Under the Freeze

by George Bartram

  “You are a bad man,” she said lightly. She was still laughing. She was very flirtatious, he saw, perhaps habitually so. It would have been flattering to think that she did it only for him.

  “You must go back to the bus,” she said to the two Americans in English.

  “We just wanted to take a walk!” the girl protested.

  “And you made the group lose time.”

  “Well, the group has made us lose enough time.”

  Juana Marino was very cool. “Individualism is an aberration,” she said. She made it sound like a quotation. “Please go back to the bus now.”

  Tarp walked up the beach and squeezed his feet into his damp canvas shoes. He bent down and pushed the .22 into the front of the cotton trousers and buttoned his shirt so that the square-cut tail hung out all around. It was an old short-sleeved shirt with epaulets that looked vaguely military and that had been made in Africa years before. He thought it would pass in Cuba.

  “Are you going back to the road, Señor Solkov?” the beautiful guide called to him. She was standing by the path that led away from the beach, just where she might have been able to see what he was doing if she had wanted to.

  “I was waiting for a friend,” he said.

  “Here?” She sounded as severe as a schoolteacher. Tarp thought of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, and of tour guides, and of the intricate systems of surveillance that made everybody a spy on somebody here.

  “No,” he said. He gestured vaguely. “Out there.”

  “Well, won’t you walk with me, then?” she said. She sounded flirtatious again.

  Tarp reached her side in half a dozen running strides. The two Americans were ahead of them, and Tarp and the beautiful Cuban woman came behind like parents herding their children homeward after a day at the beach.

  “You are visiting in Cuba, of course,” the woman said in Russian.

  “Of course.”

  “For the celebration of antinuclear peace?”

  “Partly that.”

  The path led along a cut through the sandy scarp behind the beach; on each side of them was a head-high bank of sand and a growth of pine trees. Tarp saw an old tire track in the deep sand, as if the cut were used for vehicles that patrolled the beach, perhaps. He sensed the Cuban woman studying him, and as a distraction he said, “Americans are very young for their years, are they not? These two seem like children.”

  “You have been to America?” she said.

  “I have met Americans before.”

  “Yes, they are very young. And very spoiled. They think they are the kings of creation.”

  “Many Americans think that,” he said.

  She laughed. “All Cuban men think that.”

  Up ahead he could see a paved road and a rather pretty circular road with benches and palms in the middle. There were two buses there and a crowd of people. “Are Cuban men different from Cuban women?” he said idly, thinking of how he was going to get to Havana and of whether he could get on one of these buses safely. The gun seemed very big and very visible just then.

  She was looking down at the sand. “Cuban men are children, but they think they are very grown-up, and what they want their women to be is even younger children.” She looked at him with a smile and then looked away. “It is called machismo.” She shrugged. “Politically, Cuban men are all Communists now, but sexually they are still tied to the pope’s skirts.”

  Tarp was looking at the buses, which were decorated with brightly colored posters celebrating peace and the establishment of nuclear-free zones. “Happily, we Russians do not have that problem,” he said. She laughed. She was laughing at him, no doubt, and even though she was laughing at the stuffy Russian he was only pretending to be, he was piqued. She went right on laughing at him, and the annoyance changed to genuine amusement, then to sexual recognition. “You are very beautiful,” he said.

  “You even talk like a Cuban man!” she said.

  “Men are men, at a certain level. You are very beautiful!”

  “Well.” She stopped. She took off a shoe to empty it of sand, and to hold herself steady she put a hand on his arm. “Well, I am enough of a Cuban woman to like being told I am beautiful.” She blew out her breath in what seemed to be impatience with herself. He thought she would empty the other shoe, and to do so she would hold his arm again, but she started toward the road and the buses. He caught her shoulder. “Will you go out with me?” he said. He was not sure whether he had asked her as himself or as his Russian creation.

  “Where?”

  His hesitation was very brief. “The Russian ballet.”

  “You want to see the ballet?”

  “Of course.”

  “Tonight is their last performance in Havana.”

  “Well, then — tonight.”

  She looked him over. He had a sick feeling that she could see the gun, even though the shirt hid it well. She folded her arms, which were brown and leanly muscled, like a swimmer’s arms, and covered with fine brown hairs the color of a seal’s. “I’m not one of the easy Cuban girls, Russki,” she said.

  “I can tell that by looking at you.”

  “Well … All right.” For the first time she looked unhappy with herself, as if she disliked what she had done. Still, she said stubbornly, “I will meet you in front of the theater at seven-thirty.”

  “It will be a great pleasure for me.”

  “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.” She looked at the buses and the crowd, her arms still folded, her face twisted by a frown. “How are you getting back to Havana?” she asked.

  “A friend is picking me up.”

  “When?”

  He lied. “Ten-thirty.”

  “But it is long past that!”

  “It can’t be.”

  “It is after eleven!” She held a brown wrist up for him to study. “See?”

  Tarp frowned. He meant only to look like a man who was annoyed with himself; his frowns, however, inevitably looked far more serious than that.

  “Don’t be angry,” she said softly.

  “I am not angry.”

  “You look angry. Terribly angry.”

  “Not at all.” He rubbed the lines between his brows. “Only at my own stupidity.”

  “Have you money?”

  He frowned again. She winced. “I left everything in his car,” he said. “A walk on the beach — no need to take anything — well, what a fool I am! If my superiors hear of this …”

  “Typical Russian,” she said.

  “I beg your pardon!”

  “You all go crazy in the sun. Well, come on.” She grabbed his short left sleeve and tugged. “I will find you a ride, sun-struck Russki. Come along!”

  “Can I ride with you?”

  “Certainly not! These young Americans have antennae like oversexed roosters; they would giggle and gossip and I would lose my authority with them. What little authority it is possible to have with them! You will ride in the other bus.”

  “But I will see you tonight?”

  “Yes, yes, in front of the Theatre of Revolutionary Culture.”

  “How will I find you?”

  “I will find you. You are so tall, you will stick up like a signal for yourself. Come on.”

  There were two militia men in the back of the second bus, which was rather old and which put out a cloud of diesel smoke as it racketed down the highway toward Havana. The militia men were from a Havana suburb, and they carried holstered pistols, but they were less threatening than two American deputy sheriffs might have been. Tarp sat with them and chatted whenever the bus slowed enough so that they could hear each other.

  “You like Cuba?” one of them said.

  “Oh, yes. The finest country in Latin America!”

  They smiled shyly, as if Cuba were their personal triumph.

  “You are from Moscow?”

  “No, no, the Ukraine.”

  “I studied that in school. I have been to school, of cou
rse. Before the revolution, a man like me, he would never have been to school. Now, I can write, and I read the announcements to my block committee. The Ukraine is the breadbasket of Russia.”

  “That’s very good,” Tarp said in his Russian-accented Spanish. He did not say what he really thought — that the breadbasket of Russia was in Iowa.

  They passed through clean little towns, then through a development of semi-detached concrete houses that would have reminded him of Moscow because of their sameness if they had not been painted in pretty pastels and if there had not been chickens and mules in the minuscule front yards. He waved a hand at them. “Cuba is very picturesque,” he said.

  “Cuba is very clean,” one of the militia men corrected him.

  “All of it?”

  “All except Buena Ventura.” The man smiled shyly. Then he guffawed a little nervously, and his companion elbowed him and they both giggled.

  “What is Buena Ventura, please?”

  “Buena Ventura is the place that does not officially exist.”

  The man’s companion looked disgusted. “He is a thug,” he said. “He has no manners. He should not have said that.”

  “I see.”

  The first man was enjoying being bad, however. “Buena Ventura is more carefully hidden than Fidel’s bald spot,” he said. He giggled again. The other man shushed him, then turned away and stared out the window as if he were trying to disassociate himself from his unruly friend. Clearly it had occurred to him that Tarp might make a report of the conversation. (It had already occurred to Tarp that they might make a report on him. There was nothing he could do about that.)

  “What is Buena Ventura?” he said. “Come, come, I am a man of the world.”

  The first man had gotten scared now. He closed his mouth very tightly and shook his head.

  “It is very unfair to introduce a subject and then not continue it, Comrade,” Tarp said. “A person would think there was something to hide.”

  The second man turned on the first. “You see?” he said loudly. “What a mouth!” He waved his hands at Tarp. “The first thing that comes into his head, he says it — out it comes, just like vomit. Disgusting!” He folded his arms and scowled at the other militia man. “See what you have done now, you and your mouth? Now a foreigner has formed a bad opinion of the revolution. What is that between your ears, a rock?” He swung back to look at Tarp. “Buena Ventura is a slum. Eh? That is very plainspoken, no? A slum — dirty, poor, mean, crooked — the works. The revolution has passed it by. Why? Because the people are incorrigibles. They should have been sent to the United States, but we could not get them to the boats fast enough. In my block committee, we have had a paper about Buena Ventura. As a bad example. Buena Ventura is famous. In a very bad sort of way.”

  “Maybe the revolution needs Buena Ventura to remind itself of what it triumphed over.”

  The man looked at Tarp with respect. “That is pretty good. May I repeat that at my block committee?”

  “I am flattered. But let me be honest, my friend. Even in the Soviet Union, we have slums. One or two. Socialism is a stage, after all. It is not perfection. Eh? There are always backsliders who betray the best interests of the people.”

  The first man was grinning. He had round cheeks, like Ping-Pong balls. “You can get girls in Buena Ventura,” he said.

  “Oh, sweet Jesu,” the second one said. “Will you ever shut up?”

  “You can get anything in Buena Ventura.” He swung an arm over the shiny, greasy metal tubing that formed a handhold over the back of the seat and faced Tarp. “Colombian cocaine, they say. Truly. Gambling. Cockfights. There are degenerates in Buena Ventura.” He leaned back, looked around the bus, leaned toward Tarp again. “You can really have a good time, they say.” He leaned back again, then again leaned forward and said, “Get me?”

  “I get you.”

  The man grunted. He smiled at his friend as if he were sure he had done exactly the right thing after all, for now the Russian comrade would know the real facts of the revolution. He seemed quite pleased with himself.

  The bus did not slow again long enough for them to talk, and they were all quiet. The two militia men got off near their suburb and then stood by the road, arguing with each other as the bus pulled out of sight.

  Tarp went forward and asked the driver how close he went to Buena Ventura.

  The black driver looked at him with cynical amusement. “About half-a-mile walk, man.”

  “Let me out when you are closest to it.”

  “Keep everything in your pants, man.” The black man shot him a look. “I mean your money, you follow?”

  Fifteen minutes later he waved to Tarp and brought the bus to a stop. “Don’t believe the first kid tells you his mother’s a virgin and you can have her for ten pesos,” he said.

  “Should I believe the second one?”

  “I think he lies a little, too. Have a good time, man.”

  Tarp got down from the bus and the door folded up behind him. He waved, but the driver was already looking at the road ahead, and he roared away with a belching of diesel smoke that left Tarp coughing.

  Chapter 7

  Buena Ventura had been middle class long ago, and then it had become a slum, and then the revolution had renovated it. Now it was a slum again. The government had cleaned it up and moved in the people of another old slum, perhaps believing that a change of scene would make them good revolutionaries, and they had managed to make it just like home. The architecture could still speak of a great past, a past sometime around the Spanish-American War. Decayed posters spoke of a revolution that had tried and had then turned to more rewarding efforts. One of the posters read “Exhort your men to —” but it no longer told the women of Buena Ventura what they were to exhort their men to do. “Enlarge the —” read another. “Resist,” instructed a third. Faded pink-and-gray letters, above once noble faces that had bleached like poor photographs, warned, “Enemies of the Revolution surround us.” Tarp believed it.

  The first girl approached him just after he turned the corner from the typically clean, typically spare streets of revolutionary Havana into the first of Buena Ventura’s alleys. He felt that he was moving backward in time. The litter grew deeper. There were dog droppings on the pavement. There were graffiti.

  “Want to have a good time?” said a girl of fourteen. She had a bored, professional voice.

  In two blocks he counted five pimps and eight girls, and he supposed that at least a few of them were police.

  “Sell your watch?” a grinning youth said, pressing close to his left side and falling into step.

  “Go fornicate with yourself,” Tarp said in his best Miami Spanish.

  “I give you the best price in Havana.”

  “I will give you a permanent pain between your legs.”

  “A hundred ten pesos.”

  “Go away.”

  “A hundred twenty.”

  “Go.”

  “A hundred thirty.”

  “Go.”

  “My last offer, absolutely, no excrement.”

  Tarp felt deft fingers lift the tail of the khaki shirt and feel for the wallet that should have been there. He caught one finger, twisted, drove the extended fingers of his right hand up under the young man’s ribs. There was a sound as if the man had been sick; his face was very white and his little mustache seemed to jump from it because it was so black. He looked angry and desperate and frightened, and Tarp felt sorry for him, even while he despised him.

  “Want me to break this finger?”

  “No — no! I did nothing …”

  “You change money?”

  “Yes — ah!”

  “French money?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to change some French money. You want to do business, stop trying to rob me and show me your money.”

  “How much?”

  “Four thousand francs.”

  “I have to get that much money. That is much money. I
give a good price, but I have to check.”

  “Where?”

  “Up that alley. Two minutes.” He nodded toward an opening ten yards ahead.

  “You think I am an imbecile.”

  “No!”

  “You want to get your friends so you can rob me.”

  “In two minutes?” He was almost screaming. Across the street, a girl who had her hair piled up like a forties movie star watched them without expression. “I need to check the price and get money, that is all. Truly! You think in Buena Ventura I would carry that much money? I swear!”

  “On the Virgin’s cloak, I suppose.”

  “I am a good Christian. Two minutes.”

  Tarp let him go. “You had better be honest with me.”

  “I swear.”

  The girl sauntered across. A cat, pausing in its pursuit of a flea, sat down in the middle of the pavement to watch her. “Want to go to paradise?” the girl said.

  “No money, angel.”

  “Did he get it all?”

  “There was none to get. How about taking me to paradise for love?”

  “I save my love for Fidel.”

  “And the church, I hope.”

  “Are you a cop?”

  “No, I am a priest. Good-bye, angel.”

  He went back down the street, looked into the alley, and saw the young man with the mustache. The alley was like a canyon choked with trash, sunless, smelly. There was a chain-link fence blocking it fifty feet down, and the paper had blown up against it into a pile half as high as Tarp was tall.

  Tarp walked into the alley. The brick walls were windowless; there was one doorway that had been bricked in. The only place big enough to hide a man was a buttress to his right, but the space behind it was empty.

  “The money?” Tarp said.

  The young man reached behind his back as if he were going to get something from a pocket, and his hand came back with a knife.

  “Stupid,” Tarp said. “You did think I am an imbecile.”

  “Because you are an imbecile. This is Buena Ventura, not your farm, excrement head.”

  Tarp put his back against a wall. The buttress stuck out to his left now, ten feet away, partly blocking the street. There was enough space for him to see a big man there now, however — a huge man, one of the biggest he had ever seen. He had a timber in one of his enormous hands, and he carried it easily like a baseball bat, although it was three inches on its side and four feet long.