“I can’t speak for Otto,” she said, “but what I thought was this: Kiril Kamensky, with this novel, had done his one last great thing. Why shouldn’t Otto do his? As young men they were side by side, genius and genius. Let them end in the same way.”
When Kamensky’s letter came in the Christmas mail, Rothchild had trembled with excitement. He had recognized the handwriting on the envelope as one would know the face of a friend seen by chance after many years–changed but still the same. Only days before, Rothchild had spoken to his medical specialists. They had told him that his blood pressure had begun to destroy his kidneys, that it could explode blood vessels in his brain, that it would kill him. They offered him a reprieve: the surgery in Zurich.
Maria said, “The chief doctor told me this, I have the words by heart: “The body of Monsieur Rothchild, if he consents to the surgery, will be like a sleeping foot. His brain will be salvaged, he can live a life of the intellect, if not of the senses. Madame, at his age what do the senses matter?’”
Rothchild went out of the specialist’s cabinet ready to choose death. For days afterward, Maria watched Rothchild pass through spasms of drunkenness, sexual passion, eating; he commanded Maria to telephone to restaurants and order veal Orloff, tournedos Rossini, Chartreuse de perdreaux, sweetbreads á la financiére au vol-au-vent–the glutton’s dishes he had eaten at his father’s table in his vanished Russia. To Maria he spoke only Russian. All his life Rothchild had lived in episodes, dwelling for a while in the intellect so as to be able to gratify the senses; he had always believed that his exceptional brain made exceptional pleasure possible. “What I’m offered,” he told Maria, “is a choice between two kinds of death, one where I will perceive light and one where I will not.”
Kamensky’s letter, the image of Kamensky’s novel, hidden like an infant cancer in the hated body of Soviet Russia, sending out signals to summon the blood supply that would make its growth possible, brought Rothchild back to life again. He would arrange the needed transfusion. “This is too simple a way to say this,” Maria said, “but Otto stopped seeing his surgery as the disconnection of his appetites. He began to see it–and how could anyone be more professional than this?–he began to see it as cover” Rothchild saw a way to execute a brilliant operation, the last of his career, while he lay unconscious in a hospital. The elegance of it, the humor, were irresistible.
Rothchild had Maria arrange a date for his surgery. He thought no more about the invasion of his body. His mind was fully engaged in planning the operation that would bring Kamensky’s book out of Russia, publish it in the West, put a seal on fame for both of them, overturn the security of the Soviet apparatus and the American service at the same time.
“For Kamensky,” Maria said, “Otto wanted just what he’s told you he wanted–his true place among the great writers. What I wanted for Otto, what I know he wanted for himself, was his own true place. After all he’s done, David, after all he’s meant to the world, Otto may lie in an unmarked grave. But some of us, the ones Otto cares about, ought to know where it is. That’s not so much to desire.”
Rothchild told Patchen about Kamensky’s letter. Patchen agreed to have the manuscript brought out. Rothchild suggested having it received in East Germany by an American asset; Maria, knowing the files, knowing that Patchen would trust no one but Christopher to handle the courier, knew that no agent except Bülow could possibly be used.
“We never spoke Bülow’s name to David,” Maria said. “Otto knew he’d give the job to Paul; I knew Paul had no one except Horst Bülow who could do the job.”
Otto and Maria, on the day before Epiphany, took the train to Zurich. Christopher imagined them: rising early, taking a taxi to the Gare de Lyon and then the express to Switzerland, Otto buying newspapers and magazines even as the train began to move out of the station, running after it with Maria pulling his hand, making incessant witticisms, eating too little and drinking too much, refusing to look out the window of the train as it passed through France because even the loveliest country in Europe was not worth looking at; he had not seen beauty, except in paintings, since he left Russia.
“David was resisting us, and we knew why,” Maria said. “Paul was Otto’s case officer, and David knew what Paul would say–wait, as Kamensky had asked, wait for Kamensky to die; keep him safe. Otto doesn’t like scruples. Paul is too American for him. David is a little better–he’s a scrupulous man who does unscrupulous things for practical reasons. He’s under the spell of his ideals–America is the good guy, so anything goes as long as America wins. Paul hates ideals, he believes that nothing matters except keeping absolute faith with other human beings, each as an individual, one at a time. That’s Paul’s strength, but Otto is right–one day he’ll die of it.”
Maria was sitting on the sofa now, with her legs curled beneath her skirt, and she picked up Christopher’s hand and patted it, as though her touch was necessary to take the sting from her words.
“Otto saw that we had to have a more powerful argument than the ones Paul would make,” Maria said. “We knew that if Bülow was killed before Paul’s eyes, even he would have to consider the possibility that the Russians had done the murder. I told Otto Paul would find out the truth in the end. He knew I was right. All Otto wanted was a few weeks of grace, so that we could do what had to be done, stay ahead of Paul if only by a step, run the operation right. It took cold hearts to do what had to be done. But we had to do it. Kiril Kamensky, alive, was an obscure ex-convict, living in a dacha, fornicating with a young girl. Dead, he was a martyr–and we could make him into an immortal.”
Maria was still holding Christopher’s hand. “We had to find a way to block you out, Paul,” she said. “I’m sorry. I hated using you, using what’s so good in you, this passion you have for the idea of trust, your conscience. But friendship is friendship, and business is business.”
Maria would have stopped here; she had replied at great length to Patchen’s terse accusation. Christopher knew the Rothchilds; he knew that they had rehearsed this scene, divided their confession into segments. Maria wouldn’t lie, but she demanded evidence of her own guilt before she would confirm it. She watched her face in the looking glass; she squeezed Christopher’s hand. Her palm was damp, her fingers twisted in Christopher’s, but these were her only involuntary reactions.
“Maria,” Christopher said. ‘The transfer from Otto’s numbered account to the Berliner Bank. The passports you got from the Abwehr forger in Zurich. Schaefer.”
Rothchild roused. “All that was my work,” he said. “The bank transfer wasn’t much of a risk. You surprise me, Paul. Nothing is secure. That’s the old, best rule.”
In Zurich, Rothchild went openly from the train to the bank and transferred the funds for Bülow to Berlin.
“Maria was taking all the chances,” Rothchild said. “I thought I might die in the clinic; after all, they were opening me up from pubis to jawbone. I wanted to leave a trace of evidence, not enough to be easily discovered, but enough to make it possible for you to think I’d done it all, for Maria to go away from this clean.”
While Rothchild was prepared for surgery, Maria picked up the false passports: one for Maria, one for Bülow. She sat in the clinic during the surgery. Rothchild was unconscious. (“I was riding on bülows of morphia,” Rothchild said, “I thought I saw Maria lean over me, kiss me, then go; it may have been a delusion. I was hallucinating. I thought they had disemboweled me, that the tubes in my arms and legs were electrical, that I had been made into a machine; I smelled ozone as if my breath were electrically charged. Sometimes I still smell it.”)
While Rothchild lay in the clinic, Maria flew to Berlin. She took an early flight, leaving Zurich just after dawn; she had lunch on the Kurfürstendamm, too much vinegar on the beef, half-cooked potatoes, pale bitter beer. She took the S-Bahn to East Berlin and mailed Otto’s frightening letter to Horst Bülow, typed on a German machine in perfect German. It mentioned names, a long neat list of them, men and
women Bülow had sent to their deaths in France, names taken from records that Bülow had been promised would be destroyed. The letter told Bülow to await another contact.
Maria had to do the whole job in a single day. She had to be back at Rothchild’s bedside when he regained consciousness, she had told the doctor she was going to sleep while her husband did not need her. She was, in fact, exhausted when she reached the Schaefer Baths. “It wasn’t a bad place to rest,” Maria said. “I ached. The steam took some of the kinks out, and I slept for a while, waiting for Schaefer to come to work before the nighttime crowd. You can just stretch out on a bench, like a derelict.”
There was no difficulty in arranging for the murder of Horst Bülow. Maria showed Schaefer a series of 35 mm contact prints, photographs of documents that could send Schaefer to prison for life; he read them with a magnifying glass. He spoke Rothchild’s wartime cover name, Jaguar. Schaefer ran his eye over Maria’s body, cupped his hands in the empty air as if he were holding her breasts. “I saw he meant it as a compliment to Otto, that Otto was still alive and had a woman as young as I, but God, it was disgusting,” Maria said.
Schaefer, after he recovered from the shock of blackmail, was amused. Maria had never arranged for the death of another person before that night with Schaefer. “When we first began talking about it, never uttering the specific words–murder, killing, what do you say? I wasn’t trained by the outfit for this work–at first, I was a little sick. I knew Bülow from the files. It was odd, Paul, like going through the looking glass into the files and becoming one of the assets. Killing a paper man. The reality he had for me was the reality Gunga Din had for me when I was a kid, or Nigger Jim. I had no clothes on. This flabby German was staring at my breasts and belly. How could it be real?”
Christopher looked down at their joined hands, lying on the brocade of the sofa cushion. “It was real enough for Horst,” he said, “when he signaled your friends in that black Opel, and they broke him in two. You should have seen the blood running in the rainwater.”
Maria moved, tried to take her hand away. Christopher tightened his grip on her slippery palm. A pulse was beating in her forehead, her skin showed pink through her tan, her breathing had quickened. Patchen watched these signs of her agitation as if they were needles tracing jagged peaks on the tapes of a polygraph.
Rothchild spoke. “Bülow was supposed to think that the black Opel contained friends,” he said. “Schaefer’s fellows showed him the car in Schiller Park–you know about that, I suppose–and a couple of other times. They wanted him to recognize it. Otherwise he might have jumped out of the way.”
3
Maria spoke Russian to Bülow, she met him at eighteen minutes after the hour, she made him use elaborate wasteful tradecraft, she controlled every movement, every code phrase. She used Christopher’s name, she described Christopher’s tradecraft, she named five men Horst had spotted and the Americans had recruited. He showed terror, then relief, then servility.
“Why the KGB tradecraft?” Patchen asked.
“We knew he’d recognize it. Otto hoped he might tell Paul the Russians were trying to double him,” Maria said. “That would have reinforced the purpose of the op–made it seem certain that the opposition had killed him, that the smuggling of the manuscript was blown, that we couldn’t protect Kamensky.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t tell me,” Christopher said.
“So was Otto–he thought he’d run to you with it. Maybe if I’d been a man he would have been scared enough to tell you. What he did do, Paul, was ask for money. He thought we ought to snatch you, pump you out. He was willing to deliver you for ten thousand pounds. He insisted on English money.” Maria grinned. “You’d be flattered at the value he put on you; he said he could tell from your manners that you were at least a colonel; I guess that’s the highest rank Horst could imagine. I told him you were more than that, I couldn’t resist. Then the price is fifteen thousand, Horst said.”
Rothchild laughed, a string of gasps like a tubercular cough. “Few men were such obvious fools as Horst,” he said. “He had a face like a bad actor’s seen in an old nickelodeon–put a coin in his slot, put your eye to the window, and watch greed and fear and lust flip over like dirty cartoons.”
Christopher said, “Is that how you felt about him when you knew him in Berlin in the twenties? Is that why you compromised him by introducing him to the local Communists in the Jockey Restaurant?”
Maria stirred; she picked up Christopher’s untouched glass and drank from it. Rothchild showed nothing.
“This business, Paul, is largely a matter of storing up fools for future use,” he said. “You, of all people, ought to know that.”
“Were you storing him up in Paris, Otto? Did you give him Solange in ‘44? Did you arrange for him to double her, give him the illusion that he was penetrating your network?”
Astonishment flickered in Rothchild’s face. Then it vanished and something like anger came into his eyes. These facts from his past awakened his old mannerisms: Christopher might have been implanting nerves to replace the ones the surgeons had cut in Zurich. Rothchild had stopped closing his eyes between sentences; he spoke without rest and in a steady voice.
“You don’t imagine,” he said, “that Horst Bülow could have done it on his own, do you?”
“No more than you and Maria could have killed Kamensky on your own,” Christopher said.
Neither of them answered. They were going to go no further. Patchen had been sitting, as motionless as an animal, while the other three talked. Now he rose to his feet; he seemed taller than usual in the unlighted room and his spectacles, reflecting the final red sunlight of the day, were bright disks on his shadowed face.
“Kiril Kamensky killed himself,” Maria said. “David told us so.”
Patchen turned on a lamp. He looked at Otto’s Klee, the crude technique, the rudimentary colors.
“True,” Patchen said. “But you killed Kalmyk, Maria, and all the other couriers, and their footprints led the KGB right to Kamensky’s doorstep.”
“I?” She opened her mouth to laugh, then caught the sound before it emerged. There was enough light now to see into Christopher’s eyes.
“No one but you knew Kalmyk’s name, Maria,” Christopher said. “Remember.”
Maria did. With tightened lips, shaking her head, she recalled the scene. “Right here,” she said, “in this room, after you’d knelt at Otto’s feet, Paul, with that story about putting a pen name to Kamensky’s work.” Christopher had given her Kalmyk’s name, casually, buried in a meaningless sentence, as if she already knew it. Patchen had repeated it. Now she saw the trap, after it had closed.
“Oh, Paul,” she said, “you bastard!”
She looked to Rothchild for permission. He shrugged. Maria was reporting now, in an even tone, in clear sentences. She had taken Christopher’s bait, again, when they met by the Madeleine. She had stolen the Russian proofs after he told her where they were. She had taken them to Geneva on the night train, mailed them to Munich, come back to Paris. “Even then, you knew everything,” she said. “I knew you must, there was no expression in your eyes, Paul.”
“And while you were in Geneva, you called the KGB resident with Kalmyk’s name,” Patchen said. “You knew the Russian from the files.”
“You can’t know that. There was no surveillance on me.”
“There was surveillance on Cerutti, surveillance on everyone else who might have done it. We know they didn’t do it. Therefore, you did.”
Maria lit a Gauloise and put it out. The smoke brought water to her eyes.
“Kalmyk’s name, giving it to me that way,” she said. “I didn’t see what you were doing, Paul. It was so simple a trick–it was almost an insult to Otto and me. You looked so tired, you were so upset, I’d seen how you mourned Bülow when I knew he would have sold you. I imagined, even Otto imagined, that you really wanted to save Kiril Kamensky. You were beside yourself.”
“P
aul is never beside himself,” Rothchild said. “Isn’t that true, David?”
Patchen, before he answered, moved so that he could see all of them at the same time–Christopher and Maria and himself in the mirror, Rothchild unreflected.
“Very nearly true,” he said. “But on that occasion, when he gave Kalmyk’s name to Maria, he realized what you and she would do with it. He’d made it imperative that you kill him, or lose everything. Paul, the death-hater, was killing Kalmyk and Kamensky and, as it turned out, three others. It was quite a price, but he wanted full value–to know the truth.”
“Well,” Rothchild said, “now he knows.”
4
Maria turned on more lamps. The rich colors of the room, returning with the light, revived her; she went to the window and looked down into the street. “Wilson-Watson-Wharton’s big black Citroen is parked below,” she said. “When will we see him again?”
“When Paul and I leave,” Patchen said. “He’ll have some things for you to sign.”
“The transcript of this conversation?” Maria touched Patchen’s briefcase with her foot; she was trained, she knew that it contained a transmitter, that Wilson’s technician was minding a tape recorder in the Citroen.
“That, and an insurance policy.”
Maria frowned, looked to Rothchild for help.
“Confessions to murder,” Rothchild said. “They’d want that. Blackmail insurance. You’re an outsider now, Maria.” He held out a hand for her, but she did not take it. “What love will do to us,” Rothchild said.
Secret Lovers Page 30
