Secret Lovers

by Charles McCarry

  “I want you to talk about yourself, for a whole evening, Don Jorge,” she said. “Especially about your youth–love and war.”

  The footman returned with more martinis, in fresh glasses, and another plate of canapes.

  “You wouldn’t be amused,” Rodegas said. “There was no love and too much war.”

  “I insist.”

  “Then I surrender. But not tonight. You must first play for me. Tomorrow morning we’ll ride. Then we’ll see.” He turned to Christopher. “Perhaps she’ll forget by tomorrow.”

  “She never forgets an appetite.”

  “So she doesn’t.”

  At dinner, an elaborate meal with long pauses between the courses, Rodegas asked about their life together. Cathy spoke of the journeys they had taken, of their meetings in Paris and Madrid and London, and how once she had come to Nairobi and Christopher had taken her up into the hills to see the game, and read to her from Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa the account of the death of the author’s lover. Rodegas nodded and quoted from the book: “ It was fit and proper that lions should come to Denys’s grave and make him an African monument. . . . Lord Nelson himself, I have reflected, in Trafalgar Square, has had his lions made only out of stone.’ ” Cathy, wearing the long white gown that Don Jorge had asked to see her in, said that it was unbearable that Christopher and Rodegas, the two men she loved beyond reason, should both be in love with the ghost of this Danish girl who had lived in the Ngong Hills when the one was a schoolboy and the other a child.

  “I should think you would find it unbearable, to be apart so much,’ ” Rodegas said, “and to live so much in public when you’re together.”

  “Those parts are no great fun,” Cathy said.

  Rodegas studied her with great seriousness, but if he saw her unhappiness he said nothing about it.

  “I didn’t realize,” he said to Christopher with a smile, “that poets traveled quite so much as you seem to do.”

  “Most don’t, I suppose,” Christopher said.

  “And what is he looking for, Catherine, in Germany and in Africa and in Indochina, and following the bulls in Spain?”

  “I don’t know,” Cathy said. “He has his reasons.”

  Cathy began to play at midnight. Rodegas and Christopher, drinking French cognac, sat in deep chairs at the other end of the room, so that they could hear the full resonance of the piano. Rodegas had a taste, surprising in so arid a man, for Chopin and even Schumann. These were easy exercises for Cathy; she played for hours. It rained, a sudden downpour, outside the open window behind her. She played on through the storm. The wind blew the music off the rack and she completed the piece without an error. Don Jorge applauded and a servant, responding to the handclaps, came in and collected the scattered sheets.

  “That was much more pleasant than memories of war,” Rodegas said.

  “Nevertheless,” said Cathy. “I demand a story tomorrow night.”

  Their bedroom was at the end of the house, so that one set of windows opened on the courtyard with its fountain and the other looked out on the slope of the mountain, which was strewn with white boulders. There was a bright moon and for a while they watched the horses, some of them dozing and some grazing in its light.

  In bed, Cathy said, “Listen, Paul–the fountain on one side, dead silence on the other.”

  Like the Trevi and the Piazza Oratorio, Christopher thought.

  “That was a stupid thing to say,” Cathy said, as if he had thought aloud. “I forget I can’t be completely honest with you anymore.”

  Neither of them could sleep, they had had such a long siesta and eaten so much food. Cathy spoke to Christopher about her ride with Don Jorge the following morning. She knew they would talk about Christopher. She did not want to deceive him.

  “Can’t you tell him what you are, before I make him tell you what you want to know?”

  “No. It’s not done; I can’t do it, literally cannot speak the words to an outsider. Anyway, I think Don Jorge already has a good idea of what I am. He himself has been something like me in the past.”

  Still, Cathy worried. It was wrong to trick a man in his own house, especially a man one knew and loved.

  “Can’t I tell him, while we’re riding in the morning?” she asked. “Believe me, nothing will make him betray you; you’re married to me.”

  “All right,” Christopher said; it was what he had wanted her to do.

  3

  At dinner, Cathy wanted Don Jorge to begin his confessions with the history of his loves.

  “Why, for example,” she asked, “do you and Paul pine for that Danish woman who wrote about Kenya?”

  “Because of the beauty of her mind, because she accepted her womanhood, and in her books, at least, took no revenge on anyone for it,” Don Jorge said. “Weren’t you moved by what she wrote, Catherine, when Paul read it to you?”

  “I wept. But I get so sick of that word beauty. It’s a male word. Do you live for anything else, any of you?”

  Rodegas gave her a serene look, as if the sight of her were answer enough to the question.

  “That look!” Cathy said. “All my life I’ve seen it. If it comes from someone I love, such as either of you, I don’t mind; in fact I adore it. But others, all my life, have made me feel like an animal that has the power of speech. As a little girl, I was called by the names of animals–Pussycat, Bunny Rabbit. Papa called me Filly.”

  Rodegas and Christopher waited for her to continue, but she drank champagne and ate her souffle instead. Tonight she wore nothing that Christopher had ever given her, and indeed had not since they had arrived; in Rodegas’s house she wore the jewels that had been passed down to her in her family: pearls, rubies, diamonds that had become hers as a bride.

  After supper, Rodegas showed them pictures in room after room of the house; Mendoza went ahead of them, turning on the lights. Cathy cared little for painting. “Tell Paul what the duchess said,” she asked.

  “This woman has the greatest private collection in Spain, portraits of her ancestors,” Rodegas said. “She was asked by a journalist if she was not filled with awe, to possess the works of all those dead geniuses. ‘Awe?’ she replied, ‘Genius? Goya, Velázquez, Rembrandt, were simply the people my family hired before the invention of photography.’ “

  Cathy would not let Rodegas stray from his promise. She pulled him into a room where candles burned in an old chandelier.

  “Begin somewhere interesting in the story of your life,” she said. “You don’t have to begin at the beginning. But, Don Jorge, begin.”

  Rodegas took her hand. “One of the reasons I was so affected by the writing of Karen Blixen, Isak Dinesen as she called herself–that Danish woman in Kenya,” he said, “was the manner of her lover’s death. Denys Finch-Hatton was killed in an airplane crash; he capsized with his machine, as the author put it. That happened to my own parents, you know, when I was a small child. My father was mad to be the first to fly from Barcelona to Constantinople. He and my mother crashed on the day they set out, in the mountains between here and Barcelona. Capsized.”

  It was because of that that Rodegas had been sent to England to be educated; his father, one of a type, weakened by strange enthusiasms, that appeared from time to time in the family, had ordered it in his will. Rodegas was sent to a preparatory school near London when he was eight, then to a public school, then to Oxford; he spent the long vacations at the estancia, but hardly ever went into Spanish society. One of his father’s brothers was in a diplomatic post in London, another was a high officer in the army, a third was an archbishop. They gave leave to seedy Englishmen to teach Don Jorge Latin and Greek. But in the summers, they made him into a Spaniard.

  “That didn’t include marriage and the production of an heir?” Cathy asked.

  “I failed to find the woman I wanted. Karen Blixen was born too soon, and you, Catherine, too late.”

  “Be serious.”

  “I am perfectly serious. No woman I met was s
uitable. Spanish girls of my class were, in my day, unknowable, though I was engaged to one for a time. The English were too rude–that is their good manners among themselves, but it would not be understood in this country. Americans are too easily bored to live as I live.”

  “Was it the civil war in Spain that made marriage difficult for you?”

  “I didn’t fight in that war as a soldier.”

  “But you were in it?”

  “Yes. Everyone in Spain was in it–and, worse, thousands of foreigners. Civil wars are always very much worse, Catherine, when foreigners take an interest in them.”

  Then he told the tale, in the third person, using the artificial names that the characters in his story had employed, but describing real places and real acts in a real time.

  4

  Carlos, the young hero of the story, was born in 1910, of noble parents, who soon left him an orphan. He was sent to England in 1919. His uncle, the diplomatist, had a Spaniard’s abiding suspicion of the British espionage service; it seemed inevitable to him that the English would, sooner or later, attempt to make use of a Spanish noble who had been wholly educated in their country and who might, the force of nature being what it is in young men, even marry an Englishwoman. Therefore Carlos was registered at his schools, and later at the university, not under the name that his family used–the one that went with his duke-dom–but under the name that belonged to one of the minor titles the family had acquired in antiquity through marriage. He had no need of credentials, such as diplomas, in his true name. His uncle sent a car for him every week while he was in school and had him brought to London for the weekend, to speak Spanish and to learn about Spain. In summer, he returned to Castile to the remote country house that was the seat of his family. Here he was visited by relatives and trained by servants, but he saw almost no one else. There was no time for it; he had only three or four months out of each year to live his true life as a member of the Spanish ruling class. The result was that, though Carlos knew a lot of people in England, none of them knew him by his real name; and though everyone in Spain knew his famous name, almost no one in that country knew him by sight.

  Between school and Oxford, he performed his military service. His uncle the general arranged that this should be done in a remote post in Morocco. The idea was to show him blood. At that time there was war between the Spanish colonial forces and the desert tribesmen. Carlos, as a lieutenant of cavalry, killed five men in the course of a year and was himself wounded twice, once by a spear, once by a bullet. Spain was in political uproar. Carlos took no particular interest in the rise and fall of dictators, the rebellion of garrisons on the peninsula. This had always gone on. The Bourbon king abdicated. It had nothing to do with his family, or with the other ancient families connected to his family. His uncles believed that the real threat to Spain–and to Catholicism, which was the same thing in the mind of the archbishop and probably in the minds of the others as well–came from outside Spain. They were greatly afraid of communism. Of anarchism, too, and socialism. All were the same thing in their eyes. Carlos’s uncle the archbishop, then only a monsignor, had seen forty-eight churches burned in 1909 in Barcelona, and drunken workers dancing in the streets with the corpses of nuns they had taken from the catacombs.

  “In that tragic week,” the archbishop would tell his brothers, and his nephew, “I looked the Antichrist in the face.”

  They were Spaniards, nobles and prelates. They decided that they needed an agent in the enemy camp. Carlos was engaged, by arrangement, to the daughter of another duke who was a party to the conspiracy, and sent to Oxford. He studied Arabic for his own pleasure, and Russian in preparation for his mission. He was instructed to ingratiate himself with the English Communist movement that was flourishing at Oxford in the 1930s. It was an easy job; many of the people the Communists were recruiting at the university were from the aristocracy or its fringes, class renegades. Outwardly, Carlos became like them. In 1934 he was introduced by one of his dons to a Russian, who recruited him as an agent of the Comintern. The resources of the NKVD were not sufficient to discover Carlos’s real identity, much less his real purposes. The Russians knew that nations had intelligence services; they never suspected that a class, even the class they were hoping to destroy in Spain, should send secret agents against them.

  Carlos went down from Oxford in that year. He spent the next months in Barcelona being trained as a terrorist; there he met many other Spaniards, all of them of a different class and all of them going under false names. He memorized all their faces. In 1935 he was sent away from Barcelona with a false English passport supplied by the Russians, with instructions to go to Madrid and wait. He did so. When the war broke out, in the summer of 1936, Carlos was in place.

  That fall, his fiancée, whom he had not seen for two years, decided to join him at the estancia. No one ever knew why she imagined he was there. (“She was a simple girl, Carlos hardly knew her,” Rodegas related. “In order to get from where she was to the estancia she had to cross the front lines. She decided that she would certainly be safe, even from Communists and Anarchists, if she disguised herself as a nun. She had led, as you can see, a very cloistered life. She set out, walking, like a heroine of the Middle Ages. Of course she was raped and killed by the first Loyalist patrol she encountered; her maid, too.”)

  Carlos learned nothing of this until the war was over. He became a successful spy, and had many adventures.

  (“One in particular will, I think, satisfy Catherine’s curiosity because it is, like the romantic death of Carlos’s betrothed, a story that combines love and war,” said Rodegas.)

  During the siege of Madrid, in the autumn and early winter of 1936, Carlos was, at one and the same time, an important agent of the Comintern, and the leader of the Fascist fifth column in Madrid. Carlos met with Comrade Medina, the fat Italo-Argentine who was the Comintern’s “instructor” in Spain, and with Mediña’s assistant, a Bulgarian named Stepanov; he worked with Konev, called Paulito in Spain, who was chief of terror for the Soviet apparatus. At the same time, he sent out information to his family–lists of names, lists of supplies, lists of the condemned. And scrupulous lists of all his own acts of terrorism, which were undertaken to build and protect his cover. He lived both his roles fully, murdering efficiently to win the trust of those he was betraying.

  (“That is why he lived,” said Rodegas.)

  Because Carlos had so many languages–Spanish, English, Russian, German, French–and had them so well, he was assigned to Madrid to the foreign community. Foreigners were pouring into the capital–journalists, spies, soldiers. Moscow wanted them watched; sometimes it wanted one of them killed. The Soviet controllers especially wanted a watch kept on Russians. It was better for a Spaniard to do it than a Russian, because Russians generally believed that Spaniards were children, and they would speak in front of them as they never would in the presence of others.

  Carlos was assigned to observe and report on a young Russian poet who had been sent to Spain as a journalist. That was truly all he was, a journalist. He was brilliantly talented as a writer and he had been very brave as a boy soldier in the Russian civil war. But he had no gift for intrigue. He was, perhaps, the one Russian in Madrid who was what he seemed to be.

  (“The Russian boy’s name was Zhigalko,” Rodegas said, “Kolka Zhigalko.”)

  Carlos was puzzled, before he met Kolka Zhigalko, that everyone called him a boy; according to his dossier, he was older than Carlos. No one thought Carlos a boy.

  When Carlos met Zhigalko, he understood. Zhigalko, pink and curly and smiling, exuded sexuality. Even Spanish girls were eager to sleep with him. There was a wild light in him, which was his talent. He was prodigally generous with his body, his money, his thoughts. Carlos saw him sweetly–and he supposed, when the time came, passionately–accept the advances of ugly girls. He saw him permit transparent knaves to cheat him, because he saw that it gave them pleasure. He composed songs for people he took a fancy to, played and
sang them, and forgot them; he said they were for the person to whom he sang them and it would be wrong to preserve them. Zhigalko would go out to observe the fighting in the university city–remember, he was a journalist and a noncombatant–and he would join in, rescuing the wounded. He had type O blood, the most usable kind; he gave so much of it to wounded men that he became translucent. He had no fear of anything–not of embarrassment, not of disgrace, not of failure, not of punishment, not even of death. He had the gift of knowing, all the time, in his mind and in his blood, that he was alive. Carlos asked him, when he knew him better, how he could bear to go to sleep and lose touch with his waking self. “But I dream!” Zhigalko cried.

  It was no wonder that the NKVD worried about Zhigalko. To him, they meant nothing. Kolka Zhigalko was a Communist, almost an old Bolshevik, he had gone to war with the Red Army in his teens. But he had been formed, like all Russians, in the Church and in the language and in those vast spaces of mystical Russia that everyone always uses to explain the fatalism of the Russian character. Kolka cared nothing for the secret police. How could they imprison him? He thought himself a beam of light.

  In one of his songs, he made it up in his room in the Gran Via for an English girl whose lover had been killed by a shell, he sang quite openly about God. Carlos never forgot the lines: “What is one instant of pain to a man, one passage through its darkness / When he comes from the bright face of his love for a woman / Into the heart of the Savior?” What did it matter to Kolka if the secret police killed him? They had nothing to do with what he was.

  Carlos understood that Kolka Zhigalko, living as he did, could not survive long. The temptation to protect him was very great, and for a while Carlos did. After all, Kolka was harmless by the standards of any sane man. He was a passionate Russian patriot, a passionate lover of the international working class. What Kolka did, everything he did, he did for love. He was the only Communist Carlos ever met–indeed, he may have been the only political zealot who ever lived–whose beliefs made him lovable because they rose from the truth and sweetness of his character in the same way that the actions of Saint Francis rose from his faith. That was the basis of his genius, and there was no doubt, even among the secret agents who were watching him and pondering whether or not to kill him, that he was a genius. His battle dispatches were extraordinary; every line he wrote was made flesh as soon as it was read by another person. Of course, what he wrote was not printed in Pravda as he wrote it. He cared nothing for dialectics, for jargon, for official terminology. Kolka thought that revolution had to do with life, and life with humanity, and humanity with language. The censors removed all that from Kolka’s stories. The odd thing was, Kolka was a true peasant, the son of a brute and a slattern; one of those aberrations that crops up in all breeds of animals, the one random masterwork in a hundred generations.