George Bartram - Under the Freeze

Then he was on the iron bed again. His cheek was swollen and there was bloody padding around the tooth. A numbness. Novocaine . He gave me novocaine . It’s Alice in Wonderland.

“Take him downstairs.”

They took him back to the tiled room. There was a metal chair in the very center, right above the drain. They put him in it and the doctor prepared another syringe.

“Count backward from one hundred, please.”

He felt the chemical take him the moment the syringe went in. He was very weak, he knew. He tried to think of the Spanish word for one hundred, but he could not. But he was counting backward in Russian.

“… four, ninety… ninety, ah, three, ninety…” A long, long silence. Then, a voice like a gong. “Ninety-two.” A sense of being sucked up by a great breath, by a wind that was rushing along a corridor like the endless corridor of a baroque palace. “ Ninety - one .” He expanded as he was swept along; his body almost grazed the ornate cornices, the arches, the Roman columns that lined his way. If he touched one, he would explode. He was a balloon, a bag of blood, a tissue. He got bigger and bigger…

He was laughing. Something very funny had happened. He had fallen off the chair; that was what had happened.

He was angry. His rage was like the wind in the palace; it carried him, carried the room, the men in it. He was enraged because they had killed Repin and the dancers. Those young bodies. Always the innocent first.

He was singing “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” He was giggling.

His breathing roared like surf. His blood sang. His heartbeat was like running steps. A child running down a corridor. Heels quick as raindrops. Faster. Flying!

In the darkness his breathing came and went like breezes in the tops of trees. His heart, buried deep within him, pumped blood with the measured and cautious tread of hope.

He opened his eyes.

There was a man standing over him. The man leaned close. The man smiled.

It was Strisz.

“Awake again?” Strisz said.

“Again?” He moved his head and became aware of a vicious headache. “Have I been awake?”

“Off and on.”

“For how long?”

“You have been here two days.”

Tarp rolled his head the other way. “Here” was not the Lubyanka. He could see the rails of a shiny hospital bed, an IV tube running into his right arm, which was strapped down.

“You are in a clinic,” Strisz said. “One we use sometimes for special cases.”

Tarp looked down over his chest, which was covered with white bedclothes, to the rail at the end of the bed and, in the very middle of the blank wall opposite, the shiny metal of a brushed-steel door frame. He was still coming back, coming a long way back, and it took him time to remember. When he remembered, his voice crackled. “ Beranyi !”

Strisz gave him one of his intelligent, joking smiles. “Yes, Beranyi.”

“Where is Beranyi?”

“Why do you ask?” Strisz was making a joke.

“Where is Beranyi?”

“Odd, that you should ask. For several days, Beranyi was asking, ‘Where is this Tarp?’ It seems you never appeared for your meeting with him.”

Tarp was not surprised by the story. He was surprised, however, that he was alive. “How did I get here?”

Strisz leaned on the bars of the bed and looked down, the way an idle man might lean on the railing of a bridge to look at the river below. His smile was that of a man with secret knowledge and a delight in letting go of it slowly. “A prostitute in the Maikov district called the police. She said you had been drinking and abusing her and had passed out.”

Tarp thought about that. “It sounds like more fun than what I was doing,” he said.

“I thought that might be the case, too. Your French passport was in your clothes when the police got there. They called us. Not my section, but the Seventh Department over in Directorate Two. It took a while for the news to reach me. Actually, I heard it from Telyegin, who had a bulletin out on you through Special Investigations. We moved you here as soon as we could clear the paperwork with the cops.” Strisz looked impish. “The whore gave a statement that you had paid her to tie you up and beat you with a curtain rod. She said she thought you might have some bruises.”

“Not very inventive.”

“Oh, being beaten by a whore is done, you know.”

“Not that. The story.”

“Oh? Well, if it’s false, there’s a tone of — may I say bravado ? — about it. She said you had been drinking vodka for three days. She showed the police the empties. They did a blood test and you showed a high alcohol level. However, it was fairly easy to see that it had been put into the bowel.”

“The part about passing out sounds convincing. I thought I was going to die.” Tarp shut his eyes against the headache. When he opened them, Strisz was still there.

“What did Beranyi say?”

“You’ll never guess.” Strisz held up a finger, touched his nose with it as if he were a low comedian in a play. “Guess.”

“I don’t do guesses very well.”

“Guess.”

“Forget it.”

Strisz looked sad. He had wanted his joke. In a flat voice he said, “Beranyi said nothing, because he went to a congress of counterintelligence specialists in Budapest the day before the whore called.”

Tarp thought that over. “That seems odd.”

“Oh, not at all!” Strisz’s smile had returned.

“You’ve got something to tell me, right? You’ve saved the best for last.”

“Exactly!” Strisz leaned even closer. He was wearing a bulky overcoat, and the material was pushed up on each side of his neck like chubby wings. “He went to Budapest — and disappeared!” Strisz straightened and his wings collapsed. “We think he did, anyway. He had an invitation to go fishing on Lake Balaton. There’s some confusion about whether he actually got to the lake. Somebody got there and fished, somebody who looked like Beranyi, but the Hungarians aren’t at all sure that it actually was Beranyi. On the other hand, it might have been. So, we’ve sent a team down to find out the truth.”

Tarp struggled in the bed “Help me up.”

“You’re strapped.”

“Well, unstrap me!”

“You’ve got an intravenous tube in your arm.”

“I want to sit up!”

Strisz put two pillows behind him and Tarp was able to sit more or less upright. He felt his chin with his left hand and found a stubble that was just beginning to be long. “How long since I was supposed to have met with Beranyi?”

“This is the seventh day.”

“How long has he been gone?”

“Three days.”

“Christ, he could be on the moon.” The room was spinning and he squeezed his eyes shut. He opened them and fixed them on Strisz to make things stand still. “Well?”

Strisz was looking glum. He shrugged. “Well?”

“All right, let me have it: what’s my situation now?”

Strisz looked still glummer. Tarp accepted the possibility that Strisz might like him and might even feel sorry for him.

“Officially, you were with a whore when you should have been on a delicate mission. So, you are under official KGB detention.” Strisz cleared his throat. “Unofficially, there’s a panic because of Beranyi’s disappearance. But under the panic, there’s celebration. If he’s disappeared because he’s defected, then the panic will win — and I don’t know what will happen to you. If, on the other hand, he arranged his own disappearance not so that he could defect but so that he could go God knows where, then…” Strisz beat the palm of one hand on the fist of the other. “Then he will have proved himself to be Maxudov, but in a very disturbing way.” He grinned. “But that is the cause of the celebration, because if Beranyi proves himself to be Maxudov, then the traitor is found and the worry is over. He will be declared a traitor; we will put out a worldwide notice on him — and you might go home.”