Under the Freeze

by George Bartram

  “Why the transfer?”

  “Because I am an ambitious man.” He raised his eyebrows as if to say, Surprise, surprise! “I asked to be switched to satellite communications training for one year and then to be given a suitable post in the Eighth Directorate. Am I saying too much?” He pretended to be worried. “Am I violating security, telling you this?”

  “The Eighth Directorate is satellite and electronic communications. I believe that’s already known in Washington.”

  “A Soviet citizen can be arrested for discussing these things with a foreigner. Are you really a foreigner? How do I know you’re not a Ukrainian in disguise? Ukrainians are the very devil for disguises. I may be one, in fact — this may be a false face I’m wearing.”

  “Why did you want the transfer?”

  “Because my post in the First Chief Directorate is a beautiful dead end. Do you think the future of communism lies in the reports of agents planted in the Warsaw Pact countries and Cuba? I doubt it — really, I doubt it. Satellite communications, on the other hand — there, an ambitious man could have a good time.” For a moment his face was open, as if he were asking Tarp to understand him as a man. It could have been part of his act. “I’m still young as these things go — the Soviet Union is a country of young workers and old leaders, as you may have noticed. Twenty years as head of the Eleventh Department doesn’t much excite me; twenty years scrambling to the head of First Chief Directorate does.”

  “You would have to take an inferior post.”

  “I have faith in my own abilities.”

  “That sounds like something that Maxudov might say.”

  “Now who’s indulging in psychology?”

  Strisz was a good subject for interrogations. He was, as Andropov had said, intelligent, but he was also strong-willed. “Look here,” Tarp said, trying to sound hard but not unfriendly. “The man I want set up a clandestine network in Cuba, I’m sure of it. That took time and it took inside knowledge. You’re the ideal man for that. You have the opportunity, the contacts — I’m sure you have rewards you can hand out — you know the KGB presence there because you’re in charge of it. All right-on that basis, you are Maxudov.” He held up his hand as Strisz got ready to say something. “However, I’m also looking for a man who seems to have set up something much cruder in London.”

  “Same man?” Strisz said conversationally. He might have been listening politely to a story about a not very interesting acquaintance.

  “Perhaps. Logic would say so.” Tarp leaned back. “But I don’t think you’re the man who tried to kill me in London.” Strisz smiled a little painfully. “Did I try to kill you in Cuba?”

  “That could certainly be.”

  “And who stole the plutonium.”

  “Yes, and who blew up Repin and that aircraft. Did you ever see those dancers?”

  “They weren’t from Moscow.”

  “They were very young. Good-looking, vital.”

  “Are you trying to shame me?”

  “Maxudov is beyond shame.”

  “Well, surprisingly, you do shame me. Amazing, yes? I’m amazed myself. I don’t like death. I don’t like violence. I’ve never been involved in wet work. I am an intelligence officer. I am fascinated by the collection and analysis of facts. The other side of the business …” He seemed sincere. “It is evil. Do you believe me?”

  “You seem very believable. But Maxudov will always seem believable.” Tarp stood up. “I may want to talk to you again.”

  “But do you believe me?”

  Tarp looked at him. He knew that nobody who had risen this high could be simple or simply fun-loving or really open. He thought of Juana’s bandaged head and the huge gash on her shoulder. He thought of the dancers in Havana. He thought of the old man lying in his blood in the Paris restaurant. He thought of Johnnie Carrington without his arm. “No, I don’t believe you,” he said. “If you really thought you hated violence, and you stayed in this business, you would be so self-deluded you would be a lunatic. You aren’t a self-deluded man.” He gathered up his papers and his coat and the Astrakhan hat he had been provided. “Neither is Maxudov.”

  *

  Konstantin Mensenyi met him in a park. Their cars were thirty yards apart on the wet, narrow road, the drivers inside with their newspapers while the two men walked across a field on which melting snow lay in a pierced crust that stood on the tips of the grass like lace. The firs that stood around the field were black in the gloom of the dense cloud.

  Mensenyi was grossly fat — double-chinned, blubber-lipped. Tarp disliked him on sight, then scolded himself for deserting any attempt at objectivity.

  “I protest,” Mensenyi began. “I am making my protest formally, to the general secretary. It is bad enough to be suspected of the worst crime of the century, but it is unspeakable that they should bring me face-to-face with a man like you.”

  “Your department is Latin America?” Tarp said coldly.

  “Did you hear what I said just now?” Mensenyi had a rather high voice. The fat and the high pitch made him seem a eunuch, but his file mentioned a wife and five children and a problem with a girl who had been a maid in the house.

  “Your protest is noted and I think you are wise to make it formally to the secretary-general. Is your department Latin America?”

  “You know it is.”

  “Including Cuba?”

  “You know the answer to that, too.”

  “I’d prefer to hear it from you.”

  “Bah. Very well. Cuba is not in my department except in cases where there is overlap.”

  “Argentina?”

  “Argentina, yes.”

  “You managed the transfer of intelligence materials to the Argentinians during the Falklands war?”

  “That is not relevant.”

  “It is relevant if I make it relevant. Answer the question.”

  “I protest. I will put this in my written protest as a breach of security. The answer is yes — note what sort of grief you may have caused yourself by acquiring classified data!”

  “Did you receive a reprimand from the director for your conduct of intelligence during the Falklands war?”

  Mensenyi grunted, then stopped. He looked around them, as if to make sure they were in the very center of the lace-covered field. “A letter was put in my file,” he said softly.

  “You used a courier sometimes whom you called Penguin.”

  “Code name Penguin, yes, yes. What has this to do with anything?”

  “Penguin made four trips to the Soviet Union in the last three years.”

  Mensenyi stared at him. He breathed partly through his mouth; his nose was thickened above the nostrils as if from adenoids. “Well, what if he did?”

  “Three of them came immediately after three of the plutonium thefts.”

  “I —” Mensenyi breathed heavily and then puffed out his cheeks. “The dates of the thefts are not known. Surely. Are they?”

  “Putting two and two together, Comrade — the sailing dates of certain submarines — yes, that is known well enough. What have you to say about this coincidence?”

  “It is a coincidence, what else? Ask Penguin, if you think you have made such a brilliant analysis! Eh? Go ahead!”

  “Give me the identity of Penguin, and I will.”

  Mensenyi contrived to look very sly. “Oh, no. That is very highly classified. No, no, you don’t trick me that way.” He stabbed a short, gloved finger into Tarp’s chest. “If you want to know that, you go to the general secretary.”

  Andropov had called Mensenyi a clown. He struck Tarp as more of an ox, a stubborn, almost immovable dullard. In fact, he reminded Tarp of Hacker, the CIA turncoat.

  “You have made five trips to the West since 1971,” Tarp said. “England twice, France twice. Canada once …”

  “What of it?”

  “What was the purpose?”

  “I was meeting with very important people from the other side.”

  “
Yes, that’s what the file says. What were the real reasons?”

  “The file reasons are the real reasons!”

  “There are very few good reasons for a department head’s leaving Moscow.”

  “I was not department head until 1977.”

  “Your last trip was to London in 1981.”

  Mensenyi set his fleshy jaw. His cheeks, mottled with red from the raw, wet breeze, looked like slabs of meat. “I brought out an English agent who was going to be exposed.”

  “England is not in your area.”

  “I was ordered to bring him out.”

  “You were ordered to bring him out because you begged to do so. It’s all in the file.”

  Mensenyi’s face became ugly. “He was an old friend.”

  “You make a hobby, do you, of running agents in areas not your own?”

  “I do whatever I can to help the nation, the Party, and world communism. I have always cultivated foreigners. I understand the foreign mentality. I have performed valuable service, turning foreigners to good use.”

  “You’ve also imported a remarkable collection of foreign art objects and consumer goods. You’ve even once been the object of an investigation into a black market food shop run for the diplomatic community in Moscow.”

  “I explained all that satisfactorily,” Mensenyi said hoarsely. “It was to entrap foreigners.”

  “And turn a profit.”

  “I turned all profit over to the state!”

  “After the investigation began.”

  “Bad timing! I was guilty of bad timing!”

  Andropov had been right. The man was a clown.

  Tarp ran quickly through the dates of the foreign visits, his contacts in the nuclear industry, his proximity on two occasions to the home port of the submarines at Murmansk. Mensenyi was sweating despite the wind. “You have nothing!” he shouted. He was in rage, or pretending to be. “I am innocent! I am not Maxudov! I am a thousand times better man than you!”

  “Have you read Bulgakov’s Theatrical Novel?”

  “What?”

  “I may want to talk to you again in a few days.”

  “Wait — See here …” Mensenyi put a gloved paw on his arm. “You’re finished?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well …” The blubber lips quivered. “See here, you don’t seem to be a stupid man. Nor unsophisticated. Tell me the truth. Do you know who Maxudov is?”

  Tarp removed the hand from his arm. “I may want to talk to you again in a few days.”

  “Yes, but see here …” He pulled at Tarp’s sleeve. “This can’t be easy for you. I understand that. You have to forgive my outbursts; I’m a man of short temper. It comes of having principles. Innocent men are often like that. But see here … a man like you, what happens to you when this is over? I understand the foreign mentality. I mean, I know what ambition is in the West. In Moscow, a man of your stature would be wealthy. You deserve that — eh? Here you are, working in the highest, the very highest echelons of the service, who knows, maybe even the Presidium is consulting with you. And what will your reward be? You maybe ought to be giving some thought to your own future, do you follow me? After this is over, maybe?”

  Tarp pushed the hand away roughly this time. “Not interested.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Not interested. You know what that means — Comrade.”

  It had been a clumsy attempt at a bribe. Maybe it had been an intentionally clumsy one, so that later Mensenyi could deny that he had meant it. He would say that he had been laying a trap, and in fact he probably was. “Already above his proper level,” Andropov had said, and he had been right. Tarp thought of the stupid people all over the world who had risen too high in intelligence because of political shrewdness or luck or influence. They made it much more dangerous than it already was.

  They walked back toward the cars, Mensenyi keeping a couple of yards’ distance between them. Still, when they were fifty feet from the road and at the bottom of a steep bank leading up to it, he came closer. “See here,” he said, “there’s no reason why you would say anything to implicate me.”

  “No?”

  “I’ve been cooperative. Let me make a gesture to prove how cooperative I am. I’ll tell you who Penguin is.” Tarp was a step or two up the bank and so was looking down at him. The broad, sweaty face was turned up in appeal. “It’s an Englishman. His name is Pope-Ginna. That’s classified.”

  “I’ll make a note of it.”

  *

  Josef Falomin waited for him at the end of a long baroque gallery in a museum of second-rate paintings. The building looked like a minor palace that the Bolsheviks had overlooked; closed until after World War Two, it had been used to house some of the overflow from other museums as Moscow modernized itself. There was an elderly guard at the gallery entrance and, across an echoing and domed corridor, an Oriental group with an Intourist guide. Otherwise the building seemed as deserted as if its owners had just been grabbed and shot by the Reds.

  A hard-faced young Mongol was standing next to Falomin. Falomin was in his sixties, big-chested, stolid, ruddy as if he ate too much and took long walks to make up for it. He had watched Tarp as he had come down the long gallery under half-naked Renaissance goddesses and leering satyrs, between overstuffed sofas and panels made gaudy with too much gilt. Falomin, his hands crossed in front of him, looked as immovable as a tank. When Tarp was close, the young man, who was standing in profile to Tarp, held out a hand toward him, palm up. “This is the American,” he said.

  Falomin stood on ceremony. A formal introduction, no less. “I am Tarp.”

  “This is Comrade Falomin.”

  Tarp held out his hand, which was ignored.

  “I will now leave you,” the young man said. His shoes clacked on the marble floor long after he had turned into the corridor.

  “Would you like to sit?” Tarp said.

  “No.”

  “You know why I am here.”

  “Of course. I have a file on you.”

  Tarp waited. Falomin spoke with the flat voice of a man controlling an anger. It was a humiliation for him to go through this — above all for him, who ran the department that terrorized the rest of the KGB, the diplomatic corps, and every Soviet citizen who left the frontiers.

  “You are the head of Special Service Two?”

  “You know I am.”

  “You were in London during World War Two?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you tell me about it?”

  “I was a file clerk in the military liaison office. I maintained certain connections. Those were very disorganized days.”

  “You ran a network?”

  “I was too young. I was a file clerk.”

  “But you ran agents in London.”

  “I had certain foreigners I kept contact with.”

  “Who?”

  “I am sure it is in my file. The foreign so-called freedom fighters who had taken refuge in London — the Poles, the Yugoslavs, the French.”

  “Did you have contact with an Englishman named Pope-Ginna?”

  “I had no contact with the English.” Tarp thought he had scored, however; for the first time there was an edge to Falomin’s voice.

  “Did you know Pope-Ginna?”

  “No.”

  “But you had heard of him.”

  “Perhaps. I have some recollection of the name.”

  “In what connection?”

  “A naval victory, I think. In a very cold place, I do remember that. Colder even than this tomb.” He looked at the gallery with distaste. “It amused me at the time. The English were astonished by stories of the ice. To a Russian it seemed commonplace.”

  “I thought you had no contact with the English.”

  “In the newspapers, I meant.”

  “What you meant was, your English mistress was astonished.”

  Falomin stared at him. He blinked. It was like seeing a rock blink, “it is in my file, I sup
pose,” he said slowly.

  “You had a child in England, in fact.”

  “It is in the file.”

  “Have you ever seen her?”

  “I have not left the Soviet Union since I returned in 1946.”

  “Isn’t that odd, for a man who controls a worldwide department?”

  “I don’t find it odd.”

  Tarp was wearing a Russian overcoat, but he had no gloves. He had to keep his hands in the thick pockets, and even then his hands were cold. Outside, the sun was shining, but the museum was frigid. “You know what I am looking for,” he said.

  “Naturally.”

  “You are the perfect candidate for Maxudov, on paper. You have access to every embassy, every Soviet traveler. You have the organization to cover up a complex operation inside the Soviet Union.”

  Falomin still looked like a rock. “What motive have I?” he asked in the same flat voice.

  “I wish I knew.”

  “Perhaps you would like to suggest some romance about my daughter in England. Or perhaps her mother — love, let us say. Is that what you want to suggest?”

  “No.”

  “No.” Falomin looked smug. “In fact, all that has been thoroughly checked. Yes? My old mistress has been dead for eleven years; my daughter married a professor and went to Australia in 1967. There is no romance. What is my motive, then?”

  “Power.”

  Falomin looked contemptuous. “Don’t talk about things you cannot possibly understand. It is a very American habit. You do not understand power. I respect you — I know your background, and I respect you — but I know that you are not a creature of the pack. You are a lone wolf. The creature alone does not understand power. Except his own power, and perhaps in that! envy you, for I have no chance at that. But real power is found only in the pack. Not alone. I am a wolf, too. We are all wolves here. When a wolf gets old or sick, the other wolves turn on him and eat him. Every wolf I eat increases my own power. Until one day I will be eaten. But do not tell me that I have made myself Maxudov in order to increase my power. Maxudov is outside the pack, like you.”

  “Maxudov is a loner?”

  “If he is one of us, he left the pack or was driven from it. That is Maxudov.”

  “That’s an interesting idea.”