This is the preliminary. When I’m weak enough, he’ll go after me with chemicals. Sodium pentathol, maybe. The trouble with the chemicals that made people talk was that they also made some people crazy or silly or mute with depression — or dead. I know what my choices are. It would have been romantic to think of it as a battle of wills with Beranyi, but all the will that he had he needed simply to stay sane.
The one thing he could do was fence off some of what he knew. Perhaps he could protect Repin. Perhaps he could keep Pope-Ginna to himself. It seemed important still to keep the Argentine part of it — Schneider, Pope-Ginna, the Prinz von Homburg — separate and to keep it, if possible, from the Soviets. Unless Beranyi were Maxudov, in which case he would be learning only what he already knew. Or would he? Even in his fever, that made him concentrate. What if Maxudov doesn’t know about them?
He would protect Jules Laforet somehow. And Hacker, because he would be no use at all once the Soviets learned he had been turned back.
And the amenities at the New Monroe. I don’t think I want Beranyi staying there.
He concocted a reality. In his invented reality, Repin was dead in the wreckage of the Aeroflot plane; Hacker was believed to be a loyal American; Jules Laforet had not figured in his work at all. He had never heard of Pope-Ginna. He thought of that for a while. He had talked to two of the others about Pope-Ginna. Maybe he could retreat to the code name Penguin and give that to Beranyi. So, in his new reality, he had heard of an agent called Penguin who was a go-between with Argentina. That, however, gave Beranyi access to the little he knew about Argentina, or it would if he were made vulnerable by chemicals and if he hadn’t tied up all the loose ends. Then it became necessary to invent a recent past in which there was no Argentina. Only somebody called Penguin.
Tarp told it all to himself as if it were a story, from the moment when Repin appeared at the Scipio’s dock. He tried to imagine every detail. He cut events totally — Argentina, the French safe house — and made up new ones to cover the gaps in time. Places, dialogue, clothes, faces. Everything had to be right. It had to be more right, more precise, and more believable than reality. It was his revenge on Beranyi, arising from old habit and from conviction and out of an instinct for survival, for which it was necessary to hold something back.
“Take him to room seven.”
Beranyi quizzed him about Mensenyi and Falomin. The routine was the same, with no chemicals used. Tarp must have looked a little better, however, because the doctor gave him another injection.
Then he was in his cell again, throwing up. There was blood in his urine. At some point — it was after his second meeting with Beranyi — he tried to escape and the two guards beat him again. Somehow one of his teeth was knocked loose. He remembered the taste of the blood and the seemingly huge, boulderlike size of the tooth in his mouth. And then a dentist was working on him. He made Tarp laugh. I don’t need a dentist; I need a mortician. He tried to say that but he couldn’t make words. The dentist shouted at him. He was not in his cell then. He was someplace clean that smelled like carbolic acid.
Then he was on the iron bed again. His cheek was swollen and there was bloody padding around the tooth. A numbness. Novocaine. He gave me novocaine. It’s Alice in Wonderland.
“Take him downstairs.”
They took him back to the tiled room. There was a metal chair in the very center, right above the drain. They put him in it and the doctor prepared another syringe.
“Count backward from one hundred, please.”
He felt the chemical take him the moment the syringe went in. He was very weak, he knew. He tried to think of the Spanish word for one hundred, but he could not. But he was counting backward in Russian.
“… four, ninety… ninety, ah, three, ninety…” A long, long silence. Then, a voice like a gong. “Ninety-two.” A sense of being sucked up by a great breath, by a wind that was rushing along a corridor like the endless corridor of a baroque palace. “Ninety-one.” He expanded as he was swept along; his body almost grazed the ornate cornices, the arches, the Roman columns that lined his way. If he touched one, he would explode. He was a balloon, a bag of blood, a tissue. He got bigger and bigger…
He was laughing. Something very funny had happened. He had fallen off the chair; that was what had happened.
He was angry. His rage was like the wind in the palace; it carried him, carried the room, the men in it. He was enraged because they had killed Repin and the dancers. Those young bodies. Always the innocent first.
He was singing “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” He was giggling.
His breathing roared like surf. His blood sang. His heartbeat was like running steps. A child running down a corridor. Heels quick as raindrops. Faster. Flying!
In the darkness his breathing came and went like breezes in the tops of trees. His heart, buried deep within him, pumped blood with the measured and cautious tread of hope.
He opened his eyes.
There was a man standing over him. The man leaned close. The man smiled.
It was Strisz.
Chapter 31
“Awake again?” Strisz said.
“Again?” He moved his head and became aware of a vicious headache. “Have I been awake?”
“Off and on.”
“For how long?”
“You have been here two days.”
Tarp rolled his head the other way. “Here” was not the Lubyanka. He could see the rails of a shiny hospital bed, an IV tube running into his right arm, which was strapped down.
“You are in a clinic,” Strisz said. “One we use sometimes for special cases.”
Tarp looked down over his chest, which was covered with white bedclothes, to the rail at the end of the bed and, in the very middle of the blank wall opposite, the shiny metal of a brushed-steel door frame. He was still coming back, coming a long way back, and it took him time to remember. When he remembered, his voice crackled. “Beranyi!”
Strisz gave him one of his intelligent, joking smiles. “Yes, Beranyi.”