We ignored her. Ben and I simultaneously turned to look down the long rows of buzzing steel tanks. The horror had gripped us, and we needed to shake loose, to find answers.
With a staccato series of clicks, up and down the rows, the tank lights went out in sequence.
We were like kids in a carnival, determined to see the next freak. Delbarco sensed our giddiness. “Shape up, gentlemen,” she warned. Then, with a pale, tightly controlled expression, she added, “The last thing I want is to know what’s actually going on here. I like to sleep nights.”
“Too late,” Breaker said.
Ben raised his hand and snapped his fingers. Within his plastic glove, the sound was not much louder than the plop of a raindrop. “I’ve just had a horrible idea,” he said. “The gallery in her office. There were about a hundred people in the pictures. Count the tanks.”
“About a hundred,” I said. “If they’re all occupied.”
Ben stooped and laid his albums on the floor. I stacked mine beside them.
Breaker took a call on a small walkie-talkie as Ben stalked purposefully between two rows, peering in the murky light at the stamped tin labels. “Maybe we can find a catalog,” he said. “Some ID for these bastards.”
I followed Ben, wondering what he was up to. “What’s your idea?” I asked.
“It’s too weird,” he murmured.
The doors to the monitoring stations in the center of the room were open, but the glassed-in rooms were completely bare. Dust lay in a thin gray film on the floor. Ben left tracks.
The lights switched on again. The tanks buzzed like electric hives. Instant sunlight every few minutes, regular as clockwork.
“Think Russian,” Ben called over his shoulder. “Golokhov was playing every side, pitting them against each other, supposedly doing services for everybody, with secret shenanigans as insurance. Who was taking advantage of whom? I can’t believe these are failed experiments. It doesn’t make sense they would keep them lying around, sucking up resources. They would just dispose of them. And I don’t think they were friends. Who would treat their friends this way? Wouldn’t you put them out of their misery?”
He looped back and marched up another aisle, pausing to read the tags one by one. “I think we’re in a Gulag. A steel Gulag.”
He stopped and held his finger on a tag, jiggling it experimentally. He had found what he was looking for. “This could be it. Dear, sweet Jesus.” He adjusted the plastic leggings on his suit with muttered curses and clomped up the concrete steps.
The date on the tag, following the long serial number, was 3/7/53. That would have been a year before the Jenner Building had been handed over to Silk.
Ben waved for me to climb up beside him. Together, we leaned over the rectangular window in the cylinder.
The man stretched out in the bath of red fluid had bushy eyebrows, a distinctive thick nose, and a long, back-slung shock of what had probably once been white hair, slicked now and stained pink. Spatters and purposeful ribbons of red gelatin clung to his lined cheeks and his ragged mustache, worked along parted lips.
I wondered if the red fluid dissolved the lengthening hair, took care of the waste products, kept the confined individuals fed and alive. Self-contained. I still wasn’t convinced, but the dust between the rows of tanks, marred only by our footprints, showed that few if any people had been there for years, perhaps decades.
“Doesn’t look happy, does he?” Ben asked. “Maybe he’s having bad dreams.”
“So?”
“Granted, he isn’t in the best shape. After all, he’s over a hundred and, what, twenty-five, twenty-six years old?” Ben seemed in awe. “Christ. Who had a stroke in the Kuntsevo dacha? Who was leeched but denied access to doctors? Who pointed up at the print on the wall of a boy and a girl bottle-feeding a lamb? Who died on the bed while Svetlana was watching? It was all a sham. Did Beria know?” Ben looked at me almost cross-eyed with a weird excitement.
“Know what?”
“Don’t you recognize him? Didn’t they teach you history in school?” Ben paused, then asked plaintively, “Or am I just going crazy?”
“Could be,” I said.
Ben shook his head as if to scare away flies, but he could not stop staring at the old man in the cylinder.
“Hell, I’m sure of it! He’s a wreck, but I’ve studied pictures of him since I was a kid. This is him. Banning was right. Golokhov treated him, kept him going way past a normal lifetime. But not the way he would have wanted.” Ben let out a barking laugh that echoed from the far walls of the chamber. “Golokhov was in exile, but he must have helped the Politburo bring him down. Fake an illness. Incapacitate him. Maybe they slipped in a double. Or maybe Svetlana and the others were tagged or brainwashed.” Ben was working up enthusiasm for this unlikely tale. “It has to be! They shipped him out of Russia when Silk set up shop in New York. Installed him here in the new building, along with his fellow monsters, architects of the old regime. Then they hung their pictures on the wall downstairs.” Ben squinted at the rows of cylinders. “Jesus, do you think Beria is in here, too? Packed away for old times’ sake?”
“I’m still lost, Ben.”
“It’s Koba, Hal!” Ben cried out, exasperated. “Iosip Dzugashvhili. Say ‘Hello’ to Papa Joe Stalin.”
I looked down on the shrunken, pocked, red-beribboned face and could not see a resemblance, but then, I hadn’t pored over as many old photos as Ben.
The eyes of the man within the tank opened suddenly and stared up through the glass, then fixed on me. His sclera were tinted pink and reddish spittle bubbled from his mouth. I was sure he could see me. His gaze chilled me: dim, but still electric. Charged with pure hate.
“You’re imagining things,” I said, with an awful, hollow feeling that he was not, that I was standing only a couple of feet away from the worst mass murderer in human history.
“Gentlemen!” Delbarco called.
“Am I?” Ben shot back, ignoring her. “Look at those peepers. Gorky described him as a flea blown up to human size. Didn’t give a damn about the human race, just wanted to suck out all its blood. Looks like a real vampire now, doesn’t he?”
“We’ve got to go immediately!” Breaker shouted from the vault door.
The man’s purple tongue poked out obscenely and his lips were drawn back, uncovering yellow teeth. He seemed to be trying to speak, or to scream. His head canted over, and waves of red fluid slapped against the sides of the tank. Some flowed into his mouth and he swallowed, gagged, weakly pursed his lips as if to spit, but could not. Then he writhed like an eel in a jar, thumping against the walls of the cylinder.
“It’s not possible,” I said.
Ben slapped my shoulder and laughed. “Hal, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard you say. Fuck, man, look around you.”
“There’s trouble on one!” Delbarco shouted.
Mercifully, the light in the tank clicked off, but the thumping continued, then a long, thin shriek.
