“That’s why I want to interview him.”
“We have to clear all interviews before you file them with your home office.”
“Well, all right.”
Kinsella watched him with an expression that suggested he had a secret that Tarp had not yet been told. “If I recommend you, Señor Schneider will see you.”
Tarp thought he understood. Chai. “I will be most happy to do whatever is necessary.”
Kinsella smiled a little cynically. “Would you like to have dinner with me?”
The request seemed odd. “I should be gratified.”
“At my home. I will telephone my wife. Tonight? Meanwhile, I will telephone the Schneider offices and recommend you. Then maybe he will see you.” He took his face out of the light. He seemed genuinely pleased. “We will talk. My wife is a good cook. You like children? I have three; I will have to play with them for a few minutes, you understand. Then we will talk.”
Tarp spent the day looking around Buenos Aires, poking through old files, and talking to his detective. All he learned was that he probably had the right Schneider.
Kinsella’s wife turned out to be fat but pretty; the children were well behaved and went docilely off to bed with the maid when they were told to; the food was excellent. After dinner the wife disappeared and they talked about the Malvinas war and Argentina’s future. Kinsella gave a virtual monologue on the failure of the United States to understand where its best interest lay in the region. Toward the end, the high cost of living was mentioned, and Tarp handed over three hundred dollars in Argentine pesos, the amount that Grice had suggested.
Walking back to his hotel, Tarp had the unpleasant sense that Kinsella knew who he really was. The talk about America had sounded like exactly the sort of thing a patriot might try to say to American leaders through an agent. Worse than that, neither Kinsella nor his wife seemed to be surprised when he ate no meat.
Schneider’s offices were deep within the administration building of his chemical complex, surrounded by carpeted corridors and paneled turnings where stunning receptionists and the young men with American degrees waited. Around them was a ring of glass-fronted offices, the outermost one manned by armed guards, while around them was a modern-looking wall of steel and stone with broken glass set into the top in such a way that it could be seen only from a few high vantage points. Outside that wall were young men in paramilitary uniforms with automatic weapons. Everyone was very polite.
He was given a badge to wear on his lapel and was asked to step through a metal detector, where a sweet-faced, dark woman asked him please to leave the Luger. She tagged it and gave him a receipt and a dazzling smile.
He was led by a sleek, middle-aged man along the inner labyrinth of carpeted corridors. As he had approached the center of power, the men had gotten older and the women had disappeared. Schneider, he gathered, was not the sort who surrounded himself with young nonentities in order to build his own sense of importance; rather, he pushed the young ones to the fringe and defied comparison with his own very capable lieutenants. It was the gesture of a confident (or an arrogant) man.
Tarp was shown into a long room whose starkness contrasted with the paneled warmth he had just come through. One entire wall was window from floor to ceiling; beyond it was an enclosed Japanese garden, forty feet long, with an identical window on the other side. Some trick of technology made the far window opaque. Within the room were groupings of chairs and very plain sofas, as if to accommodate discussions of different sizes. Tarp saw no ashtrays, no wastebaskets. Two-thirds of the way down the room was a white desk, situated so that the man who sat at it had his back to the window and the simplicity of the garden.
“Señor Jean-Louis Selous. A journalist.”
Light from the window made it hard to see the man at the desk. “Thank you, Perez.” The voice was deep. There was no sound of footsteps in the deep carpeting, but Tarp heard a door close, and the middle-aged man was gone. “Come,” the voice said.
He started down the long room. When he was fifteen feet from the desk, the silhouetted figure behind it moved. The torso moved back, turned; the figure came along the far side of the desk, still seated, the movement accompanied by a very low hum.
Schneider was in a motorized wheelchair.
Tarp saw the face as he rounded the end of the desk. He hid any surprise he felt. He had seen Schneider before — in Havana. He was the man who had been in the wheelchair at the ballet gala for the Celebration of Nuclear-Free Peace.
“What language do you prefer? I see you are French,” Schneider said. He had picked up a file from the desk.
“Either Spanish or French,” Tarp said.
“French, then.” Perhaps Schneider wanted to show off — or perhaps he wanted to test Tarp’s authenticity. Schneider spoke French with an accent but with considerable fluency. “I have read your articles with interest.” His hand was on the file. Presumably the file held the articles that Selous was supposed to have written.
“Was the viewpoint too Marxist?” Tarp said, speaking French rapidly and with the slight slurring that many French now affected. “Some people find it Marxist.”
“I daresay Marx would not.” Schneider laughed. “Are you a Marxist?”
“Not at all. Modern professional sport is the kind of commercial pig trough that makes one say Marxist things, however.”
Schneider was slender to the point of seeming ascetic. It was hard to make out subtleties of expression against the glare, but Tarp thought he looked rather satanically amused. “Are you a Christian?” Schneider said.
“Of course.” He said it with intentional glibness, as a Christian who never went to church might say it.
“Not a very good Christian, perhaps,” Schneider said.
“It is a state of mind, surely — a state of culture?”
“Not to the Church.” He said it as a pious layman or even a priest might have said it, austerely; Tarp made a mental note to check his ties with the Vatican. And Doctor Bonano in Havana, the abortionist.
“You asked only if I was a Christian, not if I was a churchgoer.” Tarp smiled as Jean-Louis Selous smiled, engagingly, just a bit cynically. “I am more a Christian than a Moslem.”
Schneider touched a button and the chair spun to his right. He rolled three feet in that direction, stopped, said, “I would prefer a whole Moslem to a part Christian. I do not like half men.” He had meant to sound final and acidulous, but his French was not quite up to it, and demi-homme was too crude for what he wanted. He stopped the chair again and laughed. “Moi, je suis demi-homme,” he said, and he moved again and stopped opposite an armchair. “Sit,” he said in Spanish.
Tarp sat. He could see Schneider plainly now, for behind him was an abstract painting in dark purples and blues, against which his face was clear. The skull was large and the dome loomed above the face, topped with dark hair flecked with silver like a fine pelt; the face itself seemed delicate, almost the face of an adolescent, large-eyed and almost feminine.
“To business,” Schneider said. “You have eighteen minutes left.” He sounded waspish. “You have a tape recorder, naturally?”
“Naturally.” Tarp put a small recorder on the arm of the chair. He let silence settle between them, take up residence there. Schneider grew impatient. At last Tarp said, switching the machine on, “What is the purpose of wealth?”
Schneider sneered. “Wealth is its own purpose.”
“But for you, I mean. Why a life of wealth — instead of a life of poverty, for example? Why not the life of intentional poverty, like Saint Francis?”