The Used-Book Dealer Summary

The narrator is working as an orderly in a hospital in Kolyma. He and a man with a reddish trace of a beard are sent to Magadan, to take a paramedic course. There the narrator finds out that the man with the reddish-beard is a former NKVD secret police official whom the narrator calls "Captain Fleming." This is because this man is the only one in the paramedic course who knows that the discoverer of penicillin is named Fleming. Fleming has found out about how chemicals were used to break the wills of star prisoners and get confessions in the political show trials in the Soviet Union, in the 1930s. The prisoner's will is broken by the use of chemicals, without the use of torture. Then it is possible to have the accused confess to crimes as arranged beforehand...