Secret Lovers

by Charles McCarry

  “In Berlin, for example,” Christopher said, “every German policeman above the rank of sergeant knows Barney Wolkowicz is chief of the base. It’s best if I don’t go out to dinner with him.”

  “And no one knows you?”

  “Not by true name, the way they know Barney.”

  So far, Wilson had written nothing on his file cards. He sat with his elbows on the table, his eyes on his coffee cup, speaking in a flat tone. There were inflections in his voice that made Christopher think that Wilson might once have been in the FBI. He sounded like a policeman.

  “How did you schedule meetings with Bülow?”

  “There was a standing arrangement. The first Tuesday and the second Thursday of alternating months. Always in Berlin, always in a park–the Grunewald or the Jungfernheide at alternate meetings.”

  “The twenty-fifth was the last Friday of March.”

  “Yes, this was a special meeting. It made Horst very nervous.”

  “Why?”

  “Horst was nervous by nature,” Christopher said. “He didn’t like meeting a stranger in Dresden and finding an excuse to travel again only fifteen days after he’d been out for his routine meeting. The trip made him sweat. He’d been doing this work for a long time.”

  “Did you think he was breaking down?”

  “Yes. I was going to recommend that he be terminated, defected to West Germany. We could have found some job for him.”

  “What was his cover in the D.D.R.?”

  “Horst was an official of their state broadcasting secretariat.”

  “Was that his target?”

  “Yes, but not for itself, primarily. His job put him in contact with a lot of people from third countries–Bloc types and, lately, Asians and Africans who come to the D.D.R. as visitors. We used him as a spotter. He put us onto some people who turned out to be recruitable and useful.”

  “That sounds pretty low risk for him.”

  “It was. He’d give us a name and we’d assess the man and make a recruitment five thousand miles away, a year later. Horst had just run out of breath. It makes people nervous, living in a police state.”

  Wilson smiled for the first time. “Your man sounds like a normal agent,” he said. “What was the handle on him?”

  “Horst would have said idealism. He didn’t like the Communists; he was annoyed at them for making his life squalid. He carried a lunch in his briefcase still, and he knew that no West German in his position had to do that in 1960. The Occupation was still on in the D.D.R. That exasperated him. He liked the money. He liked, passionately, the idea of himself as a spy. Horst had a perversion for tradecraft. He couldn’t cross the street without looking suspicious.”

  Wilson listened impassively to Christopher’s replies. The Security man had a habit of shutting his eyes before he asked a question; he was remembering and going over details that had been included in Christopher’s written report. He raised each point in the order in which Christopher had typed it on the page. Christopher supposed that Wilson wanted him to realize that he had memorized the report.

  Wilson, in a long string of questions, established that Horst Bülow had lived in East Berlin. He traced Bülow’s movements, as Bülow had explained them to Christopher, on the night that he had gone from Berlin to Dresden to pick up the Kamensky manuscript. Wilson did not refer to the manuscript by its name; he called it “the item.”

  “Who did Bülow meet in Dresden–who handed him the item?” Wilson asked. He opened his eyes to ask the question and stared at his blank file cards; he had not yet met Christopher’s eyes.

  “A Soviet, an army captain named Kalmyk. He was on a short mission to Dresden from his post in Warsaw. He brought the package with him.”

  “You exposed your agent to a Soviet army captain?”

  “It was supposed to be a dead-drop–Kalmyk was told to leave the package on the luggage rack of Bülow’s compartment in the train. Horst was supposed to swap it for another, identical package. But Captain Kalmyk found himself alone in the compartment with Horst. He saw that Horst had a package just like his own all ready for the exchange, so he decided to say hello. Kalmyk said he wanted to make sure the package got into the right hands because it was so precious.”

  “What did Bülow do?”

  Christopher smiled: Jumped out of his skin, he wanted to say, but he held his tongue. He had begun to be wary of Wilson’s digressions.

  “Horst took the package, said thank you, and got off at Dresden. According to him, he sauntered across to the other platform and took the Berlin express in the opposite direction five minutes later.”

  “What was in the package?”

  Christopher did not reply.

  Wilson didn’t repeat the question. “Do you know?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Who else knows? Did Bülow know?”

  “He may have looked at it, but that wouldn’t have told him much. I don’t know what Captain Kalmyk told him. He doesn’t seem to have been very careful about what he said.”

  Wilson wrote on a file card for the first time–the name “Kalmyk.”

  “Now,” he said. “Bülow was under discipline. But not Kalmyk or anyone else who brought the Kamensky manuscript out of the Soviet Union. Is that right?”

  Christopher waited, a long moment, until Wilson lifted his eyes. “That’s correct,” Christopher said.

  Wilson wrote on a file card.

  2

  Wilson rubbed his face, massaging the sockets of his eyes. His pallid skin was shiny from recent shaving. He emitted a faint odor that Christopher, searching his memory and catching the scent of his grandfather, suspenders hanging as he shaved, identified as bay rum. The fingers of Wilson’s right hand had been broken, the forefinger so often that the nail was twisted almost at right angles to the knuckle.

  “Did you play baseball in school?” Christopher asked.

  Wilson lifted his damaged hand. “I played all my life. I caught Class C ball, the Canadian-American League, when I was studying law.” He paused. “I couldn’t hit the curve above Class C,” he said. “That’s why I’m here, instead of batting .350 for the Red Sox.”

  When Wilson was not asking questions, he lapsed into a kind of street speech. He made deliberate mistakes in English, hardened his consonants. He said “ch” for “g” and “d” for “th.” He wore a light green gabardine suit that was too large in the shoulders and too wide in the lapels, and brown shoes and ankle socks; his muscular bare calves showed when he crossed his legs. On his left hand he wore a wide golden wedding band; he had set out, on the table beside the sofa bed, a photograph in a leather frame of his wife with two babies on her lap and three older children posed around her. Wilson insisted on semaphoring what had made him: a double house on a street in a factory town, parochial school, Legion baseball, Boston College, the infantry, law school at night, marriage, the FBI, and now the Security Division. Christopher thought that Wilson must find it hard to deal with men from Christopher’s side of the outfit, with whom he could not sympathize at all.

  “I don’t understand why you’re so reticent about this book that Bülow carried to Berlin for you,” Wilson said.

  “It’s a sensitive operation.”

  “You didn’t think I’d have a need to know?”

  “Yes, but telling you would be Patchen’s decision, not mine.”

  “Berlin doesn’t know?”

  “Once again, no. It’s a covert action project.”

  “Do you guys tell anybody anything?”

  “Wilson, that’s a frivolous question. We both know what the rules are and what compartmentalization is. We both know what the resentments are. The stations don’t like us because we operate on their territory and take the credit, and incidentally the blame, for the results. If you want to talk about the conflict between the CA mission and the collection of intelligence, we can. But it’s off the subject.”

  Wilson listened without expression. “And you,” he said, “are a busy
man.”

  “I’m a man who doesn’t like to lose agents.”

  Wilson, lost in thought, tapped the table with his blunt fingers, a quick march rhythm. Christopher wondered if one of Wilson’s pretty female children, back home in some Virginia suburb, might be a majorette.

  “I’ll tell you, Paul,” Wilson said, using Christopher’s given name for the first time, “so far it makes no sense to me at all. Why kill Bülow? He was a low-grade asset. He would have talked if they’d snatched him. They could have had him peaceably when he went back to East Berlin. He’d already made the delivery. It was a stupid risk. You know all this as well as I do.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why? What do you think?”

  “You’d have to know who did it. If it was the Russians, and they knew what Horst had collected from Kalmyk, then it would be a warning. They’d be saying don’t go any further if you don’t want your principal damaged.”

  “The accepted Headquarters theory is that the Russians don’t indulge in wet work the way they used to,” Wilson said. “The thinkers back home have decided that the Soviets are hungry for respectability. They want to be like us–too great a power to stoop to violence.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you believe it?”

  “Sure. They have the Czechs and the Poles and the East Germans if they need them.”

  Wilson’s manner warmed. The methods of the opposition, murder and blackmail and kidnapping, were his specialty; he was a scholar, speaking to another scholar.

  “You think it might have been one of the satellite services?”

  “It’s possible. The East Germans could have thought it was a way to upset our stomachs. Horst could easily have blown himself to them.”

  “You didn’t have much respect for him, did you?”

  “I knew his weaknesses. If they watched him, they would have suspected what he was doing just by the way he sneaked around.”

  “Couldn’t you train that out of him?”

  “By the time I got him he was set in his ways. He was a born amateur.”

  “But you liked him.”

  Again, Christopher waited until Wilson lifted his eyes. “I was responsible for him,” he said.

  “You still are,” ‘Wilson said.

  3

  Hours later, Wilson came back into the room with more coffee and sandwiches. “Are you tired?” he asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “It’s practically morning. Without windows, you don’t notice.” Wilson unwrapped a sandwich and ate it.

  Wilson took a file folder from his attaché case and slid it across the table to Christopher. “Photographs,” he said. A child’s crayon drawing lay on top of the material inside the file; Wilson took it back with an apologetic smile. He chewed, licking mustard from his fingers, as Christopher looked at the police photographs of Bülow’s corpse, lying in the street in its long stained overcoat, then naked on a slab in the morgue. The skin was white as talcum under the strong light, and Horst’s broken spine gave his body the emaciated look of a corpse in a death camp, thrown contemptuously into a corner, the first of a great heap.

  “What does all that tell us?” Christopher asked, giving back the photographs.

  Wilson put his fingertips against his heart. “That you can go from this to that in less than a second. You watched it happen.”

  They had been talking for almost ten hours. Wilson had gone over the details again and again, covering his file cards with one crabbed notation after another. He wiped his mouth with a crumpled paper napkin, yawned and stretched.

  “Now the real work begins,” he said. “I hate to think of the hours this is going to cost.”

  Wilson took another sandwich and chewed it eagerly, as if the long hours of concentration had drained his body of nourishment. He cast his eyes downward again. Christopher wondered why a man with Wilson’s specialty should be so embarrassed to ask direct questions. Wilson wiped his lips with a Kleenex, cleared his throat.

  “One last aspect we have to cover, a very, very remote thing,” he said.

  Christopher didn’t help Wilson. There was a silence.

  “Your wife,” Wilson said.

  Christopher though of Cathy for the first time since he had left her in Rome.

  “She was in Paris while you were in Berlin?” Wilson asked.

  Christopher nodded.

  “She knows people there?” Wilson asked.

  “She’s lived there, off and on, most of her life. You have all that on the file.”

  “Untrained people like your wife think they have to explain everything. Would she mention where you were, that you were in Berlin, to an outsider?”

  “She might,” Christopher said. “I’ll ask her.”

  “Do that.”

  Wilson had drawn his chair closer to Christopher’s for this exchange. When he looked up and smiled, parting his tight lips over his teeth, his eyes came into focus. He seemed to be seeing Christopher for the first time, as if his status as Cathy’s husband had made him visible.

  “I hate it when families get mixed up with the work,” Wilson said.

  Wilson put his papers back into his attaché case and locked the case itself in a safe concealed in the nightstand where the picture of his family stood. He straightened the frame, smiled at the photograph.

  “Someone wanted to do poor old Horst harm,” Wilson said. “Who knew him? On our side, you knew him, Patchen knew of him. The Berlin base knew of him. Otto Rothchild knew of him.”

  “That’s your short list of suspects?”

  Wilson remained as he was, on his knees by the safe. He worked the combination again and put the photograph of his family inside.

  “That’s the list of people who might have been careless,” he said. “Once I had a job where I arrested people for murder or filed charges against ’em for being accessories before the fact. But I wasn’t chasing Harvard boys in those days. The worst you guys can do is to be found guilty of a security violation.”

  “And if nobody is guilty of that?”

  Wilson looked at his damp palms, wiped them on the carpet. “Somebody will be. Those guys in the black Opel had to know where Bülow would be, and at exactly what time. They had to find out somehow.”

  Wilson handed Christopher his raincoat. He had looked at the label when he hung it up, hours before. Now he ran his eyes over Christopher’s standing figure, the English shoes, the Brooks Brothers suit, the plain tie. He was amused. He touched his own stomach. Wilson was as tall as Christopher but not so muscular; his brawn was already going to fat, though he was, like Christopher, still in his thirties.

  “Are you guys going to run this operation anyway, to see what happens?” Wilson asked.

  “Ask Patchen.”

  “Of course you’re going to, Paul. You think there’s a cheat in the officers’ club, don’t you?”

  Wilson went to get his own coat; he did not expect an answer. Finally he unlocked the door and led Christopher out of the building, into a cold rain that glistened in the rays of the mercury lights that still burned in the parking lot at seven in the morning.

  4

  After they had passed through the gates of the Army post and were back on German territory, Wilson held out his right hand while he steered with his left. Christopher returned the wallet containing the false documentation. Wilson, shifting his eyes from the road, flipped the plastic windows to make certain that all the papers were still in the wallet. He switched on the radio and moved the dial until he had the early news on the American station; he turned the volume high. He sat squarely in the driver’s seat, shifting and steering with great sureness, like a fine rider on a horse that trusts the man in the saddle.

  “It’s harder than you think, killing a man with a vehicle,” he said. “It’s got to be done just right.”

  They were passing through the outlying streets of the town, past gray buildings, under rows of young plane trees pruned for the winter so that they looked like cactu
s growing in the wrong country. Wilson asked, again, for the details of Bülow’s death. Christopher remembered no noise at all; the Opel had lifted Bülow, almost gently, out of the place where he had been alive and put him down in the place where he was dead.

  “That was because they hit him square, with the bumper and the radiator,” Wilson said. “Probably there was a thud, but you wouldn’t have heard it in your car with the windows closed. He hit solid metal. There must have been very little damage to the Opel. In the old days, the opposition used to like to crush the victim into a wall. Fly-swatting, it was called. It’s surer, but sometimes they’d bang the car up so bad they’d have to leave it, boiling water running out of the radiator all over the corpse, and leg it out of there through the ruins.”

  “But they’ve changed technique.”

  Wilson nodded. “We wondered why. We had a defector, one of their case officers from Berlin, and we asked him. He said they’d gotten a lot of static from their finance section about the cost of smashing up cars. That was postwar, when they had captured a whole bunch of German vehicles whose owners could not, shall we say, be traced. So they were killing people with nice old Mercedeses and BMWs that were state property. They had to retrain the drivers.”

  Wilson cleared his throat. “Q. K. Bowstring met a professional,” he said.

  Now that they had left the secure environment of the Army base, Wilson had ceased using true names. He would speak of Patchen as your friend back home; Bülow as Q. K. Bowstring; Rothchild as the fellow who had the operation.