Secret Lovers

by Charles McCarry

  In Iboudou’s country, Christopher had seen one man mounted on a writhing woman while a second waited to cut her throat, and yet another man, his white robe spotted with blood and his face dazed as if by a powerful drug, walking down a dusty road with the severed heads of children swinging from either hand. When all the members of the rival tribe had been hunted through the streets and killed in this village, Christopher had seen a grave containing a hundred bodies. All the young girls, and many of the women, had been disemboweled. There had been no reason for the massacre, no spark that could be said to have set off the carnival of rape and murder; it had just happened, as it happened again a week later, with the tribes changing places as victims and murderers, in a village at the other end of the country. Iboudou was the alternative to slaughter. That was the policy conceived in the brain of the American government. Christopher, executing policy deep in its body, had lost his trust in ideas. In a pissoir, he gave Iboudou the money he was owed, and required him to sign the receipt with a thumbprint. “Do you,” asked Iboudou, “use invisible ink for white men?”

  5

  The safe house in Montmartre was at the top of a flight of stone stairs, and Christopher mounted them slowly, so as to remain behind the pair of policemen who climbed ahead of him. There was no light in the windows of the flat on the top floor. Christopher entered the darkened hallway. The concierge, a gray bony woman who seemed never to sleep, came out of her lodge and switched on the motor of the elevator. Christopher thanked her, and exchanged a word with her about the cold rain while he waited for the lift to descend; she told him that the weather made her joints ache. Cathy, accustomed to her parents’ concierge who had been made servile by large tips, was disconcerted by this suspicious female, and after the first few days in the safe house had ceased speaking to her. Christopher, going up in the cage of the elevator, watched the concierge below, shivering in the night air. When she heard him close the gates at the top, she brought the lift back down and turned off its motor again.

  The flat was empty. Cathy’s music, sheets that she had bought in a neighborhood shop, was still on the rack of the piano, and the plate she had used for lunch was on the table with the remains of her food drying on the surface of the china.

  Her clothes were gone, and her suitcase. Christopher looked for a note, but found none. He went over the apartment foot by foot. There was no sign that Cathy had come to any harm.

  Downstairs, he found the concierge still loitering in the hall. She pressed the light switch; the dim bulb was on a timer, designed to give the tenants time enough, and no more, to pass from the outer door to the lift. As she and Christopher spoke, the light went on and off repeatedly. The bulb, when it was burning, buzzed like an insect trapped between the panes of a double window.

  “Mademoiselle departed at about five o’clock,” said the concierge.

  “She had a large bag, and there was no one to help her with it. It took her quite a long time to go down the steps. She found a taxi at the bottom.”

  “She left no envelope for me?”

  The concierge gave Christopher a sardonic look and shook her head.

  “We were expecting a visitor,” Christopher said. “Did anyone come?”

  “Male or female?”

  “One of each, a man and his wife.”

  “Evidently the wife remained at home. The gentleman came at noon, only minutes after you yourself had left. He remained for two hours, perhaps longer. No doubt Mademoiselle invited him to lunch.”

  Christopher nodded. “I’ll be leaving myself in the morning,” he said, “and I wanted to thank you for your kindness to us.” He gave the concierge a fifty-franc note. Without looking at it, she crumpled it in her fist like an unwelcome letter.

  “The gentleman who came,” Christopher said. “Describe him.”

  “American, not handsome, middle-aged. His clothes did not fit. He was evidently a strong man. He went up the stairs instead of using the lift. He ran all the way up.”

  From a telephone in a bar, Christopher called the Kirkpatricks’ apartment and asked the maid, in French, for himself. Then he asked for Madame Christopher.

  “Neither Monsieur nor Miss Catherine is here.”

  “May I leave a message?”

  “But they are in Rome, monsieur. I don’t know when they will be back, it may be weeks.”

  Christopher dialed the home number of the chief of the Paris station. He identified himself, and using Wilson’s telephone name, asked where he was staying.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I want to see him now.”

  There was a silence. “All right. Inside, in an hour.”

  The crowd of French police lounging outside the American Embassy watched Christopher idly as he walked through the front door. The duty officer was waiting for him by the Marine guard’s desk. Upstairs, in an empty corridor, he stopped and faced Christopher. “The French may have taken your picture,” he said. “We gave them some infrared equipment, and it would be like them to try it out on us. Was the police van parked where it usually is?”

  “Yes, down the avenue Gabriel.”

  “Too far away, then. But we’ll sneak you out the back. Bud is here, working late. He awaits. Call me when you’re ready to go.”

  Wilson was using an office in which the entire ceiling was covered with fluorescent light fixtures. He sat with his feet on a green steel desk, covered with file folders with ‘secret’ labels on them. The burn basket, a transparent plastic tube, was half filled with fragments of torn paper. Wilson pushed his reading glasses onto his forehead and reached inside his shirt to scratch his chest. He wore no tie and a thick tuft of graying hair curled at his unbuttoned collar.

  “It’s two o’clock in the morning,” Wilson said. “Don’t you ever go to bed?”

  Christopher sat down and moved the burn basket to one side in order to have an unobstructed view of Wilson.

  “You called on my wife this afternoon,” Christopher said.

  Wilson nodded.

  “You didn’t think it was necessary to tell me beforehand?”

  “I assumed you’d be there. When you weren’t, I thought I’d come to the point anyway.”

  “Which was?”

  Wilson laced his hands behind his head and examined the canopy of light on the ceiling. In the absence of shadows, he looked older, more pallid. His beard showed patches of white.

  “I ask you,” Christopher said, “because I found her gone and I don’t know where she is.”

  Wilson put his feet on the floor and looked at the burn basket.

  “I’m sorry,” Wilson said. “She was upset. Sometimes you touch a nerve when you don’t expect to.”

  Christopher moved the burn basket again, putting it out of sight on the floor. He watched Wilson.

  “Putting pieces of paper together,” Wilson said, “I saw that she and Maria Rothchild had once known each other. I asked her about that.”

  “And that upset her?”

  “No, it was the other connection.”

  Wilson picked up a cardboard coffee cup and turned it between his fingers, delicately, as he had handled the cards at gin rummy.

  “I’m telling you what I’m telling you as an officer, not as a husband,” he said. “You and your wife know an Italian named Franco Moroni. He’s a filmmaker in Rome. He calls himself a Communist. A romantic. I had a piece of paper from Rome. The station there is running a German girl who likes to screw Communists and movie producers, sometimes both at the same time.”

  “Come on,” Christopher said.

  “The German kid has been doing it for Moroni, with us paying her the fee. We want to know where he gets the money for his movies, and so on. To make it as short as I can, the German asset reports that Moroni is boasting that he’s sleeping with the wife of a prominent American journalist named Paul Christopher.”

  Christopher did not move. “You asked Cathy about that?”

  “Not directly. I asked how well she knew Moroni, and
if she had ever discussed your whereabouts with him when you were out of town.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why. I’m trying to find the blown fuse. Maybe if Moroni knew you were in Berlin, he told somebody like our German girl and the word got passed to Moscow or somewhere. If they’ve got him on the string, they’ve got someone talking to him.”

  “What did Cathy reply?”

  “She didn’t. She just ran into the other room.”

  “You were there for two hours.”

  “Your wife gave me a nice lunch, and played the piano. We talked about you. She acted like a woman who really loves her husband. It was only in the last five minutes that we discussed Moroni.”

  “What’s your conclusion?”

  Wilson put down the empty coffee container. “I don’t know. I told her it wasn’t you who had told us about Moroni. I had to shout through the closed door. She wouldn’t open up. I don’t know if she believed me.”

  NINE

  1

  Christopher telephoned Cathy at six in the morning. She must still have been awake because she answered on the second ring. He heard music, a tape recording of Cathy’s own performance of Schumann, playing in another room of the Rome apartment. When she heard his voice she hung up the phone. Christopher told the telephonist that he had been cut off. But Cathy did not answer when the call went through again, and in the days that followed he heard the busy signal again and again, and knew that she had taken the telephone off the hook.

  Christopher met an agent in Casablanca and walked with the man through the dark shuttered city which might have been, except for the smell of dust and the deathly nighttime silence, a French town in the provinces. The Arab held Christopher’s arm like a petty French functionary imparting a confidence, and murmured his report as they strode with measured step back and forth for an hour in the same narrow street. Christopher listened, and responded, with the surface of his mind. In its depths he listened to Cathy and heard himself reply. He glimpsed her in his imagination as she knelt in a bed and lifted her breast toward the lips of a stranger.

  Christopher stopped in Rome on his way back to Paris. Cathy wasn’t in the apartment on the Lungotevere, though her jewels were scattered on the dressing table and there were other signs of her presence. Christopher looked for her on the via Veneto and in Trastevere. The car was gone, and he supposed that she was driving around the city with the top down in the mild night. He went back to the apartment and left a letter for her. At first he laid it on her pillow; then he moved it to the dressing table.

  In Paris, Wilson sought him out. His voice was strained and he had more trouble than ever meeting Christopher’s eyes.

  “I want you to know,” he said, “that we had our German girl plant a transmitter in Moroni’s apartment.”

  “Do you really think that’s going to produce anything?”

  “Somebody had to blow your meeting with Bülow. If you’ve got a better candidate than Moroni I’ll be glad to hear about it.”

  Christopher ceased replying. Wilson, at length, shook his head, looked at the floor, and clumsily squeezed Christopher’s shoulder. “She’s not a suspect,” he said.

  “Her voice is on the tapes?”

  Wilson yawned; Christopher had never observed in one man so many signs of embarrassment.

  “I’m the only one that recognizes her voice,” Wilson said. “Moroni doesn’t call her by name, he calls her Bella.”

  “Small b,” Christopher said, “bella. Beautiful.”

  2

  Patchen was more comfortable in Paris now that it was May and his conversations with Christopher could take place without discomfort in the open air. On the day of his return to Paris, they met at the café in the Pré Catelan in the Bois de Boulogne. Patchen arrived first but ordered nothing until Christopher joined him; he read French perfectly, but he let Christopher speak for him to the French; to be misunderstood was, to Patchen, humiliation. With a vermouth cassis before him, he began to talk; it was too early for the luncheon crowd and he and Christopher were all but alone.

  “We’ve got a crypt for the Kamensky operation,” he said. “It will be called Tuning Fork.”

  “Then there will be an operation.”

  “Yes. Beginning now.”

  “I’ll point out for the last time that we’re risking Kamensky’s life.”

  “You do insist on that point, don’t you?” Patchen said. “You’ll be glad to know that I’ve got the Tuning Fork Working Group to act on your scruple.”

  Patchen’s voice had no timbre; one had to infer his tone from his choice of words, and he was never more sarcastic than when he had done a favor. It’s no wonder, Christopher thought, that you have enemies. Patchen continued, fingering his untouched drink.

  “We’re going to try to get Kamensky out. It was decided, even Dick Sutherland agreed, to give them something for him, something important.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Trade goods. Sutherland is looking in his cupboard.”

  Christopher said, “What if the opposition doesn’t buy it?”

  Patchen watched a woman and a child as they fed a flock of birds. He kept his eyes on them when he spoke to Christopher again.

  “Then we’ll have done our best. We’ll publish and Kamensky will be left behind.”

  “We’ll execute Otto’s plan, in short.”

  “Yes. I circulated the plan. It reinforced what the whole working group wanted to do. Otto foresaw that, of course. No one in Washington really wanted to make the case for publication of the novel, on the record. It might look bad if, after all, the KGB killed Kamensky. Otto has always been hailed as an unimpeachable expert on the Russian mind. Maybe he is. In any case, he gave them the rationale to do what they wanted to do, and if anything goes wrong, it will be Otto who looks bad. And that doesn’t matter.”

  “How will you and I look?”

  “Like fools. As you might suspect, there’s an element of hope back home that that’s the way we will look. The area divisions are with us in case we win. If we lose, and Kamensky is murdered and the KGB can find a way to prove we had a hand in causing them to do it, then our allies at Headquarters will have to say, as they have said before, that covert action operations really ought to be given to the real pros. Themselves.”

  Patchen put money on the table and stood up. He and Christopher walked through the Shakespeare Garden. Patchen was amused by the idea of making a garden of all the trees, plants, and herbs mentioned in the works of the Bard. “Where,” he asked, “does the wild thyme grow? Some Frenchman must have known God’s own amount about Shakespeare’s botany. Another expert in the trivial.” Patchen strolled on. “Isn’t there a place to rent rowboats here?” he asked. “Let’s have a ride on the water before lunch.”

  From the lake, the huge studio windows of the Kirkpatricks’ apartment could be seen, like mirrors in the midday sun. Patchen sat erect in the stern of the rowboat. Christopher shipped the oars.

  “I’ll give you the scenario,” Patchen said. “It isn’t exactly what you’ll want, but, then, it never is. You’re free to modify it, within reason, in the light of conditions in the field.”

  Christopher’s eye was drawn to the Kirkpatricks’ windows. He envisioned the room beyond them glowing in sunlight that magnified the objects within and intensified their colors. He uttered Cathy’s name. Patchen raised his eyebrows. Christopher told him to go on with what he was saying.

  “It has been decided,” Patchen said, “to use this Frenchman, Claude de Cerutti. He is, after all, Kamensky’s discoverer. He’s in a bad financial position. Otto knows him. Otto will introduce you to him under a cover name. You’ll be an innocent young man, just back from Russia. This manuscript has fallen into your hands by means you cannot, as a matter of honor, describe. You will be jumpy about the whole transaction. You will give Cerutti the notion that he, not you, is the old hand at international intrigue. So far, it sounds just like you, doesn’t it?”

/>   “Yes. You’re quoting my operational proposal.”

  “I know. You are going to give Cerutti world rights to this book and let him peddle it in other countries in other languages.”

  “World rights? They might be worth millions.”

  “A thought that will, I’m sure, occur to Cerutti. But you’ll have a secret agreement with him, that one quarter of all profits will be paid into a numbered Swiss account. Ostensibly, that will be your share of the take.”

  “What if he doesn’t pay?”

  Patchen put a hand in the murky water of the lake and snapped the moisture from his fingers onto the bottom of the boat.

  “People pay,” he said. “Cerutti is not, according to Otto, a cretin. In the end, he’ll certainly figure you for what you are, and I think he’ll surmise that it’s a matter of sound business practice to play it straight with you.”

  “What happens to the money in Switzerland?”

  “Another point for you, Paul. We deduct operational expenses and hold the rest for Kamensky or his heirs. Sooner or later he or his kids will get out of Russia. When they do, they’ll be rich. It’s a little gift from us to them, in addition to the regular royalties that will be put into a blocked account for Kamensky.”

  “Why did Headquarters agree to that?”

  “It was something you said to me. I paraphrased it, of course. You said Kamensky wasn’t an agent, so we had no right to sacrifice him. Of course, he is an agent–unwitting, yes, but an agent from the moment we got our hands on his book. That’s the way the KGB would look at it. Kamensky’s spent twenty years in prison camps. If one of our fellows is captured and put away, we give him his back pay when he gets out, no matter how long he’s locked up. Same principle for Kamensky. At first the concept baffled everyone back home, but then they saw it as a way of congratulating themselves on their instinctive human decency. And, of course, it cost the Treasury nothing. So they approved.”