Under the Freeze

by George Bartram

  “Uncle Tonio and me are going to teach you a lesson, farmer.”

  Tarp waited for the big man to come into the alley. The young one was anxious, however. He moved close, flashing the knife back and forth in front of him, and Tarp broke his arm and flung him toward the rear of the alley. Then, as the huge man came toward him, he took out the .22 and pointed it at the basketball-sized face. “Drop the tree, Uncle Tonio,” he said. The man puffed. “I’ll shoot your eyes out first. Then your cojones.” The wood thudded on the filthy pavement.

  Tarp gestured with the gun. “Both of you against that wall. Strip.”

  “Naked?” Tonio was almost bald. He sounded as if he had emphysema.

  “Naked.”

  “Are you a queer?”

  “No, I am a policeman.” He flipped out the green DGI card that he had taken from the dead man on the boat.

  “Holy excrement,” Uncle Tonio groaned.

  “Just so. Get the little man on his feet and start stripping.”

  When the young man objected that he had a broken arm, the older one slapped him and told him to mind his manners. He muttered like a scold and called him a fool and told him to look at all the trouble he had caused.

  “Naked?” he said again.

  “Stark naked.”

  His skin was like dirty bread dough, and it enveloped great circles of fat that fell in cascades over his chest and hips. The young man, on the other hand, was painfully skinny, and together the two of them made a very sad picture.

  “Put your hands against the brick wall and spread your legs.”

  “What for?”

  “I want to see what you are hiding, what else?”

  “Holy excrement.”

  Tarp went through their clothes hurriedly. He knew enough about the Cuban criminals who had been exported to Florida to know that they worked in big gangs and they were ruthless-made so, he supposed, by a ruthless Cuban police. He found another knife, several thousand pesos, and, sewn into the big man’s jacket behind a pocket, a little bundle of identification cards, presumably from stolen wallets?

  “You know the penalty for selling identification, Uncle Tonio?”

  “I do not sell them. They are souvenirs. Of my relatives. Did I sell them? Did you see me sell them?”

  “Do you know the penalty for hoarding identification cards?”

  “There is a penalty for that?”

  “There is a penalty for everything. You know that.”

  “They are not mine, I swear! I bought that coat used. I did not even know they were there. Truly.”

  Tarp pocketed the Cuban money and the cards and kicked the clothes down the alley. He dropped some francs from the waterproof pocket on the pile.

  “We have our eye on you two. You have one chance. Cooperate with us, or it’s the People’s Court.”

  “Sweet Jesu.”

  “I will come back tomorrow. If you have said anything about what happened here, I will know you are enemies of the revolution, and I will arrest you on the spot. Understand?”

  Uncle Tonio nodded. He elbowed the young man, who groaned. “It never happened.”

  “What never happened?”

  “Nothing never happened.”

  Tarp shoved the pistol into his belt under the shirt and stepped carefully out of the alley. He crossed it quickly and turned a corner and went a block and turned again. Fifteen minutes later he found a street market where it was possible to buy used clothes without coupons, and he bought a dark suit and very shiny black plastic shoes and a white shirt and tie, and he put Buena Ventura behind him and found a public men’s room. It was clean and almost restful after the slum; he changed his clothes and stuffed the clothes from the boat into the trash can.

  He went to a barber shop and had his hair cut, and before he could stop the barber he had been doused with sweet-smelling lotion that plastered his hair to his head like a cap. He hated the way he looked, but at least he did not look like himself. He went to a little park where children and dogs seemed to be running back and forth without stopping; there was a small Ferris wheel and a booth for throwing baseballs and a portable instant-picture place where he got two photos of himself. He found a secluded bench and ruined two of the ID cards separating the laminations, then managed to pry a third open and insert one of the photos and then seal it again crudely with the heat from a match from a packet he found on the pavement with “Support the sugar cutters in their drive for productivity!” on the cover. The card was not very convincing, but he judged it to be somewhat better than nothing.

  He ate standing up at a cafe back from the main streets, leaning on a wood counter between a truck driver and a black merchant sailor who insisted on introducing themselves and being friendly. It turned out they thought he was a policeman.

  “Do I look like a policeman?”

  “You look like George Raft. Who but a policeman would want to look like that?”

  He wiped some of the lotion out of his hair in another men’s room, but he still looked like a forties gangster.

  At seven o’clock he began looking for the Plaza Marti, and he was there by twenty minutes after. He looked with real interest at the beautiful modern building that took up one side of the square and that was the Theatre of Revolutionary Culture. Somehow, a sense of human scale had been preserved despite its size. Three tiers of lighted windows were stretched like bright ribbons across its façade; inside, and outside on terraces with plain, waist-high railings, people were moving, looking at this distance like colored chips swaying on the ribbons. In the vast plaza itself, couples moved in a clockwise whirl with the slow and graceful gait of flirtatiousness. In a larger circle, bicycles moved around them, with one or two now darting through the crowd; at the outer edge, scooters and a few cars moved almost hesitantly, like animals that have wandered into an alien environment.

  He crossed the square against the swirl of moving people. Many of the men looked as he did, slicked-down and suited, so he supposed that they were all policemen or else his two informants had been wrong. Then again, nobody else was wearing a white tie on a white shirt with a black suit. The women looked overdressed to him and too extravagantly made up. They affected dark lipsticks and towering hair and stiletto heels. Despite the revolution, it still looked as if Havana were the Las Vegas of the Caribbean.

  Juana Marino found him in the crowd. He was looking the other way when he heard her rich voice say, “You have been to a Havana barber!” and she was giggling. She had spoken Russian, which helped to remind him that he was supposed to be a Russian named Yegor Solkov and not a French journalist named Selous (as it said on the packet of documents he had in a pocket), nor a Cuban named Ibazza (as it said on the doctored ID card in another pocket), or even an American named Tarp. “You smell like a Cuban,” she said.

  “Is that bad?”

  “Oh, well …” She wrapped her hands around his left arm. “It is not yet time to go into the theater. Let us walk.”

  “Like the other couples.”

  “Yes.” She was wearing a light dress of a lavender fabric that had a sheen like silk, and her hair was piled on one side of her face with a flower in it. Her makeup was sophisticated, rather highly colored, and she seemed to have accentuated the Negroid elements of her cheekbones and her lips.

  “You are even more beautiful than I remember.”

  “Short memory.” She relaxed her hold and put one hand lightly on his left arm. “Where are you staying, did you say?”

  “I did not. I hoped that tonight I would stay with you.”

  She pulled her hand away. “Don’t be like that,” she said quickly. “I hate that.”

  “I was trying to be honest.” He took her hand and put it in his arm again. “Now I will be less honest.”

  They strolled once around the plaza and then turned toward the theater. People were pressing into the lobby in rather happily messy lines. Tarp found them much noisier than an American crowd, and noisier by far than any in Moscow.

&
nbsp; “Actually,” she said as she watched him come back with tickets, “you look quite handsome. Even with the Cuban hair.”

  “I was scolded when I told you you look beautiful.”

  “No, you were scolded when you made what you thought was a sexy remark. Then you not only looked like a Cuban man, you sounded like one. Well, for me that doesn’t work so well, because I am a new Cuban woman.”

  “One is not supposed to want to spend the night with you?”

  “One is not supposed to say so as if they were giving prizes for such remarks.”

  The auditorium seemed as big as the plaza outside. There were two vast balconies above them, an orchestra like a football field; chandeliers the size of buses hung from the ceiling, dark gold and crystal and oddly old-fashioned in such a setting. Tarp felt shrunken by such space and by the thousands now moving into it. “Individualism is an aberration,” she had said, and this theater said exactly the same thing. The only concessions to privilege were a row of loges along the front of the lower balcony, but even those were made subservient to the dominant scheme, having no private entrances and no privacy walls. They were, in fact, showplaces where officials and visitors sat, as much on display there as the performers on the stage. Now, Tarp watched them fill with men and women who were neither Cuban nor Communist.

  “Foreigners?” he said to her.

  She twisted her head to look up. A breath of perfume reached him. “From the embassies. And delegates to the antinuclear congress from South America.”

  He thought he could pick out the Russians and the French. He tried to pass the time by making a game of the nationalities, but finally he had to admit what he already knew too well — that, except for the obvious distinctions, national characteristics were not easily expressed in faces. The Africans were colorful and exotic; the Orientals seemed too pleased with it all. Many of them wore lapel badges that identified them as delegates, including a small, silver-haired man in a wheelchair who came in with two bodyguards, and an older man in a dinner jacket with military decorations that Tarp was sure were British.

  “Who’s that?” he said to her, pointing at them.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know them.”

  They took their places in a box. Tarp thought them an odd foursome, particularly when he saw the bulge of a weapon in one of the men’s coats. Some peace congress.

  There was a stir then at the back of the orchestra and they stopped talking, although Tarp glanced again at the man in the wheelchair and his thugs and found himself wondering if the man with the British medals could be English, and what he was doing there; and then, like Juana, he was craning his neck to see the group coming into the orchestra from the back.

  “Who is it?” he asked her.

  “Your Russians,” she said. She was standing, unabashed by her own curiosity. A group of twenty people was coming down the wide aisle. Around them some of the audience were applauding politely. A heavy-jowled man came first, with a short, heavy-jowled woman half a step behind him; next came two men, one either drunk or feverish; and next, to Tarp’s surprise and relief, came Repin. With him was a fortyish woman who had that rawboned look that dancers sometimes take on with age; Tarp thought she was the ballet manageress. Repin looked pleased and yet pugnacious, like Khruschev in his old photos.

  Tarp stood up.

  Repin was on the side away from him, and he was bowing a little this way and that, but he turned to say something to the tall woman with him and he saw Tarp. His face went slack momentarily and he turned rather red, like the man ahead of him. Tarp smiled and bowed.

  “What is it?” Juana tugged at his arm.

  “An acquaintance.”

  “In the ballet?”

  “A friend of theirs.”

  He smiled at Repin again. The old KGB officer had composed himself and he bowed in return, and his head came back up to jerk toward the door behind him in a way that was impossible to misinterpret. He wanted Tarp to meet him in the lobby.

  An overture played and the huge chandeliers dimmed and then the curtain rose on a lush, pretty, Romantic scene. People were still coming in, and Tarp watched for Repin’s stocky body to appear in the aisle.

  “Excuse me,” he said to Juana Marino.

  “It has just started!”

  “I shall come back.”

  He found Repin in the shadow of a staircase, at the bottom of a lobby that rose up through the building’s three stories. He seemed to be studying a program with care. When Tarp came up, he looked over the folded paper and said, “I thought you were dead.”

  “I need your help.”

  “They told me your boat had blown up.”

  “The boat did. I need to get out of Cuba.”

  “I was betrayed. You believe that, I hope? I did not try to kill you. Other times, yes. This time, why should I?”

  “There are easier ways. What went wrong?”

  “I made an arrangement with the navy; somebody in DGI finds out, maybe from Moscow. Eh? They do not kill me; that is too obvious; killing you is good idea.”

  “Do they know it’s me?”

  “Maybe not. They know is an American, obviously.”

  “Anything new on the submarine or the plutonium?”

  “I have agent here looking at something. He has idea, he thinks. We will see.” Repin pushed out his lips as if he might whistle. He was dressed in great style, not in a Bulgarian tropical disaster but in an expensive English suit, and he looked more than ever like a ruthless capitalist. “I leave Cuba in six days. Not much time.” He tapped the edge of the program on his teeth. “You are with beautiful woman. How does that happen?”

  “An accident.”

  “There are no accidents.” He tapped the program some more and lifted an eyebrow. “We are being watched by the KGB agent sent to watch the KGB agent who watches the ballet troupe. He is one of Telyegin’s, I think, so he is perhaps all right. Still, it is best I introduce you.” He took Tarp’s arm and turned him around. There was a mousy-looking young man huddled into himself next to a drinking fountain. They walked over. “Eugen Nemirovich, my young friend, I want you to meet one of our staunchest friends in the hemisphere. May I present Señor Picardo.”

  Good! Tarp thought. My fifth identity today. The Russian made a little bob of a bow. “Enchanté,” Tarp murmured.

  “Senor Picardo is an internationalist,” Repin said. He smiled. The KGB man smiled as young men do when the boss says almost anything. “We are all friends of peace,” he said.

  “Peace with honor,” Tarp said.

  “Indeed, oh, yes, surely.” After some seconds, the young man backed away to another wall, where he stood uncertainly, still watching them. By then they were the only people in the gigantic lobby.

  “I’ve got a passport, but it needs a visa and an entry stamp. Can you fix it?” Tarp said.

  “Put it inside your program and leave it on the third urinal in the men’s room. I will come in after you and get it.”

  “I’ll need a way out of Cuba.”

  “I will work on it.” Repin’s face was troubled. “But it is very hard to trust anybody now. This young man who watches us, for example — who does he talk to? Who reads his report besides Telyegin? Bad, very bad. You need a place to hide tonight?”

  “That’s all right. I’ll take care of myself.”

  “The woman?”

  “I’ll take care of myself.”

  “Maybe I should hide you. If I could find a place where it would not be handing you over to them to kill.”

  “I’ll take care of myself. How do I contact you?”

  “There is a promenade along the harbor. A cafe called Angolan Memories. Tomorrow night at seven, all right?”

  “All right.” He hesitated. “If you do find out something, you know, they will try to kill you next.”

  Repin’s face slackened. “It has been tried before. I cannot prevent it.”

  “Your agent here. Is he secure?”

  “Who knows?
” Repin sighed. “Enjoy the ballet.”

  When he slid back into his seat next to her, she took his arm again. Her thigh was very warm against his, and the touch seemed not to bother her at all. Tarp looked at her instead of the ballet. She was taller than most of the women he had seen in Havana, her face angular but full-lipped, high-boned. She was a woman that many men would have made great effort to have. He put his mouth close to her ear and said, “Do you believe in accidents?”

  “Shhh,” she said, intent on the ballet.

  Tarp stared at the stage and concentrated, instead, on Repin and the plutonium. That Maxudov had a network in Cuba was obvious; it was probably not the regular KGB net — it was silly to think that he would have corrupted a whole section — but was, perhaps, made up of a few well-placed agents and a lot of people who thought they were performing their patriotic duty to Cuba or the U.S.S.R. and were really serving one man. Such a situation did not mean that the plutonium had come to Cuba. Tarp was not convinced by the nuclear freeze posters that covered the walls of Havana, any more than he was convinced that the diplomats who sat above him at the ballet believed in peace; but he would need hard evidence before he would believe that Cuba wanted its own atomic weapons so much that it would deal with a Soviet traitor. No, that was senseless. What was far likelier was that the buyer was a terrorist or the PLO or a consortium of terrorist groups — yet it was hard to see why even they would risk the fury of Moscow.

  But if it were they — or somebody like them — who, then, was Maxudov? And why was he willing to take such risk? Not for zeal. Tarp had only marginal belief in zeal. He believed more fully in human weakness — a woman, a man, money, ambition. But how was Maxudov served in any of those ways?

  I’m in the wrong place, he thought. Wrong city, wrong country, I need to get to Washington. Ironically, the CIA would know more perhaps about Cuban ambitions toward atomic weaponry than the Soviets did, especially if the Soviets were being diddled by one of their own. Then I need the gossip from Europe. I need to be in London. Paris. He looked down the hall at Repin. Then Moscow. He would have to kill twenty-four hours before he could start. Wrong city, wrong country. He glanced at the woman beside him. Right woman.