George Bartram - Under the Freeze

“You want to look now?”

Again the round-faced man went out, leaving the other as a guard; coming back, he said, “Tell them it’s ready,” and his subordinates and the string bag of cleaning materials disappeared.

They sat in the kitchen for two hours. Tarp made his mind blank, as he had done when he had been captured years before and kept with nothing to do for weeks. Thinking was no help now, so it was best to cleanse the mind. The time passed as if it were the tick of a clock, from which he awoke rested and at ease.

The round-faced man had stood up. “In five minutes,” he said to Tarp, “you must be ready. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“Do you need to toilet?”

“No.”

“Walk ahead of me. First, I must search you.”

They walked into the other part of the house. The cold was awesome there. He could smell old wood and mildew and the pine scent. There were overhead lights in the corridor and in one room; the corridor was lined with school desks that had come out of the room, which had been swept and wiped and polished. The floor was glossy with it. The ceiling fixture had been made for four bulbs to swing on short chains, but only one socket had a bulb in it; on the floor was a plain desk lamp with a frayed cord, alight and turned up to shine into the room.

Tarp and the round-faced man stood because there were no chairs. The room encouraged stiffness. It had been bullyingly formal once, a symbol of somebody’s propriety and uprightness, angular and without prettiness. It was a room in which humiliated young men were meant to ask stiff-necked fathers for their daughters’ hands, a room in which the priest was to be received for calls.

A car drew up. It had a big, throaty engine. Doors thudded. Tarp could hear no voices, but he heard feet on a stone walk. The round-faced man stood straighter and checked his tie and his fly, then stepped toward the doorway. There were footsteps in the corridor as several people approached. One figure went past the doorway without looking in, and then a second figure came to it, paused, looked in, and entered.

It was Andropov.

He was so tall that he had a habitual stoop, as if the world’s doorways had not been made large enough for him. He was taller than Tarp. He was both professorial and menacing, as if, in his struggle upward for the supreme power of the organization that was both the source of Soviet control and its greatest sickness, he had coupled the intelligence of the academic with the ruthlessness of the gangster. He wore gold-rimmed glasses and a well-made suit, although it fit him as if he had lost weight recently. He was at that age where most men retire and where a few begin the last desperate clawing up the glass mountain of power. He had almost feminine eyes, but familiarity with him showed that not modesty but secretiveness explained them. His lips were full, the nasolabial folds defined, faintly Semitic; in all, he was handsome, intellectual, imposing, weary.

The round-faced man from the Guards quivered from the tension of being in the same room with him. Andropov did not even seem to notice him; one glance took in the stiff room, the poor light, Tarp. He wore no hat, but his long hands were gloved; he took a step into the room, then whirled, drawing the glove from his right hand with his left almost as if it were not a hand but a weapon he was taking from a sheath. He thrust the hand toward Tarp; he took only Tarp’s fingers, let go instantly. He took another step, turned profile. The round-faced man went to the door and stood there with his back to them.

“Repin sent you?” Andropov said in excellent English.

“Yes.”

“You have been slow getting here.”

“Yes.”

Andropov removed his other glove and put both of them on the mantel. “I have ten minutes,” he said. He put his back to the empty fireplace. “What is it you want?”

“I want information.” When Andropov said nothing, Tarp took his silence for permission to continue. “I want the files of the people who are suspected. I want help with a related matter. And I need to know, for form’s sake: Is it you?”

Even in the bad light Andropov’s face seemed to lengthen, to grow paler. “No.” He tipped his head back slowly and looked Tarp over. In the light from the lamp on the floor, his eyes looked Oriental.

“That leaves six possibilities.”

“Five. Galusha died of a stroke on Monday.” He stated it as fact, allowing no objections.

“Five, then.” Tarp’s tension was gone. He felt now a great sense of well-being. “Can two of them be working together?”

“I do not think so, no. I think we would know about that.”

“Repin wanted me to talk to Telyegin first.”

“Good. Telyegin is dying, you know. Maybe dying men are most likely to be honest.”

“Or deceptive. Dying men have nothing to lose.”

“Have you ever died?”

Tarp let the irony pass. It was the one clear sign that Andropov disliked him — or, perhaps, disliked this process and all it implied.

“Will you tell about them?”

“Very briefly.”

“Telyegin.”

Andropov looked away, as if to gather thought. He and Telyegin were old rivals. Andropov seemed unsentimental, but that was vastly different from being unemotional. “Telyegin,” he said, drawing the name out. “Old. Pitiless. Wily. A European, not an Oriental. A Stalinist. His work is his life.”

“Strisz?”

“Strisz is very intelligent. A deal-maker. He tells jokes, perhaps out of nervousness.” Andropov did not seem to approve of the jokes. “A very promising early career.”

“Beranyi?”

“Quite young. Ambitious. Difficult — stubborn in the way he insists upon first principles. Yet, oddly, a risk-taker. Difficult.”

“Falomin?”

“A man of his time — a brilliant manager. The opposite of Beranyi. Sometimes he gives the impression that he could as easily manage a movie house or a tractor factory as the Jewish program. He has an unfortunate wife.”

Tarp waited for more. Nothing came. “Mensenyi.” Andropov looked at him. He saw something that made him decide to be frank. “A clown. He has already been promoted above his proper level, because of political maneuvering. He will be demoted…” He hesitated. “Soon.”

“Clowns can be dangerous.”

“I did not rule him out.”

“You are convinced that one of the five is Maxudov?” Andropov narrowed his eyes. “I require that one of these five be Maxudov.” He let that sink in. He might as well have said, I am not turning my government upside-down even for this. He had already decided how the matter was to be contained: these five or nobody. It would be very hard on all five five of them if Tarp could not prove that one was Maxudov, because all five would be forever suspect. In fact, they would not last long. Nor would Tarp.

Andropov’s right hand moved to the gloves. Seeing the movement, Tarp said quickly, “There have been four attempts to kill me. There was the crash of Repin’s plane. The manner of them suggests some — incoherence. More than one person, perhaps.”

“I cannot accept that there is more than one.”

“Might somebody else be exploiting it — maybe knowing something, planning to come forward when no solution is found, to benefit from being a hero?”

“Ambition is not unknown in Moscow,” Andropov said. “But I advise you, do not look for complex solutions.”

“What if it is a complex situation?”

“Then give me a simple solution to it.” Andropov took his gloves, and, putting them on, became businesslike. “I want the man who calls himself Maxudov, and I want the plutonium. That seems quite simple. If there are complications…” He shook his head.

“Maxudov may have colleagues in other countries.”