“It would be fine.”
“Good, then. About nine-thirty, I think.” He gave the address, a very posh one near St. James’s, and Tarp rang off and stared briefly at an obscene scribble on the phone booth wall, hoping that he was not going to find an obstacle put between him and Johnnie Carrington by the British decision about the “Maxudov” problem.
He wore the dinner jacket that evening, for no better reason than that he owned it and he knew he looked good in it. In the hotel lobby, the owner, in a sweater and old corduroys, was doing his books behind the rather makeshift counter. He looked over his glasses as Tarp came by. “We don’t see many of those in here!” he said.
“I’m an actor,” Tarp said. The man laughed and then looked uncertain, and Tarp went out. It was unseasonably warm, and he strolled down Gower Street as the light faded, thinking idly about submarines and the Antarctic and the polynya. As he passed a newsstand, some word or phrase in a headline caught his attention, as now and then a word will seem to spring from a page even though the eye has not been seeking it. He had to stop and look over a table spread with newspapers before he could find it again. It turned out to be not even a major headline, but a smaller one partway down a front page.
SOVIET AIRLINE CRASH TOLL SET AT
it said; the rest was over the fold. Tarp dropped a coin among those scattered over the papers and picked it up.
SOVIET AIRLINE CRASH TOLL SET AT 72 IN LUXEMBOURG
He read as he walked. His face betrayed no emotion. His pace did not change. When he finished he folded the newspaper and dropped it into a trash bin and rubbed his fingers to rid them of the dark stain of newsprint.
He went on toward the evening as if he had not just learned that the entire Soviet dance company, including Repin and his mistress, had been killed while returning from Cuba.
Chapter 18
An elderly maid showed him into a study in the back of the Carringtons’ second story. She told him that Johnnie had telephoned and would be on his way shortly. An Asian butler offered him a drink and then a cigar, and a few minutes later an East Indian maid passed the open door on her way somewhere. It seemed a house of international servitude, in the midst of which Tarp sat very still, hearing little, thinking about Repin’s death and wondering if it was time to pack it in. Then he heard voices downstairs in English and a determined step across the foyer, and he knew that Johnnie Carrington had come home.
The first time he had ever seen him, Johnnie had seemed merely a silly young Briton of a certain type — rather chinless and self-consciously foolish, with wonderful manners and a laugh like a horse’s whinny. He had turned out to be a courageous man, however, and the foolishness had been self-conscious because it arose from such a deep self-awareness. Now, he was still a little chinless, but he was wearing enormous pale-rimmed glasses that made him seem both older and more serious, and his horsey laugh had been tinged with that raggedness that Tarp had detected on the telephone. There were new lines around his mouth and his eyes, and as he stood there pumping Tarp’s hand, he seemed to Tarp somehow older than he was himself.
“How long, how long has it been!” Johnnie exclaimed in that nervous way people use when they do not quite know what to say. It was Tarp’s first clue that Carrington was ill at ease with him. Her Majesty’s policies put us at odds. That’s bad.
“Is it two years?” Johnnie was saying. “Not quite. By God, you look amazingly fit, though! Wherever do you get your clothes? I can’t get clothes like that! Will you drink with me?”
Carrington was in that heightened state of restlessness that comes from pouring alcohol over fatigue — not drunk by any means, but about one glass beyond what his body wanted.
“What are you drinking?”
Carrington stared quizzically at an array of bottles. “They seem to have put out mostly things I’d eat over pudding. Our staff is a bit polyglot, to say the least, and they don’t seem to comprehend what the word brandy means. As a result, when one asks that a drinks tray be left out, they supply this sugary pot luck. There’s a decent Armagnac here, but so far as I can see, the rest is unspeakable.”
“Armagnac is fine, if you’re having some.”
“Indeed I am.” Johnnie poured. Like Tarp, he was in evening clothes. He held out a small glass. “‘Your honor was the last man in our mouths,’ as Shylock says.” He smiled disarmingly, too disarmingly. “I’ve been hearing your name a good deal, Tarp.”
“Oh?” Tarp set the glass down next to him, untasted.
“Oh, indeed.” There was a sharpness in Carrington’s voice. He had remained standing; his left hand clenched and unclenched, probably unconsciously. “I had a little speech prepared, you see, but … Oh, damn it.” He drank off the Armagnac at a gulp. “What’s going on?” he said hoarsely. His face flushed, and he suddenly looked middle-aged and burned out.
“I don’t understand the question,” Tarp said easily.
Johnnie was pouring himself another. “Come off it, Tarp. All hell’s breaking loose in Moscow, and your name’s in it.” He dropped the stopper back into the decanter with clink. “I’ve been deputed to ask you the question: Have you been recruited to the other side?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Answer the question, please do. Because we’re friends. Did Repin recruit you?”
“Repin’s dead, they say.”
“Please answer me.”
“You wouldn’t have used that tone of voice two years ago, Johnnie. Maybe authority doesn’t sit well on you.”
Carrington sagged. He pushed his glasses up his nose, and then the hand continued up his forehead to smooth his dark hair back. “Please forgive me,” he said simply. “This is damned difficult for me. I owe you — almost everything. But one of the things I owe you is the lesson that nobody can be trusted all the time.”
“Meaning, you don’t trust me now?”
“Meaning, have you been recruited?”
“What makes you think so?”
“A hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in gold showed up in your bank vault Thursday last.”
“Bank transactions are supposed to be confidential.”
“Oh, come!” Carrington drank off half of the second Armagnac. “I used to work in economics branch; I know the banks damned well. Confidentiality is a relative term.”
“Where did my gold come from?”
“It came from a KGB front called Bjornson-Bors Holding Company, Limited.”
“Are you sure it’s KGB?”
“Oh, come.”
“Oh, come, yourself. How do you know I did something for the gold?”
Carrington started to speak, then checked himself. “Oh, I see — you think somebody’s priming us.” He reached for the decanter again, and Tarp said coldly:
“Don’t drink any more.”
“What?”
“If you’re going to accuse me of things, I’d prefer you were fairly sober.”
“Damn you!”
Tarp looked at him, quite unmoved. “There are three things that ruin a career like yours, Johnnie — laziness, selfishness, and alcohol. You’re not lazy and you’re too decent to serve yourself and let the rest go hang. But you’d better watch out for the third.”
Carrington stared at him and then put the little glass down on the tray, empty. He pulled a chair into the circle of lamplight near Tarp and sat down, his hands clasped between his knees and his shoulders rounded. “It’s been a terrible few months,” he said. The raggedness was gone. He sounded desolate. “We’ve got a leak and we can’t plug it. Everybody’s on tenterhooks. HM’s government have taken the tack that Moscow can be hoisted on its own petard with their current mess, so when I saw the message traffic implicating you, it was the last straw.” He raised his head and smiled apologetically. “You’re rather a hero to me.”
“Why did you believe I’d been recruited?”
“A report had you in Cuba at the same time as Repin.”
“That’s very interesting.
There seem to be leaks in both directions. But I haven’t gone over. Johnnie, come on! I haven’t gone over.”
Carrington’s face was haggard. Tarp knew that the man was fighting the self-knowledge that he wanted to believe Tarp; he had to be forcing himself, therefore, to be especially skeptical.
“How high up are you now?” Tarp asked.
“Five. Number five.”
“Who made the decision about your government’s tilt in the Moscow mess?”
“There are three committees. It came out of the Foreign Office Policy Advisory Sub-Committee, I suppose. One’s never quite sure.”
“You weren’t involved?”
“I drafted some papers. I never sit on committee.”
“I’ve agreed to do a job for the Soviets for money, Johnnie. Now you tell me that it’s a job that your government disapproves of. Do you want me to leave?”
Carrington gave him a half grin. “I wouldn’t be very good at my job if I sent away everybody my government disapproved of.”
“Somebody killed Repin, Johnnie. That somebody is in Moscow. Somebody tried to kill me in Havana and somebody tried in Buenos Aires. I think that’s connected to Moscow, too. I haven’t gone over. Part of Moscow is trying to kill me. The other part — may be tolerant of me, nothing more.”
“But you took KGB money.”
“Yes.”
“To help the KGB?”
“How much do you know?”
“We know they’re in hot water — and we love it.”
“You wouldn’t love it if they panicked and decided to start a war.”
“That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t think so when I took the job. I don’t think so now. It’s a choice of evils, I admit. Nothing’s easier and more noble than backing away from a choice of evils, I know — I don’t touch such filth, one says; let them stew in their own juice. I’m not backing away.”
Carrington hunched his shoulders more and squeezed his hands between his thighs. “What is it you want?” he said abjectly. “You want something from me, I know. What?”
“Information.”
“What sort?”
Tarp shook his head. “First I have to have your word that you’ll say nothing to anybody. Nothing. Absolute confidentiality.”
“I can’t.”
“You say you’ve got leaks, Johnnie! I’ve got a problem that’s as tangled as a head of dirty hair; I can’t afford to let anything go. No, I’ve got to have your word: absolute confidentiality.”
Carrington thought a long time. He took his hands from between his thighs and put them on his knees and then he gave Tarp a halfhearted smile. “I’ll keep confidential the subjects of the information you want. Then I’ll think it over. I may then refuse to give you any information.”
“Will you keep quiet even if you do?”
Carrington made a face. “All right.”
“I want what you’ve got on Argentine nuclear armament.”
“That’s no good. They haven’t got anything.”
“They’re not supposed to have anything, I know. But your people must have such a thing as a contingency. You must have people down there looking into it. I want to know what you have, that’s all. If your reports show they haven’t anything, then I’ll be satisfied.”
“This is part of the Moscow business?”
“I think it is.”
“Well, I’ll think about it. I’d be a dreadful servant of the crown if I gave you such information for free.”
“I’ll make it a trade, of course. What I learn when it’s all over for what you’ve got now.”
“You think it really involves Argentina?”
“It may.”
“That’s an awfully sore spot for us, you know. The Franks Report didn’t deal too kindly with us. There’s an Argentine Committee now. I suppose I oughtn’t tell you that.”
“Are you on it?”
“As a matter of fact, I’m not. I’m more European.”
“There seem to be lots of committees you’re not on.”
“Well, it’s a question of rank. The Argentine is very important now.”
“Who’s on the Argentine Committee? Matthiessen?”
Carrington flushed and gave his old horsey laugh of embarrassment. “As a matter of fact, yes. You never liked Matthiessen, I know. But he’s awfully good. Awfully good.”
“Awfully priggish.”
“He’s careful, yes.”
“Priggish.”
Carrington blushed again. “He’s my superior. I’d really rather that you didn’t … It’s difficult for me —”
“Sorry. Well. Let’s change the subject.”
Carrington had flung himself back in the chair. He looked exhausted now, one hand shading his eyes, the other hanging down limply almost to the carpet. “Was Repin your control?” he said.
“I don’t have a control. It’s not that kind of arrangement.”
“You’re on your own? Good God, you have got nerve, haven’t you! How will you manage with Repin gone?”
Tarp grunted. “I’ve been wondering that myself.”
“Well, it isn’t as if you were friends. Is it? I mean, you and Repin didn’t owe each other anything.”
Tarp kept silent. He was thinking of Southeast Asia, when Repin had been running the Soviet stations and he had been an agent moving back and forth across the Chinese border. Repin’s people had almost killed him four different times. “It isn’t a question of owing,” he said. He was tempted to tell Carrington about the plutonium and Maxudov then, but he did not. “It’s simply a question of having made a contract.” Carrington continued to study him from the shadow of his hand. “I wish sometimes I’d done more fieldwork,” he said. “You people have that very odd ethos. It gives you and Repin more in common with each other than you have with me.” His mouth turned wry. “Most of my life is managing piles of paper, and after a while that’s all the reality a civil servant knows — paper. It all becomes paper. It might be good for us to get out in the field and smell the brimstone now and again.”
A few minutes after he said that, his wife came in, and the talk became social and, to Tarp, trivial. Gillian was as lovely as ever, just beginning to show the first signs of maturity. She had stayed behind at the dinner because she was relentlessly social and because, she told Tarp, she believed in her husband’s “enormous promise.” The implication was that she could help him realize that promise by going to dinner parties. She was probably quite correct, although the promise realized in that fashion would lead him inevitably to more and more paper and less and less “brimstone.” She and Tarp exchanged brief looks; he thought there was a hint of challenge, perhaps of flirtatiousness, and he wondered if she was entirely faithful. It was not a curiosity he thought worth satisfying, and after a few minutes he got up to go. She would have gone on, he knew, but her husband was visibly sleepy.
“See here,” Johnnie managed to say as he saw him to the door, “I’ll let you know tomorrow. About — the matter we discussed.”
“I’ll call you.”
“No. Meet me someplace. I’ll have made a decision; one can’t shilly-shally. Do you know Prong’s?”
Prong’s was a club, one of the oldest and least accessible in London.
“I know where it is.”
“Meet me there at half five. I’ll tell the porter to show you in. I’ll have an answer then, I promise.”
Tarp refused Carrington’s offer of a car and driver and walked. He headed for the theater district, knowing there would be crowds and light there. He supposed that he was being followed: Carrington would have posted somebody in order to keep track of him.
Tarp crossed a busy street and got into a queue waiting for a bus. He watched the people who crossed after him and thought he could identify a thin, tired-looking man as his tracker. The man did not get in the bus line but went up the street and seemed to become interested in a store window offering cheap tours to the Kenya coast.
/> Several bus routes were served by this one stop, and the queue sorted itself out as buses came roaring in. Tarp lingered where two groups overlapped; he could see the tracker, turned partway toward him, waiting to see which bus he would board. Then a passerby bumped into the man and he lost his balance, put out a hand toward the window and almost fell, and in that moment Tarp pushed past the bus line and cut up a narrow street toward Soho. After half a block he went into a Chinese restaurant whose windows were steamed to translucency by great pots of noodles that were cooking in the front. He picked a table not far from the door and sat where he could watch it, opening the menu but not reading it.
Two people came in, neither of them the tracker. One was a young Chinese who went directly to a flight of stairs and on up; the other was a short, stout man with apple cheeks and a bristle mustache and silver hair that to Tarp looked artificial. Tarp merely glanced at him before turning back to the door; still, he was aware of the man’s movements as he came toward the back.
Tarp looked up.
The man pulled out a chair and sat down opposite him, rested his umbrella against the table and began to pull off his gray gloves. Tarp now saw that the redness of the cheeks, the hair, the mustache, were all false.
“Repin!”
The wily old Russian removed his hat with great care so as not to disarrange his wig. His round face was split with a smile.
“Is not so easy to kill Repin as Maxudov thinks!”
Chapter 19
“How the hell did you find me?”
Repin tapped the wig, meaning to tap the skull under it. “Is not an idiot, this Repin.”
“That’s a Russian gesture, not an English one. You’re too flamboyant for a Brit.”
Repin showed his false teeth in a pleased grin. He liked being called flamboyant. “Repin thought he looked the picture of British civil servant.”
“How did you find me?”
“Hire Attire. Repin remembers telling you. Repin says to himself, This Tarp, he will look for this place because he likes oddities and he likes hiding places. Yes?”
Under the Freeze Page 18