[ Vasiliy lights his second cigarette of the hour as he walks, traversing the cement hallway visually indistinguishable from every other corridor with the confident navigation of a single ant moving through its network of pinpoint tunnels. It's nondescript enough to be disorienting by design, of course. The basement of the Lubyanka is meant to give a sense of unending sprawl and to smell like concrete and mildew and stale water. This is a holding place for enemies of the people, not somebody's dacha.
And another workday like all the others, for him. Distinguished, somewhat, by the fact that the ankle he sprained on the slick floors down here some months prior is bothering him—rain coming, and the poorly made jackboots, no doubt half-disintegrating in their first few months of use because of wreckers they still haven't caught, don't help—but altogether ordinary.
The only thing that's notable is that he's interrogating a former chekist, lowercase c,: from his own cadre, not Dzerzhinsky's, uppercase C. He can't imagine how said fellow chekist could be so outrageously careless, knowing what she does, let alone why she'd said and presumably thought something any sensible person would interpret as Trotskyist apologia to begin with.
Vasiliy pauses before opening the door, taking a moment to adjust his gigline ever-so-slightly off-center: he wouldn't be caught dead making a mockery of work this important on the outside of a cell, but if he's to appear human in a way that the comrade who administered the first round of physical interrogation didn't, he needs to appear less than straight-laced within it.
He opens the door without throwing it open, regarding the woman at the interrogation table with a nod of acknowledgement. There would have been no pause for this, Vasiliy knows, when Comrade Likhachyov visited yesterday night. ]
Natalia Alianova.
[ A reasonably polite introduction. An acknowledgement of dignity, by design the first such instance she will have received since her arrest some 48 hours ago. ]
something something spiral of ants
And another workday like all the others, for him. Distinguished, somewhat, by the fact that the ankle he sprained on the slick floors down here some months prior is bothering him—rain coming, and the poorly made jackboots, no doubt half-disintegrating in their first few months of use because of wreckers they still haven't caught, don't help—but altogether ordinary.
The only thing that's notable is that he's interrogating a former chekist, lowercase c,: from his own cadre, not Dzerzhinsky's, uppercase C. He can't imagine how said fellow chekist could be so outrageously careless, knowing what she does, let alone why she'd said and presumably thought something any sensible person would interpret as Trotskyist apologia to begin with.
Vasiliy pauses before opening the door, taking a moment to adjust his gigline ever-so-slightly off-center: he wouldn't be caught dead making a mockery of work this important on the outside of a cell, but if he's to appear human in a way that the comrade who administered the first round of physical interrogation didn't, he needs to appear less than straight-laced within it.
He opens the door without throwing it open, regarding the woman at the interrogation table with a nod of acknowledgement. There would have been no pause for this, Vasiliy knows, when Comrade Likhachyov visited yesterday night. ]
Natalia Alianova.
[ A reasonably polite introduction. An acknowledgement of dignity, by design the first such instance she will have received since her arrest some 48 hours ago. ]