Rothchild, born into the nobility, became a man of the Left, a Socialist, plotting against the Czar, fighting in the streets. He had a saber wound running into his scalp, delivered, he said, by one of the Imperial Horse Guards during a riot. He and others like him brought an end to the Czarist autocracy. They brought Kerensky to power. Otto had no kind memories of this man. “He looked sick all the time, and everyone thought him a dying man. But he’s still alive in America. I had a friend, a lady’s man, who was his aide-de-camp. Kerensky would tease girls who called this young man on the phone. He’d change his voice, baby talk. No wonder Lenin chewed him up and spat him out.”
In those days, Rothchild’s name had not been Rothchild. He changed his Russian name when he went to Berlin after the Bolsheviks took power. “I had lost my house, my family, my political cause, my emperor, my birch forests, my connection with the soil–this means a lot to a Russian, though foreigners smile, you, Paul, can smile. Losing all that, what good was my name? I thought it comic to take a Jewish name. I was beyond the pale. That was in 1920. Ten years later, in Berlin, it wasn’t so funny to be a Social Democrat with a Jewish name.”
In Paris, Rothchild had an apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis. Christopher had been sent there by Patchen to see if he and Rothchild, whose contacts had begun to overlap, could work together.
Rothchild, for their first meeting, had invited him to lunch. They sat on a small balcony overlooking the Seine. The flow of the river gave the illusion, after they had drunk wine in the mild autumn sun, that Rothchild’s apartment building was under way, like a ship. Rothchild was pleased when Christopher remarked on the effect; he was proud of this trompe l’oeil. On the white tablecloth by his plate, Rothchild had a row of pill bottles. He took several before the meal, several more afterward, making an apologetic face as he washed them down with Evian water.
His skin was very red and there was a pulse in his forehead. Wine excited him; he told anecdote after anecdote. Christopher realized how interesting Rothchild must once have been. He was still a handsome man, fine-boned, with a thin arched nose and melancholy eyes. He ate very lightly–two pieces of tinned white asparagus, four bites of cold chicken–but he drank most of the two bottles of wine he and Christopher shared. When the sun grew hotter he removed his jacket and sat opposite Christopher in a short-sleeved shirt. Arteries throbbed in his forearms and the skin moved as if unable to interpret incessant signals from the nerves beneath it.
So that Christopher would not be seen by an outsider, Rothchild had sent the maid away. Lunch was served by Rothchild’s wife, an American many years younger than he. She was an Agency person; Christopher had helped to train her when she had come to Paris from Vassar. He had worked with her later. She had been an officer, not a secretary, and when she had been assigned to Rothchild’s project she had fallen in love with him. No one was surprised: Maria did not like young men.
She and Rothchild had married only the year before, and she spoke to Christopher about their honeymoon in Spain. Rothchild had not been on Spanish soil since the civil war. All his friends had been on the losing side. The Rothchilds stayed at the Hotel de Madrid in Seville. “The entire downstairs is a garden, a greenhouse,” said Maria Rothchild. “I sneezed the whole time, but it was heaven, wasn’t it, Otto?” He smiled and covered her hand with his long gray fingers. Maria was happiest when she and Rothchild were in the company of someone who knew, as Christopher knew, who Rothchild really was. She loved his importance and charged the atmosphere with it; living with him, she became part of it. “I exult in being Otto’s wife; Otto doesn’t mind that at all,” she had told Christopher on her wedding day. Maria treated her husband with joshing equality, but made him see that she never forgot for a moment who he was, and what he had been. (“The second Mrs. Wilson must have treated Woodrow in about the same way,” Patchen had said. “Maria has a lot of the nurse in her. That’s why I sent her to Otto in the first place.” )
As she left the table to fetch dessert, Christopher said something that made her snort with laughter. “I almost didn’t marry her because of that laugh,” Rothchild said. “Her father paid a fortune to send her to Miss Porter’s. You’d think they would have cured her.”
Throughout the lunch the Rothchilds had flirted. Maria gave Otto the best pieces of asparagus, a special cut of glazed chicken. Now she brought strawberries and crème fraîche. “Berries are out of season,” Maria said, “God bless the expense account.” Rothchild raised his eyebrows and tapped the table with a forefinger. “Strawberries without champagne?” he asked. His wife put a hand on the back of his neck. “The expense account has limits,” she said. “Champagne,” Rothchild said peremptorily. Maria stroked his neck. “Otto, the wine is making your veins throb. . . .”
Rothchild exploded, rising to his feet, screaming, his face swelling, blood inflating the skin. He shouted at his wife in French, as if Christopher, sitting quietly across the table, could not understand that language. The tantrum lasted for five minutes. When Maria left to get the champagne, Rothchild followed her; Christopher could hear his shrill voice at the other end of the apartment.
When Rothchild came back to the table, he resumed his monologue as if nothing had happened. With eagerness he spoke the names of famous men he had known as boys, and who now did him invaluable favors, never asking for whom he worked. “It takes a lifetime to build up this kind of trust and friendship, and then the lifetime is over, or nearly so.” He touched his pill bottles with his dessert spoon. “This is the revenge my body takes on me for putting it in hazard for forty years. The Russian Revolution, the Nazis in the streets of Berlin, the civil war in Spain, Madrid with the shells falling like rain, France with the Maquis and the OSS. Never a wound, but it seems I am not immortal after all.”
He put his arm around Maria’s hips when she came back with the champagne and poured it into his glass. “Kiss your husband,” he said. Maria drew away; Rothchild held her against him, smiling upward into her eyes. She kissed him and he released her. Her face was flushed and for the remainder of the meal she ate in silence and avoided Christopher’s eyes. Rothchild ignored her.
Maria, when she let Christopher out, looked over her shoulder at Rothchild’s straight figure, still seated at the table in the sunlight. She took Christopher’s hand and went into the outer hall with him. She rang for the elevator and while it lumbered noisily up the shaft she spoke to Christopher. The blush came back to her face.
“Paul, Otto is in a bad way physically. He doesn’t know what his illness does to his personality.”
“You’re very good with him.”
Maria dropped Christopher’s hand. “Good with him? I’m not his case officer any longer,” she said. “You don’t handle someone you love.”
Christopher nodded and turned to go. Maria caught his sleeve.
“Paul, all those stories of Otto’s are true, you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
“All his closest friends are world-famous. He made them that way, and even they forget it. It’s hell to be a great man in secret. He’s sick, it’s hypertension, high blood pressure. The wine makes it worse “
Her face was controlled. “You see what it is, don’t you?” she said. “He thinks he’s going to lose everything. It happened in Spain; it may have been my fault for being so much younger. I couldn’t make him see I loved him better than I could ever love a boy. He just woke up in Seville twenty years after his friends lost the civil war and knew that he was old.”
Finally, Rothchild had an operation at a clinic in Zurich to relieve his high blood pressure. The surgeons performed a sympathectomy, severing the ganglia of the nerves down the length of his spine. Afterward he had greater control of his emotions. But he could not walk without collapsing, or read more than five pages of type without exhaustion, or drink wine or stand the cold.
“His mind is exactly what it was,” Maria told Christopher, after the surgery, “but it’s perched on a column of dead nerves. He can’t feel his o
wn flesh.”
4
Patchen and Christopher left the Tuileries and walked along the Seine.
“The ghost from Otto’s past, in this case, was a Russian named Kiril Kamensky,” Patchen said. “We’ve been hearing about him for years. He’s supposed to be the new Tolstoy.”
“It’s his manuscript Horst brought out of East Germany?”
“Yes. The only copy. Kamensky’s friends in the literary underground carried it across Russia and Poland. We wanted to break the bucket brigade in East Germany, so that the destination of the package could not be known by our friends in Moscow.”
“That seems not to have worked out,” Christopher said.
“We’ll see.”
“They killed Bülow.”
Patchen stopped walking and tugged his gray scarf higher on his throat. “Paul, I know your man is dead and I’m sure it was a bad thing to witness. But you’ve told me about it. Once is enough. We have to go on to the next thing.”
Patchen coughed, a gloved hand over his mouth, one eye streaming tears and the other, paralyzed by his war wound, open and dry and alert. “Let’s get you something to drink,” Christopher said. They had just crossed the Pont des Arts.
“The Deux Magots?” Patchen said.
“No, Cathy’s waiting for me there.”
“Singing in the rain?”
It amused Patchen to pretend that Christopher’s wife had danced out of a musical movie. He had not imagined that his friend would marry a girl who looked so much like a starlet. A Japanese grenade had scarred Patchen and crippled him. Believing himself ugly, he was embarrassed by beauty. In Cathy’s presence he talked intently to Christopher about music, or about men they had known at Harvard who had gone into Wall Street. He ignored Cathy, as if she were a girl who, knowing no one, had been foolish enough to come to a house party of lifelong friends.
Christopher led Patchen into a small bar in the rue Jacob and ordered a toddy. Patchen sipped it and his cough quieted. The place was deserted, so they sat at a table in the corner and went on talking.
“Kiril Kamensky and Otto are old friends,” Patchen said. “One day, just after Christmas, comes this letter, postmarked in Helsinki, telling Otto that Kamensky wants to entrust him with the novel he’s been writing for the last twenty years.”
“Just like that? Through the open mails?”
“Yes.”
“Kamensky must be a simple fellow.”
“Very Tolstoyan, I’m told. He was a Bolshevik as a young idealist. You’ve read his early stuff, I know. It was published in Paris after the war, stories and poems. You brought it into the room at Harvard.”
“Yes, but I thought he was dead.”
“So did a lot of people. In the thirties purges he was denounced and tried and sent to a camp. The KGB erased his work. It hasn’t been in print in the Soviet Union for years. I don’t know how long he was in prison, but evidently he kept writing.”
“Writing? In a labor camp?”
“In his head, according to Otto. It’s the way he kept from going crazy. When he got out last year, he only had to copy it down.”
“And he made only one copy?”
“Yes. I suppose he figured he could always write out another. We’ll make a photocopy or two.”
French workmen began to drift into the bar for a noontime glass. Patchen and Christopher went out the side door. Patchen, with his ruined face and his limp, attracted some notice, as he always did. He showed signs of nervousness; in his own country, at Headquarters where everyone was used to him, he forgot his wounds. Foreigners made him remember. Besides, he wasn’t used to talking outside an office where he was absolutely certain there were no listening devices.
“Why did Kamensky pick Otto?”
“Who knows? Otto doesn’t feel he has to explain everything. Besides, who else did Kamensky know in the West? He wants his work preserved.”
“He doesn’t know what Otto has become.”
“I shouldn’t think so. I don’t imagine Kamensky would want us as literary agents.”
“How does Otto feel about that?”
“Well, Otto pretty well feels we’re a great force for good in the world.”
“That’s not the view of the KGB, and Kamensky is inside the Soviet Union.”
“Yes. I believe he has children in Russia from an old marriage, and he’s taken up with a young woman since they let him out. He and Otto have that in common.”
Patchen had begun to cough again. Christopher waited for him to finish.
“I should think Otto would be worried about his friend,” Christopher said.
“As far as I can see, Otto is happy just to be busy again. Getting the manuscript out gave him an interest in life.”
Patchen looked at his watch. “I have a lunch date,” he said. “Is there a taxi stand nearby?”
“Across the street. What about Kamensky’s manuscript?”
“The manuscript,” Patchen said. “Yes. Well, now that we have it, we will read it. Maybe it’s the masterpiece Otto keeps telling me it is. The people in SR have had reports from Russia, gossip of the literati. The novel is supposed to rip the black heart right out of the Soviet system. If it’s a work of art as well, all our trouble will be justified.”
“And Kamensky’s trip back to Siberia, too?”
“That presents a problem. In his letter to Otto, he asks that Otto put the book away until after Kamensky’s death.” “Then we’ll have to do that.”
“Otto’s not so sure that’s a good idea.”
“He wants to publish?”
“He hasn’t said that,” Patchen said. “He wants you, and only you, to handle the outside work. Otto wants to sit in his bedroom with the shades drawn, and send you out under radio control.”
“Does he?”
“You’re the logical one. If we go ahead.”
Christopher and Patchen, standing in the Place de Saint-Germain-des-Prés, looked without expression into each other’s faces. Patchen broke off his gaze.
“Look,” he said. “Do you suffer from jealousy?”
Cathy was sitting next to the glass wall of the covered terrace of the Deux Magots, a tumbler of mineral water in front of her. A man was smiling down at her, talking animatedly. As they watched, she sent him away. She put the fingertips of both hands lightly against her drink and watched her own gesture with an intent smile. Her blond hair touched her cheek; her profile was perfect. Christopher and Patchen stood only a few feet away from her, but Christopher knew there was little chance she would notice them. When Cathy was alone, she looked into space or watched parts of her own body. It was not her way to pass the time by reading, or by studying the faces of strangers. She wore the dreaming look of one who is amused by a memory.
Patchen touched Christopher’s arm. “Forget about Otto and Kamensky for a while, forget about Berlin,” he said, nodding at Cathy beyond the glass. “Go wake her with a kiss.”
Patchen walked away. Christopher went into the Deux Magots. Cathy rose to meet him, and as he held her in his arms he watched Patchen get into a taxi across the street, grimacing as he lifted his long stiff leg into the rear seat of the undersized car.
TWO
1
They lay together in the narrow lower berth of a first-class compartment of the Blue Train to Rome. Though they had completed the act of love, Cathy continued to press her tense body against Christopher’s, her fingertips digging into his back, as if pleasure would escape if she relaxed her grip upon his flesh. The compartment was overheated and they perspired. An empty champagne bottle rolled over the floor. Cathy pressed her lips against Christopher’s chest and murmured wordlessly. He looked down at her body, rosy even in the dim light of the reading lamp at the head of the berth. She lifted her face. He closed his eyes.
“Where are you?” Cathy asked.
“Somewhere in France.”
“Don’t joke, Paul. I mean in your mind. You’re not with me.”
He tapped her t
emple with his forefinger and smiled.
“But you’re not with me,” Cathy said. “You almost never are. I can’t hold on to you at all.”
They passed another train. Speech was impossible while the two fast trains ran side by side. Cathy lifted herself onto her elbow and gazed into Christopher’s face, her vivid eyes unblinking. She stroked his chest and stomach and smiled brilliantly, then put both palms over his ears to shield him from the noise. Cathy knew how beautiful she was. She had told Christopher that she had fallen in love with him because he made her forget this fact about herself. When they were together, she stared at him for minutes on end.
“It’s fascinating to look at you,” she said. “You’re beautiful.” It gave her pleasure to speak these words, which she had heard repeated endlessly in her own ear since childhood.
The trains passed. Cathy took her hands away from Christopher’s ears and ran her thumbs over his cheekbones, the ridge of his jaw.
“Tell me what’s in your mind right now, at this exact moment of the present,” she said.
Christopher closed his eyes. Cathy said, “Don’t escape.” She rolled back his eyelid and put her own eye close to his. She continued to stare into his face. Christopher passed his hand between her eyes and his; her glance did not shift but she began to smile again.
“Cathy, look out the window for a while, will you?”
“I want to look at you.”
It didn’t trouble Cathy that her behavior annoyed Christopher. She chose to understand everything he did as a sign of love. “You don’t give me very many signs,” she told him, “so I have to make up for what you leave out, for what you won’t say. Why should I stop what I’m doing just because you don’t like it? I like everything you do, Paul. I want you to learn to like everything I do. I’m searching for you.”
Secret Lovers Page 2
