Secret Lovers

by Charles McCarry

  “Something simple,” Cerutti replied. “Lasserre, for example.”

  “Fine. Eight o’clock.”

  Cerutti disappeared around the corner. Christopher, walking more slowly in the same direction, saw him drive away in a battered Simca.

  2

  As they rose in the elevator at Lasserre, an even smaller cage than the one at the Rothchilds’, Cerutti ran a fingertip over its walls lined with red and gold cut velvet. “The perfect place in which to ravish a virgin, I’ve always thought,” he said. “But when to do it–going up, with all the senses undulled, or going down, with all appetites satisfied except the sexual one?”

  Cerutti was known to the headwaiter; Christopher, as usual, was not recognized. They were moved from the small table that had been reserved for an unknown named Cowan to a more favorable location. Cerutti, tonight wearing the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole, ordered the dinner and the wines; he explained to Christopher how each dish was made, and instructed him to search for the taste of the ingredients. He told him anecdotes about the wine they were drinking. In the war, he said, he had watched from a hiding place while German troops with flamethrowers destroyed a whole field of vines at a château famous for the white wine they were now drinking. The German commander posted a notice explaining that the chatelaine had given food to the Maquis. “In fact, she had been the German colonel’s mistress, and they had quarreled,” Cerutti said. “I thought I’d never drink this wine again.”

  Christopher listened. He had done what he was doing a hundred times before. Cerutti was an intelligent man, and according to the files he had been a brave one. As he talked, observing Christopher for signs of admiration, making himself a familiar of the waiter, Christopher began to see his weakness. It could not be called vanity; it was worse. Cerutti was a man who had had to settle for the mere forms of recognition. He knew that he was more than the headwaiter in Lasserre, or the cabinet minister who had done him the offhand favor of putting him up for medals, realized. Cerutti was too small, too funny, too reckless in showing his intelligence. The fault had cost him his place as a man among serious men. It was so evident that Christopher, reviewing in his mind all that he had read and heard about Cerutti, felt a pang of anxiety. It seemed impossible that this man had not already been ensnared by another intelligence service. It made no difference; Christopher, often enough, had found use for men that others had believed worn out. It was thought that Cerutti had not been part of a network since the Resistance disbanded. But a lifetime was not long enough to kill the taste for secret life; no one who had ever lived it believed that he could lose his skills.

  “You say you’re a writer,” Cerutti said. “You are, I take it, as yet unpublished?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Cerutti drew a circle in the air above his head, to encompass the voluptuous decor. “You are not a starving artist, evidently. This is the most orgiastic restaurant in Paris.”

  Christopher gave Cerutti no more information about himself.

  “Did you describe this debauchee’s life to your underground friends in Moscow?” Cerutti asked.

  “They only asked about Hemingway, and the movies.”

  Cerutti spoke earnestly to the headwaiter about dessert, then turned back to Christopher.

  “I have a professional interest in what you’ve done,” he said. “I don’t know if Otto mentioned that I own a small publishing house.”

  “I knew that you discovered Kiril Kamensky and published his work.”

  “Ah. Then you know I used to publish a lot of Russian books. At one time my imprint was quite famous in that regard. But there’s no money in it.”

  Cerutti, touching his lips with a napkin, watched Christopher begin to say something, then change his mind. His eyes shone, for an instant, with curiosity. Then he spoke of other things.

  Christopher paid the enormous bill. Cerutti suggested they walk to the Crazy Horse Saloon; inside the door there, he gave money to the greeter to get them a table near the stage. There was a new act: a very tall German girl who began her striptease in a Wehrmacht helmet and ended it with a swastika on her G-string.

  They drank Scotch whisky. Finally Cerutti, his speech faintly slurred, began to ask questions again.

  “Otto says you really found your way to interesting people in Russia. The luck of the innocent, was it?”

  “As I said, I just met people, and they introduced me to other people. It’s the same the world over.”

  “For the young and beautiful, perhaps.”

  The music had begun again, and the master of ceremonies introduced another girl. Cerutti called the waiter and watched him make his way among the tables, putting his hands on the customers to move them aside because their attention was fixed on the girl. Cerutti’s face, like the flesh of the dancer, went from pink to blue to green to stark white as the filters were changed on the spotlight.

  “Otto was hinting to me,” he said, his voice straining to penetrate the throbbing music, “that you got through to someone very interesting in Russia. One of the great lost writers. Otto was very mysterious.”

  Christopher smiled, as if in the din he could not hear what Cerutti was saying.

  “Did you? Who was it?”

  Cerutti made a megaphone of his hands and asked his insistent question again.

  Christopher ceased smiling. “There are some things,” he shouted into Cerutti’s ear, “that you just don’t ask. I’m sorry I said anything to Otto.”

  Cerutti shrugged, but he held Christopher’s glance for a long moment before he turned his chair around in order to have a better view of the girl, now almost naked, who danced in the changing colors of the limelight.

  3

  Maria Rothchild met Christopher in the bar of the Hotel Scribe. Christopher heard her brisk unmistakable footsteps as she came down the corridor. She wore a tartan skirt and before she sat down at his table she spread its pleats and made a curtsy. “I forgot that this bar is upholstered in the Campbell plaid, or whatever,” Maria said. “It wasn’t my intention to match my costume to the room.”

  She ordered a Bloody Mary and then brought the waiter back with a crooked finger. “Make it two, both for me,” she said. “Otto had a spell last night,” Maria said, “and after I put him to bed I was so bloody depressed I sat up till three drinking gin and listening to Vivaldi. I’m turning into a housebound alcoholic.”

  “What sort of spell did Otto have?”

  “Petulance. It’s hard to be an invalid. He resents my youth and my glowing good health. Life is getting to be like a novelette in a Hearst magazine.”

  “Or the Bronte sisters.”

  “Same thing,” Maria said. “Everything in nature, if I may quote you in the long ago, Paul, is the same unless it’s touched by genius.”

  “I wonder what I meant by that?”

  Maria, eagerly consuming her second Bloody Mary, did not reply. She had a reputation, as Christopher did, for remembering with great exactness everything that was said to her. Unlike Christopher, she liked to quote sentences back to the people who had spoken them; sometimes Maria waited years for the opportunity.

  She finished drinking and sat back with a hand on her stomach. “I can feel it consuming the evil humors,” she said. “God bless the discoverer of alcohol.” She took a Gauloise from a blue package, lit it, and inhaled her one long drag with such force that Christopher could hear the paper burning. Then she snuffed out the cigarette, three-fourths of it unsmoked.

  “Your small friend, the descendant of the Jesuit philosopher, enjoyed his dinner at Lasserre,” she said. “He wanted to know where you got all that money. We said we thought you had inherited young. Cowan was an only child, wasn’t he? David left that detail out.”

  “Yes. Tell me the rest.”

  “About Claude? He brought you into the conversation very casually. Slyly, I’d call it. Otto thought that that was quite telling; so do I. Evidently you gave him just enough to make him want more.”

  �
�I found a message from him at the hotel today. He wants to meet for a drink tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Only a drink?”

  “It’s his turn to pay. I’ll stretch the evening out, somehow.”

  “He’s not bad company,” Maria said, “but of course it’s business. God, the pain of eating rich food with poor fools. When I resigned from the Company I promised myself I’d never again have a meal with someone I didn’t really like. It hasn’t turned out that way, living with Otto. The agents still come for lunch. Maybe when he retires.”

  “Give me the rest on Claude,” Christopher said.

  Cerutti, Maria reported, had said very little when he came by with his weekly bottle of champagne, but he had come two days early. Cerutti had wanted to know, in detail, who Paul Cowan’s Russian mother had been.

  “Otto was vague. Like a lot of reformed revolutionaries, Cerutti is an awful snob–where the ‘de’ came from in his name is a mystery to all–so he thinks it’s natural that Otto wouldn’t have taken notice of anyone who had a Russian title granted after the reign of Peter the Great.”

  “What else?” Christopher asked. It was unlike Maria to chat instead of reporting.

  “He mentioned several times what a dish you are. I asked Otto if Claude was maybe a little bit queer, but Otto says no. It’s not a tendency Otto admires. He’s brutal to fairies, always has been.”

  “Otto’s brutal to a lot of people.”

  “So they say,” Maria replied, “but especially to fools and queers. Claude, believe me, is neither or they wouldn’t have stayed in touch, when there was nothing in it for Otto, for all these years.”

  Maria’s habit of putting a finger on her husband’s flaws interested Christopher; she spoke to him of Rothchild as a liberal in America might speak to another liberal about the fecklessness of Negroes, knowing that his credentials were too good for him to be mistaken for a bigot. Christopher seldom knew what to say in return.

  “The important thing,” Maria said, “is that Claude believes, or is beginning to believe, that there may be something for Cerutti in Paul Cowan, the Canadian. He’s keen to know what you know about the new Russian writers. He made some money out of those books in Russian he used to publish, including Kamensky’s. He’s sniffing the air for the scent of easy money again.”

  Christopher let her drink. While the glass was still at her lips he said, “Sniffing the air, Maria? According to Claude, Otto has already let him smell the bone.”

  Maria put her glass back on the table, dabbed at her lips with a paper napkin.

  “Otto did tell Cerutti that I had met one of the great Russian writers,” Christopher said, “or was Cerutti just putting a little blood in the water?”

  “Yes, Otto told him that.”

  “Why? David told him not to interfere, not to show his hand.”

  Maria Rothchild began putting things back into her purse.

  “Because, Paul, my husband does things his way. Not David’s way or your way or my way.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “And done nothing.”

  “So far,” Christopher said.

  Maria closed the snap on her purse.

  “Is that a message?” she asked.

  Christopher helped her with her chair and walked with her in silence out of the bar and up the stairs. Outside, Maria studied the façade of the Opera House.

  “You know,” she said, “before you ever met Otto, David came around to describe you. Otto asked how good you were. ‘Better than you, Otto,’ David said, ‘because he has the power of honesty.’ What a remark. What an error in handling. Otto has never forgotten.”

  She kissed Christopher’s cheek and left him.

  4

  Christopher was alone when he wasn’t with agents. He woke at dawn and went out of the hotel for breakfast. He liked the backstreet cafes that catered to the gruff early-morning trade. Often, near the Madeleine in the morning, he would be stopped by smiling young women, as fresh as Cathy, who would ask him if he wanted them. He refused; he felt not even the ghost of desire.

  Waiting for Cerutti, Christopher sat alone in his high white room in the Hotel Vendôme and tried, for the first time in years, to write poetry. The lines came to his pen as easily as ever, but they were about flowers, trees, the sky, streets; he wrote a sonnet that described the hill at Pontoise as Pissarro had painted it. He could not make verses about anything that had a voice or warm flesh.

  He wrote to Cathy. He could send nothing through the mail that might give someone who intercepted the letter insight or advantage. He didn’t think that Cathy would believe in a love letter. He made up a long joke about a woman who would not answer her telephone and woke up one morning to find, as Kafka’s hero had found himself turned into a cockroach, that she had been transformed into a telephone. Strangers shouted into her ear and listened at her mouth and punched her nostrils and eyes with dialing fingers.

  He mailed the letter at the post office in the sixth arrondissement and asked at the window if poste restante had anything in his name. He was given an envelope addressed in Cathy’s round handwriting.

  I’ve heard the phone and knew it was you but I don’t know what we’d say if I picked up the receiver. I’m terrified to think of you but I’m trying to get over that. I’ve been asked to go away to Capri for the weekend, and I may. Wherever I am, I’ll be with you. I do believe you see me in everything I do. If you haven’t the sight, then what is the explanation? What I must do is to become like you. I’m making a project of it and Christ it can be painful. When you come back, come on the late flight. Wire me. I’ll meet you at the airport. Don’t be anxious about how I’ll be. I’m all through talking. I know it’s a fool’s way of speaking love.

  5

  Cerutti had suggested meeting in the bar of the Crillon at five o’clock, an hour when it was frequented by English-speaking journalists. Some of them, hanging together in an atmosphere of sad gossip, knew Christopher in his own name as the correspondent of a great American magazine. Christopher avoided them when he could, and when he could not, he bought them drinks with his own money. It was against regulations to spend secret funds on the American press.

  He asked Cerutti to meet him instead at the Brasserie Lipp, on the other side of the Seine. They had to wait, standing up, for a table. Cerutti made no attempt to cover his annoyance. When at last he and Christopher sat down, Cerutti looked contemptuously at the clientele. “Tourists,” he said. He mopped his face with a handkerchief and drank off half of his tall glass of Munich beer at a swallow.

  Christopher had brought the English translation of the Kamensky manuscript with him, wrapped in cheap paper and tied with string. Cerutti eyed it as it lay on the table, but said nothing about it. He described an encounter he had had that day with an American film director who was interested in one of the novels on the backlist of Cerutti’s publishing house. “It’s about the Spanish Civil War,” Cerutti said. “I asked him how he expected to get money from American bankers to make a film on that subject. ‘No problem,’ he said, ‘I’m on the Hollywood blacklist. That makes me a hero in Europe and I can get money over here, pour épater les États-Unis.’“

  “Is it a good book? You said you were in the Spanish war.”

  Cerutti grunted. “There were no good books about that war. Too much ideology. Even the best writers were scared of losing their friends; they had to write what was expected of them, not what they saw and felt.”

  “Did you know Otto in Spain?”

  “Very slightly. I was in a fighting unit, the XI International Brigade, in Madrid in ‘36. Otto was a journalist, living at the Gran Via Hotel. He always had Martell cognac, I don’t know where he got it all, so we were glad to be interviewed by him.”

  “Did you tell Otto what you saw and felt?”

  “I told him true stories about the valor of the Spanish workers. Otto in those days was one of the deluded; he professed to believe in the Popular Front.”

  “You didn’t?”


  Cerutti gave Christopher a sharp look; up till now, it had been he who had asked all the questions, chosen the shades of meaning.

  “I was a Communist, and one who had fought with the Reds in Russia. I understood what fun it was going to be shooting Otto and all the other romantic Social Democrats and Socialists after the war.”

  “But you lost the war.”

  “Yes, and my faith. I’m a defrocked zealot. Franco did the job for us–he shot a lot of Otto’s kind.”

  “What did Otto lose?”

  Cerutti made a kissing noise. “Ask Otto. The odd thing was, all the Spaniards thought Otto was a Frenchman and I was a Russian. The Madrileños thought every armed foreigner was a Russian. They used to shout at all of us in the streets, Viva Rusia! It was the slogan of the war that winter–in Spain the Germans tested aerial bombing tactics; the Soviets, propaganda. You see who won in the end. In 1945 there was no more Luftwaffe. No one has yet found a way to shoot down the illusions of the Left.”

  “Or of the Right?”

  “The Right doesn’t need illusions; it has factories and mines and banks.”

  “You’re still part-Communist, my friend.”

  Cerutti showed his yellowing teeth. “A very small part, withered like an old man’s penis,” he said. “It was once the seat of pleasure, but that was a long time ago.”

  Cerutti lapsed into a mood. Christopher did not disturb him. The waiter brought more beer and a plate of cold sausages.

  “Were you in battle in the last war?” Cerutti asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then you know it’s bad enough to see your friends fall, and know that they are dead. It’s worse when they go back to the country they were fighting for, Soviet Russia in this case, and die, or perhaps do not die, there. You don’t know. They are swallowed up by the earth. You hear rifle shots in your sleep.”

  “I thought the purges came later.”