Secret Lovers

by Charles McCarry

  Christopher crossed the room, knelt at Rothchild’s feet, took his hand.

  “Otto, I’m trying to save his life,” he said.

  Rothchild extricated his hand which had lain, boneless as a glove, for a moment in Christopher’s. In a man who had any strength left in him, Rothchild’s gesture would have been a brutal one.

  “His life?” Rothchild said. “Kamensky’s life is in his book. What other life has he had, first as a fool of the revolution, then as its prisoner? And you, Christopher–you want to throw him into an unmarked grave.”

  Rothchild again moved his eyes from Patchen’s face to Christopher’s. The irises were hidden and then revealed by Rothchild’s blinking lids, as though a camera lay behind them inside Rothchild’s skull and he was recording their features on film.

  “From the first day,” Patchen said, “Paul has been trying to keep Kamensky out of the grave. I think he’s found a way. The book won’t be signed with Kamensky’s name. I won’t kill this man. Otto, accept it.”

  Rothchild turned to Maria and spoke to her, peremptorily, in Russian. She helped him from the room.

  Christopher went to the window, open to the warm breeze, and stood between the billowing curtains, looking down on the Seine. Once again he had the illusion of sailing in this building on the prow of the island.

  Maria returned. She went to the bar and filled three glasses with ice cubes and poured Scotch over them. She handed out the drinks.

  “Permit me to offer you the hospitality of Otto’s house,” she said.

  “He’s gone back to bed?”

  “Yes. I gave him a pill to make him sleep.”

  They were standing, like a conversational group at a cocktail party, in a little circle in the center of the room.

  “How do you explain Otto’s being so angry?” Patchen asked.

  Maria finished her drink, rattled the ice in the empty glass, went back to the bar and poured herself more Scotch.

  “After all,” Patchen went on, “it’s not such an irrational thing to do, to protect Kamensky. And the book will exist. Sooner or later, as soon as it’s safe, we’ll let the author’s name out. I should think it would intensify his fame, to have this work of art, as Otto calls it, wrapped in mystery for a while.”

  Maria finished her second whisky, looked quizzically at the empty glass, and resolutely put it down on a table.

  “I don’t know exactly what goes on inside Otto,” Maria said. “But he really feels that the book ought to be Kamensky’s monument. Kamensky was a friend of his youth. Evidently he genuinely loved him. You two, of all people, ought to be able to understand the nature of friendship between males. It’s a mystery to my sex, but voilà.”

  “When and where were they such friends?” Patchen asked. “I’ve never been clear on that point.”

  Maria made one of her husband’s gestures. “Otto doesn’t speak of times and places any more than you do, David. It’s training. They were young, I know that.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Go on.”

  “The rest is obvious. Otto saw that you were, finally and irrevocably, taking all control of this operation away from him. He feared that. You knew he feared it. I don’t see what it would have cost you to keep up the illusion. It’s a mistake, David, hurting a man like Otto for no good reason.”

  Patchen made no effort to fill the silence that followed Maria’s last sentence. Thinking that she wouldn’t speak again if no one replied, Christopher said, “There was no intent to injure him, Maria. We thought he’d be glad of a way to save Kamensky.”

  “You have some indication that Kamensky’s in danger? Now, at this moment?”

  Christopher answered easily. The exchange of information, the low unhurried voices of the two men, had soothed Maria. Patchen watched her fixedly, as he had watched Rothchild. Each time one of them looked up it was to look into Patchen’s opaque eyes. Christopher didn’t like Patchen’s unveiled watchfulness; he liked nothing that was obvious.

  “No, that’s just it,” he said to Maria. “Horst was killed. But the whole string of couriers that brought the manuscript out, from that Red army captain, Kalmyk, who handed Bülow the baby in Dresden on March 24, all the way back to Kamensky himself, has been left untouched by the KGB.”

  Maria was keeping a careful hand on her emotions, and she let it show in the hard-eyed way she was receiving Christopher’s information.

  “And what does that say to you, Paul?” she asked.

  “That they don’t know who the couriers are, or what was in the package. If we publish the book under a pen name, it will have just as much impact in the West. We’ll accomplish our objective and also keep Kamensky alive. Or at least increase his chances of staying alive.”

  Maria nodded. “That’s what I thought. Otto sees it too–intellectually. But his emotions are involved in this operation.”

  “Otto’s not the only one,” Christopher said. “Everyone wanted this operation too much from the start. We jumped to conclusions, we went too fast.”

  Patchen made a sound of disgust. He began to speak to Christopher, then turned away.

  “Even David,” Christopher said. “Everyone believed as soon as Horst Bülow was killed that the opposition had done it. Therefore we could go ahead, Kamensky was already a target for the Soviets.”

  Patchen faced them. “Paul doesn’t believe the Russians killed Bülow,” he said. “He never has.”

  Maria glanced at the closed door of the sitting room, listening for sounds of Rothchild beyond it. She said, “What’s your opinion, David?”

  Patchen had stopped watching her, and she had to move across the room in order to look into his face.

  “I think,” Patchen said, “that it’s very odd that the Soviets would kill Bülow and just let it go at that. Why not this Kalmyk? Why not the other couriers? Why not Paul, for that matter?”

  “Have you thought that from the start, or has it been just Paul, alone again?”

  “I haven’t Paul’s instincts.”

  “Very few people have, even Otto says so. He almost thinks Paul is a reincarnation of himself. But I don’t have to tell you two about that–you use Otto’s weakness well enough.”

  She took the empty glasses out of their hands.

  “Every time David wants to do something brutal,” she said, “he has Paul do it. That kneeling on the carpet at Otto’s feet was a lovely touch. Otto should have laid a hand on your golden head, Christopher–the ‘verray parfit gentle knight … he was as fressh as is the month of May.’ As if Otto doesn’t know, as if I don’t know, what Paul is capable of.”

  4

  An hour later, waiting in the safe house for Wilson, Patchen passed the time by discussing marriage. “It’s analagous to tradecraft, you know–there’s that helpless love of the other partner, as of an agent,” he said, “and still either of the two will deceive, betray, revile the other with a third party. Take Maria as an example. Or my own Laura. Bitterness runs like an underground river in women. Laura had an aunt whose husband lost every penny of her inheritance in the stock market; she went out within the month and got some other man to father a baby on her. Never told her husband–just watched him love the child to distraction for thirty years. The sweetest moment of her life, she told Laura, was not revealing the secret to him on his deathbed.”

  “Interesting blood in Laura.”

  “In all of us.”

  Wilson was five minutes late. He let himself in with a key. “I’m sorry about the time,” he said. “The secretary who housekeeps this place was out. I waited, so I could send her to the movies. It must be hell, living in a safe house and being sent out to play all the time; these girls earn the rent.”

  Patchen said, “Christopher has briefed me on your conversations in Zurich. I’ll let him tell you what’s happened since then on our side.”

  Christopher recounted their meeting with Rothchild.

  “You think he accepts the decision?”

  “Even Otto has to accep
t Headquarters decisions,” Christopher said.

  Wilson nodded. In Patchen’s presence, he was making no notes on his file cards.

  “We’ve finished the wiring on Cerutti,” Wilson said. “There’s a twenty-four-hour audio surveillance–phones, office, apartment, car. We had to rig a tape recorder in the car because of all the interference from mobile transmitters; you just can’t read anything from a moving vehicle in a city this size. We’ve glued a bleeper on the car, too, in case we want to follow.”

  “What have you picked up so far?”

  “Routine. He’s been talking to the woman who’s translating the novel from Russian into French. She’s gaga over the book, wants to know who the author is. Cerutti won’t answer He’s not what you’d call pally with people who work for him.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Everyday life. Of course we’ll always be twelve to twenty-four hours behind. It takes time to listen to the tapes, pick out the significant segments, transcribe. It takes manpower, and manpower I don’t really have.”

  “Audio surveillance is not enough,” Patchen said. “He has to be covered, surveilled by a team, twenty-four hours a day.”

  “That’s impossible. There aren’t that many men in the whole Paris station who have the expertise.”

  Patchen, for the second time that day, put a hand on Christopher. ‘Paul will watch him at least half the time.”

  “Alone?”

  “He’ll just be with him. They can hole up somewhere and talk and talk and talk about this publishing project. Paul can give him some more money, take him to some more three-star restaurants.”

  “When is Christopher going to tell him about publishing under a pen name?”

  “Right away,” Christopher said. “He’s not going to be any happier about it than Otto was.”

  “We don’t think he’s going to do anything tricky while Christopher’s with him, is that it?” Wilson asked.

  “That’s it. But when they part, you and whoever you can rustle from the Paris gumshoe stable will have to keep an eye on him.”

  Wilson nodded. “He’ll not be alone.”

  Christopher spoke for a moment, reminding them what the objective of the surveillance was.

  “If something develops in Berlin, I’ll go,” he said. “Someone else will have to baby-sit Cerutti.”

  Wilson nodded. Patchen, immobile, asked if any additional men were needed in Rome.

  “No,” Wilson said, “Franco Moroni is no Cerutti. We have the German girl on him, and audio surveillance. It’s enough. Besides, we know his Soviet case officer–a friend of yours, Paul, that Tass man called Klimenko. We have the Russian covered all the time.”

  “Paul shouldn’t have anything to do with the Rome part of it. He lives there; he has to stay clean.”

  Wilson showed nothing. “Agreed. I’ve already accepted Christopher’s reasons for not wanting to get involved down there.”

  Patchen asked Wilson to leave the room. He went into the secretary’s bedroom and closed the door behind him, but they heard the clasps of his attache case snap open.

  “All that remains, I guess, is to spring the news on Cerutti,” Patchen said.

  “And wait for the mousetrap to spring.”

  “Your mouse, Paul, and your trap. You’re looking a little haggard. It’s a costly business, curiosity.”

  THIRTEEN

  1

  Christopher met Cerutti in the children’s garden in the Pré Catelan on a Wednesday, the afternoon of Cerutti’s regular visit to Otto Rothchild. Cerutti recited history. “The Pré Catelan is named for a court minstrel, murdered here in the fourteenth century,” he said. “One pays in the end for making jokes about the king.”

  Now that the recruitment had been completed, there was no need for Christopher to be amused by his agent’s jokes. He walked on, looking for a quiet place to talk. Young mothers, speaking in the sweet tone that Frenchwomen use in public, scolded and warned their children. (Christopher, when he dreamt of this operation, dreamt of nursemaids and young mothers and prams: Patchen and Maria in the Luxembourg Gardens and Patchen at the zoo; Cerutti affixing his thumbprint to a receipt in the Parc Monceau; now Cerutti again among toddlers in the Bois de Boulogne.) They found an empty bench, and Christopher told Cerutti what he had to tell him.

  “This is not what we agreed.”

  “The agreement is being changed,” Christopher said. “There are excellent reasons.”

  “Ah, yes. I am but a small part of the whole, and if I only knew the entire picture, I’d see that what appears to me to be stupid is in fact a vital piece of a jigsaw puzzle designed by a genius. How many times in the past have I heard that said!”

  “I haven’t said it. What I will say is this: it’s a measure designed to protect Kamensky’s life. Surely you don’t object to that.”

  “Not at all. I’m somewhat surprised, perhaps, that a man of your profession would take Kamensky’s life into account.”

  Cerutti turned his back, walked a few paces over the gravel. Christopher waited where he was for the agent to come back to him. He asked Cerutti the state of the French translation.

  “One-third completed. It will be done, in rough form, in a month.”

  “Two weeks.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Hire two more translators; let them work as a team. You and I will do the final polishing, together. For when have you reserved the presses?”

  “For the first week in September.”

  “For the French, make it the last week in July.”

  “Impossible. August is the holiday month in France. No one works. You want to publish in August?”

  “I want every reviewer, every editor, every prominent intellectual in France to take proofs with him on vacation.”

  “Such a thing has never been done.”

  “Then it will be something new. You’ll go round to all of them, saying that you have a major manuscript by a major Russian author. You will not reveal his name. You’ll say you know his name, that the book came to you out of the underground, that you can authenticate its authorship–but only after the author dies. Your background is known, it’s just slipped everyone’s mind. Let the journalists interview you. Remind them that you fought with the Reds before Petrograd in 1918 against the Whites under Yudenich. Speak of yourself in Madrid in ‘36. Renew your credentials.”

  Cerutti turned his back again. He squatted–his round belly made stooping difficult for him–and tied a shoelace. He picked up three stones and, with his back still turned, juggled them. A small boy, standing some yards away, pointed and laughed; Christopher supposed that Cerutti’s performance, from that distance, would look like a pantomime because the flying pebbles were too small to be seen. Cerutti dropped a stone, made a frantic grab for it to amuse the child, and turned back to Christopher.

  “It’s not a bad plan,” he said. “But I’ve never spoken publicly about these things before. Once one begins. . . .”

  “It’s time you did. There will be suspicion–they will ask why you are doing this.”

  “Suspicion, my friend? Hostility. I’ll be called a turncoat. The Communists have access to the press in this country.”

  “In every country.”

  “But in certain countries, including France, they can awaken true passion. We make our bread of old political resentments. Here, believers are respected by the general public simply because they are believers.”

  What Cerutti said was true enough, and his fear for his reputation was realistic. He needed a push. Christopher disliked revealing to an agent that he knew a secret about him; it reduced the anxiety that an operative must feel in order to keep alive the fear of loss, and the greater fear of injury to his idea of himself. Yet he had prepared himself with Cerutti’s secrets, or as many of them as were recorded in the files Wilson had given him to read.

  “If I were you, Claude,” Christopher said, and watched Cerutti stiffen, for Christopher had never before called him by his Chr
istian name, nor tutoyed him. “If I were you, I’d leak the story of why you left the Party, feed it to a sympathetic journalist. Better, have someone else do it. Perhaps we could arrange that for you.”

  “It was a long, boring process.”

  “Was it?” Christopher spoke a Russian name. He supposed that Cerutti had not heard this name said aloud for forty years.

  Cerutti neither answered nor moved. Like Rothchild’s the day before, his eyes became lenses, and Christopher wondered how many brains stored these photographs of his face, taken as if a camera had been snapped in an instinctive action of self-defense at the moment a pistol was fired at the photographer. The bullet was frozen in midair, but only on the film.

  “In 1920,” Christopher said, “this man, your case officer in the Soviet intelligence service, instructed you to penetrate the French military staff that General Weygand had taken to Warsaw to run the Polish army in its war against the Russian Bolsheviks. You refused. You told him you wouldn’t spy on France. Reveal that and the French, even the intelligentsia, ought to forgive you anything.”

  Cerutti had recovered himself as Christopher spoke. He answered calmly.

  “Yes. But who will vouch for it?”

  “Not everyone was killed by Stalin in the thirties.”

  “This man lived? You know who he is, where he is, now? He would reveal himself, speak out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then he must owe you people a great deal,” Cerutti said. “All right, it’s agreed. What else?”

  Christopher told him as if it were an afterthought:

  “We want the Russian text to go to press immediately. Publish before the first of August. It will reinforce the French version, create the mystery.”

  “The first card out of the shoe,” Cerutti said. “Now you expect me to say I’ll need more money.”

  “I have it in my pocket,” Christopher replied.

  2

  Wilson took a clinical interest in facial expressions, tones of voice, gestures. He observed and recorded them as a physician, seeking signs of diabetes, will note the odor of acetone in a patient’s breath, his thirst, his fits of irritability when deprived of food. In a new safe house, Wilson recorded on one of his file cards Christopher’s description of Cerutti in the children’s garden of the Pré Catelan.