Klimenko took Christopher’s arm and walked him around the gallery. The mossy slope of Michelangelo’s dome rose behind them. Christopher heard the wail of pipes, and saw a shepherd walking across the piazza below; the man wore a sheepskin tied around his waist with a rope and a red cap like the bagpiper he’d seen by the Tiber. Straining his eyes, Christopher saw that this man had a different face.
“They close this gallery at four-thirty,” Christopher said. “We’d better go down.”
“I didn’t come out empty-handed, Paul. I can show you samples.”
Klimenko’s voice was growing thinner, as if he had suddenly caught cold. “Name a place,” he said. “Just make sure it’s secure.”
“This is not my work.”
Christopher put a hand on Klimenko’s shoulder; the flesh was loose under his thick overcoat. Christopher had always liked the Russian, but he knew what mistakes he could make. “How long do you expect to stay operational if you go around in public like this?” he asked.
“Not long. You see what’s happened to my nerves.”
“Why did you come out? You’ve always been a loyal Russian, haven’t you?”
The skin of Klimenko’s sagging face was blotched, brown and white like the meat of a bitten pear. “Loyal to Russia, yes —and I still am. I no longer agree with the line.”
“It’s no different than it ever was.”
“No. But I am. One gets tired. Doubts become more important—Klimenko’s Law: as life shortens, misgivings magnify.”
“Then I’m sorry you’ve come to the wrong man.”
“I can tell you how the arms come to the V. C. through Cambodia,” Klimenko said in a rush of words. “I can tell you what we are going to do with the structure of the Cuban intelligence service. I can give you names you don’t have. There’s been a change in the funding system—I set it up, I know the banks and the account numbers. Paul, don’t be foolish.”
Christopher shook his head.
“I know what you think,” Klimenko said. “You’re worried about your cover. But you have no cover with us. We know about you—we’ve known for years. When you begin thinking about yourself you lose your profession. I know.”
A Vatican guard appeared in the stairway door. “The gallery is closing,” he said in Italian.
“Do you want to go down first?” Christopher asked.
Klimenko uttered a little laugh; he was in possession of himself again.
“It’s comic how I fit the defector’s pattern,” he said. “I tell you how I love Russia, and offer you her secrets in exchange for safety. It’s no wonder people like you and me exist, Paul—men are so predictable, so easy to use. I know what you’ll do next. We’d better set up a meeting now. I don’t want to use the telephone anymore.”
“Gherman, I won’t see you again. I can’t help you. What I’m telling you is not technique, it’s the truth.”
“You don’t believe in the quality of the merchandise.”
“I care nothing about it one way or the other.”
“Signori,” the guard said, “you must descend now. The gallery is closing.”
Klimenko fluttered his gloved hand impatiently at the guard. He turned his back on the man and again put his face close to Christopher.
“There was an operation in the States last month,” he said. “The code word was Weedkiller. A million dollars went through a certain Swiss bank. An American got the money. A million dollars, Paul. Think about that.”
“When?”
“The money went into the bank in Zurich on November 25. It was taken out the next day, just before the bank closed.”
“By whom?”
Klimenko looked aside. “I don’t tell you that now. When we meet again, when I have assurances—but not on this roof, in the rain.”
“You’ll have assurances when I have this information,” Christopher said.
“Weedkiller?”
“Yes. All of it.”
“Tomorrow,” Klimenko said. “I can’t wait longer than that.”
Christopher nodded and smiled at the guard, who had come onto the gallery and was walking toward them with his arms thrown out and his shoulders shrugged to show that he was at the end of his patience.
“All right,” Christopher said. “Five o’clock in the morning, in the Protestant cemetery behind the Porta San Paolo. I’ll meet you on Shelley’s grave.”
“Romantic,” Klimenko said.
He walked away, leaving Christopher to talk to the remonstrating guard, who might remember him.
3
In one of the souvenir shops near Saint Peter’s, Christopher bought a postcard of John XXIII. He took a taxi to the main post office in the Piazza San Silvestro and, using the typewriter at the telegraph office, typed the name and address Nsango used in Elisabethville on it. In the message space he typed a Christmas greeting in French and signed the message with three initials. He could speak like a Frenchman, but his handwriting was plainly American.
He dropped the card in the airmail box outside and walked next door to the long-distance telephone office. When the call came through, the clerk put him in Cabin 10 as usual, and he could hear the tap sputtering on the line. Sybille answered.
“You’re coming for Christmas!” she said.
“No, I want to invite you down here.”
“My dear, we can’t. We’d have to charter an extra plane to carry the presents my husband has bought me to make up for his guilty conscience.”
“Is he there?”
“At five-thirty? Have you forgotten already what it is to be chained to a machine gun like a poor German private, rat-tatting away for the Fatherland?”
“Will you give him a message? Tell him I’d like to have lunch with him. Write down the date and time carefully—you know what his memory is.”
Christopher gave her a formula that would bring Webster, if he understood it, to Rome the following afternoon.
The shops had just reopened and the streets were teeming. Christopher went into a jewelry store and bought an opal ring for Molly. He put it in his pocket and walked into the Rinascente next door; the department store was so crowded that he moved sideways through a pack of unmoving Italians. He went to the top of the store on the escalator and came back down the stairs, leaving by the front entrance. By the time he reached the taxi stand behind the Galleria Colonna across the street, he was certain that he was still alone.
He rang his own doorbell six times, four long and two short. Molly tapped on the inside of the door four times, and he rang again twice. He heard the locks turning and the chain rattling, and Molly opened the door. She held a bottle of champagne in her hand.
“Can you open this without fumbling?” she asked. “It’s three thousand lire the bottle, you know.”
Sitting on the sofa, Christopher told Molly to close her eyes. He put the opal ring on her finger.
“It’s beautiful,” Molly said. “But aren’t opals supposed to bring bad luck?”
“A little superstition will do us good. Gaze into the stone, Molly, and live each day as if it were your last.”
“What a wonderful sense of humor you have. Is all this business really a joke to you?”
“Isn’t it a joke? Think of it—some little fellow with hate in his heart, deadly dramatic, stalking us in Christmas week. If he exists, he wouldn’t even have been told who we are or why he’s supposed to kill us. All he asks is a chance to be taken seriously.”
“I take him seriously.”
“Take his gun seriously, and his delusions,” Christopher said. “But not him. He’s just a man, and a weak and stupid one or he wouldn’t let himself be used. We know about him. That cancels his value.”
Molly kissed him. She wore no scent or makeup; he had always thought her as clean as a child. Molly did not like the image.
“After this morning,” she said, “I go on the premise that anything is permissible. I’ve been reading your poems again. Explain what you meant by these lines:
“In the cave where my father grows,
He sees my son undoubling from a rose.”
“Christ, Molly, I don’t know. It rhymed.”
“Open up,” she said, pointing a finger.
“I loved my father,” Christopher said. “He lived his whole life without doing anyone any harm. I think I hoped, if I ever had a child, that it would manage to stay innocent, the way the old man did.”
“What was the cave?”
“Silence. He stopped speaking when he was about fifty.”
“Stopped speaking? Altogether? Why? Was he mad?”
“My mother thought so,” Christopher said. “So did I, for a while. Then I began to read a little more and I realized that he would have been treated as a holy man in most places in the world.”
“On the other hand, he could have been mad.” “That’s possible. He refused to give evidence.” “Not a word, not a gesture, to the end of his life?” “Nothing.”
“You behave as if you think what he did was rather beautiful.”
“Oh, I do,” Christopher said.
4
Christopher heated milk in the dark kitchen and drank a cup of cocoa before he woke Molly so that she could lock the door after him. She had slept naked and he embraced her long body, still warm from the blankets. He stood in the hall until he heard all the locks fall into place.
It took him ten minutes to inspect his car. It was still dark and he had no flashlight. He felt the motor with his hands and lay on his back on the cold cobblestones and ran his fingers over the frame. The car had been standing in the rain for a week and the engine started reluctantly.
Christopher drove up the Tiber, crossed it on the Ponte Milvio where Constantine had seen the sign of the Cross, and came down the opposite bank. The streets were empty. When he parked the car and walked into the cemetery, there was enough light to see the tips of the cypresses against a sky filled with sailing clouds.
He walked on the grass among the headstones to avoid the noise of his footsteps on the gravel pathways.
At precisely five o’clock, Klimenko, wrapped in his long overcoat, emerged from a row of cypresses. The Russian walked without hesitation to Shelley’s grave, and Christopher thought again about Klimenko’s tendency to make mistakes: he must have come to the cemetery the evening before and marked the spot.
“Good morning, Paul.”
“Gherman. Did you case this place last night?”
“Why?”
“You knew right where to find Shelley.”
“I came earlier this morning. No one has picked me up.”
Klimenko lifted his feet, in pointed Italian shoes, one after the other out of the wet grass. “Nevertheless, I’d like to get under cover as soon as possible,” he said. “All this standing about in the open isn’t good.”
“That grave over there is where Edward John Trelawny is buried,” Christopher said. “He snatched Shelley’s heart out of his funeral pyre on the beach at Viareggio. Later Trelawny was a secret agent in Greece with Byron. He thought Byron was a romantic amateur.”
“Dung,” Klimenko said. “Let’s go over to the trees.” In shadow, surrounded by the straight stems of the cypresses, Klimenko seemed more at ease. “What arrangements have you made?” he asked.
“If what you have is valuable, I can hand you over to someone this afternoon. They’ll tell you what to expect.”
“What will that be, roughly?”
“Safe transportation to the States, debriefing, a place to stay until you’re ready to surface.”
“I don’t want money,” Klimenko said. “That has to be made plain. No money.”
“All right, I’ll tell them. What do you have with you?”
“Your interest was aroused by Weedkiller. I’ve brought you something.”
Klimenko removed his hat and turned out the sweatband. He handed Christopher three small photographs and a slip of paper with a series of numbers and letters written on it in red ink. The photographs showed two men in dark American suits and white shirts crossing a sidewalk. One of the men carried a large attaché case. The cameraman had been sitting in a car: the angle of the door showed in a corner of the picture. The faces were very clear.
“What bank in Zurich is the account number for?” Christopher asked.
“Dolder und Co., in the Bleicherweg. It’s a small bank. This was a one-time usage.”
“Who are these people?” Christopher held up the clearest photograph.
“The men who made the withdrawal. They spoke American English.”
“Names, Gherman.”
Klimenko shrugged. “They were couriers. The names they used on the hotel register were Anthony Rugged and Ronald Prince.”
“Rugged and Prince? Come on, Gherman.”
Klimenko reached into his hat and handed Christopher photocopies of two Swiss hotel registration cards. “The cards are genuine,” he said. “What do names like that suggest to you?”
“Clumsy Americanization.” Christopher looked again at the men in the photograph; they had dark, closed faces; one man’s mouth was open, as if he had been chewing gum. “Probably Ruggieri and Principi originally.”
“Something like that. I saw the passports they handed in at the hotel—genuine. Their names are Rugged and Prince.”
“What was the million dollars for?”
“I don’t know. I carried it from Stockholm. It was brought to me from Moscow by the head of my section. I made the deposit, and my instructions were to put the money in the account and leave Zurich at once. Center wanted no surveillance on the messengers.”
“Why not? Is that your standard procedure?”
“No. Do you want me to explain the whole system now? Briefly, this is the only cash transaction in any amount I’ve ever handled where no receipt was required. I couldn’t believe the irregularity of it.”
“Why would they do it this way? A million dollars.”
“Obviously security was more important than money. It was a very tight operation.”
“You must have been given a deposit slip.”
“No—they wanted no paper of any kind. Not even in the files at No. 2 Ulitza Dzerzhinskogo.” Klimenko smiled bleakly when Christopher did not react to the address of KGB headquarters, spoken aloud.
“What was the withdrawal code?” Christopher asked.
“Also spoken, not written. To make a withdrawal, one cited the number of the account and gave the codeword tortora, which means ‘dove’ in Italian.”
“Why Italian?”
“I’ll come to that—it was an insecure code, there’s a clue in it. But you know how incautious these administrators can be.”
“Who accepted the money at the bank?”
“One of the directors, Herr Wegel.”
“Where is his office?”
“Second floor, extreme northwest corner of the building. His name is on the door.”
“Could you sketch the layout of the office from memory?”
“Yes,” Klimenko said.
He produced a notebook and a pen and made a quick sketch, resting the pad on a gravestone as he drew.
“What’s this?” Christopher asked, pointing to a scribbled feature on one side of the sketch.
“A fireplace,” Klimenko said. “Herr Wegel had a coal fire going—he made a joke about being an unthrifty Swiss. I remember everything. I was worried about the lack of documentation.”
“So you decided to take some pictures and ask some questions?”
“Yes. I’d already decided not to go back. I thought the information might be useful.”
“Why didn’t you just take the million and run?”
“Where to? Mars? Besides, Paul, to steal official money? Why should I do such a thing? What would they think?”
Klimenko still held his hat in his hand. Astonishment drew wrinkles on his bald head: he could betray his service and his country, but he could not bear that his colleagues should think him a thief.
“T
his is an intriguing little mystery,” Christopher said, “but I don’t see why it should interest us. It’s incomplete. All you’ve given me is evidence of a big cash transfer and a couple of photographs. The rest is not even speculation.”
“I can speculate, if you like.”
Christopher waited.
“In the fifties, as you know, I was at the UN under deep cover as a Tass correspondent,” Klimenko said. “Mostly I handled Latin Americans—they’re easy, because they like women. Sometimes an African. My targets were all non-American, except one. I had a primary assignment targeted on a certain American group. The Latinos and the blacks were make-work. The American target was very, very difficult. I only made the recruitment three months before I was posted to Western Europe.”
“And you handed over the American asset when you left New York in 1956?”
“No, there was no handing over. I made the recruitment and told the man to go fictitious until we made contact again. It wasn’t really a recruitment. I didn’t tell him anything about his employers. We didn’t have him under discipline. He was an American patriot, he would have shot me if he had known I was a dirty Communist spy.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That I represented a group in Belgium that might need work done in America. That my name was Blanchard. That the fee would be high. That he might not hear from us for years, but when he did, we’d expect action in whatever period of time we specified. I told him it might be as short a period as twenty-four hours.”
“How did you bind the recruitment?”
“I gave him one hundred thousand dollars as a retainer. We wanted him to know we were serious.”
“How did you set up the future contact?”
“Telegram and meeting. I rented a safe house in Chicago and put two unwitting people in it. The agent had the address. When he got a telegram from Naples saying, in Italian, that his uncle Giuseppe had died, he was to go to the safe house at 10:18 on the next night after the day of the week mentioned in the telegram as the day of his uncle’s death.”
“10:18—that sounds authentic,” Christopher said. “Why do you people split the clock that way?”
Klimenko was annoyed by the digression. “It’s just technique, it’s supposed to discipline agents. In czarist days no one could tell time in Russia. After the revolution, people were shot for being late. It was part of the pattern of changing everything, making a new society.”
The Tears of Autumn Page 19
