12
The Russian torturers could be very creative when it came to extracting info from prisoners, and Dmitriy Solokoff was by far the most efficient in the service of Tsar Nicholas.
Nonna was sure she wouldn't be alive by the next day; but to be honest, what the monarch saw entering in the interrogation room, in the palace's dungeons, was something that could be hardly called alive.
Even not considering the wounds and signs of the blows suffered till then, the girl, whose arms were chained to the wall and squatting on the floor, looked like an empty shell; her eyes were dim, her expression deadpan, as if her very soul had shattered.
The Tsar had explicitly ordered to tone down the first "encouragements", even though he did not expect much from grilling the girl, whose familial history he knew very well. It was no coincidence that he had chosen her as his daughter's caretaker, and to see himself stabbed in the back like that was the least thing he had expected.
Solokoff, who was about to begin to work with the hot irons when the Tsar arrived, sidestepped to make room for him, who knelt down and stood there for some time, looking at that stony face.
Then, forcefully grabbing her chin, he had her look at him.
"Where is my daughter?"
There was no answer to that.
And the dead look, of someone who wasn't answering out of defiance or contempt, but out of loss of interest in going on living, did nothing to assuage the sovereign's ire, who replied to that silence with two brutal slaps.
Nonna started bleeding, and her cough was red, but out of that she kept her mouth shut.
"I should have known." Nicholas growled, clenching his hands around her neck. "You are the worthy daughter of your father. The inclination towards treason is like madness. It gets transmitted via blood.
In truth, perhaps I should have mistrusted you from the beginning. You were very good in pretending to be immune to your father's germ. I put my daughter's safety and fate in your hands, I forgave that traitor, and this is how I am repaid by you."
Then, he tightened his grip even further, so much that Nonna for a moment was unable to breathe, wheezing and whimpering for air.
"Maybe I ought to put an end to your cursed line right here and now. And do what I could not twenty years ago."
The thought, no matter how weakly founded, of finding out where is daughter could be was the only thing that prevented the Tsar from snapping that lean neck like a twig, letting go just in time to not let the girl suffocate.
"Talk, you damn whore! Or God is my witness, I'll have twenty soldiers in here with you!"
But even this last threat did not obtained the hoped for result, and before he could lose his mind once and for all, Nicholas chose to step away, leaving the matter in the hands of his trusted torturer.
"Have her talk. I don't care how. But make sure she can still walk. I want her to walk to the gallows with her own legs."
"Do not worry, Your Majesty." said Solokoff. "With me, eventually everybody talks."
The emperor then left the cell first, and then the dungeons, finding as he thought his wife waiting for him in the palace's courtyard, more worried than ever.
"Do you think she'll talk?" she asked him, hopeful.
"Between you and me? I doubt it. We both know whose daughter she is."
"Then? What will you do?"
"The only thing I can do."
Alexandra was accostumed to the sour and dark glares of her husband, but that was the first time in which, looking into his eyes, she felt a sense of revulsion, if not outright fear.
"Tell me you're not really thinking about it!"
"There is no choice, and you know it." he honestly replied. "You read the letter yourself. They were very clear - a city for a daughter. I cannot put the future of the empire in jeopardy just to save Ekaterina."
Faced with such a detached behavior, the Tsaritsa literally lost her mind.
"But what the hell kind of father are you?" she yelled, slapping him. "They could kill her!"
"They won't, and you know that, too." the Tsar answered, unfazed. "If they did, everyone in Europe would condemn them. In all likelihood, they'd bring her to England with a new identity. At the right moment, we will send someone to find her."
"You talk as if we were discussing a stranger. We are talking about our daughter!"
"About my daughter, Alexandra. Sometimes I get the idea you forgot about that."
"She might have come into this world out of your mistress' cunt, but Ekaterina is for all intent and purposes my daughter! I was the one who held her in my arms when she cried! I nursed her and gave her my milk! What did you ever do for her, other than mortify and make her feel inadequate? Oh, right, you put that snake right at her side!"
"Who do you think you are?" ranted the Tsar. "Do you think it's easy for me to accept all of this?"
"You are putting this cursed war ahead of our daughter's sagety!"
"But don't you get that it's what she wants?"
Those words, screamed into her face with the desolation and anguish of a desperate father, shut the Tsaritsa up at once, making her heart skip a heartbeat.
"What..."
"You heard her last night. I have to learn to behave like a man and like a true Tsar. If I did what you ask of me, if I sacrificed the fate of my country to bring my daughter back, do you really believe she would forgive me?"
It was only then that Alexandra, lulled for years into the illusion that she was dealing with a mere child, had to admit to herself that they were likely no longer talking about the erstwhile Ekaterina.
"I know that she is our daughter. Moreover, she is probably the best daughter I could hope for. Maybe even greater than Alexsandr. And do yoy know what I am regretting? That I understood it only now. But, in good conscience, I cannot ruin the fortunes of a war for her sake. Because she herself would never do so."
That said, and clenching his fist in his sense of impotence that threatened to overcome him, the Tsar returned to the palace, leaving his consort alone with her pain and her tears.
Unable to use most of his "toys" because of the imperative order of the Tsar to keep the prisoner in condition to talk, Solokoff went for a less aggressive, but equally effective approach.
They began with the most classic water torture; they shoved on Nonna's head a huge vase-shaped helmet, that was filled with water enough to cut her breath short, keeping each time the water inside for longer before opening the valve to empty it.
Then it was the time for the fire, with white-hot irons brought close enough to the skin to cause excruciating pain.
But despite everything, Nonna did not move an inch; she squirmed, at times she struggled away from the water and the fire, but notwithstanding all that she did not open her mouth, not to scream, nor to beg or to confess. It was like grilling a pillar of salt.
After an hour of unsuccessful attempts, Solokoff opted for a more direct approach.
Drawing from a torture method commonly used in Japan, and keeping in mind the instructions received, he focused on the arms, impaling them with big pins just under the skin, connected to a rod moved up and down by a chain and a winch. The pain caused by the pins moving inside the wound was nothing short of atrocious, especially when the hooks at the ends sank even deeper into the flesh to prevent the points to slip away.
With each pull, with each movement, the skin threatened to tear, and this time not even Nonna was able to contain harrowing cries of pain. But beside the screaming, nothing more came out of her mouth, despite the repeated attempts from her jailer to crush her.
That torture was followed by several others, more or less aggressive, but several hour later the girl, reduced to a patchwork of bruises and wounds, was still hell-bent on not talking.
Completely out of patience, Solokoff decided to pull his gloves off; in the end, he told himself while he was heating up the pliers, she could walk even without one or two fingers.
For her part, Nonna looked like she was waiting but for the coup de grace, even though she was fully aware that it would never come. Not because she was suffering through countless hells on Earth; simply put, looking into her eyes it could be glimpsed that she did not care about going on living.
Closing her eyes, she almost looked like trying to find comfort into the oblivion, hoping not to have to reopen them ever again.
A knock on the door did not interest her in the slightest; she heard Solokoff walking towards the door.
"What is it?" she heard him grumble.
"His Majesty sent me." she heard a familiar voice say, unable to warm her stone-cold heart, though. "He wishes for the prisoner to have religious comfort, if she were to die during the interrogation."
"That is not something to be worried about. His Majesty told me not to overdo it, and I won't."
"Sorry to have to insist, but I have my orders."
"I have them, too. And they mention not to let anyone in. Show me an authorization, and perhaps..."
A sharp noise followed, then a gasp and the thud of something hitting the floor.
"Too bad for you, my friend. Never deny a dying man the religious comfort."
The door then opened, and only then Nonna found the spirit and the strength to lift her gaze, glimpsing at first a black tunic.
"Look who the cat dragged in, Miss Nonna." said Padre Ansaldi with a smirk. "Honestly, I thought I'd find you much worse for the wear, considering the fame of your... playmate."
Nonna smiled too, even though the muscles of her face were screaming for mercy as well.
"Come here to enjoy the show? Or have you come to finish the job with your own hands?"
A few moments of silence passed; then, after fishing for it into his pocket, the priest shoved a strange dark sphere right into Nonna's throat, forcing her to swallow it. Just a few seconds elapsed, and just like chalk from a board, every trace of pain faded into nothingness.
"But what..." the girl said, shocked.
"It's a Chinese medicine." he said, freeing her from her chains. "It numbs the pain. You might have been taught to tolerate it to inhuman levels, better than anybody else, but it doesn't mean you don't feel it. You have to shape up. We have a long voyage ahead of us, after all."
Nonna jumped up a bit, looking at her unexpected savior with a tinge of surprise, only to lower her gaze once more.
"I can't do it. I don't want to."
"You can believe it or not, but I think I know why you did that. I heard some things here and there."
Lying would be perfectly useless, considering that the men standing before her had had a whole court, herself included, convinced that he was absolutely innocuous.
"Then you understand why I did it."
"Still, your eyes don't look like those of someone that knows he did the right thing."
The girl winced, as her stony heart seemed to start up once more.
"Perhaps at first you were very much set in your intentions. You gained the Grand Duchess' trust one step at a time, until you needed but a gesture to have your plan succeed. But then, something must have happened. Perhaps the conscience you thought you no longer possessed pushed you to take your time, hoping that a solution would pop up without you being forced into doing what, with each passing day, you were wanting to do less and less. Proof of that is how you killed that Uigur at the mole, to make sure that your involvement was not revealed.
But then, in the end, the part of you that still put your objectives ahead of the Grand Duchess' trust in you gained the upper hand. And yet, things have changed. You would not have doubted before, but now..."
It was true, and it was useless to deny it.
For a very long time, Nonna had had nothing into her mind but her true objective. But with time, without even noticing it, Katyusha and her destiny had become a constant presence into her thoughts, until they pierced her heart like a poisoned thorn.
The erstwhile resolution had long gone, and even though she had found herself more than once in the position of having to choose which devil she had to sell her soul to, she felt that she had done something for which she could not forgive herself; all the reasons in the world were not enough to justify such treason against the person who had so lovingly trusted her.
"Unfortunately, I am afraid we don't have much time before I'm discovered, so I'll be blunt. I have to get out there, but obviously it would be far easier for me to follow those British' traces in this wretched country, if I just knew where they are going."
"I don't know that." Nonna whispered.
"But you are good at following people, I'd bet. Perhaps even better than me." Then the Captain frowned, turning serious. "If you still have a sliver of common sense inside you, you understand what is the only right thing that you can do right now."
Interminable seconds passed, during which the two shards of the tattered soul of Nonna furiously fought. In the end, the girl closed her eyes for a moment; and when she reopened them, they were shining once more.
"Let's go." she said, getting to her feet.