Tarp looked at him very unpleasantly. “What about the other hundred and twenty-five thousand in gold?”
“As the plutonium has not been found, and Beranyi is still missing …” Strisz looked embarrassed. “The committee did not feel that, um, another payment was justified.”
“Until I find Beranyi and the plutonium?”
“No. I am very sorry, Tarp. Personally, I am humiliated. The case is closed. Whether you stay in Moscow or not.”
“They want to bury it.”
“Yes.”
Tarp’s face became ugly. “What are the rules if I go?”
“I do not understand.”
“When do I become a target?”
Strisz touched a fleck of mushroom with a finger. He lifted the finger to his mouth and licked it. “I do not know.” “Who’s taking over Department Five from Beranyi?”
Strisz’s mouth turned down as if he were going to cry. “Falomin.”
“Falomin!” Tarp shot to his feet. “They put a former suspect in charge of the death squad! Do you know how long I’ll last out there? I won’t get out of the East Berlin terminal!” He was shouting. Strisz looked as if he had been slapped. “Mokrie dela!” Tarp cried. “It’s so wet you could swim in it!”
He reached the window in two strides and stood there staring down like a statue of one of the crazier saints staring down from a pedestal at the dark street three floors below. His face was contorted with anger, and on the sill his fists beat slowly. He heard Strisz push back his chair and cross the room to him. Strisz put a hand on his shoulder. “Stay in Moscow,” he said softly. He sounded sad, but his was not the sadness of a man who felt that his country had betrayed a friend; he was a loyal Communist, a tough administrator of an oppressive bureau, a pragmatist. His sadness came from a perception of friendship threatened. “Stay in Moscow. Tomorrow, the ceremony will be in a private reception room of the Kremlin. Take your medal. There will be two of you. It will be a great honor. These things never work out perfectly; only children think they will. You’re a man of the world. Life can be good here — it can; Americans mock us, but Russia is a wonderful land! Join us. You can be just the same as if you were wealthy in the West.”
“It isn’t the same.” Tarp exhaled heavily and steam formed on a windowpane. “I have a place in Maine. Spring is coming.”
“Every man loves the ground he first got dirty on, eh?” Strisz patted Tarp’s shoulder. “There is a joke about that, but I won’t tell it. Ah, well. I knew you wouldn’t, you know. I’m sorry.” They looked at each other in the glass of the window, but it was so dark that the meeting of eyes was uncertain. “I will miss you.”
Tarp went on looking at the street. There were two men leaning on a car down there. If he went out, they would follow him. It would always be like that if he stayed. “Who else is getting the medal?” he said idly, trying to lower the temperature of the conversation.
Strisz chuckled. “The Penguin. Remember? He’s in your report.”
“I’d think he’d be contaminated from having worked with Mensenyi.”
“Well … there is that, yes. After he gets the medal, he’s going into the country for the weekend with some of Falomin’s people.”
It would always be like that, too. Weekend interrogations because you had the bad luck to get into the files of a loser. At another level, Tarp was thinking, Pope-Ginna’s in Moscow. What does that mean?
“I want to see Andropov.” He had let his voice heat up again. It sounded imperious.
“That’s impossible.”
“Before I make this decision, I want to see Andropov.”
“But you can’t.” Strisz was truly shocked. “Nobody does,” he said lamely.
“One of the British spies who got busted last year testified that he’d had dinner with Andropov. It was a great honor, he said. I’m entitled to a great honor. Ten minutes is all I need.”
Strisz sagged. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“No. Not good enough.”
Strisz became a little angry at that himself.
“You’re a good man, Strisz,” Tarp said. “I like you. I think you’re my friend. But you’ve given up. That’s why you won’t go any higher in the service. It’s your sense of humor — you have too much good sense to be really ruthless. I don’t. I’m angry now and I’m making a demand. You must get me to see Andropov! If you don’t, I will withdraw my report and I’ll write another that will show that Beranyi is not Maxudov. And you know what a mess that will make.”
Strisz unfolded his arms and wiped his face with a pocket handkerchief. “You are going to ruin everything,” he said bitterly.
“What is ‘everything’? It’s a fiction. Yes, I can ruin the fiction.” Tarp lowered his voice. “You know we don’t have the truth yet. You know that Maxudov may still be in Moscow.”
“Andropov will be very angry.”
“I’ll take that chance.”
Strisz picked up his overcoat. He put it on slowly, as if he were an old man. He buttoned it with care and then picked up his hat. Only then did he look again at Tarp, and, shaking his head, he left the apartment.
Chapter 33
There is an antechamber off the Great Hall of the People that is used by those going into the hall from the dignitaries’ end. In it are armchairs and a coatroom and, often, a bar. Beyond the antechamber is a very small room paneled in Circassian walnut and furnished in impeccable modern furniture from the factory at Kem, where Finnish craftsmen who were on the wrong side of the boundary when the Karelian A.S.S.R. was created make Scandinavian furniture for the new Socialist aristocracy. This room is used by the general secretary, as a certain room in St. Peter’s is used by the pope, for private rest before an important appearance.
It was in this room that Tarp waited. “The secretary-general will have four minutes only,” an intense, spectacled young man had said. He had seemed anguished by those four minutes, as if they had been cut out of his own flesh instead of Andropov’s appointment schedule. “You must wait here and not leave this room! You must be ready to speak instantly when he asks you! Do you understand?” Tarp had said yes and the young man had gone away, looking even less satisfied with the arrangement than when he had come in. Later, security men had examined both the room and Tarp. Later still, the door opened suddenly and Andropov’s tall figure filled the doorway. He glanced at Tarp, spoke to somebody outside too low to be heard, and came in. The door closed behind him as if he were a wizard who could control such things with spells.
“I did not think to see you again,” Andropov said mildly. He looked bemused, like a busy man with other things on his mind. “What is it you want?”
“I want a chance to stay alive. I want to be put secretly on a different flight to the West.”
“You got me here for that?”
“Don’t you want the truth about Maxudov?”
Andropov was looking down at his hands, already thinking about something else. “I am satisfied that we have the truth,” he said. He took a single sheet of paper from an inner pocket and began to read it.
“Would you be dissatisfied if I found something different?”
“You do not think it is Beranyi?”
“I don’t have the facts. Comrade Secretary, the facts will come out sooner or later. If one of the Western intelligence services finds that it was not Beranyi, they will use it against you. They will try to humiliate you. If it is not Beranyi, there will be trouble. Great trouble. And if it is not Beranyi — Maxudov is still one of you.”
“You chose not to stay in Moscow?”
“If I return to the West, I will be killed by Department Five. If I stay in Moscow, I will live, at least for a little while. Is that a choice, to stay alive? Not a very flattering reason for me to choose Moscow.”
Andropov raised his head; his heavy-lidded eyes looked sleepy. “Moscow will survive not being flattered by you, I suppose.”
Tarp could feel the man’s attention slipping away from him.
“Comrade Secretary, I am not asking for much! Let me leave the Soviet Union safely, and I will abide by the contract I made with Repin! And I would expect you to abide by it, as well.”
Andropov looked down at the paper again, and Tarp thought he had lost him. Andropov said, however, with real curiosity, “Why do you so much want the truth? Is it for the money?”
“It’s what I set out to do.”
Andropov looked piercingly at him. His eyes flicked back and forth between Tarp’s eyes. “You mean — you are a craftsman,” he said after some seconds of this examination. “Now I understand.” He shifted his weight and looked at the door, his concentration already moving toward the Great Hall. “Very well. Tell my assistant how you want to leave the country.”
“Thank you, Comrade Secretary.”
“But naturally, I will accept the committee’s recommendation that this case is closed. Unless you find differently very quickly, our arrangement is ended.”
He went out quickly. Tarp saw him pause by another man and bend his head to say a few words. The other man glanced toward Tarp. Andropov moved away, and there was a general motion to follow him among figures scattered around the antechamber. Then, as a door opened somewhere out of sight, a patter of applause began and swelled and became a sound like rain.
The man beckoned him. Tarp went into the antechamber. The room was empty except for the two of them, with that air of suspended time that comes when a great deal of activity has been ended abruptly. Smoke was still rising from a cigar that had been left in an ashtray; half-filled glasses stood on small tables and even on the floor.
“We are to go at once,” the man said.
“All right.”
“We go straight to the airport. His orders.”
“Fine.”
“We’ll check the flights when we get there.”
Tarp was driven out of Moscow in his Russian suit and shoes and sweater, without going back to his apartment, without speaking again to Strisz. It was late in the day and the sky was darkening, and many cars moved with their headlights on. As they passed the Gorky statue, a few flakes of wet snow began to fall. The river was running free of ice in the middle. Like the pond in Maine by now. He wondered if it was ice-free yet.
There was a girl on a corner where the car stopped for traffic. She wore a raincoat too light for the season and she looked harried by her life, by petty annoyances and perhaps by the huge annoyance of trying to be happy. She was pretty and intelligent-looking, fair and yet somehow like Juana. Their eyes met. She did not smile, but she did not look away. An unhappy woman, but a realist. The car moved slowly forward and he turned his head to watch her. Good-bye, Moscow.
He thought they might drive him into the country and kill him. He had little trust in Andropov’s word. He remembered Hungary too well — 1956, and promises that were broken, and a Russian ambassador who was now the general secretary. When they were waiting in a badly heated room at the airport, he thought that Falomin’s men might come in and take him. Then they ran out to the aircraft after the stairs had been pulled away and ducked under the huge body and went up the emergency after-stair. He ran up three at a time, feeling the stair bend under him. He and two security men sat in a row of three seats at the back, behind a beige curtain so the other passengers could not see them.
One of the men handed him his French passport, his other French papers, and his credit card. The other had four hundred dollars in deutsch marks.
“We didn’t have time to change the money,” he said.
I hope you didn’t have time to change anything else, either.
They flew to Helsinki. Tarp got off alone, looking for the ones who would be waiting to kill him. He put distance between himself and other people, suspecting knives, syringes. He looked far ahead down Helsinki’s sterile passages, looking for the terrorist who had been sent to kill him.
He got on the first flight out and went to Malmo, where he rented a car and drove through the black night of the Swedish winter, watching behind him for headlights that never appeared.
Good-bye, Moscow.
Chapter 34
She stirred in his arms and murmured something in Spanish. Lying awake, he had been thinking of Moscow, and the slurred Spanish had sounded alien to him. She had been sleeping heavily, keeping contact with him as if, even in sleep, she wanted assurance that he was alive.
He had come up the road to the farmhouse on foot after two days in Paris with Laforet and “Mr. Smith,” and he had seen her walking at an angle to the road, her eyes on the ground, her shoulders slumped. Something had made her look up — perhaps a peripheral sense of his movement on the road — and, seeing him, she had straightened and then had begun to run. She ran coltishly, like an adolescent who runs for the joy of it, and she had wrapped herself around him and wept.
They had made love. She laughed, then wept again. It was late afternoon then; they had gone down to eat with the others. Tarp had spoken quickly to Repin. Then he and Juana had gone upstairs again and made love. Tarp wanted to warn her off him, to make her pull back from what she called love, but she laughed at him. They went to sleep entwined and sated. He slept for four hours and then lay awake.
He had been thinking of Strisz. The Soviet’s career would not go well now, for, having arranged Tarp’s meeting with Andropov, he had put himself outside the circle of the cooperative ones and of the good assistants who kept such unpleasantness from their chief. Strisz might become a likely candidate for turning when he realized that his career would go no further.
“Don’t go away,” she said in Spanish. This time he understood her. He rolled on his back and she held him with a bare arm and leg. “Did you hear me?” she said.
“I thought you were asleep.”
“I don’t talk in my sleep. Do I?” Her hair had grown long over her ears and at the back of her neck, but the mass of it along the top of her head still stood up in a cock’s crest of black, spread now over his left arm and shoulder. He ran his fingers lightly over her healed wound. He had seen it in the light, livid and disfiguring.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” she said.
“Of course.”
“I felt you awake.”
“You did not; you were sleeping like a rock.”
“I was awake a lot.”
The rectangle of the window was a warm gray. He could make out the shape of the armoire, the black hole of the door.
“What are we going to do now?” she said.
“It’s very complicated.”
“Tell me about Moscow.”
“Not just now.” He stroked her arm. “Laforet is coming today. We’re all going to talk. Plan.”
“Repin, too?”
“Of course. You got along with Repin?”
“Oh, yes.” He could tell from her voice that she was smiling. “He makes up wonderful compliments, did you know that? He is a great flatterer. Of women, I mean.”
“Did he try to get you into bed?”
“No, he told me I was only for looking at. He is sleeping with Therese.”
“What about the old man — Therese’s stepfather?”
“The old man is gone. Repin broke his arm.” She raised herself so she could look at him in the dim light. “At least that is what Therese and I think. Repin was out in the field and the old man went after him with a pick — you know, for working in the earth? — and they went behind the hill, and then the old man came back without the pick, and his arm was broken. So the guards took him away. Now Therese sleeps in Repin’s room.”
Tarp thought about Therese, who seemed to have been handed from one man to the other like something won in a contest. “What does Therese say?”
“She says she is going back to the Soviet Union with Repin.”
Tarp’s mind begin to work forward toward what must be done next. He was surprised, then, when he heard her voice, for he had forgotten her. “I have been thinking,” she was saying. “Are you listening?”
“Of course.”
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“I had time to think, these weeks. I love you, and part of me wants that to be my whole life. But … I cannot be that indulgent. Can I? I have a responsibility. I am healed now, strong again. I must work.”
“You want to go back to Cuba?”
She was silent for a while. “I don’t want to leave you. But I must do my work in the world. Does that sound stupid?”
“No. Laforet will send you back, I think. Or — you can work with us.”
“Us. Who is us? I cannot work against my conscience, against my beliefs. I believe in socialism.”
“I think you can work with us and still believe. Until this business is over. Then …” He kissed her shoulder.
“I know, I know.”
At six-thirty he heard Therese moving in the kitchen. He pulled on clothes and went down. She was building up the fire. Her face looked fuller, he thought. She pointed her chin toward a coffeepot. “That’s from last night. He likes his coffee fresh in the morning.”
“And his bread?” He touched the coffeepot, found it hot, reached for a cup.
“Of course.”
“We will have two visitors this morning.”
“From Paris?”
“Never mind from where. They will be here all day; one of them may spend the night. Make sure there’s enough food.”
“I was going to make cassoulet. For those types who guard us, too.” She drew herself up straight. She was wearing only a knee-length white slip; her feet were bare, big, heavily marked with calluses and broken nails. Her tiny breasts did not even show behind the fabric of the slip. She seemed confident now. “I can go to the village and buy more food if you give me money.”
“All right. One of the visitors is bringing wine.” He poured a second cup of coffee for Juana. “Are you happy with him?”
“He is good to me.” She threw a small chunk of wood into the range and dropped the lid with a clang, then stood quite straight again, hands on hips. “I want to go with him back to his country. Can you fix that?”
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