Under the Freeze

by George Bartram

  “And what do all these heavy fighters do in the same ring? Eh? Do they punch hard and knock each other out? Oh, no, Tarp! They negotiate. They agree that none of them would touch this problem with his fingertips with asbestos gloves on! Why? Fear — what else?” Repin grinned and leaned forward and banged the bottle slowly on his thigh. “What if the thief is Andropov himself? Or what if the thief is Beranyi? Or what if it seems to be one man, and it is really another? Oh, no! Not with two pairs of asbestos gloves on! No, no, they say, let us go to an outside master; let us not bother the rest of the Soviet leadership with this matter; let us keep it among the brotherhood of the upper echelon of the KGB. Let us go to old Repin and ask him to deal with it.” A great grin split his face, as if a melon had been slashed. “So — I deal with it! I come to you!”

  “Was that their idea?”

  “No, no, that is my judgment. They do not know about you — do not want to know about you.”

  “All but one of them.”

  “Well, maybe, yes — all but one. Yes, the plutonium thief will want to know. Hey?”

  “And the money you offered?”

  “That was voted in Dzerzhinsky Square. At the meeting. There is lots of money in Dzerzhinsky Square.”

  Tarp took the cutting board out of its clips and rested it against his thigh, his narrowed eyes searching the white docks and the white boats around him. “Who knew you were coming here from Cuba?” he said.

  “Only three people in Cuban KGB.”

  “Swell.” He moved toward the hatch. “Come below.”

  “But I like the sun!”

  “I don’t want blood on my deck. Come below before somebody starts shooting.”

  Laughing, stumbling a little, Repin blundered his way down the narrow ladder and along the passage to the cabin. By the time he got there Tarp was pushing shells into the twelve-gauge from an open box on the room’s central table. He slammed the last one in, swung the gun up, checked the safety, and laid it on the table. “You armed?” he said to Repin.

  “Certainly not.”

  Tarp jerked his head toward the shotgun. “Safety right there. Push it this way. Pump it after each shot.”

  “What am I shooting at, please?”

  “Almost anything but me. I’m going topside to take us out.”

  When he had reached the ladder, Repin called after him, “Will you do it?”

  Tarp turned slowly. “I don’t see yet what it is I’d do.”

  Repin held up a hand, fingers spread. “Find where the plutonium goes.” A finger dropped. “Get back the plutonium or the bombs made from it.” Another finger closed. “Find the traitor who engineered it all.” The hand became an angry fist.

  Tarp did not have to think for very long. He had no interest in the internal rivalries of the Kremlin or Dzerzhinsky Square: if they-all killed each other with stolen plutonium, it would be fine with him. But when the plutonium passed the Soviet border and threatened the rest of the world, he got worried. Repin was right about that — he had a fire. Weapons-grade plutonium passing out of regular channels meant madness, just as Repin had said. Terrorism or oppression or an insane war. Forty bombs worth of madness.

  “I want a quarter million bucks,” he said.

  Repin began to protest as a matter of form and then gave it up.

  “Pegged to the New York price as of today,” Tarp insisted. “Gold.”

  “Of course. One-third now. Where would you like it?”

  “Half now. My bank in London. They can probably just wheel it from the KGB corner of the vault to my corner.”

  Repin shook his head. “So cynical,” he murmured.

  “I’ll want three passports, all different nationalities. One with a diplomatic stamp so I can get in and out easily. I want a sluzhba courtesy card, first priority.”

  “Oh, now!”

  “You know the game, Repin.”

  Repin shrugged. “Oh, well.”

  “A source of money and weapons inside the Soviet Union. And don’t put me in touch with anybody’s network, not even yours. And for God’s sake don’t try to use me — got that? No ploys to bust dissidents or any of that bull. If you try to use me, I’ll get you.”

  Repin’s head sank down, seemingly into his neck, as if there were a well between his shoulders waiting for it. His hard old eyes met Tarp’s and his hands spread wide on the table, only inches from the shotgun. “No. Because right now, I need you.” His left index finger came off the table. The gesture was a very small one, but commanding. “But do not threaten me, Tarp. Nobody ever threatened me and carried it through.”

  “Likewise.”

  They stared at each other. Tarp gave a little nod. He went up the ladder into the wet heat and the sunlight.

  First Cuba, then Moscow, he thought, what could be simpler?

  Chapter 2

  Repin was wearing a suit that looked as if it had been made in Bulgaria for sale in Cuba to Russians, for its fabric was sleazily lightweight and its style was a decade or two out-of-date, even in Eastern Europe. Repin had probably picked it up in Cuba on purpose, Tarp thought; he was normally vain about his clothes, but he believed in protective coloration. In this case, however, the coloration was wrong, for he looked like exactly what he was — a Russian in the wrong part of the world.

  “Put this on,” he said tersely. He tossed a red knit shirt to the Russian.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s a shirt. Somebody left it on board.”

  “What is wrong with clothes I am wearing? You do not like these clothes?”

  “You look as if you’re planning to offer Castro a cigar. Come on, put it on; this area’s crawling with Coast Guard patrols. Drugs and Haitians are their big thing, but they’d take a Russian agent for the change.”

  Repin was fingering the shirt with distaste. It was short-sleeved and it had a press-on image of a small animal just above the pocket. He wrinkled his nose.

  They had come out on deck and Tarp was steering from the flying bridge while Repin held on to the ladder halfway up, behind him. To their left the Caribbean sun was burning away the last of the morning haze, while to their right the water was green and then indigo and then a wonderful purple like the side of a dolphin when it is first caught.

  “But I will look stupid in this,” Repin said.

  “Of course you will.”

  “I am a man very proud of his appearance!”

  Repin had a great reputation as a womanizer. Even now, in his seventies, he was vain about it. The last time that Tarp had seen him he had had one bad eye and he had looked ten years older, but now he was more robust and the eye was healthy, as if he had grown younger. Repin was pleased, Tarp was sure, to have been chosen for this job. There would be schemes forming in his head, not merely for the recovery of the stolen plutonium, but for his own reinstatement to the KGB. No matter how old a man, he always schemed, hoped, desired. The body aged; the passions remained young.

  Thinking of all this, Tarp was watching another sportfisherman that was cutting a wake in the water to his left on an almost parallel course, as if it meant to intercept him miles out in the Gulf.

  “Is anybody expecting you?” he said, watching the other boat.

  “Is very ugly shirt,” Repin muttered.

  “Put on the shirt, please. Is anybody expecting you?”

  “Nobody. Was all done under tightest security.”

  Tarp saw the flash of binoculars from the other boat. “What’s your cover in Havana?”

  “I am papa to Soviet dance company. KGB overseer. Very cute girls, those dancers.”

  “Not very original.”

  “But good. Dance company directress is my mistress.”

  “Truly?”

  “Truly!” Repin scowled at him reproachfully. “It was part of story made up for cover, but Repin makes it true!” He barked out a laugh. “Repin is like actor — always truth, truth!” He shook the knit shirt as if it were a small animal that had tried to bite him. “W
hy I got to wear this?”

  “It’s camouflage. Put it on.”

  “I take off before we get to Cuba?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Is very, very unfashionable shirt.”

  He emerged from the cabin some minutes later with the shirt pulled tight over his barrel torso like a sausage casing. His was a hard, convex abdomen that started its outward swell at the rib cage. Below the short sleeves his old arms were finely wrinkled but still muscular, with little fat.

  “Wear your hat,” Tarp said.

  “Is Cuban hat.”

  “It’s okay. The hat is okay.” Tarp did not tell him that the same hat could be bought all over Miami. In that hat and the shirt, Repin looked just like a New York businessman on a holiday. Even his Russian pallor was right.

  Tarp switched the control to the deck and went down and began to ready the fishing gear. From time to time he glanced over at the other boat, which kept its distance but stayed even with them. It was not a boat that he recognized.

  He sewed big treble hooks up through chunks of cut bait and then wired the hooks behind big Kona flashers, one on each of the two rods that would feed from outriggers until a fish hit; then the outrigger would release the line and the fish would be played from the fighting chair. When he lifted the cover of the ice chest for more cut bait, he checked the .22 pistol to make sure it was dry and easy to reach.

  Tarp tuned the radio to a Latin station and raised the volume in case they had a narrow-cone listener on the other boat. “Tell me what you think about the submarine again,” he said. He looked at the other fishing boat, and Repin, always alert, followed his glance and turned back. “What is that boat?” he said.

  “Don’t know. We wait and see.”

  “You can go faster than them?”

  “Don’t know. Now isn’t the time to find out. Tell me about the submarine.”

  Repin looked resentfully at the other boat and then took a cigar from the pocket of his Bulgarian jacket, which was hanging on the fighting chair. “Maybe submarine was bringing plutonium to Cuba. That is why I come to Cuba, so far as my old friends in the KGB think — I not tell them about you. Is very obvious and too simple idea, that plutonium comes to Cuba, but is worth checking because sometimes obvious ideas are right.”

  “Does Moscow think the plutonium came to Cuba?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “I do not think. It was made very clear, Repin is not to think. Repin is to be — good pimp: he is to find somebody to service Moscow. Repin is to stay pure.”

  “A pure pimp.”

  “Yes — like homosexual, no? Homosexual, often he is good pimp, he stays pure from his whores. So, to you, I am your faggot pimp. You tell me so much, you service Moscow, I stay pure.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Is true.”

  “You live for information, Repin. You can’t stay pure.” The old man spread his square-fingered hands on the deck. “If Repin learns too much, they kill him.”

  “Who will kill him?”

  “Maxudov.”

  Tarp was watching the other boat. “Who’s Maxudov?”

  “Is code name of plutonium thief. Submarine captain spoke it just before he died. They say.”

  Tarp reached down into the locker beside the ladder and got a pair of huge old German binoculars. They had neutral density filters for sun and haze, and he could turn them against the morning glare and watch what was happening on the other boat. “Plutonium,” he said with the glasses still at his eyes. “Who’d want it?” He slouched against the bulkhead so that the other boat could not see him.

  “Who would not want it?” Repin shrugged. “Argentina. Brazil. Israel, maybe. India, Pakistan. South Africa. Maybe one of the East African nations — Kenya, Tanzania.”

  “Cuba?” Tarp was watching a blond young man work clumsily with the fishing gear, too clumsily for anybody who had ever done it before.

  Repin hesitated. “Well — Cuba, maybe.”

  “Tell me.”

  Repin sighed. “Is only gossip. Stupid gossip, yes? But Beranyi — you know Beranyi, the shark? — Beranyi is Department Five. He is rising star. Not rising fast enough to suit himself, they say, but rising. So, he was in Cuba in nineteen sixties, is friend of Castro, they say. There is this idiotic gossip that Beranyi wants to move Cuba faster into a military posture than the Central Committee wants to move Cuba.”

  “To atomic weapons?”

  “So they say. Is only gossip.”

  Tarp watched the young man bungle an attempt to attach a lure to a line with a Bimini twist, and he knew from the angle of the young man’s head and from his concentration that he was trying to follow the instructions of a book that he had put down on the deck. Tarp lowered the binoculars. “So the idea is that Beranyi free-lances plutonium so that Castro can go into the atomic bomb business. Is he that kind of man?”

  “Is very ambitious.”

  “Yeah, but is he crazy?”

  “Not that way.”

  Tarp grunted. He turned to the wheel and swung the boat thirty degrees closer to the other boat’s course so that he would pass close astern of it unless it took some action. After thirty seconds it accelerated and changed its own course farther to the left; Tarp swung back to his original course and increased his speed, then turned twenty degrees away from the other boat and really gave it power. When the other boat did not follow, he knew that they had decided to be cautious, and he went up on the flying bridge and watched them move away toward the east. A little later his radar told him that they had taken up a parallel course again about three miles away.

  “What’s Beranyi got in Havana?” he said now.

  “Is not sure. Is believed he has penetrated Third of June Movement.”

  “Anti-Castro?”

  “So they say.”

  “That’s beautiful. Some bunch of nitwits with an uncle each in Miami and a contact each in the CIA. So Beranyi’s into them, naturally, and it puts him right into the Florida Cuban community. It must be nice duty for an agent who’s been working the Finland station, pulling Dade County. A condo, a pool, lots of girls in string bikinis — what’s his defector rate?”

  Repin shook his head. “I know nothing. Only the gossip. I am not in that work anymore.”

  Tarp looked at the Slavic face, the barrel torso. Despite its high cheekbones and its flat nose, the face could have been that of any retired old man along the beaches, any businessman who had gotten there by cunning and greed, a hard, driven, successful face — except that this one had gotten here because of torture and sabotage, subversion and death, none of which had left any more trace on it than if it had been in the hardware business all that time. When Tarp had been running networks in Southeast Asia, Repin had been in charge of agents from Singapore to Sri Lanka. Now he looked like a retiree from the garment district.

  “You’re always in that work,” Tarp said almost bitterly. “It never gives you up.”

  Repin looked away. His face clouded for a moment. He sucked on the cigar, and the shadow, whatever it had been — anger at Tarp, perhaps; perhaps regret or even guilt — passed.

  Tarp looked at the radar. The other boat was still keeping station on them.

  “Okay. I take you back to Havana and then I go home and I start to look around — where or how, we don’t know yet. How long do you think before they know it’s me?”

  “How are they to find out?”

  “I don’t know — you tell me. It’s my guess it’ll take them less than twenty-four hours. Who knows you came to Cuba?”

  “All of them. That is, all of them who are suspect, and a few more.”

  “And they think you’re here investigating Beranyi? What does Beranyi think?”

  “He suggested it. To clear his reputation, he said.”

  “Gutsy. Supposing he told the truth, why does he worry about his reputation? Who’s he afraid of?”

  “Andropov. Te
lyegin.”

  “Eugen Telyegin?”

  “Da.”

  “Old-time hard-liner. Friend of Lenin. Your patron — yes?”

  “Da.” Repin nodded, smoked, spat. “‘The Monster,’ the Germans called him after Stalingrad. Very good to me, always.” He looked at the ashen end of the cigar. “He has cancer. First the prostate, now the bowel.” He exhaled. “I would kill myself.”

  “Is he still at work?”

  Repin stared at the dying cigar. “‘Work is blood,’ he says. I saw him three days ago in Moscow. A skeleton. Three operations, then chemical therapy. Everything has been burned away. He is like a man in the gulag. Like a man in religious fanaticism. His work has become his faith.”

  “Could he be the one? What’s the name — Maxudov?”

  Repin’s head moved heavily back and forth, back and forth. “He is suspected, too. Yes. But is ironic, you see — even if he is not Maxudov, finding Maxudov kills him. Only fanaticism for finding the guilty one keeps him alive.”

  “It’s his project?”

  “He has Internal Investigation Division now. So, it has become his blood — his truth. And I will say to you, my friend, only Telyegin, only Telyegin, had courage to say, ‘This must be stopped! This traitor must be found!’” He struck a little lighter and a gas flame thrust up. Puffing out clouds of fragrant smoke that vanished on the wind, he said, “Maybe it is cancer that gives him that courage, having nothing to lose. But it was Telyegin that insisted, nobody else.”

  “Then you do know what went on in the meeting in Moscow!”

  “I know what I know.”

  “You’re holding out on me.”

  “Of course! But I hold out nothing that you need.”

  Tarp brought the boat into the stream and took a reading, then throttled down. On the deck again, he put the rods out for fishing.

  “How many people are involved?”

  Repin sucked in smoke. “One. Maybe two or three small ones, like the submarine captain. Maybe some more very small ones. But only the one matters: Maxudov. The others are like criminals anywhere — one who sells black market vodka, the manager who steals butter from his dairy, the woman who steals coupons from the company book. Little ones are nothing. They are typical Russians, good workers of the Soviet state.” He laughed. “Good petty criminals. Good for making examples of.”