Under the Freeze

by George Bartram

  “Would he know?”

  “Of course.”

  “He could lie to you.”

  “I suppose. Anyway, that was my message: there is no plutonium in Cuba, and the line to the First Directorate is corrupt. I knew it was corrupt when the woman gave me the false information and now I know it is corrupt because they followed me to Paris so they could kill you. And me.” She touched his hand again. “That is what I carried my rose for.” Her eye was full of tears. “I was so happy when I saw you!”

  He looked at her, at the bandages and the tube and the lost tooth. “You shouldn’t have come,” he said unkindly. “It was stupid. You were almost killed.”

  “Wasn’t my message worth it at all?”

  “No. Not at all.” He was very angry and the anger poured out. “You could have sent it through the line we set up. You brought it because you wanted to indulge yourself. You did it for yourself.” He stood up. “Now look at you.”

  She wept. After a while he apologized for being cruel to her. He kissed the side of her mouth that wasn’t bruised. “I’m going away soon,” he said. “You’re to stay here and get better.”

  “Are they going to interrogate me?”

  “Some. Nothing deep. They’re all right.”

  “When will you come back?”

  “When I’m done.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Never mind.”

  “You’re going to Moscow. Aren’t you?”

  He kissed her again. “You get better.”

  Late that afternoon the helicopter came over the house and Laforet appeared a few minutes after. He visited briefly with Juana and Repin, like a schoolmaster checking on the sick ones in his infirmary, and then he came to sit with Tarp in the wallpapered room. He threw down his hat and his gloves, and sat rather heavily, showing the fatigue of overwork. “I have some bad news for you. You want to hear it first?”

  “Of course.”

  “Your friend Carrington lost his left arm. Just above the elbow.”

  Tarp thought about Johnnie, who seemed so young and so silly and who ran at life so very seriously. “I’m sorry. Thanks, Jules.”

  “He will be all right, they say. He is young; he will bounce back.”

  They sat quietly, thinking about what it meant to bounce back from the loss of a limb. Therese came in with wine and a rough paté and bread and hurried out.

  “I’m done in England,” Tarp said. “You might go on checking on the Homburg business.”

  “I’ve been in touch with your Mr. Smith. I shall ask him, too.”

  “If you can check in Germany, so much the better.”

  Again, a silence fell. Laforet put a little of the paté on the bread and ate a very small bite as if suspicious of it. He nodded approvingly and ate a much bigger bite. He sat back. “Well? What now?”

  “Moscow.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  Laforet looked down at his pant leg. He smoothed it, straightened the crease. “If you mean it, I can have you on the way in two hours.”

  “Now.”

  Laforet snapped his head up and gave him a dazzling smile. “Good. Good luck.”

  Chapter 28

  The house on Podgornyi Street had been built late in the nineteenth century and had been intended to display the solidity of a Russian middle class that did know it was moribund. Now it was a warehouse for a primary school, perhaps scheduled for demolition the next time the city government made a lurch forward. An elderly couple lived in two rooms at the back, their windows covered with rags so that only a sliver of light spilled out over the thin and melting snow. In the rest of the house painted boards covered the windows and the rooms were filled with child-sized school desks, maps of the world that no longer showed what the world was like, and gymnasium equipment that was too clumsy-looking to interest the children of the new age.

  “I am looking for a ticket to The Seagull,” he had said at the kitchen door. Repin had told him that it would not matter how he used the code word seagull. The old woman had looked at him resentfully; then, without a word but frowning terribly, she had pulled the door a few inches wider to indicate he could come in. Tarp heard her whispering fiercely while he waited in a damp entry that smelled of earth and the sour cabbage that was cooking.

  The old man had put his head into the gap of the inner door and looked him over and then disappeared. More whispering, and then he had come and told Tarp to come in. The old woman had gone into their other room — too angry, Tarp thought, to face him.

  “Are you hungry?” the old man demanded. He was in his seventies, or he had suffered enough to look that age. He was dirty, too — obviously a man who had simply given up trying to keep clean.

  “I could eat, yes.”

  The old man put down a plate of cabbage soup and a big piece of dark bread. It was like a stage version of a Russian meal.

  “You see how we have to live,” he said.

  Tarp believed that they had been made nonpersons because of some crime. They were lucky to have even this — two rooms, the stove, food — and he knew that they must have them for some other reason than their good fortune. They were probably informers, recruited after the legal punishment for their crime, put in this place to live out their lives as purveyors of gossip. They would be working for the Moscow police or the local Party secretary or even the Fifth Directorate. Probably the last, Tarp thought, because it would explain how Repin knew about them and had some kind of leverage on them.

  “It has been a long time, you understand,” the old man said, as if he followed Tarp’s thoughts.

  “You need money?”

  The old man brightened. He had an evil, cynical, entirely corrupted grin. “Always. You know the situation.”

  Tarp did not know, but he pretended to. He put a little money on the table. The old man all but sneered. “It takes many drops to fill a bottle,” he said. Tarp shook his head. He did not want them to appear suddenly rich and start other people asking questions.

  The old man took the money and put it up under his heavy sweater in a pocket so high that he had to bend over in a contortion that looked as if he were scratching his own back. When he straightened, he had that dreadful grin again. “You want vodka?” he said.

  “A little.”

  “You pay by the drink here.”

  “All right.”

  He opened a cupboard and took down a bottle. There were other bottles behind it. His bank, Tarp thought. The family fortune.

  “I got a nephew in the black market,” the man said. He squinted at Tarp. “You’re not after black marketeers?”

  “Not my line.”

  “Since Andropov, you know, you can’t trust anybody. We’re all to be saints, he thinks.” He poured three glasses of vodka. “Jews? You after Jews?”

  “Mind your own business.”

  They had been told that the people who came to them from time to time with the code word seagull were clandestine operatives of the Fifth Directorate, who, for unexplained reasons, were working unknown to the Fifth Directorate itself — a Byzantine complexity of double-dealing that only a society haunted by deception could believe.

  “Varya,” the old man bawled. He had filled the glasses to their brims, so that a mound of liquid rose above each. “Varya! Vodka.”

  She shuffled in, wearing felt slippers and a man’s overcoat over a wool skirt. She had been crying. They drank the vodka in an almost ceremonial way. Welcome to Moscow.

  The old man wanted to refill Tarp’s glass and settle down to serious drinking, but Tarp covered it and stood up. “What do you do?” he said. “During the day?”

  The old man hedged, finally allowed that he picked through trash containers in the streets.

  “You know the statue of Gogol?” Tarp said. “Near the power station?”

  “Gogol the playwright?”

  “Are there two Gogols?”

  “Near a power station?”

  “Do you or d
on’t you?”

  “I guess I do.”

  “I want you to go there tomorrow.”

  The old man looked stunned. “It’s half across Moscow!”

  “You’ll be paid.”

  The old woman showed Tarp where he would sleep, a filthy space the size of a closet with one small electric bulb in its ceiling for both heat and light. “You want blankets?” she said.

  “Of course.” He guessed the temperature in the room to be about fifty.

  She shuffled into their bedroom, banged some doors, then appeared loaded down with ancient comforters, seemingly more than he would ever need. She opened her arms when she got near him; bedclothes cascaded to the floor in a pile. She turned around and went back into the bedroom and closed the door.

  Tarp put several of the comforters under him, the rest on top. He slept in the long underwear he had worn from France. In the middle of the night he felt movement on his legs, then itching. He had a small flashlight, and in its beam he saw fleas. He stripped, then sat in the cold, cracking the shiny brown bloodsuckers between his fingernails. They were still slow because of the cold, but he got tired of it, and he put out his light and went to sleep. He even smiled a little, feeling the low hum of tension in himself that always came when things were moving. He imagined himself face-to-face with Maxudov, and he fell asleep.

  In the morning he marked up a copy of Novy Mir, following the code he had worked out with Repin, handed it to the old man, and told him where to leave it near the Gogol statue.

  “Then what do I do?”

  “Come home. Pick up rubbish. As you wish.”

  “I don’t wait by Gogol?”

  “Certainly not.” The man was wearing two overcoats over his sweaters and a torn leather helmet of the kind that aviators used to wear. “I will know if you do not do exactly as I want. You know what will happen if you do it wrong?”

  The old man licked his lips. “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  The next day he sent him to a suburban railway station to look for a message in the restroom. There was none; Tarp had not really expected one yet. The day after, however, the old man had his awful grin on when he came in the door. He handed Tarp a crumpled sheet of newspaper. “It came, it came!” he crowed.

  “What came?”

  “The message, the message you have been waiting for!”

  “You are an idiot.”

  The message was stark — three words indicated by needle pricks five words after those that mattered: Yes Where When. Tarp’s first message had been picked up by a French cutout who had passed it to an Italian who had sent it through two Soviet entrepreneurs; the reply had come through a channel almost as tortuous. Tarp marked up another copy of Novy Mir and sent the old man back to Gogol. He sat quietly in the old house, feeling the hum of suppressed excitement but showing nothing, content to smell the sour smell, to listen to the rats in the walls. After he sent off the second message his tension increased, because now he was sitting like the bait in a trap. Now they knew where he was, and if they wanted, they could make him vanish the way magicians caused things to vanish in stories.

  At twilight of the next day a van backed into the untended lot behind the house. Tarp was sitting in the kitchen, which was the only warm room. He heard the engine as the driver gunned it up over the curb; the old man and woman heard it, too, and they went to a window and tried to look through the rags.

  “It’s a school van,” the woman said, “it says so.”

  “This has never happened before,” the man said. He looked tearful, almost sentimental, like the sad clowns that bad painters make pictures of; Tarp knew that he was frightened.

  A door slammed.

  “Somebody’s coming!” the old woman cried, and she ran into the middle of the kitchen.

  “Let them in,” Tarp said.

  “No!” She began to whisper to herself. Tarp remembered the same sound when he had arrived.

  There was a bold knock at the door.

  “Open it,” Tarp said.

  The old woman tottered to the door. It took her a long time to unwrap the chain and to take down the wood props that they used for security.

  When the door was open a man pushed past her without haste and came into the kitchen. He looked around with professional caution. He had drawn a pistol, a 9mm Makorov, a big, powerful weapon. Two other men came in behind him, similarly armed.

  “Are you Tarp?” the first one said in Russian.

  “Yes.”

  If they were going to kill him, he thought, they would not do it here. They would take him somewhere outside the city, out on the still frozen ground of a forest.

  The man looked around again. He was in his midthirties, one of those sleek, rather round-faced men who seem good-looking because they take care of themselves. He even smelled good; Tarp caught his scent over the smells of the kitchen and the rats.

  He was probably from the Guards Directorate, a hand-picked and utterly loyal gunman.

  “This place won’t do,” the man said. “It stinks.” He walked out of the room, moving the old man out of the way with the same ease and the same lack of interest with which he might have moved a curtain. The old man was looking at Tarp with hatred; next to him, the old woman was sobbing. Tarp was the only one sitting down.

  He heard a jingle of keys and then the sound of a door, then hollow footsteps from that part of the house where the school things were stored. The footsteps got softer and then louder; doors banged; once, something fell and the old man flinched. After ten minutes the sleek man came back; he had put his gun away. He picked up a rag from the wooden sink and wiped his hands on it, hating the rag as much as the dirt. “We’ll use a room in there,” he said. “I left the light on so you’d know which one. Get to it.”

  The other men went past him and disappeared. The round-faced man, who had been wearing a fur hat like the one in which Brezhnev had so often been photographed, put the hat on the broken kitchen table and pulled up a chair. He unbuttoned his heavy cloth coat and let it fall open. Tarp and the round-faced man sat quietly as noises came from the other part of the house; the old man fidgeted.

  “Sit over there,” the round-faced man said. He looked at a bench against the far wall; the old couple almost ran to sit on it. “I have vodka,” the old man said, as if he had been waiting to be spoken to.

  “No.”

  The old woman clutched his arm and wept.

  Twenty minutes later one of the men came back and hunted until he found the remains of a broom. He came back a few minutes later with a piece of cardboard covered with trash, and he threw it and the trash and the broom out into the yard.

  “You want to look?” he said.

  The round-faced man stood up. “Stay here,” he ordered. He was gone only a short time; when he came back he said, “It still stinks. Fix it.” One man went to the van and fetched a string bag in which Tarp could see aerosol cans and plastic bottles. By and by a more pleasant odor, spiced and piney, reached him from the other part of the house.

  “You want to look now?”

  Again the round-faced man went out, leaving the other as a guard; coming back, he said, “Tell them it’s ready,” and his subordinates and the string bag of cleaning materials disappeared.

  They sat in the kitchen for two hours. Tarp made his mind blank, as he had done when he had been captured years before and kept with nothing to do for weeks. Thinking was no help now, so it was best to cleanse the mind. The time passed as if it were the tick of a clock, from which he awoke rested and at ease.

  The round-faced man had stood up. “In five minutes,” he said to Tarp, “you must be ready. You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you need to toilet?”

  “No.”

  “Walk ahead of me. First, I must search you.”

  They walked into the other part of the house. The cold was awesome there. He could smell old wood and mildew and the pine scent. There were overhead lights in the corridor
and in one room; the corridor was lined with school desks that had come out of the room, which had been swept and wiped and polished. The floor was glossy with it. The ceiling fixture had been made for four bulbs to swing on short chains, but only one socket had a bulb in it; on the floor was a plain desk lamp with a frayed cord, alight and turned up to shine into the room.

  Tarp and the round-faced man stood because there were no chairs. The room encouraged stiffness. It had been bullyingly formal once, a symbol of somebody’s propriety and uprightness, angular and without prettiness. It was a room in which humiliated young men were meant to ask stiff-necked fathers for their daughters’ hands, a room in which the priest was to be received for calls.

  A car drew up. It had a big, throaty engine. Doors thudded. Tarp could hear no voices, but he heard feet on a stone walk. The round-faced man stood straighter and checked his tie and his fly, then stepped toward the doorway. There were footsteps in the corridor as several people approached. One figure went past the doorway without looking in, and then a second figure came to it, paused, looked in, and entered.

  It was Andropov.

  He was so tall that he had a habitual stoop, as if the world’s doorways had not been made large enough for him. He was taller than Tarp. He was both professorial and menacing, as if, in his struggle upward for the supreme power of the organization that was both the source of Soviet control and its greatest sickness, he had coupled the intelligence of the academic with the ruthlessness of the gangster. He wore gold-rimmed glasses and a well-made suit, although it fit him as if he had lost weight recently. He was at that age where most men retire and where a few begin the last desperate clawing up the glass mountain of power. He had almost feminine eyes, but familiarity with him showed that not modesty but secretiveness explained them. His lips were full, the nasolabial folds defined, faintly Semitic; in all, he was handsome, intellectual, imposing, weary.

  The round-faced man from the Guards quivered from the tension of being in the same room with him. Andropov did not even seem to notice him; one glance took in the stiff room, the poor light, Tarp. He wore no hat, but his long hands were gloved; he took a step into the room, then whirled, drawing the glove from his right hand with his left almost as if it were not a hand but a weapon he was taking from a sheath. He thrust the hand toward Tarp; he took only Tarp’s fingers, let go instantly. He took another step, turned profile. The round-faced man went to the door and stood there with his back to them.