Secret Lovers

by Charles McCarry

  “What I want you to understand,” he said, “is that I wish Otto to have this last success. We all do. But this is going to be a sensitive, difficult operation. Otto hasn’t the powers he used to have.”

  “He does, you know.”

  “No, Maria, he doesn’t. He’s lost his bodily functions and some of his mental functions, and it scares him. He’s not the man he was.”

  “Still,” Maria said, “he’s better than almost anyone.”

  “Granted. Otto is adaptable. He’s survived a lot in his life. As he’s always telling us, he’s lost things before–his money, his country, his politics. He’s changed when he had to, always.”

  “David, you’re contradicting yourself.”

  “I’m describing Otto, so contradictions are bound to creep in,” Patchen said. “What I believe, what makes me anxious, is that Otto is adapting. He’s developing new powers.”

  Christopher saw a remark occur to Maria; it was reflected in her eyes, she parted her lips to speak, but kept silent.

  “Otto has set things in motion,” Patchen said. “He’s created an operation. I’ve never seen him want anything as much as he wants this. I’m going to give it to him because the target is irresistible. But I am not going to let him control it.”

  “Otto knows that.”

  “Yes, he does. And that’s why he’s struggling with me. I want you to help me to do him the kindness of letting him believe that he’s running things.”

  “You want me to report on him.”

  Another man, having been Maria Rothchild’s friend for years, might have put a hand on her arm. Patchen did not even raise his voice. “Yes,” he said.

  “And it’s for Otto’s own good?”

  Maria’s voice was weary. She crossed her ankles and put her head on the back of the bench. She had not expected an answer from Patchen. She watched the clouds, tinted red by the setting sun. After a time she sat upright again. She spoke now as Patchen and Christopher had been speaking, without emotion.

  “Otto’s idea,” she said, “is to wait a few more days for you to act. If you don’t, he’s going to take the Russian manuscript to a French publisher.”

  “Where is he going to get a copy? I took the one I loaned him back to Washington after he’d read it.”

  “I photographed it for him. Otto thinks ahead.”

  Patchen, for the first time, smiled. Rothchild’s cunning had awakened his admiration for the agent. Christopher, watching Maria, saw no response.

  Patchen said, “What else does Otto have in mind?”

  “Claude de Cerutti,” Maria said.

  “Kamensky’s discoverer. We’d thought of him, too. Otto knows him, of course.”

  “Of course. He comes every Wednesday and brings champagne. Cerutti used to be silent partner in a restaurant where Picasso went and paid his bills with a sketch. That’s where Otto got the one in the sitting room. They go back a long way.”

  “All the way to Kamensky?” Christopher asked.

  Maria lifted her glance. She made a thoughtful face, holding Christopher’s eyes. “That I don’t know,” she said.

  Only that morning, Christopher had read the file on Cerutti; Patchen had brought it with him from Washington. Cerutti was a Frenchman, a disillusioned Communist who had left the Party even before the purges. It was he who had first published Kamensky’s work in the West–a volume of poems, a book of stories, a novel. It wasn’t known how the work had come into Cerutti’s hands; Kamensky was already in the camps when the books appeared in Paris, after the war.

  “What Otto’s planning to do,” Patchen said, “is pretty much what we would have done anyway.”

  “Otto couldn’t know that. Paul has reservations, and everyone knows you listen to Paul.”

  “Not always,” Patchen said. “Will Cerutti accept a proposal?”

  “Otto is sure he will. So am I. He hasn’t had a real success in publishing since the last time he brought out a book by Kamensky. He’d leap at the chance to do it again.”

  “On what basis?”

  “For money, for respectability,” Maria said. “Cerutti is recruitable. Otto has used him in small ways. He knows what’s happening, all right, but he wants to wake up in the morning clean as a whistle. He insists on being unwitting.”

  Patchen nodded. He let a few moments pass. Maria showed no signs of nervousness. Guilt had come into her face only once, when she had confessed to photographing Kamensky’s manuscript, a secret document belonging to the Agency.

  “Can you bring Cerutti and Paul together?” Patchen asked.

  “Yes. He’s coming to see Otto at four o’clock next Wednesday.”

  “Is that the day Otto plans to hit him with the manuscript?”

  Maria shook her head. “Otto is giving you a little more time than that.”

  “How much more?”

  “I don’t know. He’s waiting to get the feel of what you’re doing. You know how he is.”

  Maria lit a cigarette, a Gauloise, and deeply inhaled its rank smoke. Patchen coughed and she put it out.

  “Why is Otto in such a rush about this?” Patchen asked her. “Have you any idea?”

  “No. He’s been in a mood since Paul brought the manuscript out. If i t were anyone but Otto I’d call it apprehension. He has no reason to be so impatient.”

  “His health?”

  Maria gave a sudden brilliant smile. “Otto knows that he’s not going to die,” she said. “The doctors gave him a choice before the operation–death in the near future, or what he is now for twenty years. He made his choice.”

  “Not much of a choice for you, Maria,” Patchen said. He touched her gloved hand. Christopher saw that she was startled by Patchen’s sympathy; he saw something else, deep in Maria’s disciplined face, that he hadn’t seen there before–a flash of mockery. Patchen had made a mistake with her, tried to come too close.

  Marie walked away without a good-bye, her heels clicking vigorously on the paving stones, her skirt swinging. The near wall of the Luxembourg Palace lay in shadow as Maria approached it, and the westering sun, behind it, left a strip of light around its edges.

  “A good officer,” Patchen said. “She always was.”

  “Do you think we can contain Otto?”

  “Maybe, if Maria is the key.”

  “What if he redoubles her?”

  “Unlikely,” Patchen said. “Otto may have no scruples. But Maria has no illusions.”

  SEVEN

  1

  Christopher took the Métro across the river. At the PTT on the Champs-Elysées, he placed a telephone call to Cathy in Rome, and, reading the Somerset Maugham novel he carried in his pocket, waited for it to go through. At the end of an hour, the telephonist sent him into one of the booths. He closed the door behind him, and was enveloped by the odors of old sweat and stale Caporals. The telephone rang a dozen times on the crackling line; at last the operator in Rome told him that there was no reply.

  He walked up the Champs through the evening crowds. A man in an open car, a Lancia like Christopher’s, kissed the girl in the seat beside him as he waited for the light to change. Christopher bought Le Monde at a kiosk and glanced down the wide street; it was impossible to spot surveillance in such a throng, but he looked from face to face in the approaching crowd, so as to remember any that he might see in an emptier street. He sat at a table on the sidewalk at Fouquet’s and drank a glass of beer. Then he walked on, turning down the rue Marbeuf, and took the long way around through quiet streets to the avenue George V. There was no one behind him. He had not expected that there would be.

  On the stone wall of the American Cathedral, Christopher looked for the yellow chalk mark he had been told he would see. Patchen had apologized for it. “These fellows from Security are great believers in elementary tradecraft,” he told Christopher. “You’ll just have to be patient, they like to play spy when they go overseas.” Christopher went inside the church. Wilson was seated in the corner of the last pew, the br
idge of his nose gripped between his thumb and forefinger. Christopher sat down beside him. Wilson’s eyes, the whites shining in the dim light, swiveled toward him.

  “I apologize for this meeting place,” Wilson said. “No safe house was available at this hour, and your tall friend with the war wounds wouldn’t hear of your coming into the Embassy.”

  Wilson, after a pause, began to speak again, then fell silent as a robed man padded down the aisle and nodded to them with a cordial American smile. He knelt, on one knee, in front of the altar and prayed in a whisper. The acoustics were excellent. Wilson, too, changed to a whisper, and his sibilants mixed with those of the priest in the vault of the nave.

  “I wanted to give you a little report,” Wilson said, speaking behind hands clasped for prayer. “I’m puzzled by the way things are going.”

  The clergyman finished his prayers. Wilson went on whispering.

  “I’ve got nothing definitive,” he told Christopher. “You and your tall friend ran this thing so close to the vest that no one on our side could have known where Bülow was going to be when he was zapped. Even you didn’t know until almost the moment before he was hit, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes. We’ve been over that.”

  “I don’t want to go over it again. I just want to know if you agree with something. If no one knew except Bülow where Bülow was going to be at 0612 on the morning in question, then nobody but Bülow himself could possibly have told the killers where he was going to be.”

  “Unless there was surveillance and I missed it.”

  “At that hour of the morning? Is that possible?”

  “No.”

  “You’re absolutely certain that no one except Patchen knew you were meeting the asset.”

  “Yes, and Patchen didn’t know the place or time.”

  Christopher spoke Patchen’s name aloud. Wilson flinched. He had been using true names, but he mouthed the syllables rather than whispering them. Wilson, Christopher thought, must believe that he is safe in church from lip readers, if not from microphones.

  “That’s all I wanted to confirm,” Wilson said. “Thanks. I’ll go first. I’m going to turn toward the Champs when I go out, so maybe you should head down the other way.”

  Wilson started to rise. Christopher gripped his forearm and he sat down again.

  “What are you onto?” Christopher asked, again in a normal voice. He knew that its tone would carry less well than a whisper in the stone building. Wilson hesitated, lips pursed. Christopher insisted.

  “Are you thinking that Horst was turned around?” he asked.

  “Horst,” Wilson replied, “or somebody. Most likely Horst.”

  “Doubled by whom? He was fluttered six months ago and nothing showed up.”

  “Six months can be a long time in a life like Horst’s.”

  “You’ve got something new on him.”

  Wilson sighed. “You always paid him in cash. West German marks in a sterile envelope, sterile receipt. Right?”

  Christopher nodded.

  “Horst had some extra money,” Wilson said. He took a breath before he spoke again, in a flat tone. “We have a sort of arrangement with a little German unit in West Berlin, and this unit took an interest in Horst,” he said. “They wanted to run him themselves, and the Berlin base had a time flagging them off. Of course they knew why we were fidgety, so they kept an eye on Bülow from time to time to see which American was handling him–professional curiosity. They never picked him up with you, your meetings were too secure. But a few weeks before he died they saw him in the Tiergarten with a woman. They talked, Horst and the female, for fifteen minutes, Horst nodding all the time.

  An envelope passed between them. It was morning, eight o’clock. Horst went to the nearest branch of the Berliner Bank and deposited the money to an account in the name of Heinrich Beichermann. One thousand West German marks. The file says that Heinrich Beichermann was a cover name Horst used during the war, when he was an amateur spy with the Abwehr. The bank says someone from Zurich opened the account for Horst, through the mail.”

  “Are there photographs of the woman?”

  “Our Germans say not.”

  “Description?”

  “Youngish, prettyish. It was winter. She was all bundled up.”

  “What language did she and Horst speak?”

  “Russian.”

  Wilson cleared his throat.

  “Where did they go after the meeting?”

  “Horst left the bank and got on the S-Bahn and went back to work in East Berlin,” he said. “The lady took a walk down the K-damm, then made a right turn into the American Consulate.” Wilson smiled.

  “Did she come back out?” Christopher asked.

  “They don’t know. The kid following her got cold and figured she must be an Ami who’d stay inside till nightfall, so he went somewhere for a cup of coffee.”

  “Didn’t he think it was curious that someone speaking Russian to an East Berliner would go straight into the American Consulate?”

  “He wasn’t paid to think. You don’t have to be an American to get past the Marine guards at the door.”

  The priest rose from his prayers and spoke to them, his hearty voice filling the nave. “Gentlemen,” he said, “if you’ve finished your devotions, my wife will be wondering where I am.” He smiled across the ranks of the pews, and gave them a small ironic bow.

  Wilson left as the clergyman came down the aisle, still smiling urbanely, but too far away to see Wilson’s face clearly. Christopher smiled back and walked out the door less quickly than Wilson had done. Christopher heard the lock turn and saw that Wilson, on the way out, had taken time to wipe away his chalk mark. Christopher watched the burly figure of the Security man as he sauntered up the avenue. Christopher turned in the opposite direction, toward the Seine.

  There were few pedestrians this far away from the Champs-Élysées, and Christopher heard the hurrying footsteps behind him when they were still some distance away. He put himself close to the wall and turned the sharp corner, almost reversing his direction, into the avenue Marceau. Once around the corner, he stepped into a deep doorway and waited. The footsteps, running now, turned the corner behind him.

  Wilson reached the doorway, went by. Christopher heard him stop. He came back and peered into the shadows. He was panting slightly and his flowered necktie had worked its way out of his coat. He handed Christopher an envelope. “Almost forgot,” he said. He touched his forehead and went back the way he had come, still panting.

  Inside the envelope was a typed note, unsigned. “Your wife called,” it read. “She’s in Paris, and will meet you in the bar of the Ritz at 5:00 this evening.”

  Christopher’s watch read 5:10. He got into a taxi as it let a passenger out. He rested his head on the back of the seat and closed his eyes. Cathy, when he had left her in Rome, was asleep and frowning as she dreamt. She had always insisted that she had no dream life.

  2

  Even before he became a spy, Christopher had disliked being recognized by headwaiters and bartenders. As a youth he had never exchanged a word with the New York Irishmen who tended bar at P. J. Clarke’s or the Frenchmen behind the zinc bar at the Dôme, though others seemed to attach importance to being known by name to these contemptuous men. Now, as a matter of professional caution, he booked table reservations in a false name and made certain that he did not eat at the same restaurant, or drink at the same bar, more often than two or three times a year. He broke these rules in Rome because he lived in that city, and never operated there; it was important to his cover to live as much like a normal man as possible when he was at home.

  Cathy made caution difficult when she traveled with him. She had favorite bars, favorite drinks, favorite restaurants and dishes. She refused to give them up. In the Ritz Bar, when Christopher entered, he did not see her. A waiter approached.

  “Madame has gone into the foyer for a moment,” he said.

  He took Christopher to the ta
ble; Cathy’s purse hung by its strap over the back of the chair, and a bottle of champagne stood in a bucket with two glasses chilling in the ice. Cathy had been drinking Perrier water as usual, and bubbles still rose in her half-empty glass. Christopher saw the men at the bar watch her come into the room behind him. A moment later she put a hand on the back of his head and kissed him softly on the cheek. The waiter was at her chair back, smiling. He filled their glasses. It was the most expensive champagne sold by the Ritz; Cathy told Christopher, as she did each time they met there, “This is the very first wine my father let me drink, when I was fourteen, here in this bar. ‘Cathy, my dear, let Dom Pérignon be your standard,’ he said.” She was a fine mimic, and Christopher grinned at the deep voice and the scowl of affection that for an instant turned her face into her father’s.

  “What made you think of coming to Paris?” Christopher asked.

  “Thinking of you. I took the next plane after you left. We can have the weekend together.”

  Cathy ran a wetted finger around the rim of her champagne glass and it gave off a musical note. She listened, drank some wine, and did it again, producing a slightly different tone. “I played the piano today,” she said. “I haven’t played in months, but really I’m not bad, Paul. I feel the music more. I had a teacher who used to tell me that I’d never have anything except technique until I’d suffered. She’d suffered, from the look of her, but still she couldn’t play worth a nickel.”

  “The difference between talent and genius,” Christopher said.

  “No, the difference between being alone and being with you. When I woke up and saw that you were gone the heart fell right out of me.”

  She put both of her hands on the table, asking for Christopher’s. Tears rose in her eyes; they ran over her cheeks to the corners of her unpainted upper lip. Cathy licked them away, tongue as quick as a cat’s.

  For dinner, Cathy had duck in orange. She and the sommelier had a running joke at Christopher’s expense; the wine waiter believed that white wine should ‘be drunk with duck in orange, but Christopher would have nothing except red Bordeaux. Cathy would take a half bottle of Sancerre and remark, each time the sommelier refilled her glass, how remarkably it cleared the palate and intensified the sweet flavor of the duck. She would tell him that he must convince Christopher. “Monsieur is a man of principle,” the sommelier would reply, and leave him to pour his own wine.