Under the Freeze

by George Bartram

  His destination was Red Square. He had not gone to it by a direct route, no doubt because he had been told to drive randomly. Still, the vast open space was certainly where he had been heading. So now he must feel better. The square looked cold, like the icefields over which the winds blew without regard to spring. There was little movement now — cars, a trickle of pedestrians near St. Basil’s. Far away down the square, a row of huge banners were lighted with spotlights, yet from this distance they seemed too small to be read.

  “What a place,” Gorchakov groaned.

  “Daring,” Repin said. Red Square was a good place to sell dollars or blue jeans, but it did seem a remarkable place for this sort of operation. “Well, we wait.” Repin was still watching the diplomatic car’s lights by the Kremlin wall.

  “I can’t wait here very long,” Gorchakov said.

  “Turn off your lights.”

  “The Moscow police watch the square all the time now. I don’t have an arrangement with them for this business.”

  “I will take care of the Moscow police. Turn off your lights!”

  Repin fiddled with the black box. The signal was strong, and when the other car pulled away from the wall, there was no doubt that the tube had been left behind.

  “In the wall?” Tarp said.

  “Probably. Too dark to see.”

  “I can’t stay here,” Gorchakov said.

  “Yes, you can.”

  “No, I cannot!”

  “Get out the tools and pretend you’re changing a tire. We wait here.”

  Gorchakov turned around in the driver’s seat so he could confront Repin. He looked first at Tarp, appealing to him as if he were a neutral observer, and then he turned his full attention on the old man. “If the police come, they will make trouble. They are trying to clean up the black market in the square; they have lots of spirit, you know? If I pretend to have a breakdown, they will have a truck here in minutes. If I claim official privilege, they have to log it. Then your Maxudov may hear about it.”

  “Who says?”

  “If I was Maxudov, it’s the first precaution I would take. How much trouble do you think he would have bribing somebody at Police Central?”

  Both men were stubborn, and they might even have enjoyed this kind of clash if Repin had not been so committed to what he was doing. Gorchakov was still angry about the drunk, however, and Repin was losing his objectivity as he feared it all might slip away from them.

  “How about bringing in a cover?” Tarp said. Both men looked at him with the suspicion that two people who have been looking for a fight give to the peacemaker. “A repair vehicle, something like that.”

  There was a moment’s pause in the hostilities. “This isn’t New York,” Gorchakov said sarcastically.

  “We don’t tear up Red Square once a week,” Repin added, as if he and Gorchakov had been rehearsing the response to such a stupid suggestion.

  “We may be here all night,” Tarp said. “It’s to Maxudov’s advantage to wait. But some kind of cover shouldn’t be impossible.”

  “No time,” Repin said.

  “Of course there’s time,” Gorchakov said as if his pride had been touched. “We have a special office for that kind of work.”

  “How soon?” Tarp said.

  “An hour at the longest. Less.”

  Tarp looked at Repin. “Well?”

  Gorchakov said, more reasonably now that Tarp seemed to be with him, “It’s a good idea. Really, the city cops will be here anytime.” He gave Repin an apologetic smile. “Good old Moscow, eh?”

  Repin looked at each of them, shrugged as if he were being outvoted by idiots. “All right.”

  Tarp put his hand out to open the door. “We’ll walk. You take the car and arrange the cover.” He jerked his head at Repin. “It’s still early; we can walk around the square and not look suspicious. The tourists are still out.”

  Repin’s lips made the sucking motions Tarp had learned to recognize, as if he had a cough drop in his mouth; he was covering inner indecision. “You’ve got the French passport. I have an Intourist ID. That is all right for the police. You’re a foreigner, I’m watching over you. You wanted to see Red Square by night.” He sighed. “It will be a nice scene if the cops stop us and Find these cannons. Let’s go.”

  “I’ll be quick,” Gorchakov said.

  Repin said dryly, “Of course you will.”

  They walked slowly around the enormous square, stating where they could watch the place in the wall where the tube had been left. It was colder. Repin put one hand through the crook of Tarp’s arm. “I’m hungry,” Repin said. Later he muttered, “This gun feels like a rock.” They walked in silence. A car pulled even with them. “Police,” Repin muttered. It did not stop, however, but accelerated and headed for the far end of the square. “If we go around again, they will stop us,” Repin said. “We look as if we’re waiting for somebody to make us an offer for dollars. Walk slower.”

  Forty-one minutes after Gorchakov had left them, a heavy van appeared where the twenty-foot-high banners were illuminated and began to cruise slowly by them. It stopped; men got out and began to erect a scaffolding.

  “For us?” Tarp said. They were nearing the end of their round and he was very nervous about the police now.

  “And about time,” Repin said. When they walked to the van, Gorchakov was waiting. He grinned triumphantly. “Well?” he said.

  “It’s pretty obvious,” Repin said. “Maxudov’s no fool.”

  “Neither am I.” Gorchakov’s good humor was restored. He was one of those men who are quickly angered and who as quickly cool. “A backdated work order has been filed with the Department of Municipal Improvement; a permission chit is in the basket at Police Central, exactly where it should be in the pile if it had been dropped in three days ago. The cops here in the square have been reminded that banner replacement has been on the schedule since Tuesday because the vice-premier of Indonesia is coming to town and the motorcade passes this way.”

  “The Guards keep an eye on Red Square, too,” Repin said. He jerked his head toward the Kremlin. “Maxudov may keep track of what goes on here through the Guards’ office.”

  Gorchakov’s smile became a little stiff. “I thought of that. I sealed off Guards’ operation center before I did anything else. On the general secretary’s orders.”

  “Sealed off?”

  “I called in my own people. If anybody at Guards’ operation center tries to warn Maxudov about the van and the banner changings, we’ll intercept the message and stop it. Aren’t you two hungry? I brought food from a canteen. You can’t stand out here and not be hungry.”

  They stood around the van, eating salty ham and potatoes and dark bread. Repin was quieter, but Tarp knew that he was still serious when he refused a drink. After another hour a motorcycle stopped next to them and a young man in blue jeans and western boots got off. He handed Gorchakov a brown envelope and drove off again with that gutsy roar that motorcyclists everywhere seem to love.

  “Well?”

  Gorchakov was reading a blue message paper. “Just after I put my people in, the duty commander called and said he wanted to monitor all activities in Red Square.” He made a popping sound with his lips. “I suppose he’s Maxudov’s man. The little man who made the drop by the wall must have made a phone call; then the duty commander was called.”

  “So?” Repin said.

  “Awkward.”

  “Has he been told about this van?”

  “No. We intercepted the report.” Gorchakov made the popping sound again. “Awkward. He’s a lieutenant-colonel. You two better be right.”

  Repin grunted. “We’re right.”

  Repin and Tarp took turns watching the place where the tube had been left. There were binoculars, but Tarp found them more trouble than help. Mostly, he and Repin walked up and down by the van, both watching. Gorchakov stayed behind the wheel. A police car stopped and Gorchakov leaned down and joked with the men inside. Tarp wa
tched them, understanding that boisterous, slightly nervous camaraderie of men in the same work under different bosses, at the same time allies and rivals. After some minutes the laughter stopped and the talk became serious. Then Gorchakov saluted; the policeman at the wheel waved, and the car pulled away.

  “He wanted to know if it was going to be a wet night,” Gorchakov said. “He knows me. I said it might be a little damp but he was to mind his own business.”

  “Will he?”

  “Oh, yes. He wants a promotion. I told him I’d try to do something if he proved he could keep his mouth shut.”

  It was two in the morning before anything happened. Gorchakov was almost asleep. They had moved the van three times so that the work crew could change the huge banners. Tarp was leaning against the front of the vehicle, wanting sleep; Repin was standing a few feet out toward the square, staring down toward the wall.

  A pair of automobile headlights appeared far down the square. Repin looked at them, then back into the shadow of the truck. The car drove into the square and stopped. Then, very deliberately, it turned and came slowly toward them.

  “Behind the van!” Repin hissed. He pushed Tarp ahead of him. “Down!” he shouted at Gorchakov.

  The Guards major was rubbing his eyes. When Tarp got around to the far side of the van, he opened the door and reached up and grabbed the shoulder of Gorchakov’s coat. “Down!” he said as he pulled the stocky Russian to the seat.

  The car came on slowly, the way the police cars did, with a ponderous self-confidence. It almost stopped with its headlights shining on the van before it turned and went by them, and Tarp, looking past the fender, saw the pale shape of a face at the rear window as somebody studied the workmen.

  “You think?” he said to Repin.

  “Maybe.”

  “There’s more than one.”

  “I expected that. In fact, there are four.”

  “All right. Let’s get ready.”

  He went around the back of the van and came up on the driver’s side. The other car was visible only as a pair of red lights, still moving slowly. Tarp opened the door and got in, motioning Gorchakov into the middle.

  “What are you doing?” the Guards major objected.

  “Making sure you stay noninvolved.”

  Repin was already getting in the other side. The black box was in one hand, the red light shining like an eye; he had the big pistol in the other. “I want your gun, Major,” Repin said.

  “What?”

  Repin reached into his leather coat and took the pistol out. Tarp ran his hands over the man’s ankles and calves. “You’re making a terrible mistake!” Gorchakov said.

  “It’s for your own good,” Tarp growled. “This was the arrangement.”

  The tube was in the wall diagonally across the square, a hundred yards away. The other car had made its turn at the corner to their right and was now moving slowly along the wall in which the tube was hidden. Tarp started the engine and the van rolled forward.

  At that moment the other car’s lights went off.

  Tarp needed no other evidence. He slammed the van into gear and stepped on the accelerator and the tires squealed. The van bolted and their heads snapped back, and then they were hurtling across the square in the darkness. He felt the tires strike a low curb, bounce over it, and rush on. He was driving one-handed because of the big pistol. Gorchakov had both hands up on the dash to brace himself.

  Reflected light from the sky made the car a black blot against the darkness of the wall. He thought he saw movement near it. The car was parked well away from the wall itself and thirty yards back from the place where the tube lay, giving the men in the car an unlimited field of fire if they needed it.

  Repin ducked as they came close. He had seen something that Tarp had not.

  The windshield dissolved.

  Tarp cut the van across the front of the car, his own right side missing it only by inches. As they passed it he heard two thuds against the van’s right side, but Gorchakov was shouting, “Go on, go on!” There were more thuds. My God, this thing’s armored,Tarp was thinking as he spun the wheel. They’re using silencers and this is an armored car. He sensed that Repin was flinching low on his side and Gorchakov was doing something to his face as he hit the brake and wrenched the wheel around; the van went into a skid just past the car and went on skidding over slick paving stones, careening toward the wall in a controlled spin until the right rear end hit the Kremlin Wall with a stolid boom like the closing of a vault. Then he accelerated again and the van leaped away from the wall, and he brought it to a stop between the dark shape of a man up by the wall, on Repin’s side, and the car and the men with the guns, on his.

  Then Repin was out of the van and Tarp had his own door open. A door on the passenger side of the car started to open and Tarp fired three times, the Makarov going off in the constricted space of the van with an ear-bursting loudness.

  The car lurched suddenly forward and turned to its left to go around him and get at Repin.

  Tarp stood on the accelerator, and the van rammed into the car just behind the right front wheel.

  The two vehicles accelerated over the pavement of the square, locked together. Tarp could hear the screech of metal and the heartbeat thud of a blown tire. A trail of sparks spattered along the pavement where broken metal dragged.

  His door had slammed shut again. He rolled the window down and then put the Makarov out in his left hand and fired down into the car’s roof until the gun was empty, but the car was still trying to escape the grip of the van, and he knew that the driver was still alive. He looked wildly into the cab of the van, thinking he might somehow reload the Makarov, and he saw Gorchakov reaching under the driver’s seat and coming up with a shiny mass of metal in his hand. For an instant Tarp thought it was over: Gorchakov was holding a .44 magnum revolver, a gun so big it made the Makarov look like a toy.

  Without a word Gorchakov handed him the pistol.

  Tarp put two shots through the car’s roof and two into its engine block. The sound of the engine changed and then began to mount toward a runaway whine, and then the van was dragging the car instead of keeping pace with it. Tarp took his foot from the accelerator and let both vehicles come to a stop.

  Tarp jumped from the right side of the car with Gorchakov holding the door. He came more slowly around the rear of the two vehicles, and as he passed the rear window of the car there was a shot and he fired twice and the big magnum rounds crashed into the sheet metal and there was no more shooting. The man behind the wheel of the car was dying. Tarp reached in and turned off the ignition. He could smell burned rubber and hot metal, and in the silence after the engine stopped he heard two men trying to breathe, dying.

  Tarp sprinted across the square. A red light was blinking on top of the van already, planted up there by Gorchakov. Far away, the lights of two cars came on; at the other end of the square the lights on the banners were bright and brave, but the scaffolding was empty of workmen.

  There was one figure standing by the wall. There was a puddle of darkness on the ground nearby and a vague, small shape of a lighter color where an ungloved hand lay like a flower.

  Tarp slowed, walked a few steps, stopped, the magnum held ready.

  “Repin?”

  “Well?”

  “Is it Telyegin?”

  “Of course.”

  Tarp walked slowly to him and looked down at the twisted body. It looked thin and without bulk, a pile of sticks with a coat thrown over it.

  “Did he say anything?” Tarp said carefully.

  “What would he have said?” Repin’s voice was very thin, as if his throat were constricted.

  “You were friends. I thought he might have said something.”

  Repin’s face was lighted by the oncoming cars, and the flashing red on top of the van caught one eye and vanished, as if the eye had given him a red wink. “Being friends never entered into it,” Repin said.

  Falomin was subdued by the dis
covery that his young mistress had been Maxudov’s probe, but he did his job well. He interrogated Tarp for two hours and Repin for one. He was no more cordial, no more giving than he had been that day in the museum, but he was certainly more respectful.

  “So.” Falomin stood and leaned on the plain metal table that stood between them. It was almost dawn. “So. Are you satisfied, then?”

  “Me?” Tarp touched his chest.

  “Yes. The official business is over. Here, just among the three of us …” Besides the two of them and Repin, there were two male KGB officers and a woman from the Guards; they did not seem to exist for Falomin. “Are you satisfied?”

  “That Telyegin was Maxudov? Of course.”

  “How did you know?” Falomin threw back his head and waited for the answer as if he already knew it.

  “His was the body in Red Square.”

  Falomin scowled. The flippant answer made him angry; he wanted admittance to the circle of those who had caught Maxudov. The circle of the blessed. Tarp smiled. Some blessing.

  “And he did it for this medicine?”

  “He did it so he could live a little longer, yes.”

  “Madness. Just madness. It proves what I have been saying for years. We don’t retire these men early enough. Well, it’s a lesson to us. Eh? A lesson. Too much sympathy for the sick can be dangerous to one’s health!” He laughed. Repin stared at him. Repin owed him nothing now. Repin owed nobody in Moscow anything anymore; he had wiped out any errors he had ever committed. He had become their creditor, in fact.

  But Falomin could not let it go. He wanted them to share it with him, somehow, anyhow. “So, how do you feel now?” he said.

  Tarp looked up at him. “Dirty,” he said. “Dirty. This is the dirtiest business I was ever in.”