Secret Lovers

by Charles McCarry

  “You’re training me.”

  “Ah, you’re beginning to understand.”

  Christopher, whose work was a game, hated games. Cathy loved them: “Let’s pretend this. We’re from different planets, but we’re almost, not quite but almost, the same species. We’ve been asleep in our two spaceships and everyone we ever loved on our two planets has been dead for thousands of years. We meet in space and want to make love but we aren’t sure if we can. We look like people on earth and on the other world, but what will happen if we try? We have to make up a language. We’re very intelligent and still as young as ever we were though we’ve been asleep through most of the history of our planets. We have to find a way to ask one another. We’d be like kids, Paul, filled with desire, unable to make the first move. Let’s. You make up the first word of our new language. You have to make me understand. We’re suspicious, like human lovers at the beginning. We don’t touch.….”

  But Cathy wanted to touch Christopher. All her life she had been stroked, kissed, dressed in clothes so expensive that they were like another skin against her own. She believed that the sense of touch was the key to all the other senses, and she was interested only in sensation. Like the astronauts of her fantasy, she needed speech only to arrange for the opening of the flesh to pleasure. As she lived in her body, Christopher lived in his mind. She knew it. “I have to know your thoughts,” she told him again and again. “Whether you want me to or not, I am going to become you,” she said.

  On the train, Christopher’s body stiffened and he uttered a curse before he could control himself. He had been at the edge of sleep. He had not slept for thirty-six hours, not since before the death of Horst Bülow. It was the memory of Bülow dying that woke him. “What’s the matter?” Cathy whispered.

  “Nothing.”

  “Did I hurt you?” Cathy had not wanted him to sleep; a moment before he cried out she had bitten him gently. Perhaps the small pain had caused him to remember.

  “It’s not you,” he said.

  Christopher pushed his wife’s head away and turned his back. He was trembling. He put his hand over his nose and mouth and turned off the light with his other hand. The train was passing through a station, and there was wind at the window of the compartment and a strip of fitful yellow light around the edge of the drawn shade. Cathy rose to her knees and climbed over him. She crouched on the floor of the compartment, trying to pull his hands away from his face. She was not strong enough and her fingers lost their grip and slipped away. She kept trying, speaking to him.

  “Paul, what did I do?”

  He shook his head. He wanted to think of something besides Bülow, bleeding into the rainwater, but he could not think about Cathy. The murder repeated itself in his memory; he saw it, detail isolated from detail. Fewer than eighteen hours had passed since the instant of Bülow’s death. In that time he had been able to speak to other people calmly, in German, French, and English. He had been able to joke, to buy Cathy a dress, even to perform the sexual act, though his mind did not empty along with the seminal sac. Reporting Bülow’s death, he had smiled when Patchen made a joke of it.

  Now, as Cathy clawed at his hands, he cursed again. He uncovered his face. There was just enough light to perceive Cathy’s form, kneeling before him. She let her arms fall helplessly to her sides. Her breasts, perfectly formed, did not change shape as they moved with the swaying of the train. Cathy kissed his face, gently, moving her lips across his cheek so as to cover every bit of skin with the pressure of her lips.

  “Cathy, stop,” Christopher said.

  “Something is happening, Paul.”

  “Yes, but leave me alone for a minute. I’ll be all right.”

  Cathy knew what he did for a living. She longed for details but he would give her none; the secrets of his work were like lovers in his past, alive in his mind but invisible to Cathy. Each time he returned from an operation he found her in a state of jealousy. Christopher did not know what she imagined him doing when he went away from her. She worried only about other women; his death, to her, was a smaller danger that that he might go to bed with some unknown girl. She demanded that he not remember ever having made love before they met. She told him that she was without experience, that she had never even felt desire for another man. She wanted him to say that he believed that she had no sexual past. He smiled at her.

  She sat with her back against the wall of the compartment her legs crossed, her feet clasped in her hands. She kept her eyes on Christopher’s face. He rose, opened the doors of the washstand, and wiped the sweat from his chest and back with a towel.

  “Do you want a drink?” Cathy asked.

  “No.”

  “I can have the porter bring something.”

  “No.”

  “What happened?”

  “I remembered something.”

  “About us?”

  “Cathy, sometimes I think of other things.”

  “I never do. I don’t see how you can. Everything that happens has to do with the two of us.”

  Christopher, standing, leaned across her and opened the window. She placed both hands around him and drew him gently toward her. He pulled away.

  “This is nothing you have to know about,” he said.

  “Your mysterious damned work.”

  “It’s what I do.”

  “You ought to write poems again, about yourself if you like. You’d be writing about me if you did that. You’d be happier, Paul.”

  Cathy stayed where she was. He could see the effort it caused her. The train was running through a snowstorm. It was very dark, and a stream of cold air blew through the sweltering compartment. Even the fresh air had a burnt smell. Christopher remembered another detail: a shower of blue sparks and the smell of sulfur as the streetcar, approaching Bülow, crossed a set of points.

  Cathy said, “I’ve never known before this moment how much I hate what you do. It takes you away all the time, and. . . .”

  Christopher waited.

  “And.” Cathy said, “it makes you cry out. You won’t do that for me.”

  Cathy went to sleep at last. Christopher covered her with the sheet and climbed into the upper berth. So long as he was awake, he was able to control what he remembered. When he slept, he dreamt of the murder. In his dream, he felt fear for himself and pity for Horst Bülow. Christopher dreamed of himself screaming. On the street in Berlin, Christopher had felt nothing as he watched Bülow die. He could not bring his feelings back to life even in the arms of his wife. The condition could not be explained to Cathy, or to any outsider. They had not lived Christopher’s life. It was the only sort of life he wanted to live.

  2

  Christopher had been back in Rome for a day when the man from the local station phoned. They met an hour later in the Borghese Gardens.

  “It isn’t often we see you,” the man said. “We are aware of you, though, as you pass through town on your busy rounds. You covert action types are regular Scarlet Pimpernels.”

  “I’m sure you play a useful role, too, at your desk in the Embassy,” Christopher said. “What can I do for you?”

  “For me, nothing. For Security, you can get on a plane and go to Frankfurt. We’ve had a priority cable for you.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “Some cables we take out of the Embassy. We’re not that fussy about regulations. Cables from Security we read and swallow immediately. They want you to go up tonight and call this number when you get in.” He gave Christopher a slip of paper.

  “You’re to say you’re a friend of Horst’s.”

  “And they’ll say?”

  “They’ll say Horst is out of town for one day, or two days, or some such. The number corresponds to the time they’ll pick you up, in front of the opera house, in a blue BMW with Wiesbaden plates. So if they say he’s out of town for three days, you be there at three o’clock. Got it?”

  Christopher nodded.

  “Have a good trip,” the man said. “They’r
e such nice chaps.”

  3

  Christopher had left Cathy asleep. She would sleep until he wakened her. Cathy could not wake herself up. She had never had to do so; it was one of the things that others were glad to do for her. She had never memorized the streets of the towns in which she lived. She often forgot to carry money. She never wrote letters or made telephone calls. Her beauty made everything possible; others had always given her, unasked, anything that she needed in return for the gift of her appearance.

  “I dreamed of us in Saint Anton,” Cathy said when she woke. “Do you remember the Mooserkreuz? There were flowers painted on the doors of the bedrooms. You were with that black-haired English girl all the time. It’s a good thing she had to go back to London when she did. She wouldn’t have lived a day longer.”

  Cathy had had the headwaiter seat her at Christopher’s table as soon as he was alone. “I’ve heard you speaking German,” she said to him, “so I know you can get me something to eat. What I want is something light, not fried or cooked in lard.”

  “You’re in the wrong country.”

  Cathy found it strange that Christopher asked her no questions. “Don’t you want to know anything about me?” she asked. “Men are always grilling me from the minute we meet. Do I like Mozart? What kind of skis do I use? Have I tried the local drink? Do I mind cigar smoke? Why do they do that?”

  “They’re afraid of you,” Christopher said.

  “Afraid of me!” Cathy cried. “Why?”

  “Because you’re beautiful. That frightens men.”

  She watched him, wide-eyed and intent, as if she were learning some secret ritual, as he drank from a glass of wine.

  “But not you.”

  “Maybe when I know you better.”

  When she knew more about Christopher she could not understand why they hadn’t met sooner. Their cousins had been in the same class at Bryn Mawr; their fathers used the same law firm in New York, Christopher had played hockey and lacrosse against her cousins in school and in college. She was sure they had been aboard the Queen Mary at least twice on the same voyages.

  “I’m ten years older than you,” Christopher said.

  “That’s no excuse. You should have fallen in love with me when I was ten, and waited for me to burst into flower.”

  Now, a year later in their apartment in Rome, Cathy recited their first conversation. “I asked you what made you think you were going to know me better, and you said, ‘Because I’m going to pursue you to the ends of the earth,’ “ Cathy said. She drew a sweater over her head and began to brush her hair. “Do you remember that?”

  “No,” Christopher said. “I never spoke a line like that in my life.”

  “Yes you did,” Cathy said. “To me. But I’m the one who does all the pursuing. I chase you to Paris, to London. You never stay put.”

  Christopher said, “No, I don’t. I have to go somewhere tonight.”

  Cathy stopped brushing, her hands still at her hair. “Where?” she asked.

  “To Germany.”

  “You’ve just been to Germany.”

  “I have to go back.”

  “Oh, Paul, Jesus Christ! We’ve only had about three waking hours together.”

  “Cathy, I was only gone overnight the last time.”

  “And this time?”

  “I don’t know. A few days, maybe only a day or two.”

  Cathy went to the window. The sun was going down and the lights had been turned on in the streets. The room was in darkness. She opened the sash and the sound of traffic came in with the wet smell of the March night. Christopher saw the Ponte Sant’Angelo with its rows of statues silhouetted in the last of the light, and the battlements of the round castle on the other side of the river. Cathy closed the window and turned around, her head back against the glass, her eyes closed.

  “Take me with you,” she said.

  “I can’t, this time.”

  “Paul, I don’t like to be alone. I’ve never been alone before. Never, in my whole life.”

  Christopher didn’t answer.

  Cathy put on her raincoat and tied a scarf under her chin. “Do we have time to go out for dinner before you go?”

  “Yes. We can go to Da Mario if you want to. The game season is almost over.”

  She loved this dark restaurant, filled with the aroma of cooking, where pheasants and partridges, boar and deer, hung in the rafters. But she showed no pleasure.

  “And afterward you’ll put me in a taxi.”

  “Unless you want the car.”

  “I want the car.”

  Christopher stood up. He gave Cathy a handful of money, large soiled ten-thousand-lire notes. She put them into the pocket of her raincoat without looking at them.

  “I want to tell you something, Paul,” she said. “Lately, sometimes, I’ve hated being in love with you.”

  THREE

  1

  “I hope you don’t mind our doing this in a military installation,” the man from Security said. “It’s just more convenient all around.”

  Christopher handed the man his wet raincoat. They were in a room on the Army base at Frankfurt.

  “I know that Patchen doesn’t like you to go inside U.S. installations,” the man said, “but it’s secure here and you’ll be all right as long as you keep your head down and look like an American.”

  The room was furnished like the sitting room of a hotel suite in a small American city. There were no windows. An electric percolator, on a small table by the wall, deposited a film of steam on the plaster.

  The man from Security, after hanging the coats in the closet, strode across the carpet and smiled, offering his hand to Christopher. “My name is Bud Wilson,” he said. In the car, he hadn’t introduced himself or spoken at all after he and Christopher had exchanged greetings. During the ride they had listened to the American Forces Network on the radio, popular music and sports scores. Approaching the gates of the base, Wilson had handed Christopher a wallet containing identification papers for an Army civilian employee named Peter A. Carmichael. Christopher’s photograph had been attached to the AGO card and the driver’s license. “Just in case,” Wilson said. “Sometimes the MP asks for ID when you come through the gate in a car with German plates.” But the MP had merely given them a snappy salute and waved them through.

  Christopher shook hands. Wilson offered Christopher a paper cup filled with coffee and a sandwich wrapped in transparent plastic.

  “Tuna,” he said. Christopher ate. He was unused to American food; it tasted odd, not quite as he remembered it. The coffee, sweetened with saccharin, was bitter. Christopher pushed it away. Wilson drank his coffee at a gulp.

  “This room is swept regularly,” Wilson said, “and it’s absolutely secure. It’s miked, but the tape will not be running unless I tell you it is. I’m going to take some notes as we go along. My report will go to the chief of my division, to Patchen as chief of your division, and to the Director’s files. No one else will have access. You’ve done this before, I know, but I want to remind you of the ground rules, okay?”

  Wilson had removed his jacket and tie and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt. He opened his attaché case after working the combination lock and put a stack of lined file cards on the table between them.

  “I also want you to know,” Wilson said, “that I’ve read your file. I’m aware of your rank and your record. I’m not here to be disrespectful, but I think you’ll agree it’d be a waste of time for the both of us if I called you sir.”

  “You can go ahead anytime you want.”

  “All right. At 0230 on 25 March 1960 you contacted your asset Q. K. Bowstring, true name Horst Heinrich Bülow, on a street called the Wannseebad Weg in West Berlin. You were in a rented car and he was walking. You made a secure contact and, as far as you knew, held a secure meeting in the car lasting until 0612, at which time the agent got out of your car in Kant strasse, in sight of the Zoo station of the S-Bahn. At that point, Bülow was struc
k by a black Opel sedan with West Berlin plates. You drove away after making the assumption that Bülow was dead, parked the rented car near the Hilton, took a taxi to Tempelhof Airport, and flew out.”

  “That’s essentially accurate. Between 0240 and maybe 0330, Bülow and I were out of the car, walking on the beach of the Wannsee, about a kilometer from where I picked him up.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Bülow was jumpy. He’d just come from Dresden on the train carrying something incriminating. He wanted to walk, he needed to cool off. Also, I had a rented car and I couldn’t be sure it was secure. I knew he’d be more comfortable talking in the open air. Horst was a fellow who worried about bugs.”

  “What was the weather?”

  “Wind and rain.”

  “And you stayed out in that for fifty minutes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you use a safe house?”

  “I didn’t have access to one.”

  “Did you contact the Berlin base about one?”

  “They didn’t know I was in town. Bülow was our asset, not theirs.”

  “What’s your procedure for contacting the Berlin base?”

  “I don’t contact local stations in Europe. It’s insecure.”

  “Insecure? Because you’re a singleton, or what?”

  Christopher explained, although Wilson knew the reasons. Christopher and the men in the stations belonged to different parts of the espionage service. The others operated in one country, gathering information. Christopher went everywhere in the world, looking for men who were capable of acting, and making it possible for them to act. Like Rothchild before him, he invented the politics, wrote the propaganda, calmed the fears of men who sometimes rose to lead parties and nations. Like Rothchild, he worked with his mind and his personality; he formed secret friendships. Bribery, coercion, threats, were of no use to him; he wanted agents whom he could liberate, through his expertise and his government’s money, to be themselves. He was alone, a singleton in the jargon, living under deep cover, with an ordinary passport and no protection from his government. He had been told when he began his work that he would get no credit if he succeeded and no help if he failed. The men in the stations belonged to another breed; they lived within the bureaucracy, they gathered facts, they seldom loved their agents. They defended their territory. They looked on men like Christopher, who had permission to change facts by meddling with history, with suspicion.