Under the Freeze

by George Bartram

  She was applauding. He applauded. “Wasn’t it brilliant?” she cried. “Wonderful. Wonderful!” She stood up and he realized it was over. “Would you like to go to a nightclub?” she said.

  “What would we do at a nightclub?”

  “Dance!”

  “Do you like to dance?”

  “Just now, I love to dance!”

  “We will go to a nightclub.”

  It was like places in New York that people of his generation had dreamed about when they were adolescents, places that no longer existed — the homes of gossip columnists and “cafe society.” There was a floor show of extravagant noise and glitter, and a remarkable show of bare skin for a Socialist country. There was lots of rum, and there was dancing.

  “Where did you learn to merengue?” she demanded. “You are a Cuban man!”

  “You are very beautiful.”

  “Dance with me again!”

  When the nightclub closed at two in the morning, she took him to her apartment. She carried her high-heeled shoes in one hand and held on to his arm with the other, and on the concrete balcony of the floor below hers, they kissed. They held each other’s hands, nothing else; it was like the dance again, the dance impacted. “Come upstairs,” she whispered.

  Outside her door there was a bulletin board with notices and posters and a long cardboard sign that read COMMITTEE FOR THE DEFENSE OF THE REVOLUTION. BLOCK MEETINGS TUESDAYS SEVEN P.M. EMERGENCIES ANY TIME.

  “I am the block chairman,” she murmured.

  As she undressed, she hummed a tune from the nightclub. It was self-aware but not insistent, neither coy nor stupid. Under the brown hose, her long legs were brown; her body was strong and supple. She cried out with pleasure and laughed afterward and then hugged him as they spiraled down toward sleep.

  “Do you have to go away in the morning?” she murmured.

  “Not right away.”

  “Good.” She smiled, her face against his shoulder, and he could feel the muscles move. “Go to sleep, then.”

  He had not slept for thirty-six hours. He let go, and his mind floated free.

  When he awoke, there was light coming into the room from the window, and the barrel of his own .22 was poked hard into the soft flesh just below the bend of his left jaw.

  “Did you take me for an imbecile?” she said. She was sitting on the bed naked, the gun in one hand and the DGI green card in the other.

  There are no accidents, he thought. Repin had been right.

  Chapter 8

  “Did you think I believed you, even on the beach?” she said. “Do you think that in Cuba we find men on the beach and think nothing more about it?”

  “Take the gun away,” he growled. He hardly dared move his jaw.

  “Oh, no. It is a very nice gun. An American gun — what a nice gun for a Russian to have. Or are you a Cuban named Ibazza? Is your name Ibazza when you work for the DGI?”

  “I don’t like guns.”

  “Do you think I always bring men home to my bed because they are handsome and charming and because they dance like angels?”

  Some of her hair had fallen and her makeup was smudged, but she looked wonderful. She looked intelligent and vibrant, and she looked as if she hated him.

  “You are beautiful,” he said. They were speaking Spanish now.

  “Oh, yes.” It seemed to make her sad.

  “What in the name of God — may I mention God? — do you think I was doing on the beach if I wasn’t doing what I said?”

  “You are going to tell me that.”

  “It has no logic.”

  “Oh, but it has!” She waved the green card. “It is all logic.”

  Tarp thought he understood. It made him want to laugh. He did smile a little. “You are a subversive!” He looked into her eyes, trying to penetrate to the mind beneath them, but she was tough and experienced and she held him out. “What are you, Juana?” he said. “Anti-Castro? A terrorist?” But an alarm was going off in the back of his head, which meant that something was very wrong, and he looked at the opaque eyes and the excited face and he thought she was too good to be an amateur. “Do you help people get to Miami, is that it?” he said, to play for time.

  She waved the green card again. “You know all that or you would not be here.”

  By looking down and to the left, he could see the gun. It was old; its blueing was raddled; it was only a production gun intended for somebody’s backpack. He thought of the Agency man he had shot on the boat, then of the two DGI men he had killed with the shotgun. Staying alive is a matter of knowing when to shoot first. Or at least of thinking that you knew when to shoot first, because you could never be sure — and if you shot first, you never found out if you were wrong. His eyes shifted to her face again. Does she know when to shoot first?

  There was a knock at the door. She did not move, nor did her eyes leave his. “Well?” she said.

  A man’s muffled voice said, “Fernando is here, Juana.”

  “Wait for me.”

  She stood up very slowly and backed away from him, pulling the pistol away from his throat last as if she were disconnecting a cord. She felt behind her in a drawer for a pair of panties and then pulled them on one-handed, then got slacks and a blouse and put those on without ever looking away from him. She pushed her rather big feet into shoes by standing in them and wiggling the heels in, and then she said, “Come in now.”

  Two men came in. They were both young, both dark. One looked like a college student, the sort who would be intensely intellectual and who might call himself a poet. The other looked as if he had worked all his life to get where he was, so that he was thicker and coarser and yet jollier.

  Juana gave the poetic one the pistol.

  “I will be back at noon,” she said. “Do not let him out.”

  She closed the door behind her and he heard her steps rapping over the concrete floor, and then the outer door thudded as she left the apartment, and a framed photograph of six young women in track suits swayed on its nail and hung crookedly. He thought he could hear her after she left the apartment, walking down the gallery beyond her door, but finally he could not hear even the faint ghost of her angry footsteps, and he knew that for a while he had been listening to the sounds of the morning traffic and of his own blood in his ears.

  “We could torture him,” the poetic one said.

  The thick one looked dubious. Tarp sat up. “Who wants to start?” he said.

  The poet had a little of the fanatic’s gleam, but he also had the gun, and that satisfied him. His friend, who was pragmatic and who knew that the two of them could not torture this large, muscular man, even when they had a gun, was relieved.

  “We will wait for Juana,” he said.

  “I need to pass water,” Tarp said.

  The thick one got a bucket while the poet sat astraddle of the room’s only chair, imagining himself Humphrey Bogart in Key Largo.

  The man set the bucket down next to a tiny sink with one tap. “We cannot let you go to the convenience, you understand,” he said with genuine apology in his voice.

  “Do not be so kind to him!” the poet said.

  The thick one shrugged. “Pissing is not a political issue.” He put his hands in his pants pockets. “Anyway, Juana says he may be one of us.”

  “If he is not DGI,” the poet said. “Or KGB.”

  “Actually,” Tarp said, “I am Chinese.” He got out of bed and stood there naked, eight inches taller than either of them, his body marked with scars that were like tick marks on a map to show places of interest. In fact, he had been born in China and he had grown up there, but the two young Cubans took it as the sour joke of a cynical older man. They backed to the door and then locked him in, and Tarp knew that they were well-meaning young men who thought that shooting first was morally wrong.

  His clothes were not in the room. The door was locked, and there was an angry shout from the other side when he rattled it. Tarp stalked the tiny room, first to the one wi
ndow and then more carefully from corner to corner. Well, I wanted a way to pass the time. There was a deep ledge beyond the window glass and then a somewhat Moorish concrete grill. By opening the window and pushing his head against the grill he could look down and see that there was nothing to help him get down the three stories to the street, even if he could have gotten the grill off.

  A way to pass the time, indeed. He was annoyed, most of all with himself, because he wanted to be working on the plutonium business.

  He paced. The room was eleven feet long by seven and a half feet wide and was bare except for the single bed, the one chair, the tiny sink, a very small wood table that Juana used as a dressing table, and a rather large armoire that took the place of a closet. On the concrete walls were the picture of the girls’ track team (Juana was one of them) and a bright-orange weaving, and on the floor was one small rug. Tarp made the bed. He hung up her dress from the ballet, which had been lying in front of the armoire like the wreckage of that pleasure. There were no scissors and no knives on the small table. There was a hand mirror that might make a weapon if the glass was broken.

  The chair was very light and cheaply made and no good to him. He slid under the bed and looked up at the bottom of the box spring, which looked as if it had been made of orange crates by untrained labor. Its bottom was covered with a sleazy fabric like bandage gauze. He tore it away and looked up through tangent rings of steel wire. They might have made a weapon if he had had a tool, but as they were, they were too tough for him.

  The back of the wardrobe had a twenty-inch brace, which he carefully and silently wrenched loose, giving him a club with two nails in the end. Her clothes and the handbag that lay in the bottom of the wardrobe provided nothing more than a crumpled book of matches that told him that economic self-sufficiency is national liberation.

  He put the club and the matches and the gauze up inside the box spring.

  Well, it helps to pass the time. He lay on the bed, thinking of the two men he had killed on the boat. It was never very good, thinking about the dead. He envied Christians, who could light candles and pray in scented, dark places. He had only his thoughts.

  He heard her in the outer room a little before noon. The sunlight stood straight out from the window like a bright rectangle that had been painted on the waxed concrete floor. He heard her voice out there for several seconds, then a male voice. Then the lock on the door rattled and he backed away and went to the bed. He was still naked.

  She came in and closed the door behind her very quickly as if there were an animal in the room that she was afraid would escape, a cat or a bird. She kept her right hand on the door handle. She looked around the room first, as if he were invisible, and then she looked at him. Her face was angry and her color was pale and unattractive, as if something inside her had drawn its heat back, leaving this wintry bleakness.

  “I should let them kill you,” she said.

  “They would not know how.” He was thinking that she knew something about him. Where had she been?

  She looked away from him, avoiding any sign that she knew that he was naked. He shifted his weight and she looked at him angrily. “Do not do anything stupid!” she cried. Then she almost whispered. “I told them that if you did anything to me, try to make me a hostage, they are to kill me first. You understand?”

  “They would not know how.”

  She looked at him with contempt, perhaps because she had learned somehow that he was a man who did know how. She let go of the door handle and moved to the dressing table and put her back to it so she could watch him. She put out her right hand and began to rummage in the armoire without looking.

  “I have to work,” she said, as if she owed him an explanation. She pulled out a flowered dress and dropped it over the back of the chair and then she began to unbutton her blouse. She was wearing nothing under it. She hesitated before she unbuttoned it all the way, and then, enraged, she tore the blouse off and threw it on the floor. She kicked off her shoes. Her nipples were engorged; she made no attempt to hide her breasts. Her slacks had an elastic top; she put her hands on the elastic, palms in, fingers out, and hesitated again — like him, she had to be thinking of her elegant and happy undressing of the night — then pushed the slacks down. She let go of them when they reached her calves and got them off the rest of the way by pushing one leg down with the other foot then walking them down over her ankles as if she were treading grapes. Then she did the same thing, but more slowly, with her panties. All the color had come back into her face. They looked at each other, and neither could hide the sexual eagerness.

  As they grappled on the bed, her eyes were wide, seeming to glare at him; then they closed, and her mouth was as tight as if she had taken a vow of silence. He tried to turn her anger aside with tenderness. Twenty minutes later, they lay still; she moved her body so that she lay partly over him, both of them wedged into the angle between the bed and the cool concrete of the wall.

  “Who are you?” she whispered.

  “Why does it matter?”

  “I have to know.”

  “I am Russian.”

  “No,”

  “I am a DGI agent named Ibazza.”

  “No. The thumbprint on the card is not yours.”

  Then she has access to a pretty sophisticated system, if she can find that out. She may know whom the thumbprint really belonged to. “Who am I, then?” he said.

  “I think you are an American whose boat was blown up. Are you?”

  But old caution was always with him. “I am Peruvian,” he said.

  She became angry again. “Tell me the truth!” She tangled her fingers in his hair and pounded his head against the mattress. “I swear, if you tell the truth, I will save you. But tell me who you are!”

  “Who are you?” he said. He pushed a lock of black hair away from her face. “Who are you, Juana?”

  She pushed his hand away. “I have to know who you are. It is all that matters now.”

  He moved his body, moving hers. “And this?”

  “This is nothing!” She pushed herself upon her hands, away from him. “This is — personal. Therefore, it is trivial.”

  “It is a great deal.”

  She got up and yanked the dress down over her arms and head, slowly covering her wonderful body as if she were putting out a light. She pulled the panties up and then dug through the bottom of the armoire for shoes. She was very violent in putting them on. “Promise me you will not try to escape,” she said.

  “That would be a stupid promise.”

  “Promise me!”

  “Where my life is concerned, I have no honor, and so my promises mean nothing. Therefore, I promise.”

  “It is for your own good. Those two out there are very nervous. I will come back before six. Then you must tell me who you are, or …”

  “Or?”

  “Or I will have to turn you over to people who will do terrible things to you. I do not want that to happen.”

  “Isn’t that ‘personal’?”

  She looked at him, through him, then turned the door handle and went out, closing the door very quickly again as if she feared that the same cat would escape. He heard the lock turn and then her hard, quick steps.

  Tarp waited for three-quarters of an hour. After that, he went to the armoire and found a pair of her stretch-fabric slacks that would at least cover his nakedness. There was a T-shirt with a colorful decoration from the Festival of Socialist Film. It looked foolish, but it clothed him.

  He ripped all the gauze from the bottom of the spring, splashed her cologne over it, and put it on the windowsill with some of the plastic from the mattress cover. The old matches did not light very well, but he got the gauze smoldering and closed the window on it, leaving only a crack to make a draft to feed the fire. Still, it almost went out; then it blazed, and it began to smolder the way he wanted. He opened the window and crumbled some of the yellow foam from the mattress into it, and the smoke turned an ugly green and looked as th
ick as sewer water.

  Tarp propped the flimsy chair under the door handle. He ran some water into the bucket with his urine and set it near the bed, where he could reach it quickly. He fed more foam and more cologne to the fire and watched the smoke drift out through the lattice over the window. He looked up at the smoke detector on the ceiling, which, he thought, symbolized as well as anything could the difference between Juana’s Havana and George Raft’s.

  He could see flame at the bottom of the thick smoke, but he had no way of slowing it now. The paint on the bottom of the window was blistering, and as he watched, one pane of glass cracked from the heat.

  A building like this one was like a village. Natural affinity and government nosiness made the people almost pathologically aware of each other. It had its own court system for minor “errors” (with Juana the judge); people were always on watch for others’ transgressions. A fire would be a great event. It would offer the thrill of danger, the pleasure of somebody else’s mistake, the titillation of damage to government property. There might even be revisionist or anti-revolutionary meaning in it — the secret cooking of black market food or the operation of an illegal still. That the apartment where the fire started was that of the head of the CDR was even more exciting. There had to be people in the building who would be thrilled by any sign of her failure — men who had wanted her and been rejected, women who disliked her because she was a new kind of Cuban woman, political rivals.

  They have to notice soon, he thought.

  He heard the muffled pounding of running feet on the floor above.

  He waited.

  He heard a voice far away. Then another voice, perhaps in the street below.

  Suddenly there was a loud voice in the room just outside and a noise like a chair or a table being pushed aside. Several voices were raised then excitedly. He heard a thump and then a strange brushing sound on the door, and he imagined one of his guards putting his back to the bedroom door to keep the nosy neighbors out.