Secret Lovers

by Charles McCarry

  Christopher neither moved nor spoke. Cerutti came back and sat down. He was breathing rapidly. He continued to hold Christopher’s eyes. There really was no fear in him; if the file on his long life in an age of political panic showed anything, it showed that.

  “It didn’t occur to me to accuse you, Claude,” Christopher said. “The harm is done. It has nothing to do with our arrangement. There’s no point in chewing it over. We need each other. We’ll go on with what we were doing.”

  “But this changes everything.”

  “It restores everything to what it was at the beginning. Put Kamensky’s name back on the book.”

  “And then?”

  “Behave like a publisher. Obviously this situation is going to generate its own publicity. Act normally, as you would if all this were honest. If you need money, call. I won’t advise you further on how to handle the book. Sell it to whoever wants it for whatever you can get for it. Just run with it.”

  Cerutti, fingering the rosette in his lapel, went blank for a time.

  “What a joke the past seems,” he said. “When I saw what Kamensky had entitled this novel which says everything about the torment of my generation, I was angered. He had spat on our lives and on his own great work with such a title–how can you translate it? ‘Death, My Pet,’ ‘Deathikins’? But then I saw. Kamensky went down deeper into this age of idealism than any of us. Despair, anguish, betrayal, sacrifice–my God, Paul, some submitted to castration, the actual surgical removal of the testicles, and went on like steers, loving their masters, believing in the humanity of the Party. We thought it meant something to die for an idea. In the last moment, it’s all a joke, the kiss of a whore.”

  Bit by bit, as the morning passed, Cerutti told Christopher about the past.

  “It’s kind of you to get my mind off Kamensky, and what this is going to mean for him.”

  “I’m interested,” Christopher said. He asked a question about the Hotel Lutetia. He mentioned the name Schaefer had had when he was an SS sergeant. Cerutti was alert again.

  “You know a great deal, don’t you?” he said. “We’re pickled, all of us, in the ink of those secret clerks.”

  Cerutti related the story. In 1944, before the invasion of Normandy, the German security apparatus was rolling up Maquis networks all over France. But Cerutti’s network, with Otto Rothchild handling security, was untouched. Then, somehow, Otto had learned that the network had been penetrated. A woman, one of their best operatives, was working for the Germans. Otto confronted her. She made no attempt to resist his suspicions. Before the war, she had had a Jewish lover; her child belonged to the Jew, who was already cremated in Auschwitz. The Germans knew where the child was hidden in the countryside. She would kill the whole network to save the child.

  “Otto came to me; I had a certain feeling for this girl,” Cerutti said. “He asked me how to handle it–the only occasion in all our time together he ever asked advice. It was because I loved the girl. I had no ideas; I said I’d do anything to help. I thought of killing her myself, as a favor to a comrade. For the others who trusted her to find out what she was would be like leaving her wounded on the battlefield.”

  Rothchild, as always, had had an idea. He decided to redouble the woman, play her back against the Germans. She was terrified for her child. Rothchild told her he would rescue the child at night from the farm where he was staying near Pau, and get him across the Pyrenees. The woman was terrified for herself. Rothchild guaranteed her life. A person detected in treason will believe anything of a man who shows no anger. Patiently questioning, putting details together, Rothchild identified the German officer who was handling her.

  “This man was a Gestapo type,” Cerutti said. “In early ‘44 he was still wearing Wehrmacht uniform and Abwehr badges, but he had the power of life and death over any non-German in France. He was in Abwehr Section III F at the Hotel Lutetia, the section that killed Resistance fighters after suitable torture. But Otto had found a key. He’d known this Abwehr officer in Berlin before the war.”

  “He showed himself to this German?”

  “No, Otto played him with the girl. Otto knew something about this German officer. I don’t know what it was. A weakness.”

  Rothchild had found a way. He came back to Cerutti, reminding him that he had offered to do anything. Rothchild asked him to put himself, for one day, into the hands of the SS.

  “What were Otto’s words to you?”

  “He said, ‘You may die. We both know that. But if you don’t, we can save everything, and have more besides.’ “

  At this period, vast sums of money were coming into France from Britain for the support of the Maquis. Rothchild was a handler of money. Here Cerutti hesitated.

  “This is terribly difficult, even after all these years,” he said.

  Christopher stopped walking. Cerutti halted as well, and spoke into the air, with his face averted.

  “Rothchild, by now known by the German to be the man beyond the girl, found out what networks were going to be rolled up by the Germans. He warned London about all but one–the one that was expecting a large shipment of funds on a certain day. He gave the German the date on which the money was coming in.”

  “How could he have known?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps Otto was the backup in case the man who was supposed to receive it was lost. Perhaps someone in the doomed network just told him. Security was not always the best in the Resistance. Otto, even then, had lines out everywhere. On the night the money came, he gave me and the girl to the Germans–that is, to the Abwehr officer and the SS sergeant, who were splitting the money. It was a vast sum. They wanted a true hostage, me; they assumed that Otto didn’t care what they did to the girl, after what she’d done to us.”

  Cerutti, with the girl, spent the night with Schaefer in a Maquis safe house in a warehouse behind the Gare de Lyon. Schaefer, without removing his uniform, used the girl several times as they waited for the money to come.

  “The idea of the money excited him, the girl could feel no more shame,” Cerutti said. “You must remember, I’d loved this woman. It wasn’t easy.”

  All had gone according to Rothchild’s plan. The Germans had got their money. They let Cerutti and the woman go, and even gave them papers to travel to the Pyrenees.

  “I’m surprised they didn’t kill you,” Christopher said. “They had what they wanted, and you were witnesses.”

  “I was amazed. I can only assume that Otto had promised them something else. The war was ending, the Germans were losing.”

  Rothchild preserved his network. When the Americans came he put it at the disposal of their newborn intelligence service, as if the British and the Gaullists didn’t exist. The Americans accepted, and Otto did invaluable things for them in France and later in Germany.

  “What happened to the girl and her child?” Christopher asked.

  “I took them myself through the mountains to the Spanish frontier,” Cerutti said. “It was night and I was carrying the child on my back. The guide was ahead of me, and the girl, Solange was her name, was behind. When we got to the frontier, I handed the child–it was hardly more than a baby and we’d given it cognac to make it sleep–to the man who met us, and turned around to say good-bye to Solange.”

  The woman wasn’t there. Cerutti went back down the path, feeling his way around rocks on the strange terrain, and at last he found her. She was lying in a patch of snow that hadn’t yet been melted by the April sun, and she had cut her own throat with a razor blade.

  “I went into Spain with the child,” Cerutti said. “It couldn’t be left alone.”

  He remained in Spain until the end of that summer, crossing back into France when the Americans had cleared the German army out of the south. He left the child with a Spanish family.

  “Otto raged at me when he found that out,” Cerutti said. “He hated Spain, the very dust and stones of it. I wanted him to cross the Pyrenees for safety’s sake, after that business in Pari
s, but no. There had been too much shame and defeat in Spain for him ever to set foot in it again, he said. I’ve often wondered–what could have been so much worse that happened to him, and to all of us, in Spain, than what happened in France during the war?”

  “Maybe it was winning in the end, the second time.”

  Cerutti smiled, the first time he had done so since he and Christopher had met in the early morning.

  “Very possibly,” he said. “Victors are washed of their sins.”

  4

  Maria Rothchild, in another part of the Bois, had coaxed a squirrel to eat from her hand. Christopher stopped at the turning of the path, so as not to frighten the animal, where he caught sight of her. Maria wore a flowing summer dress, the skirt spreading around her in a perfect circle on the grass. She saw Christopher at once; her white teeth flashed in her tan face and she stood up in a swirl of pastels. The squirrel scampered away, scolding. Maria gave Christopher the second signal to approach; she lifted an arm and grinned again, the spontaneous gesture of a woman delighted by the sight of an old friend.

  “You’re getting quite a tan,” Christopher said. “Have you been slipping away to the Côte d’Azur for weekends?”

  “No, lunch on the terrace, and reading in the park on the afternoons when I can get Otto to take his pill and sleep.”

  She appraised Christopher.

  “You look like you need a vacation.”

  “I’m going to take one,” he said. “If you don’t prevent it.”

  “Me?”

  “The message said you wanted an urgent meeting, Maria. Here I am.”

  Slung on a strap over her shoulder, Maria carried an airline bag–Royal Thai Airlines; she was not immune, she said, to the chic of having flown to romantic destinations.

  “Let’s go a little way off the path,” she said.

  Christopher followed her across the grass. She wore a sundress, and the bared skin of her back, with columns of muscle along the spine, was smooth and as brown as her face. She found a place that suited her, in a glen, and knelt on the grass. From the airline bag she took a light picnic blanket, shook out its folds, and spread it.

  “You’ve nothing better to do for lunch, I hope?” she said.

  She laid two large ham sandwiches on the blanket, and some fruit and cheese. She handed Christopher a bottle of wine and a corkscrew and produced two wineglasses, wrapped in napkins.

  “No paper cups,” she said. “I remember your foibles, Paul, quite as if we’d been more than friends once upon a time.”

  She held up her wineglass to be filled, and lifted it to him. “To ties that bind,” she said.

  Holding the glass at arm’s length so that it could not spill on her dress, Maria reached into her bosom, groped for a moment, biting her lip in embarrassment, and produced a soiled envelope, folded in three. She handed it to Christopher.

  “Otto got this in the mail,” she said.

  She held out her hand for Christopher’s wineglass; there was no level place to set it down. Christopher opened the envelope.

  Inside, in the same tiny, nearly illegible hand in which he had written his novel, was a letter from Kiril Kamensky. Christopher turned his body until the sun, which fell only in spots in the glade where he and Maria were picnicking, shone fully on the flimsy page.

  “You can translate at sight, can’t you?” Maria asked.

  “Yes, I’m used to his style now.”

  The letter bore the date of the first broadcast of Kamensky’s novel into the Soviet Union. He had noted the time at the top of the sheet: 6:30 in the morning. Kamensky opened with a description of the dawn: the birches marching into the eye as the light revealed them, the temperature of the air, the smell of the lumber dacha, the sounds of a woman rattling pots, snapping a sheet as she made the bed, throwing open windows, beginning a song and interrupting it for a new task. Then, on the back of the sheet, Kamensky wrote:

  As I love you, I know it cannot be you who betrayed me. I heard my life in the air an hour ago, or heard the end of it, as one hears thunder a long way off, and sees the flash long before lightning or shrapnel pierces the flesh. I had hoped to appear harmless, to have “last years,” to be quiet, to be old, to be alone. Foolishness. I know the world too well to have dreamt as I did of playing at happiness. Don’t torment yourself with what has been done. Don’t imagine that my trust in you is broken. Don’t imagine that I have forgotten anything, not the smallest detail of our province of the past; it is like a bar of music in the skull of a man long since deaf. No sense shouting poetry at the howitzers. No sense in any of it except the meeting of man with man. Stop them now if you can. Perhaps then I’ll live a little longer. If you cannot, I forgive you. And the others, too. I brought my book to life; it sent me to my death. It was a long, long march. I took the first step of it before my murderers were born; they were waiting, invisible as ova, to be fertilized by the blind swimmers that gushed from the brutal ape that was our new age.

  Christopher held the letter in his hand, a badly made sheet of foolscap that soaked up the ink of Kamensky’s pen. “Is this all?”

  “All?” Maria said.

  “I mean just this one sheet. There’s no salutation, no signature.”

  “His other letter was the same.”

  “This came to your house? When? What postmark?”

  “No, not to the house. To a poste restante, one of Otto’s accommodation addresses. Day before yesterday. The postmark was Helsinki, like the other.”

  “How did Kamensky get hold of an accommodation address?”

  “I’ve no idea, nor has Otto. This mail drop was used strictly for nonsensitive material. Otto gave it to a lot of people. Anyone, traveling in Russia and meeting Kamensky, could have given it to him. You knew this.”

  “No.”

  “Then Wilson-Watson-Wharton did. I remember going over it, Otto going over it.”

  Maria gave Christopher back his wineglass. She held her hand out, palm flat. “Otto would like to keep the original,” she said. “I’ve brought you film of it so you’ll have all the copies you need.”

  Christopher folded the letter, put it back into the envelope, and gave it to Maria. She tucked it back into the neck of her dress. “This is a damn uncomfortable secret hiding place,” she said. “I only own one bra, and only wear it when I’m smuggling supersensitive stuff. So it’s been years.”

  Christopher drank a little of the wine and ate some cheese. Maria had been eating while he read. She wrapped the remnant of her chewed sandwich in its waxed paper and put it away. Then she turned her face to the sun as Christopher had turned Kamensky’s letter, and, shaking back her hair, closed her eyes against the heat.

  “What was Otto’s reaction to this?” Christopher asked.

  “Devastation. He didn’t understand at first what Kamensky was saying. He didn’t know the broadcasts had begun–didn’t know there were going to be broadcasts. Who’s responsible for that?”

  “Not I.”

  “I didn’t suppose so, after that scene you played the last time you saw Otto.”

  “What would Otto do, if he were still doing things?”

  Maria opened her eyes and spun round on the blanket. She crossed her legs modestly under her full skirt.

  “What anyone would do–nothing. The situation is irretrievable, isn’t it?”

  “I’d say so.”

  “But you wouldn’t say, would you–being the sort of chap you are–that you were right from the beginning, that there was nothing in this for Kamensky but death?”

  Maria waited a moment, her eyes bright with the stony control she had learned in her years as a professional. When Christopher didn’t answer, she said, “You’re not eating.”

  “No.”

  “Otto asks me to tell you this: You were right, he was wrong. He apologizes and wishes to see you soon.”

  Christopher gave her back his wineglass, still half full. He stood up; Maria remained on the bright blanket, woven of the lightest
wool, designed by an artist–like all the Rothchilds’ possessions, it was a ceremonial object.

  “My part of the message is this,” she said. “I’m not quoting Otto but my intuition as a wife. Otto, for the first time, is feeling the sorrow of death. I’ve never seen him as he’s been since that letter came.”

  She paused. She drank Christopher’s wine. She was not like herself; she went on talking, as if Christopher were a man for whom explanations had to be rephrased.

  “Do you feel what Otto’s feeling–perhaps a little of it?”

  “I don’t think so,” Christopher said. “I’m not a Russian, after all.”

  Maria took what he said as a statement of fact, nothing more. Insult was not possible between them. She burrowed in her airline bag and brought out a zippered leather case of the kind that men use for toilet articles when traveling. She opened the zipper and showed Christopher what was inside–yellow spools of undeveloped film, each with a number pasted on it. “My pictures of The Little Death,” Maria said, “the ones I took for Otto. The film has never been developed.”

  “What would I do with it?”

  “Otto thought you might like to know it wasn’t our copy of Kiril Alekseivich’s novel that was sent to the radio operation.”

  “Tell Otto I never thought it was,” Christopher said. “I’ll be around to see him in a week or so.”

  Maria was on her knees again, packing the picnic back into the bag.

  “Then you really are going to take some time off?”

  “A few days.”

  “Sunshine and Cathy?”

  Christopher nodded.

  “Who could ask for anything more?” Maria inquired.

  Maria slung her airline bag over her shoulder. She lifted a hand, as if to touch his face; he wondered if the first signs of loss showed in him as new love was supposed to do. Why else was everyone moved to touch him? Maria didn’t complete the gesture. She blew him a kiss, and swung away through the trees with her rippling athlete’s stride.