Secret Lovers

by Charles McCarry

  On the fourth night after the theft of the Russian proofs, Christopher returned to his hotel at two o’clock in the morning. The directional signals of a car parked across the street blinked three times. Christopher crossed the deserted boulevard and got into the back seat. Wilson, alone, was at the wheel. He drove away without speaking, and circled through the streets, his eyes on the mirror, before he parked again, on a dead-quiet side street in Neuilly, where the diplomatic plates on his Citroen would draw the least attention from police patrols. Christopher got into the front seat.

  “Not quite what we expected,” Wilson said.

  He handed Christopher an envelope, a large bright yellow one of the kind that is manufactured only in Switzerland; it was rumpled and torn by its passage through the mail; it bore United Nations stamps and the postmark of the Palais des Nations in Geneva. It had been addressed with a typewriter to a radio station in Germany that broadcast propaganda in Russian into the Soviet Union. The radio was an Agency operation. The envelope was addressed to the head of the Russian section of the radio station.

  “It came in through the open mail yesterday,” Wilson said. “The Russian proofs were inside, and this letter.”

  The letter was in English, perfect but stilted–the sort of Engush Christopher might write if he wished the reader to believe it had been composed by a foreigner. The letter gave a synopsis of Kamensky’s novel. It described without details the plan to publish it in the West. It identified Kamensky as the author. It pointed out that no copyright had been applied for, and that the reading of the text over the air, in Russian, if it were done quickly, would infringe no legal contracts.

  “No fingerprints, of course,” Wilson said, “except the proofreader’s and the printer’s. I think we can eliminate them as suspects.”

  “No sighting in Geneva?”

  “No, but we weren’t covering Geneva for this target. I don’t know why not–it’s the obvious place, crawling with KGB, safe mail facilities. Using the UN post office was very picturesque, it eliminates a mail intercept by the Swiss liaison altogether.”

  “What do the radio people want to do?”

  “They await instructions.”

  “Yes. But what do they want to do?”

  “They want to read it on the air. The case officer says that his Russian wants to run the whole novel, take over the entire broadcasting schedule.”

  “When?”

  “Like tomorrow. They figure they can surprise the Russian jammers, get some of it through. Then they’ll switch frequencies and slip in a chapter in the middle of a music program from time to time–drive the Soviets crazy.”

  “Identifying Kamensky?”

  Wilson took the envelope and the letter out of Christopher’s hands, and locked them away in his briefcase again.

  “That’s the whole idea, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  Wilson, for once, didn’t have the radio playing; he knew that this car was secure.

  “We have no match on the typewriter, of course. It’s a Hermes portable–probably they bought it in Geneva and threw it in the lake after one use. I can’t match this Russian at the radio station with the target. He says he has no idea who’d send him such a thing; his case officer believes it.”

  “Will the guys from the radio project go along?”

  “Oh, sure. They don’t even think they have to cable Headquarters. Just put it on the air and watch Khrushchev dance.”

  “Have you cabled?”

  “Yes. Flash to Patchen.” He used Patchen’s cryptonym; Wilson used everyone’s cryptonym and so did Christopher; their speech, like their written communications to Washington, was in cipher.

  “Has he got back to you?”

  “Yes. Three words: ‘Christopher’s judgment applies.’”

  “What’s the time factor for the radio?”

  “They can go on the air instantaneously. The case officer is here in Paris on a TDY. He says the best hour of the day is early morning. Evidently the Russian audience gets up early for the real goodies.”

  Christopher didn’t really want this information; he wanted a moment to calm himself. The target had wakened his emotions. Hearing what he had heard, recognizing the profile of the operative, something had broken through the surface of his mind, a sensation in which anger and humor were intermixed. Even in trapping his enemy he had been, in a way, outwitted, because the target had acted in a way he hadn’t expected. Wilson nodded, divining Christopher’s thoughts.

  “It’s really and truly admirable, isn’t it?” he said. “What a picture-book that son-of-a-gun has been.”

  “Still is. We haven’t wrapped this up yet.”

  “What about the broadcast? The case officer has to know pretty soon; he can lay it on by phone, but he has to call by three in the morning, because of the time difference. It’s later in Russia.”

  Christopher laid his face against the glass of the car window. His skin felt hot, as if he were drunk or sick. He’d had no alcohol for a week, had not touched the flesh of another human being since he had kissed Cathy good-bye in the airport at Rome. He’d thought of nothing–not of Cathy wounding herself in Italy, not of Kamensky and the long storm of the Russian’s life, not even of this moment which he had planned. He had, for weeks, simply received data. Now he had more data. It was his function to act on it.

  “Tell them to go ahead,” Christopher said. “The fact that they broadcast will alert the target that we’re running an operation against him. He knows we control what the radio does. But what difference does it make now?”

  “He can run.”

  “He won’t.”

  “You ought to know. But there’s always that random factor–that’s what he’s lived on all his life. He sees it–the aberration, the hole, the flaw, a long way off.”

  “Right. And what’s the hole in him, Bud?”

  Wilson waited; when Christopher didn’t go on, he didn’t urge him to do so. He started the engine. He put the car in gear, but waited, with the clutch out, for another instant.

  “The hole in him,” Christopher said, “is that, of all the people he’s done this to, all through his life, we’re the only ones who won’t kill him for it. When he runs, he’ll run to us.”

  FOURTEEN

  1

  Christopher, before he went to Berlin, collected an express letter from Cathy, and an old telegram, from poste restante. He had not written to her or tried to telephone, and he had expected no word from her. The telegram told him that she was going to Spain; the letter was from Pamplona, written on the third day of the fiesta.

  July 9th

  Fireworks in the plaza, Pablo–I was just in time for them, as you and I were last year. The clock striking midnight was like my mind striking off the months of our marriage, and then that great cheap explosion of colored light in the sky, and everyone singing and gasping. The Spaniards’ festival clothes were pure white when I got here and they were their good selves, sober and nice and correct. Now they’re drunk and lewd and nasty in the same clothes, dirty and stained with wine. Why don’t we have a week in every year when it’s all right to be a beast? Far better than doing it a bit at a time. After three days of this I’m not exactly squeaky clean myself. I’m going to Madrid today, after the corrida. Paco Camino is fighting, and oh so well. I saw him in Barcelona, in the rain, on the way down here (I brought the car), and I longed to have you with me to watch. Hemingway is not here again this year, and it’s so comical. The crowd wants to believe he is here, and you hear them in El Choko and all over, saying to each other, “Hemingway está aquí, Hemingway está aquí,” and yesterday, some German movie actor who’s burly like Hemingway arrived and everyone thinks Ernesto has shaved off his beard and is this German. So at the corrida, Chamaco (I think it was) spread his cape on the barrera in front of the German (I was sitting right behind him in the tendido) and dedicated his third bull to him, “A usted, Don Ernesto,” and a lot more flowery stuff. He thought he was killing the bull
for Hemingway. It couldn’t have been more funny if Mama had made up the story, the German was so thrilled at being recognized because he didn’t know it was a case of mistaken identity, and his starlet catching the matador’s hat. Oh, Paul, you would have thought it was so funny. I am feeling alone. I hope you are too. Will you come to Madrid? Will you wire me at the Palace Hotel?. Will you please? Camino will be at the Plaza de Toros there. I hate seeing joy all around me. Is that all right? Do you see me at all in your mind these days? I believe you do. You knew I was here, I’ll bet. (Yes, the room in Pamplona where I sleep has shutters at the foot of the bed and a pottery crucifix with a chalk-white Jesus you can see in in the mirror from any point on the bed; and, yes, I swam at the waterfall in the modest blue bathing suit. And yes, what’s been said between us rings in my ears, and yes, I borrowed a guitar from a man in Las Pocholas at four in the morning and sang “La Paloma.”) And yes, you’re right, it’s a beautiful song. And Paul, if I don’t have you soon, in Madrid, with me in the places we’ve loved, I’m going to be worse off even than I am now.

  Christopher, standing in the noisy foyer of the post office, read Cathy’s letter and read it again. It was the twelfth of July. He sent her a wire:

  JOINING YOU MADRID JULY NINETEENTH MEANWHILE I DO SEE YOU BETTER EVEN THAN YOU IMAGINE AND SOMETIMES HEAR THE SONGS CATHY DON’T SPEND ANY REAL MONEY

  Because they had made it into a code, he couldn’t use the word “love” in a telegram.

  2

  Barney Wolkowicz met Christopher at Tempelhof Airport, outside the customs barrier. Wolkowicz’s presence was a calculated insult. Christopher walked by him as if he were invisible and went into the men’s room. In a moment, Wolkowicz followed him. They stood side by side at the urinals, and waited for the cleaning woman to finish mopping and leave the room. Christopher and Wolkowicz had met first in East Africa, and when Wolkowicz spoke, he spoke in Swahili.

  “Is this language secure enough for you?” he asked.

  “You’re good at languages, Barney,” Christopher replied, in the same tongue. “It’s a pity you like to let the chickens out of the hen house.”

  “Nataka kujua mahali utakapokuwapo,” Wolkowicz said: I want to know where you are. “Door to door, minute by minute,” he added in English.

  Wolkowicz cared nothing about the security of covert action operations, and he lost no opportunity to show his contempt for them. He operated in Berlin, gathering information, under official cover; he was in daily contact with the police and the German security agencies. Meeting Christopher openly at the airport, where security operatives–eyes and cameras–were constantly on the watch, was as good as identifying him, in a liaison meeting, as an agent of U.S. intelligence. Wolkowicz was giving Christopher something–access to one of his agents. Exposing Christopher to embarrassment, if not to risk, was his way of exacting payment.

  “Niende sasa?” Christopher asked–shall I go now? Wolkowicz began to speak, but Christopher cut in, speaking in English. “Or shall I take out your dentures and throw them in the urinal?”

  Wolkowicz showed his porcelain teeth. They were a sore point with him; a torturer had taken his natural teeth during the last war after he had parachuted into Burma, into the middle of a Japanese patrol.

  “Wait inside till you see me go by in a blue Mercedes with local plates, last two numbers 56, then take a cab,” Wolkowicz said. “I’ll stay ahead of the cab. Get off at Kempinsky’s Hotel. Walk around the block and I’ll pick you up in front of the hotel when you reappear. If all’s well, transfer your briefcase from your left hand to your right.”

  He walked out of the room. Christopher lingered, washed his hands and face. He left a mark in the saucer for the old woman. Wolkowicz, he saw, had tipped her ten pfennigs.

  In the safe house, an actual house in Spandau rather than an apartment, Wolkowicz drank beer from a bottle and watched while a technician disguised Christopher. The technician fitted a dark wig, salted with gray hair, over his head, and affixed matching eyebrows with spirit gum. Christopher refused a beard. The technician stepped back like a painter observing a brushstroke, and changed one pair of windowpane eyeglasses for another, tinted yellow. “Your eyes are easy to remember, we’ll just make it a little harder,” he said. “And your face is too lean; we can take care of that.” He hooked a finger in the corner of Christopher’s mouth, slipped a thin sponge between his teeth and the inside of his cheek, took it back out, trimmed it with his scissors. “I think a little pancake, don’t you, Barney?” he said. “And if we shadow those eyes, they won’t look so blue.”

  Christopher said, “I think we’ve gone far enough.”

  “The sponges change his voice, they always do,” the technician said. “He’ll be speaking German. Will the asset be able to tell he’s a foreigner?”

  “No,” Wolkowicz said.

  “Then he ought to have German clothes instead of that stuff he has on. It has Brooks Brothers written all over it.”

  “Too late. The fellow will be here in twenty minutes.”

  “Then I’d better go,” the technician said. He walked around Christopher slowly, shining a bright lamp on his head. “You’ll do,” he said. “Just give the equipment back to Barney–and, oh, don’t drink anything with those sponges in your cheeks. It makes you squirt when you talk. We almost drowned an asset once, spoiled the whole effect.”

  Wolkowicz let the technician out. When he came back and spoke to Christopher his voice was friendly; the disguise, Christopher supposed, had something to do with it.

  “Now this asset is not the brightest kid in the world,” Wolkowicz said, “so don’t go too fast with him, and for Christ’s sake don’t let him get the idea that he’s in on anything important. He’s always after more money and I don’t want him bringing you up as a justification. His name is Wolfram. I’ll introduce you and leave. Actually I’ll be down-cellar on the earphones. We can’t spare a tech for something like this. If you want me up here, say that you have a nephew in Munich.”

  “Why would I want you up here?”

  “Wolfram can be a little odd. He carries a gun, and I know you don’t believe in violence.”

  “You think he’s going to stick me up, Barney?”

  “Not for money. He may want your wig.”

  3

  Wolfram, though he could not have been older than twenty-five, was totally bald. When he removed his Tyrolean hat, after coming in out of the July sun, his skull shone with sweat. He shook hands with Christopher, then mopped his head with a handkerchief already damp from earlier use. The blinds were drawn in the room where he and Christopher sat in facing chairs; Wolkowicz, before he left, put two bottles of cold beer on the table between them. He gave Christopher a winking smile. The straps of Wolkowicz’s shoulder holster were clearly visible under his summer jacket. He always went armed; the fact that this was obvious was, like having a disguise detected, one of the signs that Wolkowicz flashed to his agents that they were dealing with a real spy.

  Christopher let Wolfram quench his thirst before he began to speak to him. The young German drank off most of his bottle of beer in one long pull. Wolkowicz had provided no glasses.

  “Did you walk here in this heat?” Christopher asked.

  “Almost a kilometer, from the S-Bahn station at Spandau-West. I was a little behind time, so I ran part of the way.”

  “Surely that’s not good security, to run in the streets?”

  “Better than being late for a meeting with Krupp.”

  “Krupp?”

  Wolfram pointed a thumb over his shoulder and spoke the name by which he knew Wolkowicz. “We call him Krupp because he loves his cannons so.”

  The German settled back in his chair, his ankle thrown over his knee. He eyed Christopher’s untouched bottle of beer; he had swallowed his own so quickly that his scalp was sweating again, and he wiped away the moisture with his sleeve. His shirt, under his woolen jacket, was soaked and transparent. Christopher uncapped the second bottle and gave
it to Wolfram; the faint skunklike aroma of German beer escaped from the neck of the bottle.

  Christopher spread a half-dozen glossy photographs on the table under the strong light that the makeup technician had used. These were pictures of European men, some of them studio portraits, others candid shots of unwitting subjects. Wolfram leaned forward and moved aside with a stiff forefinger all but two photographs. One was a passport photo of Horst Bülow; the other showed Bülow in an overcoat and hat, crossing a Berlin street with a bombed wall in the background.

  “I recognize this man,” Wolfram said. “None of the others.”

  “Tell me what you remember about him.”

  Wolfram gave Christopher a complete physical description, an inventory of Bülow’s mannerisms, the brand of cigarettes he smoked, his drinking habits, a list of restaurants he frequented in West Berlin. “He lived in East Berlin, in Christburger strasse,” Wolfram said; he gave a music-hall smirk. “That street is near some hospitals. The subject used to go out in the evenings and in the mornings and watch the nurses come and go when the work shifts changed. He liked to look at nurses, but he never approached one.”

  “Lived in the Christburger strasse? Past tense? Has he moved?”

  “I don’t know. I was assigned to surveille him for several weeks last winter, then I was put onto something else. I don’t ask what I don’t need to know.”

  “What were the exact dates you were on him, please?”