Tarp thought about Carrington’s arm and about the dead man in the passage. He looked at Matthiessen. “Was it worth it?” he said.
Matthiessen’s lip curled, merely from habit. “I would have done much more to help my wife,” he said.
“Did it help her?”
Matthiessen hesitated. “For a few weeks, after each injection, she was better.” He could not keep the roughness of emotion out of his voice. It was the first time that Tarp had really believed in the depth of this unlikable man’s love for the woman for whom he had traded his career and what, for lack of a better word, Tarp thought of as his honor.
*
Repin was waiting for him at the farmhouse. He had messages from Andropov and from “Mr. Smith.” “We go,” he said. He was grim.
Tarp told him what had happened in England, but Repin seemed to listen with only half an ear. For him it was Moscow and the Soviet traitor that mattered.
They left within an hour by helicopter. They would go to Paris, to the Seychelles, to Oman, and to Syria. There, a Soviet military jet would be waiting for them.
Chapter 41
There was a Russian Fiat waiting for them in Moscow. Behind the wheel was a heavyset, thirtyish man who said his name was Gorchakov and who produced papers to identify himself as a major in the Guards. On the seat beside him were three boxes the size of reams of letter paper, each so crammed that the top was held on with rubber bands. Files on our three possibilities.
Repin walked around the car, inspecting it. His shoes crunched on bits of stone that had worked out of the asphalt. The day was wet but springlike, and he had opened his alpaca coat to get cool. “I don’t like that license very much,” Repin said to the guards major in Russian.
“Why not?”
“Too easy to remember.”
The major sighed. He reminded Tarp of policemen he had known — intelligent, unimaginative, unable to put himself into the worries of others. Repin was quite right, Tarp thought: there should be nothing distinctive about the car.
“I’ll have it changed,” Gorchakov said.
“Good.”
A car came out to the military airport from Moscow and they lost an hour while a new plate was put on. During that time Repin and the major found they disliked each other. They had too many antipathies — old-young, Stalinist-modernist, Guards-Operations. Repin became very busy with the files. Tarp realized for the first time that Repin was nervous.
They drove into an area of small factories and dumps and wooden shacks that looked like badly made dollhouses; Tarp could not orient himself. He saw the ugly buildings of the university rising beyond what looked like a mountain of mud, but he could still not place where he was. Repin seemed unconcerned. Repin purported to dislike Moscow and therefore to know nothing about it.
They parked in the submanager’s space of a bicycle-wheel factory, and Repin went inside with Gorchakov, who came out only seconds later as if he were afraid that Tarp would steal the car. Watching his eyes, Tarp knew that he was worried about the files and not about the car. He had probably not been told that Tarp had seen these same files some weeks before.
“He’s making a telephone call,” Gorchakov said.
“Of course.” Repin had a tape recording of Pope-Ginna.
They sat without speaking. Gorchakov lighted a Russian cigarette and held it out the window as if he knew that Tarp disliked it. He’s had my file, too, Tarp thought. This kind of intimate prying was Repin’s justification for hating Moscow. “You fart in Moscow, they make a note in Dzerzhinsky Square,” Repin had told him. “You fart in Tiflis, people ask you how you are.” It was only a joke, of course, because there were informers in Tiflis, too, but Moscow was the center and therefore the focus of Repin’s distaste for his own system, now that he was one of the victims instead of one of the managers of it.
Repin came out and nodded curtly, then got into the back of the Fiat with Tarp.
“Ready?” Gorchakov said.
“We are ready to be driven, if that is what you mean.”
“Where?”
“Next we go to the Children’s Park.”
“This is where it starts?”
“Maybe.”
Gorchakov reached under his seat and took out two boxes one at a time and handed them back. There was a 9mm Makarov in each one with a full clip and an unopened box of cartridges.
“Are you armed?” Repin said to the major.
“Of course.”
They drove past more factories as a light rain began to fall; then they crossed the river and the rain stopped and a bright spot showed in the clouds where the sun was trying to stab through. As they turned through the gates of the Children’s Park, pale light and pale shadows appeared on the ground as if projected from underneath.
The car park was almost empty.
“Can you see the tree from here?” Repin said.
“I wouldn’t think so,” Tarp muttered. “Not if he’s smart.”
“Well, we know he’s smart. An oak on a knoll above the carousel, Pope-Ginna said.”
“The carousel must be over there where the kids’ rides are.”
Repin grabbed the back of Gorchakov’s seat and pulled himself forward. “We’re going to walk.” He might have been threatening the major.
“Please don’t let the pistols show.”
Repin looked at the back of Gorchakov’s head, then at Tarp, his nostrils lifted in disgust. “Come on,” he said. He got out awkwardly because the Fiat was small and his overcoat confined him.
They found the oak tree. It had an iron bench around it, as Pope-Ginna had said it would, and six feet off the ground there was a hole where a branch had fallen off and the ants had eaten the heart of the wood.
“Radio working?”
Repin took a small black box from his pocket. He pressed a red button and a red light glowed. He nodded, took from the other pocket one of the cigarlike tubes from the habitat. It had been fitted in Paris with a transmitter so they could track it after it was picked up.
“And if he doesn’t come?”
“He?”
“Maxudov.”
“He will come. Maybe not directly, but we will find him. If not this way, then another.”
They waited at the top of a slope from which they could watch both the oak tree and the car park. Gorchakov said that he had another car at the far side of the park in case Maxudov went in that direction, but Tarp never saw it. The day grew warmer and brighter; at two in the afternoon the sun came out in full and he felt suddenly that he was not in Moscow but in Boston, on the Common on an April day. Children appeared as if on cue, like a crowd in an opera; a few young people strolled among the trees. Tarp felt sleepy, but Repin stood tensely, his eyes fixed on the tree and the hole where the tube lay. He had the intensity of the end of a hunt, which Tarp did not yet feel.
At half-past three, a woman and a little boy began to play near the tree. The child was about four. The woman, who seemed to be his nurse, was in her early twenties and very fair.
“Do you think?” Repin said.
“Good cover, the kid. Maybe.”
“Colossal ass on her. Shit, yes, look at that!”
The woman and the little boy had been rolling a ball back and forth. The woman sat on the bench by the tree and rolled the ball from there, and then she bounced it high to the child and he chased after it, and while he was running and shrieking, the woman quickly stood on the iron bench and reached up to the hole and got down again.
“Just like that.”
It had taken only a few seconds. She was still holding the tube in her hand when she sat down, and only when the little boy came lumbering back with the ball did she open her purse and push it inside.
“The bitch.” Repin seemed to hate her for playing a part in this. “Using a kid.”
“It isn’t the first time.”
“Shut up.”
Repin turned on the tracking device and moved it back and forth as the blond woman and th
e child moved across their field of vision. The box gave out a groaning noise when it pointed toward her and then faded when it moved away. A green crystal display showed numbers — 5 when it was pointed directly at her. 0 when it was all the way off.
“They’re coming this way. Let’s move.”
They went obliquely up the slope, coming around behind their own car from a screen of firs. Gorchakov looked bored but did not seem surprised to have them come behind him. There were other cars in the parking area, most of them clean and shiny, the status symbols of the upper bureaucracy.
“Well?” Gorchakov said when they got in.
“It’s been picked up.” Repin seemed to grudge him that much information.
“And?”
“Coming this way. A woman and a kid.”
“Coming back to her car, probably.”
Repin grunted. He swung the black box and it registered 4, and then the little boy tottered to the edge of the graveled parking area and fell down and began to howl. The woman came after him. Her coat was slung over her shoulders like a cape; under it, her gray wool dress, which was probably meant to look severe, looked provocative because of her body.
“I know her,” Gorchakov said.
“What?”
“She’s Falomin’s mistress. The boy is his. And hers.”
Repin pulled himself upright again with the help of the seatback. “Are you sure?”
“Of course.” Gorchakov leafed through one of the boxes on the seat. His eyes moved back and forth between the woman and the files. “She’s supposed to be the kid’s nurse. He’s supposed to be Falomin’s brother’s kid. But it’s his, and so is she. There.” He handed a photograph over the backs of the seats. It was a greatly enlarged picture of the blond woman and Falomin, both in casual clothes somewhere in the sun where it had been warm and there had been a lake or ocean and they had had to squint.
“She travels in style,” Gorchakov said. The young woman was lifting the boy into the back of a chauffeur-driven Volga.
“Has she still got the tube?”
“Yes.”
They followed the sedan toward the diplomatic section, even turning on Tchaikovsky Street and going right past the American embassy, to Tarp’s rather grim amusement. On they went into smaller streets lined with handsome buildings like small Renaissance palaces from before the revolution, then into a still narrower side street where the sedan parked in front of a handsome wrought-iron gate with gilt spearheads along the top. Gorchakov drove on past, turned the corner, and stopped.
“Well?” Repin said.
“That’s an apartment block. A lot of foreigners. I can go back to see where she’s gone.”
“All right. But if they take off …”
“Then you’ll sit here until I get back! I have the keys. Don’t worry; the other car is in the next street.” Gorchakov said something on his radio and scrambled out.
He walked like a man trying to find where he was in a strange part of town, his head lifted as if to look for signs. He was not a bad-looking man, and in his leather overcoat he looked prosperous.
“Who is Major Gorchakov, do you suppose?” Tarp said.
“One of Andropov’s personals.”
“‘Personals’?”
“Bodyguards. He seems to know a lot. Andropov may keep his own surveillance on his friends.” Repin moved the black box. “The signal is not very good here. Too many buildings.”
“I don’t believe it’s Falomin. Do you?”
“I can’t get the damned signal!”
“Andropov said that Falomin had an ‘unfortunate wife.’ Is she ill? Is he like Matthiessen?”
Repin got out of the car and walked to the corner. He stood with his back to the street down which the sedan waited. Then, after two minutes, the sedan passed him and went up a hill and around a curve. Repin did not move until it was out of sight, and then he hurried back to the Fiat.
“She’s dropped it someplace. It isn’t in the car, but she is.”
“And Gorchakov?”
“The signal is weak, but at least it’s readable. The tube is back there in that building.”
“What about Gorchakov?”
“What? Oh, he’s coming, I suppose. We have to wait here some more. Who cares about Gorchakov?”
The major came back and the car sagged under him. He slammed the door too hard and turned all the way around to look at them. “I think she’s left it with a man named Czerny. I didn’t see her do it; that’s a guess. Take your finder down there and you can check for sure. But I think it’s Czerny because I saw her coming from his stairway.”
“Who’s Czerny?” Tarp said.
“He’s supposed to be an artist. Actually, he runs a shop for people from the foreign embassies. In his apartment — food, textiles, fine wines — if you can pay his prices, and in Western currency, Czerny can get it for you.”
“It sounds illegal.”
“It is. But he has friends.”
“Like Mensenyi?”
“Yes, like Mensenyi.” Gorchakov looked into his eyes fora second. “Actually, Czerny performs a service of a sort. It’s a way of keeping an eye on a lot of foreigners.”
Tarp held his hand out toward Repin. “My turn,” he said. “They’ve seen you once.” He strolled down the street and in through the wrought-iron gates, walked around the spare, beautiful courtyard beyond it, and found a stairwell where the signal was strongest. On the second floor above, by a brass plate in a door marked Czerny, the signal was strongest of all. Tarp thought of going in, then thought better of it and went back to the car.
“It’s in Czerny’s all right. It’s a good drop. Somebody’ll come in to buy something, he’ll wrap the tube with it, and away it will go. Another cutout, is my guess. A foreigner this time.”
“Shall I pick up the woman?” Gorchakov said. “Falomin’s dolly?”
“Not yet.”
“Is it Falomin?” Gorchakov said. It was the first sign he had given that he knew the case in its details. Tarp and Repin both looked at him and then at each other, and he turned away, aware that he had overstepped a line.
“Well?” Tarp said.
Repin jabbed a finger at Gorchakov’s back. “There must be a tap on Czerny’s telephone.”
“What if there is?”
“He’ll make a call now that he has the tube. It has to be done that way. He’ll call; somebody will come and get it.”
“We’d never get it in time. Czerny’s low priority. It goes on tape, somebody types it up, next week it will be in a file someplace. It’s not a live tap.”
“We can go up,” Tarp said, “and stay out of sight in Czerny’s apartment.”
“No!” Repin was almost violent. “Maxudov will have him terrorized. Czerny will be more afraid of Maxudov than of us. He will give a signal. Mark me, Maxudov has something on him — a relative in the gulag, maybe. No. We do not show ourselves.”
Gorchakov got out and looked down the street and came back. “Maybe I can put the car in the courtyard just up the street. It’s the near of one of the embassies, but they’ll cooperate. Let me move the car and then I’ll see about leaving it.” He looked at Tarp. “It will cost some money.”
“That’s all right.”
They parked next to a steel trash container, a row of smaller trash bins at their rear bumper like guards. Repin complained that the black box’s signal was no good, but they were now in a place from which they could watch the approach to the gate.
Several cars passed along the narrow street. A few parked, but the black box did not respond, and they were sure the tube had not moved. In the dusk just after five o’clock, however, a small car pulled up opposite them and a man got out and hurried toward the gated courtyard.
“He looks like he needs the pissoir,” Tarp said, using the French word.
“Maybe he’s the cutout.”
“And maybe he’s got a small bladder.”
But when the man came back the tube came with him
. The black box’s whine changed to a groan and the numbers went up as he jumped into his car and flicked on the lights before starting the motor. Repin grinned. “He was nervous.” He laughed.
“Last lap?” Tarp said as Gorchakov started the car.
“Maybe. Maybe.” Repin laughed again and they pulled out into the street and saw the taillights of the other car disappearing around the curve. Gorchakov followed slowly and turned his own lights off as they topped a rise where they could have been seen from the other car. It was far ahead but moving slowly.
“Easy to follow,” Gorchakov said.
“Too easy?”
“No, he’s just being careful. It’s got diplomatic markings, that car. Italian. Your Maxudov has friends everywhere.”
Gorchakov gave an order on his radio and waited until another car pulled in behind them before he turned off on a cross street. They drove parallel to the other’s route for six blocks and then pulled in behind again and the other car turned off.
“He’s heading for the Kremlin,” Gorchakov said. He laughed nervously. “Maybe he’s going to deliver it by hand.”
Repin looked dyspeptically at Tarp.
“Maybe he’s going to give it to Comrade —” Gorchakov started to say.
“Shut up,” Repin growled.
Gorchakov shrugged himself deeper into his coat. He began to take his frustration out on the car, which seemed to find more bumps now. It was almost dark. Steering too fast around a corner, Gorchakov almost missed seeing a drunk who stepped into his path; both Tarp and Repin cried out, and the major wrenched the wheel just in time to miss the shambling figure.
“His own fault!” Gorchakov shouted. “It would have been his fault if I’d killed him! These pieces of excrement that infest the streets, they keep the government liquor industry in business and they’re the shame of our society! It would have been better if I’d killed him, the —”
“Shut up,” Repin muttered.
“I didn’t see him!” Gorchakov said sharply. “He could have ruined everything.”
“Exactly.”
After that, Gorchakov drove more slowly. Tarp thought they had lost the other car, but the major somehow kept it in sight in spite of the drunk and his own anger, and he almost got too close to it as it dawdled along by a crowded sidewalk. They were two lanes over but almost abreast, and Tarp saw the driver in silhouette, gripping the wheel very tightly and sitting up straight. Nervous. Really nervous. The man did not look at them. He was more worried about where he was going than who might also be going there.
Under the Freeze Page 41