“Is that bad?”
“Oh, well…” She wrapped her hands around his left arm. “It is not yet time to go into the theater. Let us walk.”
“Like the other couples.”
“Yes.” She was wearing a light dress of a lavender fabric that had a sheen like silk, and her hair was piled on one side of her face with a flower in it. Her makeup was sophisticated, rather highly colored, and she seemed to have accentuated the Negroid elements of her cheekbones and her lips.
“You are even more beautiful than I remember.”
“Short memory.” She relaxed her hold and put one hand lightly on his left arm. “Where are you staying, did you say?”
“I did not. I hoped that tonight I would stay with you.”
She pulled her hand away. “Don’t be like that,” she said quickly. “I hate that.”
“I was trying to be honest.” He took her hand and put it in his arm again. “Now I will be less honest.”
They strolled once around the plaza and then turned toward the theater. People were pressing into the lobby in rather happily messy lines. Tarp found them much noisier than an American crowd, and noisier by far than any in Moscow.
“Actually,” she said as she watched him come back with tickets, “you look quite handsome. Even with the Cuban hair.”
“I was scolded when I told you you look beautiful.”
“No, you were scolded when you made what you thought was a sexy remark. Then you not only looked like a Cuban man, you sounded like one. Well, for me that doesn’t work so well, because I am a new Cuban woman.”
“One is not supposed to want to spend the night with you?”
“One is not supposed to say so as if they were giving prizes for such remarks.”
The auditorium seemed as big as the plaza outside. There were two vast balconies above them, an orchestra like a football field; chandeliers the size of buses hung from the ceiling, dark gold and crystal and oddly old-fashioned in such a setting. Tarp felt shrunken by such space and by the thousands now moving into it. “Individualism is an aberration,” she had said, and this theater said exactly the same thing. The only concessions to privilege were a row of loges along the front of the lower balcony, but even those were made subservient to the dominant scheme, having no private entrances and no privacy walls. They were, in fact, showplaces where officials and visitors sat, as much on display there as the performers on the stage. Now, Tarp watched them fill with men and women who were neither Cuban nor Communist.
“Foreigners?” he said to her.
She twisted her head to look up. A breath of perfume reached him. “From the embassies. And delegates to the antinuclear congress from South America.”
He thought he could pick out the Russians and the French. He tried to pass the time by making a game of the nationalities, but finally he had to admit what he already knew too well — that, except for the obvious distinctions, national characteristics were not easily expressed in faces. The Africans were colorful and exotic; the Orientals seemed too pleased with it all. Many of them wore lapel badges that identified them as delegates, including a small, silver-haired man in a wheelchair who came in with two bodyguards, and an older man in a dinner jacket with military decorations that Tarp was sure were British.
“Who’s that?” he said to her, pointing at them.
She shook her head. “I don’t know them.”
They took their places in a box. Tarp thought them an odd foursome, particularly when he saw the bulge of a weapon in one of the men’s coats. Some peace congress.
There was a stir then at the back of the orchestra and they stopped talking, although Tarp glanced again at the man in the wheelchair and his thugs and found himself wondering if the man with the British medals could be English, and what he was doing there; and then, like Juana, he was craning his neck to see the group coming into the orchestra from the back.
“Who is it?” he asked her.
“Your Russians,” she said. She was standing, unabashed by her own curiosity. A group of twenty people was coming down the wide aisle. Around them some of the audience were applauding politely. A heavy-jowled man came first, with a short, heavy-jowled woman half a step behind him; next came two men, one either drunk or feverish; and next, to Tarp’s surprise and relief, came Repin. With him was a fortyish woman who had that rawboned look that dancers sometimes take on with age; Tarp thought she was the ballet manageress. Repin looked pleased and yet pugnacious, like Khruschev in his old photos.
Tarp stood up.
Repin was on the side away from him, and he was bowing a little this way and that, but he turned to say something to the tall woman with him and he saw Tarp. His face went slack momentarily and he turned rather red, like the man ahead of him. Tarp smiled and bowed.
“What is it?” Juana tugged at his arm.
“An acquaintance.”
“In the ballet?”
“A friend of theirs.”
He smiled at Repin again. The old KGB officer had composed himself and he bowed in return, and his head came back up to jerk toward the door behind him in a way that was impossible to misinterpret. He wanted Tarp to meet him in the lobby.
An overture played and the huge chandeliers dimmed and then the curtain rose on a lush, pretty, Romantic scene. People were still coming in, and Tarp watched for Repin’s stocky body to appear in the aisle.
“Excuse me,” he said to Juana Marino.
“It has just started!”
“I shall come back.”
He found Repin in the shadow of a staircase, at the bottom of a lobby that rose up through the building’s three stories. He seemed to be studying a program with care. When Tarp came up, he looked over the folded paper and said, “I thought you were dead.”
“I need your help.”
“They told me your boat had blown up.”
“The boat did. I need to get out of Cuba.”
“I was betrayed. You believe that, I hope? I did not try to kill you. Other times, yes. This time, why should I?”
“There are easier ways. What went wrong?”
“I made an arrangement with the navy; somebody in DGI finds out, maybe from Moscow. Eh? They do not kill me; that is too obvious; killing you is good idea.”
“Do they know it’s me?”
“Maybe not. They know is an American, obviously.”
“Anything new on the submarine or the plutonium?”
“I have agent here looking at something. He has idea, he thinks. We will see.” Repin pushed out his lips as if he might whistle. He was dressed in great style, not in a Bulgarian tropical disaster but in an expensive English suit, and he looked more than ever like a ruthless capitalist. “I leave Cuba in six days. Not much time.” He tapped the edge of the program on his teeth. “You are with beautiful woman. How does that happen?”
“An accident.”
“There are no accidents.” He tapped the program some more and lifted an eyebrow. “We are being watched by the KGB agent sent to watch the KGB agent who watches the ballet troupe. He is one of Telyegin’s, I think, so he is perhaps all right. Still, it is best I introduce you.” He took Tarp’s arm and turned him around. There was a mousy-looking young man huddled into himself next to a drinking fountain. They walked over. “Eugen Nemirovich, my young friend, I want you to meet one of our staunchest friends in the hemisphere. May I present Señor Picardo.”
Good! Tarp thought. My fifth identity today. The Russian made a little bob of a bow. “Enchanté,” Tarp murmured.
“Senor Picardo is an internationalist,” Repin said. He smiled. The KGB man smiled as young men do when the boss says almost anything. “We are all friends of peace,” he said.