George Bartram - Under the Freeze

A grenade exploded on the far side of the restaurant. He was looking up at her. One moment she was weeping, trying to pull at him, and the next she was lying on the worn carpet of the corridor, blood where her tears had been and her hands scrabbling at the carpet in confusion and pain.

The concussion stunned him. Deafened, he lost contact with his world: Juana’s mouth was open, working, but he could not hear her. The screams and the firing seemed to have stopped. For him they were ended.

The air was thick with plaster dust. He bent over her. Her fashionable jacket and the T-shirt had been slashed from under the left arm across the shoulder and the neck. The left side of her face looked like red lace. He could not see her left eye.

He was thinking only of getting out. The two attackers had been after him, he was sure: the movement he had seen just after she had come in had been somebody following her, looking for him. And when they had started to fire, they had aimed at the place where he had been sitting. He wanted to get out before the police came and made their gory, helpless sense out of the scene, before they took down names and identified the dead. He wanted to get out while there would still be a few hours when his pursuers thought he was one of those in the other room.

He picked her up. The fluorescent picture on her shirt was obscured by blood. Her rose was gone.

He carried her out the back door of Ivan’s the way he had carried the poet out of her apartment in Havana. This time the danger was real and his heart was pounding and he was urging himself on because he wanted to save her. There was the abrasive noise of sirens now, as there had been in Havana; there were muffled screams, shouts. The grenade had blown out all the windows of the restaurant and then the second attacker had disappeared; Tarp had brought her out in the seconds between the explosion and the noise of the first siren.

He put her down by the rear entrance and went outside alone, waiting for the bullet, almost eager for it; when he knew it was safe, he picked her up and ran along the curving, alleylike street. A dumply woman in black with rolled-down black stockings came clumping toward him with two long loaves of bread under her arm, and as he ran past she saw Juana’s face and bloody shoulder and she backed against a wall on the other side. He was already past her then, and he ran on, coming out on the rue Jacob, pushing himself past concern for breathing or fatigue. There had been a pharmacie along here years before, and he ran toward the location. In the next streets, ambulances and police cars made inhuman noises.

He carried her into the narrow shop. The astringent smell seemed not to have changed in thirty years.

“ Aidez - moi !” he gasped. “ Secours !” Two middle-aged women looked up from a display of hot-water bottles. Somebody appeared at the back of the shop, a younger woman with a suspicious face.

“A woman is hurt!” he shouted at her in French. He put Juana down in the single aisle between the ceiling-high shelves and pushed the women out of the way as he grabbed at bottles of disinfectant and paper packages of gauze.

“What is it? What is it?” one of the women said excitedly. Her voice seemed to come to him from the vaults of a church because his ears were still affected. “Was it a bus?” she said.

“Terrorists.”

The woman sucked in her breath. “Eh, terrorists,” said the other one, as if that explained everything. She looked down at Juana’s bloody face and winced and pulled the other woman away.

The younger woman came very deliberately from the back of the shop. He had ripped the tan jacket from the shoulder by then and was ripping apart what was left of the black T-shirt, rending it down the side below the arm so that Juana’s torso was bared.

“This is a matter for the police,” the younger woman said. She was wearing a white shop coat over a dress.

Tarp was spilling disinfectant over the wounds. “There are people dead,” he said. “The police are already there.” He was shoving a whole pack of wadded gauze into a hole in Juana’s shoulder, trying to stop the blood.

“She is dying,” the female pharmacist said.

“Check her legs for injuries.” He could see the gash along the pectoral and the shoulder; it was deepest close to the arm, where blood was welling through the scarlet bandage.

He wiped the side of the beautiful face. There were a bruise and a gash under the ridiculously short hair, and three deep cuts high up on the cheek, as well as a pulpy abrasion on the temple. He could not see the left eye at all.

“Nothing,” the woman was saying as she knelt over Juana’s legs. She ran her hands over the thighs, then over the pelvis and abdomen. “Nothing. Nothing. Nothing, nothing.”

One of the middle-aged women had pulled an invalid’s cushion from somewhere and put it near, but not under, Juana’s head, and the other was in the back of the store, running water. “Poor thing,” the first woman muttered.

“We’ve got to stop the bleeding,” Tarp said.

“We can’t.” It was the pharmacist.

“We’ve got to stop the bleeding!” He was shouting at her, furious. “Stop the bleeding!”

“Poor, poor thing. So pretty.”

“You’ve got to stop the bleeding.” Tarp pushed rolls of bandage into the pharmacist’s hands and ran to the back of the shop. To his surprise, he was limping. He found a telephone on the counter and dialed without even thinking. The telephone was picked up before it had rung twice.

“Central.”

“This is Chimère. I must talk to Laforet.”

“You have the wrong line.”

“No, I haven’t! This is an emergency!”

“I know no Laforet. Please free this line.”

“Put me through to Laforet! It’s Chimère!”

But the man had rung off. Tarp looked down the shop. The three women were looking down at the floor. They looked dumbstruck. One of them was holding a rubber hot-water bottle that she had filled with water. She held it with both hands, numbly. The pharmacist knelt, and when she stood up she held a ball of dark-red, dripping gauze.

Tarp scrabbled through the pages of the telephone directory. At last he found the number and dialed, hearing background traffic and pops and fizzing sounds.

“The Office of the Sub-Minister for External Affairs.”

“Monsieur Laforet, please. It’s an emergency. Tell him it’s Chimère.”

“On the part of whom, monsieur?”

He looked down the shop. Two people came to the door and peered in. One was a woman who had been crying. There was a smear of blood on her skirt.

“Chimère.”

The woman came into the shop. She was gesturing behind her, but she had seen Juana on the floor, and she seemed unable to speak.

“Laforet here.”

“Jules, thank — I’ve got an emergency.”

“Are you in Paris?”

“Yes. It’s medical. I need a doctor and blood. And protection.”

“You understand the rules—”

“Fuck the rules! I’ll explain later.”

“Where are you?”

“A pharmacy, rue Jacob just east of rue Napoleon.”

“The identification will be ‘Marc Antoine.’”

He started back down the aisle. His right leg did not seem to want to move very well. The pharmacist was piling bandages into the arms of one of the women; the newcomer with blood on her dress was weeping and in shock and unable to take her eyes from Juana.

He knelt again by the injured head. A puddle of blood had formed under her. Someone had laid white bandage over her bare breast.

He could not find a pressure point with which to control the bleeding, but the blood was dark and steadily flowing and so he thought at least that it was not arterial. He put another fist-sized wad of gauze into the wound and pressed down, and he was still kneeling there, trying to control the bleeding, when a voice above him said, “I am looking for Marc Antoine.”