“Oh, but it has!” She waved the green card. “It is all logic.”
Tarp thought he understood. It made him want to laugh. He did smile a little. “You are a subversive!” He looked into her eyes, trying to penetrate to the mind beneath them, but she was tough and experienced and she held him out. “What are you, Juana?” he said. “Anti-Castro? A terrorist?” But an alarm was going off in the back of his head, which meant that something was very wrong, and he looked at the opaque eyes and the excited face and he thought she was too good to be an amateur. “Do you help people get to Miami, is that it?” he said, to play for time.
She waved the green card again. “You know all that or you would not be here.”
By looking down and to the left, he could see the gun. It was old; its blueing was raddled; it was only a production gun intended for somebody’s backpack. He thought of the Agency man he had shot on the boat, then of the two DGI men he had killed with the shotgun. Staying alive is a matter of knowing when to shoot first. Or at least of thinking that you knew when to shoot first, because you could never be sure — and if you shot first, you never found out if you were wrong. His eyes shifted to her face again. Does she know when to shoot first?
There was a knock at the door. She did not move, nor did her eyes leave his. “Well?” she said.
A man’s muffled voice said, “Fernando is here, Juana.”
“Wait for me.”
She stood up very slowly and backed away from him, pulling the pistol away from his throat last as if she were disconnecting a cord. She felt behind her in a drawer for a pair of panties and then pulled them on one-handed, then got slacks and a blouse and put those on without ever looking away from him. She pushed her rather big feet into shoes by standing in them and wiggling the heels in, and then she said, “Come in now.”
Two men came in. They were both young, both dark. One looked like a college student, the sort who would be intensely intellectual and who might call himself a poet. The other looked as if he had worked all his life to get where he was, so that he was thicker and coarser and yet jollier.
Juana gave the poetic one the pistol.
“I will be back at noon,” she said. “Do not let him out.”
She closed the door behind her and he heard her steps rapping over the concrete floor, and then the outer door thudded as she left the apartment, and a framed photograph of six young women in track suits swayed on its nail and hung crookedly. He thought he could hear her after she left the apartment, walking down the gallery beyond her door, but finally he could not hear even the faint ghost of her angry footsteps, and he knew that for a while he had been listening to the sounds of the morning traffic and of his own blood in his ears.
“We could torture him,” the poetic one said.
The thick one looked dubious. Tarp sat up. “Who wants to start?” he said.
The poet had a little of the fanatic’s gleam, but he also had the gun, and that satisfied him. His friend, who was pragmatic and who knew that the two of them could not torture this large, muscular man, even when they had a gun, was relieved.
“We will wait for Juana,” he said.
“I need to pass water,” Tarp said.
The thick one got a bucket while the poet sat astraddle of the room’s only chair, imagining himself Humphrey Bogart in Key Largo.
The man set the bucket down next to a tiny sink with one tap. “We cannot let you go to the convenience, you understand,” he said with genuine apology in his voice.
“Do not be so kind to him!” the poet said.
The thick one shrugged. “Pissing is not a political issue.” He put his hands in his pants pockets. “Anyway, Juana says he may be one of us.”
“If he is not DGI,” the poet said. “Or KGB.”
“Actually,” Tarp said, “I am Chinese.” He got out of bed and stood there naked, eight inches taller than either of them, his body marked with scars that were like tick marks on a map to show places of interest. In fact, he had been born in China and he had grown up there, but the two young Cubans took it as the sour joke of a cynical older man. They backed to the door and then locked him in, and Tarp knew that they were well-meaning young men who thought that shooting first was morally wrong.
His clothes were not in the room. The door was locked, and there was an angry shout from the other side when he rattled it. Tarp stalked the tiny room, first to the one window and then more carefully from corner to corner. Well, I wanted a way to pass the time. There was a deep ledge beyond the window glass and then a somewhat Moorish concrete grill. By opening the window and pushing his head against the grill he could look down and see that there was nothing to help him get down the three stories to the street, even if he could have gotten the grill off.
A way to pass the time, indeed. He was annoyed, most of all with himself, because he wanted to be working on the plutonium business.
He paced. The room was eleven feet long by seven and a half feet wide and was bare except for the single bed, the one chair, the tiny sink, a very small wood table that Juana used as a dressing table, and a rather large armoire that took the place of a closet. On the concrete walls were the picture of the girls’ track team (Juana was one of them) and a bright-orange weaving, and on the floor was one small rug. Tarp made the bed. He hung up her dress from the ballet, which had been lying in front of the armoire like the wreckage of that pleasure. There were no scissors and no knives on the small table. There was a hand mirror that might make a weapon if the glass was broken.
The chair was very light and cheaply made and no good to him. He slid under the bed and looked up at the bottom of the box spring, which looked as if it had been made of orange crates by untrained labor. Its bottom was covered with a sleazy fabric like bandage gauze. He tore it away and looked up through tangent rings of steel wire. They might have made a weapon if he had had a tool, but as they were, they were too tough for him.
The back of the wardrobe had a twenty-inch brace, which he carefully and silently wrenched loose, giving him a club with two nails in the end. Her clothes and the handbag that lay in the bottom of the wardrobe provided nothing more than a crumpled book of matches that told him that economic self-sufficiency is national liberation.
He put the club and the matches and the gauze up inside the box spring.
Well, it helps to pass the time. He lay on the bed, thinking of the two men he had killed on the boat. It was never very good, thinking about the dead. He envied Christians, who could light candles and pray in scented, dark places. He had only his thoughts.
He heard her in the outer room a little before noon. The sunlight stood straight out from the window like a bright rectangle that had been painted on the waxed concrete floor. He heard her voice out there for several seconds, then a male voice. Then the lock on the door rattled and he backed away and went to the bed. He was still naked.
She came in and closed the door behind her very quickly as if there were an animal in the room that she was afraid would escape, a cat or a bird. She kept her right hand on the door handle. She looked around the room first, as if he were invisible, and then she looked at him. Her face was angry and her color was pale and unattractive, as if something inside her had drawn its heat back, leaving this wintry bleakness.
“I should let them kill you,” she said.
“They would not know how.” He was thinking that she knew something about him. Where had she been?
She looked away from him, avoiding any sign that she knew that he was naked. He shifted his weight and she looked at him angrily. “Do not do anything stupid!” she cried. Then she almost whispered. “I told them that if you did anything to me, try to make me a hostage, they are to kill me first. You understand?”