George Bartram - Under the Freeze

His clothes were not in the room. The door was locked, and there was an angry shout from the other side when he rattled it. Tarp stalked the tiny room, first to the one window and then more carefully from corner to corner. Well , I wanted a way to pass the time . There was a deep ledge beyond the window glass and then a somewhat Moorish concrete grill. By opening the window and pushing his head against the grill he could look down and see that there was nothing to help him get down the three stories to the street, even if he could have gotten the grill off.

A way to pass the time , indeed . He was annoyed, most of all with himself, because he wanted to be working on the plutonium business.

He paced. The room was eleven feet long by seven and a half feet wide and was bare except for the single bed, the one chair, the tiny sink, a very small wood table that Juana used as a dressing table, and a rather large armoire that took the place of a closet. On the concrete walls were the picture of the girls’ track team (Juana was one of them) and a bright-orange weaving, and on the floor was one small rug. Tarp made the bed. He hung up her dress from the ballet, which had been lying in front of the armoire like the wreckage of that pleasure. There were no scissors and no knives on the small table. There was a hand mirror that might make a weapon if the glass was broken.

The chair was very light and cheaply made and no good to him. He slid under the bed and looked up at the bottom of the box spring, which looked as if it had been made of orange crates by untrained labor. Its bottom was covered with a sleazy fabric like bandage gauze. He tore it away and looked up through tangent rings of steel wire. They might have made a weapon if he had had a tool, but as they were, they were too tough for him.

The back of the wardrobe had a twenty-inch brace, which he carefully and silently wrenched loose, giving him a club with two nails in the end. Her clothes and the handbag that lay in the bottom of the wardrobe provided nothing more than a crumpled book of matches that told him that economic self-sufficiency is national liberation.

He put the club and the matches and the gauze up inside the box spring.

Well , it helps to pass the time . He lay on the bed, thinking of the two men he had killed on the boat. It was never very good, thinking about the dead. He envied Christians, who could light candles and pray in scented, dark places. He had only his thoughts.

He heard her in the outer room a little before noon. The sunlight stood straight out from the window like a bright rectangle that had been painted on the waxed concrete floor. He heard her voice out there for several seconds, then a male voice. Then the lock on the door rattled and he backed away and went to the bed. He was still naked.

She came in and closed the door behind her very quickly as if there were an animal in the room that she was afraid would escape, a cat or a bird. She kept her right hand on the door handle. She looked around the room first, as if he were invisible, and then she looked at him. Her face was angry and her color was pale and unattractive, as if something inside her had drawn its heat back, leaving this wintry bleakness.

“I should let them kill you,” she said.

“They would not know how.” He was thinking that she knew something about him. Where had she been?

She looked away from him, avoiding any sign that she knew that he was naked. He shifted his weight and she looked at him angrily. “Do not do anything stupid!” she cried. Then she almost whispered. “I told them that if you did anything to me, try to make me a hostage, they are to kill me first. You understand?”

“They would not know how.”

She looked at him with contempt, perhaps because she had learned somehow that he was a man who did know how. She let go of the door handle and moved to the dressing table and put her back to it so she could watch him. She put out her right hand and began to rummage in the armoire without looking.

“I have to work,” she said, as if she owed him an explanation. She pulled out a flowered dress and dropped it over the back of the chair and then she began to unbutton her blouse. She was wearing nothing under it. She hesitated before she unbuttoned it all the way, and then, enraged, she tore the blouse off and threw it on the floor. She kicked off her shoes. Her nipples were engorged; she made no attempt to hide her breasts. Her slacks had an elastic top; she put her hands on the elastic, palms in, fingers out, and hesitated again — like him, she had to be thinking of her elegant and happy undressing of the night — then pushed the slacks down. She let go of them when they reached her calves and got them off the rest of the way by pushing one leg down with the other foot then walking them down over her ankles as if she were treading grapes. Then she did the same thing, but more slowly, with her panties. All the color had come back into her face. They looked at each other, and neither could hide the sexual eagerness.

As they grappled on the bed, her eyes were wide, seeming to glare at him; then they closed, and her mouth was as tight as if she had taken a vow of silence. He tried to turn her anger aside with tenderness. Twenty minutes later, they lay still; she moved her body so that she lay partly over him, both of them wedged into the angle between the bed and the cool concrete of the wall.

“Who are you?” she whispered.

“Why does it matter?”

“I have to know.”

“I am Russian.”

“No,”

“I am a DGI agent named Ibazza.”

“No. The thumbprint on the card is not yours.”

Then she has access to a pretty sophisticated system , if she can find that out . She may know whom the thumbprint really belonged to . “Who am I, then?” he said.

“I think you are an American whose boat was blown up. Are you?”

But old caution was always with him. “I am Peruvian,” he said.

She became angry again. “Tell me the truth!” She tangled her fingers in his hair and pounded his head against the mattress. “I swear, if you tell the truth, I will save you. But tell me who you are!”

“Who are you?” he said. He pushed a lock of black hair away from her face. “Who are you, Juana?”

She pushed his hand away. “I have to know who you are. It is all that matters now.”

He moved his body, moving hers. “And this?”

“This is nothing!” She pushed herself upon her hands, away from him. “This is — personal. Therefore, it is trivial.”

“It is a great deal.”

She got up and yanked the dress down over her arms and head, slowly covering her wonderful body as if she were putting out a light. She pulled the panties up and then dug through the bottom of the armoire for shoes. She was very violent in putting them on. “Promise me you will not try to escape,” she said.

“That would be a stupid promise.”

“Promise me!”

“Where my life is concerned, I have no honor, and so my promises mean nothing. Therefore, I promise.”

“It is for your own good. Those two out there are very nervous. I will come back before six. Then you must tell me who you are, or…”

“Or?”

“Or I will have to turn you over to people who will do terrible things to you. I do not want that to happen.”

“Isn’t that ‘personal’?”

She looked at him, through him, then turned the door handle and went out, closing the door very quickly again as if she feared that the same cat would escape. He heard the lock turn and then her hard, quick steps.

Tarp waited for three-quarters of an hour. After that, he went to the armoire and found a pair of her stretch-fabric slacks that would at least cover his nakedness. There was a T-shirt with a colorful decoration from the Festival of Socialist Film. It looked foolish, but it clothed him.