George Bartram - Under the Freeze

“We’ll never find another pair of shoulders like yours. Not to go into those suitings. It’s a crime not to take all four.”

“Well…” He was wearing the dinner suit, which must have been made when its owner was slimmer, for it fit the best of the three. Its style was so out of fashion that it was in fashion again. “I’d take all four if I could store them here indefinitely. And have them always available.”

“How long is indefinitely, sir?”

“ Indefinitely .”

McCann coughed delicately into his right hand and withdrew to confer with Goldberg. He came back smiling. “Since, if you bought all four, sir, you would be a valued customer; and since we do what we can to oblige our valued customers… indefinitely is on, sir.”

“I’ll take the four.”

“We’ll put a bag in that upper cupboard with your name on it, then, Mr…”

“Black.”

“Yes, I see. Mr. Black.” He coughed discreetly again. “Then your suitings will always be there. Always , you understand, being a relative term, given my age and Mr. Goldberg’s.”

“Given the world, always is a relative term for everybody.” While the suits were being altered, Tarp found another phone booth and tried to call Johnnie Carrington again, and again he was intercepted by the young man. He bought shoes and shirts and other things and went back to the half-hidden shop.

“That suit is perfect ,” Mr. Goldberg said. “That’s a perfect suit you got on. That’s a suit has been looking for your body since the day it was made — right, Mr. McCann?”

McCann beamed. “Quite right, Mr. Goldberg.”

Tarp wore the suit, which was dark and “correct,” and carried the dinner jacket. He stopped his taxi by a telephone and called Whitehall once more, and this time the boy at the other end was almost pleasant.

“Mr. Carrington will talk to you, sir.” He seemed quite astonished.

The telephone made curious noises, like a stomach.

“John Carrington here.”

“Johnnie — it’s your friend from Maine.”

“It is you. How delightful! You are the one for dropping in from outer space, aren’t you. Are we going to see you?”

“That’s why I called.”

“Well, sad to say, I can’t make dinner, because we dine out it seems every night; if it isn’t my career, it’s Gillian’s charities. We’ve become terribly social. Terribly.”

Laughter came through the voice. It was just a little ragged, as befitted a man in his early thirties who was on the verge of success and power. He was the rising star of MT-5, the son of an agent, fiercely dedicated, ambitious, wealthy through marriage. That he owed his success in part to Tarp was a fact that he never tried to disguise. He had that oddest of qualities in an ambitious man, gratitude.

“How is Gillian?” Tarp said.

“Oh, divine, as always. You know.” Indeed, Tarp did know. He had had a brief, splendid affair with her before Johnnie had ever thought of marrying her. Tarp wondered if Johnnie knew and hoped he did not.

“I need to talk to you privately,” Tarp said.

“I see. Well, not on this line. Hmm. I’ve got a dinner I can leave a little early, if needs must be. Why not meet me at home? I’ll tell the staff to expect you. Would that do?”

“It would be fine.”

“Good, then. About nine-thirty, I think.” He gave the address, a very posh one near St. James’s, and Tarp rang off and stared briefly at an obscene scribble on the phone booth wall, hoping that he was not going to find an obstacle put between him and Johnnie Carrington by the British decision about the “Maxudov” problem.

He wore the dinner jacket that evening, for no better reason than that he owned it and he knew he looked good in it. In the hotel lobby, the owner, in a sweater and old corduroys, was doing his books behind the rather makeshift counter. He looked over his glasses as Tarp came by. “We don’t see many of those in here!” he said.

“I’m an actor,” Tarp said. The man laughed and then looked uncertain, and Tarp went out. It was unseasonably warm, and he strolled down Gower Street as the light faded, thinking idly about submarines and the Antarctic and the polynya . As he passed a newsstand, some word or phrase in a headline caught his attention, as now and then a word will seem to spring from a page even though the eye has not been seeking it. He had to stop and look over a table spread with newspapers before he could find it again. It turned out to be not even a major headline, but a smaller one partway down a front page.

SOVIET AIRLINE CRASH TOLL SET AT

it said; the rest was over the fold. Tarp dropped a coin among those scattered over the papers and picked it up.

SOVIET AIRLINE CRASH TOLL SET AT 72 IN LUXEMBOURG

He read as he walked. His face betrayed no emotion. His pace did not change. When he finished he folded the newspaper and dropped it into a trash bin and rubbed his fingers to rid them of the dark stain of newsprint.

He went on toward the evening as if he had not just learned that the entire Soviet dance company, including Repin and his mistress, had been killed while returning from Cuba.

An elderly maid showed him into a study in the back of the Carringtons’ second story. She told him that Johnnie had telephoned and would be on his way shortly. An Asian butler offered him a drink and then a cigar, and a few minutes later an East Indian maid passed the open door on her way somewhere. It seemed a house of international servitude, in the midst of which Tarp sat very still, hearing little, thinking about Repin’s death and wondering if it was time to pack it in. Then he heard voices downstairs in English and a determined step across the foyer, and he knew that Johnnie Carrington had come home.

The first time he had ever seen him, Johnnie had seemed merely a silly young Briton of a certain type — rather chinless and self-consciously foolish, with wonderful manners and a laugh like a horse’s whinny. He had turned out to be a courageous man, however, and the foolishness had been self-conscious because it arose from such a deep self-awareness. Now, he was still a little chinless, but he was wearing enormous pale-rimmed glasses that made him seem both older and more serious, and his horsey laugh had been tinged with that raggedness that Tarp had detected on the telephone. There were new lines around his mouth and his eyes, and as he stood there pumping Tarp’s hand, he seemed to Tarp somehow older than he was himself.

“How long, how long has it been!” Johnnie exclaimed in that nervous way people use when they do not quite know what to say. It was Tarp’s first clue that Carrington was ill at ease with him. Her Majesty’s policies put us at odds . That’s bad .

“Is it two years?” Johnnie was saying. “Not quite. By God, you look amazingly fit, though! Wherever do you get your clothes? I can’t get clothes like that! Will you drink with me?”

Carrington was in that heightened state of restlessness that comes from pouring alcohol over fatigue — not drunk by any means, but about one glass beyond what his body wanted.

“What are you drinking?”

Carrington stared quizzically at an array of bottles. “They seem to have put out mostly things I’d eat over pudding. Our staff is a bit polyglot, to say the least, and they don’t seem to comprehend what the word brandy means. As a result, when one asks that a drinks tray be left out, they supply this sugary pot luck. There’s a decent Armagnac here, but so far as I can see, the rest is unspeakable.”

“Armagnac is fine, if you’re having some.”

“Indeed I am.” Johnnie poured. Like Tarp, he was in evening clothes. He held out a small glass. “‘Your honor was the last man in our mouths,’ as Shylock says.” He smiled disarmingly, too disarmingly. “I’ve been hearing your name a good deal, Tarp.”