Secret Lovers

by Charles McCarry

  “Embezzlement, to the Swiss, is what arson is to the Japanese,” Wilson said. “Cops have a kind of freemasonry–catch a crook, make a friend. The embezzler I caught made me a true friend of one particular Swiss cop. I had supper with my friend. He was able to help, because there is nothing in Switzerland that the Swiss police don’t know. It makes you envious. The money, Paul, went to Berlin from a numbered account in the Swiss Credit Bank. This is a photo of the transfer order, with one of the authorized signatures. It’s a funny name, of course, but do you know the handwriting?”

  Christopher looked at the card. He felt no anger, no surprise. It was what he had expected. His talent, the gift of the operative, was to separate from years of talk the one phrase that betrayed the truth, and from miles of action the single deed that revealed the person.

  “Yes,” he said, “I know the handwriting.”

  Wilson took the photocopy back. He looked at Christopher with undisguised sympathy. When he spoke there was tenderness, almost a caress, in his hoarse voice.

  “What now?” he asked.

  “You’ll have to put it in the mill. But knowing who had Bülow killed is no good to us. Why? I’d want to know that before I swept them up.”

  “So would I. I think we ought to let it run. Maybe even make something happen.”

  “I want to talk to Patchen.”

  Wilson took a cable out of his briefcase and handed it to Christopher.

  “He wants to talk to you,” Wilson said. “But it can’t be about this. I haven’t put anything on this subject into the traffic.”

  The cable told Christopher that Patchen would be in Paris in the morning; it set up a meeting for ten o’clock in the zoo in the Bois de Vincennes.

  “Can you brief me afterward?” Wilson asked. “I think you and I had better move together on this as much as we can.”

  “All right. I’ll phone when Patchen is through with me.”

  Wilson held up the photograph of the bank form he had brought back from Zurich.

  “Do you want to show him this? I think you ought to tell him what we know, instead of my doing it. After all, I’m a stranger to you two, and I guess you’d have to say this is a private grief.”

  Christopher shook his head. “David can look at it when he gets back to the Embassy,” he said. “I wonder if he’ll want to.”

  2

  When Christopher arrived on the dot of ten, Patchen was waiting by the great artificial rock in the center of the zoo, watching the mountain goats. It was summer, and Patchen had changed from his black chalk-stripe suit to blue seersucker; he had Brooks Brothers send him one of each in September and May, and every other year he bought a tweed jacket for winter weekends and a linen blazer for summer. Christopher, who had been his roommate in a naval hospital and later at their university, had seen him sometimes without a necktie. Few others had done so. “David undresses in the dark,” Patchen’s gaunt wife had told Christopher one evening after too much drink; “it’s his wounds, you know–he thinks being disfigured makes him unattractive sexually.” Laura Patchen was an intellectual woman. “I’ve wondered,” she added, “if some race memory isn’t involved–there is a biological alarm system that warns one not to mate with defectives. But war wounds’ve never bothered the ladies–tell him that, Paul, will you?”

  In the zoo, Patchen caught sight of Christopher and clasped his hands behind his back, the signal that he had seen no surveillance and it was safe to approach. Christopher smiled, his signal. Patchen thought these precautions foolish, but he took them automatically. He knew that Christopher, failing to see a signal, would break the contact and make him wait for an hour and go to another place to meet him.

  Patchen waved a hand at the jagged concrete alp with goats clinging to its side; no verbal joke was necessary. They walked on. It was not too early in the day for crowds; the paths of the zoo were filled with children, being herded from species to caged species by scolding adults. Patchen and Christopher went back outside the gates and walked down a wooded path until they found a bench where they could talk undisturbed.

  “I’m afraid I have some unhappy news for you,” Patchen said. “Two things have happened about Tuning Fork since we talked, and neither is going to make things easier for you.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “First, the swap for Kamensky. We can’t do it. We had a heavyweight of theirs and they had a collection of small fry, ours and the Brits’, and we were going to work up a package. We were going to say, as sort of an afterthought, ‘Oh, by the bye, we have something else to sweeten the pot. Why don’t you make yourselves some propaganda hay by letting some of your unhappy intellectuals out? We’ll even pump a little applause into the Free World’s press. No question of defection, you understand; you just give them exit visas and say how anyone can travel to the outside world from the great Soviet Union. Like, uh, Blank and Blank–and what’s that fellow’s name? Kamensky.’“

  “You thought that would work?”

  “Dick Sutherland did. They want their master spy back. But then, last week, the Soviets snatched one of ours. One of Sutherland’s. If they publicize it, it’s sure going to look like we’ve been meddling in the internal affairs of the U.S.S.R., because this fellow they’ve got in Lubianka has been giving us everything except the time and duration of Khrushchev’s erections.”

  “He’s a Russian?”

  “He is indeed. But one of their fellows in Delhi, of all places, has come to our man out there and told him that just as soon as they wring out our agent they’d be quite glad to deliver him to us on neutral ground in exchange for their fellow, who’s languishing in prison.”

  “I see.”

  “Yes. Dick Sutherland may have faults, but leaving one of his assets in the hands of the KGB’s interrogators is not among them. He went for the deal like a hungry muskellunge. The swap will take place before I can get back home, probably.”

  “There’s nothing else he could do.”

  “No. And the other thing is, the Tuning Fork Working Group, taking into account the possibility, the probability even, of a lot of bad press because of the arrest of Sutherland’s agent, wants to publish Kamensky’s book as quickly as possible. Yesterday, for example.”

  “To show what a hero our spy was, to try to kill the Soviet system?”

  “By indirection, yes,” Patchen said. “It’s not fully appreciated outside our profession that it’s sometimes an honorable act to commit treason.”

  In the shade where they were sitting it was many degrees colder than it had been in the sunlit zoo. Patchen shivered in his thin suit and stood up, ready to walk again.

  “What word would you use to describe the act we’re about to carry out against Kamensky?” Christopher asked.

  Patchen walked away.

  Christopher followed. Patchen asked for a report on the Rothchilds, and Christopher told him of his conversation with Maria.

  “Did I say such a thing?” Patchen asked. “Place you, place anyone, above Otto?”

  “It sounds like you, and Maria never misquotes.”

  Christopher led Patchen through the maze of footpaths. They went on talking about the Rothchilds. Christopher told him Cathy’s story about her evening with them, and Patchen stopped in his tracks to guffaw at the idea of Otto in a Bette Davis film. “You know,” he said, “Maria looks a little like Bette Davis, the bangs and the eyes. I wonder if she knows it.”

  Christopher didn’t laugh. He let a silence collect, and then, on a bench in the sun, he told Patchen in a few sentences what Wilson had found in Zurich, what they both suspected. Patchen’s body jerked as though he had taken a physical blow. Then he listened coldly. When he had heard it all, he made his perfunctory protest. It was a last word of loyalty to people who had betrayed him.

  “There doesn’t need to be a connection,” he said. “It’s an indication, Paul. It’s not proof.”

  “That’s true. David, do you think I want to believe it?”

  Patchen
shook his head, looked at nothing for a time, shook his head again. Nothing astonished him. What Cathy believed she must develop occult powers to achieve, Patchen did every day with paper and money and radio transmissions–saw the shadow inside the flesh.

  “Cuckolds never want to believe it,” he said to Christopher now.

  “We have to know, David.”

  “What does Wilson want to do?”

  “Let them run. Maybe feed the baby and watch it grow.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I’m going to Berlin myself to check out as much of it as I can. I may make a second trip, to Spain, with Cathy. But I think Wilson’s right. We have to set up a reaction, and read it.”

  “All right. But I suppose you want to keep it in the family. You’re closest to it.”

  “Until we’re sure, yes. Then it will have to be handled however these things are handled. I insist on the consequences. No rescues, David.”

  He told Patchen what action he wanted to set in motion. Patchen listened, nodding; at one point he smiled at the cruel humor of what Christopher was doing to himself in the name of something that he held to be more real than he.

  “All right,” Patchen said, and in addressing Christopher he used his secret name again. “I’d like to ask you this: is there any limit on what you’ll pay for the truth?”

  Christopher turned his back.

  “I don’t know why it surprises me,” Patchen told his friend, “but it always does, when you decide to show what a cold-blooded son of a bitch you are.”

  3

  Otto Rothchild permitted Christopher and Patchen to see him walk. They heard his wheezing breath in the hall and the shuffling tread of his shoes on the carpet before they saw him. He leaned on two canes with his elbows locked, the weight of his body pushing the bones against the stretched flesh of his shoulders. He nodded to them as he entered the sitting room. Patchen, whom Christopher had watched in the hospital as he learned to walk again after the war, ran his eyes up and down Rothchild’s ruined body. Emotion flickered in Patchen’s deadened face–kindred feeling, the memory of disgust; Christopher heard again, like a shout coming into a house from the street, Patchen’s cries of loathing for his own body, fifteen years before, when it would fail to obey the commands of his brain.

  Rothchild sat in his chair, arranged his clothes. He was breathing rapidly, shallow inhalations, strong exhalations through the nose–an athlete after a run. His eyes did not close. While he waited for his voice to return he rested his eyes on the small Klee that was the pride of his collection.

  “The canes,” he said to Maria, “are not good for the rugs. You must get some of those rubber tips.”

  Rothchild turned his gaze toward Patchen.

  “You seem to be making progress, Otto. Everyone will be glad to hear that.”

  “Yes, David. Part by part I am hauling my body out of the grave. What brings you here? You’re commuting from Washington these days.”

  “The Kamensky business.”

  Rothchild lifted a glass of water, using both hands, and wet his mouth.

  “Paul is handling it extremely well,” he said. “He has Cerutti under contract, if not under discipline. It’s all going according to the scenario.”

  “That part, yes. But more and more, Otto, I worry about the effect on Kamensky. So do the others at home.”

  Maria, seated with ankles crossed, did not bother to watch Patchen as he spoke; his face showed nothing. She had her eyes on Christopher, who was listening passively as usual, and when Christopher caught her glance she gave him a smile, a crinkling of the skin around the eyes, a widening of the full lips; it was the grin a sister might give to a favorite brother.

  “Each time we meet, David, this subject arises,” Rothchild said. “But it never advances. We are worried; we see what the consequences for Kiril Kamensky may be–probably will be. What, my dear David, can we do about it?”

  “We had a plan, Otto. We thought we could get him out.” “Get him out? How? Send in parachutists and kidnap him? Really, David.”

  “Trade goods, Otto.” Patchen named the captured Russian spy that Headquarters had been willing to exchange for Kamensky. Rothchild’s hands twitched in surprise. Then, preparing a reply, he looked from face to face. When he spoke, he was gazing at none of them but at his Klee: a flower, a stick figure, a line of color like a cancellation; it was a picture with no depth, it suggested nothing but its surface. Christopher wondered why Rothchild, of all people, loved it so.

  “I can’t believe it,” Rothchild said. “Exchange a man of that stature for a writer, a forgotten writer? It would never have worked.”

  “There were permutations. It would have worked.”

  “Do I understand that the plan has been abandoned?”

  “Yes.” Patchen explained what had happened, as he had explained it to Christopher.

  “Then it’s a dead issue. Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Not at all. We’re afraid that Kamensky, if he came to a bad end, would be an operational liability. One way or another, we have to save him.”

  “You’ve just said that’s gone by the boards,” Maria said.

  Rothchild lifted a hand, forbidding another interruption. He nodded to Patchen.

  “There are two things we can do, it seems to me,” Patchen continued. “We can postpone publication of the novel. We can orchestrate the world intelligentsia in a campaign to release Kamensky. It would take a long time, maybe, but in the end I think we could get him out that way, by hard-nosed public pressure. Paul has a head of state on the string in Africa who’d put Kamensky’s name in for the Nobel Prize. That’s Option One. What do you think?”

  Rothchild put his head back and lapsed into one of his stillnesses. Maria cocked her head, examined her husband. She asked Patchen and Christopher if they wanted tea. They refused.

  “I think it’s possible, David,” Rothchild said, opening his eyes. “But the time element is a strong, strong negative. It might take ten years. Kamensky could die in the meantime. Also, and I know you’ve considered this, it would certainly arouse the suspicions of the Soviet security apparatus. Why, they would ask, why? So you might put Kamensky in greater hazard. Besides, I don’t know if we could keep up the campaign long enough. Intellectuals are like children; they’re passionate about the interest of the moment, but they’re easily diverted. They wouldn’t stay with it.”

  “So you think this is not a viable option?”

  “No. Because of all I’ve said, and because of another, much more important element.”

  “Yes,” Maria said in her hard-edged voice, and gave a knowing smile. “The fatal flaw is pretty obvious.” Rothchild waited, with his new patience, for her intrusion to end.

  “Kamensky wouldn’t come,” he said. “He would never consent to leave Mother Russia. Bone and blood, brain and flesh, Kiril Kamensky is a Russian. He’d rather be in a prison camp in Siberia or in Lubianka than wear silk and eat caviar with foreign earth under his feet.”

  Rothchild, having finished this speech, looked again from Patchen to Christopher to Maria, his eyes glinting with amusement, as if he had told them some delicious joke. Patchen, unresponsive, broke Rothchild’s pose with a question.

  “What would induce him to break this mystical bond with Holy Russia?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, Otto. Fame. I got the idea you thought he hungered for it.”

  “He does. But fame among Russians. He cares about no one else.”

  “A woman?”

  “At his age?”

  Patchen moved his head toward Maria. She bit her lips and flushed; pushed back a strand of hair.

  “Let me ask you this,” Patchen said. “If we found a secure way to communicate with Kamensky, would you, as his friend, plead with him to come out? A letter.”

  “Of course,” Rothchild said. “I’m under discipline. I’ve done many silly, futile things for that reason. David, it would not work.”
>
  Patchen stood up abruptly. “Excuse us a moment,” he said. He took Christopher by the arm–Christopher saw that Maria was as astonished as he that Patchen should touch another man–and led him to the far corner of the sitting room. There, Patchen, with his eyes fixed on a tiny fragment of old carpet in a heavy gold frame, whispered at length in Christopher’s ear. They returned to the sofa and sat down.

  “What’s that scrap of rug you have framed, Otto?” Patchen asked.

  Rothchild had closed his eyes again. Maria answered for him. “It’s supposed to be a bit of a seventh-century carpet called the Springtime of Chosros. The Arabs cut it into sixty thousand pieces as booty when they sacked Ctesiphon. It belonged to Otto’s family. He brought it out with him in 1917.”

  “A piece of the True Cross, in carpet-worshiper’s terms,” Rothchild said. “If you have faith that it’s what you think it is, it’s priceless.

  Christopher said, “Otto.”

  Rothchild opened his eyes. The light of interest had gone out; fatigue whitened his face.

  “Otto, everything you’ve said makes sense,” Christopher said. “David agrees.”

  “David is letting you speak for him?”

  “Still we’re worried. I don’t like the atmosphere of this operation. I have a feeling, just a feeling, that something is going to go really wrong. I’m not thinking about Kamensky, I’m thinking about ourselves.”

  “I’m growing very tired, Paul.”

  “This won’t take long. Option Two is to print Kamensky’s book under a pseudonym. No one except those of us inside, and Cerutti outside, will know who wrote the book.”

  Rothchild’s lax body stiffened. He stared first at Christopher, then at Patchen. He started to speak, coughed, covered his mouth. Maria rushed across the room and gave him water. He pushed her body aside as if it were an object of furniture.

  “That’s monstrous,” he said. “It’s theft from Kamensky. You’re proposing to steal his lifework, give him nothing, take everything for our dirty little purposes. This novel is a work of art.”