“Don’t you have work to do?” Tarp said. He felt on good terms with Strisz, even good enough to make personal jokes. “I’m doing my work.”
“Was that the general secretary’s decision?”
Strisz hesitated. “There was a meeting. We made some decisions.”
“Who? You and the secretary?”
“No, no — at Dzerzhinsky Square. Those of who were, um, closest to this.” The suspects, he meant. The foxes who had been given charge of the henhouse.
“Was the secretary there?”
“He sent a deputy.”
“Telyegin? Was Telyegin there?”
“Telyegin is very ill. He went into the hospital last night.”
Tarp was dressing. “These clothes almost fit. Russian factories are getting better. Why am I dressing?”
“You’re being moved.”
“Where?” Tarp thought of the Lubyanka, not without a tremor of fear.
“An apartment.”
“You’re treating me very well, I must say. Almost as well as if I were a defector.”
“Frankly, the general opinion is that Beranyi was it. There’s some feeling that you can be sent home. The general secretary wants to, um, send a signal to Washington that we can put our own house in order and stand by our commitments.”
“I’m not much of a signal.”
“Oh, yes.”
“I don’t work for Washington.”
“You have contacts. Come, come, we’re realists here. We think it makes better public relations if we send you back in good condition.”
Tarp pulled a tie around his neck and slipped it under the shirt collar. He almost never wore ties. “And the Mongol?”
“He gave a statement during the night.”
That “during the night” made Tarp wince. He could imagine what had gone on during the night. “What did he say?”
“He substantiated your story. Anyway Special Investigations has found the cells where you were held. One of the old blocks of the Lubyanka. They’d wiped everything down, but Forensics and Evidence found two partial fingerprints on a bed frame. Yours. And a little dried blood on the underside of a drain. Your type.”
“So there is some evidence now.”
“Oh, yes. Yes. Plenty of evidence.”
Which, in Moscow, could be a help — unless it’s decided that the truth will be different, in which case evidence is no help at all.
They walked down the corridor. They saw nobody; the staff were being kept safe from seeing him, in case there was trouble later. There was no checkout procedure, no formal discharge. “No bills,” Tarp said aloud.
“What is that?”
“Another joke.”
“Are all your American jokes about money?”
“We have lots of jokes about sex.”
“Ah, so do we. I often find them distasteful. Do you know the one about …” He told Tarp a joke that Tarp had heard when he was eleven years old.
“Yes, we have that joke, too. I find it a little distasteful.”
“Good. Then I don’t have to tell you any more sex jokes.”
They stepped outdoors to a rubber matting that covered the concrete sidewalk. Water from melting ice lay in long ribbons between the raised black ribs. The air was crisp, but the sun was shining and there seemed to be reason to believe that spring would come.
“I want to show you something,” Strisz said.
Tarp walked slowly because he was still weak. He wheezed when he breathed heavily, and his back and ribs were still sore.
They got into a car and Strisz murmured to the driver. For some minutes they rode in silence; then Strisz began to point out landmarks. Tarp realized that Strisz had a great love for Moscow and almost an expert’s knowledge of architectural history. He also had a critic’s disdain for bad architecture.
They turned into Podgornyi Street.
“Slow down at the school,” Strisz said to the driver.
The car rolled quietly past the school, from which a sound of singing came. Beyond the school, where the old house should have been, there was a new gravel play area. Nothing was left of the house — not a stick, not a chunk of brick.
“That house was built in 1887,” Strisz said.
Tarp was thinking of the old couple.
“Sometimes …” Strisz’s voice faded.
Is this a warning? Tarp wondered.
They drove for another twenty minutes and then the car stopped outside a block of apartments whose bogus monumentality brought a caustic comment from Strisz. He leaned forward to the driver, putting a hand on Tarp’s arm to indicate that he was not to get out yet. “Get the key from the block manager,” he told the driver.
“I don’t know where the office is.”
“Find it, then. Idiot.”
Tarp and Strisz sat together in the back of the car. The windows were partway open and the air, upon which spring had laid a very light touch, smelled good.
“Mensenyi is dead,” Strisz said without looking at him. “He killed himself. I wasn’t to tell you until now. Nobody knows but the upper echelon.” He stopped talking and watched a girl walk past. “It’s a complicating factor.”
It was like being in a car on a stakeout, Tarp thought, sitting there, waiting, passing the time with talk. He had the eerie feeling that he and Strisz were partners waiting for a suspect. “When?” he said. He, too, was watching the girl.
“The night that Beranyi went to Budapest. Beranyi went to see him. We learned that afterward, of course. Mensenyi shot himself sometime that night. Actually about four in the morning, they think.” Strisz dug his hands into his overcoat pockets and slumped down on his spine. “The theory is that you told Beranyi something that suggested that Mensenyi knew too much, and so he went to Mensenyi and either killed him or forced him to kill himself. What do you think of that?”
“It could be made to make sense.”
“Did you tell Beranyi something about Mensenyi?”
“I don’t know. I was out of my head.”
“Did you think that Mensenyi was Maxudov?”
“No. Not really. But I thought he was pretty deep into some things that were going to get him into trouble. I don’t think it would have been very hard for Beranyi to scare him.”
“You think he knew something about Maxudov?”
“I think he knew a piece of something. I think he knew it without understanding it.”
Strisz crossed his legs. He was almost lying down now. “The most popular theory is that Beranyi is Maxudov and he blackmailed Mensenyi, who had helped him in some minor way — foreign contacts, maybe. Nobody liked Mensenyi. Andropov thought he was an idiot. I used to have lunch with Mensenyi sometimes. I didn’t like him, but I always found myself laughing when I was with him. We both liked jokes.” He looked at Tarp, his eyes sad and troubled. “Do you believe that Beranyi is Maxudov?”
Tarp kept looking out the window, as if the suspect for whom they were waiting would emerge from the big central doorway of the apartment block. “It’s easy to understand why the hierarchy believe that Beranyi is Maxudov.”
Strisz managed a weak grin. “You have a fine grasp of Socialist truth. Maybe you should stay in Moscow.” He wriggled into a more upright position. “It will be important to be correct in this matter.”
Tarp understood why he had had the feeling that they were partners. There was a natural sympathy between them, that temptation toward friendliness. More compelling now was their isolation from power. Strisz, Tarp sensed, was being boxed in with him by rivals in the service; whether he liked it or not he was being made Tarp’s ally. So, they were on a stakeout together. The suspect they were waiting for was truth.
Chapter 32
He was told to write a report. The report was to show that Beranyi was Maxudov. He was not told that the report was to show that Beranyi was Maxudov, but he understood quite clearly that the official truth was taking that line. Events had gotten ahead of him: he had been brought in to investiga
te, and now he was expected to make the investigation conform to facts it had never discovered.
The KGB team in Hungary had determined that Beranyi had reached Lake Balaton, but the man who fished there all day had been a double. Beranyi had slipped into Austria, and Strisz reported a reliable source who had seen him at the Vienna airport.
Tarp decided to write his report so that the leadership could find its own conclusions confirmed there but to try to leave enough loose ends so that they would not feel immediately vengeful if Beranyi turned up — as Tarp believed he meant to do — with the real Maxudov in hand.
He asked for Mensenyi’s office files. It took a day to clear the request; then the files showed up with two guardians, one a female censor and the other a man who never identified himself but who was certainly from the KGB. Each paper had first to be studied by both of them and then, if it got by them, it was handed grudgingly to Tarp. He got about one paper in seven. The result was that his report was filled with words and phrases like “possibly,” “in the case that,” “if,” and “should a complete search of the files show.” In a sense, however, Soviet secrecy worked in his favor, for it became their fault and not his own that so much was conjectural.
He asked for a Russian dictionary. His colloquial Russian was not up to the confusions of official jargon.
The agent named Penguin was mentioned in Mensenyi’s files. In each case the code name was blacked out by one of the censors, but he could tell from context who was meant. He was able to learn, for example, that he had been active in the Argentine acquisition of a whiskey-class submarine in Murmansk, refitted for polar research. There were other references that showed a blacked-out agent in Murmansk and Moscow during the period when Maxudov had been most active. It was this information, he believed, that Mensenyi had held but not understood. Somehow, Beranyi must have puzzled it out — and then killed Mensenyi.
And now Beranyi is out there looking for Pope-Ginna. But he did not mention that idea in his report.
“I’d like a typist,” he told Strisz.
“Of course.” Strisz looked at him quizzically. “A pretty one? I mean — do you want a woman? You know what I mean. A woman?”
Tarp thought of Juana. “No,” he said.
“We have some very sexy typists.”
“Save them for the leadership.”
He got a heavily censored transcript of the interrogations of the submarine captain who had been caught by the Swedes. Many of the pages had more black than white on them and were almost illegible. There was testimony of the crew, too. Tarp read it all and found only one statement of some interest, that of a sailor who had been on a previous mission with the same captain to the South Atlantic.
“No, there was nothing unusual. Maybe one thing. Tubes four and eight, that happened before, treating them different. With Captain (name deleted), yes. No, there was no radioactivity I ever heard about. We never check for that on the (deleted) boats. We were a night maneuver in Operation (deleted) and we blew air out of tubes four and eight. No, not in the (deleted) or in (deleted) waters. No, we were south of Station (deleted). Tubes four and eight. Yes, only air. Yes, that is a funny thing.”
Not in the what? Not in the Baltic? Not in Swedish waters? Maybe south of the rendezvous station in the South Atlantic?
“The committee believes Beranyi is in Sweden.”
“What committee is that?”
“The Committee on Inter-Departmental Unity.” Strisz looked sheepish. “Those of us who began all this, plus the general secretaires deputy, plus some people from Investigation.”
“Ah, the Committee for the Protection of Hens.”
“What?”
“The committee the foxes always form. Never mind. Why would Beranyi be in Sweden?”
“Because that is where we think the plutonium went.”
“Why?”
“Because that is where the submarine went aground.”
“And what would the Swedes do with plutonium?”
“Make bombs.”
“The Swedes have trouble even getting nuclear power plants past their people. The nuclear freeze is very strong in Sweden.”
“The committee believes that is a front.”
“And what are the Swedes going to do with the bombs? Attack Denmark?”
“Sell them. Israel, South Africa, Brazil.”
“Israel and South Africa can make their own bombs, and Brazil has made its own weapons-grade plutonium in a lab. Which Sweden could also do, if it chose. The money the Swedes might get for nuclear bombs is peanuts to what they can get for conventional industrial production. The idea is crazy.”
“Not if the leadership accepts it.” Strisz cleared his throat. “Anyway, there is a strong feeling against the Swedes just now. They are so smug, you know?”
In nine days he had the report done. He was much less outspoken about the Swedish theory than he had been to Strisz, and he left open the possibility that the plutonium had gone to Cuba or farther south. The typist packed up her metal table and her copy of an IBM electric and went away; the censors departed. For two days Tarp paced back and forth in the hot little apartment. He read Gogol, did exercises, cooked for himself from the lavish stock of foods that had been supplied to him. He ran twice a day.
Late on the second day the censor returned. With her was not the same KGB overseer, but a gray-haired man in a worn raincoat who was not even introduced.
“I have another file,” the woman said. “You must sign.”
“I’ve finished my report.”
“I was told that you were to see it. It was on a different requisition number, you know.”
The man watched him write his signature, and then the two of them waited. “We must take it back,” the woman said.
“Ah.” He opened the file. There were only two pieces of paper in it — one, in his own handwriting, the list of names he had asked to have checked against the German World War Two records; he had forgotten it. The other was a computer printout in a very open dot-matrix format.
FAHNER, GUSTAV. BIOCHEMIST, DIRECTOR, INSTITUTE FOR SCIENTIFIC ADVANCEMENT. SPECIALTY: GENETIC RESEARCH. PRINCIPAL AUTHOR OF THE NOTORIOUS ‘SUPER-GENE THEORY’ OF CAUCASIAN SUPERIORITY. PREWAR RESEARCH IN MENDELIAN DISTRIBUTION NOTEWORTHY. BELIEVED RESPONSIBLE FOR EXPERIMENTATION ON LIVING FETUSES, I943-44, DRESDEN GYNECOLOGICAL HOSPITAL BUT RECORDS DESTROYED. KILLED, 1944, PRINZ VON HOMBURG.
There were other names, but nothing in the details about them seemed relevant. Separate from the list of those supplied to him by Mrs. Bentham was a single name that he had added himself.
BECKER, NAZDIA. b. MISKOLC, HUNGARY I927. d. BUCHENWALD, I943.
“Thank you,” he said to the woman. He handed her the file. “You must sign again.”
“Of course.”
“You made no notes?”
“As I said, my report is completed.”
She and the man went away. Tarp began pacing around the apartment again. How many Hungarian Nazdia Beckers could there be? It isn’t a Hungarian name, so there can I have been many.
Late on the third day Strisz came to the apartment. He had been staying away, perhaps to get his own work done, perhaps to be discreetly out of the picture if the leadership rejected the report. He seemed elated.
“Your report has been accepted!”
“Good.” Tarp was cooking rice with canned mushrooms and fresh yogurt, and steamed cabbage with sesame seeds. “I’m going to eat. Would you join me?”
“It smells good!” Strisz threw his coat over a chair and rubbed his hands together. “It smells delicious, in fact. What is it?”
Tarp told him. Strisz stopped rubbing his hands together. “How can you eat like that? Where is the meat?”
“Meat is for capitalists.”
“Meat is for men!” Strisz picked at the rice, then began to eat it and the cabbage with some interest. “Not bad.” Tarp poured vodka for him and set out coarse black pepper. Strisz shook pepper into a glass and poured in vodka. �
�Very good, in fact.” He drank off the vodka.
“About the report,” Tarp said.
“Yes? Is there bread? Ah, there — yes, good! The report?”
“What did they say?”
“You live very well here, Tarp. Very well. You are comfortable, yes?”
“Comfortable, yes. It seems contradictory to have canned mushrooms when I know they’re not available in the stores.”
“That is a privilege. A perquisite. Because you are an honored guest.”
“Because I’m a temporary member of the upper class in this classless society, you mean. What about the report?”
Strisz swallowed and had to clear his throat. His eyes were shiny with tears because he had swallowed too much at one time. “How would you like to go on living in this apartment as an honored guest of the people?”
“Not much. Do I have a choice?”
“Of course!”
“What about the report?”
“It was accepted. It was approved. Between you and me, if I could write reports like that, I’d have a much larger office than I have.” Strisz mopped up yogurt and mushroom juice with dark bread. “Telyegin says you ought to get the Korilenko medal.”
“What’s the Korilenko medal?”
“They just created it. For service to the State in extraordinary circumstances.”
“I don’t collect medals. I thought Telyegin was in the hospital.”
“He’s out again. He was at the committee today. He’s like that, up and down.”
“Are they going to let me go?”
Strisz chewed the bread. He made a humming sound several times. “Mm. Mmm. Mmm.” He poured more vodka. “Andropov likes you,” he said.
“Are they going to let me go?”
“Well.” Strisz tossed down the vodka and then sat back, arms folded. “You have two choices. One, stay in Moscow, you will get the medal, this apartment, any job you want that doesn’t offend security. We would assist in making your personal life very pleasant — bring to Moscow the Cuban woman you met in Havana, for example — a boat and a beach house in summer, and so on. Or, two — you can leave in four hours on the Aeroflot to Berlin. From there, you would be on your own.”
Under the Freeze Page 31