The Secret Lovers
Authors: Charles McCarry
Author photograph © John McCarry
CHARLES McCARRY established an international reputation as a novelist with the publication of his worldwide bestseller,
The Tears of Autumn.
He is the author of eleven
other critically acclaimed novels
(The Miernik Dossier, The Secret Lovers, The Better Angels, The Last Supper, The Bride of the Wilderness, Second Sight, Shelley’s Heart, Old Boys,
Christopher’s Ghosts, Lucky Bastard
and Ark) that have been translated into more than twenty languages. His nine non-fiction books include
Citizen Nader
, the authoritative first
biography of Ralph Nader. He is the former Editor at Large of
National Geographic
and has contributed dozens of articles, short stories and poems to leading national magazines. His op-ed
pieces and other essays have appeared in
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal
and
The Washington Post.
During the 1950s and 1960s, McCarry served for a decade under deep
cover as a CIA operations officer in Europe, Africa and Asia.
Novels by Charles McCarry
Ark
Christopher’s Ghosts
Old Boys
Lucky Bastard
Shelley’s Heart
Second Sight
The Bride of the Wilderness
The Last Supper
The Better Angels
The Secret Lovers
The Tears of Autumn
The Miernik Dossier
Praise for CHARLES McCARRY
‘McCarry’s thrillers really thrill, his political insight is praised by senior politicians and his erudition, experience and good writing turn spy stories into
literature. McCarry and his dynamic alter-egos wipe the floor with the opposition’
Daily Telegraph
‘The absolute best thriller writer alive’
P. J. O’ROURKE
‘McCarry’s novels are among the best of our time’
The Wall Street Journal
‘The books I’ve been recommending lately are Charles McCarry’s CIA novels’
NORMAN MAILER
‘Ranks up there with le Carré in a select class of two’
Daily Mail
‘In an arena that has become more and more distinguished, Charles McCarry remains the greatest espionage writer that America has produced. The greatest. Period’
OTTO PENZLER, owner, The Mysterious Bookshop
‘As a storyteller, McCarry surpasses Len Deighton and John le Carré ... his novels have a multidimensional quality, a deep sensitivity and a verisimilitude that
tells you the author knows what he’s talking about’
The Washington Post
This edition first published in the UK in 2012 by
Duckworth Overlook
90-93 Cowcross Street
London EC1M 6BF
[email protected]
www.ducknet.co.uk
First published in the USA in 2004 by
The Overlook Press, New York
Copyright © 1977 by Charles McCarry
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the British Library
ISBNs
Paperback: 978 0 7156 4502 4
Mobipocket: 978 0 7156 4555 0
ePub: 978 0 7156 4556 7
Library PDF: 978 0 7156 4557 4
Manufactured in Great Britain
For my father
in loving memory
ONE
1
As the car moved through the wet streets of Berlin in the hour after dawn, Horst Bülow fussed with his briefcase. It was a pigskin satchel, strapped and buckled, so old
that it had lost the smell of leather. The night before, Bülow had carried it out of East Germany. Now he arranged on the seat of the car the things he had brought in his briefcase: a safety
razor and a tube of shaving cream, a heel of bread, half a sausage, a bit of hard cheese with tooth marks on it, a flask of schnapps—and, finally, a thick manuscript, hundreds of flimsy pages
covered with tiny handwriting. “You’ll need a cryptanalyst to read this,” Bülow said, “it looks as if this Russian writes with his fingernails.”
Paul Christopher smiled at the agent. “Did you read it on the train?” he asked.
Bülow looked shocked, then realized the American was joking. “Not a chance,” he said. “There is only one thing more boring than Russians in the flesh, and that is Russians
in a novel, tormented by their own stupidity, called by three different names. What is Russian literature? One universal genius, Tolstoy, and six provincial bores.”
Risk made Bülow talkative. He had been chattering, giving his opinions, ever since Christopher picked him up three hours earlier near the Wannsee. They had walked together in the dark on
the deserted beach. Bülow, his long graying hair blown by a wind filled with rain, told Christopher about the Wannsee beach between the wars. He had brought girls to a lakeside restaurant
called the Schwedischer Pavillon and fed them trout and strawberries and cream and a drink called Bowle, a mixture of Rhine wine and champagne, with fruit and herbs and sugar. “Afterward, we
would lie down in the Grunewald,” Bülow had said, “but none of that exists anymore. I haven’t heard of anyone drinking Bowle for twenty years.”
In the car, he shivered violently and drank from his flask. He registered his complaints. The manuscript had been handed to him in Dresden by a man, clearly not a professional, who had brought
it from Warsaw. Bülow wanted to know why the package had not been delivered in a more secure manner. “I asked for a dead-drop,” he said. “I don’t like to see faces and
I don’t like my face to be seen.” He had been in the Abwehr, he had operated against the OSS. He believed that Americans knew nothing about tradecraft. He thought himself in constant
danger because of his employers’ clumsiness. Once, he had almost been taken at the frontier with a strip of microfilm. The border guard had taken Bülow’s sandwich apart, but had
somehow missed the evidence, smeared with mustard, concealed between two slices of cheese. Afterward, Bülow had seized Christopher by the shoulders and cried, “Why do you think I work
for you? It’s the money, only the money. I’d work for the British for one-tenth the price—they’re professionals!” Christopher had said, “I don’t think the
English want people who hide microfilm in sandwiches—the mustard is bad for the film.” Bülow drew danger to himself by the excessive use of technique; he behaved like a spy because
he enjoyed the trappings of conspiracy. He had been making the same furtive mistakes for such a long time that he believed they had preserved his life. No one else doubted that sooner or later they
would kill him.
Christopher did not like to stay with Bülow any longer than was necessary. But the German required handling. At each meeting he talked more compulsively than at the last. As he became less
valuable, he demanded more money. He wanted reassurance. He wanted to come over to the West and stay there, to be given a quiet job. He had been twenty years old in 1930, and the following ten
years had been the best in his life. In Bonn and Hamburg and Munich, he thought, Germans had regained the past he had believed lost forever. They went to restaurants in the park on Sunday and
walked together under the trees and owned things. He wanted that again.
Christopher watched the mirror carefully. There was no surveillance, nothing in the long street behind the rented car except the first streetcar of the day, howling to a stop to pick up a small
group of old women, night cleaners on their way home. Christopher handed Bülow an envelope; the agent counted his West German marks and signed the receipt. Christopher gave him two thick
books, novels in German. “Put these in with your lunch,” he said. “You’ll want your briefcase to look as full going back as it looked coming over.” Bülow repacked
his satchel, buckled its straps, held it on his lap. The sun shone feebly through the overcast, like a lamp covered by a woman’s scarf in a shabby hotel room. The S-Bahn sign for the Zoo
station was just visible through the fogged windshield. “On Sundays we used to dance in the Zoo,” Bülow said. “There were endless gardens, orchestras, the girls came in
droves. You’d buy one beer and share it with a girl.” He looked out the back window, making certain that the street was empty. “I’ll get down here,” he said.
He opened the door and held it slightly ajar while the car pulled to the curb. He turned his long face, the bony jaw covered with stubble, toward Christopher and nodded once, crisply, before
stepping out. The war had been over for fifteen years, but Berlin still smelled of dead fires when it rained and Horst Bülow still carried himself like a German officer. He strode over the wet
pavement as if he wore the tailored jacket and the polished boots of a cavalry lieutenant, as if the bent old women waiting for the streetcar were once again the girls who had drunk beer from the
same glass with him in the gardens of the zoo.
At the corner, Bülow stepped down into Kant strasse and raised the rolled newspaper that he carried to signal the streetcar. In the mirror, Christopher saw a black Opel sedan, tires
slipping as it accelerated in first gear, flash past the streetcar, then past his own parked automobile. The Opel, gears shrieking, splashed through a pool of water and struck Bülow. His
upraised newspaper popped open like a magician’s trick bouquet. His body was thrown twenty feet, pages of the newspaper sailing after it. The corpse fell to the pavement in the path of
another car, an old Mercedes whose driver braked after running over it; Christopher heard the thud of the tires like four rapid gunshots.
Bülow’s briefcase lay in the street. The black Opel reversed with its door open. A man’s arm reached out and took the briefcase into the car. The Opel moved away at normal
speed, gears changing smoothly.
No one approached the dead man. The old women who had seen the murder gazed for a moment at Horst Bülow as blood leaked through his clothes and mixed with a rainbow of spilled oil in a
puddle of rainwater. Then they walked away.
While the eyes of the witnesses were still on the black Opel, Christopher backed his own car into a side street, turned it around, and drove away, toward the Wannsee to the
west. Again he wasn’t followed. He didn’t attempt to call the Berlin base. Bülow was not their agent. The base would want to know what Bülow had brought to Berlin, why the
opposition had waited to break the chain of couriers when it was almost at its last link, what was so valuable. It was not so usual in Berlin to run people like Horst Bülow down with cars as
it had been a few years earlier. They would want to know why this had happened on their territory. They had no need to know.