“But I will look stupid in this,” Repin said.
“Of course you will.”
“I am a man very proud of his appearance!”
Repin had a great reputation as a womanizer. Even now, in his seventies, he was vain about it. The last time that Tarp had seen him he had had one bad eye and he had looked ten years older, but now he was more robust and the eye was healthy, as if he had grown younger. Repin was pleased, Tarp was sure, to have been chosen for this job. There would be schemes forming in his head, not merely for the recovery of the stolen plutonium, but for his own reinstatement to the KGB. No matter how old a man, he always schemed, hoped, desired. The body aged; the passions remained young.
Thinking of all this, Tarp was watching another sportfisherman that was cutting a wake in the water to his left on an almost parallel course, as if it meant to intercept him miles out in the Gulf.
“Is anybody expecting you?” he said, watching the other boat.
“Is very ugly shirt,” Repin muttered.
“Put on the shirt, please. Is anybody expecting you?”
“Nobody. Was all done under tightest security.”
Tarp saw the flash of binoculars from the other boat. “What’s your cover in Havana?”
“I am papa to Soviet dance company. KGB overseer. Very cute girls, those dancers.”
“Not very original.”
“But good. Dance company directress is my mistress.”
“Truly?”
“Truly!” Repin scowled at him reproachfully. “It was part of story made up for cover, but Repin makes it true!” He barked out a laugh. “Repin is like actor — always truth, truth!” He shook the knit shirt as if it were a small animal that had tried to bite him. “Why I got to wear this?”
“It’s camouflage. Put it on.”
“I take off before we get to Cuba?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Is very, very unfashionable shirt.”
He emerged from the cabin some minutes later with the shirt pulled tight over his barrel torso like a sausage casing. His was a hard, convex abdomen that started its outward swell at the rib cage. Below the short sleeves his old arms were finely wrinkled but still muscular, with little fat.
“Wear your hat,” Tarp said.
“Is Cuban hat.”
“It’s okay. The hat is okay.” Tarp did not tell him that the same hat could be bought all over Miami. In that hat and the shirt, Repin looked just like a New York businessman on a holiday. Even his Russian pallor was right.
Tarp switched the control to the deck and went down and began to ready the fishing gear. From time to time he glanced over at the other boat, which kept its distance but stayed even with them. It was not a boat that he recognized.
He sewed big treble hooks up through chunks of cut bait and then wired the hooks behind big Kona flashers, one on each of the two rods that would feed from outriggers until a fish hit; then the outrigger would release the line and the fish would be played from the fighting chair. When he lifted the cover of the ice chest for more cut bait, he checked the .22 pistol to make sure it was dry and easy to reach.
Tarp tuned the radio to a Latin station and raised the volume in case they had a narrow-cone listener on the other boat. “Tell me what you think about the submarine again,” he said. He looked at the other fishing boat, and Repin, always alert, followed his glance and turned back. “What is that boat?” he said.
“Don’t know. We wait and see.”
“You can go faster than them?”
“Don’t know. Now isn’t the time to find out. Tell me about the submarine.”
Repin looked resentfully at the other boat and then took a cigar from the pocket of his Bulgarian jacket, which was hanging on the fighting chair. “Maybe submarine was bringing plutonium to Cuba. That is why I come to Cuba, so far as my old friends in the KGB think — I not tell them about you. Is very obvious and too simple idea, that plutonium comes to Cuba, but is worth checking because sometimes obvious ideas are right.”
“Does Moscow think the plutonium came to Cuba?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, what do you think?”
“I do not think. It was made very clear, Repin is not to think. Repin is to be — good pimp: he is to find somebody to service Moscow. Repin is to stay pure.”
“A pure pimp.”
“Yes — like homosexual, no? Homosexual, often he is good pimp, he stays pure from his whores. So, to you, I am your faggot pimp. You tell me so much, you service Moscow, I stay pure.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Is true.”
“You live for information, Repin. You can’t stay pure.” The old man spread his square-fingered hands on the deck. “If Repin learns too much, they kill him.”
“Who will kill him?”
“Maxudov.”
Tarp was watching the other boat. “Who’s Maxudov?”
“Is code name of plutonium thief. Submarine captain spoke it just before he died. They say.”
Tarp reached down into the locker beside the ladder and got a pair of huge old German binoculars. They had neutral density filters for sun and haze, and he could turn them against the morning glare and watch what was happening on the other boat. “Plutonium,” he said with the glasses still at his eyes. “Who’d want it?” He slouched against the bulkhead so that the other boat could not see him.
“Who would not want it?” Repin shrugged. “Argentina. Brazil. Israel, maybe. India, Pakistan. South Africa. Maybe one of the East African nations — Kenya, Tanzania.”
“Cuba?” Tarp was watching a blond young man work clumsily with the fishing gear, too clumsily for anybody who had ever done it before.
Repin hesitated. “Well — Cuba, maybe.”
“Tell me.”
Repin sighed. “Is only gossip. Stupid gossip, yes? But Beranyi — you know Beranyi, the shark? — Beranyi is Department Five. He is rising star. Not rising fast enough to suit himself, they say, but rising. So, he was in Cuba in nineteen sixties, is friend of Castro, they say. There is this idiotic gossip that Beranyi wants to move Cuba faster into a military posture than the Central Committee wants to move Cuba.”
“To atomic weapons?”
“So they say. Is only gossip.”
Tarp watched the young man bungle an attempt to attach a lure to a line with a Bimini twist, and he knew from the angle of the young man’s head and from his concentration that he was trying to follow the instructions of a book that he had put down on the deck. Tarp lowered the binoculars. “So the idea is that Beranyi free-lances plutonium so that Castro can go into the atomic bomb business. Is he that kind of man?”
“Is very ambitious.”
“Yeah, but is he crazy?”
“Not that way.”
Tarp grunted. He turned to the wheel and swung the boat thirty degrees closer to the other boat’s course so that he would pass close astern of it unless it took some action. After thirty seconds it accelerated and changed its own course farther to the left; Tarp swung back to his original course and increased his speed, then turned twenty degrees away from the other boat and really gave it power. When the other boat did not follow, he knew that they had decided to be cautious, and he went up on the flying bridge and watched them move away toward the east. A little later his radar told him that they had taken up a parallel course again about three miles away.
“What’s Beranyi got in Havana?” he said now.
“Is not sure. Is believed he has penetrated Third of June Movement.”
“Anti-Castro?”
“So they say.”
“That’s beautiful. Some bunch of nitwits with an uncle each in Miami and a contact each in the CIA. So Beranyi’s into them, naturally, and it puts him right into the Florida Cuban community. It must be nice duty for an agent who’s been working the Finland station, pulling Dade County. A condo, a pool, lots of girls in string bikinis — what’s his defector rate?”