Under the Freeze

by George Bartram

  *

  Juaquin Schneider was not a difficult man to find. He had an eighty-acre industrial park outside Buenos Aires, and his chemical plant took up most of the acreage. The name Schneider was painted in a special shade of blue on all the chemical tanks; the same blue and the same letters were on a large but tasteful sign at the entrance to the complex, as well as on the door and on objects in the offices — matchbooks, pens. The grounds around the plant were beautifully tailored.

  Tarp drove out to look at the industrial park. It all seemed too easy. There were other Schneiders in Buenos Aires, and he hired a detective to follow up three of them, explaining that his wife was having an affair with somebody named Schneider. If the piece of paper in the dead man’s pocket in Havana was genuine, then he supposed this Schneider was the obvious one, although the connection between plutonium and agricultural chemicals was not obvious at all. A day’s nosing around Buenos Aires turned up nothing to change the profile of Schneider as a rich, powerful man who had made his money in fertilizers.

  “Schneider?” The speaker was one of many new acquaintances, a red-faced Englishman named Grice in the Foreign Press Club bar. Grice boasted that he had ridden out the Malvinas war better than the Argentine navy had, right here at this bar, and he knew more about what was what in the country than the government did. Or so he said. “Of course I know Schneider. Know of Schneider, I mean. Very rich. Up to his oxters in agribusiness, although the real brains were his wife’s. A Jewess, naturally. Dead now. Sure, I know who Schneider is. Why?”

  “I am a little interested in him.” Tarp had to remember to speak English with a slight French accent.

  “Why? Let me be frank with you, my French friend, old copain, old ally — I don’t give out information for free, you know; if it’s a story, I want a share. There’s actually a news service back in London that expects to hear from me once in a way.”

  “I cannot give away my story.”

  “Well, ’course not. No.” The Englishman pulled at his nose with a thumb and finger as if he were popping his ears after a dive. “You ready for another?” He meant that he was ready to be bought another beer, which he downed with the gusto of a Falstaff.

  “My pleasure,” Tarp said.

  “That’s the spirit! Well, you have to understand, Frenchy, I need a little before we’re done — human interest, anything of that sort — you’re not into dirt, are you? Not one of the American supermarket rags, are you? ‘Princess Di Pregnant by UFO,’ that sort of tripe? I mean, we all have our standards, even poor old Grice. Well, this beer has bought you a swallow or two more of information, all right? On account, as it were? Dear me, I hope we’re speaking the same language, you and I. Well, at any rate, about Schneider: he’s second-generation Argentine, one of the fifty wealthiest sods in the country. Or was, three or four years ago. Papa came from Deutschland in the Weimar days — got out in time, I mean, before Hitler. Not a Jew, for all the present Schneider married one. But the old man — I mean, the one who emigrated from Weimar — was a nobody; it’s the present Schneider who built the fortune.” He drank, banged his big glass down — empty again — and stared at Tarp, his face flaming. “Not a man to mess about with.”

  “Mess about?”

  Grice looked around, waited until the barman had moved away. He may have been doing it all for effect. “The death squads. You hear things. That he’s one of the backers, you know?” His breath was warm and rich with the beer. “Squads have been lying low of late, at least around Buenos Aires. But he was in it up to the oxters, see?”

  “Anything proven?”

  Grice fiddled with his empty glass. Tarp ordered him another. Grice still looked unhappy. “Look, chum, we got to have an understanding, you and me. What’s the split if you get a story?”

  “Ten percent,” Tarp said with Gallic caution.

  “No, no.” Grice grasped the fresh glass as if it were a lifeline. “I need stories, Frenchy, not a cut! What do I get in the story department?”

  Tarp thought. “First look at my rough draft?”

  Grice beamed at him. “Now you’re talking, Frenchy!” He drank and left a mustache of foam on his sandy mustache. “And don’t try to cross me up, love; I’ve got friends at Reuters could see to it that your stories never got relayed correctly back to Paris ever again. All right, so now we’re partners, are we? Good. Well, let me see. ‘Anything proven,’ you were asking.” He chortled. He had a fat man’s laugh — throaty, big, shaking the whole torso. “Proven? In Argentina?” He slapped Tarp’s shoulder. “Buy me another pint, I’ll tell you what the system is down here.”

  When Tarp took the fat man to his apartment at two in the morning, he had learned a lot of sometimes scandalous detail, but little of importance that was radically different from what he had found in newspapers and magazines. Schneider was a widower; Schneider had a beautiful daughter; Schneider was a rightist with ties to the military.

  The only really useful thing he’d learned from Grice was that Schneider had just returned from Cuba.

  Chapter 12

  In order to see Schneider personally, he had to go through an outer perimeter of secretaries and mindlessly smiling young men with MBAs from American universities. A day of it was enough for him, and Grice laughed at him when they met at the bar that evening. Grice rubbed his thumb and two fingers together. “Chai, mon ami,” he said. “Chai.”

  Chai was the word for tea wherever tea was drunk, but it was also a word for “tea money” — bribes.

  “Ah, baksheesh,” he said.

  “You got it, chum. How’s our story coming today?”

  The payments started, it appeared, at the Ministry of News and Information, so back he went next morning to the same official who had issued his journalist’s card. His name was Kinsella, but he spoke only Spanish and was as Argentinian as the dry dust of Patagonia. He was a balding, slack-looking man in his thirties with a sandy mustache and the blue eyes of the Kinsella who had first come to Argentina in the nineteenth century.

  Kinsella rested his head on one hand, absentmindedly pulling reddish hairs over the baldest place. He frowned at a piece of paper that lay in the circle of light on his desk. It was a dark day, and Tarp felt that he was receding into a Victorian murk, along with the city and its ideas.

  Kinsella sighed. “You are requesting an interview with Juaquin Schneider.” He sounded more than a little surprised, as if such a thing had never happened to him before.

  “That is correct.”

  “You told me you were here because of the fishing. I remember mentioning Bariloche to you.”

  “I believe it was I who mentioned Bariloche.”

  “Why do you argue with me?” Kinsella looked annoyed. He put his face down into the circle of light as if he wanted Tarp to see its unhappy expression. “You are not a very tactful man.”

  “Forgive me.”

  “A journalist should be tactful. Especially if he has some idea of meeting a man like Juaquin Schneider.” He shook his head. “You said you were going to write about fishing.”

  “Is that important?”

  “Would I be mentioning it if it was not?”

  “Is it your business to pass on everything I do?”

  “Of course. What do you suppose my function is? This isn’t the United States, you know. We don’t want journalists running around like wild dogs, pestering people. You said you were here to write about fishing.”

  “I said I was writing a book about diversions. I assume Señor Schneider has diversions.”

  Kinsella put his hand over his forehead again and leaned on the elbow. “Señor Schneider’s office is not inclined to favor your request.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They called me twice yesterday. They said you were being a pest.”

  “I thought I was going through channels. I did not realize that I should go through you.”

  Kinsella looked at him. Kinsella already looked tired, as if his workday was ending, not beginnin
g. “Señor Schneider is an immensely wealthy man.”

  “That’s why I want to interview him.”

  “We have to clear all interviews before you file them with your home office.”

  “Well, all right.”

  Kinsella watched him with an expression that suggested he had a secret that Tarp had not yet been told. “If I recommend you, Señor Schneider will see you.”

  Tarp thought he understood. Chai. “I will be most happy to do whatever is necessary.”

  Kinsella smiled a little cynically. “Would you like to have dinner with me?”

  The request seemed odd. “I should be gratified.”

  “At my home. I will telephone my wife. Tonight? Meanwhile, I will telephone the Schneider offices and recommend you. Then maybe he will see you.” He took his face out of the light. He seemed genuinely pleased. “We will talk. My wife is a good cook. You like children? I have three; I will have to play with them for a few minutes, you understand. Then we will talk.”

  Tarp spent the day looking around Buenos Aires, poking through old files, and talking to his detective. All he learned was that he probably had the right Schneider.

  Kinsella’s wife turned out to be fat but pretty; the children were well behaved and went docilely off to bed with the maid when they were told to; the food was excellent. After dinner the wife disappeared and they talked about the Malvinas war and Argentina’s future. Kinsella gave a virtual monologue on the failure of the United States to understand where its best interest lay in the region. Toward the end, the high cost of living was mentioned, and Tarp handed over three hundred dollars in Argentine pesos, the amount that Grice had suggested.

  Walking back to his hotel, Tarp had the unpleasant sense that Kinsella knew who he really was. The talk about America had sounded like exactly the sort of thing a patriot might try to say to American leaders through an agent. Worse than that, neither Kinsella nor his wife seemed to be surprised when he ate no meat.

  *

  Schneider’s offices were deep within the administration building of his chemical complex, surrounded by carpeted corridors and paneled turnings where stunning receptionists and the young men with American degrees waited. Around them was a ring of glass-fronted offices, the outermost one manned by armed guards, while around them was a modern-looking wall of steel and stone with broken glass set into the top in such a way that it could be seen only from a few high vantage points. Outside that wall were young men in paramilitary uniforms with automatic weapons. Everyone was very polite.

  He was given a badge to wear on his lapel and was asked to step through a metal detector, where a sweet-faced, dark woman asked him please to leave the Luger. She tagged it and gave him a receipt and a dazzling smile.

  He was led by a sleek, middle-aged man along the inner labyrinth of carpeted corridors. As he had approached the center of power, the men had gotten older and the women had disappeared. Schneider, he gathered, was not the sort who surrounded himself with young nonentities in order to build his own sense of importance; rather, he pushed the young ones to the fringe and defied comparison with his own very capable lieutenants. It was the gesture of a confident (or an arrogant) man.

  Tarp was shown into a long room whose starkness contrasted with the paneled warmth he had just come through. One entire wall was window from floor to ceiling; beyond it was an enclosed Japanese garden, forty feet long, with an identical window on the other side. Some trick of technology made the far window opaque. Within the room were groupings of chairs and very plain sofas, as if to accommodate discussions of different sizes. Tarp saw no ashtrays, no wastebaskets. Two-thirds of the way down the room was a white desk, situated so that the man who sat at it had his back to the window and the simplicity of the garden.

  “Señor Jean-Louis Selous. A journalist.”

  Light from the window made it hard to see the man at the desk. “Thank you, Perez.” The voice was deep. There was no sound of footsteps in the deep carpeting, but Tarp heard a door close, and the middle-aged man was gone. “Come,” the voice said.

  He started down the long room. When he was fifteen feet from the desk, the silhouetted figure behind it moved. The torso moved back, turned; the figure came along the far side of the desk, still seated, the movement accompanied by a very low hum.

  Schneider was in a motorized wheelchair.

  Tarp saw the face as he rounded the end of the desk. He hid any surprise he felt. He had seen Schneider before — in Havana. He was the man who had been in the wheelchair at the ballet gala for the Celebration of Nuclear-Free Peace.

  “What language do you prefer? I see you are French,” Schneider said. He had picked up a file from the desk.

  “Either Spanish or French,” Tarp said.

  “French, then.” Perhaps Schneider wanted to show off — or perhaps he wanted to test Tarp’s authenticity. Schneider spoke French with an accent but with considerable fluency. “I have read your articles with interest.” His hand was on the file. Presumably the file held the articles that Selous was supposed to have written.

  “Was the viewpoint too Marxist?” Tarp said, speaking French rapidly and with the slight slurring that many French now affected. “Some people find it Marxist.”

  “I daresay Marx would not.” Schneider laughed. “Are you a Marxist?”

  “Not at all. Modern professional sport is the kind of commercial pig trough that makes one say Marxist things, however.”

  Schneider was slender to the point of seeming ascetic. It was hard to make out subtleties of expression against the glare, but Tarp thought he looked rather satanically amused. “Are you a Christian?” Schneider said.

  “Of course.” He said it with intentional glibness, as a Christian who never went to church might say it.

  “Not a very good Christian, perhaps,” Schneider said.

  “It is a state of mind, surely — a state of culture?”

  “Not to the Church.” He said it as a pious layman or even a priest might have said it, austerely; Tarp made a mental note to check his ties with the Vatican. And Doctor Bonano in Havana, the abortionist.

  “You asked only if I was a Christian, not if I was a churchgoer.” Tarp smiled as Jean-Louis Selous smiled, engagingly, just a bit cynically. “I am more a Christian than a Moslem.”

  Schneider touched a button and the chair spun to his right. He rolled three feet in that direction, stopped, said, “I would prefer a whole Moslem to a part Christian. I do not like half men.” He had meant to sound final and acidulous, but his French was not quite up to it, and demi-homme was too crude for what he wanted. He stopped the chair again and laughed. “Moi, je suis demi-homme,” he said, and he moved again and stopped opposite an armchair. “Sit,” he said in Spanish.

  Tarp sat. He could see Schneider plainly now, for behind him was an abstract painting in dark purples and blues, against which his face was clear. The skull was large and the dome loomed above the face, topped with dark hair flecked with silver like a fine pelt; the face itself seemed delicate, almost the face of an adolescent, large-eyed and almost feminine.

  “To business,” Schneider said. “You have eighteen minutes left.” He sounded waspish. “You have a tape recorder, naturally?”

  “Naturally.” Tarp put a small recorder on the arm of the chair. He let silence settle between them, take up residence there. Schneider grew impatient. At last Tarp said, switching the machine on, “What is the purpose of wealth?”

  Schneider sneered. “Wealth is its own purpose.”

  “But for you, I mean. Why a life of wealth — instead of a life of poverty, for example? Why not the life of intentional poverty, like Saint Francis?”

  “Saint Francis began with wealth. He chose poverty later. It is the right direction to take. To begin with poverty and then choose poverty is to be an idiot.”

  “And you began with poverty and chose wealth?” And what has this to do with plutonium? he was wondering, but he knew only that he wanted to draw Schneider out.

&nbs
p; “I began with the curse of curses, neither poverty nor wealth — the obscure comfort of the middle class.” He snapped the words out. “And one does not choose wealth, Monsieur Selous — unless one is as big an idiot as the poor man who chooses poverty — because wealth is a by-product: what one chooses is work. I chose to achieve! Next to achievement, the rest is second-rate. One exists under the eye of God. One must achieve. One must demonstrate one’s being.”

  “Because one is watched?” Tarp was thinking, Is acquiring Russian plutonium an achievement?

  “Because it is expected!” As he grew excited, Schneider began to make gestures, as if he were tracing magical signs in the air. “When I say that we are under the eye of God, I do not mean that one is watched as in some stupid film about Big Brother. No, I mean that one is under the eye of God as, in a stadium, the athlete is under the eye of the spectators. One performs — because it is expected!”

  “So, life is a form of sport.”

  “It is the only sport. The only real sport. What you call sport — throwing balls, running about, jumping — is only imitation. At one time, I played football. Oh, yes, I could run and jump then. But it was frivolous. Mere imitation.” He sneered. “But wealth is like the gold medal. The prize after the achievement.”

  “So you think that wealth is a proper reward.”

  “Of course. God has made the athlete strong, and he accepts his medal; God has made me an achiever, and so I accept wealth.”

  “And the poor?”

  “What poor?”

  “Even in Argentina, there are poor.”

  “The poor do not much interest me.”

  “They are the losers?”

  Schneider did not understand at first. “Oh, I see, yes — the ones eliminated in the early rounds. Yes. The champion hardly thinks of the duffers when he is in the finals.”

  “And what of the poor politically?”

  Schneider smiled. “Your subject is supposed to be sport, not politics. But I will answer you. You mean, what of the poor in what is called a democracy, I suppose.”