Under the Freeze
Page 37
Repin came out of the chopper like an athlete bursting from the stadium tunnel. He was wearing a new alpaca overcoat and a black hat that was so stylish he looked operatic. On his hands were gloves of leather as thin and flexible as rubber.
“So!” Repin was smiling gleefully. “So!” He looked questioningly at Tarp. “So, my friend?”
“I got the plutonium.”
Repin clapped him on both arms. “Ha-ha!” He looked up into Tarp’s grim face. “But that should please you, Tarp!”
“It does.”
“No, it does not.”
Tarp shook his head, pulled away from Repin’s grasp. “Where is he?” They were shouting over the sound of the dying helicopter rotors.
“He is very slow old man. Almost as old as me.” Repin laughed again.
Tarp led Repin away from the helicopter pad toward the superstructure. “Is he on the chopper?”
“Of course, of course!” Repin turned a triumphant face toward the aircraft, whose rotors were almost still. “He comes out now, you see? He is very sick old man.”
Two crewmen were struggling to bring their burden out of the helicopter. It looked like a body bag to Tarp.
“Sedated?”
“I hired a doctor in Mexico City.” He clasped his hands in front of him. “A healthy climate, Mexico City. Very enjoyable. Cuban cigars, good drink, very pretty girls …” He sniffed as if he were smelling that air and not the mist of the South Atlantic.
“How long before he’ll come around?”
“I have an ampoule of something if we want to wake him up. Otherwise, several hours.”
Tarp frowned. “I want him healthy,” he growled.
Repin looked coldly at him. “Do you, now,” he said in a chilly British voice.
“I want him so he can talk.”
“He will talk.”
“Has he talked already?”
“I know better than to do that. I am not an amateur.”
Pope-Ginna was in a sleeping bag, his face a pink circle in the hood at the top. As he was carried by them, his eyes blinked slowly, unseeingly.
“Compartment A-twenty-seven!” Tarp shouted at the seamen as they came close. They nodded. They already knew.
Tarp took Repin’s arm and led him along the narrow and slippery gangway that flanked the huge deck. The metal surface was crisscrossed with cast-in steel ribs, but there was still danger of sliding on the wet surface. Repin grabbed the rail and looked around at Tarp. “I do not like the water much!” he shouted. The ship rose and his weight shifted suddenly; Tarp put out a hand and started him toward a ladder.
He had requisitioned a vacant suite behind the captain’s, one kept for executives and guests of the oil company that owned the tanker. It was luxurious, and Repin, stepping into it, seemed to forget the discomfort of the deck.
“For me?” He beamed.
“And Pope-Ginna, when he’s done talking.”
There were two rooms, a private bath, a serving galley. It was like a very, very good hotel. “I should have brought Therese,” Repin said, looking into the galley. He glanced at Tarp. “No, I did not take her to Mexico.”
“I didn’t say you did.”
“I know how suspicious you are.” Repin laid his beautiful hat on a polished table and tossed his beautiful gloves into it. “Now Repin pretends he is very important man, appropriate to this suite, yes? Yes. Repin will be manager of oil cartel. So, to business!” He slapped his hands together. “So, you got the plutonium. You are very remarkable. Very remarkable. Where is it now?”
“On board.”
“Is radioactive?”
“Barely.”
“So.” Repin nodded several times. “So.” He looked out a port that had been made square like the window of a building. There was nothing to be seen but gray sea, and yet he looked and looked. “So now I can go back to Moscow.”
“We don’t have Maxudov yet.”
“You think you will Find him?”
“I hope so. He isn’t Beranyi, I’m sure of that.”
He told Repin about the habitat and about Beranyi. He showed him the photographs of the Russian. He did not mention the phials or the computer discs or the fetuses.
“What is it for, this habitat?”
“Dead storage.”
Tarp was still wearing the weather jacket he had worn on the deck. He unzipped it now and took it off; as he did, Repin unbuttoned the overcoat and stood with it swept back behind his arms. “Why?”
“To hide things.”
“What things? Plutonium? Bodies?”
“Yes. Those things. Some other things, too.”
“What?”
Tarp shook his head. “Part of it’s a laboratory. It looks as if it’s used for one stage of a process. The final stage, that would make sense. Everything’s brought in; I don’t think that much actual work is done in the habitat. I think that it’s meant as a safe repository — surrounded by a very hostile environment. There were some experimental specimens there, in locked boxes that were kept at a constant thirty-one degrees Celsius. Outside the habitat it was six degrees; ten miles away it was one degree. It’s a good place to put something that’s unstable and potentially dangerous.”
Repin narrowed his eyes.
“What kind of something?”
There was coffee in a shiny vacuum bottle. Tarp poured himself some and handed the bottle to Repin. “Something alive.”
He looked at Repin over the rim of the cup. Repin poured, replaced the bottle’s top with great care. “You are being mysterious.”
“Not intentionally. I brought back a sample of something. I’m having it analyzed. You remember the message in your man’s pocket in Havana — about Schneider and about a doctor who ran an abortion clinic?” Tarp sipped the coffee and set the cup down. “Whatever is there in the habitat, I think it uses research on fetuses. Gustav Fahner had used fetuses in research in Germany.” He touched the saucer, tapped the side of the cup with a fingernail. “I don’t like it.”
“You’re sure it’s Beranyi?”
“It’s Beranyi all right.”
“But he isn’t Maxudov.”
“I don’t believe so.”
“But do you know so? How does being dead prove anything? He could be Maxudov and be dead — ah?”
“We’ll find out from Pope-Ginna. Maybe.” Tarp poured more coffee. “This is a dirty business.”
“That is not news.”
“No, no, not what we’re doing. What went on in that sea lab. A filthy business. There were little boxes in the wall — a sickly green light inside them, and test tubes of stuff that looked like …” He shook his head. “Like something you’d find in a boil. And the fetuses. I know in my bones what it means: it’s Fahner’s work, being done in a new way and a new place. It’s that Nazi shit come back to make us filthy again.”
Repin looked at him with great sympathy. In a low voice he said, “The Nazis did not invent evil, my friend. But they taught your country what it is. For that, ironically, the world should perhaps be grateful.”
“For what, for learning how to live with filth?”
“For learning to live with the rest of us in the real world.”
“In order to be real, does it have to be filthy?”
Repin smiled, mostly to himself. He took Tarp’s cup from him as if Tarp were a sick man and put it down next to the vacuum bottle. “I envy you your idealism,” he said simply. He clapped his hands together. “Come, come — this is no good for you and me! We have work. Let’s work!”
Tarp zipped the jacket. “Let’s see what Pope-Ginna can tell us.”
They started out. Repin glanced into the bedroom, then, unable to resist it, darted in. Tarp saw him bending over the bed. Seconds later he was back. “Real percale sheets,” he said. “Very nice. Very seductive, capitalism. At the top, I mean.”
Tarp remained matter-of-fact. “Funny, that’s just what your friends in Moscow tried to tell me about communism.”
Chapter 39
Pope-Ginna was still swaddled in the sleeping bag. He had been put on the floor of the empty chain locker, and from above he looked like a caterpillar that had crawled into the rivet-studded compartment and died there — soft, small, wrinkled. Up close the pink face looked ill, blue-gray under the eyes and along the unshaven chin, the lips almost brown. When Tarp leaned close he realized that Pope-Ginna had worn false teeth and that now they were missing.
“What happened to his teeth?”
“In my pocket. The doctor feared he would swallow them.”
“All right, let’s wake him up.”
Tarp unzipped the bag and Repin busied himself with a small plastic kit, then straddled the plump pile and lifted a white arm. Pope-Ginna was naked inside the bag. Repin straightened and let the arm drop. “Fifteen minutes,” he said, his face red from bending over.
“Cold in here,” Tarp said.
“Good.” Repin bent again and felt for a pulse. “We don’t want to kill him,” he said.
They pulled the bag off the limp old man and laid him down on the metal floor. Pope-Ginna had a pendant belly and a small, sad, flaccid scrotum below gray pubic hair. In his prime, his hair had been red or blond, and the hair on his arms and legs still looked coppery, but the skin was gray-white. He had started to show goose bumps and to shiver.
“He’s coming around.”
“Stand up,” Repin said some minutes later. “Please.” Pope-Ginna was awake and shuddering with cold.
“I can’t.” It was an old man’s whine.
“Get up,” Tarp rasped. “We don’t care whether you can or not.”
Interrogation had many variations, but it was always cruel, and its basic pattern was sadistic: bully and victim, predator and prey. The interrogator used fear; it underlay all his other tools — guile, surprise, entrapment. Unless the interrogator was careful, this great advantage could be turned against him, for sometimes the victim was able to make the victimizer guilty for it. Tarp was trying to be very careful.
Pope-Ginna was trying to get up. The ship was just then moving up into a wave, and he was pushing himself up on his hands and feet, just getting his knees off the vibrating metal plates when it started down again and he lost his balance and fell heavily. He yelped with pain. When he looked up at them there was blood on his forehead where he had struck it on a rivet.
“Get up,” Tarp said.
“No.”
“Get up.”
“I can’t. I won’t.”
“Get up.”
They went ’round and ’round. Pope-Ginna was made to understand that he would get nothing until they were satisfied, and their satisfaction could not begin until he got up. No food, no clothes, no warmth. At last he crawled into a corner and got up by bracing himself against the walls and then leaning there. Tarp remembered his time in the Lubyanka, and he winced inwardly, knowing how those cold plates felt under that old skin.
Tarp was the bully, Repin the nurse. As Tarp became harsher, Repin became comforter and confidant to the Englishman. He may have felt some real sympathy because of their age. Perhaps he was simply a good actor.
“I don’t want him to do this to you,” Repin was murmuring. He and Pope-Ginna were in the corner, while Tarp had backed away as far as he could and turned his back. “This is very bad place for you,” Repin said.
“Tell him to let me go.”
“I cannot. You tell him what he wants to know. Is only way.”
“I don’t know you. Who are you?”
“Tell him, please. Is only way.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“You are old man. Like me. At our age, what is important, but that we be comfortable? Eh? Tell him what he wants, and I can take you back to your life.”
Pope-Ginna was disoriented and physically weak. He had been with the KGB interrogators before he had left the Soviet Union. They would have been very easy on him, but the experience would have told. “Are you going to kill me?” he said in a small, frightened voice.
“Is a very bad situation, this. Make it easy.”
Pope-Ginna hugged himself. “I know him,” he said. “I met him in Buenos Aires. I never did anything to him. Why is he doing this?”
“Tell him what he wants to know.”
“I’m seventy-nine years old. I’m an old man,” he whined.
“Yes. Yes.” Repin’s voice was very soft. His accent had gotten thicker, and to Tarp he sounded like an actor playing a Russian, perhaps in something slow and sad by Chekhov. “Yes, you are old.” He sounded very kind. “An old man.” He was not touching Pope-Ginna, but he was very close. “I tell you something about old men: we do not want to die, either. Yes?”
“I don’t want to die. No.” Pope-Ginna hugged himself and shivered. “I’m not going to die.”
Tarp stood in front of him and pushed Repin away. “Look at yourself!” He sneered at the old man. “You ought to be damned well ashamed. Look at yourself!”
“Give me my clothes.”
“If your men could see you now! They worshiped you — damn well worshiped you! And look at you. They called you ‘His Holiness.’ They would have walked through fire for you. And look at you! And you’re a traitor.”
“Oh, no.”
“A damned traitor!” Tarp’s shouted voice came back to him from the steel walls like the banging of a drum. “You sold them out!”
“No.”
“No? Then what did you do?”
“It had nothing to do with — I didn’t. I’m a loyal subject. I am. How dare you! I am decorated, a much decorated flag officer of — “
“Traitor.”
They kept at it for two hours. Tarp left to relieve himself, came back to find Repin walking Pope-Ginna up and down, sheltering him in his overcoat. Repin left the old man when Tarp came down the ladder and Tarp began to bully him again. This is awful, he was thinking. This is dirty. The poor old sonofabitch.
It ended with Pope-Ginna sitting splay-legged against the hull with Repin’s overcoat wrapped around him. Repin sat next to him while Tarp paced up and down only inches from the bare old feet, a small tape recorder whirring in an inner pocket.
“How did it start? Well? It started with the Homburg, didn’t it? Didn’t it? Well, didn’t it?”
“Yes.” A voice like a sigh, a surrender.
“Tell me about it.”
A very long pause. The old voice gathered strength, as if the memory itself brought sustenance. “I had HMS Loyal. And the pickets —”
“I know all that. Cut that.”
The old faced winced and tears came to his eyes. “I did, I was the flag officer of an attack force. I was!” He paused for breath and shivered. “London ordered me to hunt the Prinz von Homburg. Coming south of Cape Town into the South Atlantic.”
“Why?”
“London wasn’t sure.”
“Why?”
He hesitated, then panted, “It was most secret.”
“Tell me.”
The old man looked to Repin for help, but Repin shook his head. In a flat voice, Pope-Ginna said, “There was an intelligence report she was carrying gold. Millions. There was talk of setting up a Nazi state in Argentina. Oh, God, I’m so cold.”
“You’ll get warm when you finish. Go on.”
There was another, longer pause, but it turned out be the last one. It was as if he had opened a door that had been closed for a generation; now that it was open, he flung it wide.
“The order was very clear: seek out and sink. The Nazis were not to be allowed a refuge anywhere on earth. The Homburg was well south. I knew she would be. They’d tried to track her by air from South Africa but had lost her. Weather. Tried to sink her
twice as she came down the coast, but no good. So it was up to me. I sent out aircraft ’round the clock. Took my force out of Port Stanley and headed southeast. My staff said I was mad. Said I was sure to lose her. But I had to take the risk. I’d — botched a job earlier. Done well in my war, but — in forty-three I’d lost some ships I oughtn’t have. So they’d posted me down to the Falklands and the Loyal. She was old. Not much doing down there. Running submarine patrols. It was my chance. See?”
He was telling the story straight to Repin, as if Tarp were not there, and Repin was listening sympathetically. “Yes. You were quite right.”
“So I took my force out. Loyal carried two seaplanes. Launched from catapults; that’s the way we did things then. Land in the water, get picked up by a crane. Gave me some air surveillance, you see? We looked and looked. And we found the Homburg on the eighth day. Incredibly farther south than London thought. Almost in the drift ice. Been hiding there. Sitting, looking for fog banks. Lots of floating ice to confuse radar. Terrible chance the German was taking, but it was the best one. He took a risk, I took a risk. See?
“So I went right after him. It was a chase. Hell of a chase. Loyal was slower but had bigger guns. One of my destroyers got in a hit with a torpedo, damaged his steering, I think. Then it was only a matter of time. We chased her right into the ice. Icebergs, I mean, in among the icebergs. Ice pack.” His voice faded.
“Is that what you mean, Admiral? You’re sure? Just among the icebergs?” Tarp made his voice threatening. “You don’t want to lie to me.”
Pope-Ginna sighed. “Into the ice. He had two icebreakers. I had two. In the drift ice, there are — like rivers, veins of water — you can get a big ship in, but … You can tear the bottom out, too. I lost one destroyer to the ice. Then …”
He looked up at Tarp. He sounded hopeless. “We came out into open water. I’d never heard of such a thing. A sea of open water inside the drift ice. Incredible. You have to believe me. Really, I’m not lying! Really.” He appealed to Repin. “Please believe me.”