Secret Lovers

by Charles McCarry

  “Along with a lot of other people.”

  “It’s just a matter of blowing the dust off,” Wilson said. “The contacts are there. They’re always there. You just have to find the cross-references.”

  Wolkowicz had made a kissing sound.

  Now, hours later, in the sauna room, Wolkowicz was talking in Swahili again.

  “There are two ways to handle this,” he told Christopher. “You can expose yourself to Schaefer and ask your own questions. Or you can let me shake the tree. I won’t make a recommendation.”

  Christopher realized that it was just a matter of confirmation now. He asked Wilson if he would remain behind for a few hours and bring Wolkowicz’s information with him to Paris.

  “You have to realize,” Wolkowicz said, “that old Karl isn’t going to tell us the identity of the driver of that black Opel that killed Bülow. He doesn’t owe us that much.”

  “All I want is the auspices–whether it was free-lance or an organization. And how the killing was set up. I’d like the phone codes, the dates, the amount that was paid. If there was a sighting in this place–that, too.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “Pay him.”

  Wolkowicz gave his dazzling smile.

  “Yes,” Christopher said. “You can use CA funds, and you can put in a formal bill so that your hand shows in the file. It’ll show in Bud’s report anyway.”

  Christopher stood up. Wolkowicz, reclining on the smooth wooden slats of the bench in the sauna room, raised himself on an elbow. He shook hands with Christopher. Their bodies glistened with sweat.

  “Paul,” Wolkowicz said, “for whatever it’s worth, I don’t take any pleasure in this. We have different philosophies and different methods and all that. But I don’t like to see you kicked in the crotch.”

  Christopher took a cold shower and dressed. His locker had not been disturbed, the marks he had left were untouched. The man at the desk, a battered middle-aged German with the manners of a clever servant, called a taxi. He paid no obvious attention to Christopher, who had come in fifteen minutes before Wolkowicz and Wilson, and was leaving while they remained. The man wore a white singlet with the name of the bath house printed across the chest. On the inside of his heavy biceps was the tattooed double lightning flash of the SS. Schaefer might have been rewarded with a new name, but he had kept the real marks of his identity.

  FIFTEEN

  1

  “Let me amuse you before we get down to brass tacks,” said Patchen. They were outdoors again in Paris, by the aviary in the Jardin des Plantes. Rain, falling the night before while Patchen was airborne from Washington and Christopher from Berlin, had laid the dust and left a fresh smell in the air. The tropical birds tumbled inside their great cage in the sunshot morning, their colors brighter than usual, as though the rain had washed them, too.

  “I had lunch with Hopkins from the British service last week,” Patchen said, “and he remarked that I was looking rather peaked. ‘Been flying a lot, have you?’ he said. ‘In and out of time zones, in and out of climates?’ I was professionally noncommittal, but you know the Brits. Hopkins is like all the rest, not shy about asking questions.‘The jet aeroplane,’ he said, ‘really is the fatal weakness in American foreign policy. In our day, my dear fellow, we went out to those godforsaken places in gunboats–gave us weeks to think up what we were going to do to the Wogs when we got there. But you poor chaps can get to the Guinea Coast or Vietnam or wherever in a matter of hours. No time to think. That’s your dilemma. Like the birds you were given wings. You lost the need for ratiocination.’ I’d never heard that word used in conversation before.”

  Patchen had shaved and he wore a fresh shirt, but his seersucker suit was rumpled after his night in the seat of an airplane. He was haggard, his eyes were bloodshot, and there remained on his breath the last faint odor of the alcohol he had drunk the night before. Christopher knew that Patchen must have something unpleasant to say if he would begin, as he had done, with small talk.

  “I have come to tell you,” Patchen said, “that what you predicted would happen has begun to happen. Captain V. I. Kalmyk was arrested by the KGB in Warsaw ten days ago, and taken to Moscow to the cellars at No. 2 Ulitza Dzherzhinskogo. He broke after forty straight hours of interrogation. We had a further report, during the night, that Kalmyk was shot late yesterday.”

  “That must mean they’ve picked up the next link in the courier chain.”

  “Yes, and broken that man, too. If we knew how long the chain was, we’d know how much time we have to play with. But we don’t. Dick Sutherland says there may be only two or three roaches to step on–that’s KGB lingo, I’m told.”

  “The broadcasts began after they broke Kalmyk. They won’t need to unravel the whole courier network in order to guess what Kalmyk gave to Horst.”

  “No, but they don’t like loose ends. They’ll want to roll it up just to make things orderly.”

  The Jardin des Plantes lay between the river and a railroad junction, and some of Patchen’s words were smothered by the drone of morning traffic on the quais of the Seine and the squeal and clatter of trains entering and leaving the Gare d’Austerlitz. Otto Rothchild had sounded as Patchen sounded now, in the days after his operation in February, when words and phrases were snuffed out by the aftereffects of what the surgeons had done for him in Zurich.

  “Have you seen Cerutti since you got back from Berlin?” Patchen asked.

  “No. There’s no hurry about it now. Wilson will pull off the surveillance when he gets back this afternoon.”

  “I suppose there’s no point in going on with it.”

  “None It’s served its purpose. But the girl may stay with him. She’s a competent translator, and I think we’ll need her. It’s not a bad thing to have an ear inside the house.”

  “Even when it’s falling down,” Patchen said. “Tell me about Berlin.”

  This time it was Christopher who took Patchen’s arm. Patchen flinched almost imperceptibly; Christopher thought that it must be distaste, to have even the hand of his best friend laid upon him, because Patchen knew already what Christopher was going to tell him. The death of Kalmyk in the punishment cells of the KGB’s center in Moscow had forewarned him.

  “We’re not just speculating any longer,” Christopher said. “We can see their faces now.”

  Patchen listened. There was no need to ask questions; Christopher gave him the details, one after the other–dates, places, methods.

  “Everything but motive,” Patchen said at the end of Christopher’s report. “It’s quite a feat to do what you and Wilson have done, to work backward. Detectives are supposed to solve crimes by finding the motive.”

  “I plan to go on a little longer.”

  “Do that. I want to know. I don’t understand wanting the death of others–a poor fool like Bülow is the worst. You were right about that from the beginning. What could be worth it?”

  “I don’t know. They’ll never tell, of course. It’s too deep. Barney, who ought to know, told me even torture can’t get a human being to confess a personal act that’s covered him with shame. Anything else, but not that.”

  “You think that’s what it is?”

  “Yes,” Christopher said.

  Two attendants carrying cleaning tools entered the aviary. Patchen and Christopher moved away, toward the elephant cage. Patchen had saved the foil packages of nuts that he’d been given on the plane. Taking them from his pocket, he handed one to Christopher and kept one for himself. They fed the fancy nuts to the elephants.

  “You think you can find out why in Spain?” Patchen asked.

  “Possibly.”

  “Even with Cathy right there? It’s not the ideal operational climate, is it? Bullfights and big luncheons and lazy afternoons in the hotel room?”

  Patchen crumpled the empty package and threw it in a trash barrel. “Why does something as small as a nut mean so much to something as large as an elephant?” he asked. “I’m left
with nothing to say except crap like that.”

  “I’m meeting Cathy in Madrid day after tomorrow.”

  “Because you can’t live without her, or because she can introduce you to this man Jorge de Rodegas?”

  Christopher answered half of Patchen’s question. “Cathy knows Rodegas very well. Not only is he her godfather, he breeds Thoroughbreds. These horse people are worse than we are for living in each other’s pockets.”

  “Everyone’s world is special,” Patchen said. “It’s funny, isn’t it, how outsiders, unwitting damned dreamers, are usually the ones who drive the last nail for us?”

  2

  Wilson had not learned to relax with a man of Patchen’s rank. He sat on the edge of his chair while he made his report. Patchen and Christopher had come first to the safe house, in the early evening, and they were drinking Scotch when Wilson arrived, straight from the airport. He refused whisky but got himself a can of beer.

  “The fellow in the Turkish bath instantly made both photographs,” Wilson said. “Bülow and the female target.”

  “Her, too?” Christopher said.

  “I thought that would surprise you. It seems she came to the Schaefer Baths as a customer, to make the first contact. Evidently she had bona fides that she had to present in person.”

  “Which were?”

  “Details of an old operation during the last war. Schaefer let somebody slip through the Gestapo’s fingers in return for certain considerations–cash on the barrelhead and a good word for him in the right places after the war. This was in 1944–even SS sergeants had figured out who was going to win by that time.”

  “Can we cross-check?” Patchen asked.

  Wilson hastily swallowed a mouthful of beer, almost choking on it. He nodded deferentially to Christopher.

  “My suggestion would be to have Paul draw it out of Cerutti. He was involved. Schaefer remembered that cover name of his, Frère éméché. He said he knew a literary type must be using it–no one has used a word like éméché in French since Rabelais.”

  “I want to go back to something,” Christopher said. “She came to the Schaefer Baths as a customer?”

  Wilson was truly embarrassed. “Yes, according to Schaefer. She walked in stark naked, sat on the edge of his desk, and laid it all out. Wolkowicz was amused. He asked a lot of questions.”

  “What sort of questions?” Patchen asked.

  “About her appearance. Schaefer was impressed. He said she was like a ripe peach. I guess he doesn’t get many women in his establishment with bodies like hers.”

  “I’m surprised she’d show it to Schaefer,” Christopher said.

  “Technique,” said Patchen, once more the misogynist. “Women are born with a sense of it.”

  Wilson’s file cards made a thick pile now, frayed at the edges. He slipped the heavy rubber band that held them together over his wrist and began to read. The woman had contacted Schaefer on January 14, almost three weeks before Wolfram’s surveillance had begun.

  “Where was Christopher on that date?” Patchen asked.

  “In the Congo,” Wilson said. He pointed a finger at Christopher. “Did the target know that?”

  “That I was not in Europe, yes.”

  Wilson made another notation, nodding. He rubbed his eyes before he spoke again. “The woman had two sets of photocopies –one to reassure Schaefer and let him know that her principal was his old pal from Occupied France,” Wilson said. “The second was incriminating documents, signed by Bülow at the Hotel Lutetia in ‘44. They were death warrants for a bunch of Resistance leaders.”

  Wilson repeated Schaefer’s description of the scene. The woman, naked, sat with her legs crossed, watching him at his desk as he read the photocopies that could send him to prison for twenty years. She asked him for a cigarette and then for a light. Schaefer thought she wanted to see if his hand trembled, because she snuffed out the cigarette after one puff.

  “Then she asked Schaefer if he knew anyone in Berlin who could kill with a car,” Wilson said. “He told the gal he didn’t know such people any longer. She wouldn’t take no for an answer. After some special persuasion, as Schaefer called it, he gave her a phone number. He tried to suggest the special persuasion included sex–but, Paul, I don’t believe that.”

  “Have you a tape of this conversation?” Patchen asked.

  “No. Schaefer will only converse with naked people. Barney made him strip, too. We talked in the outdoor swimming pool. I must say it’s good protection for him.”

  “Schaefer claims that was the end of the deal, on his side–giving her the phone number?”

  “Tried to,” Wilson said, “but Barney wouldn’t buy it. Finally Schaefer said, okay, so I passed a little money for this woman. That’s what he did–set up the kill, paid the killers. He was the broker. The target gave him the whole scenario.”

  Wilson went on in his level tone of voice. His words were transformed in Christopher’s mind into a running series of illuminations: Horst Bülow hearing from his old sergeant, his obsequious old under-headwaiter at the Jockey Restaurant. Horst coming to the baths, naked and sweating in a room with strangers, being told that his past in the Abwehr could be brought to the attention of the East Germans; perhaps even that his present position as an American spy could be exposed. Horst being given bait–money, the promise of a girl, the flattery of being the key to a big operation that would hurt no one, the lost pleasure of working in secret again with Germans instead of foreigners. Being given, finally, the phone number to call to set up his own murder.

  “That’s how it was,” Wilson said. “Simplicity itself. The night before he went into East Germany to pick up the package, he phoned and set up a meeting at the zoo at 0618 the next morning. He thought they were going to ram your car, take the manuscript, and run with it.”

  “Didn’t he think they’d kill Paul?”

  “Horst tried to protect Christopher, according to Schaefer. Horst said Paul was his agent, a mere courier. Bülow implied that he was pretty big stuff in the spy game still. Killing Christopher would be unprofessional, he kept on saying.”

  Patchen waited, to see if anything would be added. Wilson went through his cards, checking off the items he had covered.

  “Who did Schaefer think the naked lady was?”

  Wilson shook his head in admiration. “He has no more idea than the man in the moon. She spoke French to him with a Russian accent. She turned him into a cut-out on the first night. He hired other cut-outs. There were three layers of soundproofing between the killers and this dame.”

  “What did Schaefer think she was?”

  “Dynamite. Scary. He figured her for the opposition right from the start. It was her cold-bloodedness.”

  Wilson had arranged to have the surveillance logs for the past forty-eight hours brought to the safe house. He met the courier in the hall and shut him up in there with a second radio playing at high volume.

  It didn’t take Wilson long to go through the material; he had been given synopses, not the minute-by-minute, word-for-word raw logs. Twice he got out a fresh file card and recorded new facts. He put the papers back in the envelope, sealed it, went into the hall, and saw the courier out the door before he spoke again to Patchen and Christopher.

  “Two new items,” Wilson said, holding up the white cards one after the other. “First, Moroni is in Spain, shooting his movie. The German girl says he did some crowd scenes in Pamplona during the fiesta and then went on to Madrid.”

  He cleared his throat and, quickly, sipped beer from his can of Schlitz.

  “And, believe it or not, audio surveillance finally turned up something. The target, talking to her case officer. They’ve had a surprise, Paul. They’re upset. But, Jesus, they’re professional– they want to turn it back on us. On you. They don’t miss a trick.”

  Wilson didn’t read aloud from this card, but handed it to Patchen, who read it and passed it to Christopher. Wilson took the card back and tapped it against his front
teeth.

  “We know she’s a cold one,” Wilson said. “But, Paul, will she really try to use this on you?”

  Christopher was tired. His bones ached–ankles and shins and the reconstructed joint of his knee. He wanted to eat something and go to sleep.

  “I guess I’ll find out when I see her,” Christopher said.

  3

  Cerutti met Christopher at the mouth of the Metro station at Porte Dauphine. He carried all the morning papers under his arm, and his face was reddened by agitation. But he kept discipline and followed Christopher at a discreet ten paces into the Bois de Boulogne. When they were alone, on a bench beneath a plane tree, Cerutti threw the stack of newspapers onto the wooden seat between them.

  “You’ve seen the wire service stories?”

  “Yes.”

  “Kamensky’s novel is being read over the propaganda radio. They are broadcasting his name!”

  “That’s what the papers say.”

  Cerutti pounded his small fist into his palm. There was ink from the fresh newsprint on his fingers, and it was smeared on his face as well.

  “Who is responsible?”

  “Whoever stole the proofs from the printer, I suppose,” Christopher said.

  “But to know it was Kamensky’s work? Who knew that?”

  Christopher, who had been looking upward into the dappled interior of the spreading tree, slowly turned his head and gazed without expression into Cerutti’s eyes. Cerutti recoiled.

  “You’re maddened by your trade if you think that of me,” he said.

  “Am I?”

  In one of his darting movements, Cerutti rose from the bench and crossed to the other side of the path. From there he stared at Christopher.

  “Yes, crazy,” he said, “like every one of you I’ve ever known since 1918. It doesn’t matter where you come from, what government sends you out. You’re a nationality to yourselves, a species to yourselves. You think everyone is like you. Merely to be in the thoughts of men like you is an insult.”