Under the Freeze

by George Bartram

  “I thought they were supposed to be discreet.”

  “Oh, very discreet. I tell them my tall friend is coming to buy clothes, will they please to give him special treatment. They tell me my tall friend is here already. Aha, I tell myself, he goes next to his old friend Carrington. So. I wait outside Carrington’s house. In truth, I never thought I find you that way; tomorrow, I try dead drop in Geneva, which takes a week to reach you.”

  “You’re on the run?”

  “Da — very fast.”

  A waiter appeared and proved immediately that he did not know enough English to matter, and they both started to speak to him in Chinese, then stopped, aware that it was a mistake. Tarp stumbled through an order in English for noodles with garlic fish for two. When the waiter had ambled off, looking cocky and careless, Tarp said, “Are you supposed to be dead?”

  “Oh, yes. Was very bad, that plane crash. Many bodies still unidentified.”

  “Were you warned?”

  Repin shook his head. His small eyes were angry, his face impassive with a control that came from rage. “The KGB flunky I show you in Havana, at the ballet, you remember? At Luxembourg, I see him leaving plane. Very peculiar. I see him meet with man in mechanic’s overalls. They go away. So, I tell Svetlana Mikhailovna, do nothing, act natural, I must leave. Young woman of air crew, she tries to stop me; she tells me pilot has very strict schedule. I tell her I am KGB, which she really knows anyway, and I do what I want. I leave airplane, sniff around, follow young KGB fellow. You know where I find him? In a trash container, dead. By then my aircraft is in flight. Then it is over — within sight of the airport.” He raised his hands quickly: an explosion. Tarp thought of the dancers who had been so lithe and so young.

  “Who knows you’re in London?”

  “Nobody.” Repin looked unhappily into his teacup. “I had extra set of papers, you understand. Insurance. You understand insurance.”

  “Yes.”

  Repin sipped the tea. “Has not been easy, however. Repin is not used to being renegade. Yes, renegades — is what we are now.” His thought had kept pace with Tarp’s. “A place like this — is our home, eh? Our China. Is for you and me like rendezvous on moon.” The angry calm came down over his face again. “Repin did not think this Maxudov would try to kill him. Repin did not think he would kill Svetlana Mikhailovna. Such legs! Even, forgive me, for a woman of her age — forty — a body of great character. And dead now. Is very clumsy kind of assassination, this. Like murder of my man at Havana, yes? Is not mokrie dela either one, not like Department Five. Is clumsy, desperate. Is …” He searched for the word. “Wasteful. You know how I know is bad work? When I see the little KGB fellow leave the aircraft, then I begin to know. Why? Because, if Repin decides to send flunky with aircraft to be blown up, he does not tell flunky about it — flunky gets blown up, too. This is because Maxudov has not enough people. No organization. No bureaucracy, eh? Must make do with few people.” He looked away from Tarp, his face grim. “Still, is very, very bad, this. Is very deep business.”

  “Is there anybody you can call on for help?”

  “Nobody I trust.” He laughed. “Except you!”

  Tarp did not laugh. “‘When the hunter comes, the tiger runs with the deer.’ Where are you staying?”

  “Last night, Hyde Park. A little cold, but not bad.”

  The noodles came, clean and shiny on thick white plates, with chunks of browned onion and garlic and pungent fish lying among them like flowers. Fragrant steam filled the space between them. Repin bent his face into the steam and inhaled luxuriously. He was very hungry, Tarp saw.

  “Shall we give it up?” Tarp said.

  “No.”

  “The British aren’t going to help me. We’re very isolated.”

  “No.”

  “You were going to be my contact in Russia; now you can’t even get back there yourself. The top echelon is supposed to have guaranteed your safety; they couldn’t even keep you safe on an Aeroflot flight. If you stay outside the Soviet Union, you’re neutralized; if you go back …”

  “What do you suggest?” Repin said through a mouthful of noodles.

  “I have no suggestions. You know that you could go over to the West. You have money here, I’m sure. Files. Johnnie Carrington would be delighted to protect you, I’m sure.”

  Repin chewed. His eyes, hooded now, seemed fixed on Tarp’s nose. Repin swallowed, drank tea, never looked away. “I am Soviet citizen. Bad or good, I am Soviet citizen. You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “You read Pasternak?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do not ask me again if I defect. Nor do I give up this Maxudov thing. Especially after this madness with the aircraft.” He laid his left forearm on the table so that it enclosed the plate of noodles and bent over it, shoveling food in again. After he had swallowed again he said, “I have message from your woman. From Mimosa.”

  “Yes?”

  “She is sending a messenger to the place you told her. Noon each day.”

  Tarp frowned. He had given her the address of a place called Ivan’s in Paris. “Was that the whole message?”

  “Yes. No sweet nothings, I am afraid.”

  “How was she?”

  “Much too good. Too cheerful. She is new at all this, I think. Plus also, she thinks she is ‘in love.’ Ha-ha. When you meet messenger, you carry a Havana newspaper; the messenger carries a rose. Sweet, yes?”

  “A rose?”

  “A rose. Yes. Is infantile.”

  Tarp thought about that. “It’s all infantile,” he said vaguely. He watched Repin eat. “You need a place to stay.”

  Repin shrugged. “Another night in the park is possible.” He smiled sarcastically. “I have your gun for protection.”

  “My gun!”

  “Yes. I bring it from Havana.”

  “I really wouldn’t like it if you shot somebody in London with my gun.”

  “Well, if the choice is shooting somebody with your gun and shooting somebody with no gun at all, and I need to shoot somebody, I think your gun will be my choice.”

  “I’ll find you a place to stay. What sort of passport have you got?”

  “Belgian. Is very good passport. Very expensive.”

  “I’ll call somebody.”

  “Who is somebody?”

  “One of those people who are useful for money. You know those people, right?”

  “Very useful people.” Repin’s plate was empty and his eyes strayed to Tarp’s plate. Tarp pushed it across and Repin began to eat. “I’ll be back,” Tarp said. He moved toward a telephone on the wall, and on the way he stopped the waiter and ordered sniffed dumplings for Repin. He dialed a number in the East End and waited while it rang and rang. When at last the telephone was answered he heard a pounding din and loud voices, and then somebody shouted, “Other Cheek, hello!”

  “Jenny Barnwell!”

  “Can’t hear you, it’s a madhouse here.”

  “Jenny Barnwell!”

  “Not here.”

  “Of course he is.”

  “Not here.”

  “It’s a hundred pounds for him and ten for you.”

  The racket at the other end seemed to increase, underscored by the hard pounding of a rock band’s bass. The voice he had been talking to seemed to have gone away. As suddenly, it was back. “Gimme a number,” it said. Tarp read him the telephone number from the wall telephone. “Five minutes,” the voice said and hung up.

  Tarp waited by the telephone. He watched Repin welcome the arrival of the dumplings and begin on them. He cleared a quarter-sized place on the window of steam and looked out, checking for Carrington’s — or anybody else’s — tracker. When the telephone rang, he picked it up on the first jangle.

  “Well?”

  “This is Jenny, who’s this?”

  “Jenny, it’s the Chinaman.”

  “Oh, Christ, I should have known.” Jenny was male and well past thirty and even when h
e was happy he sounded dyspeptic. “I was led on with talk of a hundred pounds.” Behind him the Other Cheek’s music pounded unmercifully.

  “The hundred pounds is real, Jenny.”

  “For what?” Barnwell said suspiciously.

  “I’ve got a friend needs a bed.”

  “What is he, an ax murderer? I know your friends.”

  “He’s a man with a hundred pounds a night.”

  “In advance?”

  “In advance. But he’s got to be secure, Jenny. You know what would happen if he wasn’t.”

  “Christ, yes, I know you. What is he, a Chink?”

  “Belgian.”

  “Oh, come on! Belgian, my ass! Well, all right. When?”

  “Now.”

  “Now? Christ, I was just meeting somebody nice!”

  “Meet me.”

  “Oh, Christ, just when I was settling in.” His voice had an adolescent tone of abused righteousness. “Where?”

  “Have you got wheels?”

  “A borrowed cycle is it.”

  “Camberwell New Road in half an hour. Pick a place.”

  “Oh, all right. Christ, I hate you. All right, there’s a BP petrol stand halfway along; go another street and you’ll see a lighted sign on the left. It says ‘Rose.’ That’s all, just Rose. I’ll be there. It’s dark and nothing ever going down.”

  “Half an hour.”

  “All right, all right!”

  When Tarp got back to the table, Repin was sitting with his hands hanging down beside him, smiling contentedly at nothing. He belched discreetly and said, “My first food in thirty-six hours.”

  “I’ve got a place for you. A hundred pounds a night.”

  “Where is this, please, Buckingham Palace?”

  “With an acquaintance.”

  “He is what, financier?”

  “Actually he’s a leather queen, but he’s safer than the Bank of England. Come on.”

  He hustled them into a taxi. There was, indeed, a small neon sign that read only Rose on the left side of Camberwell New Road, shocking pink against a particularly black stretch of ugly building. It seemed to mark no doorway, no shop or restaurant.

  Barnwell had pulled the cycle into the shadow of a building, and he was lurking sullenly with his haunches up on the rear fender.

  “Hello, Jenny.”

  Barnwell sighed. A slight odor of alcohol drifted between them. Barnwell was wearing a black leather jacket and leather pants and sunglasses. “Where’s your friend?” he said.

  “Don’t be a smart-ass, Jenny. Nobody loves a smart-ass.”

  “Nobody loves a hard case, either. Christ, what am I doing, messing about with you again? I swore I’d never do it.”

  “I pay well.”

  “Bloody hands, that’s what you’ve got — fucking bloody hands. Bloody well better pay well, the hands you got.”

  Tarp gave him a hundred-pound note. Barnwell sighed again. “Nobody’ll crack a note like this where I come from,” he whined.

  “Life is hard, Jenny. Want to do a job for me?”

  “Wot, another?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, Christ! Well, all right, if it pays. You’re fucking Mephistopheles, you know, seducing my innocence?”

  “Give me a number where you can pick up a message. I’ll leave a time. Add three hours to that time and call me here.” Tarp gave him a slip of paper with the number of a phone booth near Russell Square.

  “Wot’s this, then, cops and robbers?”

  “Spies and hard cases. It’s the new fad.” He signaled to Repin, who got slowly out of the cab and lumbered toward them. “Don’t cross him,” Tarp murmured. “He’s very tough.”

  “Christ, if he’s a friend of yours, I wouldn’t dare say Ta to him. Wot you take me for?”

  Tarp introduced them in the most cursory sort of way, using no names. They appraised each other and were, it seems, about equally appalled.

  “Mind your manners with each other,” Tarp said. “Jenny, I’ll call you. Remember what I said.”

  “Yes, Mum. I’ll be a good boy.”

  He touched Repin’s shoulder. “Dormez bien, monsieur.”

  Barnwell kicked the big cycle into a roar and, without a word to Repin or Tarp, took it down over the curb and into the street. Tarp saw Repin’s arms go around the leather-clad waist, and then they were up the road, and he could hear them long after the tail light had disappeared.

  Tarp went back to his Bloomsbury hotel. As he slipped into sleep his last thought was of Maxudov, the faceless power who seemed able to check him now at every move.

  Chapter 20

  He awoke from a dream of anger and lay in the strange bed keeping it alive. A man who had tried to teach him martial arts long, long before had been in it; and Juana had been in it. The dream had been erotic; he had the evidence of his body for that. They had been coupled, he and Juana; there had been some fear of interruption. “Your lesson, your lesson,” she had said. Then — or had it been earlier? Or had he dreamed it several times, so that each preceded and followed each — that awesome battler from his past had tried to teach him self-protection.

  I was always afraid of him. Tarp scowled into the dark room. I was always on the defensive.

  The teacher had been Maxudov, he realized. Yes, he was certain of it now. Somehow, in the cocoon of the mind, the unknown Maxudov had metamorphosed into the long forgotten teacher. And put me on the defensive.

  There was the source of the anger. Tarp stood up, naked. Because I’ve been two moves behind him ever since I got to Cuba. I haven’t been able to make a move. I’ve done nothing but react.

  He left the little hotel before the front door was unlocked, letting himself out into a silent street where the day was only a gray wash by which the eye could distinguish a tree from a car, an iron paling from a building half a block behind it. The dream stayed with him like vapor trailing from an engine. On the defensive. He could not stop being angry.

  He found himself resenting Juana’s messenger and this trip to Paris. He ought to be doing something different. He ought to be making his own move; he ought to be on his way to Moscow. Now Maxudov had made that more difficult by negating Repin.

  A taxi put him down near the Opera before ten. He had not been in Paris for a year, but it was not a city he greatly cared for. Still, it had been the center of the world for him at one time, and so he returned to it with a certain curiosity, as if he might find himself walking down one of its side streets, a slight, perhaps not remarkable adolescent. It was hard for him not to look at Paris as if it, too, partook of his dream, so firm was the grip of the night on him. He began to walk. He passed a building where a trading company had in other days had an office, actually a front for French intelligence. He walked down toward the Quai d’Orsay, then turned away from it. He had been in and out of Paris a lot just after Dien Bien Phu, putting a network together from the shreds the French had left behind. Now he was gone from Southeast Asia and other people had patched his nets and put something new together. He saw Paris mostly in that context, as a place where he had begun something that had failed. Perhaps surprisingly, he was not made sad by the place and its reminder of failure; far less was he made bitter by it. He had learned that from his French mentors, who had known so much failure that they accepted eventual failure as part of the learning process that is history.

  In the dream he had had only one eye. No wonder he had been on the defensive.

  Dreams were a form of thought, perhaps a form of learning. They spoke in puns and seeming riddles, as oracles used to speak to the antic half of the brain. He thought of all the sayings about eyes: to see with half an eye; he closed one eye to; in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man; to have eyes to see. I-eye. With only half of I.

  He was passing Palais Royal, but his inner vision was so startling that he stopped where he was and almost collided with a woman coming behind him. A dark circle of water like an iris in an ocean of white — the polynya like a d
ark eye in the ice. Had he read that? Or was it simply the ability to see in metaphor?

  He turned left around Palais Royal and made his way toward the Pont Neuf; on the bridge itself he began to overtake clusters of people moving toward the Left Bank. Many of them were young, but some were middle-aged and older; he thought he recognized Scandinavians and Germans, a few East Indians, and here and there an African in a bright-colored printed cloth over wanner European clothes. He heard English spoken, recognized the nasality and the hard r’s of American. There were many French. An unusual sense of community prevailed, and he looked more closely at the signs on the lampposts and on the placards that some of the people were carrying. Givrage mondiale. Journée de paix atomique. A young woman with pretty breasts was wearing a shirt that read Veux-tu qu’on les bruler? Some of the signs had been tied to the posts with string and hung down slackly, like masks pulled down around their wearers’ necks. Journée de témoignage contre la guerre atomique, with an arrow pointing ahead — Day of witness against atomic war.

  A girl pinned a button on his coat. It was white. In blue letters in a circle was the single word Givrage: Freeze. She smiled up at him, then kissed him with an impulsiveness that was easy and erotic. Some image from the dream flashed: Juana, a kiss, her beautiful face.

  The crowd turned left at the end of the bridge and he turned right, then left again into the little streets of St.-Germain. He had lived here during one winter. He did not envy these young ones now. He touched the button on his lapel, thinking of the futility of such gestures. Still, he left it where she had put it.

  Ivan’s was a cafe not far from the church of St.-Germain-des-Près, as French as a tourist poster but recognizably Jewish to those who loved the food. In the mornings the pastries looked like relatives of New York’s Danish; at lunch and dinner Eastern Europe and Second Avenue were not too far away. Ivan’s had always been there for Tarp; it went back before the war, it was said, although Ivan, whoever he was, had disappeared with others of the Resistance. Today, its outdoor chairs were tipped against the tables and no waiters leaned in the doorway, watching for sidewalk customers. Inside, however, the brass and mahogany shone, and the warm smell of coffee mingled with that of pastry and something slightly sour that was being readied for lunch.