Under the Freeze

by George Bartram

  Tarp’s mental alarm went off, yet he was able to say lightly, “In what capacity? My intelligence, or my boldness?”

  “Are you interested?”

  “I am always interested in stimulating work.”

  “Come to see me tomorrow morning, then. At the factory. About ten.” Schneider seemed about to say something else, but he thought better of it. The wheelchair hummed, and he moved off. Ahead of him the crowd of people opened and then parted like a sea and closed again behind him.

  Now what is that all about? Tarp thought, and, as if it were toward that point that the whole evening had built, he found himself left increasingly alone. He had met the people who mattered, the party seemed to say to him now, and he had been introduced to the women with whom he might lawfully flirt, and now he was on his own.

  Given that head, Tarp decided to go home.

  At the door he bumped into old Pope-Ginna, who was almost certainly waiting there for him, for he smiled hugely and put himself where Tarp could not possibly avoid him. “Going so soon, are you?” he said. He laughed. “Awfully early for a young chap like you to be slippin’ away, what with so many of the beautés here. Eh?” He held Tarp’s arm. “Owe you an apology. Made a frightful ass of myself earlier; rather got a tongue-lashing from mine host about it. Most abjects, etcetera. Do say that you forgive and forget, that’s a good fellow.”

  “Of course. My pleasure, Admiral.”

  The title did not seem strange to the old man. “You’re a decent fellow,” he said. He seemed to have been drinking a little too much, and his speech was faintly slurred.

  “I spoke much too strongly, Admiral. It is I who owe you an apology.”

  “Oh? Not at all. Damned decent of you to say. Damned decent. Look here. Why not have lunch with me at the Hurlingham Club one day. Tomorrow, for the matter of that. Eh? If you’d give an old fellow like me the pleasure of your etcetera for a few hours.”

  Two in one evening. Not bad. He felt more than ever like a hapless bridegroom.

  “Saw you chatting with Jock. Got along with our resident King Midas, did you?”

  “I try to get along with everybody, Admiral.”

  Pope-Ginna stared at him with slightly reddened eyes and then burst into loud and somehow inappropriate laughter. Something that Tarp had said had amused him hugely. He slapped Tarp’s shoulder and moved away, still laughing; then he seemed to see somebody he knew, and he said a hasty good night and was gone. When Tarp looked into the far room where most of the party was, he saw Pope-Ginna with one of the “butlers,” lifting another glass from a tray of champagne.

  An odd party, Tarp thought. As if it had been put together for my benefit. But maybe that’s egoism. Except that there are no accidents.

  Tarp retrieved his coat. The weight of the Luger dragged one side down, made it difficult to carry over his arm. He turned from the apartment doorway and looked back into the room where there was dancing.

  He plummeted in the high-speed elevator. There were several other guests from the party, and he left it with them and stepped from the bright world of the apartment house into the soft darkness of the streets. The lights were slightly hazed; more distant ones looked less like jewels from down here. The pavements were wet but there was no rain, and, not seeing a taxi, he set out along a broad sidewalk. Two big American cars had been pulled up for the others. They sailed past him like boats setting out on placid water. Far away down the boulevard before him, another car came toward him, then turned off. The night became quiet. Music, almost ghostly now, came from somewhere above him and to his right, and he thought he recognized one of the tunes about the Malvinas that he had heard in Santiago.

  It was about then that he realized he was being followed. He put his hand on the Luger in the overcoat pocket. He could hear only one person behind him. Still, it was definitely somebody following. He eased the safety off and waited.

  He heard a car coming along the cross street before he saw it. The tires hissed on the wetness. The engine changed voice as the driver shifted down for the corner, then took it at speed, letting the tires squeal as he gunned down the boulevard toward Tarp. The house fronts came to the street here and there was nowhere for him to run except along the sidewalk itself. His strides lengthened; his eyes began to search the dark buildings for a hiding place or a handhold, for anywhere to make a stand.

  The car passed him, but it was braking. Doors popped open. Two men were out of the car before it stopped and another was pulling himself awkwardly from the rear seat.

  Is the death squad the purpose of wealth? he had asked Schneider. It seemed squalid now. Violent death always seemed squalid to him — bodies left along highways; shallow graves with silent, frightened peasants watching. Stupid men like these, spilling from cars on sidewalks to commit murder — was this what it was all about?

  Tarp pointed the Luger at the first man and pulled the trigger. The pistol was not loaded.

  At the party. They unloaded it at the party.

  He had dropped the overcoat into his left hand and he swung it forward and up to make a swirling wall between them; in its cover, he moved to his right and back-kicked and felt his foot meet the man’s chest.

  There were no shots. They carried guns, but they had not used them.

  In the country. First, a talk; then the shots. The body by the road. The hands or the head cut off.

  He wanted one of their guns. That was all he was thinking, to get the gun of the man he had kicked. There were three of them, one or two more in the car; he had little chance, perhaps no chance, but his body was doing its own thinking.

  He let go of the coat, which settled over the man as he dropped toward the sidewalk. He was trying to see where his gun was going to fall when an automatic weapon started to fire. The shots came out like angry words, like those terrible, short, uncontrollable bits of hatred that are said when we mean things most.

  The other two men fell to the pavement, one shrieking in Spanish. The machine pistol continued to chatter. Windows blew apart in the car. There was a change in the sound as another automatic weapon joined in.

  A car came around the corner to his right and blocked the car at the curb. Men erupted from it. They knelt on the street and the sidewalk, using the doors as shields, and poured fire into the first car.

  Tarp bent over the man he had kicked. He was stretching to grasp the man’s pistol when he was struck on the back of the head and he stopped seeing. He fell forward on his knees. He was still conscious; he felt his knees hit the stone. Blackness, then a slow brightening, the return of vision — stones, the sickly glare of the streetlight, the shadow of a tree — and pain in his head and his knees.

  And then a sharp burning in his left shoulder. Hot. Spreading. Ice, fire, knife. An injection. It took all his strength to raise his head. He saw two men coming toward him, moving slowly and raising their knees as if they were walking in snow. He saw two bodies on the sidewalk. He saw that the first car had no glass in the windows anymore. He saw the driver with his head thrown back over the seat. He saw that the rear door on his side was open and the soles of two shoes were pointing at him through the opening.

  He twisted his head to the left and heard himself groan when he did it. He used his last strength to twist his head farther. He was dropping forward on his hands and then his elbows. He put his right cheek down on the cool stones. He looked up — up legs, up thick waist, up black nylon jacket. Up. The throat. The jaw. The face.

  It was Kinsella, the bureaucrat who had signed his journalist’s card.

  But … He tried to think, but he was unconscious.

  Chapter 14

  He was in a moving car. He had been unconscious; now he was coming to. It was still night. Lights passed over his face, coming and going with the regularity of heartbeat. The lights stopped coming, and they drove into darkness. Cold air blew over him and he slept again.

  He awoke to find no movement. He smelled oil, machinery. There was a naked light to his left, far away.


  Then he was being lifted. He felt hands on his ankles and under his arms; there was a voice cursing in Spanish.

  Bright light. He winced. The light searched out his eyes and one eye was forced open. He tried to speak, but his tongue was too slow and too thick. The light left his face and moved to his left arm. There was more muttering, more cursing in Spanish, the sound of ripping fabric. He felt another injection.

  A face came close to his.

  “Do not come back to Argentina,” a voice said. The face and the voice were connected.

  The lights went off and he dropped into unconsciousness. His dreams were ugly. He came up toward waking sometimes, enough to feel cold and to resent the constant yammer of jet engines, but he would sink away again. Outside time, outside thought. He felt pain and nausea — and fear. Not fear of anything specific. Simply fear. He told himself that the drug was doing that to him, but knowing it did no good. He was still afraid.

  When the floor tilted under him and he could feel the world dropping, he was more fully awake, and he knew that he was in an aircraft that was on a final approach. The fear started to focus on crashing, but he talked himself away from it; he talked himself and the aircraft down, through the final turns, down to the runway. The tires screeched and he told himself that he was on the ground and safe, but he was still afraid.

  There was a sound of small motors and of moving metal. Warmer air bathed over him as the plane slowed. He smelled something rank, organic. The plane stopped altogether and then rolled forward again, turning in a tight arc, rolling off a hard surface and then stopping again.

  “Quickly,” a voice said in Spanish.

  Hands pushed on his left shoulder and left hip. He began to roll over, paused, rolled, and dropped heavily.

  The drop had only been about four feet. He landed on his right hip and his shoulder and his face and he had the breath knocked out of him. Engines deafened him. He tried to turn his head. There was a dark rectangle above him with many small lights in it. As he looked, the lights began to move and the rectangle got narrower.

  Bomb bay.

  He was lying on sand and scrub grass. The plane passed over him and went away, out of his field of vision, leaving him in the marshy night. He managed to roll on his back and look up at the sky. After a while, he believed that these were not the stars of Argentina.

  Other aircraft landed and took off next to him. He would hear them coming behind him and then their great wings would pass over him.

  Pass me by, angel of death. Pass me by.

  What time is it?

  When he was able to lift his arms, he tried to look at his watch, but it had been smashed. He felt the back of his head, which had a lump, and then he felt his pockets, which still held his papers and his money and a key to a Buenos Aires hotel room. Half an hour after that, he was able to roll to his left side, then to his belly, and slowly to draw his legs up so that he was on his face and his knees. He threw up. He rolled back on his haunches and lay like that for a while. Only two planes came by, and they seemed not to see him in the ruin of his tight black evening suit.

  After he had sat there for a while, he crawled away from the runway like a crab. The sand hurt his palms and his knees. He thought he was crawling in a straight line, but he was not. He threw up again and then lay in the sand for a while.

  Eventually he reached a chain-link fence. He could have slept by then, he was sure, but he thought that if he could get over the fence, he could get away from whatever he was afraid of, which had become a blond angel in an airplane, at least some of the time. Being inside the fence with it had to be worse than being outside the fence. Although inside and outside were only relative terms.

  Getting over the fence was very difficult. There were green plastic ribbons woven through the diagonal openings, and his fingers kept tangling in them and the wire. It was not a very serious fence, for it had no barbed wire on the top, but it was very difficult for him to climb nonetheless. Falling off the top on the other side was easy by comparison. He lay next to the fence, looking at the stars again. The aircraft were taking off some distance away from him now, and he wondered how they had moved the runway.

  There was a swamp a few feet from the fence. He knew the smell and the sound of it. He knew the tree silhouettes that were beginning to show as the sky brightened with dawn.

  “Onward and upward,” he said. Or thought he said.

  He staggered along the fence, using it as a support. The fence came to a road; the road headed straight for the dawn.

  “Big night?” somebody said. The voice was too cheerful to be his own. With difficulty, he turned his head. There was a pickup truck and a young man with a neck like a ham and a head with a baseball cap on it. Tarp tried to say something but failed.

  “Man, you really been on one! Git in here, ’fore you die!” The young man laughed. Tarp crawled to the door of the pickup, tried to stand up, missed the door, and crashed into the door frame so that he fell facedown on the slippery seat. The boy laughed again and then said, “Aw, shit” with disgust. “Hey, man, you okay?”

  Tarp looked up. He formed a word very carefully. “Yeah,” he said after several seconds.

  “Well, git in!”

  Tarp put his hands on the seat directly under his shoulders and pushed, then pulled a foot up and braced it in the door frame, then pushed and pulled and got his body in. The boy reached across and slammed the door. “Hey, man, that musta been a party. I mean, some kinda party! Jeez! Holy shit, a tuxedo and ever’thin’, no shit! Where you been at, man?”

  Tarp got his mouth ready and said, “Buenosh Airesh.” The boy howled and hit the steering wheel with his fist. They were tearing down a narrow road and Tarp was trying not to be frightened. He shut his eyes. “Huh?” he said when he realized the boy had been talking to him.

  “I said, you wanna go into Orlando or don’t you?”

  “Huh?”

  “Orlando, man, you wanna go t’Orlando or not?”

  He thought he knew what Orlando was. A city. A city would have death squads and angels. “No,” he said.

  “Okay, but you don’t look so good to be trompin’ ’round the roads, ’f you don’t mind me saying. I mean, you look like twenty-four hours in the sack would be mucho help, you know what I mean?”

  Tarp tried to make a smile. After a while, the boy stopped the truck and let him out. He leaned against a palmetto and threw up again, and then he sat for a while and watched a lizard. He took off the dinner jacket and emptied the pockets and tossed the jacket away, then ripped the sleeves from the white shirt and threw them away. He had a French passport, a Jockey Club card, some other papers, a penknife, and a lot of Argentine pesos.

  A black child came down the road. When she got opposite him, she stopped and looked. After a long time, she said, “You sick?”

  “Feels like it.” He was able to talk more clearly.

  “Look like it, too.” She went away.

  Tarp got on his feet and started walking in the hot sunshine. He thought he was heading north. If the boy had been talking about Orlando, Florida, then he wanted to go north. He was thinking somewhat clearly now. His boat ought to be back in the slip at the marina, but there was no point in going there because the Agency people would have impounded it or staked it out or done something equally troublesome. He needed to go to Washington. That was about as much sense as he could make just then.

  He passed through a small black community where people looked at him with a mixture of hostility and contempt, and they made no move to stop their dogs when the dogs barked and snarled. He didn’t blame them. He was not frightened anymore, so he thought the effects of the drug were passing. He had a cruel headache and he felt weak.

  He washed himself in a creek and drank a lot of water from a hose at a gas station. He asked a fat black man what day it was and found that he had lost an entire day and night.

  I missed my appointment with Schneider.

  He traded the fat man the penkn
ife for two candy bars and ate them sitting by a highway, waiting for a ride. Who laid on a death squad for me? Schneider? The funny old Englishman? He thought of all the people at the party.

  By noon he had gotten a short ride with a half-drunk real estate salesman who drove as if he were going to kill himself before the day was over; by three o’clock he was near Jacksonville with a sailor; by nine that night he was passing through South Carolina. At a truck stop he found a six-wheeler that was headed for D.C. At seven the next morning he was in the District.

  “Where you goin’ at?” the driver asked him.

  “The White House would be fine.”

  “Oh, yeah.” The man laughed. They had been talking about football, women, war, hunting, unemployment, and the promise of space. Tarp had not slept. “Oh, yeah.”

  “Drop me anywhere, then.”

  “Shit, I can put you out on Pennsylvania Av. if that’s what you want.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “You got it.”

  He got down six blocks from the White House and walked from there, turning off the avenue opposite the mansion and walking half a block to an unassuming stone entrance in a block of handsome old buildings. The only indication of the building’s identity was a very small brass plaque that read New Monroe Hotel in letters so small they were unreadable from the street. There were three steps up from the sidewalk; a man in a dark suit stood on the top step. He looked Tarp up and down — the torn sleeves, the grimy dress trousers, the mined evening shoes.

  The man touched his cap.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “Hello, Frederick. I’m not expected.”

  “I’m sure that’s all right, sir. Go on in.” Frederick led him to a reception desk that was little more than an alcove in a beautifully paneled little foyer. There were fresh flowers on a table and a strong smell in the air of furniture polish and wax. “Mr. Tarp will be needing a room,” the man named Frederick said.

  A gray-haired man with a very large mustache leaned over the reception counter. “Of course,” he said. He had red cheeks of the sort that are supposed to be associated with jollity and convivial drinking; in fact, he was a recovered alcoholic who had once held a fairly high post in the State Department. Frederick disappeared and the man held out a pen. “Good to see you again.”