“Tonight. The team has to go in and plant the gun and clean the apartment while I interrogate her.”
“That is not easy.”
“Of course it isn’t easy.”
“Moscow would not be happy.”
“Moscow would not be happy if it rained loaves of bread.”
Repin sighed. “You are very crass sometimes. Let’s have a drink.”
“My place or yours?”
Repin gave him a disgusted look. “I am taking you to a place.” He looked at Tarp’s stained T-shirt, the woman’s stretch slacks he wore. “We will perhaps find you some clothes. You look absurd. Truly absurd. Do you ever see me look like that? Of course not.” Repin fingered the lapel of his coat. “London. The very best. I dress carefully, always. But you! These clothes are ridiculous. It is a wonder you were not stopped by the police and arrested as a pervert.” He seemed genuinely annoyed. They drove the rest of the way in silence.
It was a scruffy little suite of rooms next to a fire station and above a hardware store that had cockfighting in the basement. Repin said it had been offered to him by a Party official who thought he might need a “discreet localization for assignations.” Even Cuban bureaucrats talked that way now, it seemed. Repin sent the driver out to buy clothes for Tarp and then he busied himself behind a screen with a bottle of vodka. He had left his expensive London jacket over the back of a chair, and Tarp looked at it. It was a beautiful suit, indeed; a Bond Street tailor’s label was sewn under the pocket. At the neck, however, there was another, much smaller label that read “Hire Attire. Gentleman’s Preowned Suitings.”
When Repin came in with two full glasses of vodka and the bottle tucked under his arm, Tarp was looking at the Hire Attire label. Repin stiffened, got red, then laughed. “Well, so you found it. So? My pension is not as generous as it ought to be.” Tarp put the jacket back over the chair. “Gentleman’s preowned suitings?” he said with a little smile as he took the vodka.
“The perfect solution to anonymity, my friend. Try them! After all, what better protective coloration could an agent want than wearing some dead man’s clothes?”
They drank. Tarp chose not to think about wearing a dead man’s clothes as a metaphor for the way they spent their lives.
Chapter 9
She sat across the metal table from him, her face bare of makeup, her arms bare and strong and her hands folded on the table’s edge just between her breasts.
“Do you understand, Juana?” Tarp said in Spanish.
“No, I do not understand.” She had given up being angry. Now she seemed chastened. “I understand nothing.”
“Are you supposed to understand, do you think?”
“Maybe not.” There had been a slight tremble in her lower lip at first, but that was gone now. “I can accept orders without question.”
“Good.” He put cigarettes on the table next to a cheap notebook and pen. “Good.” It was impossible not to play a part when he did this sort of thing, because he had watched so many interrogators and had been an interrogator so often himself. It was difficult to keep from being so detached from the role that he would stop monitoring himself. “Who am I?” he said.
“I do not know anymore.”
“Who do you think I am?”
“I—” She bit her lip and colored. “I thought at first that you were the American.”
“The American?”
“The one we thought had come ashore. His boat exploded off the coast. There was a circular for the cideristas.”
He tapped his fingers together — not his own gesture, but that of a Frenchman in the old days just after Dien Bien Phu. “That was a man named Robert Plumb.” The name was that of the blond young man from the Agency whom he had left on his boat.
“I never heard that name.”
“Of course not. Go on.”
“Then I thought that you were from Moscow.”
“Yes?”
“One of us.”
“Us?”
“The sluzhba.”
“I see. And?”
“And — and that is as far as I got.”
“I see. So, you thought I was KGB, but you did not identify yourself to me.”
“I was not sure!”
“Nor did you try to help me.”
“I did!” They were both thinking, he was sure, of her bed. “I did not let the anti-Castro people have you.”
“But you did not help me.”
Tarp rubbed his eyes with his fingers and then looked at her around the hand whose fingers rested on the bridge of his nose. He looked and looked; then he got up and went out of the plain room and waited for three minutes.
They were in a house on the western edge of Havana. It had once been rather elegant; now an old couple took care of it and pretended to be the only ones there, and the KGB used it when they wanted to get away from their Cuban allies.
He went back into the room and sat down again across the table from her. “Do you know what is happening in Moscow?” he said.
She seemed genuinely confused. “Politically?” she said. “Oh, come! Surely you know better than that! Juana, we spent ten years and a great deal of money training you, and the best you can say is, ‘Politically?’ Come, come — in the service, Juana. Do you know what is happening in the service?”
“I do not know.”
“Truly? You mean there is no gossip in Havana, Juana? Are you cut off from all communication? Have you taken a vow of silence?”
“I hear very little.”
“From your father?”
“My father is a translator, nothing more. If there is some gossip I am supposed to have heard, I would not have heard it from him.”
He got up, paced around the table as he had seen it done so often, as he had done it so often, and stood behind her. “You were trained at Brest-Litovsk?”
She nodded.
“Many who came from that school show a devotion — a personal, almost a fanatical devotion — to Comrade Mensenyi. Our good Comrade Mensenyi, who has so many devoted followers, even in Cuba and South America. Are you a devoted follower of Mensenyi’s, Juana?”
She took a deep breath. “I am loyal to the Party.”
“That goes without saying. Do you have a personal loyalty to Mensenyi?”
“We are not supposed to have personal loyalties.” Her voice was so soft that he could not have heard it from a few feet farther away. “We are not supposed to have feelings.”
“Tut-tut, that is almost Stalinist. You are out of touch, Juana. ‘Agents are human beings’ — Directive four oh nine point seven.”
“There is no such directive. You are making fun of me.”
“Are we not human beings, then?”
“I love you!” She twisted in her chair and shouted it at him. She caught him off guard — her naked face, her passionate voice; if he had really been a KGB officer trying to trap her, he would almost have trapped himself. Tarp took a step away. “Are you ‘personally loyal’ to me, then?”
“I don’t even know who you are!”
“And yet you love me! Wonderful!” He moved around the table. “I told you when this interview began, I hold the rank of colonel; I am of the service; I am in Cuba covertly. That is all you need to know. We are in a KGB safe house — you know it, I suppose; you are of the service. I have been vouched for.”
An old crony of Repin’s had brought her to the house and had made a great show of authenticating Tarp’s identity.
He sat down across from her again. “Juana.” He folded his hands under his chin. “There is great trouble in Moscow. Great trouble.”
“The man you bowed to at the ballet.” She was limp; her face was bleak. “He is here because of it, isn’t he?”