Under the Freeze

by George Bartram

  The man shrugged again. Tarp decided not to press it just then. “There will be coffee,” he said. He went inside and looked over the house, which had been empty for months. There was very little furniture. Downstairs was a kitchen with an enormous wood range; a large room that took up most of the ground floor; and a very small room with wallpaper, as if it had had aspirations toward being a parlor. Upstairs there were four small bedrooms. Repin had already commandeered one that had a wooden bedstead in it with a mattress but no bedclothes. A new sleeping bag lay rolled on the bed. Repin picked it up, dropped it. “I lived better in Indochina,” he said disgustedly. “You lived like a prince in Indochina.”

  “Only some of the time. This place stinks.”

  “It needs airing out.”

  Tarp picked a room for himself. Like Repin’s, it had a new sleeping bag on the bed. One of the other rooms had had a hospital bed moved into it for Juana.

  Tarp went downstairs again and found the frightened woman coming into the kitchen from the back with five eggs in her hands, which she carried cupped against her belly like a woman in a medieval painting. As if to emphasize the freshness of the eggs, a chicken cackled outside, and then a cockerel jumped up into the open window and strutted. The woman with the eggs stood looking at it; Tarp looked at them both. The picture that they made seemed ancient and full of symbols, but he could not understand them because he was so tired or because he was alienated from them.

  He slept most of the day, then woke when the sound of a helicopter passed close overhead and went toward the village. Some minutes later he heard the voice of one of the guards, calling up the stairs, “The chief is coming!”

  Tarp smelled coffee and something wonderful, full of onions and perhaps chicken. He rolled out of the sleeping bag and went downstairs carrying his shoes. The woman had built a fire in the range and there was a huge pot there, cooking. There were chicken feathers on the floor and a little dried blood on the windowsill. Tarp was wearing the same clothes he had driven from London in and the trousers they had given him in Paris after the attack in the restaurant. “Hot water,” he said to the woman. She stared at him. “To shave.”

  “Ah.”

  The only running water came from a tap in the kitchen. The toilet was a separate stone privy next to one of the barns, with a stone urinal through which water always ran and a filthy flush toilet that had a tank high above and a chain pull. Tarp told himself that it would have to be cleaned and went back into the kitchen. “What is your name?” he said to the woman as she filled a black iron kettle from the tap.

  “Therese.”

  “Are you the old man’s wife?”

  “He is my stepfather.”

  He took a small pan of hot water upstairs and borrowed a razor from Repin, who had provided for himself in London. Repin carried a scuffed leather case that he had brought with him from the doomed aircraft, and Tarp supposed that he had the makings of a new life in it: currency, perhaps some gold; somewhere sewn into the lining or the handle, a strip of microfilm that he could use to bargain for freedom and security. Repin was a survivor.

  His room was small. Half of it had a sloping ceiling. A single window opened outward on a view of the privy roof and the collapsing barns. The bed was high; in a corner was the squat washstand where he stood to shave. Against the only other wall was a massive wardrobe that was black as if from charring. He stripped, gathered the dirty clothes into a bundle, put on the trousers and the shoes, and went down again to the kitchen.

  “Wash these,” he said, handing her the clothes. “Then dry them over the stove. Quickly. They are all I have.”

  She looked at his bare torso. He had a long scar that seemed to fascinate her. She put the dirty clothes into the zinc-covered sink and went out the back and came in again with an old jersey that was frayed and faded but as soft as cashmere from much washing. She held it out to him.

  “Thank you.”

  He pulled it over his head. When he pulled it down from his eyes, he found that she was still looking at him, her hands cradled in front of her belly as if she were waiting for him to put more eggs into them.

  “If I had flour, I would make bread,” she said.

  “Tell the old man to buy flour.”

  “I do not tell him anything.” She turned her face away, and he saw the shadow of a bruise high up near her pale hair.

  “I will tell him, then.”

  He went to the door as the guards’ Fiat came up the stony road. Laforet got out, looking Parisian and governmental, his shoes too delicate for the hard ground, his suit inappropriate but beautiful. He wore no hat but had on black gloves, and he carried a dark-gray coat over his arm. He looked out of place and too solemn, like the minister of a small country forced to negotiate its surrender in the mud of a battlefield.

  “So here you are,” he said, giving Tarp his left hand. “Leave us,” he said over his shoulder to the guards. He looked around the big downstairs room. Laforet was an urbanite. He actively disliked the country; he had often said so. The stone floors and the thick whitewashed walls were not to him picturesque, but unsanitary. “Where can we talk?”

  “I brought somebody with me.”

  “So I heard. Is it Repin?”

  “Yes.”

  “So he is not dead. How like him. Well, you and I must talk; I cannot deal directly with Repin. You understand.”

  Tarp led him into the small room with the wallpaper. It had big, hard chairs and a painted cupboard that was locked.

  “Therese!” Tarp called. She appeared almost instantly. “Is there wine?”

  She was trying not to look at Laforet, as if he terrified her. “From the village,” she said.

  “Bring it.”

  It came in a bottle twice the size of an ordinary one, without a label. There must be a place in the village, he knew, where you took your own bottle to have it filled from a barrel. She put down two stemmed beer glasses and hurried out.

  “That looks like dreadful stuff,” Laforet said.

  Tarp smiled. “You must bring your own next time.” The wine was rough, strong, almost black. Tarp liked its coarseness, and Laforet drank it without complaint.

  “So,” Laforet said. “This is becoming very complex.”

  “I know.”

  “First you, then the woman, now Repin.” Laforet took his gloves off the table and put them on his coat, which he had folded on the seat of a chair. “Your sanctuary is becoming a commune, my friend.”

  “I couldn’t leave him in London. They tried to kill me there.”

  “There, too?”

  “Something has gone wrong there. It smells. The whole thing smells.” He told him quickly about the meeting with Matthiessen and the shooting of Johnnie Carrington. “It smells,” he said again.

  “It does, indeed.” Laforet sipped the wine, which he seemed to like better and better. For all his elegance, Laforet was honest in his tastes. Tarp had a flash of memory: Laforet bending over a jungle pool that was green with scum, drinking, raising a face then rimmed with golden beard, saying, “Nectar!” They had been on the run for four days, looking for the montagnards to hide them. Now the beard was gone, the hair was silver, but he still could take nectar on its own terms. “I must hold Repin here,” he said now.

  “He’ll have something to bargain with, I’m sure.”

  “He won’t be pleased. He won’t thank you for bringing him here.”

  “I don’t care about his thanks.”

  “You have an idea?”

  Tarp poured more wine. “Moscow thinks he’s dead.”

  “Not for much longer.”

  “No. Let’s put out a story that Repin is in England.”

  “London will deny it.”

  “So?”

  Laforet tapped his lower lip. “I don’t want them looking for him here. This arrangement is very much disapproved of by part of my department; nastiness would be a gift to people who want to get me out. I want things here to stay quiet. Beautifully q
uiet.” He sipped. “Well, we will try saying that we have heard that Repin is in London.” He crossed his legs and bent sideways to take a cigarette case from his side pocket. “About the Cuban woman.”

  “Yes.”

  “She is KGB, as you know. Her father is a translator in the Fifth Department. Spanish, a leftover from their civil war. You know all that? He was in the gulag, did you know that, too? Oh, yes; he was a singer, and he sang a song about Stalin. He doesn’t sing anymore. But he’s not a dissident; we have nothing on him in that direction. The daughter has been in Cuba for four years. Nothing on her, either. I would assume she works for the Eleventh Department.”

  “Have you talked to her yet?”

  Laforet closed the cigarette case with an audible snap. “One of my people interviewed her. She’s quite heavily sedated. Nothing worth repeating.” He gave Tarp a brief, sad smile. “She asked how you were.”

  “Can she be a double?”

  “Of course. But we have very little in Havana, my friend; Cuba is not our area of interest. Of course, there have always been rumors. Castro is unpredictable, to say the least. When Khruschev had the confrontation over the missiles twenty years ago, we thought it a logical time for Moscow to set up a machinery that was not known to the Cubans themselves. On the other hand, Castro has been maddeningly independent sometimes, especially in the midseventies, and we don’t know how far he may have gone in getting rid of KGB probes. We did get a Caribbean defector, curiously, about seven years ago who said in passing that she had heard that the Cuban KGB had been infiltrated by a different wing of the KGB. That was provocative. We turned it over to the Americans, and naturally we never heard anything more about it.”

  “I think somebody in Moscow may have planted his own people there.”

  Laforet lighted the cigarette and inhaled deeply. “Don’t you think it’s time you told me about it?” he said.

  Tarp hesitated. “Do we have a deal?”

  Laforet lowered his head, his eyes almost closed. “We do.” He raised his eyebrows as his head came up. “But please, no more people to share your sanctuary.”

  Tarp told him about Maxudov and the plutonium. He was thorough and it took time. When it was done he said, “I think you ought to get in touch with ‘Mr. Smith.’”

  “Washington and Paris are not close these days.”

  “It isn’t official.”

  “Very well. Are you going to Moscow?”

  “Yes. I’ve got to have a way in.”

  “I think I can help there. When?”

  “A few days. I’ve got to tie up loose ends.”

  “This business of the German ship?”

  “Partly, yes.”

  Laforet paused, then shook his head. “The connection is not there.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Ah, well.”

  “I need a secure telephone to call my contacts in London, and I need the hardware to talk to my data bank.”

  “I shall take you back to Paris with me.”

  “I’ll need clothes.”

  “I noticed.”

  Chapter 26

  Mrs. Bentham had “some papers” for him, and Jenny Barnwell was “working on something.” Access to his computer from a Parisian terminal was more difficult than he had expected, and it was after midnight before the printer began to hum in the chic and soulless computer center that Laforet had borrowed for him. He was almost alone in a room that was oppressive in its insistence that all machines, all humans, all ideas were interchangeable.

  “Mr. Smith” and Hacker had both been supplying information, but the sum of what they had given was not much. The biographies of the KGB officials whose names Repin had given him on the Scipio were no more revealing than if they had come from a popular magazine; there were contradictions, vast holes. There was even some confusion as to which departments of the KGB they headed.

  The materials on Juaquin Schneider were more complete and, he supposed, more accurate. Yet when he had studied them he was impressed by what was not there instead of by what was. He queried the data bank but got no further answers. At first he focused on a single question: Where did Juaquin Schneider get the money when he emerged in the nineteen fifties? Then, as he went over and over the pages of mostly irrelevant material that had been given him, another question surfaced: Who was Juaquin Schneider’s wife?

  There was, to be sure, a figure with a name: Nazdia Becker. There was a marriage date: 1949. There were some details: Jewish, born in Hungary, refugee; brilliant biochemist, holder of several patents that Schneider Agri-Chem had turned to great profit. But where had she been educated — and when? How, Tarp wondered, had she gotten to Argentina? What was her birth date? She had died in 1971 — but of what?

  At three o’clock Tarp turned the machines off and lay down on the cot that had been provided for him. If he dreamed, he remembered nothing. At midmorning he flew to the farm, landed at the security guards’ house two hundred yards away, and walked across a muddy field. The Fiat was in the lane; the Humber was parked under a twisted apple tree, and there was a new Citroen close to the house.

  “Too many cars,” he said to the guards. “They attract attention.”

  “One of them’s yours.”

  “Whose is the Citroen?”

  “Nurse. They’re sending the Cuban woman up today.”

  He started toward the house. The bearded man grinned. “The old man’s drunk. Watch out for him. He’s bad.” Therese came to the kitchen doorway. “I have made bread,” she said without prelude as he crossed the big room toward the stair.

  “Is there cheese?”

  “He bought cheese in the village. It is from Denmark. In a can. He thinks it is comical.” She stared at him. “He is drunk.”

  “He’ll regret it.”

  Repin was upstairs, surrounded by newspapers that the guards had bought for him. On the window ledge were the last crumbs of the brioches. “I have been watching birds,” he said. He was wearing glasses with gold rims that made him look severe. “This is a very boring place. The birds are the most interesting thing here.” He jerked his head. “Except maybe that one.” Tarp looked out and saw the old man asleep on a mound of rotted hay. “When are you going to Moscow?”

  “Soon. I need more information. From London.”

  “Why do you need information from London so you can go to Moscow?”

  “I think they’re two ends of the same stick. I’d like to understand at least one end.”

  “You still think it smells?”

  “Rotten.”

  “You think I have lied to you?”

  “It occurred to me, Repin, but I can’t think of why you should. No, it doesn’t smell because it’s wrong; it smells because I don’t understand it. You brought it to me as a simple matter of a man in Dzerzhinsky Square. But it’s not a man in Dzerzhinsky Square. It’s Buenos Aires and maybe London. And Dzerzhinsky Square.”

  Repin eyed him over the tops of the glasses. “Moscow cares only about Dzerzhinsky Square.”

  “Fuck Moscow.”

  “Mm.” Repin went back to the paper. “Better men than you have tried.”

  Tarp went down and filled a bucket at the kitchen tap and dumped it over the old man. He groaned and rolled down the pile of moldy hay and lay with one shoulder and an arm in an ice-rimmed puddle. His eyes were, open, however. Tarp bent over him. “This is the warning. I only give one warning. Stay sober or you’re out.” When he went back into the kitchen, Therese was there. “Does he hit you?” he asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  Tarp put the bucket under the window where he had found it. “Tell him I will hit him once for each time he hits you. I can hit harder than he can. If he gives you trouble, tell me.”

  “And if you aren’t here?”

  “Tell the other man.”

  “The Russian?”

  “Yes, the Russian.”

  “Is he a nice man?”

  “Better than the one you’ve got.”

&n
bsp; She nodded. “He liked my bread. He said he would teach me to make brioche.”

  Tarp nodded. Repin planned to do more than watch birds, he thought.

  He put in a call from the other house to Jenny Barnwell, whose return call came two hours later. He had found somebody, he told Tarp — a petty officer who had been on the navigation bridge during the Homburg engagement. The man lived in a village sixty miles south of London in the Weald.

  “I’m on my way.”

  He drove the Humber to the ferry at Calais and arrived at Dover late that night. There was a guest house open near the castle. He was on the road again at dawn and in London for a late breakfast. He picked up the dark suit from Hire Attire and got a chauffeur’s cap and what he hoped was Barnwell’s size in a dark coat. Mr. McCann was severe with him. He thought that Tarp was very hard on his clothes.

  Jenny was waiting under the Rose. Tarp paid him and then asked him about the man in the Weald.

  “Harry Gossens. He retired from the navy in seventy-five, been puttering around his roses or some such stuff ever since.”

  “You’re sure he’s alive?”

  “He was yesterday. I telephoned him to ask if he wanted to buy an encyclopedia.”

  “That was bright.”

  “I used to sell encyclopedias, don’t be so quick to criticize!”

  “I never thought of you as a man of letters. What’d he sound like?”

  “Like a nice old duffer, know what I mean? Lonely, I’d say. Was glad to talk to me, even about the encyclopedias. Almost bought one, the poor sod; I had to persuade him not to. Wife died four years ago of the big C; he’s up with bad circulation of the extremities and don’t get about much, he says. Practically bedridden.”

  “You’re sure he’s the right one.”

  “Well, I couldn’t come right out and ask him if he was the Harry Gossens that was on the Loyal, now could I? That would rather have queered whatever lie you’re going to tell him, wouldn’t it? But he’s the Harry Gossens that’s getting the pension check for Harry Gossens, Royal Navy retired, number aught seven seven five eleven fifty-one.”

  “Jenny, I underestimated you. You have resources.”