Secret Lovers

by Charles McCarry

  “He’s tough,” Wilson said. “It takes a man to keep his head after he’s told that a forty-year-old secret is still alive, that the fuse has been burning all those years.”

  “Who have you got on him now?”

  “I’ve got a young couple. They’re good. I’m hoping she can get Cerutti into bed. That would give us twelve hours of control every night. The expense of this surveillance, if we lay it on the way Patchen wants to, makes my head spin.”

  “Yes. But we have to have someone on Cerutti, and on Moroni, all the time. Otherwise, we can’t be sure.”

  “How long do you think it’ll take?”

  Christopher shrugged. “Not long. We have to catch the move when the target makes it. Then listen. The way the KGB goes after things like this, I’d say two or three weeks, maybe less, to the day of reckoning. What do you think?”

  “The same. If our target moves. That may not happen. It may not be as important to the target as you think.”

  “We’ll see,” Christopher said.

  Wilson’s throat was dry. He went into the kitchen of the apartment and Christopher heard him open and close the refrigerator door and punch holes in the tops of two beer cans. He returned with the beer, Schlitz from the PX, and gave Christopher a can. “There’s a messier girl living here than in the other place,” he said. “Dishes for two still in the sink, bed unmade. Only one glass has lipstick on it.”

  He described to Christopher the state of his negotiations with the Berlin base. There were difficulties about bringing Christopher together with the German stringer who had observed Horst Bülow’s meeting with the Russian-speaking woman in the Tiergarten.

  “The Germans are Wolkowicz’s assets,” Wilson said. “He doesn’t like your shop. He keeps saying you killed Bülow on his territory. He gave me a general cursing-out about CA operations.

  He thinks you guys spend too much money on agents. But he sort of likes you personally; he says you pick up information sometimes, so you’re not a total loss to the Company.”

  “Yes, but will he help?”

  “He has to. He’ll cover the phones and the mail in Berlin. He’ll let you talk to the German asset, in Berlin, if the Berlin base controls the contact one hundred percent.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Their safe house, their time, they get a tape of the conversation and a contact report from you.” Wilson grinned. “One thing more. Wolkowicz wants you to wear a disguise. He’s a great one for wigs and stuff. In this case, it’s not a bad idea.”

  Wilson’s smile enveloped his face and infected Christopher. Wilson had read Christopher’s file with care and he knew about Wolkowicz and disguises: Years before, when Wolkowicz worked in an Asian station, Christopher had asked him to deliver some money to a local agent. Wolkowicz, known to the agent as Mr. Walters, a visa officer in the American Consulate, had thought it prudent to wear a blond wig and beard and to speak to the agent in a heavy Teutonic accent. He had reported all this and been admired by desk men in Headquarters for his cunning. A month later, the Asian had seen Christopher again. “Paul, it was most curious the way your money came to me,” he said. “Mr. Walters brought it, but he had on a yellow wig and he’s grown a beard. He spoke in such a strange way that I thought he had injured his tongue, and it was quite ten minutes before I recognized him.”

  “Nevertheless,” Wilson said, sobering, “I went through some of Berlin base’s bio files–old stuff from the Nazi archives. The German political police watched everyone in the twenties and thirties, and I thought maybe something would jump off the page.”

  Wilson opened his briefcase and gave Christopher a short report, a photostat of a photostat of the original handwriting of a secret police informer who had operated in Berlin twenty-five years before, when Horst Bülow had been living the happiest days of his life. Christopher read it. Wilson showed him another scrap of paper. Both were copies of Gestapo reports.

  “Did Bülow ever mention these places to you–Peltzer’s Bar and the Jockey? They were intellectuals’ hangouts in the thirties.”

  “No,” Christopher said. “He talked about dance halls, summer restaurants by the Wannsee, places where he picked up girls. What Horst remembered for my benefit was the life of the body.”

  Wilson put away the reports, glancing again at the prim subordinate’s German in which they had been written by the informers who had been watching Bülow in 1931.

  “Evidently there was more to him than that,” Wilson said. “There usually is.”

  3

  One of the extra translators hired by Cerutti was the young woman Wilson had assigned to surveille him. She had grown up in Montparnasse, the child of a Frenchwoman and an American painter who could not paint. “She wants to be as much unlike her layabout folks as possible,” Wilson said. “Good material. Her boyfriend is a tech, a simple fellow like most of them, and notre petite Joëlle runs the team.” The girl worked all day with Cerutti in his tiny office; soon she was with him most nights as well. Her friend, parked outside in a car or following if they drove, recorded their conversations. The surveillance reports were routine: Cerutti carried out Christopher’s instructions to the letter. When he used a public phone, it was to call Christopher and arrange a meeting. His mail was clean. Wilson kept watch all the same; every other day he debriefed Joëlle. She kept a shorthand log of every minute of Cerutti’s day. To this charcoal sketch of her target’s life she added, in her verbal reports, the color–Cerutti’s jokes, his tempers, his manner toward the men and women he was contacting, his anecdotes. His behavior in bed, she said, was entirely normal for a man at his time of life.

  Her efficiency freed Christopher. Cerutti brought him each chapter of Kamensky’s novel as it was translated into French. It had been transformed from a tapestry into a sheet of lace. Rothchild had been correct; no language except the original could contain the vitality of Kamensky’s writing. Christopher, sometimes arguing heatedly with Cerutti, changed a sentence here, a phrase there. Neither man was satisfied with the result. “Reading this in translation is like making love to one woman while imagining another,” Cerutti said.

  He had given a copy of the Russian typescript to the printer. The type was being set. He had paid an enormous surcharge, using money bought with his thumbprint, to obtain such rapid service from the printer. Each afternoon he sent Joëlle to collect the typescript from the printer; she took it back to the print shop every morning. “One doesn’t want to take chances,” Cerutti said. “A leak at this point would not be good.” Christopher asked Cerutti if he thought the girl was trustworthy. “Trust? What’s that?” Cerutti replied. “One hopes for the best.”

  4

  Maria Rothchild, when she met Christopher on the steps of the Madeleine, told him that Cerutti, who had come to see Rothchild as usual on four Wednesday afternoons since his recruitment, had never mentioned Christopher or Kamensky’s novel.

  “He brings the champagne, he gets a little buzzed, he amuses Otto with stories about the old days,” Maria said. “He and Otto, between them, know more about the European Left, all its fevers and perversions and its incredible web of connections, than Proust knew about the French upper class.”

  “How is Otto?”

  “Seething. How did you think he’d be?”

  “Should I come to see him?”

  “Not yet. I don’t know when.”

  Christopher persisted. “I can cover for him for a while, but if he wants his pay he’ll have to submit to a weekly contact while this operation is running.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Maria said. “Do you want to come shopping with me?”

  Christopher went with her to Hediard while she bought tropical fruits. “It’s here I got the strawberries in autumn, the first day you came to meet Otto,” she said. “It seems an age has gone by since then.” Nearby, at Fauchon, she found some Russian caviar and a small jar of foie gras. “It’s a constant struggle, tempting Otto’s appetite,” she said. “He’s going back to his
boyhood, he wants to eat the way he ate when his family was rich, in old Russia. More and more, Paul, that’s what he talks about–Russia before the revolution. He’s gluing that life back together, piece by piece, like a smashed cup.”

  “He did the smashing, or helped.”

  “Yes, but that was when he was, politically, a child. He doesn’t see why anyone would hold him responsible, now that he understands the value of what he broke.”

  “You make him sound like a man who’s losing his wits.”

  “Otto? Not bloody likely. But he has his fantasies. Don’t we all?”

  In the street again, Christopher asked Maria to follow him; they crossed to the other side to escape the stream of customers entering and leaving the fancy grocery. Maria handed him her packages and began to go through her large purse, the picture of a woman who had misplaced something. Christopher admired her professional reflexes and had always done so. The natural appearance is the goal of tradecraft; not many operatives had Maria’s gift for covering criminal behavior with the wasted motions of everyday life.

  “I wanted to keep you posted, even though Otto’s mad at us,” Christopher said.

  He told her about his arrangements with Cerutti, the printing schedule, the plans to exploit Cerutti’s past as a means of certifying the authorship of an anonymous book. Maria asked the names of the printing houses–named the obvious ones–and Christopher confirmed that these were the ones that were being used. Maria buckled her purse and took her packages back.

  “Thanks, Paul,” she said. “It makes me feel better when we’re open with one another. It’s hell to love Otto and also be loyal to the outfit in a situation like this.”

  “Are we always so open?”

  “I am. But I’m just a weak and foolish female.”

  She started to walk, but Christopher did not follow. She turned around, waiting, and tapped her foot in a pantomime of impatience.

  “It’s teatime,” Christopher said. “Let’s trot down to Queenie’s and have a cup.”

  Maria frowned, paused. The memory registered. She laughed again.

  “Ah, Paul,” she said, “you should have been on the stage, pulling things out of a hat. How perfect Cathy would be as your assistant, with those glorious legs and that glorious blond hair and her glorious torso in a spangled bathing suit.”

  But they went to Queenie’s, and had tea. Maria had several glasses of Dry Sack as well. “I drink sweetish sherry when I’m out of Otto’s sight,” she said. “At home I’m allowed nothing but manzanilla.”

  Maria offered no explanation as to why she had never mentioned her meeting with Cathy. “I assumed she’d told you, why shouldn’t she? She was not part of the picture with you and me and Otto. If I hadn’t drunk so much sherry, being so glad to see an old schoolmate, I’d never have taken her home for dinner.”

  “Didn’t Otto think it was a mistake?”

  “Otto tolerates my mistakes when I bring someone who looks like your wife into the house. He longed for her throughout the evening. Everyone has always longed for Cathy.”

  Christopher let the subject go. Maria went upstairs and was gone for a long time. When she returned, they talked for another half hour, the gossip of their trade–what old friend was chief of station in Tokyo, who was next in line as DDP, would the Director remain if the other party won the next elections? Maria was happy, lost in the secret world she had left for Otto Rothchild as he himself, if Maria was to be believed, was lost in memories of his noble family that went back to Alexander Nevsky and beyond.

  “I’m more like Otto than I know,” Maria said at length. “Russia is his whole subconscious, no other place is beautiful enough or interesting enough. I’m the same about the Company–it’s my Russia. No one outside of it is real to me. Are they to you, Paul?”

  “If they aren’t, Maria, what use is the Company?”

  She shook her head, took his hand, smiled at him as she had done many times before–an older sister remembering mischief, moments of pride, gruff boyish signs of love in a small brother, now grown up. Christopher was older than she, but since her marriage Maria behaved as if she had taken on her husband’s age along with his name.

  “You really do try to hold on to what you started out to be, don’t you?” she said.

  Christopher was annoyed; he let it show. Maria let go of his hand. She made up her face, peering into a hand mirror, while he paid the bill. Gathering her packages, she left before him. He watched through the window as she swung away into the afternoon crowds in the Place de la Madeleine, her head turning left and right, bobbed hair swinging, as alert as a doe.

  Christopher remained at his table for a long time, watching the crowds. He did not think. All that was going to happen in his mind had happened; the sequence of intuition, suspicion, evidence had been completed. He was waiting for final proof. The soft light of evening faded from pink to gray. He wondered if Cathy–who never read, never wrote, never ( as she insisted) thought as a conscious act–felt, as he did now, that she could not live another hour with dread.

  Christopher knew that what he was making happen would happen; he hated the scenes he had invented for himself and others to live through. A week before, by the chateau at Vincennes, he had said so to Patchen.

  “No one is responsible for suicide except the man who commits it,” Patchen had replied.

  5

  In less than a week, Cerutti phoned Christopher and, using the code for urgency, asked for a meeting. Under the Pont de la Concorde, where, a few weeks before, the seduction had been completed, Cerutti told Christopher that a set of Russian proofs of the completed novel had been stolen from the printer.

  “Vanished, vanished,” Cerutti said. “They were supposed to be kept locked up at night.”

  “Were they taken in the night?”

  “The printer doesn’t know. He just stuffed the package into his cabinet before he went home at the end of the day; the proofreader brings them in to him at five o’clock.”

  “Where is the proofreader?”

  “Still there, proofreading. An old émigré. One can’t make it seem too serious, questioning him. Anyway, what does he care?”

  Christopher put his hands on Cerutti. “No one knows the author’s name? You’re absolutely certain.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Wilson, giving Christopher the same news two hours earlier, had made the same assurance. Wilson’s eyes were red-rimmed from reading–transcripts, reports, old files. He carried everything that had any significance written on his little stack of file cards in his briefcase during his waking hours; when he slept, he locked the locked case in a safe at the Embassy.

  “Paul, if Cerutti’s gotten word to anyone, he’s done it by carrier pigeon while Joëlle was asleep. The tapes, everything, leave him absolutely clean.”

  “Has Moroni had any contact with Klimenko?”

  “No, the Russian is out of Rome, futzing around in Tanganyika,” Wilson said. “Moroni is working on his next movie. He spends a lot of time in a new place, not his own apartment. But we have that wired.”

  Wilson held Christopher’s eyes. The radio, volume turned high to drown their voices, was at Wilson’s elbow; as the news came on, he turned the sound even louder, and listened intently to the first few bulletins.

  “We can assume something will break in a few days now,” Christopher said. “As soon as it does, I want that meeting in Berlin.”

  “I’ll fix it up with Wolkowicz,” Wilson said. He hesitated, one hand lifted to give notice that he intended to say something. He dropped the hand, and his eyes, and gathered up his briefcase. But at the door, he put a hand on Christopher’s shoulder.

  Christopher said, “I know about the apartment in the Piazza Oratorio. You don’t have to apologize for doing your job.”

  “At this point, Paul,” Wilson said, “anything you want from me, you’ve got.”

  6

  Christopher, alone in a hotel room, had photographs and sanitized files broug
ht to him, and books from the Embassy library. He read all day, histories and geographies of Russia and Germany and Spain, old agents’ reports, operational summaries, the crude ore of espionage. He was trying to understand Kamensky and his novel, trying to understand Cerutti and Rothchild and Bülow, attempting to put himself into their skins and into their time. He belonged to a different century, a different class, a different emotional style. He memorized a place name from Russian history, a date from a wartime OSS report on a Maquis network in Pau, a fact from a transcript of university grades. He wrote nothing down. At the end of each day he put the papers back into a manila envelope, sealed it, carried it back to a rendezvous, and gave it for safekeeping to a young officer from the Paris station. At night he worked with Cerutti on the translation.

  When he left the agent, late, he walked the streets; in this city, in the past fifteen years, he had played out the best and the worst moments of his life. Here, talking quietly to men who had traveled thousands of miles to meet him, he had walked under the trees in the darkness and discussed their wish to murder the governments under which they lived; they spoke always in terms of a birth of liberty because they were talking to an American, but the violent death of their rivals was what they had in mind. Under the same trees, he had taken girls, one after the other, into his arms, overcome by the sweetness he saw in all women; and when he could still put lines on paper, he had left poems all over this city, scribbled on napkins and tablecloths and, once, on the skin of a girl’s arm. “You do with your poems what a gambler in cowboy films does with banknotes, lights his cigar,” the girl had told him; “one day it will be gone, mon amour, and you’ll never get it back.” Christopher, remembering her ten years afterward–every detail, the ink on her tan skin under the fine sun-bleached hairs, the brown eyes sharp with intelligence, the strong slightly crooked teeth that were the key to her sexuality –laughed again at her solemnity. The gift for poetry still seemed to him a trivial thing to lose; there was nothing he wanted to describe in rhyme and image. He had learned to see things as they were and to keep quiet.