George Bartram - Under the Freeze

“Here!” he said. A dumpy-looking man in a raincoat knelt next to him. “Her?”

“Yes.”

The man stood up quickly and shouted, “In here!” to somebody outside, and two men in hats and coats came in quickly, picked Juana up, and went out again. They looked like gangsters. They might have been gangsters, for all he knew; they showed no interest in her. Their care was for speed, that was all. Tarp was pushed into the back of a van with her and the dumpy man, and he was hardly in before one of the men was slamming the door and pounding the side of the van as he ran forward, shouting, “Go, go!”

Tarp had seen the logo of a delivery service on the van. Inside, however, there was a stretcher clamped to the floor and an IV bottle. The dumpy man was holding on to a cleat and swaying above her. “That cut’s a bitch,” he said. “Not a knife.”

“Grenade.”

“Shit.” He bent close, then straightened. “In that restaurant?”

“In a restaurant, yes. Are you a doctor?”

“We’re going to the doctor. We heard about the restaurant as we came out. After the Jews again, were they?”

“It’s a Jewish restaurant,” Tarp said heavily. He was thinking of the old man whose blood had been gushing from his chest.

The van darkened as they passed under an arch, and a heavy door closed behind them. They drove for another eight feet, coming out into light again. There were walls close in on both sides. They made two turns, then backed for several yards.

“Where are we?” Tarp said.

“Safe house.” The dumpy man gave a rubbery smile. There was a smear of blood on his right cheek; when he gestured, Tarp saw that he was wearing bloody surgical gloves. “The best in Paris. You must be a big cheese.” He kicked the door open and held it with his foot while Tarp got painfully out; by then two men were there with a stretcher, and a nurse was standing by the van looking up at the smoke-darkened stone walls that rose five stories above them. Tarp could not hide the limp as he went went through a neoclassical doorway after the stretcher and then along a tiled floor into an elevator almost too small for the stretcher. They went up three slow floors and came out in a bright corridor with ceiling-high windows with curved tops. Tarp could see the Seine and the bridge he had crossed ninety minutes before. For my day of witness .

The doctor was a young man who looked as if he disapproved of everything that was happening. He had been called from somewhere else, clearly, and he was still struggling into a gray surgical gown. He noticed Tarp’s leg, then looked at Juana as they wheeled her past him, and he said, “The woman first,” and disappeared through a big oak door.

“Are we on the Ile de la Cité?” Tarp said to the dumpy man, who was fanning himself with one of the sleeves of his raincoat. It was cold in the anteroom, but he was not used to hurrying.

“Mm,” he said. He raised himself from his chair to look out the window. “Notre Dame is the other way.”

Another man appeared with a telephone and plugged it in near Tarp. “ Le chef ,” he said. He looked meaningfully at the dumpy man. “ Privé .” The dumpy man got up and moved away to the far end of the room.

“Chimère here.”

“Tarp, I just heard about the bombing. How are you?”

“I’m good, Jules. A woman with me is hurt.”

“Yes, I’ve been told. I shall want you to be debriefed.”

“Of course.”

“Were they after you?”

“Why would they be after me?”

“I am not pleased that you have brought this sort of trouble.”

“I didn’t know it would be like this.”

“You are not an innocent, I think.”

“No.”

“I am not grateful at all. We have enough violence here.”

“Jules, I’m sorry. Truly sorry.”

Laforet was quiet. “We are always truly sorry. Afterward.”

Tarp sighed. “Yes.” He was looking at his right leg. The trouser was torn from the knee to the ankle, and the calf was dark with caked blood.

“I may hold you for a while, Tarp.”

“Why?”

“Come, you know why.”

“Not too long, Jules.”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“You know ‘on what.’”

On my telling him what I am doing , yes .

“All right.”

“I’ll send an interrogator to you. It’s routine, you know. Be honest, please, and be consistent. Nobody expects you to be entirely truthful, of course. I shall have to file a report. I want to talk to you myself, too. Tonight?”

He thought of Repin. “Sooner?”

“All right. Wait.” Laforet left the telephone, probably to talk to an appointments secretary. When he came back he said, “I can spend half an hour before lunch. Will you be frank with me?”

“Yes. Jules, it’s important that I get back to London.”

A pause. “We shall see.” Another pause. “Who is the woman? Come, come, my friend; if I can start things now, you will leave that much sooner. Well?”

“Her name if Juana Marino. She’s Cuban. Born in Moscow.”

“Ah. Would I have a file on her?”

“You might.”

“Ah. Well, we shall have things to talk about. Until lunch, then.”

“Thank you, Jules.”

He handed the telephone to the other man. He turned and stared out at the Seine, thinking of Juana and the old man dying on the restaurant floor. Unthinkingly, he put his hand up to touch the shiny button the girl had pinned on him, but it was gone.

Jules Laforet was nearing sixty, but he was still austerely handsome. Once, he had been romantically handsome, like the men on the covers of cheap editions of Malraux — a weapon in one hand, the face turned to look at some ideal that was just out of view — but age had refined and tempered him. He had begun as a Socialist but he had become an aristocrat, proving, perhaps, that it is easier to keep one’s looks than one’s ideals. Thin, silver-haired, beautifully dressed in the slightly flamboyant style of French tailoring, he looked like a very rich poet. He shook Tarp’s hand, holding it a little longer than was necessary because they were old friends, and then he sat in a fragile chair with his back to a view of the river.

“I have the interrogation report. They were very cursory, as I instructed.”

“Very.”

“And your leg?”

“Not bad.”

“Nine stitches is not bad, no. You look a little as if you may be still in shock. The woman, on the other hand…”

“Yes, they told me.”

“She is more serious.”

“Yes.”

Laforet took out a thin silver cigarette case and opened it one-handed. The action seemed dated, of the thirties, though he was not so old as that. “A very evil business,” Laforet said. “Six dead, seven injured. Two of them children.” He selected a cigarette and then lit it with Tarp’s lighter-derringer, which he produced from his own pocket. Tarp had been searched earlier. “One of the attackers was killed,” Laforet said. “A Palestinian. A stray bullet or a piece of one, the police think just now.” He held up the lighter. “You?”

“Yes.”

Laforet pulled up the end so that the .22 chambers showed. “Not at any distance, I should think.”

“About an inch.”

“That would seem about right.” Laforet exhaled. He crossed his long legs, down which the trouser crease ran like a wire. He moved a finger and thumb along it as if to make it even sharper. “What is going on?”

“Dzerzhinsky Square. Repin asked me to look into a problem there.”

“Why you?”

“‘We love the enemies of our enemies.’”

“I thought Repin was out of favor.”

“That’s why they picked him.”