Under the Freeze

by George Bartram

  Tarp asked questions about plutonium and about submarines. Falomin had a very wide general knowledge and he seemed quite willing to talk. He was either very confident or very daring. The questions quickly became routine. When Tarp stopped to think, Falomin said, “Why did you ask me about the English admiral?”

  “That’s my business.”

  “I have another recollection of the name. He was adviser to the Argentine government when we sold it a submarine.”

  “That wouldn’t seem to fall under your responsibility.”

  “Oh, I know many things that don’t fall under my official responsibility. Every wolf in the pack does.”

  “What else do you know about Pope-Ginna?”

  “I may have a report on him somewhere.”

  “I’d like to see it.”

  “Only if the order comes from the director.”

  “Why tell me about it, then?”

  “To show you that I am a wolf.” Falomin unclasped his hands, took Tarp’s right arm in a powerful grip, and started to walk him up the long gallery. “I am not Maxudov. I am insulted that they think I could be, but I put up with these things; it is part of life. However, I am telling you I am not Maxudov, and I will not be made to feel guilty because I keep a lot of information to myself. Now, your time is up. I told the general secretary how much time I would give you, and your time is up. Leave me alone.”

  They stopped at the door. Tarp put out his hand again, and this time Falomin took it. “You were wrong about me,” Tarp said.

  “I would be very surprised if I was.”

  “I am not a wolf. In Alaska the Eskimos dip a knife in blood and freeze the knife, hilt down, in the ice. A wolf comes along and begins to lick the blood; he cuts his tongue on the knife, and then he licks up his own blood, because it is so cold that he does not know he has cut himself. Soon, he cannot stand. Other wolves come along and eat him. While they are eating, the Eskimos shoot the wolves.” He looked at Falomin, unsmiling. “I am not a lone wolf. I am a lone Eskimo.”

  “And Maxudov is a very smart wolf. I think he knows all those tricks.”

  Chapter 30

  Beranyi was the last on the list. Tarp expected him to be the toughest, although he wondered really what he had gotten from any of them. All would deny being Maxudov to their graves. He could hope to keep pressure on them all, perhaps, and so force the one to do something revealing or stupid.

  “Your next interview will come for you at five,” the round-faced Guards man told him.

  “Like the ghost of Christmas yet to come.”

  “What is that?”

  “Charles Dickens. You don’t read the Christmas Carol?”

  “Charles Dickens, of course. The Cricket on the Hearth. It is a classic production of the Art Theatre. I took my daughter to see it.”

  “In the Christmas Carol, a man waits for visitors he doesn’t really want to see. They keep coming at stated times. They’re more or less ghosts.”

  “Ah.”

  “My visitors are not ghosts.”

  “No.” He laughed.

  The last ones would take him somewhere to meet Beranyi. Saving the best for last. He wondered if it had been Beranyi’s insistence, or if they had drawn straws, or if there was some protocol at work he knew nothing of.

  When he heard a car Tarp got up and began to dress. The days were warmer, but when dark came it was cold again. He put on the heavy overcoat, a wool scarf. “I still need gloves,” he said.

  The Guards man snapped his fingers. “I knew I forgot something! Tomorrow, Comrade.”

  “Maybe I won’t need them.” Tarp went out and found two men in the yard behind the old house. One was Oriental, probably Mongol; he looked distrustfully at Tarp. The other man looked like an American stage cop — beefy, middle-aged, red as if from drink. He looked tough and capable, the kind it would be better to run from than fight; with a ten-yard lead you could wear him out in a block, but if he ever caught you he’d commit murder.

  “We were going to knock,” the big one said.

  “1 saved you the trouble. Let’s go.”

  They looked him over, then studied his identification. They produced their own. They were identified as guards attached permanently to Department V. Nice people.

  “Let’s go,” he said again.

  They were using yet another dark sedan that they had pulled up under the trees. There was a driver in front, and the two guards got in on each side of him in the back. Tarp suspected Beranyi of having chosen them for their looks in order to shake him before the interview began.

  They drove with that disdain for ordinary traffic laws that often marks policemen. It was dusk. Lights were on everywhere. There were deep pools of slush along the roads, and people stepped back as they roared along, trying to avoid the ice water that splashed shoulder high. They would be standing there, trying to wipe the water and the dirty ice from their clothes, muttering about bigshots and Party favoritism; would they have understood if they had known he was American? Being good Soviet citizens, they probably would have the sense not to try to understand.

  It was only when they passed the Dzerzhinsky statue that Tarp understood they were headed for KGB headquarters itself. He was surprised. Beranyi was proving to be the only one audacious enough or secure enough to meet him on home ground. The others had felt a diffidence about being seen where, presumably, they were most themselves.

  The car turned into the wide entrance from the square and drove along between two buildings, turned again and went through a small parking lot in which Tarp could see the white blurs of signs reserving each space. The driver flashed the lights and a door opened upward, exactly like a suburban American garage door. Beyond it was a tunnel through part of an older building, and, at the far end, a courtyard that looked black in the near darkness. The driver spun the wheel and brought the car to a stop in a reserved space next to a gloomy and ancient doorway.

  Tarp had not seen it before, but he knew what it was by instinct: the old Lubyanka Prison.

  Going right to the source.

  The four of them, two in front, one in back with Tarp, walked through the doorway and along a brick corridor where the four sets of feet gave off noises that rang in a way to jangle the nerves. They stopped at a doorway above which a red bulb glowed; when one man knocked, a grill opened, somebody said something. The door opened and a green bulb went on.

  The driver stayed behind. Tarp and the two men who had ridden in the back with him crossed a metal grating as, behind them, the heavy steel door thudded shut. There were metal doors on each side now, then a metal stairway that seemed to plunge down into an open well in the building. They directed him downward.

  I’ve bought it, Tarp thought.

  Beranyi was proving even more audacious than he had guessed. Beranyi was going to take control.

  The metal stairway led to a concrete floor at the bottom of a large open area two stories high. Doors opened from it at each level. High up were lights in factory shades, but their light was inadequate. Any light would have been inadequate.

  The Mongol had a key to one of the doors.

  Inside was a room with a tile floor and white tiles running up the walls to head height. In the center of the room was a round drain with a pierced metal cover, and the floor sloped slightly to it from all four walls.

  The mongol went in. He beckoned to Tarp.

  Tarp started to speak. “I —”

  The beefy one hit him from behind between the shoulders, knocking the breath out of him and sending him forward and down. He caught himself, but, clumsy in the heavy overcoat, he stumbled; another blow put him inside the tiled room. The Mongol swung his right hand, in which Tarp glimpsed something long and dark; it struck his head with a thud like the closing of a door. It was a leather sap, weighted with bird shot to deliver a crushing blow without breaking the skin.

  “Strip,” the beefy one said.

  “I protest,” he had time to say before they hit him again. The beefy
one locked his arms behind him and the Mongol opened the overcoat and broke three ribs with a kick. Tarp tried to kick back and gave it up after a punch in the groin. He was sensible enough that he was in the hands of two experts, and fighting them would be futile.

  They stripped him and went away with the clothes. They came back after half an hour and beat him again. Tarp was afraid that one of the broken ribs would puncture a lung and he covered his chest, and they began to work on his back and kidneys. One of them, in swinging him around, hit his mouth, and they both stopped and looked worriedly at his upper lip.

  “Is he bleeding?”

  “Mostly inside the mouth.”

  “I missed. The fucker ducked.”

  “It was stupid.”

  “You saw it. He ducked.”

  “They won’t like it.”

  They pounded his back with lead-filled, phallic-looking saps and then left him again.

  Two hours later he was moved to a cell on the level above. When he did not move fast enough, they beat his back and buttocks. The flesh there, already bruised, was excruciatingly tender.

  He was alone in the prison, so far as he could tell. There might have been thirty cells around the central opening, but he heard no sounds and never saw another person. It had been reserved entirely for him, he supposed. There would be no record of his having been there and no witnesses except the absolutely essential, probably absolutely loyal few.

  The cell was cold. There was an iron cot with a thin mattress but no bedclothes. In the corner was a water tap and, below it, a three-by-six-inch hole in the concrete — the toilet. There was no window, but high up in the wall opposite the steel door was a metal grate. In the middle of the ceiling were three light bulbs covered with a basket of metal mesh, like the lights in an old gymnasium. The walls were scarred and painted over so much that the once square holes in the gratings were almost round and partly closed. It was a very old part of the Lubyanka, probably a very historic part, in which some very good people had died.

  He tried wrapping himself in the mattress, but it was sewn to the cot with wire. He lay on it and shivered.

  Beranyi. It seemed disappointingly clear. Beranyi, all the time. He wondered if he had been set up in some way by all of them, to give the appearance of an investigation that would end with his disappearance. Perhaps the word was already out in Moscow that he had disappeared. Where? Where did people disappear in Moscow? A thousand places. Anywhere. Or maybe it was Beranyi working all by himself, audacious enough to say that one of the others had done it and Tarp had never reached him. I sent my car to get him, Beranyi might say; he was already gone. We were going to discuss this terrible Maxudov business like civilized men over supper at the Slavansky Bazaar. The Guards men at the house said a car came for him, pretending to be from me. Not mine, of course. Thugs. Criminals hired for the purpose. And so on.

  Well, at least I didn’t destabilize the new regime. “Mr. Smith” will be relieved.

  The door opened and three men came in, the two who had been beating him and a slender man with glasses.

  “He’s a doctor,” the Mongol said. “He’s going to examine you.”

  The doctor probed quickly, deftly. Like many medical men who go into the service of the doomed — prisons, the military — he looked a little defeated. Perhaps he had an ethos, and self-hatred was defeating him. When he prodded the cracked ribs and Tarp cried out, he showed no sympathy. He made notes.

  “Twenty minutes,” he said.

  They took him down to the tiled room and beat him again. When the doctor came in, Tarp was lying with his face almost on the metal drain cover. There was a smear of blood along the floor where he had pulled his right cheek, trying to get up.

  “You have made him bleed,” the doctor said. “Do you never do as you are told?” He put an astringent on the cut and examined Tarp again. Tarp wanted to ask how he was doing, but he knew he would get no answer.

  “Take him upstairs.”

  He hobbled along, holding himself up on the iron railings, as if he were making his way along a pair of parallel bars. He had been kicked in the right thigh and he had trouble walking now. One of them hit his buttocks with the sap to make him go faster.

  The doctor told him to lie down on the cot, and then he began to fill a syringe. “For the pain,” he said.

  Tarp knew better than that. The other two had to hold him. He felt the contents of the syringe go into the muscle, stinging and spreading. Twenty minutes later he was having trouble breathing.

  Perhaps it had looked like an opportunity to try out a new biological agent. His nose was so filled he could not breathe through it; his sinuses pounded; his chest felt small and dry and he could never draw enough air into it. His body temperature fell and he thought that he was losing his strength and his will. When he tried to get up so he could go to the corner and relieve himself, he could not stand.

  “Take him to room seven.”

  Tarp had been asleep. His nightmares had been dreadful, filled with an omnipotent, many armed Maxudov. He looked up at the doctor with hunted eyes. The doctor did not look into his eyes but put a stethoscope to his chest instead. Tarp could not feel its cold touch. He wanted to say that he could not breathe, but his mouth was dry and his tongue was thick and unusable.

  “Don’t make him go too fast. The heart is weak now.”

  They almost had to carry him. He was shivering. Twice he nearly fell, and only their hands under his arms kept him from going down. Their faces loomed horribly at him like things from dreams, all eyes and wrinkled foreheads. He understood after he had thought about it for a while that they were wearing surgical masks.

  He had to go up one flight of metal stairs and down a corridor. There was a room there with a varnished door. Inside were a wood desk and five wood chairs. There was a recorder’s machine on a small table and a typewriter on the desk, but nobody was there to use them. There was no telephone. The walls were bare of decoration, painted mustard below and brown above shoulder height. It was like a room where people had to wait for state employees to process papers for mundane things like auto licenses. The banality of evil.

  There was a short man standing in the room. He had curly gray hair and a dark, almost black mustache. He wore an almost black suit whose tightness suggested powerful shoulders and the beginning of a belly. His nose had a bump below the bridge and another at the end between broadly flared nostrils, below which were very deep nasolabial folds so that he always looked as if he detected a bad smell. He could have been a New York cabdriver or a Paris union organizer, but he was Mikhail Beranyi, the chief of Department V.

  “Put him in a chair.”

  Tarp felt himself pushed to the right. His supports left him and he sank down, to find himself sitting in a straight wood chair.

  The doctor muttered something and showed Beranyi a piece of paper. Next he handed him a surgical mask, which he helped him to tie behind his head. Beranyi made a gesture with his hand, and the others left the room.

  “Tell me your name,” he said.

  Tarp tried to speak. No sound wanted to form in his throat. “Ta —” He took a breath. “Tarp.” He shivered violently.

  “Tell me in Russian why you are in Moscow.”

  Beranyi was simply trying to find if he could talk and think. He knew all these answers, as Tarp had known the answers to so many of the questions he had asked the others.

  “I came — to — look for — look for —” He had to swallow. He sucked air in, trying to fill his burning lungs. “Maxudov. Stolen plutonium.”

  “Good. I am Beranyi. You have already guessed that. You wanted to meet with me; well, we meet. I am not like the others, you see. I do not choose to tell you anything. Instead, I choose that you tell me. Once you have told me things, you will be quite safe. But you understand your position here. You are alone. You can hardly walk; you are very sick. If you do not work with me, you will be beaten. And there are worse things, to be sure.” He passed his right hand over hi
s cheek, making a scratchy sound that Tarp associated with not shaving. Maybe it was late in the day, or even night. “Tell me now in Russian that you understand.”

  “I understand.”

  “Good. Now, we begin.”

  He pulled a chair closer and sat down, taking a dingy notebook from a pocket as he did so. He uncapped a plastic pen. He took a pair of plastic-rimmed glasses from a case and put them on. “Begin with Telyegin. You saw him when, please?”

  “Telyegin?” He had to concentrate fiercely to remember who Telyegin was. Old man in the wheelchair. He hated me. In the dacha. Yes, that one. He began to talk, the words disjointed and his voice hoarse, but Beranyi paid no attention to his condition. He made notes. Tarp shook so badly sometimes that he thought he would fall out of the chair. Beranyi called the others into the room and said, “Do something with him, he keeps falling.” The Mongol put a chair on each side of Tarp and draped his arms over them so that they supported him. Beranyi jerked his head and the man left.

  “Feodor Strisz next. That is correct, is it not — Strisz next?”

  Tarp fought for air and could manage only panting breaths. His head was down on his chest. His arms were shaking on the chairbacks, yet there was a film of sweat matting the hair on his chest and belly, as if he had been rubbed with grease.

  Beranyi went on. He would let Tarp talk until he ran out of voice; then he would backtrack and ask a question from another direction. The character named Strisz in the Theatrical Novel — who had brought that up? Why? Did Strisz laugh then? Did Strisz mention Cuba? What did he say? Why did he say that? What was his tone of voice?

  Tarp woke up in his cell. He did not remember it ending, but here he was. Maybe I just stopped. Maybe I died.

  He was not shivering now; in fact, he was hot. He had new pains across his shoulders that were not the result of the beating, but of fever.

  Tarp put a foot on the floor, then a hand, and then he let himself down and crawled to the corner. He squatted over the hole, smelling the sickness of his body. There was no paper, no towel. He slowly raised his left hand to the faucet above him, only to find that he lacked the strength to turn it on. He gave up and crawled back to the iron cot but had to lie next to it on the floor because he could not get up on it.