Cathy spoke, with her musical Southern good humor, to the owners of the restaurant, and to the boy who brought them coffee at the end of the meal from the bar next door. But she and Christopher said nothing to one another. When they had finished she turned her face, masked by sunglasses, toward his.
“I’ve got something to show you,” she said.
Cathy led Christopher across the piazza and into a building. He followed her up the narrow unlighted stairway to the second floor. She took a key from her purse and opened the only door on that floor.
They were in a small flat. Cathy stood in the center of the sitting room, holding the ends of the silk scarf that she had draped around her neck. She lifted a hand in invitation. Christopher opened a door and saw a bedroom and a bath beyond. The walls were covered with enormous photographs of Cathy’s face. The pictures were new; they were like publicity stills for a film star. She opened a closet; it was filled with clothes, plainly Cathy’s from the color and style, that he hadn’t seen before. The flat was shuttered, chilly and damp like a summer place rented from strangers. Christopher caught the afterscent of marijuana.
Cathy went to the door, waiting for him to open it for her. Then, before Christopher could move, she flung it open herself and walked into the hall.
“You’ve seen it,” she said, beckoning him to follow. “I don’t want to talk to you about it inside it.”
They walked the few steps to the Galleria Colonna and ordered more coffee. The orchestra was playing, so they could not speak above its noise; Cathy listened to the waltzes in the echoing stone gallery for a moment, then covered her ears and, making a sign that she would be back, walked away into the crowd.
When she returned, the orchestra had gone. She opened her hand; in her palm was a gold wedding ring. “I know you don’t like rings and wouldn’t have one when we were married,” she said, “but I bought you this just now. I think it will fit.” She slid it onto Christopher’s finger. He took his hand away, and she did not resist; a month before she would have struggled with him.
“I said in my letter that I was done with talking about love,” Cathy said, “but there’s quite a lot I have to say to you. I want to explain what’s happening, or what I’m trying to make happen, so that there’ll be as little confusion between us as possible. So will you let me talk this one last time about you and me before I let it alone forever?”
Christopher nodded. “Start with the place we just saw,” he said.
“All right. I was going to, anyway. You remember, when I came down here to tell you I loved you and we went to Cannes, what it was you did, directly after we’d been to bed?”
Christopher was not likely to have forgotten. In Cannes he told her what he had not told his mother or his brother, or any person outside the Agency–that he was a spy, a secret agent. The words, spoken aloud, sounded ridiculous. They were seated at the breakfast table. Cathy had pushed the table onto the tiny balcony because the sun was shining, but it was cold and they wore their winter coats over their naked bodies. Cathy, a mink collar turned up around her face, greeted the news with a laugh of delight, then turned serious as he told her more. Even now she could not understand what a proof of love Christopher’s confession had been; even loving her, it had made him ill, caused him to tremble and sweat, to speak the inmost truth about himself to an outsider.
“I had no idea what you were saying to me,” Cathy said now. “I was so dazed with love and desire. You said you’d never told anyone else, but you told me, and later you told me more. “That’s where I live,’ you said to me.”
Cathy had removed her sunglasses. Her glance was inward as she spoke; she might have been reading off a page. Her slim body was as straight as that of a young girl at a recital; she sat on the cafe chair as if it were a piano bench.
“You just showed me the rooms, though, not what was hidden in them,” Cathy said. “That’s what I thought at the time, and have thought ever since–your life, this secret existence you lead when you’re not with me–is like a darkened house. I’d say a haunted house, but you’d make one of your faces, Paul. You do so hate for me to dramatize.”
Cathy, as she spoke, turned her own wedding ring round and round on her finger. She wore no other jewelry.
“My life with you is like living on some planet that has a year of night for every hour of daylight, Paul. When you’re gone, I’m in the dark. I try to go with you in my mind, but I can’t make the journey because you can’t tell me where you are or what you’re doing. You just vanish, and sometimes you have dreams about where you’ve been after you come back, but you won’t tell me what they are, so I know they must be true memories of what’s happened to you. You shut the doors on me. For all I know, you kill and torture; I don’t believe you do, but I don’t know. If I asked you now those two simple questions: do you kill, do you torture, would you answer?”
“Yes, I’d answer. I don’t do either of those things.”
“But would you, if there was no other way to do what you do?”
A man they knew went by; he waved and called out a greeting in Italian.
“Yes,” Christopher said.
“I thought so. There must be a reason. You’re such a sweet and gentle lover, Paul, I’ve never known a man who wants so much not to hurt. You’ve never hurt me with your body. Never.”
Cathy uttered a long sigh, caught up Christopher’s hand, fondled the ring she had just given him between her thumb and forefinger. She lifted his hand to kiss it, then stopped herself. Before she spoke again, she let go of him.
“I’ve decided to take the rights you say I can have, Paul,” she said. “I’ve rented that place you just saw for myself. To use for my own purposes, to vanish, to go black–isn’t that the word you use when you become someone else?”
She took his hand again and leaned across the table. Christopher saw the shape of his own face, his movement of surprise, on the glistening surface of her eyes.
“You can never come back to my place,” Cathy said; she touched his face, smiled. “It has nothing to do with you and me. What I do there is secret. You can’t touch it, see it, know about it. I have different clothes I wear there. I’ll speak a different language. I’ll bring nothing from one life to another. Like you, I’ll never lie in our part of life. In the other part I’ll do what I want, according to rules others and I will make. You can’t know the rules.”
Christopher’s life had taught him that it was no use to ask questions. There was nothing to ask Cathy; he understood what she wanted. It was what she had always wanted–to make it impossible for him to banish her from his mind even for an instant.
“You’ll dream of me now the way I’ve dreamt of you,” Cathy said. “If you feared anything, Paul, if you were capable of it, you’d be afraid. I’ve had my share of being terrified for your sake.”
“Will what you’re doing cure you of that?”
“So far it hasn’t even made me forget, not for an instant. No matter what’s happening to me.”
Cathy’s dry hand, a musician’s hand, long-boned and muscular, lay in Christopher’s open palm. He imagined it, a frozen detail like the focus of a painting, stroking another man’s body. Emotion kindled within him for an instant that lasted no longer than the glimpse of Cathy’s flesh, and then his mind extinguished his feelings.
“You’re doing something dangerous,” Christopher said.
“Then save me from it.”
“You’ll do what you want to do.”
“You say that about everyone, Paul. It’s one of your sayings.”
“It’s true of everyone.”
“People do what they have to do,” Cathy said. “There’s a difference.”
Cathy’s face was shaped, for a moment, by an expression of wisdom. Everything that she felt registered on her flesh; it was as much a screen as Christopher’s mind. The changeful face and voice, the body that danced or collapsed as her moods changed, were the things that he loved in Cathy and remembered in her absenc
e. He felt sexual desire for her only when he was with her, and all the time he was with her. He had never had a sexual dream about her.
“Paul, you won’t ask me why I’m doing this to us, will you?”
Christopher took his hand away and called for the bill.
“Because I thought that the love I felt for you was a force that would bring you to me, make you choose me, over anything,” Cathy said. “I told you from the start–I thought I could make you become me.”
The waiter was at the table. His eyes were on Cathy, and she spoke quickly while her voice was still in control.
“I’m doing what I’m doing, Paul, to see if I can become you. If I can, surely you’ll understand love and I’ll understand you.”
When they rose from the table, Cathy took a step toward Christopher, halted, then put her arms around his waist. He held her against his body, increasing the strength of his embrace as she tightened her arms. Her face was crushed against his chest.
“Bella!” cried a stranger, passing by.
3
Cathy wanted to leave Rome for a while. She and Christopher, having a drink on the sidewalk at Doney’s, a day after his return, had met Franco Moroni. The Italian, tailored and barbered, sat down with them and spoke about his new movie; he was going to film it in Spain, with Spaniards playing a band of terrorists who kidnap an American President’s daughter. “Cathy would be perfect for the girl, she’d only have to be herself with that glorious American face that has no memory of passion and no idea of pain,” Moroni said. “But she won’t agree to take the part.” Cathy watched Moroni with mocking eyes. “What happens to the girl in the end?” Christopher asked. “She’s killed by the CIA; my fi’ms are true to life,” Moroni answered. He called the waiter over and paid the bill before he left, and while he spoke to Cathy, asking her again to be in his movie, he gripped the back of Christopher’s neck with warm damp fingers, as though touching her flesh at second hand.
The next morning they left the city. Cathy wanted to be near the sea. They drove through the mountains straight across Italy to Pescara on the Adriatic. They found a hotel by itself on a long sand beach. The weather turned windy; danger flags flew all along the shore, keeping swimmers out of the water. They walked on the sand for hours; Cathy stopped sleeping so much and rose at dawn with Christopher. “I don’t know why I gave up the early morning for so long, I used to love being up and out at sunrise with my papa on the farm,” Cathy said. “I love this, too, it really is the sweetest time of the day, anywhere in the world.”
Cathy teased Christopher and laughed. There was no great change in her, or in the times they had together. She bought a lot of cheap jewelry made of shells from an old man who overcharged her for it. “I love to let him cheat me, he’s such a transparent villain,” she said. “Eight thousand lire–how much is that in real money?”
Christopher asked her, driving back to Rome, what Maria Rothchild had been like as a girl.
“Strange and alone,” Cathy said. “Maria was a funny combination of things. She was a super athlete, but she was clumsy off the playing field–she bumped into things. She was an honors student, but she didn’t know things everyone else knew, like who was in what movie. No trivia for Maria. The main thing about her, though, was that she could only have one friend at a time. She’d be all tooth and claw about someone and absolutely wear the person out, and then she’d find another and do the same. But never did she have two human beings in her life at any one time.”
“Girls you mean.”
“Well, Miss Porter’s is a girls’ school. Maria was not exactly fixated on the opposite sex. I couldn’t have been less surprised when I found her nursing that wrinkled old Russian in Paris, and married to him. Why, Paul, he looks like somebody who died for the love of Bette Davis and was stuffed, and Maria found him in a cute little shop on the Left Bank near the Pont des Arts.”
Cathy was bouncing in her seat, loving every syllable of this wicked gossip about a woman she had never liked.
“Otto wouldn’t be amused to hear you say that,” Christopher said. “He’s led an adventurous life.”
“Yes, he told me. Maria says the blood of Ivan the Terrible runs in his veins. All he talked about the night I met him, in the periods when he would come back to the world of the living, was Oriental carpets. Shah Abbasi and Kashan and Beluchi prayer rugs. He does know the subject. And Berlin between the wars. All the colorful decadence and politics of it, it sounded like Fayette County. It was carpets, carpets, carpets, and Berlin, Berlin, Berlin. I tried to mention other things, like you, and what an expert you were on Berlin, which was where you were at that very moment. But they just went on as if they didn’t know you. What actors you spies become. Maria’s husband kept reeling off the names of people he knew in Berlin before they went to Buchenwald. It was like a telephone book of the dead.”
“You mentioned that I was in Berlin?”
“I expect so–it was the subject of the hour,” Cathy said. She was eager to go on with her gossip.
In Rome, Cathy was quiet again. She sat with Christopher while he wrote or read a book. Looking up from his work, he would find her eyes on him sometimes; but sometimes, now, she looked elsewhere–out the window at the city as its colors changed in the light of the strengthening sun, or at herself. She would spend long periods turning her hand or her bare leg, studying the flow of the muscles and tendons under the skin, the articulation of the joints. She had read in a novel of a girl, also from the South, who, when she wished to do so, could visualize the interior of her body–heart, lungs, the miles and miles of veins and arteries and blood vessels, the brain filled with tiny leaping charges of electricity.
“I wish I had that gift,” Cathy said. “In the old days I used sometimes to begin to see your flesh melt away, Paul, and I’d get a look at the shadow inside.” They had been married a year; she spoke of the time before her adultery as the old days. “In the old days,” she told Christopher, “I was trying to write my life on the pages of your absence, like a bride in wartime would keep a diary while her husband was off somewhere with the cavalry.”
On the anniversary of their marriage, on the night before Christopher had to leave again, they had dinner at Dal Bolognese, sitting outside so as to inspect the Piazza del Popolo again; Cathy, each time she saw this square, discovered some object of beauty that had escaped her notice until then. She believed that one could spend one night a week for a lifetime in the Piazza del Popolo and still not notice everything that artists and architectural pranksters had done, century after century, to make it more beautiful. Christopher agreed.
The shops were still open when they finished eating, and they strolled down the Corso. In the via Condotti, Christopher saw a bracelet in a window and took Cathy inside and put it on her wrist. Cathy asked, seeing the row of figures on the check that Christopher wrote, how much it was in real money. Christopher put a hand over her mouth and she seized it and kissed the palm.
Cathy, paying no attention to the little cars that darted through the narrow street, walked along with her wrist before her eyes, turning the bracelet so that it caught the light; the gold was not very different in hue and texture from the skin of her arm. Christopher put his arms around her, turned her body, and kissed her.
Farther on, they found a pet shop. Cathy went inside. She asked the clerk to open a cage and let her hold one of the Siamese cats inside. “It’s a risk, signorina, these cats don’t like strangers,” said the clerk. But the Siamese lay in Cathy’s arm, purring, and rubbed its head against her hand.
Christopher bought it for her. Cathy unclasped the bracelet and put it around the cat’s neck like a collar. “Look, Paul, the stones match her eyes. The color’s brilliant, but the stones have more depth in them. And more warmth.” She touched Christopher under one blue eye, then under the other.
There was a second cat in the cage. Cathy bought it. She hadn’t enough money with her to pay for it, and wouldn’t take any from Christopher. She left t
en thousand lire as a deposit and said that she’d be back the following afternoon. Christopher, by that time, would be in Paris.
“I need two of almost everything now, one for our place, one for the other place,” Cathy said.
She put the bracelet back on her wrist. She carried Christopher’s cat home in her arms, refusing the cardboard box the shop offered.
Cathy wore her new bracelet all night. But in the morning, at the airport, he saw her take it off and put it into her pocket as she walked away after kissing him good-bye.
TWELVE
1
Wilson had been to Zurich, and he carried the data he had gathered there on an index card in an inside pocket. Christopher noticed changes in the Security man; he spoke more gently, he had begun to look Christopher in the eye. As he collected information, he abandoned mannerisms. He believed now that he was close to the truth.
“The dates fit,” he said. “The phony passport Bülow had on him when he died could have been made in Zurich. There’s a fellow there, a former Abwehr forger, who does similar work.”
“What about the airlines, the hotel, car rentals?”
“Zero. I’d have used phony paper, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, but the hotel clerk might have remembered a night’s absence.”
Wilson shook his head in bewilderment. “It’s hard. We have this liaison thing with the Swiss, that we won’t operate on their territory. Bern takes it seriously. They wouldn’t let me talk to the hotel fellow without informing the Swiss. I wanted to send him some money in an envelope and have him meet me in Germany. Bern said that that would transgress the parameters of liaison proprieties.”
“What about the money? It went from Zurich to Berlin.”
Christopher had no hope that Wilson or anyone else could breach the security of the Swiss banking system. But Wilson smiled in triumph. Years before, he said, when he was in the FBI, he had found an embezzler that the Swiss had wanted, and the man had been brought back to Zurich, money and all, in the most discreet possible way.
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