wall and stood in front of me then. Dark eyes regarded me in silence.
His wing span was over two metres, the feathers obsidian black and as sharp as razorblades. The face was an indistinct darkness, a blur of still movement. He was full of paradoxes and even more of threat, and suddenly I thought, I didn’t bargain for this, and then Azrael moved until his face was almost upon my own, his lips brushing mine, and he spoke in a whisper that ran down my spine like poisoned wine. “Angels fear nothing. Nothing. Nothing.”
I felt his hand on my throat, a caress that turned into a strangle; his eyes threatened to draw me out of myself and be absorbed. His eyes burned like a multicoloured flower drenched in kerosene and set on fire. The air around us hummed, charged with electricity, and I could feel the walls moving in and out of my perception as if the prison itself was gasping for breath.
For the tortured there is a fine line, a knife edge, which is their breaking point. The secret is to live on the edge.
With Azrael, I stayed there for a long time.
It was less an interrogation than an expression of rage, and it made my resistance easier, hoarding away all the little dirty secrets of the trade in my mind, thinking of nothing, keeping the Bureau safe.
It’s the only way to survive.
“What,” I said, through teeth that were clenched around the little air I had, “are angels afraid of, Archangel? Chego angely bojatsja?”
He let me go then, and left me to gain control of my breath as he pondered me from a distance, a huge puddle of darkness in the room. His next words came slowly, oozing like rivulets of revulsion. “Have you come to kill me?”
He came near again and bent down, looking at me. His wings rustled and I could feel his breath, faintly sweet against my face.
“You have traces of angel on you.” His voice had changed, as if he were performing an autopsy, speaking into a tape recorder. Dry. Emotionless. “And the scent of Paris on your body. Raphael and Metatron.” He sounded as if he had almost resigned himself to my answer. “Have you come to kill me?”
“No,” I said. “I haven’t.”
I thought he was going to speak to me then, perhaps to confide, perhaps only to resume his interrogation, but then somebody turned on the light and an awfully familiar voice said, echoing in the darkness, But I have