“Peace with honor,” Tarp said.
“Indeed, oh, yes, surely.” After some seconds, the young man backed away to another wall, where he stood uncertainly, still watching them. By then they were the only people in the gigantic lobby.
“I’ve got a passport, but it needs a visa and an entry stamp. Can you fix it?” Tarp said.
“Put it inside your program and leave it on the third urinal in the men’s room. I will come in after you and get it.”
“I’ll need a way out of Cuba.”
“I will work on it.” Repin’s face was troubled. “But it is very hard to trust anybody now. This young man who watches us, for example — who does he talk to? Who reads his report besides Telyegin? Bad, very bad. You need a place to hide tonight?”
“That’s all right. I’ll take care of myself.”
“The woman?”
“I’ll take care of myself.”
“Maybe I should hide you. If I could find a place where it would not be handing you over to them to kill.”
“I’ll take care of myself. How do I contact you?”
“There is a promenade along the harbor. A cafe called Angolan Memories. Tomorrow night at seven, all right?”
“All right.” He hesitated. “If you do find out something, you know, they will try to kill you next.”
Repin’s face slackened. “It has been tried before. I cannot prevent it.”
“Your agent here. Is he secure?”
“Who knows?” Repin sighed. “Enjoy the ballet.”
When he slid back into his seat next to her, she took his arm again. Her thigh was very warm against his, and the touch seemed not to bother her at all. Tarp looked at her instead of the ballet. She was taller than most of the women he had seen in Havana, her face angular but full-lipped, high-boned. She was a woman that many men would have made great effort to have. He put his mouth close to her ear and said, “Do you believe in accidents?”
“Shhh,” she said, intent on the ballet.
Tarp stared at the stage and concentrated, instead, on Repin and the plutonium. That Maxudov had a network in Cuba was obvious; it was probably not the regular KGB net — it was silly to think that he would have corrupted a whole section — but was, perhaps, made up of a few well-placed agents and a lot of people who thought they were performing their patriotic duty to Cuba or the U.S.S.R. and were really serving one man. Such a situation did not mean that the plutonium had come to Cuba. Tarp was not convinced by the nuclear freeze posters that covered the walls of Havana, any more than he was convinced that the diplomats who sat above him at the ballet believed in peace; but he would need hard evidence before he would believe that Cuba wanted its own atomic weapons so much that it would deal with a Soviet traitor. No, that was senseless. What was far likelier was that the buyer was a terrorist or the PLO or a consortium of terrorist groups — yet it was hard to see why even they would risk the fury of Moscow.
But if it were they — or somebody like them — who, then, was Maxudov? And why was he willing to take such risk? Not for zeal. Tarp had only marginal belief in zeal. He believed more fully in human weakness — a woman, a man, money, ambition. But how was Maxudov served in any of those ways?
I’m in the wrong place, he thought. Wrong city, wrong country, I need to get to Washington. Ironically, the CIA would know more perhaps about Cuban ambitions toward atomic weaponry than the Soviets did, especially if the Soviets were being diddled by one of their own. Then I need the gossip from Europe. I need to be in London. Paris. He looked down the hall at Repin. Then Moscow. He would have to kill twenty-four hours before he could start. Wrong city, wrong country. He glanced at the woman beside him. Right woman.
She was applauding. He applauded. “Wasn’t it brilliant?” she cried. “Wonderful. Wonderful!” She stood up and he realized it was over. “Would you like to go to a nightclub?” she said.
“What would we do at a nightclub?”
“Dance!”
“Do you like to dance?”
“Just now, I love to dance!”
“We will go to a nightclub.”
It was like places in New York that people of his generation had dreamed about when they were adolescents, places that no longer existed — the homes of gossip columnists and “cafe society.” There was a floor show of extravagant noise and glitter, and a remarkable show of bare skin for a Socialist country. There was lots of rum, and there was dancing.
“Where did you learn to merengue?” she demanded. “You are a Cuban man!”
“You are very beautiful.”
“Dance with me again!”
When the nightclub closed at two in the morning, she took him to her apartment. She carried her high-heeled shoes in one hand and held on to his arm with the other, and on the concrete balcony of the floor below hers, they kissed. They held each other’s hands, nothing else; it was like the dance again, the dance impacted. “Come upstairs,” she whispered.
Outside her door there was a bulletin board with notices and posters and a long cardboard sign that read COMMITTEE FOR THE DEFENSE OF THE REVOLUTION. BLOCK MEETINGS TUESDAYS SEVEN P.M. EMERGENCIES ANY TIME.
“I am the block chairman,” she murmured.
As she undressed, she hummed a tune from the nightclub. It was self-aware but not insistent, neither coy nor stupid. Under the brown hose, her long legs were brown; her body was strong and supple. She cried out with pleasure and laughed afterward and then hugged him as they spiraled down toward sleep.
“Do you have to go away in the morning?” she murmured.
“Not right away.”
“Good.” She smiled, her face against his shoulder, and he could feel the muscles move. “Go to sleep, then.”
He had not slept for thirty-six hours. He let go, and his mind floated free.
When he awoke, there was light coming into the room from the window, and the barrel of his own .22 was poked hard into the soft flesh just below the bend of his left jaw.
“Did you take me for an imbecile?” she said. She was sitting on the bed naked, the gun in one hand and the DGI green card in the other.
There are no accidents, he thought. Repin had been right.
Chapter 8
“Did you think I believed you, even on the beach?” she said. “Do you think that in Cuba we find men on the beach and think nothing more about it?”
“Take the gun away,” he growled. He hardly dared move his jaw.
“Oh, no. It is a very nice gun. An American gun — what a nice gun for a Russian to have. Or are you a Cuban named Ibazza? Is your name Ibazza when you work for the DGI?”
“I don’t like guns.”
“Do you think I always bring men home to my bed because they are handsome and charming and because they dance like angels?”
Some of her hair had fallen and her makeup was smudged, but she looked wonderful. She looked intelligent and vibrant, and she looked as if she hated him.
“You are beautiful,” he said. They were speaking Spanish now.
“Oh, yes.” It seemed to make her sad.
“What in the name of God — may I mention God? — do you think I was doing on the beach if I wasn’t doing what I said?”
“You are going to tell me that.”
“It has no logic.”