The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [119]
Commander Ga removed the camera from his pocket. “May I?” he asked the Dear Leader.
“Oh, Commander Ga,” the Dear Leader said, shaking his head. “You and your cameras. At least this time it’s a female you’re taking a picture of.”
“Would you like to meet a senator?” Ga asked her.
Guardedly, she nodded.
“You keep your eyes open in this place,” he said. “No more rowing with your eyes closed. Do that and I’ll bring you a senator.”
The girl flinched as Commander Ga reached to pull the hair from her face, and she was wild-eyed with fear as the camera’s tiny motor whirred her into focus. And then came the flash.
WHEN OUR interns first arrived at Division 42, they were issued the standard items—field smocks, which buttoned in the front, interrogation smocks, which buttoned in the back, clipboards, and, finally, mandatory eyeglasses, which lend us an air of authority, thus further intellectually intimidating our subjects into compliance. All the members of the Pubyok team had been issued gear bags that contained items designed to brutalize and punish—abrasion gloves, rubber mallets, stomach tubes, and so on—and it’s true that our interns looked disappointed when we broke the news that our team had no need for such things. But tonight, we handed Jujack a pair of bolt cutters, and you could see his face light with a sense of mission. He hefted the cutters before his eyes to find their balance point. And Q-Kee took possession of a cattle prod by rapid-firing the trigger so fast that our room strobed blue. I didn’t exactly travel in elite yangban circles, so I had no way of knowing who this Comrade Buc fellow would turn out to be, but I was sure he’d be an important chapter in our biography of Commander Ga.
Then we all donned headlamps and surgical masks and took turns buttoning up the backs of each other’s smocks before descending the ladders that led into the heart of the torture wing. As we were unscrewing the hatch that led down into the sump, Jujack asked us, “Is it true that old interrogators get sent to prison?”
Our hands stopped turning. “The Pubyok are right about one thing,” we told him. “Don’t ever let a subject get inside your head.”
Once we were through the hatch, we sealed it behind us. Then we descended many metal rungs, protruding from the cement wall. Down here were four great pumps that pulled water from bunkers even deeper below. They activated a couple of times an hour, running for only a few minutes, but the heat and noise they generated was tremendous. This is where the Pubyok stored recalcitrant subjects, ones that were being softened by time and a humidity that steamed our lenses. A bar that ran the length of the room was bolted to the floor, and to this thirty-odd subjects were chained. The floor was sloped, for drainage, so that the poor fools on the lower side of the room slept in a skein of standing water.
Few people roused as we crossed the room through a light drizzle of warm water that dripped from a concrete ceiling that was slick with green. We held our masks tight. Last year diphtheria stole into the sump, taking all subjects and pocketing a few interrogators as well.
Q-Kee placed the prongs of the cattle prod against the iron bar and crackled off some juice—that got everyone’s attention. Most of the subjects covered their faces on instinct or rolled into a baby position. A man at the end of the bar, down in the water, sat up and barked in pain. He wore a torn, soaked dress shirt, underwear, and sock suspenders around his calves. This was Comrade Buc.
We approached him and saw the vertical scar above his left eye. The wound had split the eyebrow in two, and it had healed so badly the halves of the brow missed each other. Who marries a woman that can’t sew?
“Are you Comrade Buc?” we asked him.
Buc looked up, blinded by the headlamps. “What are you, the night shift?” he asked, and laughed a feeble, unconvincing laugh. He put his hands up in mock defense. “I confess, I confess,” he said, but the laugh broke