Under the Freeze, page 17
Tarp wondered how deep the split between the Argentine navy and air force had become since the Falklands war. Was it deep enough for the two services to be shooting at each other?
QUERY: POPE-GINNA, ADMIRAL, he asked it.
The machine began to give him information at a remarkable rate. He turned on the printer and let it give him the data that way, so that he could have time to absorb it. The printer chattered like a self-absorbed animal, and a tongue of paper was extruded, to fold over on itself and wait obediently for his hand.
POPE-GINNA, ANTHONY MARCUS AURELIUS, it said.
BORN PORTSMOUTH ENGLAND AUGUST 1904/ COMMISSIONED ROYAL NAVY 1923/ FIRST POSTING AS
Tarp’s eyes skimmed the paper, passing over a remarkably detailed summary of a naval career. A fact buried in the middle of it caused him to stop, then to backtrack.
COMMANDING OFFICER LIGHT CRUISER HMS LOYAL 1943-44 AND BLUE ATTACK SQUADRON SOUTH ATLANTIC HQ FALKLAND ISLANDS PAREN 4 DESTROYERS, 1 LIGHT CRUISER, SUPPORT VESSELS PAREN/ PURSUED AND SANK GERMAN CRUISER PRINZ VON HOMBURG WATERS SOUTH-SOUTHWEST GEORGIA ISLANDS 1944/ PERSONAL CITATION/ UNIT CITATION/
Then there were more details, and:
TO ADMIRALTY OFFICE FOR PLANNING AND PREPARATION 1945/ TO SUBSURFACE TRAINING CENTER BRISTOL HAVEN BY OWN REQUEST 1946/ COMPLETED 1947/ STAFF EXEC ATLANTIC UNDERSEA COMMAND 1947-49/ TO ADMIRALTY OFFICE FOR UNDERSEA RESEARCH 1949-51/ REQUESTED RETIREMENT 1952/
Tarp skipped a summary of Pope-Ginna’s London life that included his clubs and his wife’s gardening society and jumped to:
ARGENTINE RESIDENT 1955 TO PRESENT/ ADVISER ARGENTINE GOVT MARINE RESEARCH AND FISHERIES/ MEMBERSHIP BOARDS OF BANCO FIDUCIA BUENOS AIRES/ SCHNEIDER AGRI-CHEM INC/ SCHNEIDER AGRO-INDUSTRIA/ CORTILE DEL DEVELOPMENTS MERIDIONALE/ ANGLO-ARGENTINE EXPLORATION COMPANY/ NAVOLINEAS ARGENTINAS/ INTELL REPORT MAKES HIM ACTIVE MEDIATOR GB-ARGENTINE FALKLANDS DISPUTE/
Tarp stared at the sheets, over which the letters marched like neat bird tracks.
He called up the map of the tip of South America and the Antarctic Peninsula again.
LOCATE: SINKING OF GERMAN CRUISER PRINZ VON HOMBURG.
A light pulsed on the screen, just at the edge of the drift ice. At the top of the screen the words ESTIMATED LOCATION ONLY appeared.
LOCATE: POLYNYA.
A dotted circle appeared within the line of drift ice. The estimated location of the sunken German cruiser was about two hundred miles outside the circle, north and west.
QUERY: WAS THERE A POLYNYA IN 1944?
NO DATA.
QUERY: EXACT LOCATION PRINZ VON HOMBURG?
NO DATA.
Tarp wanted to argue with the machine.
QUERY: SOURCE FOR ESTIMATED LOCATION PRINZ VON HOMBURG?
ROYAL NAVY HISTORY OF WORLD WAR TWO.
That made no sense. The Royal Navy did not deal in estimated locations. The war had been over for a generation, so there seemed no reason to classify the matter. Surely, he thought, they knew where their ship was when it sank a major German ship?
Of more interest, however, was just what the German ship had been doing at the edge of the Antarctic drift ice — and so close to an area that might now interest Soviet and Argentine submarines.
I believe I ought to visit London.
Tarp took out a pack frame and put a change of clothes and food for three days into it. He put both the French and the Canadian identifications in, and the little cigarette lighter with the two .22 rounds. He put in survival gear — matches and fire starter; two reflective, ultralight plastic blankets; a light tent; a subzero down sleeping bag. He propped the pack frame next to the door with a pair of snowshoes.
That night he sat up with the computer and a glass of Laphroaig, but nothing more could be coaxed from either the machine or his brain. Yet he felt better. Buenos Aires had become a puzzle rather than a pain. He went to bed with the wind sighing against the cabin wall behind his head and snow grating against the window shutters like sand.
When he awoke in the dark of the morning, it was quiet.
Snow’s over.
He fried the rest of the biscuits in canned butter and ate them greedily with the rest of the jam, washed his few dishes, and propped them in the steel sink as if he would be back for lunch. He poured antifreeze into the drains again and turned off the computer. Electric heating units would keep its vital systems ready to start again.
The sun was hanging in the black trees again when he went out, but it was not obscured by clouds now, and above it the sky was a thin yellow and, overhead, cold blue. The day would be bright, bitter cold, and windless. He put hrs feet in the snow-shoe harnesses and put the pack frame on his back and went down across his clearing and through his woods, down the river bank to the frozen water, to pick his way among boulders that in the summer made the river a peril to canoes.
He climbed the other bank and headed into the woods, in Canada now. He knew the land here. That night he camped in the hollow under a canopy of trees, and the next night he spent in a motel outside Fredericton, having come the last twenty-three miles in an oil truck. He sent all his gear back to a Canadian border town marked Hold Until Spring. They understood that sort of thing there.
That afternoon he caught a plane to Montreal, and from there he flew to London.
Chapter 17
There were hotels above the British Museum where nobody knew him and nobody was likely to look for him. They accepted Mr. Roger Murdock and his Canadian passport without question, and, if the hotel was different from the New Monroe, it was discreet and comfortable enough.
He walked down toward the museum, found a coin telephone box, and called a number at Whitehall. The voice at the other end was very young, very tight, and very officious — the voice of an ambitious boy whose job was to protect his master.
“Seven nine five, Kennington speaking.”
“Mr. John Carrington, please.”
“Who shall I say is calling, please?”
“An American friend.”
“I’m afraid I really can’t consider any request to speak to Mr. Carrington without knowing who is calling, sir.”
“My name is Friend. Mr. American Friend.”
The boy never missed a beat but said in a voice as smooth as butter sliding down a warm skillet, “Mr. Carrington is in conference at the moment, I’m afraid.”
“Please tell him that Mr. Friend called, then.”
“Certainly.”
“Thank you.”
“Thank you.”
“Good-bye.”
“Good-bye to you.”
Tarp could picture him — twenty-two or -three, terribly proper, got up in a diplomat’s costume. He could be prime minister one day, if he proved both ruthless and lucky.
Tarp pulled at his lower lip, trying to remember a telephone number. When he could not get it he swung up the directory and began to leaf through the Bs. He stabbed with a finger. “Bentham!” It had been eleven years, but he still disliked forgetting such details. He dialed and put in another coin and held more ready.
“Yes?” cried a shrill but proper female voice. “Yes?”
“Mrs. Muriel Bentham, please.”
“This is she!” Mrs. Bentham sounded a little like Margaret Thatcher and a little like an Alpine guide coaxing an echo from a peak.
“I’m looking for the Muriel Bentham who does research.”
“Oh, yes.” Mrs. Bentham seemed to be hunting for the mot juste, but she settled for, “Yes, this is she.”
“Yes, Mrs. Bentham, my name is Rider; you did some work for me a few years ago, it had to do with some historical research.”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Rider!” He was sure she didn’t remember at all, but she said, with that same high-pitched, remarkably loud voice, “The Canadian gentleman who was writing the book about weather.”
It turned out that he was the one who had forgotten. He wouldn’t have remembered what book he was pretending to write. “Yes, very good,” he said.
“How did the book turn out?” she demanded.
“Very well. Thank you.”
“I never saw it in the stores.”
“It wasn’t sold in the stores.”
“Oh. How very odd.”
“I’d like you to do something more for me.”
“Oh, yes, I’d be delighted.” Her powerful voice took on a sharpness. “My rates have gone up. Because of the economy.”
“Of course.”
“Is this about weather?”
“Military history.”
“Ah. Very much the same thing.”
He supposed that that remark meant something to her. It certainly meant nothing to him. “Naval history, to be precise.”
“That’s nice. I respect the navy.”
“Yes.” He wondered if Mrs. Bentham had gone funny in eleven years. She had been, he thought, in her fifties back then, already widowed, the sharpest researcher he had ever encountered. She had been a librarian who had grown impatient with poor pay. “It’s about a ship in the Second World War. Can I give you the details now?”
“I was dusting.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I don’t have a pencil in my hand. I have a duster.”
“Ah.”
“I shall need to write it down. Shall I get a pen?”
“Please.”
She was back within seconds. “Yes?” she bellowed.
“HMS Loyal,” he said.
“Yes?”
“I want to know everything about its encounter with a German cruiser called the Prinz von Hamburg in 1944.”
“Surely not everything!” she cried. “Everything would fill volumes.”
“Very well, not everything. Salient details.”
“Ah, what a nice word salient is! You even talk like a writer, Mr. Rudge.”
“Rider.”
“What?”
“My name is Rider.”
“Of course it is.” She began to tell him how she would proceed. Her grasp of that seemed very sharp; he decided he would trust to his first experience with her and hope for the best. He said he would call her each evening at the same number, then rang off.
He had several hours until Johnnie Carrington’s young man would give him the message or, failing that, until he could get Carrington at home. He had brought no clothes; he would need some. He started to leave the telephone box to hunt out a store, and then, with a smile, he thought of the label in Repin’s coat, back in Havana. Hire Attire. He found it in the telephone book, and, still smiling, he headed for the underground.
It was in an area of shops and small restaurants above Knightsbridge. Here, in a back street that was almost an alley, a black sign no larger than the New Monroe’s advertised Hire Attire in chipped gold letters. In the window were several dusty bolts of cloth and a faded picture, circa 1965, of a man in evening dress. Inside was the odor of clothespressing, a mixture of steam and burned fiber. There was a counter that divided the shop, shelves stacked with boxes and two clothes racks behind it, and, beyond that, a doorway through which he could see an old man bent over a tailor’s bench. The long walls were lined with ranks of closed cupboards, from floor to ceiling.
“I think I need some clothes,” Tarp said.
“Oh, yes.” The man behind the counter was tall, old, bald, and beaked, but unbent. He looked as if he had been a gentleman or a butler or an actor.
“I’d like a decent suit.”
“Of course.” The huge nose dominated the face; on each side of it small eyes darted back and forth as if trying to find a way around. The old head was thrown back — it was this gesture that made him seem an actor — and he looked Tarp up and down and all around. “Six feet one, sir?”
“And a quarter.”
“Chest forty-four,” the man murmured to himself. He raised his eyebrows almost disapprovingly. “Your hips are a problem.” He inhaled, ending in a sniff. “So very narrow.” He turned his head halfway toward the rear doorway. “Mr. Goldberg!”
The other old man got down from his tailor’s bench as if every joint in his body hated him for it and came slowly forward, pushing aside a drape that had already been pushed aside, perhaps years before. He had the remains of a once abundant crop of curly hair plastered against his skull with sweat or oil; on the back of his head was a plain black yarmulke. He wore a shirt but no tie, a vest open all the way down, and pants that sagged under a round belly.
“Yes, Mr. McCann?” he said in a sepulchral voice.
“This gentleman wants suitings, Mr. Goldberg, but you see the matter of the hips. Would you prefer that I go small so that you may enlarge, or large so that you can make small?”
Goldberg whipped a worn measuring tape from around his neck and passed it about Tarp’s waist as if he were about to do a magic trick. He joined the tape again in front and held it with one hand. “That is some waist you got,” he said. “What are you, an ath-a-lete?”
“I’m a farmer,” Tarp said softly.
Mr. Goldberg looked up at his eyes, then down at his shoes. “Nice clean farm you got,” he said. “Fit his chest and height and I make good the rest, Mr. McCann.”
“Thank you, Mr. Goldberg.”
“That lot come up from Surrey last month, Mr. McCann. Like it was made for him, except the waist.”
“My very thought, Mr. Goldberg.”
Goldberg padded back to the workroom, and McCann pulled a wheeled ladder from the back of the store and rolled it along the ranks of cupboards, then stopped partway along and went elegantly up the ladder as if he were rehearsing for an ascent into Heaven. He opened a cupboard up toward the ceiling and took down several garment bags, which he brought down and on an aged circular rack. “The very finest quality, sir,” he said. “The very finest. The owner was from one of our best families. I cannot mention the name — it is our policy, Mr. Goldberg’s and my own, never to mention names — but one of the very best. These are from his estate. I am able to say that such quality can hardly be found anywhere in the world anymore. You know what times we live in.” He flipped back a lapel. “Hand stitching, of course — look at it.” He lowered his voice. “Mr. Goldberg says it is almost as good as his own!” He took four suits out of the bags, one a dinner jacket.
“I don’t need them all.”
“No.” McCann sounded sad.
“I need a suit today.”
“That is possible, sir.”
“I think a friend of mine is one of your customers.”
“We are pleased to hear it, sir.”
“A Russian.”
“I believe we have a Russian client, sir.”
McCann’s discretion was remarkable. Tarp warmed to him. He tried on the suits. They fit beautifully in the chest and shoulders but were large in the waist, as had been predicted.
“I could make a discount for all four,” McCann suggested.
“I could take two of them.”
“We’ll never find another pair of shoulders like yours. Not to go into those suitings. It’s a crime not to take all four.”
“Well …” He was wearing the dinner suit, which must have been made when its owner was slimmer, for it fit the best of the three. Its style was so out of fashion that it was in fashion again. “I’d take all four if I could store them here indefinitely. And have them always available.”
“How long is indefinitely, sir?”
“Indefinitely.”
McCann coughed delicately into his right hand and withdrew to confer with Goldberg. He came back smiling. “Since, if you bought all four, sir, you would be a valued customer; and since we do what we can to oblige our valued customers … indefinitely is on, sir.”
“I’ll take the four.”
“We’ll put a bag in that upper cupboard with your name on it, then, Mr …”
“Black.”
“Yes, I see. Mr. Black.” He coughed discreetly again. “Then your suitings will always be there. Always, you understand, being a relative term, given my age and Mr. Goldberg’s.”
“Given the world, always is a relative term for everybody.” While the suits were being altered, Tarp found another phone booth and tried to call Johnnie Carrington again, and again he was intercepted by the young man. He bought shoes and shirts and other things and went back to the half-hidden shop.
“That suit is perfect,” Mr. Goldberg said. “That’s a perfect suit you got on. That’s a suit has been looking for your body since the day it was made — right, Mr. McCann?”
McCann beamed. “Quite right, Mr. Goldberg.”
Tarp wore the suit, which was dark and “correct,” and carried the dinner jacket. He stopped his taxi by a telephone and called Whitehall once more, and this time the boy at the other end was almost pleasant.
“Mr. Carrington will talk to you, sir.” He seemed quite astonished.
The telephone made curious noises, like a stomach.
“John Carrington here.”
“Johnnie — it’s your friend from Maine.”
“It is you. How delightful! You are the one for dropping in from outer space, aren’t you. Are we going to see you?”
“That’s why I called.”
“Well, sad to say, I can’t make dinner, because we dine out it seems every night; if it isn’t my career, it’s Gillian’s charities. We’ve become terribly social. Terribly.”
Laughter came through the voice. It was just a little ragged, as befitted a man in his early thirties who was on the verge of success and power. He was the rising star of MT-5, the son of an agent, fiercely dedicated, ambitious, wealthy through marriage. That he owed his success in part to Tarp was a fact that he never tried to disguise. He had that oddest of qualities in an ambitious man, gratitude.
“How is Gillian?” Tarp said.
“Oh, divine, as always. You know.” Indeed, Tarp did know. He had had a brief, splendid affair with her before Johnnie had ever thought of marrying her. Tarp wondered if Johnnie knew and hoped he did not.
“I need to talk to you privately,” Tarp said.
“I see. Well, not on this line. Hmm. I’ve got a dinner I can leave a little early, if needs must be. Why not meet me at home? I’ll tell the staff to expect you. Would that do?”
