What the NKVD wanted was simple. Some time before, the secret police of the Spanish Republic had found several hundred bourgeois hiding in the deserted Finnish embassy in Madrid. The NKVD had located another abandoned building, also a former embassy. They were going to hoist the flag of some remote Asiatic country over it, and hope that secret Nationalists would seek refuge there. There was a list of people, some of them Fascist agents, some of them Anarchists whom the Soviet apparatus wanted to destroy, some of them Social Democrats, some of them merely men the NKVD wanted to kill for their own reasons. Many of these last two classes were friends of Kamensky. The NKVD wanted Kamensky to warn them that death warrants were out for them, and to tell them where the false embassy was so that they could take refuge there. The bargain was struck; it would have terrified a man who had a smaller appetite for guilt than Kamensky, or who loved the man he was saving less than Kamensky loved Kolka Zhigalko.
Kamensky lured his friends to the embassy, one after the other. The NKVD listened to their conversations with hidden microphones. Then they killed them–twenty-seven murders altogether. The victims were taken into the basement and shot. Their last sight was the heap of the dead who had come down the stairs before them. Before each execution–the executioners had the condemned kneel in order to receive a revolver bullet in the spinal cord in the descabello style of the NKVD–they told the man who was to die that Kamensky was the one who had betrayed him.
At the end of it, the NKVD man delivered the transcripts and the pictures and the negatives to Kamensky. He told him what had been done in the cellar of the false embassy.
“Your class believes in God,” the NKVD man said. “Think of it, highness–twenty-seven souls ascending to the Heavenly Father, cursing your name as they fly to Him.”
“Go away,” said Kamensky.
“Before I do,” said the NKVD man, “I wish to tell you that you were entrapped. Kolka Zhigalko is, and always has been, our agent. Be —ed you on our orders and —ed you, and —ed you.”
As he spoke these words, the NKVD man turned over the photographs of the acts that he was describing with his obscenities. Another man might have attacked. Kamensky had already made his gesture. Now he sealed himself from the NKVD man. He stared at him, absolutely cold and absolutely silent, until he went away. Of course what Kamensky had been told about Kolka was a lie; it was payment for the slaps on the face he had delivered to the NKVD man. But how could Kamensky ever be certain? All Carlos’s life he had heard the phrase, never knowing what it meant, but now he saw it in reality: Kamensky’s heart was broken.
He stayed in Madrid for a few more days, until the siege was lifted. He remained with Kolka, who of course suspected nothing. He thought Kamensky’s sadness had to do with the fact that he would be sent by his paper to some other city, and thus be separated from Kolka. But Kolka told him not to worry, he’d find a way to be sent where Kamensky was, nothing could part them. He pleaded with Kamensky to return to Russia; Zhigalko had powerful friends in the Party, even in the NKVD, he said, and he could make things all right. Kamensky knew nothing could make him acceptable in Russia, but to please Kolka, he agreed that he would, perhaps, go back.
Then Kamensky, one night on a dark street, walked up behind the NKVD man and shot him in the head. He immediately left Madrid. He did not say good-bye to Kolka, he took no clothes, none of his things. He just left.
Of course there was an uproar in the clandestine world. Kamensky was sought everywhere in Spain, but he got away. Kolka was inconsolable. He lived in darkness–darkness of two kinds, the despair of the loss of love, and ignorance of why the loss had befallen him. No one told him the truth. Not Kamensky, not the other Russian Communists, not Carlos. To console himself, Kolka Zhigalko, with manic energy, wrote a cycle of poems and short stories, beautiful things. Andre Girard read them and told Carlos about them. He made copies for safekeeping. Andre did not trust the revolution; he knew that it would burn the books and slash the paintings of its artists.
Carlos read Kolka’s work. It burned the page in his untidy, almost illiterate handwriting, tiny and cramped, as if no sheet of paper were large enough to contain all that Kolka wanted to put down on it. Out of this crabbed pen flowed the whole of human passion, the whole of the landscape of our time.
Carlos went to see Kolka, to express his admiration. The loss of Kamensky and, Carlos supposed, the expenditure of energy in the writing of the wonderful stories and verses, had left Kolka exhausted. He was translucent again, as he had been when he gave too much of his blood to the wounded. There was no gaiety left in him. To Carlos, he said, “I have lost everything.” Carlos asked him what he meant. In that innocent, reckless way of his, Kolka told him of the love affair with Kamensky.
“You may think it filthy, but I tell you it was love!” Kolka said.
“I know it was love,” Carlos replied.
Carlos had decided that Kolka, to be saved, must know the truth. Carlos took a hideous chance: he told Kolka what had been done to Kamensky, and what Kamensky had done for him. Kolka slumped. The life, the optimism, the force of hope–whatever it was he had that made him believe that he and his comrades had made a new world, ran out of him. Illusion drained from Kolka. It was like watching a man bleed to death from a heart wound. Kolka said nothing, he had no last words as the old Kolka. Carlos, by telling him the truth, had killed what he had been.
“The secret police,” Kolka said, and this was his only question, “they must have had a code name for him. What was it?”
“Kiril Alekseivich Kamensky,” Carlos replied.
“Thank you, Carlos,” said Kolka.
Kolka Zhigalko took the pages of his stories and crossed out his own name. In its place, under each title, he wrote, in cyrillic characters twice as large as any others on the page, BY KERIL ALEKSEIVICH KAMENSKY. Later he instructed André Girard to change the author’s name on his copies of the works; he didn’t tell Andre the reason, merely that he had decided to write under a pseudonym.
A month or two later, Kolka went back to Russia. He did have powerful friends, and through their intervention he changed his name in a Soviet court to Kiril Alekseivich Kamensky, which is the name under which he has been known ever since.
(Don Jorge de Rodegas ceased speaking; Cathy was sitting at his feet, gazing up into his face, over which no emotion had moved while he spoke. “Go on,” Cathy said, “don’t stop. What happened to them all?”)
Kolka Zhigalko published his stories, under his new name, in the Soviet Union when he returned there. In a matter of months his work was seized and burned, and he was sentenced to prison. Most Russians who had been in Spain were shot or imprisoned in the great purge of 1937, the Yezhovschina, a bloodbath named for Yezhov, then head of the NKVD. Evidently not even Yezhov could bear to kill Kolka; he merely sent him to prison for life.
Carlos was arrested by the victors at the end of the war. He was sent: to prison for an interval. There he learned a number of things, a prisoner’s skills and tricks.
(Don Jorge folded a sheet of writing paper into an intricate pattern and made a little cup; he poured wine into it, held the paper cup over a candle flame, and showed Cathy that the wine was boiling while the paper did not burn.)
After a time, Carlos was condemned to death. He was taken out of his cell by the guards. The other prisoners saw a man killed by a firing squad in the prison yard. It was not Carlos. Elsewhere in the prison, he was being fitted secretly into the uniform of a major in the Nationalist Army, and in those clothes he walked out of the prison and back into his true identity. He returned to the estancia. He rejoined his uncles. From them he heard the story of his fianceé’s death, almost four years before. They thought it a most pathetic tale. Carlos was not much moved by it. He had lost the habit of judging people by the way they died.
Carlos wanted silence; he wanted to be alone. He remained on the estancia. He was haunted by the work he had done during the civil war and tried to train himself not to dream. In 1941 he volun
teered for the División Azul, the Spanish force that fought in Russia with the German army, and was wounded again. Each time his troops liberated a prison camp on Soviet territory he looked for Kolka, but of course he never found him.
Carlos did have communication of a sort with Kolka. While he was recovering at the estancia in 1944 from the wounds he had received in Russia, he had a visitor. One spring afternoon, the man he had known as André Girard walked up the drive, carrying a child. Andre had seen a photograph of Carlos at a sporting event in a Spanish magazine, and had recognized him. He knew his true identity. There was no question of his betraying it; he was sick of revolution and reprisal. Like Carlos, he had given up politics. The child belonged to the woman, Solange, who had been Kamensky’s lover in Madrid before Kolka. André knew nothing of what had happened between Kolka and Kamensky. Carlos told him nothing. Solange had told him nothing, even though she had taken André as a lover–the tale she had told Carlos when she was still hot with scorn is not one a woman would tell to a new bedmate. Andre said she had died in the mountains on the escape from France. André did not know what to do with the child. Carlos took it and kept it until the war was over; afterward he sent it to France, to Solange’s people. Andre made the arrangements.
Carlos asked André if he still had in his possession Kolka’s stories and poems from Madrid. He did. Carlos gave Andre money, after the end of the European war, to have these things published in the West, in Russian and in other languages. They were, of course, published under the name Kamensky. Carlos was pleased to think that Kolka’s work, some of it at least, had been kept alive.
“That can’t be the end of the tale,” said Cathy. “What about the original Kamensky? You haven’t told us what happened to him.”
“Carlos never heard news of him.”
“What: was his real name? Did he go back to Russia?”
“His real name was Prince Boris Donskoy. He was of the oldest Russian nobility. It was impossible for him to go back to his own country.”
Christopher spoke. “Under what name did Carlos and Zhigalko and the others know Kamensky, in Madrid?”
“Otto Rothchild,” replied Don Jorge de Rodegas.
EIGHTEEN
1
“All of them, one after the other,” Patchen said. “Dick Sutherland, each time he had news of another killing, would lay a cable from Moscow on my desk like a cat bringing a dead mouse into the parlor.”
After the searing light of the Castilian Meseta, the August sun in Paris seemed feeble to Christopher; it hardly penetrated the cloth of his coat, but there was perspiration on Patchen’s face. He had been waiting, alone with the consequences of their plans, for Christopher to return. As much as anything could be for Patchen, this operation was a personal matter. In the months since the death of Bülow, he had acknowledged to himself, bit by bit, that he had put his trust in the wrong people. His picked assets had gone bad. The worst thing that could befall an intelligence officer had happened to him.
Patchen had intellectual stamina and emotional control, but his body displayed the strain of sleeplessness and incessant travel. He had lost weight and the stringy musculature of his neck showed above his collar. He limped more than usual and sometimes he caught himself as he began to stammer.
“First there was Kalmyk,” Patchen said. “You were right. That was the opening. Then they rolled up the other couriers; there were two of them. Sutherland has their names, not that it matters. They were patriots. One of them was even a KGB man of medium rank, a Scandinavian specialist, so that he must have been the one who mailed the letters from Helsinki for Kamensky.”
As a matter of routine, the KGB took Kamensky’s girl, Masha, in for interrogation. She knew nothing of the courier network, nothing of The Little Death. Naturally her interrogators didn’t believe her. Masha had been dealing with the KGB for ten years, since she was sixteen; she knew what they were. She held out for a long time. Sutherland’s source said they used the soft method on her–kept her standing and sleepless, stripped, without food and water, with relays of interrogators repeating the questions, never stopping. What was her name? Her father’s name? Her mother’s? School? Who was her KGB trainer when she was recruited for special work? What were the names of the men and women she had entrapped for the KGB? What was her grandfather’s name? What was the cover name used by her American case officer? What was her blood type? At what age did she lose her virginity? When was her last meeting with her Agency contact? Did she masturbate? How much did the Americans pay her? What was her grandmother’s father’s name? Where was she born? What did Kamensky’s Agency contact look like?
Finally she broke. She had almost nothing to tell them. She had been cleanly handled by a good officer–brush contacts in the subway, dead-drops behind a radiator in an apartment building where her KGB handler met her. That particular insult, a typical Agency prank, infuriated them. They kept hammering away at The Little Death–how did Kamensky get it to the Americans? Masha must have carried it, handled it. She could tell them less than the couriers had told them–she didn’t even know that the book existed. The couriers had had no contact with any American. Captain Kalmyk described Horst Bülow, but he couldn’t identify him in the photo album. Of course he couldn’t put a name to him. Kalmyk was an army officer, not a trained observer. Bülow, from his description, could have been any of ten thousand shabby East Germans.
They killed Masha as they had killed the couriers; they knew that all of them were utterly wrung out, that they could not tell the KGB the one thing that would make sense of this whole shameful defeat for Soviet security–that treason had been committed, that the smuggling of Kamensky’s manuscript and its publication in the West was an American operation. Even the surfacing of Cerutti did not tell them that; whatever else he had been, he had never been an asset of the Americans. Now the Soviets put surveillance on him, replaced the wires that Wilson had removed. But Cerutti was in quarantine. He’d never see another American operative–not Christopher, not Joëlle, not a young man in a park, not anyone. Even under torture, Cerutti could not reveal that he had been dealing with the Americans, because Christopher had never disclosed his true nationality or his true name or his true purpose.
“Maria knew well enough what the Russians would be up to as soon as the news of Kamensky’s death hit,” Patchen said. “She picked a fight with Cerutti when he came around with his weekly bottle of champagne, threw him out. She called him a disgusting little fat Frog who made her skin crawl. Told him Otto had never liked him, thought he was a joke.”
“What was Cerutti’s reaction to that?”
“He put the question to Otto: Is that what you feel, my friend? Otto said yes. Maria, he said, you didn’t need to be so brutal, I asked you not to be insulting. She said, what other method would have worked with this cretin? Cerutti left. He made no reply to them.”
“So the opposition won’t connect him to Otto at all?”
“Not unless they’ve done it in the past. He sure won’t go back to the Ile Saint-Louis.”
Christopher asked about Kamensky’s death. He and Patchen were walking slowly toward the Orangerie, with the morning light behind them and the greenery of the Tuileries ahead. Patchen was breathing more heavily than usual, suppressing the grunt of pain that rose in his throat each time he swung his wounded leg. Christopher had to ask him again for details. Patchen stopped by the stairs that divide the long riverside terrace and surrendered momentarily to his body; he sat down on a bench and stretched his bad leg before him. He looked around. They were quite alone, the city was empty of Frenchmen this month and it was too early in the day for tourists.
“What Kamensky did,” Patchen said in his toneless murmur, “was to ask Masha to get him a death pill.”
Christopher, when he was examining data in his hotel room, had studied a photograph of Kamensky, the only one in the possession of American intelligence. It was a good clear picture, taken in strong sunlight, of an old man with the shaved head of a
prisoner, sitting on a bench against an unpainted lumber wall. Now Christopher saw Kolka Zhigalko, young and passionate, moving within the old man.
“Masha was stung by the request,” Patchen said. “She used her emergency procedure–a God-damned chalk mark on a Moscow wall her American case officer has to drive by on the way to work wouldn’t you know?–to ask for a meeting. She asked us for two cyanide pills.”
“She was going with him?”
“That’s what Sutherland says. She told the case officer that she loved the old man. If he dies, there’s no sense in scum like me living, she said.”
Of course Kamensky’s request was never considered. To have him die and to have cyanide found in his body tissue at the autopsy would have been all the confirmation needed by the KGB that a foreign intelligence service was involved with him. Where else would he get cyanide? Besides, Kamensky’s request shook the Moscow station. Did Kamensky know, somehow, of Masha’s connection with our side? Masha said no–he must have assumed, as any rational man would, that she was a KGB asset. Why he thought the Soviet service would give Masha poison was not explicable. Perhaps he thought she had a sexual hold over a senior officer; perhaps he thought they’d be happy to have him out of the way. That was what Masha told the interrogators in the cellars of the KGB. She stuck to that point to the end. Nothing would make her accept the possibility, even, that Kamensky had a connection with an imperialist secret service. In the end she admitted everything, would have done anything. She was too tired to resist death, and she was only twenty-six years old. But she stubbornly insisted, up to the instant that she fell like a stone with a bullet in her spine, that Kiril Alekseivich Kamensky was incapable of treason. “He is a Russian!” she had cried over and over as they had pounded the question into her.
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