“He might kill me to protect himself.”
“He might. Not likely.”
“So you don’t think your man was killed by Maxudov’s people?”
“I think nothing. I am puzzled.”
Tarp took an orange from a basket and began to peel it. “Suppose your man had not been killed. Suppose you got this same message in code from him. What then?”
Repin took a step, pulling at his lower lip. “I would have taken it rather seriously.”
“And so your man’s getting killed actually lowers the likelihood of somebody’s trying to feed us.”
“Yes, yes, I see what you mean.” Repin sat down. “If they want to give us false data, they would better have sent it through him.”
“Yes.”
Repin grunted. He picked up the piece of paper, dropped it. “I don’t like any of it.”
“Neither do I.”
“For once, I would like the bureaucracy. To check everything.”
“We have to check everything ourselves.”
Repin’s eyes glinted. “Buenos Aires?”
“I’d think so. If Schneider is a name there.”
“It is. I already checked. There are a number of Schneiders, but only one in chemicals. Schneider Chemical, Limited.”
“And Doctor Bonano?”
“Makes no sense.”
“Well?”
“There is one medical doctor named Bonano in Havana. He is head of an abortion clinic.”
Tarp ate part of the orange. “No, that makes no sense. Some other Doctor Bonano, then. Maybe in Buenos Aires.”
“You will go?”
“Yes. On my way to Moscow.”
“They are likely waiting there with one of their famous death squads.”
“Maybe.”
“How do you want it done?”
Tarp made a neat little pile of the orange peelings. “Get a place on a flight tomorrow to Mexico City. Order a passport in the same name from the Fourteenth Department here — my height and so on. Make some show of it. Make a separate reservation from Mexico City to Buenos Aires.”
“You will take these flights?”
“Of course not.”
“How will you go?”
“I don’t think I’ll tell you.”
“I think you are wise. It is humiliating, but you are wise.”
“I’ll need clothes.”
“Yes, yes — at once.”
“I’ll need a communication link.”
“Very well, but only after I leave Havana. I will give you a contact in Europe. Then we will work on getting you into the Soviet Union, assuming …”
“Yes, assuming I get out of Argentina. Yes.”
Tarp met Juana in the Plaza Marti at four o’clock, where they strolled in the sunshine with other couples, old and young — a boy going slowly on a bicycle so he could stay even with a girl, a woman in a wheelchair being pushed by an old man. Pigeons rose, swung across a quadrant of sky, settled again.
“I am going away,” he said.
“When?” She sounded listless. She looked as if she had slept badly.
“Tomorrow,” he lied.
“Where?”
“I can’t tell you. Have you learned anything?”
She shook her head.
“Will there be any trouble because of me?”
She shook her head again.
“The man at the ballet will get a message to you. To authenticate me. Then he’ll tell you how we will communicate.” She shrugged. The conversation seemed to bore her. They walked another twenty steps before she said anything, and then her voice was thin. “I want to tell you something,” she said, seeming both defiant and afraid of him.
“Well?”
She folded her arms over her breasts. “I want you to understand that I am ashamed of myself. For last night. For —” She shut her mouth tight as somebody walked passed them, as if she feared to be overheard. “For saying that I loved you.”
“Well, at least today you know better.”
She laughed, and a flight of pigeons went up as if the sound had frightened them. “No, today I don’t know better. It’s that I am ashamed of.” He saw her watch another woman who was crossing the square ahead of them; she seemed to be assessing the other woman, perhaps comparing herself. “I am not a child. I am a grown woman. I have had lovers. I have been infatuated. I was married for two years to a beautiful pig. I know what love is supposed to be like. I know what it is like.” She took her eyes away from the other woman. “It is not like this sickness.”
“What do you want me to do?” he said.
“What can you do? You are going away, that is good.” She hugged herself more tightly. “You don’t love me.”
“No.”
They walked a few steps. Her head was down now, as if she feared to stumble. “I must see you again,” she said.
“I’m not likely to come back to Havana.”
“Then I will come where you are. Moscow. Wherever.”
“Maybe you’ll get over the sickness.”
“Or maybe I can give it to you.” The feeble joke seemed to cheer her a little. She ran ahead of him to a handcart where a woman was selling ices, and then they went on around the plaza licking the ice out of the cold plastic cups. When he got some on his chin, she laughed at him, and she was transformed — simple, delighted, loving — and he was hurt by a realization of the price he was making her pay, the price he always made people pay, for the way he lived.
“Listen to me,” he said. “I’m going to give you a way to reach me if the regular route breaks down. Memorize it; don’t ever put it in writing. Don’t ever use it except in an emergency.” He gave her an address in Paris. “Anything that comes there addressed to Monsieur Chimère will get to me. Sign it ‘Mimosa.’ I’ll know it’s you.”
“My problem would be to get it out of Cuba.”
“You can manage that.”
They had nothing more to talk about. She seemed angry again. He promised to see her again before he left Havana, knowing as he said it that he would not keep his promise.
Chapter 11
He took a bus to the airport in the twilight and bought a seat on the first outbound flight that had space. He used the Selous passport and had no trouble. He was wearing glasses and a rather silly mustache that had the odd effect of making him look both older and inconsequential.
The plane few to Jamaica. He went into the men’s room there, got rid of the glasses and the mustache, and bought himself a flight bag and a sporty wind jacket in an airport shop. He booked himself on a flight to Rio; while he waited for it, he dialed a number in Mexico City.
“Five seven seven five,” a masculine voice said in accented Spanish.
“I wanted Aatahualpa Curios.”
“Correct.”
“I’m looking for a one-armed buddha.”
There was a pause, then laughter. “Is this who I think it is?” the voice said in American English.
“Probably.”
“You looking for something with brass balls?”
“That’s the one.”
More laughter. “Hey, man, how the hell are you? Long time.”
“Long, long time. Can we talk?”
“Maybe yes, maybe no. Uncle’s got big ears. What can I do you for?”
“I need a piece. In Argentina.”
“Argentina’s a big country, m’friend.”
“Name a place.”
“Hold on.” Silence. “I gotta think. Hold on.” More silence. Then: “Fly to Santiago del Estero. Used to be able to get there from La Paz or Brasilia. You’ll be met. How do they recognize you?”
Tarp looked at the flight bag. “Brown shoulder bag. Cross on it in tape.”
“Okay. Cash on delivery.”
“Right.”
“What’s the purpose of this item you want?”
“Social work.”
“Got you. They’ll be looking for you. Hey, drop in ol’ May-hee-co sometim
e, you hear?”
“Will do.”
“Nice to talk to you. Hey, you ever see any of the guys?”
It was not like Tarp to hesitate, but that took him a fraction of a second. “There’s nobody left to see.”
“I thought — When I left, there were some. Weren’t there?”
“Later, there weren’t.”
Another silence. Then the man at the other end said, “I thought I might go look at this new memorial in D.C., you know? Look for some names.”
“They wouldn’t be there.”
“Yeah. Well, I sort of thought that. Well. Hey, listen, drop in sometime, hey? We’ll tip a few tequilas, talk over — some things. Hey?”
“Yeah.”
*
He bought a role of plastic tape to mark the shoulder bag, then ate, read a Spanish paper and a French paper, then flew to Rio and slept until morning, when another plane flew him to Brasilia for the change to Aerolineas Argentinas. At a little after noon, he came down the steps to the dry, hot field at Santiago.
A middle-aged woman had a 9mm Luger for him in an ancient shoulder holster. She led him into a baggage area, where they stood fifty feet from the clattering belt that was bringing bags past a few travelers. She handed him the gun in a paper bag.
“Cartridges?”
“There are eleven in the bag. All we had.”
“Are they the right caliber?”
“My husband said so.”
The gun was too big and too heavy, but there was nothing he could do about it. He gave her money. “Is it hard to get guns in Buenos Aires?” he said.
“No harder than here, maybe.”
“Not so hard, then?”
She seemed very ladylike. “Nothing is hard if you have the money,” she said. He thought that perhaps she and her husband had had money and had fallen on bad times. In Argentina that was not so unusual.
There was a night train to Buenos Aires. The train itself looked well intentioned but inadequate, which was perhaps a fitting symbol for a country in which so many things had started out well and gone so wrong. His sleeping car had once, perhaps, been up to the standards of a run-of-the-mill European train, but that would have been many years before. Now, layers of paint had been allowed to pile up on the inner surfaces, obscuring all detail; the sink gave only a trickle of water; the bed, when folded down, made noises as if it might collapse altogether. Through some mix-up, he had not gotten the private compartment he had paid for but was put instead into a small double with another man. When he showed his ticket, the conductor explained with some asperity that there were no private compartments on this train and it had been foolish of him to try to buy one. If he wanted a single, he would have to take the noon train tomorrow.
“This will be splendid,” he said.
Tarp was uneasy about the gun. He had it in the flight bag, but he thought it might be safer worn under his arm. Any question he had about it was removed some minutes after he went into the compartment, when his companion removed his own coat, shook out a sporting newspaper, and sat by the window with a cigar. He was wearing an enormous automatic under his arm.
“Cigar?” he said amiably to Tarp.
“I don’t smoke.”
“Mistake. Keeps off viruses.”
His cigar would have kept off anything. Tarp went into the corridor and watched the Santiago suburbs groan by. A solemn child was waving at the train. Tarp waved back, but the child’s seriousness did not change. A dog watched him. Two women watched, so still they might have been frozen. He saw another child, standing under a wall with a faded message urging power to Perón, the child and the message like the national hope and the national ghost. Tarp supposed that he could have seen these things anywhere, but his ideas of Argentina were much colored by what he knew of the country’s past — its seedy fascism during World War Two, its sanctification of Perón’s wives. Thus, Tarp saw his preconceptions: a sad, rather baffled country where things had been done slightly wrong, not wrong enough to bring revolution, but a little wrong again and again and again, so that now it had its shaky military junta, its memories of Perón and Evita, and the Falklands war like a hangover.
“You really do not smoke?” his companion said. He had come out of their compartment to join Tarp in the corridor.
“No.”
“But you used to smoke, eh?”
“A little.”
“And you gave it up because of the propaganda, eh?”
“No.”
“Of course you did. Where are you from, Paraguay?”
“France.”
The man was instantly suspicious. Argentina had wasted a century trying to be France, an effort that made it both envious and paranoid. On the other hand, the man was certainly aware of France’s help in the Falklands (here, the Malvinas) war. Thus, he was both suspicious and grateful, or about as amiable as a panhandler.
“You sound like a Paraguayan.”
“France.”
“What do you think of Argentina?”
Tarp had bought an American travel book to read on the plane. He knew what the correct answer to the question was. “It is the best country in South America.”
The man nodded. “It is our gift for facing reality. The other countries, they are dreamers, madmen, idiots, whatever — one way or another, they do not face reality.”
In Santiago, Tarp had already heard a couple of songs about the Malvinas war. They were nostalgic and patriotic. They did not, in his view, face reality.
He sat in the dining car, inevitably, with the same men and two others much like him. They were younger than Tarp, rather hearty, almost swaggerers. Machismo ran very deep here, and with it a suggestion of sexual uneasiness and a resulting overplaying of the sexual hand: men were too much men; women were so feminine they made the teeth ache. These men were loud and rather pleasant, except that they used the word faggot for everything humane and different. The British who had conquered the Malvinas were faggots; liberals were faggots; newspaper editorial writers were faggots; Americans were faggots.
“What do you do?” his compartment mate said.
“I’m a salesman.”
They all thought that was good. What did he sell?
“Computers.”
Computers were fantastic, they all agreed.
When the meal was over, Tarp had not touched his huge steak.
“Not good enough?” one said. “Mine was fantastic!”
“Argentine beef is the best in the world!” said another.
“I’m a vegetarian,” Tarp said.
He might as well have told them he was a faggot.
When he awoke in the morning, they were barreling through the outermost fringe of Buenos Aires. As he stepped around his sleepy companion so that he could shave and dress, he watched the landscape urbanize itself. It looked like Italy, he thought: put Mussolini’s name where Perón’s appeared and it could be suburban Naples thirty years ago.
“Buenos Aires is a beautiful city,” the other man said with unnecessary force.
“So they say.”
“See for yourself.”
He gestured toward the slum beyond the window. Then, looking at the scene, he said, “Soon.” Tarp smiled and took the Luger out of its paper bag and checked it over, making sure that the ammunition fit it before he put it away in the flight bag. The other man looked at him with something approaching approval, as if he had made up for some of his losses of the night before.
Tarp stepped down from the train into a cool bath of morning air that smelled as sweet as a park full of flowers. He walked out of the huge old European station into streets where men in coveralls were hosing and sweeping in brilliant early sunlight. The air had just that edge of coolness that tells one it is not quite yet the warm season, or that the warm season has not quite ended. Yet the air was clean, almost pure, and it was possible to look for blocks down broad streets and see everything sharp-edged, handsome, pleasing because the air was thin. It was the kind of morning t
o make him smile.
Yes, it all looked very European to him. Handshakes in the street, fashionable women, nineteenth-century architecture. Like Turin or Lucerne; like parts of Paris, the later but not quite modern parts. He had coffee and wonderfully fresh, crusty croissants and watched people go by.
He found a small hotel beyond the city center and followed the desk clerk’s directions to a men’s shop, where he bought an Italianate sport coat and several shirts. He went to the Foreign Press Club to present his Agence-Presse Europa card and they told him he would have to get an authorization from the Ministry for News and Information; he followed their directions and found a room where, after being routed to three wrong offices, a man entered his name in a record and where he was given a very official piece of pasteboard that proclaimed him an “acceptable journalist.”
“You are going to write about Argentina?” the official asked.
“I am working on a book.”
“About Argentina?”
“About sport. Diversions. In our time, everything is play. I am writing a book about how people play.” The ghost-written articles that had been published in Europe over the Selous name were all about sports.
“What will you write about in Argentina? Football? We missed the World Cup?” His native paranoia was showing.
“Trout fishing.”
The man nodded. He seemed suddenly relieved. He looked at Tarp’s press card, then at the “acceptable journalist” card he was about to sign, then up at Tarp. “There is no trout fishing around Buenos Aires, you know.”
“I know.” He did know, as a matter of fact, just as he knew where the fishing was in Switzerland and Yugoslavia and off the Bahía coast. “Lago Nahuel Huapí. Bariloche.”
“Patagonia.” The man seemed pleased with both of them. He held out the signed card. “If you need any help, making contacts, for example, please feel free to call on me. We want the foreign press to form the right opinions — the truth, of course — about Argentina.”
Under the Freeze Page 11