“Please do be at ease.” They talked for several minutes. The man was American, a corporal named Hedges from Detroit, and he had a girl back home who he hoped was getting his letters. His father worked assembling automobiles. His mother hated to cook, and on some mornings he and his sisters had to wake her from deep, black sleeps that they called “the bends,” and he had learned to make her coffee when he was only seven years old.

“Where were you just stationed?”

“Onega, sir.”

“And how is the weather out in Onega?” Ironside asked.

“It’s so cold, sir, you can hear your spit crack when it hits the ground.”

To which Ironside replied, “Quite.”

Corporal Hedges was on morphine. There wasn’t a mark on him, not a bruise or a scratch. Ironside shook his hand, they exchanged salutes, and then, with a groan, Ironside stood.

Wrapping themselves up again, he and Pishkoff left the infirmary and returned to the darkness outside.

“Yes?” Ironside said.

“He was captured at Onega three days ago. A cart dropped him off here this morning, early. The enemy has executed him.”

The tense was undoubtedly accurate, and not meant to sound dramatic. He listened to the snow crunching underfoot.

“The Bolsheviks greased a pinecone, and then used a hammer and a stone chisel to lodge it point-up in his rectum. There’s no way to remove it. He’ll die of tenesmus.”

Ironside continued to walk. He could hear the phrase “your spit crack when it hits the ground” again. He would arrange for morphine, a great deal of it. He had never heard the word “tenesmus,” but realized that Pishkoff had. “Terrible,” he said.

“There was a note from the enemy in his pocket,” Pishkoff continued, uninflected. “It gloated a bit, but the point was, there is at least one pinecone in Russia for each Allied soldier.”

They had reached headquarters, and they trotted up the front steps to stand inside the snowsuit room, where they both began unwrapping their many layers. They shook snow off themselves. Ironside had to navigate through signing documents even now, and then again up the marble staircase to his office, where he was stopped by petitioners, by reports from the field, by women who wanted him to call on them. It took long minutes to get inside the office, and at no time did Pishkoff speak.

When they were alone, Ironside said, “I never thought this would be easy.”

“Sir, may I ask you a question?”

“I wish you would.” He ran his hand along the schedule for today. The film of Trotsky next.

“What if that”—Pishkoff swept his scarred right hand to indicate everything outside the room—“what if that is what order actually looks like?”

“Pardon?”

“We’re here to bring order. I know. But what if this mess is the natural state and what we’re doing is ridiculous?”

“You can’t believe that.”