Repin looked at him with great sympathy. In a low voice he said, “The Nazis did not invent evil, my friend. But they taught your country what it is. For that, ironically, the world should perhaps be grateful.”
“For what, for learning how to live with filth?”
“For learning to live with the rest of us in the real world.”
“In order to be real, does it have to be filthy?”
Repin smiled, mostly to himself. He took Tarp’s cup from him as if Tarp were a sick man and put it down next to the vacuum bottle. “I envy you your idealism,” he said simply. He clapped his hands together. “Come, come — this is no good for you and me! We have work. Let’s work!”
Tarp zipped the jacket. “Let’s see what Pope-Ginna can tell us.”
They started out. Repin glanced into the bedroom, then, unable to resist it, darted in. Tarp saw him bending over the bed. Seconds later he was back. “Real percale sheets,” he said. “Very nice. Very seductive, capitalism. At the top, I mean.”
Tarp remained matter-of-fact. “Funny, that’s just what your friends in Moscow tried to tell me about communism.”
Repin was pushing the fingers of the thin gloves down over his own fingers. “But it is true, of course. Everything is seductive at the top. Morals aside, I mean — always, morals aside. One could live happily with any system — morals aside — if one could live at the top… eh?”
Chapter 39
Pope-Ginna was still swaddled in the sleeping bag. He had been put on the floor of the empty chain locker, and from above he looked like a caterpillar that had crawled into the rivet-studded compartment and died there — soft, small, wrinkled. Up close the pink face looked ill, blue-gray under the eyes and along the unshaven chin, the lips almost brown. When Tarp leaned close he realized that Pope-Ginna had worn false teeth and that now they were missing.
“What happened to his teeth?”
“In my pocket. The doctor feared he would swallow them.”
“All right, let’s wake him up.”
Tarp unzipped the bag and Repin busied himself with a small plastic kit, then straddled the plump pile and lifted a white arm. Pope-Ginna was naked inside the bag. Repin straightened and let the arm drop. “Fifteen minutes,” he said, his face red from bending over.
“Cold in here,” Tarp said.
“Good.” Repin bent again and felt for a pulse. “We don’t want to kill him,” he said.
They pulled the bag off the limp old man and laid him down on the metal floor. Pope-Ginna had a pendant belly and a small, sad, flaccid scrotum below gray pubic hair. In his prime, his hair had been red or blond, and the hair on his arms and legs still looked coppery, but the skin was gray-white. He had started to show goose bumps and to shiver.
“He’s coming around.”
“Stand up,” Repin said some minutes later. “Please.” Pope-Ginna was awake and shuddering with cold.
“I can’t.” It was an old man’s whine.
“Get up,” Tarp rasped. “We don’t care whether you can or not.”
Interrogation had many variations, but it was always cruel, and its basic pattern was sadistic: bully and victim, predator and prey. The interrogator used fear; it underlay all his other tools — guile, surprise, entrapment. Unless the interrogator was careful, this great advantage could be turned against him, for sometimes the victim was able to make the victimizer guilty for it. Tarp was trying to be very careful.
Pope-Ginna was trying to get up. The ship was just then moving up into a wave, and he was pushing himself up on his hands and feet, just getting his knees off the vibrating metal plates when it started down again and he lost his balance and fell heavily. He yelped with pain. When he looked up at them there was blood on his forehead where he had struck it on a rivet.
“Get up,” Tarp said.
“No.”
“Get up.”
“I can’t. I won’t.”
“Get up.”
They went ’round and ’round. Pope-Ginna was made to understand that he would get nothing until they were satisfied, and their satisfaction could not begin until he got up. No food, no clothes, no warmth. At last he crawled into a corner and got up by bracing himself against the walls and then leaning there. Tarp remembered his time in the Lubyanka, and he winced inwardly, knowing how those cold plates felt under that old skin.
Tarp was the bully, Repin the nurse. As Tarp became harsher, Repin became comforter and confidant to the Englishman. He may have felt some real sympathy because of their age. Perhaps he was simply a good actor.
“I don’t want him to do this to you,” Repin was murmuring. He and Pope-Ginna were in the corner, while Tarp had backed away as far as he could and turned his back. “This is very bad place for you,” Repin said.
“Tell him to let me go.”
“I cannot. You tell him what he wants to know. Is only way.”
“I don’t know you. Who are you?”
“Tell him, please. Is only way.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“You are old man. Like me. At our age, what is important, but that we be comfortable? Eh? Tell him what he wants, and I can take you back to your life.”
Pope-Ginna was disoriented and physically weak. He had been with the KGB interrogators before he had left the Soviet Union. They would have been very easy on him, but the experience would have told. “Are you going to kill me?” he said in a small, frightened voice.
“Is a very bad situation, this. Make it easy.”
Pope-Ginna hugged himself. “I know him,” he said. “I met him in Buenos Aires. I never did anything to him. Why is he doing this?”
“Tell him what he wants to know.”
“I’m seventy-nine years old. I’m an old man,” he whined.
“Yes. Yes.” Repin’s voice was very soft. His accent had gotten thicker, and to Tarp he sounded like an actor playing a Russian, perhaps in something slow and sad by Chekhov. “Yes, you are old.” He sounded very kind. “An old man.” He was not touching Pope-Ginna, but he was very close. “I tell you something about old men: we do not want to die, either. Yes?”
“I don’t want to die. No.” Pope-Ginna hugged himself and shivered. “I’m not going to die.”
Tarp stood in front of him and pushed Repin away. “Look at yourself!” He sneered at the old man. “You ought to be damned well ashamed. Look at yourself!”
“Give me my clothes.”
“If your men could see you now! They worshiped you — damn well worshiped you! And look at you. They called you ‘His Holiness.’ They would have walked through fire for you. And look at you! And you’re a traitor.”
“Oh, no.”
“A damned traitor!” Tarp’s shouted voice came back to him from the steel walls like the banging of a drum. “You sold them out!”
“No.”
“No? Then what did you do?”
“It had nothing to do with — I didn’t. I’m a loyal subject. I am. How dare you! I am decorated, a much decorated flag officer of — “
“Traitor.”
They kept at it for two hours. Tarp left to relieve himself, came back to find Repin walking Pope-Ginna up and down, sheltering him in his overcoat. Repin left the old man when Tarp came down the ladder and Tarp began to bully him again. This is awful, he was thinking. This is dirty. The poor old sonofabitch.
It ended with Pope-Ginna sitting splay-legged against the hull with Repin’s overcoat wrapped around him. Repin sat next to him while Tarp paced up and down only inches from the bare old feet, a small tape recorder whirring in an inner pocket.
“How did it start? Well? It started with the Homburg, didn’t it? Didn’t it? Well, didn’t it?”