George Bartram - Under the Freeze

“But good. Dance company directress is my mistress.”

“Truly?”

“Truly!” Repin scowled at him reproachfully. “It was part of story made up for cover, but Repin makes it true!” He barked out a laugh. “Repin is like actor — always truth, truth!” He shook the knit shirt as if it were a small animal that had tried to bite him. “Why I got to wear this?”

“It’s camouflage. Put it on.”

“I take off before we get to Cuba?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Is very, very unfashionable shirt.”

He emerged from the cabin some minutes later with the shirt pulled tight over his barrel torso like a sausage casing. His was a hard, convex abdomen that started its outward swell at the rib cage. Below the short sleeves his old arms were finely wrinkled but still muscular, with little fat.

“Wear your hat,” Tarp said.

“Is Cuban hat.”

“It’s okay. The hat is okay.” Tarp did not tell him that the same hat could be bought all over Miami. In that hat and the shirt, Repin looked just like a New York businessman on a holiday. Even his Russian pallor was right.

Tarp switched the control to the deck and went down and began to ready the fishing gear. From time to time he glanced over at the other boat, which kept its distance but stayed even with them. It was not a boat that he recognized.

He sewed big treble hooks up through chunks of cut bait and then wired the hooks behind big Kona flashers, one on each of the two rods that would feed from outriggers until a fish hit; then the outrigger would release the line and the fish would be played from the fighting chair. When he lifted the cover of the ice chest for more cut bait, he checked the .22 pistol to make sure it was dry and easy to reach.

Tarp tuned the radio to a Latin station and raised the volume in case they had a narrow-cone listener on the other boat. “Tell me what you think about the submarine again,” he said. He looked at the other fishing boat, and Repin, always alert, followed his glance and turned back. “What is that boat?” he said.

“Don’t know. We wait and see.”

“You can go faster than them?”

“Don’t know. Now isn’t the time to find out. Tell me about the submarine.”

Repin looked resentfully at the other boat and then took a cigar from the pocket of his Bulgarian jacket, which was hanging on the fighting chair. “Maybe submarine was bringing plutonium to Cuba. That is why I come to Cuba, so far as my old friends in the KGB think — I not tell them about you . Is very obvious and too simple idea, that plutonium comes to Cuba, but is worth checking because sometimes obvious ideas are right.”

“Does Moscow think the plutonium came to Cuba?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“I do not think. It was made very clear, Repin is not to think. Repin is to be — good pimp: he is to find somebody to service Moscow. Repin is to stay pure.”

“A pure pimp.”

“Yes — like homosexual, no? Homosexual, often he is good pimp, he stays pure from his whores. So, to you, I am your faggot pimp. You tell me so much, you service Moscow, I stay pure.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Is true.”

“You live for information, Repin. You can’t stay pure.” The old man spread his square-fingered hands on the deck. “If Repin learns too much, they kill him.”

“Who will kill him?”

“Maxudov.”

Tarp was watching the other boat. “Who’s Maxudov?”

“Is code name of plutonium thief. Submarine captain spoke it just before he died. They say.”

Tarp reached down into the locker beside the ladder and got a pair of huge old German binoculars. They had neutral density filters for sun and haze, and he could turn them against the morning glare and watch what was happening on the other boat. “Plutonium,” he said with the glasses still at his eyes. “Who’d want it?” He slouched against the bulkhead so that the other boat could not see him.

“Who would not want it?” Repin shrugged. “Argentina. Brazil. Israel, maybe. India, Pakistan. South Africa. Maybe one of the East African nations — Kenya, Tanzania.”

“Cuba?” Tarp was watching a blond young man work clumsily with the fishing gear, too clumsily for anybody who had ever done it before.

Repin hesitated. “Well — Cuba, maybe.”

“Tell me.”

Repin sighed. “Is only gossip. Stupid gossip, yes? But Beranyi — you know Beranyi, the shark? — Beranyi is Department Five. He is rising star. Not rising fast enough to suit himself, they say, but rising. So, he was in Cuba in nineteen sixties, is friend of Castro, they say. There is this idiotic gossip that Beranyi wants to move Cuba faster into a military posture than the Central Committee wants to move Cuba.”

“To atomic weapons?”

“So they say. Is only gossip.”

Tarp watched the young man bungle an attempt to attach a lure to a line with a Bimini twist, and he knew from the angle of the young man’s head and from his concentration that he was trying to follow the instructions of a book that he had put down on the deck. Tarp lowered the binoculars. “So the idea is that Beranyi free-lances plutonium so that Castro can go into the atomic bomb business. Is he that kind of man?”

“Is very ambitious.”

“Yeah, but is he crazy?”

“Not that way.”

Tarp grunted. He turned to the wheel and swung the boat thirty degrees closer to the other boat’s course so that he would pass close astern of it unless it took some action. After thirty seconds it accelerated and changed its own course farther to the left; Tarp swung back to his original course and increased his speed, then turned twenty degrees away from the other boat and really gave it power. When the other boat did not follow, he knew that they had decided to be cautious, and he went up on the flying bridge and watched them move away toward the east. A little later his radar told him that they had taken up a parallel course again about three miles away.

“What’s Beranyi got in Havana?” he said now.

“Is not sure. Is believed he has penetrated Third of June Movement.”

“Anti-Castro?”

“So they say.”

“That’s beautiful. Some bunch of nitwits with an uncle each in Miami and a contact each in the CIA. So Beranyi’s into them, naturally, and it puts him right into the Florida Cuban community. It must be nice duty for an agent who’s been working the Finland station, pulling Dade County. A condo, a pool, lots of girls in string bikinis — what’s his defector rate?”

Repin shook his head. “I know nothing. Only the gossip. I am not in that work anymore.”

Tarp looked at the Slavic face, the barrel torso. Despite its high cheekbones and its flat nose, the face could have been that of any retired old man along the beaches, any businessman who had gotten there by cunning and greed, a hard, driven, successful face — except that this one had gotten here because of torture and sabotage, subversion and death, none of which had left any more trace on it than if it had been in the hardware business all that time. When Tarp had been running networks in Southeast Asia, Repin had been in charge of agents from Singapore to Sri Lanka. Now he looked like a retiree from the garment district.

“You’re always in that work,” Tarp said almost bitterly. “It never gives you up.”

Repin looked away. His face clouded for a moment. He sucked on the cigar, and the shadow, whatever it had been — anger at Tarp, perhaps; perhaps regret or even guilt — passed.

Tarp looked at the radar. The other boat was still keeping station on them.

“Okay. I take you back to Havana and then I go home and I start to look around — where or how, we don’t know yet. How long do you think before they know it’s me?”