“Christ, a compliment! It must be about to rain solid gold suppositories. A compliment from the original hard case! Oh, Mum, can I write it down in my commonplace book?”
Tarp handed him the coat and the hat. “Be a chauffeur.” Barnwell looked at the clothes with disgust. “I should of known. First the pat on the head, then the shove into the pismire. A bloody servant!”
Tarp sat in back while Barnwell, now in the rather ill-fitting chauffeur’s costume, drove him down to Mrs. Bentham’s in Croyden. She peered out through impeccable curtains to see what chauffeured eminence had driven up; recognizing Tarp as her Mr. Rider, she was so grand that he had trouble making sense out of her. She had one thing for him: a list of the German civilians on the Homburg.
“Still classified, Mr. Rider! And publication of these names would involve us both in a technical violation of the act. You are warned.”
“And the names?”
“Three scientists, a banker, an engineer, and four others who were either diplomats or military men incognito. Some of them were easy to identify, but some I simply haven’t had time to track down. Shall I persist?”
“Please do.”
“I didn’t really find a great deal, I’m afraid. These were highly secretive people, you know. One librarian suggested that I might do better on the other side of the Iron Curtain. They seem to have been active there during the Nazis’ heydays.”
“Perhaps I’d better go there to look, then. Thank you so much.”
They drove south and then east, through the far suburbs of London, past one of the reservoirs where boats were being painted, as if spring were really almost there, and into the rising country above the Downs. The narrow road plunged downhill and then up again, always twisting, and there were deep woods and gullies that looked as dark and secretive as they must have when the Romans had found Britons smelting iron here. Harry Gossens’s village was a wriggling cross of two roads lined on each side with brick houses with a pub at the end of each arm as if to mark the limit. It occupied only the top of a hill; on all four sides the roads plunged down into more of the Weald’s wooded gloom.
“Ask at the post office store,” Tarp said.
“Oh, la, just like a bloody capitalist. I ain’t really your chauffeur, you know, ducks.”
“Ask at the store, Jenny.”
Harry Gossens lived in an attached house in a row of four behind the church, as if they had once been almshouses or even a school. The house looked clean and cared for, the small front yard given the excessive care of someone with not enough to do. Tarp rang and then waited a long, long time while the sounds of painful shuffling came toward him through the house.
“Yes?”
Harry Gossens was bent. His head was twisted a little to the left and his neck seemed unable to support it so that it hung forward. He had been a tall man when he stood straight.
“Mr. Gossens? Mr. Gossens, my name is Matthew Rider and I’m an author. I’m writing a book on one of your country’s great ships. I wonder if you can help me with some questions about HMS Loyal?”
Mr. Gossens seldom closed his mouth. It made a constant, soft, interrogative circle at the bottom of his face, as if life had become so puzzling to him that he would never get enough answers to justify closing it. “I — I’m sorry.” He stared at Tarp. “I don’t hear well. You said your name is Rider?”
“Yes, Matthew Rider. I’m a writer.” He had meant to say author, because “Rider the writer” sounded funny. “I’m writing a book on the Loyal.”
“The Loyal.” Gossens considered that, gazing down at Tarp’s shoes. “A book, you say?”
“Yes, a book. About the Loyal.” Tarp had a story ready — that he had written several letters to Gossens and received no answer; that perhaps the naval office had given him the wrong address.
“Come in, come in,” Gossens said surprisingly. He gave a kind of ghastly chuckle. “No point in heating the whole outdoors, as my father used to say. Would your, um, young man care to come in?”
Tarp looked back toward the Humber, where Jenny was slumped against the fender. “No,” he said decisively.
They drank tea and ate a dark, heavy cake thick with fruit and some rather stale scones and a paste of mashed sardines. Gossens rustled this up by banging on the wall, a noise that brought the woman from the next house, who, he explained, “took care of him.” She came in twice a day and in emergencies like this one. “And the church is very good. Very good.”
“I’m sure.”
“Very good. Hot meals. Very good.” Mr. Gossens was a religious man. A Bible and a crucifix and two religious pictures were very prominent. He was not a dedicated navy man, as it turned out: he had joined the navy on the day Churchill had been made first lord in 1939, purely out of patriotism and a sure instinct for greatness. He had stayed in for thirty-six years because there was nothing he would rather have done. Now, his house had not a memento of those days.
“I had hoped you might be able to help me with the encounter with the Prinz von Homburg,” Tarp said.
“There was a terrible thing, now.”
“Was it?”
“Terrible. So cold. I was snug in the navigation section, you know, not even having to go up to shoot readings, but those poor fellows out on the decks! We had ice on the ship as thick as — as I don’t know what. It was terrible. I think often about those poor Germans in the water, and us not able to help them. I pray about that still.”
“Why couldn’t you help them?”
“It was dark, and there was ice. It was quite peculiar. We’d broken out of the ice that afternoon, I remember it very clearly; there we were all of a sudden with open ocean. Oh, I was so glad to see it! Though you’d have died in minutes if you’d gone over, you know. Still, it looked so much more — more natural than the ice. We’d been trailing an icebreaker for two days, you know, with Homburg up ahead out of range, they said. It was terrible. The men used to come down from the deck watches with their faces frozen, some of them. They lost toes, fingers. I hate the cold, I always have. It was terrible.”
“You came out of the ice into the open ocean before you sank the Homburg?”
Gossens chuckled. “Oh, I didn’t sink the Homburg. On a big ship, you know, Mr., um, Rider, you’re ever so faraway, and the guns go bang, and then by and by somebody says you’ve made a hit. There we were in the navigation section, closed in with charts and readings and gauges, you know, we might as well have been in London, I used to say. What was your question, sir? I’m so sorry … Ah, about the ice! Yes, we came out. That was why the navigation officers were so confused.”
“Because of the ice?”
“The water. We’d been proceeding mostly by dead reckoning — that’s a form of educated guessing — because we had no electronics down there, no Loran or any of that; and the weather was simply constant fog and cloud and snow, we hadn’t shot a star in days. Taken a reading, I mean — do you understand celestial navigation? It’s steering by the stars in very mathematical fashion. Well, we couldn’t do that. And dead reckoning had us deep in the ice, you know, and then we broke through into the open ocean, and the navigation officer and His Holiness — that was Admiral Pope-Ginna, we called him His Holiness; you see the pun, of course — you aren’t Roman Catholic, are you? I meant no offense — no, no, dear me … Where was I? Oh, there was quite a set-to. His Holiness was both ship’s captain and flag officer, and so his ship’s navigation was the example for the force. Well, we seemed to be scores of miles from where dead reckoning had us. There was a great row. Then one of our airplanes sighted the Homburg in the ice. It was sheer luck, they said. You know. War’s half luck, I think. Or God’s will, and we call it luck because we’re blind. Are you a religious man, Mr. Rider?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Ah. You should be afraid indeed. No offense. ‘If the righteous know fear, what shall be in the hearts of the sinful and the ignorant?’ No offense.”
“How did they resolve the navig
ational problem?”
“Well, there was the battle, you see. We went right into battle formation, flank speed, off in a direction where the Homburg wasn’t supposed to have been, until the seaplane saw it. Then, they said, they got it on the radar and the guns started. It was night by then. Such a night as it was! I went up on deck for a moment, thinking to see something. Guns roaring, black as a cat’s belly, snow coming down, and somewhere off there was something they were supposed to be shooting at.”
“Did you know when they sank the Homburg?”
“Well, we heard something of it. A hit, and so on. But as for sinking, you know, a capital ship doesn’t go down like a hammer you’ve dropped in the water. Some of them take days. The Homburg went quickly, as big ships go. It was gone by the morning, I mean.”
“And did you pick up survivors?”
Gossens was silent. “Too few. Too few.”
“Why?”
Gossens breathed heavily through his mouth. “They told us there were many, many icebergs. There was great fear we’d strike on one. That is not an idle fear down there, Mr. Rider. We did stay in the area another day and a night. But …” His voice trailed off. “Poor chaps. Even if they were Germans.” He looked appealingly at Tarp. “Do you believe the Germans are terrible men?”
“Some of them were then. Not the ones who died down there, I suppose. Not most of them.”
Gossens sighed. He was tiring, Tarp saw. Yet he was younger in years than Repin. It was important to Tarp to tie down the matter of the ship’s position as closely as possible. “About the navigational row.”
“Yes. Terrible row. Yes.”
“How did they settle it?”
“They settled it by His Holiness telling them what the position was to be, that’s how they settled it! He was a splendid leader, Pope-Ginna. Men liked him. I always liked him, as much as a rating can like an admiral. But he could be a holy terror, too. What we heard was that he’d called the navigation officers of every ship in his force for a conference — and indeed, we had ’em coming over in the breeches buoy, murderous thing to do in those seas — and a fellow who had been there taking notes said he took everybody’s dead reckoning estimate and compared them all and then told them what the position was, as coming from the flagship. They could like it or lump it — meaning they could file official protest to the flag log if they wanted. You can imagine how many takers they had. Actually, I believe there were hearings after we returned to Port Stanley, but the real row was over. His Holiness had his way, I believe — as was only right and proper, of course.”
“And did you have to go through the ice again after you sank the Homburg?”
Gossens stared at him. His eyes were as round as his mouth. “Yes, as a matter of fact, we did. It was very peculiar.”
“As if you’d been in a lake of open water surrounded by the ice.”
“Yes. That’s just what it was like. But that’s fanciful.”
Tarp smiled and rose to go. “Well, writers are fanciful people. Thank you so much.”
Gossens had been delighted for the company, but now he was glad to see Tarp go, because he was tired. Age had come down to that paradox for him.
“Enjoy your tea, Mr. Rockefeller?” Barnwell said as he drove them away from the town.
“As a matter of fact, I did.”
“I bloody near froze my ass off. Never gave a thought to me, I suppose.”
“You could have gone to a pub.”
“I did go to a pub! Christ, you didn’t even notice I was gone! It’s lovely to be a negligible human being, believe me, just lovely! Christ, you’re a specimen.” He pounded the wheel. “How was the old poop?”
“As a matter of fact, he wanted to ask you in.”
“Yeah, see? See? There are some genuine human beings left in the world! Not that I ever meet them, naturally. Or work for any of them!” His eyes met Tarp’s in the rearview mirror. Tarp said nothing, making Barnwell’s mood even worse.
“Drop me at Gatwick,” he said as they came to the highway.
“Oh, very good, my lord.”
“And take the car back wherever you got it.”
“Oh, thank you, my lord!”
He flew out of Gatwick on a shuttle to Lille and, instead of going on to the farm, spent the night there. Deep fatigue had settled over him on the flight, and with it the depression that makes all things seem pointless. He wanted to believe that what he was doing was worthwhile, and so he sought sleep.
Chapter 27
He picked up a car in Lille in the morning and drove down toward the coast with nothing in his belly but black coffee. He was no more hopeful than he had been the night before. He knew it was time to go to Moscow, and he felt as if he were holding nothing in his hands but strands like the slime of fish, which slipped through and broke and were gone.
He left the car at the gate and walked up the stony road. One of the security guards was standing by a copse of trees seventy yards away and waved languidly, but there was no other greeting. Tarp went to the kitchen and found fresh-baked bread and some of the cheese; he ate the bread and cheese standing by a window set up high in the kitchen wall. Therese came in and watched him, more as if he were some domesticated animal she had been set to watch than a human being. Without looking at her he said, “Has the other woman come?”
“The beautiful one?” she said without envy.
“I suppose.”
“Yes. She is upstairs.” Her canine eyes watched him as he finished the food and drank a cup of bitter coffee that she put down for him. He went by her and up the stairs, noticing that Repin’s room was empty and that the fourth room had belongings scattered all over it, clothes and medical instruments and stupid popular magazines, all the signs of the nurse’s occupation. Juana’s door was closed, and he knocked and then went in, finding her in the high, rather old hospital bed, with an IV bottle hanging in a rack beside her. The nurse was sitting in a chair with one of the mindless magazines. “Leave us,” Tarp said; she started to resist but he said it again in the same inflexible tone and she left them.
Tarp looked at Juana. Her left eye was covered with a bandage that should have looked rakish but that looked dangerous because it suggested that so much of her head was injured; her left arm was taped up against her lower ribs, and the long gash along the shoulder was heavily bandaged, with a tube coming from it to drain the worst of the wound. Her short-cropped punk-rock hairdo stood up above her bandage like a cockerel’s tail.
“I didn’t betray you,” she said quietly.
“I never thought you did.”
“Of course you did.” She didn’t open her mouth very far. He saw that she had lost a tooth in front. “Somebody betrayed me,” she murmured.
“Who?”
“Somebody who wanted to kill us. Don’t you think?” He sat down on the bed on her right side and held her hand. She did not respond much. “It was awful,” she said. “All those people.”
“You saved me,” he said. He was not sure it was true, but it was true enough. He breathed heavily. “Why did you come?”
“I love you.”
“You hardly know me.”
“I know.” She turned her face to the left; her right shoulder made an effort to shrug.
“Did you have a message for me?”
“Of course!” In her anger, she turned back to face him.
“What was it?”
She looked away again. “I am not really Cuban.”
“I know.”
“You do? Yes, of course. I forget things now. The doctor says that will pass. My father is Spanish. My mother is African. I grew up in Moscow. When I was sixteen, they said they wanted to send me to a special school; it would help my father, they said. He was in the camps then. For revisionism. I went to the school and became a technician in intelligence; then I was recruited for fieldwork. My father was home by then. They sent me to Havana, which Moscow does not trust very much.”
“I know.”
“
I report to a man named Sandor.” She rolled her head back to look at him. “You are not KGB, are you?”
“No.”
“You lied to me. Lied and lied. For a long time I didn’t believe you. Then, in the safe house in Havana, I believed you. Now I don’t believe you.”
“I’m not KGB. I’m not anything. I’m working for the man you saw me bow to at the ballet. He is working for Andropov.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“No.”
She breathed in and out. “But I love you. I reported to a man named Sandor. He reports through channels to the Eleventh Department of the First Directorate — that is —”
“I know.”
“All right, you know. Kepel reports that way, too. That means that there are two channels reporting the same thing to Moscow, so there is a way of cross-checking. I was trying to find out about plutonium, as you asked me. Back when I believed you.” She stroked his hand with two fingers, then pulled them away. “I had sometimes a — relationship with a scientist at the academy.” She twisted her head so that she could look up at him. She searched his face for a response. “You’re a stone, aren’t you?” she said bitterly.
“What did you find out from your scientist?”
She waited, gave the one-shouldered shrug again. “A woman who ran errands for Sandor came to me and told me she knew something I ought to know. She said that she had been ordered from Moscow to help me with the plutonium investigation. I said I didn’t know what she meant. She said, ‘You know, your tall friend in the KGB.’ So I let her talk. I knew she was a fake. Or thought I did. She told me that two submarines had docked in Cuba and unloaded plutonium at the small base near Guantanamo.”
“How was she supposed to know this?”
“She didn’t say.”
“She knew you’d been with me in Havana?”
“Of course, what else? Sandor had found me out somehow. So he fed me this information, I suppose on orders from above someplace. So I talked to my scientist that night. I slept with him. See how much I love you? I love you so much I sleep with other men for you.” The right side of her mouth smiled bitterly. “There is no plutonium in Cuba. He says it categorically, and I believe him.”
Under the Freeze Page 25