George Bartram - Under the Freeze

Tarp made his way to the harbor and stayed on the move, not lingering in one place for long and never going back over the same route because he feared the police would notice him. Idle men stood out in Havana. At seven o’clock he had located the Angolan Memories Cafe, and he walked along opposite it. There was Repin, sitting on a bench and reading a Russian newspaper so that nobody would doubt that he was Russian. When he saw Tarp he made no sign, but he got up and walked along the promenade and then turned up a street of very old merchants’ houses and went into a yard full of trucks. Tarp followed him and found him sitting in a big black car.

“Get on the floor,” Repin said. Tarp got in and crouched down; Repin signaled to the driver and they headed for the center of the city. After ten minutes Repin let him get off the floor and sit back with him.

“Two things,” Repin said. “First, the beautiful woman you were with at the ballet. Her name is Juana Marino.”

“I know.”

“She is a lieutenant in the KGB.”

Tarp watched a water sprinkler playing like a fountain over a beautiful lawn. “She acted as if she were anti-Castro.”

Repin shrugged. “Her father is a niño — Spaniard from their civil war. She is Moscow born. Moscow educated. She could have a great future.” His eyes glittered at Tarp. “She has great breasts.”

Tarp watched as they drove slowly past lovely old houses set back from the street, their lawns tended, their plantings brilliant with flowers. “You think she is one of Maxudov’s?”

“I do not know. I do not know her father. He might be Telyegin’s man, but maybe not. She is a KGB probe in an anti-Castro cell; whether she is also an agent for Maxudov remains to be found out.”

“She can identify me. Fingerprints in her apartment. On my gun.”

“She has your gun?”

Tarp nodded.

“You spent the night in her apartment?”

He nodded again.

Repin breathed deeply. A self-satisfied little smile appeared.

“When I was young… Well. You understand. We have our nights, eh?” He put his hands on his knees and sat upright, as if he wanted to make it clear that they should stick to business. “What do we need to do?” he said.

“We need to cover my tracks.” Tarp looked out at the pleasant streets, the color, the sedate old houses. “You said there were two things. What’s the second?”

“My agent thinks he has something. I have a message from him. He thinks he will have something tomorrow.”

“About what?”

“About the plutonium, he thinks.”

“Here in Cuba?”

“He would not say. He does this for the money, you understand. He is very close-mouthed.”

They rode without speaking for some minutes. Tarp roused himself and said, “This is what I need. First, a gun like the one I left in her apartment — a Colt twenty-two Woodsman. Second, a team to go in and sanitize her place, wipe out every trace of me. Third, a safe house where I can interrogate her.”

“Oh, that is all?”

“Are you being sarcastic?”

“Me? Sarcastic? Why should Repin be sarcastic, when all an American wants is a gun in a Socialist country, the use of a team of experts who are not supposed to exist, and permission to enter a nonexistent but secret location?” He sat back and folded his hands over his expensive waistcoat. “When?”

“Tonight. The team has to go in and plant the gun and clean the apartment while I interrogate her.”

“That is not easy.”

“Of course it isn’t easy.”

“Moscow would not be happy.”

“Moscow would not be happy if it rained loaves of bread.”

Repin sighed. “You are very crass sometimes. Let’s have a drink.”

“My place or yours?”

Repin gave him a disgusted look. “I am taking you to a place.” He looked at Tarp’s stained T-shirt, the woman’s stretch slacks he wore. “We will perhaps find you some clothes. You look absurd. Truly absurd. Do you ever see me look like that? Of course not.” Repin fingered the lapel of his coat. “London. The very best. I dress carefully, always. But you! These clothes are ridiculous. It is a wonder you were not stopped by the police and arrested as a pervert.” He seemed genuinely annoyed. They drove the rest of the way in silence.

It was a scruffy little suite of rooms next to a fire station and above a hardware store that had cockfighting in the basement. Repin said it had been offered to him by a Party official who thought he might need a “discreet localization for assignations.” Even Cuban bureaucrats talked that way now, it seemed. Repin sent the driver out to buy clothes for Tarp and then he busied himself behind a screen with a bottle of vodka. He had left his expensive London jacket over the back of a chair, and Tarp looked at it. It was a beautiful suit, indeed; a Bond Street tailor’s label was sewn under the pocket. At the neck, however, there was another, much smaller label that read “Hire Attire. Gentleman’s Preowned Suitings.”

When Repin came in with two full glasses of vodka and the bottle tucked under his arm, Tarp was looking at the Hire Attire label. Repin stiffened, got red, then laughed. “Well, so you found it. So? My pension is not as generous as it ought to be.” Tarp put the jacket back over the chair. “Gentleman’s preowned suitings?” he said with a little smile as he took the vodka.

“The perfect solution to anonymity, my friend. Try them! After all, what better protective coloration could an agent want than wearing some dead man’s clothes?”

They drank. Tarp chose not to think about wearing a dead man’s clothes as a metaphor for the way they spent their lives.

She sat across the metal table from him, her face bare of makeup, her arms bare and strong and her hands folded on the table’s edge just between her breasts.

“Do you understand, Juana?” Tarp said in Spanish.

“No, I do not understand.” She had given up being angry. Now she seemed chastened. “I understand nothing.”

“Are you supposed to understand, do you think?”

“Maybe not.” There had been a slight tremble in her lower lip at first, but that was gone now. “I can accept orders without question.”

“Good.” He put cigarettes on the table next to a cheap notebook and pen. “Good.” It was impossible not to play a part when he did this sort of thing, because he had watched so many interrogators and had been an interrogator so often himself. It was difficult to keep from being so detached from the role that he would stop monitoring himself. “Who am I?” he said.

“I do not know anymore.”

“Who do you think I am?”

“I—” She bit her lip and colored. “I thought at first that you were the American.”

“The American?”

“The one we thought had come ashore. His boat exploded off the coast. There was a circular for the cideristas .”

He tapped his fingers together — not his own gesture, but that of a Frenchman in the old days just after Dien Bien Phu. “That was a man named Robert Plumb.” The name was that of the blond young man from the Agency whom he had left on his boat.

“I never heard that name.”

“Of course not. Go on.”

“Then I thought that you were from Moscow.”

“Yes?”

“One of us.”

“Us?”

“The sluzhba .”

“I see. And?”

“And — and that is as far as I got.”

“I see. So, you thought I was KGB, but you did not identify yourself to me.”

“I was not sure!”

“Nor did you try to help me.”

“I did!” They were both thinking, he was sure, of her bed. “I did not let the anti-Castro people have you.”

“But you did not help me.”