Secret Lovers

by Charles McCarry

  “Because I’m bad and mad, too? I love you, and I’m trying to ruin you.”

  “Cathy, it’s not me you’re doing this to, it’s my work. You think you can end my other life if you make a catastrophe of our life.”

  “But it won’t work?”

  “No. The other is too strong, Cathy.”

  “What if I stop now?”

  She sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed with her hair capturing most of the light in the darkened room and a wreath of painted flowers behind her on the polished wood of the door; Christopher was always seeing her framed like a girl in a painting, enclosed by a window or by a space between trees or fountains.

  “Cathy, you can’t stop,” he said.

  He kept speaking her name with every sentence, as if the sound of it would soften the rest of what he was saying. Cathy said she would stop. She was going to close her place in the Piazza Oratorio, sell the other clothes. She had used fictitious names with all of her lovers except Moroni: she could escape from them.

  “When you come back from the Far East, it’s only two weeks from now, all the traces of the others will be gone,” she said. “I have a plan.”

  5

  In Indochina, while he waited for agents, Christopher worked on the poem for Cathy.

  When he returned to Rome he found a bottle of wine cooling in an ice bucket. Cathy had left it on the low table where the cat liked to sleep, and both Siamese were curled up beside it. At the sight of Christopher, the animal that did not know him leaped down and ran into hiding.

  There was a note from Cathy, two lines saying that she had one last errand to run. “The Plan is working perfectly,” she wrote. “The cure is complete.”

  Christopher waited. He had flown from Saigon, nearly twenty-four hours in airplanes and airports. All that he had heard and done in the Orient was in his mind, intermixed with lines from Cathy’s poem. He began to write his report so that it would not prevent him from listening to Cathy when she came home.

  The phone rang, and when he lifted it he did not recognize the voice at the other end. It was Cathy; her words were distorted and she was taking great sobbing breaths. Finally a male voice came on the line; it was the waiter in the coffee shop on the Piazza Oratorio. He told Christopher to come quickly.

  Christopher found Cathy leaning against the peeled wall of a building with a group of chattering Italians around her. Her face was bloody and swollen. She cradled her own body, half-crouching when she moved with her arms wrapped around it, as if her pain was an injured child.

  “I think something’s pieroed inside me,” she said. When she spoke, blood ran from the wounds inside her mouth. Her heavy hair was stained with blood and she had vomited on her clothes. Christopher carried her to the car and put her in and started for the hospital.

  “Paul,” she said in her blurred voice, “put up the top.”

  Christopher took her hand and kept driving, very fast, through the streets of Rome–over the Tiber, through Saint Peter’s Square, up the steep narrow road on the Janiculum, toward the international hospital.

  “Put up the top,” Cathy said, “put up the top. Paul, put up the top.”

  At the door of the hospital he lifted her out of the car and she wakened, he saw intelligence come back into her eyes for an instant. She put a stained finger on his lips. She wanted him to kiss her He did so, longing for her; hours later, when he looked in a mirror, he saw the bloodstains she had left on his mouth.

  Cathy’s teeth had been broken, and bones in her face. Her spleen had been ruptured. Because she was a foreigner, the police did not investigate. Christopher sat with her, sleeping in her room for several nights, until she was able to let him leave without crying from fear. Mostly while she was still drugged, she told him what had happened.

  Cathy had taken almost everything from the apartment in the Piazza Oratorio. She had gone back, on the day that Christopher returned, to give away her clothes; Franco Moroni had a German girl who wanted them. When she arrived she found Moroni in the apartment with a dozen of his friends, including three or four foreign girls. They were seated in a circle, like a theater in the round, in the room where the huge photographs of Cathy were hung. They were drinking spumante.

  When Cathy entered, one of the girls slipped behind her and locked the door. Then Moroni, removing his jacket and shirt, beat Cathy with his fists while the other women watched and sipped their wine. She saw her own blood flying, little clouds of red droplets, and she realized why Moroni had stripped to the waist: he didn’t want to spoil his clothes. At the end, he knelt beside Cathy where she lay on the floor, ran a finger into the blood on her face and, making certain that she was watching, licked his finger. Then he pushed her out the door. Through her ringing pain she heard him, inside, smashing the objects in the apartment.

  Christopher could not find Moroni. He had the German girl’s name from Wilson. He called her and asked her to meet him in Cathy’s flat. Moroni had ripped the photographs from the wall and they hung in tatters. The furniture was overturned, the glasses smashed, Cathy’s clothes torn and dirtied.

  “Were you among the spectators?” Christopher asked.

  The German girl stood with her hand on the doorknob, trembling.

  “No. I would have warned her. I didn’t know. Franco brought some Swedish girls.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Gone. I don’t know where.”

  The girl, a stranger to Christopher, shrank against the door. He realized that he had lost control of his face and he tried to smile at her. She saw the effort he was making, and spoke.

  “There’s a man Franco sees, a Russian,” she said. “He went to see him afterward, and he came back terrified. Franco just packed a bag and left in the car. He’d had a lot of dope and he was talking to himself. He kept saying your name. He was sobbing from fear. I don’t know what the Russian told him about you.”

  Christopher knew.

  6

  At the airport, they stood together by the glass wall above the tarmac and looked down at Cathy’s plane. She had made no effort to cover her injuries. Her face was still swollen and her eyes were distorted by the pull of the discolored flesh. She was still bandaged from the surgery to remove her spleen and she moved apprehensively. She told Christopher she had no more pain. “But I know it’s still in my body somewhere,” Cathy said, “waiting to come out again.”

  Her mother would meet her in New York. Cathy had spoken to her on the phone about an automobile accident. She had said nothing, for the time being, about the divorce.

  “I have this for you,” Christopher said.

  He gave her the poem. She leaned against the wall in the thin light–it was a morning in early winter and it was raining–and read the handwritten sheets. As she read, grace came back into her body, and she stood for a while in her old dancer’s attitude. She did not cry.

  “That’s the only copy,” Christopher said.

  “I won’t lose it.”

  Her flight was called. Christopher carried her handbags down the ramp for her. Their ears were filled with the shriek of taxiing jets. They stood under an umbrella at the foot of the gangway with other people crowding by. Christopher put his arms around her to shield her from their jostling. Cathy’s lips could not bear the pressure of a kiss. Their faces were very close together.

  “There’s this, Paul,” Cathy said. “We’ve loved each other as no one will ever love either of us again.”

  Her eyes were dry. Christopher wept.

  “How much is that in real money?” he asked.

 

 

 
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