Secret Lovers

by Charles McCarry

  ALSO BY CHARLES McCARRY

  Old Boys

  The Tears of Autumn

  The Miernik Dossier

  The Last Supper

  The Better Angels

  The Bride of the Wilderness

  Second Sight

  Shelley’s Heart

  Lucky Bastard

  Copyright

  This edition first published in the United States in 2006 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  Woodstock & New York

  WOODSTOCK:

  One Overlook Drive

  Woodstock, NY 12498

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  [for individual orders, bulk and special sales, contact our Woodstock office]

  NEW YORK:

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  New York, NY 10017

  Copyright © 1977 by Charles McCarry

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be

  reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic

  or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information

  storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without

  permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who

  wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written

  for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-4683-0038-3

  Contents

  Also by Charles Mccarry

  Copyright

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  For my father,

  in loving memory

  ONE

  1

  As the car moved through the wet streets of Berlin in the hour after dawn, Horst Bülow fussed with his briefcase. It was a pigskin satchel, strapped and buckled, so old that it had lost the smell of leather. The night before, Bülow had carried it out of East Germany. Now he arranged on the seat of the car the things he had brought in his briefcase: a safety razor and a tube of shaving cream, a heel of bread, half a sausage, a bit of hard cheese with tooth marks on it, a flask of schnapps–and, finally, a thick manuscript, hundreds of flimsy pages covered with tiny handwriting. “You’ll need a cryptanalyst to read this,” Bülow said, “it looks as if this Russian writes with his fingernails.”

  Paul Christopher smiled at the agent. “Did you read it on the train?” he asked.

  Bülow looked shocked, then realized the American was joking. “Not a chance,” he said. “There is only one thing more boring than Russians in the flesh, and that is Russians in a novel, tormented by their own stupidity, called by three different names. What is Russian literature? One universal genius, Tolstoy, and six provincial bores.”

  Risk made Bülow talkative. He had been chattering, giving his opinions, ever since Christopher picked him up three hours earlier near the Wannsee. They had walked together in the dark on the deserted beach. Bülow, his long graying hair blown by a wind filled with rain, told Christopher about the Wannsee beach between the wars. He had brought girls to a lakeside restaurant called the Schwedischer Pavillon and fed them trout and strawberries and cream and a drink called Bowle, a mixture of Rhine wine and champagne, with fruit and herbs and sugar. “Afterward, we would lie down in the Grunewald,” Bülow had said, “but none of that exists anymore. I haven’t heard of anyone drinking Bowle for twenty years.”

  In the car, he shivered violently and drank from his flask. He registered his complaints. The manuscript had been handed to him in Dresden by a man, clearly not a professional, who had brought it from Warsaw. Bülow wanted to know why the package had not been delivered in a more secure manner. “I asked for a dead-drop,” he said. “I don’t like to see faces and I don’t like my face to be seen.” He had been in the Abwehr, he had operated against the OSS. He believed that Americans knew nothing about tradecraft. He thought himself in constant danger because of his employers’ clumsiness. Once, he had almost been taken at the frontier with a strip of microfilm. The border guard had taken Bülow’s sandwich apart, but had somehow missed the evidence, smeared with mustard, concealed between two slices of cheese. Afterward, Bülow had seized Christopher by the shoulders and cried, “Why do you think I work for you? It’s the money, only the money. I’d work for the British for one-tenth the price–they’re professionals!” Christopher had said, “I don’t think the English want people who hide microfilm in sandwiches–the mustard is bad for the film.” Bülow drew danger to himself by the excessive use of technique; he behaved like a spy because he enjoyed the trappings of conspiracy. He had been making the same furtive mistakes for such a long time that he believed they had preserved his life. No one else doubted that sooner or later they would kill him.

  Christopher did not like to stay with Bülow any longer than was necessary. But the German required handling. At each meeting he talked more compulsively than at the last. As he became less valuable, he demanded more money. He wanted reassurance. He wanted to come over to the West and stay there, to be given a quiet job. He had been twenty years old in 1930, and the following ten years had been the best in his life. In Bonn and Hamburg and Munich, he thought, Germans had regained the past he had believed lost forever. They went to restaurants in the park on Sunday and walked together under the trees and owned things. He wanted that again.

  Christopher watched the mirror carefully. There was no surveillance, nothing in the long street behind the rented car except the first streetcar of the day, howling to a stop to pick up a small group of old women, night cleaners on their way home. Christopher handed Bülow an envelope; the agent counted his West German marks and signed the receipt. Christopher gave him two thick books, novels in German. “Put these in with your lunch,” he said. “You’ll want your briefcase to look as full going back as it looked coming over.” Bülow repacked his satchel, buckled its straps, held it on his lap. The sun shone feebly through the overcast, like a lamp covered by a woman’s scarf in a shabby hotel room. The S-Bahn sign for the Zoo station was just visible through the fogged windshield. “On Sundays we used to dance in the Zoo,” Bülow said. “There were endless gardens, orchestras, the girls came in droves. You’d buy one beer and share it with a girl.” He looked out the back window, making certain that the street was empty. “I’ll get down here,” he said.

  He opened the door and held it slightly ajar while the car pulled to the curb. He turned his long face, the bony jaw covered with stubble, toward Christopher and nodded once, crisply, before stepping out. The war had been over for fifteen years, but Berlin still smelled of dead fires when it rained and Horst Bülow still carried himself like a German officer. He strode over the wet pavement as if he wore the tailored jacket and the polished boots of a cavalry lieutenant, as if the bent old women waiting for the streetcar were once again the girls who had drunk beer from the same glass with him in the gardens of the zoo.

  At the corner, Bülow stepped down into Kant strasse and raised the rolled newspaper that he carried to signal the streetcar. In the mirror, Christopher saw a black Opel sedan, tires slipping as it accelerated in first gear, flash past the streetcar, then past his own parked automobile. The Opel, gears shrieking, splashed through a pool of water and struck Bülow. His upraised newspaper popped open like a magician’s trick bouquet. His body was thrown twenty feet, pages of the newspaper sailing after it.
The corpse fell to the pavement in the path of another car, an old Mercedes whose driver braked after running over it; Christopher heard the thud of the tires like four rapid gunshots.

  Bülow’s briefcase lay in the street. The black Opel reversed with its door open. A man’s arm reached out and took the briefcase into the car. The Opel moved away at normal speed, gears changing smoothly.

  No one approached the dead man. The old women who had seen the murder gazed for a moment at Horst Bülow as blood leaked through his clothes and mixed with a rainbow of spilled oil in a puddle of rainwater. Then they walked away.

  While the eyes of the witnesses were still on the black Opel, Christopher backed his own car into a side street, turned it around, and drove away, toward the Wannsee to the west. Again he wasn’t followed. He didn’t attempt to call the Berlin base. Bülow was not their agent. The base would want to know what Bülow had brought to Berlin, why the opposition had waited to break the chain of couriers when it was almost at its last link, what was so valuable. It was not so usual in Berlin to run people like Horst Bülow down with cars as it had been a few years earlier. They would want to know why this had happened on their territory. They had no need to know.

  Christopher left the car in a parking space near the new Hilton Hotel and loosened the coil wire. At the airport, Christopher told the Hertz girl that the car had broken down, and where it was. She apologized and deducted the cost of the taxi from his bill.

  Christopher got aboard the early flight to Paris. He had no luggage except an attaché case. In it he carried a clean shirt a toothbrush and razor, and the manuscript in Russian that had been handed from idealist to idealist in a long line that had begun in Moscow and had not quite ended in Berlin. Was Bülow the first of them to die, or the last? None of the others had been agents. They had been friends of the author, men with a higher opinion of Russian literature than Horst Bülow had had. They were unknown to Christopher and his people. They would disappear unnoticed as soon as they were known to the Soviet security apparatus.

  On the airplane, Christopher refused breakfast and went into the toilet to escape the smell of food. He shaved and brushed his teeth, and put his shirt, sweaty from being worn all night, on top of the smeared manuscript. The title, CMEPTEHbKA–The Little Death–was printed in large cyrillic capitals in the careless hand of the Russian who had begun all this by wanting to write the truth.

  2

  “Bülow,” said David Patchen, “at least had the satisfaction of dying a professional death.”

  Christopher described the look of Bülow as he died. “It would be a mercy if that were true,” he said. “Horst always wanted to be important enough to be killed. But I don’t think he had time.”

  “He didn’t see it coming?”

  “I don’t think so. It was very quick. One second he was waiting for the streetcar, the next he was ten feet in the air with a broken spine. I’d never seen it done before.”

  “Stupid.”

  “Yes. Why didn’t they just pull him into the car? He would have told them where their package went. Now they have a dead end to deal with.”

  Patchen and Christopher were strolling in the Tuileries Gardens. Two young men had taken the manuscript into the Embassy, on the other side of the Place de la Concorde. Christopher had handed it to them inside the Jeu de Paume while Patchen at the other end of the long gallery, limped from painting to painting. He didn’t linger; the Impressionists annoyed him. “Picnics explain nothing,” he said, when he joined Christopher in the open air.

  Now, considering the death of Bülow, Patchen sighed. “This is going to be a pain,” he said. “Berlin is going to see it as a security problem. I see it as a security problem. If you had no surveillance, if no one followed you, if you hadn’t made a habit of dropping him by the zoo, how did they know?”

  “There are ways. Maybe Horst told them. He was a born security problem. Maybe they bugged my car and followed on parallel streets. Maybe Horst told someone who told them. He was hell-bent on getting off at the Zoo station. I couldn’t talk him into taking the S-Bahn from a quieter neighborhood.”

  Christopher described Bülow’s behavior in the moments before he died: the untidy clothes, the unshaven cheeks, the giddy speech, the military manners copied from Nazis who had copied them from films. “The Zoo,” Horst had said, voice trembling with anxiety; he had to get back to his office in East Berlin before 7 A.M. “Only the Zoo will give me time, the S-Bahn line is direct to my stop.” Patchen cut Christopher off; even in death Bülow had the power to exasperate.

  “I wanted a quieter operation than this,” Patchen said. “That’s why I used Bülow and you to bring the book the last few miles. Now we’ll have gumshoes from Security all over us. I wish I knew who was responsible for this.”

  A street photographer snapped a picture of a couple walking ten yards ahead of them. Patchen and Christopher turned into a path that led toward the Seine. It was not quite spring. The trees were bare, the fallow flower beds beside the walk were cold mud. Patchen coughed. In the war he had been wounded in the lungs. He was subject to colds and always caught one when he came from Washington to Europe in winter. He and Christopher could not talk inside. They continued to walk in the bitter wind.

  “There’s no understanding this,” Patchen said. “Why run over that poor ass after he had been with you for three hours, and then let you go, not even following? If they wanted the manuscript the Russians could have taken both of you. It would have been easy.”

  “Why does it have to be the Russians?”

  “No one else has an interest.”

  Christopher put out a hand, showing Patchen which way to turn.

  “Now that I’ve let a man be killed,” he said, “maybe you can tell me what exactly their interest is.”

  Patchen turned his stiff body to stare at Christopher. “You’ll have to know,” he said. “I want this kept among three people–you, and me, and Otto Rothchild.”

  “I thought Otto was going to retire.”

  “Not quite yet. As Otto will tell you, he has ghosts in his past, and more ghosts. One of them wrote him a letter, and that’s why you went to Berlin, and why poor old Bülow.….” Patchen broke off the sentence with a shrug.

  3

  Grinning, Christopher reproduced Patchen’s gesture and mimicked the self-mocking tone in which the other man had spoken Otto Rothchild’s name. It was an old joke, and Patchen was tired of it; shivering in the soaking cold, he looked beyond Christopher to the dome of Sacré Coeur, white as an erasure on the smudged winter horizon. Too much talk of Rothchild embarrassed Patchen. He had a weakness for this agent, and he was overcoming it more slowly than he usually did. Rothchild was old now, and sick, but in his day he had been a legendary operative; his successes, coup after brilliant coup, had made the careers of other men, hidden away in Headquarters, brighter than they would otherwise have been. Rothchild had temperament. He insisted, as the price of his work and friendship, that others see him as he saw himself. He hunted down and destroyed those who insulted his idea of himself; time after time, he had forced Headquarters to make a choice between him and a case officer who had tried to control him. Headquarters had always chosen Rothchild. Patchen named some of Rothchild’s old agents: “Lazarus. Rainbow. Sailmaker. Thinkingcap.” These were the cryptonyms of famous men; Rothchild had recruited and handled them all. To the unwitting, they were prime ministers and statesmen. In fact they were aspects of Rothchild. Patchen said, “Otto may be a bastard, but he gets results. I know you think we love him too much.” Christopher didn’t want to go over the old ground onto which Patchen was leading him; Rothchild’s secret fame, the more delicious because it was known only to a handful of the most trusted men in America, fascinated Patchen. Once again he wanted to explain it. “An intelligence service is like a frigid woman,” he told Christopher. “It waits such a long time between orgasms that it thinks of nothing else. When a man is found who, like Otto, can give consistent results, the outfit t
ends to be blind to his faults.”

  Patchen saw the danger in admiring any human being, and he wanted to be reminded of Rothchild’s flaws. Four years before, he had made Christopher Rothchild’s case officer. Christopher, as Patchen had expected, saw Rothchild as he was, and kept Rothchild from realizing it. Like many daring men, Rothchild was a hypochondriac. As he grew older, his illnesses became real; he had severe hypertension, and his physical weakness reduced his intellectual power. Rothchild sought to conceal this condition as an alcoholic, moving and speaking with exaggerated care, attempts to hide the signs of drunkenness.

  Christopher and Rothchild met once a month. In the past year, the physical change in Rothchild had accelerated; over the course of a dozen meetings he had turned, stage by stage, into an old man. He could no longer handle his agents; his physical weakness took away the illusion that he could protect them, and one by one they were reassigned to Christopher and other case officers.

  Rothchild, when he saw Christopher, had little to report. He spoke about himself constantly, watching Christopher’s face for some flicker of impatience. Nothing bored Christopher; he had learned to accept all experience and all information, false or true, without emotion. Rothchild’s past was very deep, and only he knew everything about it. “If I talk too much about my life, I don’t mean to weary you,” Rothchild had said to Christopher. “I’m getting older. I’ve spent all my life in this work. I’ve lived so many cover stories that I feel a need, Paul, to describe my real life, my original self, over and over again. It’s a way of keeping these things alive. Someday, if you go on living in secret, you’ll feel this need too.”

  Rothchild had been born in Russia. He was just old enough for the Great War, and he was commissioned at eighteen and invalided out of the Imperial Army before he was twenty as a result of a wound. Recovering in Moscow, he and other young wounded officers spoke to one another of the shame of defeat after defeat. “It was incomprehensible,” Rothchild told Christopher forty years afterward. “How could the Germans, who were already fighting the French, the English, the Italians, and finally the Americans, still thrash the Imperial Russian Army? Russia was like some great whale attacked by clever savages with stone spearheads. By the time news of a wound had traveled through the nervous system to the brain, it was too late. It was fatal.”