Secret Lovers

by Charles McCarry

  “He has Maria.”

  “Maria is under discipline.”

  “Still?”

  “She hasn’t lost the habit of trusting us.”

  “She’s Otto’s wife.”

  “She’s one of us. Whom do you trust more, Cathy or the outfit?”

  Rothchild, Christopher thought, does not understand the American mind. To Patchen he said, “In the Tuileries, the other day, you used the word ‘ghosts.’ “

  “Did I?”

  “Yes. You were talking about Otto’s assets. You realize that Kamensky is just that to Otto–a ghost? He thinks of him as having been dead for twenty years, or however long it’s been since he saw him last. He knows he’ll never see Kamensky again.”

  “That would be like Otto. Does Kamensky have some greater reality for you?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “But you expect to be seized by fellow feeling before all this is over?’

  “Maybe not before it’s over. Afterward. So will you, David.”

  Patchen put on his coat and hat and prepared to go. “There’s no point in planning just now,” he said. “I wish you’d think quietly about this, away from Otto, for a week or two. Read the Russian manuscript. I’ll get a translation to you as soon as I can, maybe in a couple of weeks if I can put a team on it. I’d like you to do the final polish.”

  “What about the planning?”

  “I won’t brief Paris or Rome just yet. I guess Berlin will know pretty much what’s going on, with that fellow Wilson plodding around.”‘

  “Yes. He doesn’t like covert action ops.”

  “I know. He doesn’t like FI ops, either. Whether it’s us or the stations., we cause him trouble.”

  “I wonder how he’ll get along with Otto.”

  Patchen hesitated. “So do I,” he said. “He discovered something in the file. Otto, in all these years, has never been fluttered.” “That’s impossible.”

  “I would have thought so, but it’s true. Otto has always been a contract agent, it seems, and .regulations don’t require the box for that category of employee unless it’s requested for security reasons. I suppose no one ever wanted to offend Otto. So he escaped the ordeal.”

  “That must bother Security.”

  “That’s a mild way to describe it,” Patchen said. “Otto was born a Russian, he spent his whole youth fooling around with every leftist cause in Europe, he drank schnapps in Berlin with members of the Red Orchestra.”

  “What are they going to do?”

  “Flutter Otto. How can we possibly know if he’s told us the truth about anything if we haven’t buckled a lie detector on him and asked him whether he’s ever had a blow job or taken money from the opposition?”

  “You’ll approve that?”

  Patchen shrugged. “Security is a law unto itself. What would I say? That Otto is a dying man? They’d reply that in that case they’d better hurry.”

  5

  Maria Rothchild was waiting in the open door of the apartment when Christopher reached the top of the stairs. She wore a white pleated skirt; she had the smooth legs of a tennis player, still faintly sunburnt even in winter. Christopher did not think of her as a member of the opposite sex. They had known one another always as fellow professionals. What they had in common was their work, and a way of thinking that grew out of their work. When Maria had first come to Europe and begun to work with Christopher, the wife of a station officer had tried to make a match of them. She had invited them both for a weekend at a rented country house, and Christopher remembered how startled he had been by a rush of sexual feeling when he had encountered her, skin gleaming with oil in the noonday sun, beside the swimming pool. She had a lovely body, and he had seen amusement in her eyes when she observed his surprise on finding it stretched out in a bikini. The idea of seduction had passed in and out of Christopher’s mind in a moment, but he and Maria had, without regret, remained colleagues.

  “I didn’t want you to ring,” Maria said now. “Otto is up. I want to talk to you before you see him.”

  They went inside. Maria closed the huge oak door softly and led Christopher into the kitchen. She closed another door behind them, and turned on the radio.

  “Speak softly,” she said. “It’s odd, but he hears much better than he did before. One sense compensating for the loss of another, I suppose.”

  She pointed at a tray of liquor bottles and raised her eyebrows in inquiry. Christopher shook his head. Maria gave herself a glass of vodka.

  “We’ve had a visit from Security,” Maria said. “A man who told Otto his name was Bud Watson. David told us to expect somebody named Wilson. He’s an apelike creature in a Robert Hall suit. He massages his face when he’s confused and can’t look anyone in the eye.”

  “Watson?”

  “Yes. These Headquarters types can never remember what cover name they’re supposed to use. I used to see him in the halls back home when I carried files from one temporary building to another. His name is not Wilson or Watson.”

  “Wharton,” Christopher said. “His true name is Wharton. When I saw him, he had a crayon drawing by one of his children in his briefcase. It was signed ‘Debbie Wharton, love to Daddy.–

  “What does he want?”

  “What did he ask you for?”

  “That’s the problem. Nothing, really. He just chatted to Otto about how they knew each other after the war. He hinted that he’d run the security check on Otto before he was recruited. Otto doesn’t remember him.”

  “I thought Otto never forgot anyone.”

  Maria had been standing, buttocks against the kitchen sink, with her arms crossed. She unfolded them and, hiding a smile, gave Christopher a cool, level look. Something in Christopher’s tone had awakened her training, taken her back into their professional style. She was an agent even before she was a member of her sex. Christopher was the same. She treated him as another woman might treat an old lover, encountered by chance in a place where they had been together years before. A remark, a touch of the hand, a smile, turns the eye toward the past, upon scenes that only the two of them know. Friendship becomes passion again. She goes matter-of-factly to bed with him, and then returns home, guiltless, to make supper for her children and her husband.

  “Total recall is one of Otto’s conceits,” Maria said. “In fact he only remembers people who gratify him. Otto’s not one to store the memory of a man who never did anything important.”

  “How did the two of them get on?”

  “All right. Otto condescended to him, because of the appearance Wilson-Watson-Wharton made in his cheap clothes. The man liked that. The contempt of others gives him an edge.”

  Maria, bright-eyed, watched the smile of admiration form on Christopher’s lips; they saw the same things in other people, and liked each other for it. She touched Christopher, a fingertip on his arm.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “David told you nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  Christopher fixed his eyes on Maria’s. “Horst Bülow brought the manuscript out of the D.D.R. He was killed after he delivered the package to me.”

  Maria frowned, compressed her lips. She closed her eyes tightly for an instant, as if she remembered, or foresaw, something. She knew Bülow–not as a person, Christopher thought, but as a man in the files. She knew him better, having read his reports, and the reports about him, than she would know her own child, if she ever had one.

  “Am I to tell Otto about this?” she asked.

  “Use your own judgment. Is the Security type coming back?”

  “Yes, tomorrow. Otto can only take him for about twenty minutes at a time. He’ll have to return several times, unless he takes a night course in coming to the point.”

  “He’ll have to tell Otto eventually. That’s what the investigation is about.”

  Maria, without asking Christopher if he wanted it, made him a drink, and another for herself. They stood face to face in the dim kitchen. In t
heir silences, the motor of the old refrigerator labored noisily.

  “There’s no way to spare Otto any of this?” Maria said.

  It was not a question, and Christopher did not answer. Maria finished her drink quickly, dumped the ice cubes into the sink, rinsed her glass.

  “Is the investigation about anything else, besides the murder of the asset?” Maria asked.

  Christopher said, “Maria, come on.”

  “It’s about everything,” she said. “Of course it is. Otto’s last operation. What a way to end a career like his, being required to remember everything for a man in a forty-dollar suit.”

  FIVE

  1

  In Rome the winter rains were over. Christopher, riding into town from the airport, rolled down the window of the taxi. Even at four in the morning, the air was balmy and he could smell the earth of the farmlands along the Via Ostiense. He looked out the rear window of the speeding taxi and saw that the long straight road behind him, with the moon at the end of it going down into the sea, was empty. He had slept and eaten too little and drunk too much, and was left with a bitter taste in his mouth and a ringing in his ears. The operation, like the imagined form of a child not yet born, passed through his mind, a series of pictures: Kamensky’s tattered manuscript, Rothchild in his tall chair, Maria Rothchild with tradecraft bringing the light of passion back into her face, Patchen’s cold even voice. And beyond that, the future, with Christopher himself moving from place to place, talking, acting out the patterns of deceit that only he could execute because he possessed the talent that Otto Rothchild had once had, the gift of inspiring trust in others. Saying good-bye before he went to Zurich for his surgery, Rothchild had been especially garrulous, telling tales of agents he had had to sacrifice. “Betrayal is an act of strength, Paul,” he had told Christopher; “a man with your gifts will learn, in time, to disguise it as an act of love, and you’ll be astonished to find how much more you’ll be loved, afterward, by the person you betray. Human beings are perverse creatures.” Maria, seated on the floor beside Rothchild’s chair, traced the pattern in the carpet as her husband spoke; Rothchild stroked her hair. Her cheeks burned. In the hall, as Christopher left, she told him that Rothchild, though he had never said so even to her, believed that he was going to die in Zurich. “I know,” Maria had said, “because he talks about all the times he’s almost died in the past, and mentions the things he’s ashamed of in his life. Betrayals, Paul, and failures.” Christopher had touched her eyelids gently with his knuckle; when she spoke to him of Rothchild, she had a way of closing her eyes.

  Now Christopher saw Bülow die again, and knew that he would see this picture once an hour, awake and asleep, until the Kamensky operation was over. Afterward, he would see it only when he was very tired, or when he glimpsed a man in the street who had one of Horst’s foolish mannerisms. All the images he had just seen began to flash through his mind again, in slightly different order. Christopher stopped them running and cleared his head.

  By the time the taxi passed through the wall of the city at Porta San Paolo there was light in the east. The streetlights were still burning; the city smelled of coffee and flowers and crowds. “You said Lungotevere,” the driver said. “Where on the Lungotevere?” Christopher gave him an address ten blocks from his own apartment.

  Christopher, alone, strolled along the Tiber. His bones ached. Years before, he had been shot in the knee and when he was tired the wound throbbed; compared to Patchen’s injuries, the bad knee was nothing, but the pain reminded him that he had a body. From childhood, Christopher had had a tendency to forget that he existed in physical form; he came out of his mind only for brief periods, as an animal will come out of its burrow, in order to eat or make love. He felt pleasure with great intensity but he did not desire pleasure all the time, as Cathy did. He thought of it only when he was in the midst of it.

  The light increased; he walked onto a bridge, the Ponte Sisto, and watched the domes of the city come out of the shadows, taking on mass at first, and then, gradually as the sun rose, color. The sun’s heat could not yet be felt on the skin, but it was stirring the mist on the Tiber. Pigeons, roosting on the bridge and almost the color of its stones, stirred and began to murmur. In the limpid light, which lasted only for moments before the full sunrise, each building, each line of roof, became distinct. Church and palace and house drifted apart, as a couple asleep in the same bed will drift into dreams, and become what each really is until they wake. The sun rose above the horizon; Rome flowed together again, hues of rose and terra cotta. Christopher began to hear the sounds of traffic, music from radios, dishes clattering.

  He walked away from the river to a coffee bar near the Piazza Navona that he knew to be open early. He was the first customer. The sleepy fat girl at the cash register took his money and gave him the printed stub from the machine. At the bar, he drank a double caffè latte and ate a bun. When he went back outside, the day had begun. The narrow street was filled with people, and the cool new air, which had been so still only half an hour before, quivered with the sound of their voices.

  2

  The bed in Christopher’s apartment was empty. It was neatly made, as the maid had left it the day before. Cathy’s clothes, the ones she had worn during the day, were scattered across the bedroom floor. She had left the bathroom light on, and a brush filled with her hair lay on the sink. She wore no makeup, used no hairpins, so she left little trace of herself, except for a trail of clothes, and dishes and glasses still half-filled with the food and drink she had thought she wanted but could almost never finish. There was no note. Christopher, remembering her angry mood when he had left her two nights before, opened her closet. Her clothes and shoes were where they had been, her suitcases were stored on the shelf. She had left her jewelry, as she always did scattered on her dressing table; she often tried on every ring, every necklace, every bracelet that she owned before finding the ones she wanted to wear. She left the rejected pieces–pearls and rubies from Cartier that had belonged to her grandmother, a dead aunt’s great diamond ring–where she had dropped them, as though she would never want to wear them again. Cathy had been raised in a house where it was taken for granted that the rich were too much admired to be robbed.

  Christopher took the phone off the hook and undressed. Naked, he carried Cathy’s damp towels and his own soiled linen from the bathroom to the clothes hamper in the kitchen. He took a shower and got into bed. He thought, with great concentration, of a baseball game in which he had played as a schoolboy. The bat stung his hands; he saw a fly ball, hit to him in center field twenty years before, descend slowly out of the dull sky into his glove, felt the loss of breath like broken glass in his lungs as he ran the bases. He went to sleep.

  What woke him was not Cathy’s weight in the bed, or the touch of her body, or his awareness, as he might be aware of another presence in a dark room, that she was staring into his sleeping face. It was the scent. Her face, lowering toward his own, was cold, and in her hair was the smell of the city. Cathy drove, night and day, with the top down on the convertible. There was a trace of perfume on her skin, all that was left of what she had worn when she went out the night before; it was almost too faint to be apprehended. Overwhelming all these aromas was another, rising from within her body, that Christopher knew. She had been making love.

  Christopher, wide awake, saw through closed eyelids that the room was flooded with sunlight. He was lying on his side with his back to Cathy. She grasped his shoulders and moved him onto his back. He felt her watching him intently. “Don’t wake up,” she whispered. He didn’t know whether she really believed him to be asleep, or if she was playing dolls with him. She lay on her back beside him. Lifting his inert hand, she placed it between her thighs. She was still wet from the stranger she had left. Christopher moved his hand away. Cathy whispered again, “Don’t wake up.” She moved lightly over the bed. He felt her lips on his body.

  “No,” he said.

  Cathy went on trying
to arouse him. She lifted her head and said, in a firm voice, crouching with her whole body flinching and rigid, “Please!” She wept, and put her eyes against his body so that her tears, warmer than her tongue had been, wet his skin.

  Christopher lifted her and turned her rigid body toward him. He kissed her. Her lips moved against his. “Oh, Paul, Jesus, I can’t bear to be alone and I can’t bear what I’ve done,” she said. She trembled violently in his arms. “I couldn’t finish,” she said. “It went on for hours and I couldn’t. Couldn’t. Help me, Paul.”

  Cathy lay absolutely still beneath him, accepting his body. She reached orgasm, as she always did, with her eyes open and staring into his. A long cry escaped her, growing louder and louder. Christopher put his hand over her mouth; she snatched it away and went on uttering the hysterical sound. She seized his hair so that he would look at her eyes. He realized that she was making an accusation. She was repeating the word “love” over and over again, as if they were, indeed, from different galaxies and life depended on making him understand the meaning of this monosyllable in her language.

  3

  Christopher woke when the late-afternoon sun came through the west windows of their bedroom. Cathy did not stir. She lay on her back, her limbs composed, her hair framing her face. Not even sleep could blur her beauty; she was as perfect unconscious as awake. No trace of her tears remained; the only mark on her body was a faint blue bruise on her neck where she had been bitten by her lover. Christopher looked at his watch; they had been asleep for ten hours. He went into the bathroom and shaved, and took another shower.

  When he emerged, he found Cathy rushing through the bedroom. Her hair was still uncombed, but she was fully dressed except for the shoes she carried in her hand. At the sight of him, she paused in mid-flight, tottering for a moment on one stockinged foot. Finally she completed the step and staggered with hand outstretched for the support of the wall. Then she stood there, in silence, with both high-heeled shoes clutched to her stomach. Her eyes widened as Christopher approached her. He kissed her softly on both cheeks, his hands resting on her shoulders; she wore a soft woolen sweater, blue-gray like her eyes. Cathy did not move; it was the first time he had ever touched her without feeling a response.