CHAPTER 9. AND HE WHO WALKS THROUGH LIFE WITH A SONG

A few days later there really was an FSB raid and interrogation. They burst in under the pretense of a financial audit of the cosmonauts, slammed everyone to the floor—and only then realized something was wrong. They forced the NTV and LifeNews crews to press their servile faces to the same floor (kept in a separate room so they wouldn’t see too much), spread all the recording equipment on a table, and clipped the physical storage devices they had extracted with wire cutters. The riot police were simply told the operation was top secret, and the journalists were escorted offsite. After a short deliberation, the officers ordered another film crew to restage the raid in two hours while they commenced interrogations.

Everyone except him was interrogated, while calls were made to find out about him. It turned out the real boss was at home, filming a canned segment for the news before his next round of Botox and endocrine surgery. More competent investigators rushed over and identified the fake through biometrics. That’s when it all began for him.

First they established his real identity and demanded an explanation: what was a store clerk doing at the Cosmonaut Training Center, especially in a role that could be called sacred to the country? He laid it all out about getting fired from the store and becoming a film actor slated to shoot in space.

Once the investigators concluded he was essentially an outsider—a former enlisted soldier from the army—the interrogation shifted into a different register: syrupy, confidential, and sickening to the stomach.

“You’re dealing with Russian officers here! Defenders of the Motherland—reduced to selling their honor for tourist dollars!” they crowed. “You, however, are an honest man… right? Help us, please, as an honest citizen. Tell us about their dealings with businessmen. Maybe you heard or saw something. Maybe someone unusual came by, or money and valuables changed hands. Every detail matters. You’ll be a confidential witness. We won’t tell anyone. You can trust us. An officer’s word. My honest word. I swear on my mother’s grave.”

They misread his “no” and decided that if he refused to be their agent then he must already be someone else’s agent—no third option existed. Then Code 117 was invoked, and the investigators’ faces changed. They began laying arsenal of pain on the table. They extolled stun guns, needles that could be worked under fingernails, but the crown jewel was a telephone with a rotating electric handle.

“We have these in every police station now for cases just like yours,” they informed him, and resumed the interrogation, using for the moment no physical persuasion.

“Who do you work for, you scum?” the first demanded.