“Would you like to get to know me a little better and then I could really put a seed in your whore’s belly? I wonder what I could make you tell me if I was inside you.” Yulia bit the inside of her lip and remained still. Don’t let them think rape was the key to loosening her tongue. For the first time, her fear was replaced with contempt; they would try to use sex as a weapon, of course they would. The hand moved beneath the hem onto the flesh of her thigh, squeezing lightly, then abruptly lifted.
There was silence again, before the second voice spoke once more.
“Do you drink, Miss Jelic?” Yulia licked her dry lips, relieved that they had decided, for the moment at least, and despite quickly seeing through her ‘pregnancy façade’ that an assault was not the best course of action.
“Occasionally,” she admitted. “There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?” Yulia added wishing she had a large tumbler of whisky to hand. There was the scrape of a match and then the smell of tobacco. One of the men – she couldn’t tell which – took an audible drag on what she could smell was a cigar and blew smoke in her face.
The fumes were overpowering, and she retched. Then she felt a bright spot of heat grow close to her cheek, dancing over her skin. Panic flared brighter than the tip of the cigar and coursed through her veins.
“How much do you think it would hurt if I ground this into your eye? Unless you tell me what we need to know, that’s what I will do.”
Yulia pulled her head as far back as she could, straining against the back of the chair. “What do you know about a Suffusion of Yellow? This is your final chance before I pass you to my colleagues so they can loosen your tongue. They will not be as tolerant as we have been.”
The SVR Agent grew cold. The rumoured methods of interrogation used by the Suffusion of Yellow terrorist network were supposed to be taken from the text books of Pinochet’s regime forty years earlier.
Through her panic and coldness, the stiff joints and pain, Yulia slumped in her seat. She was exhausted, yet she knew her ordeal had only just begun. She lifted her head and sat as straight as she could, the blindfold still denying her sight. In the steadiest voice she could muster, she spoke.
“I have nothing to tell you. My name is Yulia Jelic and I’m a dancer.”
A few days earlier, in the Departamentos P Apartment Building, Barrio Lastarria, Downtown Santiago, Republic of Chile
Yulia stood in the hallway talking with the woman who had presented herself as the landlord.
“I can pay now,” Yulia said. “I can give you a month’s rent in advance.” The SVR Agent had arrived in Santiago with just enough money to substantiate her cover story.
The woman’s eyes lit up, and Yulia was warmly ushered up to a small room on the third floor. Like many buildings of its type, the ground floor was given over to the private rooms.
At one end, there was a cast-iron bedframe and mattress, and a dressing table, closed off by a threadbare curtain. It looked like a room out of Russia in the darkest days during the early parts of the Cold War. The other end of the room contained a table and a wooden chair. A single ringed oil stove was just big enough to heat a pan of water or milk. It was a far cry from her family home in Russia, even the neat and tidy two bedroomed apartment she had in Washington. This was basic.
Nevertheless, it would certainly suffice and help her get by as nothing but a young dancer needing work. The room contained no windows but had a skylight set at an angle in the roof. Yulia opened it as wide as she could to let some air inside, then went to the tiny bathroom on the corridor, and could hear someone humming a tune. At least she wasn’t alone. Yulia decided, as she climbed into the narrow bed, and settled down for the night, to try and get a little sleep …
Club Kim, Enrique Mac Iver 187, Santiago, Republic of Chile, 10pm
Club Kim was a Strip Club.
“Bastards,” Yulia muttered to herself, cursing that her whole brief had been set up by the centre to operate from here. They had provided her with ‘cover’ as a stripper, and she could imagine the grins on the faces of her colleagues at the Centre as they were establishing her ID and backstory. Inside this establishment was her contact, and this is where she would be working as a dancer, though how much actual dancing she would be doing was open to question … At least she could dance, if required. Not only had it been a part of her training at the Academy in Moscow, Yulia had trained as a ballerina until she reached the age of seventeen, which was not all that long ago.
The club stood halfway up a narrow road on a hill leading away from the Mapocho river, it looked smart from the outside, and was double-fronted in one of the three-storey buildings that lined the street.
Neon Lights highlighted the ‘Club Kim’ sign as Yulia cautiously entered. Her first encounter was with the young girl on the door, who looked at her in a very suspicious way. The SVR Agent was ‘dressed to impress’ in a particularly revealing dress, and five-inch heels.
“You Dancer?” The door-girl said, “… or lesbian?”
Her candid approach took Yulia by surprise.
“Oh, yes I’m Dancer,” she grinned in response, hoping to lighten the mood.
“Then through there. Sit at small table alone. He will see you in a few minutes …” the girl looked Yulia up and down, then nodded, “He will like you.”
If she had been in Russia, before being recruited to serve the Motherland, Yulia would have turned her nose up at any suggestion that she spend an evening in a place like this. But, she reasoned, existing as a disreputable dancer might mean that she would stand less chance of being discovered for who she really was.
Yulia pushed the door open ever so slightly and was greeted by the sound of laughter from the main club into which she had clearly walked. Club Kim was hectic tonight. She hesitated, wondering if the middle of a busy evening was the best time to try to make contact with her man, or whether she should return tomorrow when there would be fewer witnesses to the conversation she needed to have.
She was still wavering indecisively when voices speaking Spanish turned her head. A quartet of men was making its way towards her. Yulia tensed, recalling where in her brief it had described the brutality of the torture that she may encounter if she was discovered. Had she been found out already?
They walked two abreast as one in the first pair nudged his young companion and gestured towards Yulia. The two walking behind spoke in Spanish to each other, laughing. It was obvious to Yulia that the young man was being teased and that she was the subject.
Her Spanish was more than passable, it really had to be, and so she offered them a simple smile before looking away again.
“Are you available Chica?” asked the man who had begun the joke.
“No, sorry, I’m just here … looking for a job.”
“Oh, she is waiting for you, Enrique,” said the oldest of the group to one of his compardres, and stepped aside to let a larger, thicker set man – presumably, ‘Enrique’ – pass him