Secret Lovers

by Charles McCarry

  Cathy was radiant with remembered affection and with the vitality of the anecdote. To her mind, stories were like living creatures with hearts pumping blood. To speak about an absent friend was to bring him into the company, living and breathing and as much there, Cathy said, as those who were present in body. Then her expression became colder.

  “Why do you want to meet Don Jorge?” she asked, again.

  “First, can you arrange it? If you call, will he ask us to his house?”

  “His estancia. Yes. But why?”

  “He knows something I want to know.”

  Cathy frowned. While she had been talking, the clocks on the post office had rung the half and three-quarter hours, and now she listened to the striking of noon. She toyed with the felt coasters.

  “You told me you’d never involve me in your work,” she said at last. “Why is this different?”

  “Because there’s no other way. No one knows Rodegas.”

  “What does Don Jorge know, Paul? What do you think he knows?”

  There was no one at the neighboring tables. The waiters stood together by the bar, talking in brittle Madrid Spanish of the next day’s soccer match. Christopher leaned toward Cathy, took her hands, told her parts of what he knew.

  “They might kill him,” she replied, whispering.

  “I don’t think so. They think he’s dead these twenty-five years. I’ll find a way to conceal the source.”

  “But you can’t be sure, can you?”

  “No,” Christopher said. “You can never be sure.”

  Cathy could not make the decision at once; she was frightened by Christopher’s information, unsure of his purposes. She had never known murderers. And now murder seemed real, as she told Christopher, because she knew what she herself was capable of doing in cold blood. Had she been in truth an agent, he would not have told her about the chain of deaths in which he was involving her–it was an error in handling, it put in jeopardy his single chance to find the truth. Because he loved Cathy, he could not deceive her. He realized that he was, all the same, using her as he used agents. With them, too, it was fear of loss, and sometimes even love, that made the hideous risks they took seem worth the danger.

  For the remainder of the day, they followed Cathy’s plan; got back aboard the steamboat, as she said. She wanted to walk in the Retiro and go for a boat ride in the artificial lake. Christopher had had enough of parks, but he went with her. Gradually the light came back into her face, and she began to talk again. Everything she wished to do was something they had done before, and while they were reliving scenes she had loved she spoke of others: How, in Palma de Mallorca, they had found their way through silent, sun-scorched streets in the last minutes of the hour of siesta, and had come down a long flight of worn stairs as a clock had struck five; and, at that exact moment, as they stepped out of the sun and into the thick shade of the trees on the Borne, hundreds of birds had burst into song in the branches above their heads. And how she had recovered her childhood fear of sin, seeing jeweled rings on the chipped fingers of the wooden virgin in the cathedral at Palma; the offerings told her that this smiling city was filled with women–the rings had all belonged to women–who went in shame and in fear of death. She remembered meals, drinks, a certain line of surf as they had swum together in the sea. No event of their honeymoon, the spring and summer before, which could be recorded on the physical senses had escaped her memory: they had driven from city to city and from fiesta to fiesta, from San Isidro in Madrid in May to San Fermin in Pamplona in July, seeing bulls killed in the ring and idols and relics carried in the streets, and touching and speaking to no one but one another. It was then that Cathy had told Christopher, as they walked at sunrise on a beach near Valencia, having spent the whole night drinking manzanilla, alone with a troupe of musicians and dancers in a flamenco bar, that she had achieved what she had always desired, perfect union with a man.

  Now, a year later in Madrid, after they had eaten tapas in the warren of streets between the Puerta del Sol and the Plaza de Santa Ana ( mushrooms in one place that Cathy remembered, grilled shrimp in another, gazpacho in another, pinchos morunos in another; vino tinto in all), they sat together in a café among the sickly trees of the Plaza de Espana that seemed, at night, to be an enclosing forest, and drank glasses of weak Spanish cognac that a footsore waiter brought to them, pouring Cathy’s glass half full and Christopher’s to overflowing. Cathy had been sunk in a long silence. Then, in a small voice, she said, “All right, Paul; I’ll phone Don Jorge in the morning, or wire, or whatever is quickest.”

  Rodegas invited them to his ranch for the weekend. That gave them two more days together. They had already had eight.

  “Ten days alone is better than nothing,” Cathy said.

  4

  On the ninth day, Christopher received, through the open post, a telegram from Paris; it contained a code phrase that told him that Kiril Kamensky was dead. A day later, the news was in the papers. The Soviet authorities spoke of a heart attack. Claude de Cerutti, in Paris, used the word “murder” in a press conference. Journalists who had never known that Kamensky was alive began to describe his genius as his novel came out in Russian, and as the French translation, circulated in proof by Cerutti, began–as Otto Rothchild had put it–the process of developing Kamensky’s work in the darkroom of the public mind.

  SEVENTEEN

  1

  The estancia of Don Jorge de Rodegas lay many miles from Madrid, and Christopher and Cathy left the city before first light. They drove with the top down in the chill of the dawn, and then northward into the kiln of the summer morning, through the scorched, rising country of Old Castile. On the horizon were lines of trees, bent by the shimmering heat as the spinnakers of a sailing squadron are tilted by the wind. Nearer were the villages, cubes of earthy masonry with their blind walls turned toward the road. Cathy imagined twisted dwarfs in their streets, and widows in black, and a corrupt priest, also in black, commanding the parents of beautiful virgins to marry them to the humpbacked sons of rich fathers. Christopher tried to make her see in the bleached sky and the bleak landscape and the severe peasant architecture the colors and forms in the painting of Picasso and Juan Gris. But Cathy preferred ghosts and monsters. Wrapped round her head she wore a scarf of the same changing blue shades as her elongated eyes; as the heat increased she took it off, and knotted one end to her new necklace. Her hair and the silk, gold and blue, flew behind them like pennants. She had bought a guitar in Madrid, and when she could no longer get music on the radio she played the instrument and sang. Her small, true voice sounded, in the rushing open car filled with wind, like that of a person singing in a wood–muffled, and coming from no direction that could be identified. She could not bear the lunar silences of Spain’s empty places; she had only recently begun to learn to bear silence at all.

  There was a ringing silence when Christopher turned off the engine of the car in the flagged outer courtyard of the country house of Don Jorge de Rodegas. They were expected for the midday meal, and they had arrived at one o’clock, a polite hour. The great stone house, lying at the end of a pebble road in a deep valley, was shuttered. They had driven down an avenue of olive trees; there was a lake made from a dammed river below the house, and they had seen water spraying gardens beyond high green hedges, and smelled flowers growing. On the irrigated green hillsides, little herds of horses grazed in the shade of trees. Everywhere on this land trees had been planted for the comfort of the horses. Here, there was everything for the eye, but nothing for the ear. Christopher and Cathy heard no sound at all; even the horses, drugged by the heat, did not snort or stamp or whinny. A pair of large Scotch deerhounds loped around the corner of the house; they sat down side by side and looked at the humans, but did not bark. Cathy spoke to them. They didn’t move or pant or wag their tails. Like hidalgos who never remove their coats, the dogs took no notice of the heat.

  Christopher and Cathy got out of the car, and at that moment two young servants
in livery, wearing white gloves, emerged from the house. They were followed by a grander servant in a tailcoat. “Mendoza, the butler,” said Cathy. “I thought the first time I came here and saw him in his buttons that if Don Jorge was a duke, then Mendoza must be the king.” Mendoza was very tall, with the blond hair and the light eyes of Navarre; they were on the borders of that province. He spoke gravely to Cathy, with a shading of familiarity: “Senorita Caterina.” He had known her from young girlhood. Cathy spoke to him in French; he understood all that she said, but answered in Spanish. He made no sign, when Christopher addressed him in Spanish, that he had noticed that husband and wife were talking different languages. Don Jorge was in the pastures with the horses, but he would return for luncheon at three.

  Mendoza led them through the door and into the inner courtyard, flagged and tiled, with loggias on all four sides and a high fountain playing in the center; citrus trees grew within the walls, oranges, lemons, and limes, filling the air with a scent so heavy that it was apprehended not so much in the nostrils as in the roof of the mouth. They followed Mendoza down a long dim corridor, over carpets that Otto Rothchild, Christopher imagined, would have bent to kiss. Except for the portraits that lined the walls, the house reminded Christopher of the palace of an amir where he had once stayed in the Sudan. It had the same stillness, the same sense that the house and everyone in it were suspended out of ordinary time and place. Each was ruled by a man whose absolute authority was never exerted because it was never questioned.

  Their luggage somehow reached their rooms before they did, and the maids were unpacking it as they came in; other maids were drawing baths. When they were alone, Cathy stood in the center of the sitting room, surrounded by vases of cut flowers on all the tables, and smiled in triumph.

  “How long have you been coming here?” Christopher asked.

  “Every fall, after the Paris racing season, since I was thirteen. Twelve years. I came down last October to be with Mama and Papa for a weekend while you were in Asia.”

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  “I wrote. It was one of those letters that never found you, and it came back. You never opened it.”

  There was a Velázquez on one wall, a Goya on another, portraits of Don Jorge’s ancestors–females and children. Cathy drank a glass of mineral water. She peeled an orange and gave half of it to Christopher. The moist green leaves were still on the stem to show that it was freshly picked. While she ate her portion she wandered around the room, looking at the pictures and removing her clothes, as if she were in a hotel suite. Naked, squinting with the pleasure of biting into each sweet section of orange, she walked into the bathroom, and soon Christopher heard her settle with a sigh into the tub. He went into a separate bathroom and bathed himself. The absolute silence was broken by the voice of a woman, singing as she swept the flagstones below his window.

  2

  It was evident that Don Jorge de Rodegas loved Cathy. He shook hands gravely with Christopher and looked him in the eye without a flicker of expression. But his face, tanned like a fine hide by decades of exposure to the weathers of the Meseta, glowed with joy when he turned to Cathy. He gathered her into his arms and kissed her on the forehead and both cheeks, then stood back from her, with his hands on her elbows, and examined her musing face.

  “Perfect,” he said. “My dear Christopher, you have married the only perfect woman who has lived on this earth since ancient times.”

  He spoke English like an Englishman. Cathy had named his English public school and his college at Oxford.

  Champagne was brought to them and they drank, standing. The room was lined from floor to ceiling with paintings by the Spanish masters; most of the men, conquerors, were painted full-length. They all looked like Don Jorge–thin figures in close-fitting black, like columns of smoke against the landscapes behind them, with cruelty sleeping in their immobile faces.

  At luncheon Rodegas asked Christopher to excuse his rudeness while he asked Cathy a number of questions about her parents and about horses. He seemed to know by name every animal on the Kirkpatricks’ farm. He and Cathy discussed bloodlines and speed, and Christopher had never seen her so much at ease. Nothing showed in Rodegas’s face when, upon asking, he learned that Christopher could not ride.

  “What luck for me,” Don Jorge said; “I can ride in the morning alone with my cousin. With your permission.”

  Rodegas told them that he had arranged nothing special for the weekend; there was not much suitable company nearby, and he had supposed that the usual country-house entertainment in Spain, the fighting of heifers and the shooting of game birds, wouldn’t interest them.

  “You are,” he said to Christopher, “a poet?”

  “He is,” said Cathy.

  “Your mother-in-law was kind enough to send me a copy of one of your books. I liked the sonnets very much.” He quoted lines from two of them. “I’ve had the volume bound; perhaps you’d sign it for me.”

  Rodegas studied Christopher. Cathy took his attention away with a description of Paco Camino’s fight, just before San Fermin, in the ring at Barcelona. The corrida had been held in the rain, Camino had been gored by the second bull, but not badly, and had continued, bleeding, and taking greater and greater chances, until even the Spaniards in the crowd were moved. One man, sitting beside Cathy at the barrera, had wept openly.

  “There have been others like Camino,” Don Jorge said. “I wonder if the old ones were as classical as they say?”

  “Surely you’ve seen some of the famous ones of the last twenty or thirty years?”

  “Most of them. They’re not so wonderful in memory as they seemed at the time. I no longer go to bullfights.”

  “You feel they’ve been corrupted?”

  “They were always corrupt. Pablo Picasso is said to have remarked of some Germans who liked bullfights, ‘They would–they like bloodshed.’ Very Spanish, that–to believe that only Spaniards can understand Spanish things.”

  Christopher smiled at him. “You must not have seen much of other nationalities, here in the mountains.”

  “Not recently,” said Don Jorge, dabbing moisture from his lips with a napkin.

  “Tonight,” Cathy said, “I have a wish. Will you two grant it?”

  Rodegas turned his smile on her. “I say yes, Catherine, without even asking what it is. Tell me at dinner what it is you want.”

  “All right.”

  “What I shall want,” Don Jorge said, “is to hear you play, and it’s my wish that you should wear a white dress, if you have one with you.”

  After the dessert, Cathy left them; it was a Spanish house after all, she said. Rodegas smoked a cigar while he and Christopher drank coffee. He chose to speak of poetry; he believed that only two languages, English and Russian, were capable of producing great poetry. Christopher asked if he spoke Russian as well as English; Rodegas let the question go by and pressed Christopher for his opinion on this idea.

  “I’ve heard that said, often,” Christopher replied. “Always, before this, by Englishmen or Americans or Russians.”

  “Well. I’m a sort of Englishman, my mind was formed in England. It always seemed odd to me that Russian should be the other language of great poetry, when the Russians are, generally speaking, so contemptuous of self-control. Poetry ought to deal with what did not happen.”

  Rodegas led Christopher out of the dining room. In the great hall, he showed him a portrait of a young woman in ringlets; a large ruby glowed between her fine breasts. “My father called this the sacred heart portrait,” Rodegas said. “It’s Eugenie, of course. My ancestress, and Catherine’s. They do look rather alike, don’t they? But Eugenie, poor woman, seems a bad copy of a masterpiece beside Catherine.”

  That evening, they strolled in the garden. It was a hodgepodge of the Moorish, French, and Italian styles, with avenues of trees, beds of flowers planted in elaborate designs, a maze, and many fountains. One of Don Jorge’s ancestors had come back from Versailles in the eig
hteenth century and installed a number of water jokes–jets that sprayed upward from the paths into women’s skirts, or outward from the walls into the face and hair. Don Jorge, cautioning them to stand well back, sprang some of the traps. “These devices to mock and shatter dignity were never a great success with Spaniards,” he said. “My grandfather used to demonstrate them on foreign servants specially hired for the purpose. I remember him doing so when I was a child.”

  Mendoza and two footmen brought them cocktails, dry martinis containing olives stuffed with almonds. They drank two very large ones each, seated on a bench in a grotto with cool water running down the walls and bubbling out of the floor everywhere but on the stone island where they sat. One of the footmen stood just outside the grotto; the other, returning to the house with Mendoza, sang as he went. Rodegas asked Cathy what her wish was.