Under the Freeze

by George Bartram

  The air in the room grew stifling. The smell of burning plastic attacked his nose, the back of his throat. He coughed. He was thinking of the poisonous gases that could be made by burning plastic. He closed his mind to that and impaled a paper label from the mattress on his improvised club, set it afire, and held it up under the smoke alarm. It screamed like a hurt rabbit.

  “Fire!” Tarp shouted in Spanish. “Help me! Help. Help. Oh, Jesu, help me!” While he shouted he was opening the window and tearing down a curtain to drop it on the burning pile on the window ledge. He rubbed soot from the ledge on his hands and face.

  “Comrades, for Jesu’s sake! Help!”

  The door handle rattled.

  He picked up the pail of watery urine.

  The door was pushed in an inch and stopped by the chair. Somebody was bellowing outside.

  “Help me, Comrades!” he shouted into the gap.

  The door crashed as two men broke the back of the fragile chair. Tarp would remember their faces after — sweating, intense, the faces of good men trying to do good — and then he looked beyond them and saw the poet.

  “Fire!” Tarp bellowed, and he threw the pail of liquid over the heads of the first two men and directly at the slender intellectual.

  The smoke and the smell in the room were bad, and the first two men covered their noses with one hand while they grabbed him with the other and pushed him out; one of them stayed long enough to look around so that he could make a full report of it later.

  “Fire, fire!” Tarp was shouting as he came rushing out of the room, trailing wisps of plastic poison, and as he came past the poet he brought his left fist up solidly into the abdomen and felt the young man fold up like an ironing board. Tarp wrapped his arms around him and dragged the young man along. “Victim of the fire,” he cried. “Make room — make room!”

  He was looking for the other man, the thick one, the capable one; but he was not there. Perhaps he had called for help. There were a dozen other people in the room, however, and more looking in the doorway from the balcony. Tarp shoved through them. With his left hand, he was trying to find his gun on the young man. “Make room!” He pushed people back, but nobody seemed to care; they wanted to get past him so they could see what was going on.

  He laid the young man down on the floor of the balcony, just under the big bulletin board of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution.

  “Victim of the fire,” he said to half a dozen people who came out of nowhere to stand around. “Smoke inhalation.”

  “You were inside, Comrade?”

  “The first to arrive. He was smoking in bed.”

  “In la ciderista’s bed?” They began to look wide-eyed at each other at the thought of the young man in Juana’s bed.

  “Open his shirt,” Tarp said. The young man was still unconscious. Tarp took off his shoes. “Make him cool!” he said. He backed away down the balcony with the shoes in his hands. The crowd went on growing; when he reached the stairs, there were people coming from the floors above and below, and the sick-animal wail of a fire truck was rising from the street. Tarp crouched in a doorway and put the shoes on without tying them and then bounded down the stairs feeling the shoes pinch and trying to ignore the discomfort.

  *

  He cleaned himself at a tin wall fountain and shaved at a public restroom, where an old black attendant found a discarded razor for him in the trash.

  “On the move?” the old man said.

  “Waiting for my ship to load.”

  “A sailor. You are not from Havana, I can tell.”

  “From Camagücy.”

  “Ah.” He took a cigarette butt from a plastic bag. “I was in Camagücy once. That was before Fidel.” He lit the butt. “It was hard to be a black man in Cuba then. Now it is all right to be a black man.” He puffed. “You were very drunk last night?”

  Tarp tried to smile. “Do I look it?”

  “Too much rum and just enough woman, that is how you look.” He laughed, coughed on the smoke, drew the butt down to a fiery circle between his dark fingers. He wore a sweat-stained old T-shirt, and hanging around his neck was a string with a little bag that rested just in the hollow of his clavicle. Santerría, Tarp thought. The old religion. Magic. It must be interesting, believing in both santerría and the revolution. “You are happy in Havana now?” Tarp said as he wiped his hand on a paper towel.

  “Very happy.”

  “Nowhere you want to go anymore?”

  Tarp made a move to throw the towel away, but the old man took it and smoothed it over his thigh. “I was in Florida once. That was in 1937. No, there is nowhere I want to go.”

  “What was Florida like?”

  “It was another place where it was not good to be a black man.” He put the smoothed-out towel to dry with half a dozen others.

  “I have no money to give,” Tarp said.

  “I know. You are a sailor.”

  “I will trade shirts with you, if you like.”

  They traded T-shirts. The old man studied himself in Juana’s bright-colored shirt and was pleased.

  Tarp made his way to the harbor and stayed on the move, not lingering in one place for long and never going back over the same route because he feared the police would notice him. Idle men stood out in Havana. At seven o’clock he had located the Angolan Memories Cafe, and he walked along opposite it. There was Repin, sitting on a bench and reading a Russian newspaper so that nobody would doubt that he was Russian. When he saw Tarp he made no sign, but he got up and walked along the promenade and then turned up a street of very old merchants’ houses and went into a yard full of trucks. Tarp followed him and found him sitting in a big black car.

  “Get on the floor,” Repin said. Tarp got in and crouched down; Repin signaled to the driver and they headed for the center of the city. After ten minutes Repin let him get off the floor and sit back with him.

  “Two things,” Repin said. “First, the beautiful woman you were with at the ballet. Her name is Juana Marino.”

  “I know.”

  “She is a lieutenant in the KGB.”

  Tarp watched a water sprinkler playing like a fountain over a beautiful lawn. “She acted as if she were anti-Castro.”

  Repin shrugged. “Her father is a niño — Spaniard from their civil war. She is Moscow born. Moscow educated. She could have a great future.” His eyes glittered at Tarp. “She has great breasts.”

  Tarp watched as they drove slowly past lovely old houses set back from the street, their lawns tended, their plantings brilliant with flowers. “You think she is one of Maxudov’s?”

  “I do not know. I do not know her father. He might be Telyegin’s man, but maybe not. She is a KGB probe in an anti-Castro cell; whether she is also an agent for Maxudov remains to be found out.”

  “She can identify me. Fingerprints in her apartment. On my gun.”

  “She has your gun?”

  Tarp nodded.

  “You spent the night in her apartment?”

  He nodded again.

  Repin breathed deeply. A self-satisfied little smile appeared.

  “When I was young … Well. You understand. We have our nights, eh?” He put his hands on his knees and sat upright, as if he wanted to make it clear that they should stick to business. “What do we need to do?” he said.

  “We need to cover my tracks.” Tarp looked out at the pleasant streets, the color, the sedate old houses. “You said there were two things. What’s the second?”

  “My agent thinks he has something. I have a message from him. He thinks he will have something tomorrow.”

  “About what?”

  “About the plutonium, he thinks.”

  “Here in Cuba?”

  “He would not say. He does this for the money, you understand. He is very close-mouthed.”

  They rode without speaking for some minutes. Tarp roused himself and said, “This is what I need. First, a gun like the one I left in her apartment — a Colt twenty-two
Woodsman. Second, a team to go in and sanitize her place, wipe out every trace of me. Third, a safe house where I can interrogate her.”

  “Oh, that is all?”

  “Are you being sarcastic?”

  “Me? Sarcastic? Why should Repin be sarcastic, when all an American wants is a gun in a Socialist country, the use of a team of experts who are not supposed to exist, and permission to enter a nonexistent but secret location?” He sat back and folded his hands over his expensive waistcoat. “When?”

  “Tonight. The team has to go in and plant the gun and clean the apartment while I interrogate her.”

  “That is not easy.”

  “Of course it isn’t easy.”

  “Moscow would not be happy.”

  “Moscow would not be happy if it rained loaves of bread.”

  Repin sighed. “You are very crass sometimes. Let’s have a drink.”

  “My place or yours?”

  Repin gave him a disgusted look. “I am taking you to a place.” He looked at Tarp’s stained T-shirt, the woman’s stretch slacks he wore. “We will perhaps find you some clothes. You look absurd. Truly absurd. Do you ever see me look like that? Of course not.” Repin fingered the lapel of his coat. “London. The very best. I dress carefully, always. But you! These clothes are ridiculous. It is a wonder you were not stopped by the police and arrested as a pervert.” He seemed genuinely annoyed. They drove the rest of the way in silence.

  It was a scruffy little suite of rooms next to a fire station and above a hardware store that had cockfighting in the basement. Repin said it had been offered to him by a Party official who thought he might need a “discreet localization for assignations.” Even Cuban bureaucrats talked that way now, it seemed. Repin sent the driver out to buy clothes for Tarp and then he busied himself behind a screen with a bottle of vodka. He had left his expensive London jacket over the back of a chair, and Tarp looked at it. It was a beautiful suit, indeed; a Bond Street tailor’s label was sewn under the pocket. At the neck, however, there was another, much smaller label that read “Hire Attire. Gentleman’s Preowned Suitings.”

  When Repin came in with two full glasses of vodka and the bottle tucked under his arm, Tarp was looking at the Hire Attire label. Repin stiffened, got red, then laughed. “Well, so you found it. So? My pension is not as generous as it ought to be.” Tarp put the jacket back over the chair. “Gentleman’s preowned suitings?” he said with a little smile as he took the vodka.

  “The perfect solution to anonymity, my friend. Try them! After all, what better protective coloration could an agent want than wearing some dead man’s clothes?”

  They drank. Tarp chose not to think about wearing a dead man’s clothes as a metaphor for the way they spent their lives.

  Chapter 9

  She sat across the metal table from him, her face bare of makeup, her arms bare and strong and her hands folded on the table’s edge just between her breasts.

  “Do you understand, Juana?” Tarp said in Spanish.

  “No, I do not understand.” She had given up being angry. Now she seemed chastened. “I understand nothing.”

  “Are you supposed to understand, do you think?”

  “Maybe not.” There had been a slight tremble in her lower lip at first, but that was gone now. “I can accept orders without question.”

  “Good.” He put cigarettes on the table next to a cheap notebook and pen. “Good.” It was impossible not to play a part when he did this sort of thing, because he had watched so many interrogators and had been an interrogator so often himself. It was difficult to keep from being so detached from the role that he would stop monitoring himself. “Who am I?” he said.

  “I do not know anymore.”

  “Who do you think I am?”

  “I —” She bit her lip and colored. “I thought at first that you were the American.”

  “The American?”

  “The one we thought had come ashore. His boat exploded off the coast. There was a circular for the cideristas.”

  He tapped his fingers together — not his own gesture, but that of a Frenchman in the old days just after Dien Bien Phu. “That was a man named Robert Plumb.” The name was that of the blond young man from the Agency whom he had left on his boat.

  “I never heard that name.”

  “Of course not. Go on.”

  “Then I thought that you were from Moscow.”

  “Yes?”

  “One of us.”

  “Us?”

  “The sluzhba.”

  “I see. And?”

  “And — and that is as far as I got.”

  “I see. So, you thought I was KGB, but you did not identify yourself to me.”

  “I was not sure!”

  “Nor did you try to help me.”

  “I did!” They were both thinking, he was sure, of her bed. “I did not let the anti-Castro people have you.”

  “But you did not help me.”

  Tarp rubbed his eyes with his fingers and then looked at her around the hand whose fingers rested on the bridge of his nose. He looked and looked; then he got up and went out of the plain room and waited for three minutes.

  They were in a house on the western edge of Havana. It had once been rather elegant; now an old couple took care of it and pretended to be the only ones there, and the KGB used it when they wanted to get away from their Cuban allies.

  He went back into the room and sat down again across the table from her. “Do you know what is happening in Moscow?” he said.

  She seemed genuinely confused. “Politically?” she said. “Oh, come! Surely you know better than that! Juana, we spent ten years and a great deal of money training you, and the best you can say is, ‘Politically?’ Come, come — in the service, Juana. Do you know what is happening in the service?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Truly? You mean there is no gossip in Havana, Juana? Are you cut off from all communication? Have you taken a vow of silence?”

  “I hear very little.”

  “From your father?”

  “My father is a translator, nothing more. If there is some gossip I am supposed to have heard, I would not have heard it from him.”

  He got up, paced around the table as he had seen it done so often, as he had done it so often, and stood behind her. “You were trained at Brest-Litovsk?”

  She nodded.

  “Many who came from that school show a devotion — a personal, almost a fanatical devotion — to Comrade Mensenyi. Our good Comrade Mensenyi, who has so many devoted followers, even in Cuba and South America. Are you a devoted follower of Mensenyi’s, Juana?”

  She took a deep breath. “I am loyal to the Party.”

  “That goes without saying. Do you have a personal loyalty to Mensenyi?”

  “We are not supposed to have personal loyalties.” Her voice was so soft that he could not have heard it from a few feet farther away. “We are not supposed to have feelings.”

  “Tut-tut, that is almost Stalinist. You are out of touch, Juana. ‘Agents are human beings’ — Directive four oh nine point seven.”

  “There is no such directive. You are making fun of me.”

  “Are we not human beings, then?”

  “I love you!” She twisted in her chair and shouted it at him. She caught him off guard — her naked face, her passionate voice; if he had really been a KGB officer trying to trap her, he would almost have trapped himself. Tarp took a step away. “Are you ‘personally loyal’ to me, then?”

  “I don’t even know who you are!”

  “And yet you love me! Wonderful!” He moved around the table. “I told you when this interview began, I hold the rank of colonel; I am of the service; I am in Cuba covertly. That is all you need to know. We are in a KGB safe house — you know it, I suppose; you are of the service. I have been vouched for.”

  An old crony of Repin’s had brought her to the house and had made a great show of authenticating Tarp’s identity.

  He sat
down across from her again. “Juana.” He folded his hands under his chin. “There is great trouble in Moscow. Great trouble.”

  “The man you bowed to at the ballet.” She was limp; her face was bleak. “He is here because of it, isn’t he?”

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw his file on a desk at Kepel’s.”

  General Kepel was the KGB chief in Cuba. “Kepel is not your immediate officer.” That was a guess, but it was an informed one.

  “No.” She picked at one fingernail, destroying the cuticle. She held it up. “I love you. Look what love makes me do.”

  “I hope it helps you to tell the truth.”

  “It doesn’t help me do anything. It is more like being sick.”

  “What were you doing at General Kepel’s?”

  “He has me report to him once a week.”

  “Why?”

  She glanced at him bitterly. “Because he wants to screw me, what else?”

  “That would be a way to greater responsibility,” Tarp said equably.

  “I do not mean to get ahead on my back, thank you.”

  “Well, so you were at Kepel’s, and you saw a file there and connected it with the man at the ballet. What has that to do with what I have been saying?”

  “Kepel handed the file to an assistant and said, ‘Take all this Moscow woe from wit away.’ That is all.” She bit her cuticle. “Woe From Wit is a play, you know.”

  “I had heard of it.”

  “You are making fun of me again.”

  “So from that one remark you immediately concluded that Moscow was sending a man to cause trouble for Kepel, and then he showed up at the ballet and you saw me bow to him, and everything fit together?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I am not.”

  “You are! You lie constantly. Have you not lied to me since that first time? Lies, all lies —”

  “I have not — I swear!”

  “This excrement about love, this nonsense, these lies —”

  “The truth, this is truth!”

  They both began to shout. She was weeping, but he had the feeling that the tears were at least partly a device, like the word love; she could use tears as a kind of armor, he thought, as some people use an appearance of weakness as a strength. Oddly, he found himself admiring her. She was very tough.