Secret Lovers

by Charles McCarry

  SIXTEEN

  1

  Cathy had a plan for them to follow in Madrid. On the hotel telephone, when Christopher called her from the airport, she asked if he had any work to do while they were together. “One thing only,” Christopher replied, “but it will be so mixed up with fun that you won’t know it’s happening.” The line went dead briefly, then Cathy said, “I’m better at reading you than I used to be, Paul. You’ll see.”

  In their room, when he arrived, she refused to make love. “Luncheon first, in the cellar of the Nacional Hotel,” she said. “I’ve booked us one of those wonderful booths with the high carved backs and fronts–do you remember? We’ll eat the entire menu, champagne throughout.”

  As she named each of the five courses, she gave him a fluttering kiss. He stepped back, holding her hands, and laughed with the joy of seeing her again. Her eyes darkened with pleasure. Cathy considered Paris and Rome home ground, but when they met in another city, they gave each other gifts. Christopher had brought her a heavy gold necklace, an antique. She looked at herself in the glass while Christopher clasped it around her throat. “It’s a necklace for a queen,” she cried. She gave him his present, a tiny drawing. “My God, Cathy, it’s a Goya–what did you have to spend for this?” he asked. She watched his delight. “In real money, I don’t know.” she said. “Lots and lots of pesetas, though. It would have been more, but my wonderful Don Jorge got it for me from some ruined nobleman.”

  “That’s Jorge de Rodegas?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve seen him?”

  “I always see him. When I was sixteen I wanted to propose marriage to him, but Mama said it would be incest. ‘Incest?’ I said. ‘He’s no more than a twelfth cousin by marriage and you and Papa are first cousins once removed.’ She told me Don Jorge would go to hell if he married his goddaughter. He’d already sentenced himself to purgatory by being godfather to an Episcopalian.”

  “Maybe you should have asked Don Jorge his opinion.”

  “Maybe,” Cathy said. “He’s more beautiful than you, Paul, and a whole lot richer, and he stays at home. He’s gone to the mountains now, back to his estancia.”

  At lunch, in the cool restaurant with its dark wood and blue tiles, she spoke about her music. She had rented a suite at the Palace Hotel with a piano in the sitting room. While he was in Paris and Berlin, after she had come down from Pamplona, she had stayed in the suite, alone, playing through the long afternoons.

  “Did you see me?” she asked Christopher. “Did you hear the music?”

  “I do now.”

  “Tell, Paul–all the details.’

  In fact he had imagined her seated at the instrument. The picture had come into his mind, along with those of Horst Bülow being lured to his death, when Wilson had come back from the Schaefer Baths with his report. He had caught a look of puzzlement in Wilson’s face because he had grimaced suddenly, at the incongruity of the mental images, a diptych with Bülow’s sagging corpse on one leaf and Cathy’s luminous figure on the other.

  “All right,” he said. “The shutters were closed and there were bars of light falling on your figure and running across the music rack. The bracelet I gave you in Rome, on the night we bought the cats, was lying on the little piece of wood at the treble end of the keyboard, and it picked up the light. You were wearing a yellow dress, with the skirt pulled up over your thighs. Your feet were bare, working the pedals. You were playing Bach and not getting it right; you played a passage from one of the Preludes over and over, and after making mistake after mistake in the same bar you crashed your fist down onto the keyboard, then sucked your hand because you’d hurt it.”

  As Christopher spoke, Cathy, her eyes intent, sipped champagne thirstily, as though the wine were a potion that drew these visions from him.

  “That’s absolutely accurate,” she said. “Paul, it’s no wonder I’m living under an enchantment. How do you do it? What else did you see?”

  Christopher seized her face and kissed it. He said, “I made it all up. Cathy, how many times have I watched you play the piano? It’s a game, this business of the sight. I don’t have it.”

  “You do. What else did you see?”

  A waiter took away their empty plates; the headwaiter, drinking the sight of Cathy as avidly as she gulped wine, poured more champagne and brought another bottle.

  “I saw you, often, when you weren’t alone,” Christopher said.

  Cathy returned his gaze without embarrassment.

  “I know. You’d come into my mind. I couldn’t turn the others into you, though; you wouldn’t let me, Paul.”

  Cathy would not give up her belief in magic, telepathy, curses, second sight; she had grown up in a house filled with ghosts, hearing tales of witches and enchantments. As a child, she had seen fortunes told with cards and chicken bones, and the future foretold in the liver of a bird.

  Christopher held up his hand; they stopped talking. Another course was brought. “If we lived in Spain, Paul, we’d die of gluttony, ’ Cathy said. “Why don’t we live here for a while? You love it so.”

  “Live here? All you’d need is an eye for beauty and a heart of stone. Italy is bad enough.”

  “Every place is bad enough. Shall we talk about the downtrodden nigras and the white trash and Miss Catherine up in her big ol’ white house on the hill? That’s what they used to do a lot in school; your pal Maria Custer would invite me to bull sessions so she and the other guilty rich girls would have a Southerner to whip, just like I was supposed to have whipped the slaves back home.”

  “You really don’t like Maria, do you?”

  Cathy smiled, a parody of Maria Rothchild’s bold and sudden grin. “I hate her,” she said. “I always have.”

  “Will you say why?”

  “I don’t want to talk about Maria, or anyone except you and me.”

  Christopher shrugged. Cathy’s smile had vanished. Her hand had been lying on his thigh, and she took it away.

  “All right,” she said. “Maria is a snob. She’s rotten with pride–in her family, her brains, her wit, her looks, and now that old Russian husband. She makes you keep quiet while she boasts–she’s like de Gaulle talking about France. Everyone sees that utter nonsense is being talked, but it’s so embarrassing that you let it pass.”

  “What harm is there in somebody else’s self-delusion?”

  “Try contradicting Maria or frustrating her or insulting her and you’ll find out, Paul. If you touch one hair of her silly, transparent, pretentious idea of herself, Maria will kill you if she can. Literally. She’s an assassin.”

  Christopher picked up Cathy’s wineglass and put it into her hand. “I think we’d better talk of indifferent things for the rest of this lunch,” he said.

  Cathy told him that she wanted to control their time in Madrid–choose the things they did, select the foods and wines, the times they slept and were awake, the things they bought, even the clothes Christopher wore. “I’ve imagined it all,” she said. “In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain tells how the pilot of a riverboat had to have the whole length of the Mississippi in his mind, every detail in this mental river–sandbars and channels and villages on the banks–exactly as they were in the real river. That’s what I’ve done with Madrid, made it into a place in my mind for you and me. I’m the pilot, you’re the passenger.”

  Christopher laughed aloud again; he thought that he had never loved her so much, taken such pleasure in the flight of her mind, the rise and fall of her voice.

  “All right,” he said. “But I’ll have to get off the steamboat just once. There’s something I want to do.”

  “Not alone, Paul. With me, every day, every minute.”

  “This is something I can’t do without you, Cathy. You’re the key to the door.”

  “What door is that?”

  He didn’t tell her.

  The enormous luncheon, not begun until midafternoon, lasted till after five o’clock. Christopher and Cathy walked
hand in hand up the Paseo del Prado, under a sun that was still brilliant and hot. Coming out of the darkened restaurant, Cathy was stricken blind by the light and covered her eyes with her hands. Christopher led her inside the Prado Gallery, and in the long, dim galleries her sight returned. They looked at the El Grecos.

  “Part of the cruise on the Mississippi is a trip to Toledo to see more of these,” Cathy said. “El Greco does get to you, doesn’t he? He used lunatics from an asylum for models, and the figures are all stretched out that way because El Greco had a bad astigmatism. That’s what I learned at Bryn Mawr.”

  “I thought all you did at Bryn Mawr was play the piano.”

  “I had to do some reading, and there were weekends when I did a power of kissing.”

  Cathy pulled Christopher’s head down and kissed him, long and searchingly, on the lips. An elderly Spanish guard, shouting his outrage, hobbled across the room and pulled them apart. Cathy, in her Spanish that kept sliding into Italian, told him that they were married. She showed him their rings.

  “It’s all a lie,” Christopher said. “See? The rings don’t match. And, besides, she’s been insulting El Greco.”

  The guard was stern; there was a ban, imposed by the archbishop, on the sexes touching one another in public. “The lady must be more modest while she is visible to Spaniards,” he said.

  “Let’s go indoors, then,” said Cathy.

  But in the hotel bed she lay rigid, and shuddered at Christopher’s touch. He moved away. “No,” she said, “go on, Paul. It’s nothing to do with you. I’ll be all right.” He touched her but came no closer. She spoke the words she had spoken when she had come back to their bed and awakened him, weeks before, in Rome. “Help me,” she said.

  They slept, woke in the dark with the sounds of evening coming in at the shutters, made love again. Cathy had changed; there was a difference in her body. Christopher, unable to see her face, and still confused by sleep, thought for an instant that he was with a strange woman. He pulled away from her spasmodically, so suddenly that her fingernails raked his back. He fumbled with the bedside lamp, turned it on, and, crouching, looked down into her face.

  “Paul, my God–you’ve got murder in your eyes.”

  He rolled away, onto his back. She followed him, pushed the hair back from his forehead. She asked no questions; six months before, she would have insisted on knowing what had happened in his mind. Then, he would have put her off.

  “I had a hallucination,” he said now. “I must have been asleep when we started. I thought it wasn’t you.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. You feel different to me. It panicked me, to think I might have lost control and had another woman against my will.”

  “Panicked you why–because you lost control, or because you thought it was somebody else?”

  “Both.”

  Once more he saw the image of Cathy, lifting her breast toward a lover’s lips; he saw the man’s dark face. He told her what was in his mind. “That happened in Capri,” she said. “Can you go on, knowing that?” Christopher touched her lips. And, as Cathy began to cry out, he said, “I love you.”

  2

  Cathy was as silent about her lovers as Christopher about his spies. What had happened to him in bed, he thought, was not entirely a trick of the mind: Cathy had changed, or awakened in herself a second identity. He began to understand why she had been excited by his own hidden life. His desire for her, which had always been almost unbearable, became stronger. Now, sometimes, it was Cathy who smiled at his ardor. He had never felt sexual jealousy, and he did not feel it now. Cathy, nevertheless, reassured him constantly, in silent ways, accomplishing what she wished as she had always done, with her flesh. But she was more graceful, more gentle, more aware of Christopher. The mystery had begun to run both ways. Finally, as they lay resting one afternoon, he asked her if she knew these things. For a long time she remained silent, one long leg lifted and flexed in the shaft of lemon-colored light that traced a diagonal from the window to the bed.

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “What made you change?”

  “The others,” Cathy said, gazing at the play of the sun on her calf. “I know you don’t believe it, but you really were my first lover. I wasn’t prepared for anyone like you.”

  Her leg fell of its own weight. She turned over, looked into his face, pushed back his hair, traced the line of his features: all the old gestures. Something was gathering in her brain; Cathy had been trained to be amusing and musical and elusive, never to be honest with a man. Christopher, withholding from her part of his own honesty, the portion that had to do with his agents, had caused her to thirst for the truth. She had come, after only a year with him, to the point where she would accept almost any pain to have the whole truth. She would even speak it herself.

  “What these affairs have been, Paul, is like dancing lessons.

  Sleeping with these men, so clumsy and so selfish, has shown me the mistakes I made with you. The same thing happened when I took ballet–I couldn’t dance until I saw someone else making the errors I’d been making. After that, I knew what not to do. Is that the secret of life?”

  “It may be.”

  “You’re never going to ask me anything about the others, are you?”

  “No.”

  In the end, he knew, the others would ruin them. Cathy hadn’t the equipment to go on submitting herself to them without sensuality, in order to intensify the taste and scent and the visions of their life together. She was too open to pleasure, too conscious of physical beauty, too new at living in secret. Sooner or later she would begin to love her new self, which was separate from Christopher, as much as the old; the two lives would spill into each other. Christopher knew. He was trained, and experienced, and cold; but, with all that, he could not control the spillage.

  Cathy, already trading information, wanted to ask him a question. Their lives had changed, something had happened to her mind as well as Christopher’s, on the train between Paris and Rome. It was then, as she looked out the windows into a hypnotic whorl of snowflakes, that she had decided that she must commit, as she put it to him, some act of madness in order to break through to him. She wanted to know what had happened in Germany–why he was so shattered. “I saw cruelty in you that night,” she said. “Not just your old hardheartedness. Cruelty.”

  “An agent was killed.”

  Cathy was neither surprised at the statement, nor surprised that he would tell her; he had told her other things that she had no need to know, in the beginning when she required signs that he trusted her as much as the men and women with whom he spent his real life, and whom she never saw.

  “How? Did you kill him?”

  “No, I didn’t commit the murder. But I caused it. I was stupid about something. I made a mistake.”

  “And while I’ve been doing all these things you’ll never ask about, you’ve been trying to avenge your own mistake–is that it?”

  Christopher didn’t answer, and Cathy, with her new senses awake, drew back.

  3

  The next: day, Christopher asked her to introduce him to Jorge de Rode gas.

  They were seated together under the awnings of the cafe in the Plaza de las Cibeles. Cathy liked to go there in the forenoon, to hear the great clock strike eleven and twelve, to watch the crowds, to observe Christopher’s pleasure in the small glasses of cold draft beer that were served there; she liked the thick disks of brown felt on which the glasses were set–she liked all small things, such as precious metals and common rocks and cats, that had more weight, when held in the hand, than their mass suggested.

  When she heard Christopher utter Rodegas’s name, she came out of a reverie–the clock had been striking eleven.

  “Don Jorge de Rodegas?” she said. “Why?”

  As always when she was taken unawares, her accent thickened; she spoke several sentences in her natural drawl before the intonation she had been sent north to learn returned to her.<
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  “I want to know him,” Christopher said.

  Cathy put a finger on Christopher’s arm. “No one knows Don Jorge. He’s worse than you for secrets.”

  “Let’s be spies, then,” Christopher said. “Brief me about Rodegas ”

  Cathy spun the story in the air between them. She was as amused and as animated as her mother, and loved a colorful character as much. She came from a society in which the language was still used to express wonder at the comedy of life. Of Rodegas, she said that he had come to the Kirkpatrick’s farm just after the war, when she was still a young girl, to buy horses. Her father had asked him to stay with them; there were no decent hotels in the nearest town, and Don Jorge carried a letter of introduction from a man in France who was much liked by her father. The two men spoke about horses all day. It was Cathy’s mother, of course, who drew Don Jorge’s story from him at the dinner table. He was a grandee of Spain, the childless head of an ancient family, a man of such sureness that he never, for an instant, mimicked the manners of his hosts; he was what he was. “He wore a coat and tie and never a hair was out of place from sunup to bedtime,” Cathy said. “He was, in those days, twelve years ago this spring, incredibly handsome, with a high forehead and a great arched nose–not unlike Maria’s husband in looks, if Otto were in perfect health and fifteen years younger.” Don Jorge knew all about the Kirkpatricks’ connection to Eugenie; he, too, was related to the fallen empress through the Spanish branch of her family, and considered the Americans cousins. “And, Paul, he is once a duke, four times a marquis, and I don’t know how many times a count.” On Cathy’s thirteenth birthday, she and her parents and Rodegas had gone riding to hounds. Cathy’s horse, a birthday present, had fallen as he tried to take a limestone wall that was too high for him, and Cathy had broken her leg. They were miles from the nearest telephone. Rodegas had carried her in his arms, guiding his horse with his knees only, at such a smooth canter that she had felt virtually no pain. “Had I been the last glass of wine in the world, Paul, Don Jorge wouldn’t have spilled a drop of me,” Cathy said. “He had arms like steel. If I’d’ve had any sense I would have given him my virginity at the end of the ride. Instead, I cried because they had to cut off my new boot. My father made me drink bourbon for the pain, and it gave me a terrible crying jag–I couldn’t stop. Don Jorge brought me, in the hospital, five dozen white roses, and the most beautiful pair of boots I have ever owned–he had them made in London and flown over for me. That was in the days when I thought flying was something boys in the Air Corps did; everyone else took ships. It was too romantic.” No one knew why Don Jorge kept so much to himself; not even Cathy’s mother had been able to draw the secret from him. He stayed in Spain, never leaving except to buy breeding stock in America and in Ireland. He visited no other countries; evidently he had no foreign friends except the Kirkpatricks and a family of horsemen in Kilmoganny. He raced his horses only in Spain. His name never appeared on the card as owner; he used one of his lesser titles instead. He was almost never seen in public.