“Very nice,” Christopher said. “Worthy of Otto.”
“I’m glad you approve. I want you to seduce this Cerutti before the end of the month. Put all your other ops aside, cancel all your agent meetings. Stay in Paris. I don’t want any paper on you in true name anywhere for at least two weeks. I have a Canadian passport for you and other black ID. Move into a hotel. Don’t give Cerutti a moment’s rest until you’ve got him. I want this book printed, bound, and ready to go, if we have to go, in sixty days.”
“How is Cerutti going to pay for all this?”
“An angel is going to appear with a black bag. That’s how Claude will know that God is on his side. You can remind him that He’s a jealous God.”
Christopher put the oars back in the oarlocks.
“Pull for the island,” Patchen said. “Isn’t there a restaurant there?”
3
Maria Rothchild brought tea on a silver tray. Patchen, who had full use of only one hand, refused a pastry. So did Christopher, who did not like sweets. Maria ate a mille-feuilles. “I do this in the intervals when Otto’s eyes are closed,” she said. “He thinks I’m reckless about my figure.”
Patchen walked with his teacup around the four walls of the sitting room. He looked intently at each picture. “Otto, you’ve collected wisely,” he said. Rothchild gave Maria a look: what does this bureaucrat know?
“Have you had this place swept, as I asked?” Patchen asked.
“Yes. Wilson-Watson-Wharton had his technician do it. No enemy is listening.”
“Is Wilson still coming around?”
“Every day, practically,” Maria said. “It’s not as bad as all that really, but he does come often. You heard about the great polygraph adventure?”
“Yes. Evidently those Swiss surgeons disconnected your conscience, Otto. You ought to tell Paul the cost of the operation. I think we could justify it as an operational expense in his case.”
Without preamble, Patchen told Rothchild that the Kamensky manuscript would be published.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “I want you to introduce your pal Claude de Cerutti to your young Canadian friend, Paul Cowan, here.”
“Paul will handle the seduction?”
“Yes, and all the legwork. He’ll keep you posted.”
“I am to know nothing of what is going on between Paul and Cerutti, so far as Cerutti knows?”
“Nothing. You just bring them together.”
“I’ve known Cerutti for twenty-five years. He will know.”
“No, Otto, he will not know. He’ll suspect. We know how to live with that.”
Rothchild whistled through his bloodless lips. Patchen refused to believe in Rothchild’s boredom.
“I’m going to speak plainly to you, Otto,” Patchen said. “This is your operation. You conceived it. But in its execution, you’re in the background. You must not show up on anybody’s screen. If there was some other way of putting Paul and Cerutti together, I’d do it.”
“Then let Paul walk in on him cold.”
There was a sound of breathing in the quiet room. Maria, lips and fists clenched, was staring fixedly at the pattern in the carpet.
“David,” she said, “what, exactly, is the point of treating Otto like some GS-8 just off the Farm? I don’t understand you.”
“Then I must make myself plainer. The security of this operation was compromised at the beginning. I don’t want it compromised again, not in the smallest way. Not through ego, not through mistakes.”
Rothchild glanced from face to face, as if he were chairman of the meeting. “If there’s no more to be said on this subject,” he said, “I suggest we discuss more pressing questions.”
Patchen described to Rothchild the outlines of the operation. Rothchild said, “You’ve changed very little of what I recommended. The money arrangement is good. Cerutti will be dazzled by it. He’ll have too much to lose to compromise us.”
“That’s the idea.”
“You haven’t said what language you intend to publish in.”
“We’re using a French publisher.”
“A French publisher,” Rothchild said, emphasizing each word, “who was once the leading publisher of Russian-language books in Europe.”
Maria, as Rothchild spoke this last sentence, stirred on the sofa beside Christopher.
“Paul has read the Russian original,” Rothchild said. “What does he think of it?”
“I’ve told you, Otto,” Christopher said. “It’s a great novel.”
“Could you do it justice in your attempts to fix up the English translation?”
“You know the answer. Kamensky’s writing can’t be translated. It’s still very powerful in English, but it hasn’t the heat of his Russian.”
“Exactly. If you cannot do it in English, and you’re a man with a mind and a poetic gift very like Kamensky’s, Paul–if not in English, which is the closest language to Russian in its depth and its resonance, what will happen in French?”
“French isn’t big enough,” Maria said. “French is too limited a language to encompass such a vast work of art as The Little Death.”
“French managed to contain Voltaire and Flaubert and Baudelaire,” Christopher said.
“And Victor Hugo, hélas,” replied Maria.
Patchen avoided Christopher’s eyes. “I thought I understood you wanted this book published first in French, Otto. Did I miss something?”
“No, David, I missed something. Incessantly, you and Paul talk about Kamensky, Kamensky, Kamensky. Well, what about him?”
No one replied. Rothchild waited until he had their full attention.
“What Kamensky wants is for his work to be published in Russian,” Rothchild said. “Cerutti has the printer to do it. He can bring it out in French and in Russian on the same day.”
“It’s brilliant,” Maria said. She went to Rothchild and put her hands on the back of his chair, caressing the fabric as if it were part of his body.
Patchen now looked full at Christopher. “Yes,” he said. “It is brilliant. Dick Sutherland will love it. Russian émigrés will be smuggling copies into the Soviet Union like girls into Arabia.”
“That may happen,” said Rothchild. He stirred in his chair. “It might even make a nice little secondary op for Sutherland’s shop, to keep him happy. But the main thing is Kiril Alekseivich Kamensky. We’ve decided to give his work to the world. Let’s give it to the world whole, as he made it.”
As he spoke, Rothchild actually leaned forward in his chair, panting with the effort, pointing a trembling forefinger at them.
It was dusk when Patchen and Christopher left the Rothchilds. They walked over the Pont Sully and along the boulevard toward the Bastille. Patchen was limping badly. They found a café and Christopher ordered beer for them both.
“You said nothing to Otto about getting Kamensky out.”
“No,” Patchen replied. “I don’t think Otto needs to know about that.”
Christopher said, “David.” Patchen kept his eyes on the passing traffic.
“David,” Christopher said, “you do see that Otto is trying to kill Kamensky, don’t you?”
Patchen snapped his tongue against his teeth, softly.
“So it seems,” he said. “It must be his illness.”
“You think Otto doesn’t see what he’s doing?”
Patchen was weary. “I don’t know. Why would he want Kamensky to die?”
“Printing his novel in Russian will guarantee it,” Christopher said.
“Perhaps.”
“No, David, not perhaps. It’s a death warrant. Are you going to do it?”
Patchen turned to Christopher and this time there was emotion in his voice. “Am I going to do it?” he said. He spoke Christopher’s false name, the one by which he was known inside the Agency. “Not alone. If we do it, we are going to print Kamensky’s book in Russian–you, me, Otto, Sutherland, Horst Bülow’s ghost, all of us. And if it kills Kamensky, we’ll accept t
hat and do the same thing another day. We are the apparatus, and that’s the kind of thing we do.”
TEN
1
Claude de Cerutti wore the rosette of the Resistance in the buttonhole of his sober blue suit. He was a short round man with a rubicund face and a halo of gray curls around his bald skull.
“In the Resistance,” Otto told Christopher, “one of Cerutti’s cover names was Le Frère éméché, the Tipsy Friar.”
“What was Otto’s?”
“That’s still a secret,” Rothchild said.
“Jaguar,” said Cerutti. “He was head of counterintelligence in our réseau. A stealthy night-living animal, much feared by those who had reason to be afraid.”
Cerutti, when he was introduced to Christopher, stood back and examined his face, a puzzled look in his bright eyes. Maria had forewarned Christopher that it was one of Cerutti’s poses to pretend that he had previously met everyone to whom he was introduced, but could not quite remember the new person. He asked Christopher where in the United States he came from.
“I’m a Canadian, from Toronto.”
“Surely not? You don’t speak French like a Canadian.”
“French is not spoken in Toronto.”
Cerutti, when he spoke to Otto Rothchild or made a remark Rothchild was meant to overhear, had a way of raising his voice. “It’s extraordinary,” he said in a piercing tone, “how all the North Americans I meet at the Rothchilds’ talk French like natives. No Frenchman will believe it. They say I am the only man in France who has ever met a comprehensible American.”
Cerutti had brought a bottle of champagne, carrying it from his car in a silver ice bucket, and he rose from his chair to give more wine to Maria and Christopher. He brushed Maria’s hand as he filled her glass.
“It was that touch of Maria’s skin for which I traveled all the way from the avenue Foch,” he said. “Otto thinks I am performing a corporal act of charity, visiting him each Wednesday as I do. The truth is more corporeal. I hope to persuade Otto’s wife to come away with me to the South Sea islands. I am mad for American girls, a Neanderthal entranced by a female of the Cro-Magnons. Such exquisitely cruel beauty; they are the first examples of another stage of mankind.”
Cerutti, standing above Christopher’s seated figure, asked him a series of questions about himself. He spoke still in the light tone of voice that he had used when flirting with Maria, but with the faint hostility of a European speaking to a foreigner whom he cannot define by the standards of his own circle. Christopher answered easily with his cover story: his name was Paul Cowan, he was the orphaned son of a banker from Toronto, he was unmarried, he had gone to McGill University, he was hoping to write.
“One must not hope to write,” said Cerutti. “One must write. It is necessary to wring an apology from Gide.”
“I’m not aiming to be Proust. I think it’s better to get out of the cork-lined room, to travel. Even to catch cold. I’ve just been to Russia.”
Cerutti’s interest was aroused. “And what is Russia like? I haven’t been there since I was younger than you. As Otto was coming out, a dispossessed aristocrat, I was going in, a young firebrand who thought he’d inherited the future. Ah, the Russian Revolution! All my friends died of it.”
“Not quite all,” Rothchild said.
“No, Otto, there’s you, but ex–Social Democrats hardly count. I speak of the Red heroes. You were a pink hero–the only one ever, so far as I know.”
Cerutti returned his attention to Christopher. “Tell me about your trip,” he said. “Was it one of the Intourist things where you see no one and look at all those pictures of boys and girls on tractors?”
“Mostly. I tried to get off the beaten track a little. You can slip away if you’re not too obvious. I talked to some of the ordinary Russians.”
“Talked to them? You speak Russian?”
“A little. I had a Russian mother.”
The real Paul Cowan, who had died at Dieppe, had in fact been the son of a woman who had been brought out of Petrograd in 1917.
Cerutti’s eyes, shining but opaque, never wavered. “To what sort of people did you speak Russian in Moscow?” he asked Christopher.
“All sorts. Of course everyone thought I was an American, it’s the bane of Canadian nationality. The Russians seem to feel about Americans as you do about American women, that they are one stage ahead of everyone else in the evolutionary process.”
“Do you agree with that view?”
“Not quite. I come from the most anti-American country on earth.”
“Canada? Ah, no. America is the most anti-American country on earth. When you speak of public opinion, young man, you speak of the opinions of the intellectuals because they are the only ones who publish and broadcast. The masses are dumb. Intellectuals always hate their own country, but the United States has produced an intelligentsia that is positively bloodthirsty.”
“You see America as a benevolent force?”
“What does it matter what it is?” Cerutti asked. “It’s what it symbolizes. Food, clothes, cars, dancing. Money. These are the things mankind lusts for. If one country shows that these things are available to the common man, all others will have to become like it, or fall.”
Otto Rothchild cleared his throat. “This is the young Communist who fought the Whites in Russia, Franco in Spain, the Gestapo in the streets of Paris,” he said.
“Yes,” Cerutti said, raising both short arms above his head, “with these little fists. One day I unclenched my hands and wondered why I had not preferred the itching palm all my life.”
Cerutti resumed his questions. Christopher told him that he had tried to meet other writers and artists. There was, he had found, a considerable underground. Stories, poems, even whole novels were passed from hand to hand. Their readers copied them on typewriters so that extra copies could be circulated.
“They confided this to you, a foreigner? Showed you the manuscripts?”
“There’s not much to confide. It’s well known that this goes on. The Russians, the literary sort of Russians anyway, are dying to speak to the rest of the world. Their country is a huge cloister, intellectually speaking, with everyone in involuntary celibacy.”
“And you got in the window, among the novices?”
Christopher grinned. “I hadn’t thought of it in quite that way. We talked, drank, stayed up all night. It was like being back at the university.”
“Surely it was very dangerous for these young Russians?”
“We were careful.”
“Careful? You’re very innocent. Probably one in five of your young rebels was a KGB informer.”
“That I doubt.”
Cerutti shrugged. “Good luck to your friends, then.”
Descending in the lift, Cerutti clasped his silver champagne bucket, elaborately chased and decorated like a coarse enlargement of a Cellini miniature, to his chest. His chatter had ceased as the door of the Rothchilds’ apartment closed behind him.
For two hours, Cerutti had barely interrupted himself. He had flirted with Maria, told stories of Russia and Spain during their civil wars–he had fought for the Communists in both conflicts. He spoke of his ancestry: he was descended on one side from a Jesuit philosopher of the French Revolution, on the other from the chef de cuisine Catherine de Médicis had brought to Paris when she married Henri II. “How can one be descended from a Jesuit?” Maria asked. “Don’t ask rude questions,” Cerutti replied; “my ancestors introduced cooking and even the fork to France, and, having civilized this country in the sixteenth century, radicalized it in the eighteenth.” In the lift with Christopher, however, Cerutti was quiet.
“You’ve known Otto a long time, I gather,” Christopher said.
“During two wars.”
“Don’t tell me you met in the First World War as well as the Second?”
“No. In Spain in 1936 and then during the last war with the Germans.”
They were very close together in the
tiny cage. Christopher smiled, reflecting how little Patchen, who had arranged this situation, would have enjoyed feeling the heat of Cerutti’s body, smelling the wine on the Frenchman’s breath and the cologne beneath his sweaty clothes. Cerutti stood back and permitted Christopher to struggle with the doors of the lift after it had groaned to a stop. The two men shifted their bodies to make room for the inner doors to swing into the cabin with them; Cerutti held his silver bucket aloft to protect it.
“How do you happen to know Rothchild?” he asked. “Of course, he knows everyone.”
“My mother. Russian émigrés all know one another.”
“Was she, too, a member of the old nobility?”
“Weren’t they all?”
Cerutti pursed his lips; he was beginning to look upon Christopher with interest.
“Otto is quite genuine, a descendant of Demetrius Donskoy, who defeated the Golden Horde on the Kulikovo Plain in 1380,” he said. “Much better than being a Romanov. For years I doubted Otto’s lineage. His behavior was all wrong for a displaced boyar.”
Christopher, with a change of expression, asked for the completion of the joke.
“He never borrowed money,” Cerutti said.
In the street, they shook hands. Christopher hesitated for a moment, then asked Cerutti if he would care to have dinner with him one night that week. Cerutti handed him the ice bucket and took a date book from an inner pocket. He studied it, holding it at arm’s length.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “I have no other free night this week.”
Christopher agreed. Cerutti uncapped a large fountain pen. “It’s Paul what?” he asked.
“Cowan.” Christopher spelled the name. “Hotel Vendôme.”
Hearing the name of this hotel, Cerutti showed new signs of alertness.
“What restaurant do you prefer, and what time?” Christopher asked. He smiled. “You’re my guest, of course.”
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