The Charm School

certainties, moral or otherwise. Hollis began writing his confession. He chose to write it in Russian, so if there were any problem of fact, he could plead ignorance of the finer points of the language.
    He knew that if they had the time, they’d make him rewrite it again and again. The Russians took the written word very seriously, and as former Orthodox Christians they were obsessed with confessions of guilt; thus the legendary written confessions that poured out of the Lubyanka. But Hollis suspected that Burov was on a tight schedule to get on with the important business, the interrogation to find out what he and Alevy knew and what the embassy knew and what Washington knew. Hollis reflected on the sequence of the criminal justice system here: trial, confession, interrogation. He supposed it didn’t matter. The bullet still came at the end. Hollis continued to write.
    Hollis paused to collect his thoughts, then continued his confession. In truth, there wasn’t much to tell. He’d been spying on the Charm School, ran into two Border Guards, and shot them. His chance sighting of Yablonya from the helicopter removed that moral problem and gave him an opportunity to betray people who were already liquidated. He knew, too, that the KGB wanted not only details, but philosophical motivations for what he’d done, an enlightened awareness of his shortcomings as a decadent product of Western capitalism. They also wanted apologies. He’d written several sample confessions in the Washington Lubyanka, but he didn’t want to make it appear that he was a pro at it.
    As he started a new page, Hollis thought about Lubyanka West, the Charm School, and the many other manifestations of Washington’s and Moscow’s obsession with and emulation of each other. He always thought that if either side were ultimately defeated in a future war, the victor would feel a sense of loss and purposelessness. He recalled the almost disappointed expression on Burov’s face upon passing the death sentence on him. There was no doubt that each side got something out of the conflict, drew some sort of unnatural psychic energy from it.
    Hollis filled the writing tablet with words, then read what he’d written. It was a good confession, a mixture of hard fact and hard-to-prove fiction. The facts were things Burov probably already knew. The fiction was that Greg Fisher’s phone call to the embassy was the first time they’d heard of an American POW in Russia. Burov would believe that because he wanted to believe it.
    Two hours after he’d begun writing, Hollis signed the confession and lay down in his sleeping bag. He thought briefly about Lisa, then forced her out of his mind, but he fell into a restless sleep and dreamt about her anyway.
    * * *
    On the fifth or sixth day of his imprisonment, after the third draft of his confession, the door to his cell opened, and the lieutenant who had been the duty officer when he arrived walked in and said in Russian, “Your confession is accepted. Now you will write an appeal of your death sentence. Come with me.”
    Hollis, half starved by now, stood unsteadily and followed the lieutenant out into the corridor. The man pointed, and Hollis walked toward the rear of the building. It was at this point where they usually put the bullet into your neck. But why that odd custom of the hallway execution—begun in the 1930s in Lubyanka—persisted was beyond him. It
would
have been humane if no one knew about it, but as it was fairly well-known in the Soviet Union, Hollis thought he’d just as soon face a firing squad outdoors.
    He could hear the lieutenant’s boots on the concrete floor and listened intently for the snap of the holster flap, wondering if he’d misjudged Burov’s need to interrogate him. He remembered his own advice to Lisa at the restaurant in the Arbat, that the KGB were not rational, and he could well believe that Burov had let his emotions get the better of his intellect.
    “Stop!”
    Hollis stopped and heard a door open to his right. The lieutenant said, “In there.”
    Hollis entered a small windowless room that was just another cell like his own except that there was a table and chair in it. On the table was a sheet of paper and a pen.
    “Sit down.”
    Hollis sat, and the lieutenant moved behind him. Hollis saw that the table was of yellow pine, and the boards of the table were stained with what could only have been blood. Against the wall in front of him were stacked bales of