Under the Freeze

by George Bartram

  This isn’t fatal, he told himself. This is some kind of flu. They do ads about it on television. Everybody gets it. He knew that that was not quite true. He had never been this sick. Common ailment. Keeps doctors in business. Keeps doctors’ wives in fur coats. Keeps doctors in the Republican party. Without flu, doctors would have to go on welfare. Very common. What he had was not common, but it might become so if the Soviets used it as an ABC agent. Perhaps they would try it out in Afghanistan or Southeast Asia, where respiratory infections really cut a swath. Take two aspirin and go to bed. He looked up at the underside of the bed he couldn’t get into.

  This is the preliminary. When I’m weak enough, he’ll go after me with chemicals. Sodium pentathol, maybe. The trouble with the chemicals that made people talk was that they also made some people crazy or silly or mute with depression — or dead. I know what my choices are. It would have been romantic to think of it as a battle of wills with Beranyi, but all the will that he had he needed simply to stay sane.

  The one thing he could do was fence off some of what he knew. Perhaps he could protect Repin. Perhaps he could keep Pope-Ginna to himself. It seemed important still to keep the Argentine part of it — Schneider, Pope-Ginna, the Prinz von Homburg — separate and to keep it, if possible, from the Soviets. Unless Beranyi were Maxudov, in which case he would be learning only what he already knew. Or would he? Even in his fever, that made him concentrate. What if Maxudov doesn’t know about them?

  He would protect Jules Laforet somehow. And Hacker, because he would be no use at all once the Soviets learned he had been turned back.

  And the amenities at the New Monroe. I don’t think I want Beranyi staying there.

  He concocted a reality. In his invented reality, Repin was dead in the wreckage of the Aeroflot plane; Hacker was believed to be a loyal American; Jules Laforet had not figured in his work at all. He had never heard of Pope-Ginna. He thought of that for a while. He had talked to two of the others about Pope-Ginna. Maybe he could retreat to the code name Penguin and give that to Beranyi. So, in his new reality, he had heard of an agent called Penguin who was a go-between with Argentina. That, however, gave Beranyi access to the little he knew about Argentina, or it would if he were made vulnerable by chemicals and if he hadn’t tied up all the loose ends. Then it became necessary to invent a recent past in which there was no Argentina. Only somebody called Penguin.

  Tarp told it all to himself as if it were a story, from the moment when Repin appeared at the Scipio’s dock. He tried to imagine every detail. He cut events totally — Argentina, the French safe house — and made up new ones to cover the gaps in time. Places, dialogue, clothes, faces. Everything had to be right. It had to be more right, more precise, and more believable than reality. It was his revenge on Beranyi, arising from old habit and from conviction and out of an instinct for survival, for which it was necessary to hold something back.

  “Take him to room seven.”

  Beranyi quizzed him about Mensenyi and Falomin. The routine was the same, with no chemicals used. Tarp must have looked a little better, however, because the doctor gave him another injection.

  Then he was in his cell again, throwing up. There was blood in his urine. At some point — it was after his second meeting with Beranyi — he tried to escape and the two guards beat him again. Somehow one of his teeth was knocked loose. He remembered the taste of the blood and the seemingly huge, boulderlike size of the tooth in his mouth. And then a dentist was working on him. He made Tarp laugh. I don’t need a dentist; I need a mortician. He tried to say that but he couldn’t make words. The dentist shouted at him. He was not in his cell then. He was someplace clean that smelled like carbolic acid.

  Then he was on the iron bed again. His cheek was swollen and there was bloody padding around the tooth. A numbness. Novocaine. He gave me novocaine. It’s Alice in Wonderland.

  “Take him downstairs.”

  They took him back to the tiled room. There was a metal chair in the very center, right above the drain. They put him in it and the doctor prepared another syringe.

  “Count backward from one hundred, please.”

  He felt the chemical take him the moment the syringe went in. He was very weak, he knew. He tried to think of the Spanish word for one hundred, but he could not. But he was counting backward in Russian.

  “… four, ninety … ninety, ah, three, ninety …” A long, long silence. Then, a voice like a gong. “Ninety-two.” A sense of being sucked up by a great breath, by a wind that was rushing along a corridor like the endless corridor of a baroque palace. “Ninety-one.” He expanded as he was swept along; his body almost grazed the ornate cornices, the arches, the Roman columns that lined his way. If he touched one, he would explode. He was a balloon, a bag of blood, a tissue. He got bigger and bigger …

  He was laughing. Something very funny had happened. He had fallen off the chair; that was what had happened.

  He was angry. His rage was like the wind in the palace; it carried him, carried the room, the men in it. He was enraged because they had killed Repin and the dancers. Those young bodies. Always the innocent first.

  He was singing “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” He was giggling.

  His breathing roared like surf. His blood sang. His heartbeat was like running steps. A child running down a corridor. Heels quick as raindrops. Faster. Flying!

  In the darkness his breathing came and went like breezes in the tops of trees. His heart, buried deep within him, pumped blood with the measured and cautious tread of hope.

  He opened his eyes.

  There was a man standing over him. The man leaned close. The man smiled.

  It was Strisz.

  Chapter 31

  “Awake again?” Strisz said.

  “Again?” He moved his head and became aware of a vicious headache. “Have I been awake?”

  “Off and on.”

  “For how long?”

  “You have been here two days.”

  Tarp rolled his head the other way. “Here” was not the Lubyanka. He could see the rails of a shiny hospital bed, an IV tube running into his right arm, which was strapped down.

  “You are in a clinic,” Strisz said. “One we use sometimes for special cases.”

  Tarp looked down over his chest, which was covered with white bedclothes, to the rail at the end of the bed and, in the very middle of the blank wall opposite, the shiny metal of a brushed-steel door frame. He was still coming back, coming a long way back, and it took him time to remember. When he remembered, his voice crackled. “Beranyi!”

  Strisz gave him one of his intelligent, joking smiles. “Yes, Beranyi.”

  “Where is Beranyi?”

  “Why do you ask?” Strisz was making a joke.

  “Where is Beranyi?”

  “Odd, that you should ask. For several days, Beranyi was asking, ‘Where is this Tarp?’ It seems you never appeared for your meeting with him.”

  Tarp was not surprised by the story. He was surprised, however, that he was alive. “How did I get here?”

  Strisz leaned on the bars of the bed and looked down, the way an idle man might lean on the railing of a bridge to look at the river below. His smile was that of a man with secret knowledge and a delight in letting go of it slowly. “A prostitute in the Maikov district called the police. She said you had been drinking and abusing her and had passed out.”

  Tarp thought about that. “It sounds like more fun than what I was doing,” he said.

  “I thought that might be the case, too. Your French passport was in your clothes when the police got there. They called us. Not my section, but the Seventh Department over in Directorate Two. It took a while for the news to reach me. Actually, I heard it from Telyegin, who had a bulletin out on you through Special Investigations. We moved you here as soon as we could clear the paperwork with the cops.” Strisz looked impish. “The whore gave a statement that you had paid her to tie you up and beat you with a curtain rod. She said she thought you mi
ght have some bruises.”

  “Not very inventive.”

  “Oh, being beaten by a whore is done, you know.”

  “Not that. The story.”

  “Oh? Well, if it’s false, there’s a tone of — may I say bravado? — about it. She said you had been drinking vodka for three days. She showed the police the empties. They did a blood test and you showed a high alcohol level. However, it was fairly easy to see that it had been put into the bowel.”

  “The part about passing out sounds convincing. I thought I was going to die.” Tarp shut his eyes against the headache. When he opened them, Strisz was still there.

  “What did Beranyi say?”

  “You’ll never guess.” Strisz held up a finger, touched his nose with it as if he were a low comedian in a play. “Guess.”

  “I don’t do guesses very well.”

  “Guess.”

  “Forget it.”

  Strisz looked sad. He had wanted his joke. In a flat voice he said, “Beranyi said nothing, because he went to a congress of counterintelligence specialists in Budapest the day before the whore called.”

  Tarp thought that over. “That seems odd.”

  “Oh, not at all!” Strisz’s smile had returned.

  “You’ve got something to tell me, right? You’ve saved the best for last.”

  “Exactly!” Strisz leaned even closer. He was wearing a bulky overcoat, and the material was pushed up on each side of his neck like chubby wings. “He went to Budapest — and disappeared!” Strisz straightened and his wings collapsed. “We think he did, anyway. He had an invitation to go fishing on Lake Balaton. There’s some confusion about whether he actually got to the lake. Somebody got there and fished, somebody who looked like Beranyi, but the Hungarians aren’t at all sure that it actually was Beranyi. On the other hand, it might have been. So, we’ve sent a team down to find out the truth.”

  Tarp struggled in the bed “Help me up.”

  “You’re strapped.”

  “Well, unstrap me!”

  “You’ve got an intravenous tube in your arm.”

  “I want to sit up!”

  Strisz put two pillows behind him and Tarp was able to sit more or less upright. He felt his chin with his left hand and found a stubble that was just beginning to be long. “How long since I was supposed to have met with Beranyi?”

  “This is the seventh day.”

  “How long has he been gone?”

  “Three days.”

  “Christ, he could be on the moon.” The room was spinning and he squeezed his eyes shut. He opened them and fixed them on Strisz to make things stand still. “Well?”

  Strisz was looking glum. He shrugged. “Well?”

  “All right, let me have it: what’s my situation now?”

  Strisz looked still glummer. Tarp accepted the possibility that Strisz might like him and might even feel sorry for him.

  “Officially, you were with a whore when you should have been on a delicate mission. So, you are under official KGB detention.” Strisz cleared his throat. “Unofficially, there’s a panic because of Beranyi’s disappearance. But under the panic, there’s celebration. If he’s disappeared because he’s defected, then the panic will win — and I don’t know what will happen to you. If, on the other hand, he arranged his own disappearance not so that he could defect but so that he could go God knows where, then …” Strisz beat the palm of one hand on the fist of the other. “Then he will have proved himself to be Maxudov, but in a very disturbing way.” He grinned. “But that is the cause of the celebration, because if Beranyi proves himself to be Maxudov, then the traitor is found and the worry is over. He will be declared a traitor; we will put out a worldwide notice on him — and you might go home.”

  “With thanks and a gold watch.”

  “Is that an American joke?”

  “It has to do with what happens when people retire.”

  “Ah. Everyone gets a gold watch?”

  “No, only people who don’t need them.”

  “Soviet workers would be delighted with a gold watch.”

  “I think the sense of humor is different here.”

  Strisz looked troubled. “You think we lack a sense of humor?”

  “What’s going to happen to me? Forget humor. What’s going to happen to me?”

  “The general-secretary has decided that you will be detained until the Beranyi business is solved.”

  Until it’s solved … Meaning, until knowledge falls into their laps. That could be months. Years. “What’s your role?” Tarp said, trying to make it casual.

  “Me? Oh.” Strisz looked a little embarrassed. “Oh, I’m a friend of the court, as they say in Western law.”

  “Well, better you than Telyegin.”

  “But Telyegin is fair. When he’s well, I mean. For that matter, we’re all fair.”

  Tarp looked at him. “Is that one of your jokes?”

  “Certainly not. Certainly not!”

  Tarp smiled. He was left unsure as to just where Strisz stood; no doubt it had been the intention to leave him that way. He was silent and began to think of his situation. There would be pressure now to wind the Maxudov thing up. And that could be good for me. Tarp wondered about the possibilities of escaping from the Soviet Union. Not good. I might do something through the French if I could find one of Laforet’s people, but my chances would be slim. There’s the Gogol’s statue drop. “Is anybody interested in what really happened to me during those days?” he said.

  “Oh, definitely. But, ah, it is not my mission to ask such questions.”

  “Whose? Telyegin’s? Falomin’s? Mensenyi’s, because of understanding of the foreign mind?”

  “Two of Falomin’s people are outside.”

  “Oh, I see. You’re the warm-up act. Is that it?”

  “What is ‘warm-up act’?”

  “I suppose everything we’ve said is on tape.”

  “There has been normal surveillance.”

  “I hope they get the joke about the gold watch.”

  *

  For the next two days two teams of interrogators alternated in asking him the same sets of questions. The clinic seemed divided between keeping him alert enough to answer questions and sedated enough to get the sleep he needed. Still, they took the IV away the day after he woke up, and the day after that he was walking down the corridor in order to meet his interrogators there. They tried to be objective, but their questions were tinged with an incredulity that suggested they had been primed to taunt him.

  “And you insist that Comrade Beranyi himself questioned, you?” one of them asked for the fifth time.

  “Yes.”

  “While you were sick and injured?” The man sounded shocked, even though he had been through it all before.

  “Yes.”

  “How could you be sure it was Comrade Beranyi?”

  “I had his file. There were seven photos of him in it. I had his physical description.”

  “But he did not introduce himself as Beranyi!”

  “He used that name.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Tarp tried to be honest. “I think he did.”

  “Aha! You see?”

  It was pleasant in the sunroom. The Moscow sun actually shone into it, making it a warm and drowsy place. Even the repetition of the questions seemed soothing, like an old story retold by a fire.

  “Have you considered,” one of the investigators said, “that your story sounds like an enormous hoax?”

  “Hoax?” Tarp, who had been reclining in the sun with his eyes closed, opened one eye to look.

  “Suppose your story were true, but suppose these were impersonators pretending to be Comrade Beranyi and these others. Suppose the place was not the Lubyanka at all.”

  “Like a play,” Tarp said.

  “Exactly!”

  “You’re right. It was actually the stage of the Maly Theatre.”

  He closed his eyes. He heard a sharp inhalation, perhaps a
gesture of disgust. The man was young, seemingly eager; it was a sign of what was happening in the investigation that the ones he dealt with now were lower bureaucrats. Somebody had decided that the way to whitewash the Maxudov affair was to make it routine. It would be allowed to sink into the bottomless mush of bureaucracy.

  Strisz came back. The same somebody who was turning it to routine seemed also to have decided that Strisz was to be the “good guy” of Tarp’s world, the one who comforted and who listened sympathetically. It was not a role that could do Strisz himself much good, Tarp thought.

  “They think they’ve found your Mongol guard,” Strisz told him. “In Balakhna.”

  “Dead?”

  “No, no. Quite alive. He’s in the Jewish program out there. They’re going to bring him to Moscow for questioning.”

  “A little strange that he’s alive.”

  “Well, this isn’t America, you know. We aren’t gangsters. Still, yes, it’s all very audacious. As if Beranyi believed we wouldn’t really care.”

  As if, in fact, he weren’t Maxudov. As if he questioned me because he didn’t trust me and he thought they’d understand. Or as if he questioned me to get in ahead of me and take all the credit for himself. He did not say so, however. He wanted to get out of the Soviet Union.

  They brought the Mongol to the clinic that evening. Tarp was sitting up, wearing trousers and a sweater. Two men from Special Investigations brought the man into his room.

  “Is this one of the men who, you submit, assaulted you?”

  Tarp looked the man over. He remained impassive, even insolent. “Yes,” Tarp said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Have him say something.”

  One of them nudged the Mongol. “Speak.”

  “What am I to say?”

  Tarp ran his tongue over his injured gum. “Say, ‘The fucker ducked.’”

  “The fucker ducked.”

  “Louder.”

  “The fucker ducked!”

  “That’s the man.”

  The next morning Strisz brought him more clothes and a rather greasy bag of sweet poppy-seed rolls. It turned out that Strisz liked the rolls himself.