Under the Freeze

by George Bartram

  Tarp sat against a wall between two long windows. There were at least thirty people in the place, although it was early for lunch, late for breakfast. He ordered coffee and spread the Havana paper on the table so that the masthead was visible. Now that he was there, he could try to cleanse his mind of his anger and the dream. He sat quietly. He looked at a neutral piece of wall, which long before had been painted to imitate marble and then varnished so many times that it had become simply a varnish-colored space.

  The Maxudov of the dream reappeared, with the face of the man he had not thought about in years. Is that what Maxudov was — one man in another? Or was it rather that Maxudov’s identity was less important than something else? Was it, instead, that Maxudov existed in relation to something else? A bargain has two hands, was the saying. So that it was not simply Maxudov … His attention flickered. Not simply Maxudov …

  He had seen the rose. That was the signal, and it brought him back to the world of Ivan’s and the gleaming white button on his jacket, back to Givrage Atomique and the message from Havana. The rose was red, and its stem and and all but one leaf of the flower were wrapped in white paper. It was carried in the hand of a tall woman with a stunning figure who had come in and who was standing with her back to him so he could not see her face, one of those women who give Paris its reputation for style despite the silly clothes its designers force on other women. She was wearing blue jeans so tight they outlined the cleft of her buttocks; a wide leather belt of the sort that American bikers used to wear; high, shiny, cruel-looking boots with soft insteps; and a tan nylon jacket with a boyish, stand-up collar, the jacket so short it showed off most of the studded belt. She was wearing enormous sunglasses, but what he noticed was her hair, which was cut like a punk rocker’s, with a high comb of black, feathery strands along the top of her skull and short strands over her ears and around the back.

  She strode to a table across the restaurant, turning toward him as she bent to sit. She was wearing a black T-shirt under the jacket, with a luridly fluorescent picture of a mushroom cloud and a fireball on it. Her face turned to him, as stark and beautiful as a piece of sculpture within the clasp of the demonic hair.

  It was Juana.

  He supposed he had been expecting her all along. It was a very different-looking Juana, to be sure. She looked slimmer. She did not look as if she came from a people’s republic of anything; her makeup was lavish and deliberate. She looked — there was no other way to put it — rich.

  She saw him but she gave no sign of recognition. Tarp glanced around the restaurant; several men were looking at her. He was aware of motion near the door, but when he looked there, whoever had moved was gone. The dream, the idea about Maxudov, vanished at once; an internal alarm began to sound.

  She stood up. She held the rose. Follow me, she and the rose were saying.

  Tarp got up. Danger, his internal sense told him.

  She had gone into a short corridor that led to the toilet. He started after her. His eyes continued to search the room for the source of danger — somebody watching her too closely, somebody watching him, somebody with a weapon.

  He entered the corridor, the dining room now behind him. She was standing by a door at the far end, a dozen feet away. He stopped to look behind him.

  Wrong, said the familiar voice inside his head. It’s wrong. He was turning back to look at her, turning to see if she had a weapon, turning to see if it was she who was betraying him, turning to see how Maxudov had put him on the defensive again — to see she had no weapon, but welcomed him, smiled, waited — and he knew as he turned that whatever was wrong was behind him: he had seen it in the flash of a car door out the restaurant window, seen it in movement in the street: a human head, a hand, the hand reaching up to the black wool cap above the face, pulling the front down, making a mask of a rolled-up ski cap.

  He threw himself at her. She had no sense of danger. Her smile was real and loving. She was raising her hands to embrace him, the rose in the left. He threw himself at her and wrapped her up in his long arms and crashed through the door of the restroom.

  Somebody screamed behind him. The scream was obliterated instantly by the obscene clatter of an automatic weapon. Oh, God, no, Tarp thought, not here. They’ve been through enough here, but the weapon went on in outrageous spurts. Many people were screaming; somebody was shouting in rage. The smell of spent ammunition reached him, hot oil and nitrite, then a smell of plaster. Glass was breaking. Another weapon began firing, then the two together.

  Tarp let her go as he smashed through the door with his shoulder; he swung her into the room and pulled his hands free, tearing at the little metal cigarette lighter in his pocket. There was no way to get out of the restaurant from here, but there was a back door down another corridor. But that was where the first weapon seemed to come from, and he knew that somebody had come in the back and had started shooting at thirty people, most of them French Jews, who were drinking coffee and eating pastry on this slightly gray Parisian day of witness for atomic peace.

  He popped open the derringer barrels as he was swinging back into the corridor. Behind him he heard her shout, “No!” but he drove on, moving fast now, a large man with great quickness and a huge anger. He was a stride from the main room when a man wearing a ski mask moved into the opening ahead of him, his left side to Tarp, his eyes on the restaurant. Tarp could see smoke and dust beyond him; he could see an overturned table and a trickle of coffee on the floor, and an old man who had been hit in the chest and stomach by automatic weapons fire, lying against a table with blood gushing from his heart.

  Tarp raised the little gun.

  The man in the ski mask was changing clips. He turned. Tarp saw the eyes. They looked young and surprised and therefore innocent. Tarp put his fist against the mask and pulled the trigger and shot one of the eyes, and the man screamed and tottered backward.

  Tarp lunged for him, wanting his weapon. He saw the other figure silhouetted against the silver light of the door. He wanted the assault rifle to turn on that other one.

  Juana was clawing at his left shoulder. He tried to push her away. She was screaming. She was weeping — the tears astonished him, as if tears were out of place in such atrocity. He put his hand on her face and tried to shove her back. She caught his arm and he slipped; off-balance, he dropped to his left knee, just inside the corridor. She was standing over him.

  A grenade exploded on the far side of the restaurant. He was looking up at her. One moment she was weeping, trying to pull at him, and the next she was lying on the worn carpet of the corridor, blood where her tears had been and her hands scrabbling at the carpet in confusion and pain.

  The concussion stunned him. Deafened, he lost contact with his world: Juana’s mouth was open, working, but he could not hear her. The screams and the firing seemed to have stopped. For him they were ended.

  The air was thick with plaster dust. He bent over her. Her fashionable jacket and the T-shirt had been slashed from under the left arm across the shoulder and the neck. The left side of her face looked like red lace. He could not see her left eye.

  He was thinking only of getting out. The two attackers had been after him, he was sure: the movement he had seen just after she had come in had been somebody following her, looking for him. And when they had started to fire, they had aimed at the place where he had been sitting. He wanted to get out before the police came and made their gory, helpless sense out of the scene, before they took down names and identified the dead. He wanted to get out while there would still be a few hours when his pursuers thought he was one of those in the other room.

  He picked her up. The fluorescent picture on her shirt was obscured by blood. Her rose was gone.

  Chapter 21

  He carried her out the back door of Ivan’s the way he had carried the poet out of her apartment in Havana. This time the danger was real and his heart was pounding and he was urging himself on because he wanted to save her. There was the abrasive noise of sirens no
w, as there had been in Havana; there were muffled screams, shouts. The grenade had blown out all the windows of the restaurant and then the second attacker had disappeared; Tarp had brought her out in the seconds between the explosion and the noise of the first siren.

  He put her down by the rear entrance and went outside alone, waiting for the bullet, almost eager for it; when he knew it was safe, he picked her up and ran along the curving, alleylike street. A dumply woman in black with rolled-down black stockings came clumping toward him with two long loaves of bread under her arm, and as he ran past she saw Juana’s face and bloody shoulder and she backed against a wall on the other side. He was already past her then, and he ran on, coming out on the rue Jacob, pushing himself past concern for breathing or fatigue. There had been a pharmacie along here years before, and he ran toward the location. In the next streets, ambulances and police cars made inhuman noises.

  He carried her into the narrow shop. The astringent smell seemed not to have changed in thirty years.

  “Aidez-moi!” he gasped. “Secours!” Two middle-aged women looked up from a display of hot-water bottles. Somebody appeared at the back of the shop, a younger woman with a suspicious face.

  “A woman is hurt!” he shouted at her in French. He put Juana down in the single aisle between the ceiling-high shelves and pushed the women out of the way as he grabbed at bottles of disinfectant and paper packages of gauze.

  “What is it? What is it?” one of the women said excitedly. Her voice seemed to come to him from the vaults of a church because his ears were still affected. “Was it a bus?” she said.

  “Terrorists.”

  The woman sucked in her breath. “Eh, terrorists,” said the other one, as if that explained everything. She looked down at Juana’s bloody face and winced and pulled the other woman away.

  The younger woman came very deliberately from the back of the shop. He had ripped the tan jacket from the shoulder by then and was ripping apart what was left of the black T-shirt, rending it down the side below the arm so that Juana’s torso was bared.

  “This is a matter for the police,” the younger woman said. She was wearing a white shop coat over a dress.

  Tarp was spilling disinfectant over the wounds. “There are people dead,” he said. “The police are already there.” He was shoving a whole pack of wadded gauze into a hole in Juana’s shoulder, trying to stop the blood.

  “She is dying,” the female pharmacist said.

  “Check her legs for injuries.” He could see the gash along the pectoral and the shoulder; it was deepest close to the arm, where blood was welling through the scarlet bandage.

  He wiped the side of the beautiful face. There were a bruise and a gash under the ridiculously short hair, and three deep cuts high up on the cheek, as well as a pulpy abrasion on the temple. He could not see the left eye at all.

  “Nothing,” the woman was saying as she knelt over Juana’s legs. She ran her hands over the thighs, then over the pelvis and abdomen. “Nothing. Nothing. Nothing, nothing.”

  One of the middle-aged women had pulled an invalid’s cushion from somewhere and put it near, but not under, Juana’s head, and the other was in the back of the store, running water. “Poor thing,” the first woman muttered.

  “We’ve got to stop the bleeding,” Tarp said.

  “We can’t.” It was the pharmacist.

  “We’ve got to stop the bleeding!” He was shouting at her, furious. “Stop the bleeding!”

  “Poor, poor thing. So pretty.”

  “You’ve got to stop the bleeding.” Tarp pushed rolls of bandage into the pharmacist’s hands and ran to the back of the shop. To his surprise, he was limping. He found a telephone on the counter and dialed without even thinking. The telephone was picked up before it had rung twice.

  “Central.”

  “This is Chimère. I must talk to Laforet.”

  “You have the wrong line.”

  “No, I haven’t! This is an emergency!”

  “I know no Laforet. Please free this line.”

  “Put me through to Laforet! It’s Chimère!”

  But the man had rung off. Tarp looked down the shop. The three women were looking down at the floor. They looked dumbstruck. One of them was holding a rubber hot-water bottle that she had filled with water. She held it with both hands, numbly. The pharmacist knelt, and when she stood up she held a ball of dark-red, dripping gauze.

  Tarp scrabbled through the pages of the telephone directory. At last he found the number and dialed, hearing background traffic and pops and fizzing sounds.

  “The Office of the Sub-Minister for External Affairs.”

  “Monsieur Laforet, please. It’s an emergency. Tell him it’s Chimère.”

  “On the part of whom, monsieur?”

  He looked down the shop. Two people came to the door and peered in. One was a woman who had been crying. There was a smear of blood on her skirt.

  “Chimère.”

  The woman came into the shop. She was gesturing behind her, but she had seen Juana on the floor, and she seemed unable to speak.

  “Laforet here.”

  “Jules, thank — I’ve got an emergency.”

  “Are you in Paris?”

  “Yes. It’s medical. I need a doctor and blood. And protection.”

  “You understand the rules —”

  “Fuck the rules! I’ll explain later.”

  “Where are you?”

  “A pharmacy, rue Jacob just east of rue Napoleon.”

  “The identification will be ‘Marc Antoine.’”

  He started back down the aisle. His right leg did not seem to want to move very well. The pharmacist was piling bandages into the arms of one of the women; the newcomer with blood on her dress was weeping and in shock and unable to take her eyes from Juana.

  He knelt again by the injured head. A puddle of blood had formed under her. Someone had laid white bandage over her bare breast.

  He could not find a pressure point with which to control the bleeding, but the blood was dark and steadily flowing and so he thought at least that it was not arterial. He put another fist-sized wad of gauze into the wound and pressed down, and he was still kneeling there, trying to control the bleeding, when a voice above him said, “I am looking for Marc Antoine.”

  “Here!” he said. A dumpy-looking man in a raincoat knelt next to him. “Her?”

  “Yes.”

  The man stood up quickly and shouted, “In here!” to somebody outside, and two men in hats and coats came in quickly, picked Juana up, and went out again. They looked like gangsters. They might have been gangsters, for all he knew; they showed no interest in her. Their care was for speed, that was all. Tarp was pushed into the back of a van with her and the dumpy man, and he was hardly in before one of the men was slamming the door and pounding the side of the van as he ran forward, shouting, “Go, go!”

  Tarp had seen the logo of a delivery service on the van. Inside, however, there was a stretcher clamped to the floor and an IV bottle. The dumpy man was holding on to a cleat and swaying above her. “That cut’s a bitch,” he said. “Not a knife.”

  “Grenade.”

  “Shit.” He bent close, then straightened. “In that restaurant?”

  “In a restaurant, yes. Are you a doctor?”

  “We’re going to the doctor. We heard about the restaurant as we came out. After the Jews again, were they?”

  “It’s a Jewish restaurant,” Tarp said heavily. He was thinking of the old man whose blood had been gushing from his chest.

  The van darkened as they passed under an arch, and a heavy door closed behind them. They drove for another eight feet, coming out into light again. There were walls close in on both sides. They made two turns, then backed for several yards.

  “Where are we?” Tarp said.

  “Safe house.” The dumpy man gave a rubbery smile. There was a smear of blood on his right cheek; when he gestured, Tarp saw that he was wearing bloody surgical gloves. “Th
e best in Paris. You must be a big cheese.” He kicked the door open and held it with his foot while Tarp got painfully out; by then two men were there with a stretcher, and a nurse was standing by the van looking up at the smoke-darkened stone walls that rose five stories above them. Tarp could not hide the limp as he went went through a neoclassical doorway after the stretcher and then along a tiled floor into an elevator almost too small for the stretcher. They went up three slow floors and came out in a bright corridor with ceiling-high windows with curved tops. Tarp could see the Seine and the bridge he had crossed ninety minutes before. For my day of witness.

  The doctor was a young man who looked as if he disapproved of everything that was happening. He had been called from somewhere else, clearly, and he was still struggling into a gray surgical gown. He noticed Tarp’s leg, then looked at Juana as they wheeled her past him, and he said, “The woman first,” and disappeared through a big oak door.

  “Are we on the Ile de la Cité?” Tarp said to the dumpy man, who was fanning himself with one of the sleeves of his raincoat. It was cold in the anteroom, but he was not used to hurrying.

  “Mm,” he said. He raised himself from his chair to look out the window. “Notre Dame is the other way.”

  Another man appeared with a telephone and plugged it in near Tarp. “Le chef ,” he said. He looked meaningfully at the dumpy man. “Privé.” The dumpy man got up and moved away to the far end of the room.

  “Chimère here.”

  “Tarp, I just heard about the bombing. How are you?”

  “I’m good, Jules. A woman with me is hurt.”

  “Yes, I’ve been told. I shall want you to be debriefed.”

  “Of course.”

  “Were they after you?”

  “Why would they be after me?”

  “I am not pleased that you have brought this sort of trouble.”

  “I didn’t know it would be like this.”

  “You are not an innocent, I think.”