Secret Lovers

by Charles McCarry

  “I’m not telling you anything you don’t know,” Wilson said abruptly. “There are only two ways to go. We talk to everyone at our end. Probably that will produce nothing. You, for example, don’t seem to make mistakes.”

  “What about the other end?”

  “Well, that’s a little trickier. Maybe we can put the daisy chain together–find out who carried the package and where to. Then do name checks on everyone. We can watch the fellow your man talked to on the train and see what happens to him.”

  “What’s your guess?”

  Wilson looked steadily into the rearview mirror. A car in the street behind them made a right turn. Wilson, too, turned right and arrived at the intersection of the next parallel street in time to watch the other automobile park in the driveway of a house. A woman wearing a belted coat got out of the car and walked quickly into the house. Wilson grunted and drove on.

  “Guessing is a waste of time. We’ll see. That chain of couriers may go off like a string of firecrackers. If so, that’s the end of your friend the scribbler at the other end. It would be logical to expect that.”

  “Not so logical. If they make a martyr of him, that would be good from our point of view. They’d want to avoid unfavorable propaganda.”

  “They could leave him alone and still blow up all the post offices. They wouldn’t want all those guys hanging around waiting for the next masterpiece to come into the pipeline.”

  “Yes, they could do that.”

  “Let’s see if they do. We’ll look for blood on the snow.”

  Wilson pointed at the sky to the west. A silver airplane dropped into a bank of ground fog on the approach to the airport. They heard its engines fade, then resume power. The same plane rose out of the fog and made a steep climbing turn. “I’ve been watching them do that for the last five miles,” Wilson said. “You may not get out on the early flight.”

  “I can have breakfast and read the paper.”

  “Don’t talk about this to the fellow who had the operation,” Wilson said. “I want to make my own contact with him.”

  “All right.”

  “We go back to the war, the old days. He and I knew each other. We were worlds apart then, of course.”

  “He hasn’t changed, except for his illness.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Wilson said.

  In the airport parking lot, Wilson pulled the car into a space in a long rank of empty vehicles. He turned in the seat, using the steering wheel to help shift his bulky body in the small passenger compartment. He shook hands. The gesture surprised Christopher.

  “There’s one thing,” Wilson said. “I know how you are, because I’ve read everything we have on you. You have this reputation for never giving up, for going after things. Don’t do it this time.”

  “Why?”

  Wilson drummed a parade rhythm on the steering wheel. “Just don’t go looking for them. just leave it alone,” he said. “You’re out in the open, like your friend was when he was waiting for the streetcar. Somebody knew about him, somebody knew where he’d be. That’s all it takes.”

  Wilson turned his head and looked into Christopher’s eyes for the first time. The overheated passenger compartment of the BMW smelled, as the room on the Army base had smelled, of bay rum, Brylcreem, tuna sandwiches, American coffee, American cigarettes. Christopher wondered if he smelled, to Wilson, like a member of another race. Wilson winked at him.

  FOUR

  1

  Otto Rothchild refused the costume and the manners of the invalid. He wore a gray tweed jacket and an open shirt with a silk scarf at his neck. Maria had crossed his right leg over his left, and the perfect crease in his flannel trousers had been arranged so that four inches of dark blue stocking showed between the cuff and the top of his suède shoes. He sat in a high-backed chair, with his head pressed against the upholstery and his hands clasped. Before the surgeon had severed his nerves, Rothchild had trembled in moments of excitement. Afterward, his body lost the power of involuntary movement. He sat very still, moving his lips only. The loss of his gestures was very strange; the Rothchild who confronted Christopher was like an impersonator who had not got things quite right: the telling characteristics were missing. Still, Christopher thought, the man had not changed in any important way. He had lost energy, not intelligence. The surgery had given him back the use of his mind; he could control his thoughts again, now that the blood no longer pumped itself without warning into his brain. From his chair, alert and wary, he watched Christopher.

  Christopher said, “Have you had a chance to read Kamensky’s book?”

  “Some of it,” Otto Rothchild replied. “It’s very long. Kamensky has tried to put fifty years of Russia, everything about it and everything about himself, into one novel. No one will ever be able to comprehend it all.”

  “What do you think?”

  Rothchild began to speak. Midway through a sentence his throat dried; a healthy man would have cleared it or coughed. Rothchild went on speaking, his lips moving silently as bits of his sentences disappeared.

  “ … work of genius,” he said. “Of course, Kamensky has always had it in him, no Russian of my generation had such gifts. … curious old-fashioned quality to it, not just the language but the attitudes. Paul, he writes like Tolstoy or like Lawrence in English … clumsy language, a kind of invincible stupidity so that everything they observe, though it’s worn and familiar to a normal man, is an incredible surprise to them. They make us see life through the eyes of a fool, so we see it as it really is. Only the greatest writers have that gift.”

  Rothchild closed his eyes; a smile came onto his face. Maria looked at him without anxiety.

  “Otto has read almost all of it,” she said. “It’s terribly exciting for him. He reads himself unconscious, day after day.”

  “Unconscious?”

  “Yes. When he does too much, has too much excitement, he just drops off. He’s done it now. It was scary at first, but I’ve learned he’ll come out of it and go right on with what he was doing.”

  “Isn’t it bad for him, the excitement?”

  “Being turned into a wreck by that operation was bad for him. He’s happy again. I turn the pages for him. He reads like the wind. ‘Turn, Maria, turn!’ he says. His eyes gallop down the page. It’s as if he expects to find something; it’s like a chase.”

  Christopher glanced at Rothchild’s figure, collapsed in the chair, the smile still on his lips.

  “What do you think Otto’s looking for in Kamensky’s book?” he asked.

  “Himself,” Maria said. “What else could it be?”

  2

  “The amazing thing is,” Maria said, “Otto’s mind is better than it’s ever been. He can only stay conscious for ten minutes or so, if he’s working with his brain, but he’s so lucid in those periods that it’s practically supernatural. He’s been relieved of his anger. To that extent, the operation accomplished what the doctors promised.”

  Rothchild opened his eyes. “This novel,” he said, “if we handle it correctly, will shake the world. It’s a matter of designing the right operation, Paul. You and David and I can do it. Headquarters must be kept out of it as much as possible. Those people are bulls in the china shop. They don’t understand the world. They don’t have to live with what is done.”

  “David is at Headquarters.”

  “Yes, but he has the power to put Headquarters’s trust in you and me.”

  Rothchild’s eyes moved from Christopher’s face to Maria’s. He tapped his thigh with the reading glasses he held in his hand. Maria poured Evian water into a crystal wineglass and held it to her husband’s lips. Rothchild made little noises as he drank. She masked his face with her body, but Christopher saw that she was holding a napkin under Rothchild’s chin, and wiping away the drops of water that ran from the corners of his mouth.

  “The first translation,” Rothchild said, “must not be into English. Do you agree?”

  Christopher said, “If we publ
ish.”

  Maria sat beside Christopher on the sofa. He felt her body stiffen as he spoke. She threw Rothchild a glance, but he ignored her.

  “If we publish?” Rothchild said. “We will publish.”

  “What are Kamensky’s wishes?”

  “Kamensky? What does Kamensky know? When he came back from Spain they locked him up for twenty-two years. Politically, he’s a deaf man. He always was.”

  “So are a lot of artists, Otto. But this is his book. It’s not ours.” Rothchild’s voice vanished and Maria gave him more water.

  “A book such as this is not anyone’s property,” Rothchild said. “It’s a work of art. Or will be. Now it is merely the seedbed of a work of art.”

  “Meaning what?”

  Rothchild moved, very slightly, inclining his body toward Christopher.

  “Kamensky has done his work, Paul. He’s covered a thousand pages with his handwriting. Wonderful work, all of the Russian horror is there. But to be completed, it must be read. Any novel is a collaboration between the writer and the public. The author is the camera, his work is the film. It must be developed in other human brains, over and over again. Only a fool would say we won’t publish.”

  “A fool,” Christopher said, “or someone who thought that we had a duty to protect Kamensky.”

  “Protect him?”

  “He’s still behind the Curtain. Otto, he’s only been out of prison for a year. He was in the camps from 1937.”

  Rothchild took a moment to compose himself. What right had Christopher, an American, to speak of the camps? Rothchild said, “Yes, and knowing the worst, having lived through it, he sent me his novel. Why do you think he did that?”

  “For safekeeping, as David understood it.”

  “Maybe that was what Kamensky told himself. Very possibly that’s what he told himself, if I remember Kamensky.”

  Rothchild’s voice was neutral; he was assessing Kamensky as an asset, not expressing contempt for a friend. He kept friendship and professional behavior in separate compartments.

  “What exactly did he tell you, in his letter?” Christopher asked.

  Rothchild closed his eyes. They sat in silence in the elegant room. Rothchild’s narrow brown shoe lay on the Kerman Ravar carpet. Books, written by his friends but unsigned, bound in leather, lined the shelves. “Men like you and me cannot keep photographs,” Rothchild had once told Christopher; “every one of these objects suggests a friend.” Behind him on the wall hung a sketch with which Picasso had paid the bill in a restaurant owned by one of Rothchild’s friends; the artist had scribbled the line of a cheek, an empty human eye, the movement of a gull, on the back of the bill. The column of addition on the front had begun to show through the drawing.

  Rothchild’s lips moved. “Kamensky asked me to put the book away until he dies,” he said.

  “You don’t think he meant it?”

  “I don’t know what he meant, Paul. I’d like to get a message to him.”

  “Saying what?”

  Rothchild smiled. His eyes were open, but they were looking into the past.

  “Saying ‘Choose fame,– he said.

  “And what would Kamensky reply?”

  Rothchild stirred.

  “Yes. That’s what Kamensky would say, Paul. Like Molly Bloom, he would whisper, ‘Yes, oh yes yes.’ When he was young, when I knew him better than anyone, he was a devourer of life. Yes was always his answer.”

  Maria watched anxiously as Rothchild’s body slumped in the chair. His head fell slightly to one side. She went to him, touched his forehead, lifted his leg from his other knee, placed both of his feet on the floor.

  “This time he’s asleep,” She said. “I’ll cover him. He may doze for hours.”

  Maria adjusted the blanket, tucking it around Rothchild’s lax frame, and removed the shoes from his bony feet.

  3

  “You’re right, Otto is not what he was,” Patchen said. “Since the surgery, I have the feeling that he’s in the spirit world and I’m talking to him on the telephone.”

  Christopher had met Patchen in a safe house a few blocks from the Embassy. One of the station’s secretaries lived in the apartment. Patchen had gone through each room like a cat, observing everything. On a stiff forefinger, he lifted the girl’s quilted dressing gown from a hook on the bathroom door, and looked without expression at the faint line of dirt on the collar. “No sex life, obviously,” he said.

  In the living room, Patchen opened a cabinet and removed a bottle of Scotch whisky. “Ours, I presume,” he said. He went into the kitchen. Christopher heard the sound of ice being broken out of the metal compartments of a freezer tray. Patchen returned with two glasses of Scotch.

  “Otto has given me a complete operational proposal,” he said. “It would work. Otto’s proposals always work. Or almost always.”

  “What does he tell you he wants?”

  “What he always wants. Humiliation for the opposition, secret satisfaction for us. Otto and you and I will create a world best seller, maybe even an immortal classic. And no one will know we did it. Another prank. The three of us littering after lights out.”

  “And Kamensky in his grave,” Christopher said.

  Patchen waved the sentence away. “That probably wouldn’t happen. Anyway, it’s not an operational consideration.”

  Christopher began to speak before Patchen finished; he had known what the words would be without hearing them. Patchen listened to Christopher with even less surprise.

  Christopher said, “It’s an important operational consideration. If the KGB kills Kamensky, or locks him up, we’d love it. You couldn’t buy the publicity that would create. He’d be a martyr.”

  “Yes. It would be nice to have world opinion on Kamensky’s side.”

  “Wouldn’t it be on his side anyway?”

  Patchen jerked his head, as if calling Christopher’s attention to the world outside the curtained windows of the safe house.

  “You haven’t read the book,” he said. “Kamensky eviscerates the Soviet, from the days of the old Bolsheviks down to Khrushchev. Every Communist saint is in the book, with blood on his chin. He has Beria shitting his pants from overeating at a feast with Stalin during the war when the Russian people were starving in the snow. It’s the most vicious thing I’ve ever read, and it rings with truth. Kamensky has impeccable credentials. He was one of the first members of the Party. He was there. And he’s a great writer. Everyone knows those things about him.”

  “I see.”

  “Yes. I wonder if we can get away with publishing it. I think the whole intellectual establishment in the West will come down on Kamensky like a ton of bricks.” Patchen wanted no interruptions. “Otto thinks the intellectuals can be handled,” he said. “He wants to find a way to make them read Kamensky’s book as something other than what it is. In fact, it is an act of treason to their illusions. If the book is published cold, they’ll want to hang Kamensky for it in the press. They’re just getting over their embarrassment about Hungary. They want to believe that Khrushchev is the man who’ll make the future work. The Mechanic-Messiah.”

  “What does Otto suggest?”

  “He’s still turning it over in his mind. Actually, he’s turning it over in his intestines. Otto has always been an instinctive operator. He feels results before they come about.” Patchen coughed into his handkerchief. “That’s why he likes to work with you,” he said. “You’re just like him.”

  Patchen held out his glass to Christopher. He would not have asked another subordinate to wait on him. Christopher had been his friend since the war; he knew what pain it cost Patchen to rise from a chair. The two of them lived for secrets, but this was the only personal secret between them. Christopher made Patchen’s drink; the whisky melted the tiny French ice cubes before Patchen could lift the glass to his lips.

  Patchen drank and laughed. “You know,” he said, “visiting Otto the other day, it crossed my mind what a trio we make. You’re his int
ellectual heir, he thinks. And he and I are heirs to the misfortunes of the flesh.”

  “I’m not quite Otto’s spiritual double.”

  “I know that. But Otto thinks he’s trained you up to be a paragon of operational skill and virtue. Otto, if you listen to him talk, is always betraying his belief that people are born on the day they meet him.”

  “Yes, and die when he sees the last of them.”

  Patchen lifted his glass again. When he spoke, he still had whisky in his throat, and the distortion made him sound as if he were speaking through a chuckle.

  “You’re describing the perfect secret agent,” he said.

  4

  Patchen had been in Paris for a week. He could stay away from Headquarters no longer. Rothchild had made him uncomfortable. “Otto’s ego has been reborn,” he told Christopher, “he’s full of ideas again. He takes it for granted we’ll do things his way.” Twice, Rothchild had asked to see Patchen alone. On both occasions he had discussed Christopher as if Christopher were the agent and Rothchild the case officer. “He’s using everything on me–the past, his illness, what he calls his friendship for Kamensky,” Patchen said. “He told me, ‘Paul is a wonderful boy, everyone admires him, but he’s timid about risking agents, and he doesn’t understand the Russian mind.’ “

  Rothchild had a legitimate claim on the operation: he had brought Kamensky and his manuscript into the house, after all, and he had conceived the plan. But he wanted it too much, and that was reason enough for Patchen to deny it to him.

  “You’ve got to run it,” Patchen told Christopher. “Otto can’t, he’s lost too much of what he used to be.” Patchen smiled affectionately. “He hasn’t lost so much, Paul, that he won’t try to take it away from you.”

  “Do you think we can stop him doing that?”

  “We can limit what he does without telling us. After all, he’s not Jack-Be-Nimble any longer.”