George Bartram - Under the Freeze

Yes, it all looked very European to him. Handshakes in the street, fashionable women, nineteenth-century architecture. Like Turin or Lucerne; like parts of Paris, the later but not quite modern parts. He had coffee and wonderfully fresh, crusty croissants and watched people go by.

He found a small hotel beyond the city center and followed the desk clerk’s directions to a men’s shop, where he bought an Italianate sport coat and several shirts. He went to the Foreign Press Club to present his Agence - Presse Europa card and they told him he would have to get an authorization from the Ministry for News and Information; he followed their directions and found a room where, after being routed to three wrong offices, a man entered his name in a record and where he was given a very official piece of pasteboard that proclaimed him an “acceptable journalist.”

“You are going to write about Argentina?” the official asked.

“I am working on a book.”

“About Argentina?”

“About sport. Diversions. In our time, everything is play. I am writing a book about how people play.” The ghost-written articles that had been published in Europe over the Selous name were all about sports.

“What will you write about in Argentina? Football? We missed the World Cup?” His native paranoia was showing.

“Trout fishing.”

The man nodded. He seemed suddenly relieved. He looked at Tarp’s press card, then at the “acceptable journalist” card he was about to sign, then up at Tarp. “There is no trout fishing around Buenos Aires, you know.”

“I know.” He did know, as a matter of fact, just as he knew where the fishing was in Switzerland and Yugoslavia and off the Bahía coast. “Lago Nahuel Huapí. Bariloche.”

“Patagonia.” The man seemed pleased with both of them. He held out the signed card. “If you need any help, making contacts, for example, please feel free to call on me. We want the foreign press to form the right opinions — the truth, of course — about Argentina.”

Juaquin Schneider was not a difficult man to find. He had an eighty-acre industrial park outside Buenos Aires, and his chemical plant took up most of the acreage. The name Schneider was painted in a special shade of blue on all the chemical tanks; the same blue and the same letters were on a large but tasteful sign at the entrance to the complex, as well as on the door and on objects in the offices — matchbooks, pens. The grounds around the plant were beautifully tailored.

Tarp drove out to look at the industrial park. It all seemed too easy. There were other Schneiders in Buenos Aires, and he hired a detective to follow up three of them, explaining that his wife was having an affair with somebody named Schneider. If the piece of paper in the dead man’s pocket in Havana was genuine, then he supposed this Schneider was the obvious one, although the connection between plutonium and agricultural chemicals was not obvious at all. A day’s nosing around Buenos Aires turned up nothing to change the profile of Schneider as a rich, powerful man who had made his money in fertilizers.

“Schneider?” The speaker was one of many new acquaintances, a red-faced Englishman named Grice in the Foreign Press Club bar. Grice boasted that he had ridden out the Malvinas war better than the Argentine navy had, right here at this bar, and he knew more about what was what in the country than the government did. Or so he said. “Of course I know Schneider. Know of Schneider, I mean. Very rich. Up to his oxters in agribusiness, although the real brains were his wife’s. A Jewess, naturally. Dead now. Sure, I know who Schneider is. Why?”

“I am a little interested in him.” Tarp had to remember to speak English with a slight French accent.

“Why? Let me be frank with you, my French friend, old copain , old ally — I don’t give out information for free, you know; if it’s a story, I want a share. There’s actually a news service back in London that expects to hear from me once in a way.”

“I cannot give away my story.”

“Well, ’course not. No.” The Englishman pulled at his nose with a thumb and finger as if he were popping his ears after a dive. “You ready for another?” He meant that he was ready to be bought another beer, which he downed with the gusto of a Falstaff.

“My pleasure,” Tarp said.

“That’s the spirit! Well, you have to understand, Frenchy, I need a little before we’re done — human interest, anything of that sort — you’re not into dirt, are you? Not one of the American supermarket rags, are you? ‘Princess Di Pregnant by UFO,’ that sort of tripe? I mean, we all have our standards, even poor old Grice. Well, this beer has bought you a swallow or two more of information, all right? On account, as it were? Dear me, I hope we’re speaking the same language, you and I. Well, at any rate, about Schneider: he’s second-generation Argentine, one of the fifty wealthiest sods in the country. Or was, three or four years ago. Papa came from Deutschland in the Weimar days — got out in time, I mean, before Hitler. Not a Jew, for all the present Schneider married one. But the old man — I mean, the one who emigrated from Weimar — was a nobody; it’s the present Schneider who built the fortune.” He drank, banged his big glass down — empty again — and stared at Tarp, his face flaming. “Not a man to mess about with.”

“Mess about?”

Grice looked around, waited until the barman had moved away. He may have been doing it all for effect. “The death squads. You hear things. That he’s one of the backers, you know?” His breath was warm and rich with the beer. “Squads have been lying low of late, at least around Buenos Aires. But he was in it up to the oxters, see?”

“Anything proven?”

Grice fiddled with his empty glass. Tarp ordered him another. Grice still looked unhappy. “Look, chum, we got to have an understanding, you and me. What’s the split if you get a story?”

“Ten percent,” Tarp said with Gallic caution.

“No, no.” Grice grasped the fresh glass as if it were a lifeline. “I need stories, Frenchy, not a cut! What do I get in the story department?”

Tarp thought. “First look at my rough draft?”

Grice beamed at him. “Now you’re talking, Frenchy!” He drank and left a mustache of foam on his sandy mustache. “And don’t try to cross me up, love; I’ve got friends at Reuters could see to it that your stories never got relayed correctly back to Paris ever again. All right, so now we’re partners, are we? Good. Well, let me see. ‘Anything proven,’ you were asking.” He chortled. He had a fat man’s laugh — throaty, big, shaking the whole torso. “Proven? In Argentina ?” He slapped Tarp’s shoulder. “Buy me another pint, I’ll tell you what the system is down here.”

When Tarp took the fat man to his apartment at two in the morning, he had learned a lot of sometimes scandalous detail, but little of importance that was radically different from what he had found in newspapers and magazines. Schneider was a widower; Schneider had a beautiful daughter; Schneider was a rightist with ties to the military.

The only really useful thing he’d learned from Grice was that Schneider had just returned from Cuba.

In order to see Schneider personally, he had to go through an outer perimeter of secretaries and mindlessly smiling young men with MBAs from American universities. A day of it was enough for him, and Grice laughed at him when they met at the bar that evening. Grice rubbed his thumb and two fingers together. “Chai, mon ami ,” he said. “Chai.”

Chai was the word for tea wherever tea was drunk, but it was also a word for “tea money” — bribes.