She rose, purse in hand, and tossed a wad of drachmas onto the wooden table. The coffee drinkers around them did not look up from their newspapers and tourist maps.
As they made their way past the Olympic Airways office on the corner and across the avenue, she said nothing. Her silence is deliberate, he told himself, part of a trick to unnerve me.
It was working. He was learning something about himself he'd never before known. He was learning he was a coward.
That was the reality. He wouldn't hold out. He'd tell them everything he knew, because they would hurt him badly. He couldn't bear pain; they probably knew that. And then they'd kill him anyway because he couldn't tell them the one thing they wanted to know. He didn't know it himself.
Viktor Fedorovich Volodin realized he was about to die. All the years of pointless intrigue in the party, the fudging of production figures, the father-in-law who'd made his existence wretched, it all added up to a lifetime of nothing but misery, with the payoff a bullet. Rasstrel, a KGB execution.
They were entering the national garden, a mirage of green in the desert of asphalt and cement that is central Athens. Its informal walkways were shady lanes of quiet and cool that seemed miles away from the smoke and glare and heat of the avenues.
Finally she spoke. "We're running out of time, and patience, Viktor Fedorovich. Let's start with the money. Where have you deposited it? Next, we want to know the names of everyone--"
"It--it's--I don't know where it is now."
"You're lying." She did not break her pace. "The time for that is over."
"But I don't have it. Someone else--" He heard himself blurting out the truth. "He's in charge of everything."
"You are lying, again. You are the one who embezzled the funds." She was walking by his side as they entered a secluded alleyway of hedges, the other two trailed only inches behind. There was no escape. "The criminal is you, Viktor Fedorovich."
"No, he--I--I don't know anything." How true was that? he asked himself. He knew where the money was supposed to go, but he didn't know what it was for, at least not specifically. That part had been classified. He had the small picture but not the big one.
"If you know nothing, then telling us everything you do know should not take very long." The calm, the assurance in her voice sent chills through him. He knew he would talk and they knew it too. "However, the more you have to say, the longer we can linger."