George Bartram - Under the Freeze

“How was she supposed to know this?”

“She didn’t say.”

“She knew you’d been with me in Havana?”

“Of course, what else? Sandor had found me out somehow. So he fed me this information, I suppose on orders from above someplace. So I talked to my scientist that night. I slept with him. See how much I love you? I love you so much I sleep with other men for you.” The right side of her mouth smiled bitterly. “There is no plutonium in Cuba. He says it categorically, and I believe him.”

“Would he know?”

“Of course.”

“He could lie to you.”

“I suppose. Anyway, that was my message: there is no plutonium in Cuba, and the line to the First Directorate is corrupt. I knew it was corrupt when the woman gave me the false information and now I know it is corrupt because they followed me to Paris so they could kill you. And me.” She touched his hand again. “That is what I carried my rose for.” Her eye was full of tears. “I was so happy when I saw you!”

He looked at her, at the bandages and the tube and the lost tooth. “You shouldn’t have come,” he said unkindly. “It was stupid. You were almost killed.”

“Wasn’t my message worth it at all?”

“No. Not at all.” He was very angry and the anger poured out. “You could have sent it through the line we set up. You brought it because you wanted to indulge yourself. You did it for yourself.” He stood up. “Now look at you.”

She wept. After a while he apologized for being cruel to her. He kissed the side of her mouth that wasn’t bruised. “I’m going away soon,” he said. “You’re to stay here and get better.”

“Are they going to interrogate me?”

“Some. Nothing deep. They’re all right.”

“When will you come back?”

“When I’m done.”

“Where are you going?”

“Never mind.”

“You’re going to Moscow. Aren’t you?”

He kissed her again. “You get better.”

Late that afternoon the helicopter came over the house and Laforet appeared a few minutes after. He visited briefly with Juana and Repin, like a schoolmaster checking on the sick ones in his infirmary, and then he came to sit with Tarp in the wallpapered room. He threw down his hat and his gloves, and sat rather heavily, showing the fatigue of overwork. “I have some bad news for you. You want to hear it first?”

“Of course.”

“Your friend Carrington lost his left arm. Just above the elbow.”

Tarp thought about Johnnie, who seemed so young and so silly and who ran at life so very seriously. “I’m sorry. Thanks, Jules.”

“He will be all right, they say. He is young; he will bounce back.”

They sat quietly, thinking about what it meant to bounce back from the loss of a limb. Therese came in with wine and a rough paté and bread and hurried out.

“I’m done in England,” Tarp said. “You might go on checking on the Homburg business.”

“I’ve been in touch with your Mr. Smith. I shall ask him, too.”

“If you can check in Germany, so much the better.”

Again, a silence fell. Laforet put a little of the paté on the bread and ate a very small bite as if suspicious of it. He nodded approvingly and ate a much bigger bite. He sat back. “Well? What now?”

“Moscow.”

“When?”

“Now.”

Laforet looked down at his pant leg. He smoothed it, straightened the crease. “If you mean it, I can have you on the way in two hours.”

“ Now .”

Laforet snapped his head up and gave him a dazzling smile. “Good. Good luck.”

The house on Podgornyi Street had been built late in the nineteenth century and had been intended to display the solidity of a Russian middle class that did know it was moribund. Now it was a warehouse for a primary school, perhaps scheduled for demolition the next time the city government made a lurch forward. An elderly couple lived in two rooms at the back, their windows covered with rags so that only a sliver of light spilled out over the thin and melting snow. In the rest of the house painted boards covered the windows and the rooms were filled with child-sized school desks, maps of the world that no longer showed what the world was like, and gymnasium equipment that was too clumsy-looking to interest the children of the new age.

“I am looking for a ticket to The Seagull ,” he had said at the kitchen door. Repin had told him that it would not matter how he used the code word seagull . The old woman had looked at him resentfully; then, without a word but frowning terribly, she had pulled the door a few inches wider to indicate he could come in. Tarp heard her whispering fiercely while he waited in a damp entry that smelled of earth and the sour cabbage that was cooking.

The old man had put his head into the gap of the inner door and looked him over and then disappeared. More whispering, and then he had come and told Tarp to come in. The old woman had gone into their other room — too angry, Tarp thought, to face him.

“Are you hungry?” the old man demanded. He was in his seventies, or he had suffered enough to look that age. He was dirty, too — obviously a man who had simply given up trying to keep clean.

“I could eat, yes.”

The old man put down a plate of cabbage soup and a big piece of dark bread. It was like a stage version of a Russian meal.

“You see how we have to live,” he said.

Tarp believed that they had been made nonpersons because of some crime. They were lucky to have even this — two rooms, the stove, food — and he knew that they must have them for some other reason than their good fortune. They were probably informers, recruited after the legal punishment for their crime, put in this place to live out their lives as purveyors of gossip. They would be working for the Moscow police or the local Party secretary or even the Fifth Directorate. Probably the last, Tarp thought, because it would explain how Repin knew about them and had some kind of leverage on them.

“It has been a long time, you understand,” the old man said, as if he followed Tarp’s thoughts.

“You need money?”

The old man brightened. He had an evil, cynical, entirely corrupted grin. “Always. You know the situation.”

Tarp did not know, but he pretended to. He put a little money on the table. The old man all but sneered. “It takes many drops to fill a bottle,” he said. Tarp shook his head. He did not want them to appear suddenly rich and start other people asking questions.

The old man took the money and put it up under his heavy sweater in a pocket so high that he had to bend over in a contortion that looked as if he were scratching his own back. When he straightened, he had that dreadful grin again. “You want vodka?” he said.

“A little.”

“You pay by the drink here.”

“All right.”

He opened a cupboard and took down a bottle. There were other bottles behind it. His bank , Tarp thought. The family fortune .

“I got a nephew in the black market,” the man said. He squinted at Tarp. “You’re not after black marketeers?”

“Not my line.”

“Since Andropov, you know, you can’t trust anybody. We’re all to be saints, he thinks.” He poured three glasses of vodka. “Jews? You after Jews?”

“Mind your own business.”

They had been told that the people who came to them from time to time with the code word seagull were clandestine operatives of the Fifth Directorate, who, for unexplained reasons, were working unknown to the Fifth Directorate itself — a Byzantine complexity of double-dealing that only a society haunted by deception could believe.

“Varya,” the old man bawled. He had filled the glasses to their brims, so that a mound of liquid rose above each. “Varya! Vodka.”