Interrogations, In Progress

[nikanor-liadov.livejournal.com]

"So that's the Colonel, Lieutenant Gurlukovich and this..Snake," said Nika, leaning back in his chair, tapping his pen on the steel of the utilitarian table.

Everything in the room was spartan- the brick wall with the high, bright window, the plain off-white walls that created the rest, but it was still a far cry from the cinderblock and bare bulbs of the deep subfloor in the MVD building in Moscow.

Those rooms, of course, were not for everyone. For most, a clean, spare office did fine. It was more the investigator than the environs, anyway, or at least Nika had always believed so- but it never hurt to have your surroundings on your side.

He glanced at Rakitin. He'd been surprised by how the man took to it, despite all his reticence at the outset. Perhaps all it had taken to bring out his dormant sense of crusade was a little intimate time with Molokov's battered body.

Liadov frowned, putting his pen to his lips.

He still hadn't been able to coerce himself to go and view the evidence for himself. He knew it was inevitable, and that Rakitin expected it, sooner rather than later. Nika had reasonably made the case that interrogationg the witnesses and suspects they had while their memories- and their guilt- was still fresh was priority, and while he knew this was the truth, he also could not deny the palpable sense of relief he felt at putting off the physical evidentiary review.

No, Mikhail had not been a close comrade, not since they'd been cadets- and even then it had never been anything like his comradeship with the Isaevs- but he'd known him, he was a contemporary, and that stung.

He could hardly imagine how Krauss-

He bit off his thoughts abruptly.

No, he thought. Krauss deserved none of his compassion. The German was an egocentric narcissist, with only fleeting moments of anything one might equate to what the textbooks called a 'true self'.

He might have loved Molokov, but Nika was grimly final on his assessment. It was inconceivable that the polite, genteel Major had allowed the release of men who were so irretrievably culpable- of real, horrible crimes- not the Stalinist inventions of the early days, that were already waning when Nika joined the ministry, but lingered in its halls indefinitely like the fabled samovar.

Some of the older operatives and agents were indelibly branded by the rheotoric and indoctrination of the purges, and had to be restrained from falsifying charges and seizing citizens like the good old days.

Most of them had been pushed not-so-gently into retirement, given dachas by the sea where they could pick mushrooms and take walks with their wives, and act like the nice old men they never deserved to be.

But now he was able to envision Krauss rather clearly in his younger, steel-eyed Schutz-stuffel days, giving orders for executions. Making selections of prisoners. He would have been a handsome young man with a mink-like mien, and an unrelenting pillar of titanium for a spine, that would have pushed out any space compassion might have considered occupying. Displaced humanity.

Like those old men, he'd grown a little, when removed from his duties. With the fingers removed from him. But so far as Nika could tell, it was moss clinging to a stone. Humanity as a parasite on a greater, darker host.

Lampreys. Remorras of conscience. A nuisance, and the source of a slight anemia in his sociopathy.

Liadov snorted slightly to himself, in a noise that might have been a laugh but contained no levity.

The flame patrol were garden variety homicidal maniacs, so prosaic as to be quaint. Krauss was the real specimen.

"You're doing remarkably well at this, Rakitin. I'm impressed with your fortitude and resourcefulness. It's rarified work- a lot of people don't take to it quite so...duckily."

He turned his head.

"Any observations so far? Synthesis?"

His eye traveled obscurely downward to the roster in front of him.

Irinarhov, Raikov, Fury (the), Imanov, Charushkin, Isaev, Khostov, Boss (the), Ocelot, Borishnakov...

"We're doing well. It's only mid-afternoon, and we've completed three full inquests. At this rate we should be able to get through at least three more."