George Bartram - Under the Freeze

“No, sir. I was never good at team sports.”

“Okay. O - kay ! At least we know where we stand. Now, a couple more things.” He was a good manager: finding that his anger was wasted, he put it behind him and went on.

“The administration wants some distance between itself and, uh, this business, but at one and the same time they want to keep some contact, so… The people across the street hoped you and I could stay in touch.”

“What our Russian friends call a bomsha .”

“What’s that?”

“Sort of a nurse.”

“More like a communications link.”

Tarp looked at him. “What can I expect from you? Support?”

The former president shook his head. “Case by case. Nothing out of Operations Division, I was told to say.”

Tarp nodded. “Information? Analysis?”

“On a case-by-case basis.”

They talked for a few more minutes about ways and means of communicating — contacts, fallbacks, ways of working. “Mr. Smith” could not conceal a delight in the mechanics of it all. He had administered a country and he had made great decisions, but he had never been down in the dirt of intelligence work. Now, like the well-bred boy who has finally been allowed to go out and play in the mud with the roughnecks, he was having the time of his life. Just like the movies , Tarp thought. Well , maybe they’ll let me play at being president someday .

“Mr. Smith” had another Scotch and, only a little tight, went off to his own room at midnight. Tarp was asleep within minutes.

He went down early the next morning to the New Monroe’s almost hidden dining room and sat alone so that he could mull over what had been said. The Buenos Aires failure still weighed on him like one of those dull, relentless pains of the ear or the neck that seem not quite bad enough to require a doctor but are always too bad to be ignored. Behind that dull ache was a lesser but more threatening one: a feeling of malaise whose source was the suspicion that the basic problem Repin had given him was unsolvable — or that, even if it was solvable, it was too involved and too profoundly soiled for anybody to get out of it clean.

After breakfast, Tarp went to his bank and sequestered himself with his safe-deposit box. There were three passports in it and three credit cards in the same names; nineteen hundred dollars in several currencies; a thousand in gold; a Browning .38; and a fiat object that was in part a cigarette lighter. He took a Canadian passport and its credit card, three hundred American dollars, and the lighter and closed the box up. In a nearby store he bought a down jacket, a pair of winter hiking boots, a sweater, another turtleneck, and a silk undershirt, all with the credit card; and back at the hotel he put a hundred-dollar bill into the lining of the tweed jacket and gave it to the housekeeper to sew up. He changed into the new clothes, and, when she returned, he handed her the garment bag with the other things.

“Into storage, please, Mrs. Mims.”

“Like usual, I assume.”

“Please.”

He could go away for a year or twenty. When he came back, the clothes and the money would be waiting. Or he could come back tomorrow.

One end of the lighter produced a thin jet of propane-fed flame that could be adjusted to a needlepoint that would melt silver solder. A pull at the other end raised a solid block machined to a block below it, in which were two .22 holes and a firing mechanism. Two inches below the holes a small decorative logo pushed forward as the block was pulled up and served as a trigger. Tarp checked it over, tested the flame, looked into the .22 chambers. They were empty. The desk was able to supply him with two .22 shorts, which he inserted before he closed the little weapon up so that it looked like a stainless-steel lighter again.

“Leaving us?” the clerk said when he went down.

“For a while.”

“Everything satisfactory, I hope.”

“Very.” He put down the Canadian credit card, which had a quite different name on it, but the other man’s beautiful mustache did not so much as twitch.

“Did you have one egg or two at breakfast?”

“One.”

“Ah.” The ends of his mustache climbed his cheeks as he smiled. “I would have overcharged you. Glad I asked.”

The bill was over a thousand dollars. Eggs were about eighty-nine cents a dozen in the supermarkets.

He flew to Boston and then to Bangor, and there he walked down along the cargo hangars and beyond them to a shed that had pontoon aircraft parked around it, their wings covered with snow. It was hot inside the tiny office and there was a smell of coffee and cigarettes.

“Billy,” he said to a skinny man in a plaid shirt.

“Well, well — Mr. Tarp.” He pronounced it a little like tahp and a little like tap . “Kinda early in the year for you.”

“Ice out, Billy?”

“No sirree. Plenty of ice still on Moosehead. Could put a twin engine down on Moosehead. Don’t know ’bout your pond.”

“Want to try it?”

“Well, now…” He stretched his skinny neck out of the flannel collar and made a face. “I’d rather take the helicopter.”

“That’s okay with me.”

“Cost you more.”

“That’s fine.”

“Be half an hour or so.”

The little helicopter zoomed in over his woods, and he watched a startled moose begin its awkward, crazy gallop down a hillside. The leafless trees looked like dark lines scratched on the white veneer of snow. Blow-downs made crosshatching, like the shadows in an engraving. Billy put the chopper down in the cleared area below his cabin. When Tarp stepped out, the snow was up to his knees.

“Want me to come back for you?” Billy shouted.

“I’ll call you if I need you.”

Tarp ducked under the rotors and ran. The engine blasted and the little machine danced off the snow and swung away over his trees; then it was gone, leaving its smell and the terrible hush of the silenced woods.

Tarp looked around. He acknowledged a sentimental pleasure. This was home — as much as he had a home. To his left, his pond was a flat snowscape with a dark tracing of deer prints. His log dock appeared to have dragged itself to the pond’s edge and put its head in, for the far end was buried under the snow. His canoes were stored under a mound of snow and logs nearby; to his right, a line of woods curved from behind the cabin around the clearing to join the woods that ringed the pond in a sweep to the river, three hundred yards away. Across the river was Canada.

Tarp went up the slope to the cabin. The big window had been shuttered for the winter. The log porch was stacked with firewood. Tarp circled the cabin, but nobody had troubled it; after his first year here, not even meddlers on snowmobiles had come near. He had bought his privacy with two fights, a lawsuit, a large gift to the police retirement fund, and some rifle shots. He bothered nobody; nobody bothered him.

It was dark inside and cold as a mausoleum. He laid a fire in the wood stove, opened the shutters, and turned on two lights, then went to the roof and swept snow off the solar panels that backed the power company’s line. In half an hour the stove was beginning to give up its slow heat; there was hot coffee on the gas stove; and his computer screen was glowing. Tarp checked the locker where the long guns were, then the wall panel where another .22 pistol was hidden.

The daylight was fading. He stepped outside to see the last of it on the treetops across the clearing. The surface of the ponds was velvety blue. Nothing stirred. In its lair beyond the edge of the woods, the badger would sleep another two weeks; high in the trees, the squirrels would nestle in the beds of leaves, warming each other.