Secret Lovers

by Charles McCarry

  Carlos was pressed for incriminating material on Zhigalko. He held back. The pressure was increased. Kolka was in the machine; it was impossible to release him. Anyone who has had to do with secret life will know that this is the unbreakable truth about it, that once a thing is started, once a case is opened, it can never be abandoned. The file must be completed. The spy longs for the final fact as the monk yearns for the last Host. Carlos, it must be said, lost his coldness where Kolka was concerned. He saw that Kolka was an artist, and that weighed. He saw that he was good, in the antique meaning of that word, and that weighed, too. But what weighed most was that Carlos was disgusted by the idea of having a hand in the destruction of such a creature as Kolka. Carlos, remember, was doing what he was doing because he was a Catholic, coming from fifty generations of Catholics. It is an interesting fact about Carlos that he prayed silently all the time he was doing murder, or betrayal, or whatever the day’s work brought him. He thought that Kolka’s was one death that God would not forgive him; Carlos was, after all, only the same age as Kolka. He thought in these terms.

  The atmosphere in Madrid that winter was extraordinary. It was cold, Madrid is so cold in winter; there was no fuel to speak of, there was little enough food. One saw people in bandages everywhere, working and fighting. Shells were falling in the streets. The Moroccans and the Spanish troops of Generalissimo Franco were at the gates of the city. There were three great battles in November, and bombing by airplanes at night. The people were in something that resembled a religious hysteria. They went about the streets crying incessantly, “ No pas-ar-án! No pas-ar-án!”–they shall not pass! It was a murmur, a buzzing, like the chant of some primitive religion coming out of a sealed tomb. Carlos felt that he had come to the rim of existence. He was exalted, against his will, by the bravery of these Madrilenos, by their obstinate refusal to submit. On the other hand, always remember, he was their deadly enemy, a wolf among them. What in God’s name would happen to Spain if those people–so courageous, so maddened by their hatred of all that Carlos was in his true self–should conquer? For a month or two in Madrid, in the winter of 1936, he thought that they might be irresistible.

  At about this time, Carlos saw a way in which he might save Kolka Zhigalko from the secret police–or, if not save him, then at least prevent his death. A few weeks before, another journalist, traveling under a League of Nations laisser-passer, had come to Madrid and got a room at the Gran Via Hotel, directly below Zhigalko’s. This man wrote for French and Belgian newspapers, and also sent feature stories to the English and American weekly papers. Like Carlos, he spoke a great many languages. He was ten years older than Carlos and Zhigalko, or perhaps a little more. A handsome man, a splendid conversationalist. He had a cynic’s wit; faith and emotion in others amused him. He knew something about everything. Soon he knew everyone in Madrid. It was extraordinary how he got about. It was a gift quite as great, in its way, as that of an artist; this man could meet a man or a Woman once, speak three sentences, and stay in the other person’s mind forever. Had he been an American or an Englishman he would have become the head of government. But, as Carlos found out, this man had no country.

  Naturally the NKVD was interested in him. They couldn’t believe that ànyone who operated as this man operated was not a master spy for some imperialist power. They opened a dossier on him. He went about, almost alone in Madrid, under the name on his papers, which Carlos took to be his own name. The NKVD gave him a code name. In their secret conversations he was called Kiril Alekseivich Kamensky. Sometimes, secret symbol within secret name, “K.A.K.” But usually Kamensky. He maddened them; they could not get a grip on him. Who was he? Where did he come from? They learned some things about him–that he was a man of the Left, that he was not using his baptismal name after all. Finally they learned that he was a Russian. Before, they had been curious about Kamensky. Now they hungered for him. Carlos was told to befriend him, entrap him, take the bones out of his flesh.

  Kamensky was the most approachable man in Madrid. There is a kind of intelligence operative called an antenna–he makes himself visible so that information will come to him. That’s what the NKVD thought Kamensky was. They gave Carlos information to feed him, thinking that it would be transmitted to his masters. It was thought that he must be working for the British secret service; the Russians were, if anything, more convinced of the omnipotence of English espionage than Carlos’s uncles. Perhaps, too, they thought, he was a Nazi agent, but they held that theory in reserve. Kamensky hadn’t the Nazi style–he was too fine. His looks, his speech, his mind, his manners all argued that he could not be a follower of Hitler. So the NKVD, louts judging louts, looked at the matter. The information Carlos gave to Kamensky appeared in his newspapers. That, thought the NKVD, only proved how clever he was. They instructed Carlos to give him more information, chicken feed as they called it; Kamensky printed some of it, and told Carlos he hadn’t used the rest because he hadn’t been able to verify it. There was consternation. What deep game was Kamensky playing? If he didn’t want our false information, what true information must he be obtaining for his masters, and how was he obtaining it? Kamensky became their obsession. Carlos urged them to consider the possibility that Kamensky was what he said he was, a genuine journalist. Impossible, they said. He must be trapped.

  It was, in the end, easy. Through Carlos, Kamensky met Kolka Zhigalko. Kamensky had brought with him to Madrid a French girl, also a journalist, who was obviously in love with him. He, less obviously, for he was a man who masked his special passions with a general amiability, was fond of her. The four of them– Kamensky, Zhigalko, Carlos, and the French girl–fell into the habit of meeting in Kamensky’s room during the bombardments. It was a gathering place for a large group of people, mostly foreigners, who wished to show their contempt for the guns and the bombers by refusing to take shelter. There was always a lot of French cognac to drink, the only supply of it in Madrid in private hands.

  The language of this group was French, sometimes English. Zhigalko was no linguist. He limped along in Spanish. In French and English he was worse. But he liked the atmosphere, and because of his ear–most artists are able to learn languages rather easily, it has to do with their heightened powers of observation, perhaps–he understood a great deal more than he was able to say. He would sit there, golden curls and blue eyes, the ideal human form incarnate, his face shimmering with the heat of his interest in life, and listen to languages he could not really understand. Oddly, everyone spoke to Kolka–addressed their best remarks to him, as if he could apprehend meanings, even in foreign tongues, that others would miss. Kolka would smile his innocent smile, and sometimes make up a song. Sometimes, too, he would struggle with French or English, attempting to say what was in his heart. One night they had all had a lot to drink and the bombs had fallen quite near. Kolka made a song. Then he tried to translate it; it was in Russian, of course. He tried Spanish; no luck. Then French and English; worse and worse. Carlos had understood the Russian, but of course, drunk as he was, he dared not reveal his knowledge to the group.

  Suddenly Kamensky, who up to this time no one had suspected (except Carlos, who knew) of understanding a word of Russian, addressed Kolka in that language. He spoke it beautifully; it was evident to all in the room that Kamensky was reciting a poem. At the end of it, Kolka, with Russian tears running over his cheeks, threw his arms around Kamensky and kissed him on the lips. Russians do that, or did. Kolka said something in Russian; Kamensky said something back. Carlos understood that they were proposing to go up on the roof of the hotel in the midst of the air raid. The Heinkels were flying over in the dark, dropping high explosive, the antiaircraft guns were firing, shrapnel was falling back on the city. Enemy artillery shells passed overhead, gasping, and exploded in the streets. These two Russians, very drunk, of course, on cognac, raced together to the roof of the hotel. For the others in the room, that was carrying drunken bravado too far. It was the duty of Carlos to follow them; his drunkenness wa
s excuse enough to do so.

  On the roof he found them, standing at the very edge, facing the flashes of the rebel guns beyond the university on the horizon, shouting poetry in Russian. They remained there until the bombardment ended, and came back down, shivering–they had been sweating in the crowded room where the party was, and their soaked shirts were beginning to freeze–and with their throats scraped raw by their counterattack on the Fascist batteries.

  Kamensky’s French girl crawled in between the two of them, and kissed them both. When Carlos, the last to leave, departed, they were lying, all three of them, on the bed. Kolka was singing. After each verse, the French girl, her voice muddy with drink, would ask for a translation. Kamensky only smiled and stroked her hair.

  They remained together all night. It was a thing that drunken people in a dying city might easily do. The French girl was desirable, and she belonged to that emancipated class of young women which existed in the thirties. These girls believed that they had absolute sovereignty over their own lives and bodies, that they could do as they liked, and deal with the consequences. That night she slept with both Russians. The next day she left, because during the night, out of Kolka’s generosity and Kamensky’s drunken release of his real self, the two men became lovers.

  It was the French girl who told Carlos. She came to him to ask if he could arrange transport for her to the French frontier. It was early in the morning, Carlos had just awakened, and, yawning, he was removing the blackout curtains from the windows of his room when he saw the girl approaching in the street below. She wore the uniform of her type: belted raincoat, high-heeled shoes, a felt hat with a round brim pulled down on one side of her head, plucked eyebrows, lipstick. She was carrying a heavy valise and she teetered under its weight on her high heels.

  Upstairs, Carlos gave her tea. Really, he thought, she is attractive, she would be something to subdue, with all that intelligence showing in her face, and all that unveiled hostility to men. There was a great deal of anger in her. She described, in a rush of French like a jet of bile, what had happened: the three bodies in the dim light, the two men caressing her, the strangeness of it and the terrible excitement, for this sort of woman lived for forbidden things. And then she opened her eyes to find the two men kissing not her, but one another. They went on as if she weren’t there, murmuring to one another in Russian. She was fascinated, the mysteries of the male body were being revealed to her in the way they handled each other. But she let it go too far. Kolka, after he had rested, came back to her and she admitted him, but as soon as he had satisfied her she was filled with disgust. Kamensky woke, he had fallen asleep, and found Kolka and the girl together; he had flown into a rage, speaking only Russian. The girl realized that it was Kolka he refused to share, not her.

  Carlos heard the story with less surprise, and with much less repulsion, than would have been possible in most Spaniards. He had grown used to homosexual practices at school in England; he saw nothing wrong in them in others. He understood that most men, when they love most deeply, love other men, though not usually with a sexual dimension. The French girl, a woman scorned, was less tranquil. She told Carlos she wished to leave Madrid, leave Spain, because she feared that she would kill the lovers if she remained. He arranged passage for her within the week; he could have sent her sooner but he wanted to know more about Kamensky. She told him all that she knew–willingly, sometimes with tears, sometimes with sudden shrieks of fury that burst from the depths of her body. She meant Kolka and Kamensky no harm–she was heartsore and she thought that Carlos was a friend.

  Carlos told his controller in the NKVD about the love affair. Now the secret agents saw a way to use the man they called Kamensky. They let the affair between Kamensky and Kolka Zhigalko run on. The two were discreet–after all, there was nothing strange about a man becoming Kolka Zhigalko’s inseparable friend. No one but Carlos, and the people to whom he sent his secret report, knew that they were secret lovers. The meetings in Kamensky’s room went on as usual. No one much missed Solange, the French girl. Journalists, soldiers from the International Brigades, every class and type of foreigner came every night to drink cognac and talk. Now that Kolka had an interpreter, everyone loved him more. It became evident that he had, in addition to his body and his face, an incandescent mind. Carlos, of course, had known this all along, and everyone else had felt it; Kamensky made it visible to all, translating Kolka’s long drunken speeches, interpreting his poems, explaining his silences.

  One night, when Kolka had fallen into a melancholy mood, a little Frenchman, an officer in the International Brigades, wandered into the room looking for Kamensky. He’d been wounded and he carried his arm in a sling. Kolka had been lying on the bed with his eyes closed. He sat up and saw this Frenchman and leaped to his feet with a bellow of joy. It appeared that he and the Frenchman had fought together against the tanks of the White Army in front of Petrograd. They embraced and the Frenchman uttered a howl of pain as Kolka crushed his shot arm between them. Torrents of Russian ran between Kolka and Kamensky and this Frenchman, whose nom de guerre was André Girard. Soon André was a nightly visitor; when he was wounded again, Kolka gave him his room and moved down to Kamensky’s room. Kolka nursed Andre, who had a head wound, by day. By night he slept with Kamensky. Soon the Frenchman was up and around. Kolka remained with Kamensky.

  Carlos was ordered by the NKVD to make friends with André Girard as he had done with Kolka and Kamensky. But Andre knew nothing of Kamensky, and of Kolka he would only say that he was the most important man in the Russian Revolution, because one day he would write about it. Andre had perfect literary judgment; he read languages as easily as Carlos and Kamensky spoke them, and when he saw genius he recognized it. Kolka, he said, was the sort of writer who appeared once in a century. Someday he would put Russia, all of it, onto the page. Kamensky tolerated the attachment between André and Kolka; Andre was a plain, small man, there was even something comical in his looks–you saw that he was going to be fat in a few years. He was no sexual threat; besides, Andre was ravenous for women. Oddly enough, he had a great deal of success. He was amusing, intelligent–and wounded. Girls came to him.

  Carlos’s controllers in the NKVD wanted to have access to Kolka’s room. Andre was seldom in it at night; usually he went to a woman’s room after the party in Kamensky’s room. Kolka’s room, one will remember, was directly above Kamensky’s. The spies made a hole in the floor, under the bed, and installed a microphone and a camera in such a way that they could not be detected. With the camera they took hundreds of photographs of Kolka and Kamensky on the bed below. Kamensky took such pleasure in the sight of his lover that he had him with the lamps lit. He made things easy for the photographer. A stenographer, one of those coarse-bodied Russian girls, sat in Kolka’s room with a pad on her knees and earphones on her head, taking down in shorthand the things that Kolka and Kamensky said to each other in Russian when they were alone. Carlos observed this scene once; it was enough.

  One day the NKVD man showed the photographs to Kamensky. While Kamensky looked at these travesties of his form and Kolka’s, the NKVD man read him excerpts from the transcript of the stenographer’s shorthand notes. Carlos was told that Kamensky sat through it all, unmoving. Then, like a snake, as the NKVD man put it to Carlos, Kamensky struck. He slapped the spy’s face, a half-dozen rapid, stinging blows. As a boyar would strike a serf, Carlos thought; in the depths of the NKVD man’s mind that image was awakened, too. Kamensky had made an error. Now the NKVD man, who had simply wanted to use him, had a personal reason to destroy him. He showed no sign, or believed that he showed no sign, that Kamensky’s blow had stung him. He smiled at Kamensky.

  “Done like a prince,” he said. “When you’ve done what I am going to tell you to do, I will have something to tell you.”

  “For you I will do nothing.”

  “No? Someday, perhaps, you will go back to Russia. It is ours.”

  “Not yours forever.”

  “Perhaps n
ot. But Kolka Zhigalko will go back. You know how puritanical the government of the proletariat is. What if the Cheka”–he used the old term for the secret police, so that Kamensky would understand–“were to have these pictures, these transcripts, our testimony?”

  Kamensky saw that he was being made the instrument of Kolka’s death. He didn’t hesitate. He bargained: one act on behalf of the NKVD in return for the pictures and the transcripts, and for Kolka’s safety. It was a delusion; nothing would save Kolka now and Kamensky knew it. But Carlos, thinking on the matter, decided that Kamensky, abandoning himself to emotion, felt that he had to make the effort. He had to do something, and he had the sort of mind that would perceive the lasting damage to himself of committing an act of treachery and disguising it as an act of atonement. There was no question of Kolka staying in Christendom; he was an incurable Russian, he longed to return to Russia, he would never leave it once he did go back. Kamensky knew all that because he was the same. Later, Kolka told Carlos that Kamensky had told him that he, Kolka, was the breathing apparatus that Kamensky needed to live in the poisonous air of a country other than Russia.