The Secret Lovers (15 page)

The happy days with her mother and father, the long quiet hours in the apartment, the simple pattern of work and music, eating in plain restaurants, going to the movies, had begun to take Cathy
back to what she had been before she had gone to bed with Franco Moroni. Christopher did not speak to her of her adultery, and after a few days, Cathy stopped talking about it as well. She made
love more shyly now, she waited for Christopher to move toward her in bed. He asked her why.

“I’ve lost the right to ask you for love,” she said.

“You’re wrong.”

“You keep on saying it’s all right, Paul, that I’m the same. But I’m not. You can’t really think that I am.”

They were lying in the dark. The bedroom in the safe house had no windows; some earlier owner had torn out the whole interior of the apartment in order to make an enormous salon and dining room,
but he had left only one small dark corner in which to sleep and another for a kitchen.

“Cathy, you think of that night you spent with Moroni as a mutilation.”

“You are so right.”

“What do you need to be healed?”

“Paul, the only thing I need is for you to care that it happened.”

“I care.”

Sentences formed in Christopher’s mind: It’s your body, you can do anything you like with it. I don’t own your flesh or your mind because I love you. He didn’t speak;
Cathy would never abide such thoughts.

“I know you care,” Cathy said. “But for me, not for yourself. If you did to me what I’ve done to you, I’d kill you in your sleep.”

Christopher gathered her body into his arms. She lay inert for an instant before she responded. In daylight, now, she sometimes looked away when she spoke to him.

“I wish I had another life, the way you do, Paul,” she said. “Maybe I could stay inside it, as cold as you, and learn the secret you told me when I told you about
Franco.”

“The secret?”

“Of how to love, and feel nothing.”

4

Christopher finished his work on the Kamensky manuscript and gave it to the Paris station to be retyped.

Christopher, meanwhile, waited for an agent to come from Dakar for a meeting in Paris. The man had been instructed to meet him on the last Wednesday in April at noon, by the tomb of the unknown
soldier beneath the Arc de Triomphe. If the meeting failed, he was to come to the same place again at ninety-minute intervals until he made contact with Christopher. The African was six hours late.
Christopher watched his tall figure, swathed in a heavy overcoat, as it dodged through the traffic of the Place de l’Étoile. Tires shrieked, horns sounded in violation of the law.

“I assure you,” the African said, “that I was not followed for the last hundred meters of my journey.” He offered no explanation for being late and Christopher asked for
none. He led the agent into the underground passage, then into the crowded Métro. When he was satisfied that they were alone, he took the man into a brasserie and ordered dinner. The
man’s name was Iboudou; he sent his steak back to be cooked again; he had the horror of the civilisé for rare meat.

The debriefing took a long time, as it usually did with blacks. The man was a rising politician. Christopher had given him money and technical assistance to found a party newspaper. He had
financed trips abroad for the politician’s supporters, and arranged scholarships for promising young men. The politician had gradually, with Christopher’s secret funds and
Christopher’s secret advice, built up a base of support. Christopher had recruited him because he was intelligent and self-interested, qualities he had derived from a European education.
Also, he was from a minor tribe that was acceptable to the two large ones which contended, sometimes bloodily, for control of their new nation. It was thought that Christopher’s agent might
even, if a compromise became necessary to avert civil war, be made prime minister. He was already in the government.

In Iboudou’s country, Christopher had seen one man mounted on a writhing woman while a second waited to cut her throat, and yet another man, his white robe spotted with blood and his face
dazed as if by a powerful drug, walking down a dusty road with the severed heads of children swinging from either hand. When all the members of the rival tribe had been hunted through the streets
and killed in this village, Christopher had seen a grave containing a hundred bodies. All the young girls, and many of the women, had been disemboweled. There had been no reason for the massacre,
no spark that could be said to have set off the carnival of rape and murder; it had just happened, as it happened again a week later, with the tribes changing places as victims and murderers, in a
village at the other end of the country. Iboudou was the alternative to slaughter. That was the policy conceived in the brain of the American government. Christopher, executing policy deep in its
body, had lost his trust in ideas. In a pissoir, he gave Iboudou the money he was owed, and required him to sign the receipt with a thumbprint. “Do you,” asked Iboudou, “use
invisible ink for white men?”

5

The safe house in Montmartre was at the top of a flight of stone stairs, and Christopher mounted them slowly, so as to remain behind the pair of policemen who climbed ahead of
him. There was no light in the windows of the flat on the top floor. Christopher entered the darkened hallway. The concierge, a gray bony woman who seemed never to sleep, came out of her lodge and
switched on the motor of the elevator. Christopher thanked her, and exchanged a word with her about the cold rain while he waited for the lift to descend; she told him that the weather made her
joints ache. Cathy, accustomed to her parents’ concierge who had been made servile by large tips, was disconcerted by this suspicious female, and after the first few days in the safe house
had ceased speaking to her. Christopher, going up in the cage of the elevator, watched the concierge below, shivering in the night air. When she heard him close the gates at the top, she brought
the lift back down and turned off its motor again.

The flat was empty. Cathy’s music, sheets that she had bought in a neighborhood shop, was still on the rack of the piano, and the plate she had used for lunch was on the table with the
remains of her food drying on the surface of the china.

Her clothes were gone, and her suitcase. Christopher looked for a note, but found none. He went over the apartment foot by foot. There was no sign that Cathy had come to any harm.

Downstairs, he found the concierge still loitering in the hall. She pressed the light switch; the dim bulb was on a timer, designed to give the tenants time enough, and no more, to pass from the
outer door to the lift. As she and Christopher spoke, the light went on and off repeatedly. The bulb, when it was burning, buzzed like an insect trapped between the panes of a double window.

“Mademoiselle departed at about five o’clock,” said the concierge. “She had a large bag, and there was no one to help her with it. It took her quite a long time to go
down the steps. She found a taxi at the bottom,”

“She left no envelope for me?”

The concierge gave Christopher a sardonic look and shook her head.

“We were expecting a visitor,” Christopher said. “Did anyone come?”

“Male or female?”

“One of each, a man and his wife.”

“Evidently the wife remained at home. The gentleman came at noon, only minutes after you yourself had left. He remained for two hours, perhaps longer. No doubt Mademoiselle invited him to
lunch.”

Christopher nodded. “I’ll be leaving myself in the morning,” he said, “and I wanted to thank you for your kindness to us.” He gave the concierge a fifty-franc note.
Without looking at it, she crumpled it in her fist like an unwelcome letter.

“The gentleman who came,” Christopher said. “Describe him.”

“American, not handsome, middle-aged. His clothes did not fit. He was evidently a strong man. He went up the stairs instead of using the lift. He ran all the way up.”

From a telephone in a bar, Christopher called the Kirkpatricks’ apartment and asked the maid, in French, for himself. Then he asked for Madame Christopher.

“Neither Monsieur nor Miss Catherine is here.”

“May I leave a message?”

“But they are in Rome, monsieur. I don’t know when they will be back, it may be weeks.”

Christopher dialed the home number of the chief of the Paris station. He identified himself, and using Wilson’s telephone name, asked where he was staying.

“I don’t know.”

“I want to see him now.”

There was a silence. “All right. Inside, in an hour.”

The crowd of French police lounging outside the American Embassy watched Christopher idly as he walked through the front door. The duty officer was waiting for him by the Marine guard’s
desk. Upstairs, in an empty corridor, he stopped and faced Christopher. “The French may have taken your picture,” he said. “We gave them some infrared equipment, and it would be
like them to try it out on us. Was the police van parked where it usually is?”

“Yes, down the avenue Gabriel.”

“Too far away, then. But we’ll sneak you out the back. Bud is here, working late. He awaits. Call me when you’re ready to go.”

Wilson was using an office in which the entire ceiling was covered with fluorescent light fixtures. He sat with his feet on a green steel desk, covered with file folders with
‘secret’ labels on them. The burn basket, a transparent plastic tube, was half filled with fragments of torn paper. Wilson pushed his reading glasses onto his forehead and reached
inside his shirt to scratch his chest. He wore no tie and a thick tuft of graying hair curled at his unbuttoned collar.

“It’s two o’clock in the morning,” Wilson said. “Don’t you ever go to bed?”

Christopher sat down and moved the burn basket to one side in order to have an unobstructed view of Wilson.

“You called on my wife this afternoon,” Christopher said.

Wilson nodded.

“You didn’t think it was necessary to tell me beforehand?”

“I assumed you’d be there. When you weren’t, I thought I’d come to the point anyway.”

“Which was?”

Wilson laced his hands behind his head and examined the canopy of light on the ceiling. In the absence of shadows, he looked older, more pallid. His beard showed patches of white.

“I ask you,” Christopher said, “because I found her gone and I don’t know where she is.”

Wilson put his feet on the floor and looked at the burn basket.

“I’m sorry,” Wilson said. “She was upset. Sometimes you touch a nerve when you don’t expect to.”

Christopher moved the burn basket again, putting it out of sight on the floor. He watched Wilson.

“Putting pieces of paper together,” Wilson said, “I saw that she and Maria Rothchild had once known each other. I asked her about that.”

“And that upset her?”

“No, it was the other connection.”

Wilson picked up a cardboard coffee cup and turned it between his fingers, delicately, as he had handled the cards at gin rummy.

“I’m telling you what I’m telling you as an officer, not as a husband,” he said. “You and your wife know an Italian named Franco Moroni. He’s a filmmaker in
Rome. He calls himself a Communist. A romantic. I had a piece of paper from Rome. The station there is running a German girl who likes to screw Communists and movie producers, sometimes both at the
same time.”

“Come on,” Christopher said.

“The German kid has been doing it for Moroni, with us paying her the fee. We want to know where he gets the money for his movies, and so on. To make it as short as I can, the German asset
reports that Moroni is boasting that he’s sleeping with the wife of a prominent American journalist named Paul Christopher.”

Christopher did not move. “You asked Cathy about that?”

“Not directly. I asked how well she knew Moroni, and if she had ever discussed your whereabouts with him when you were out of town.”

“Why?”

“You know why. I’m trying to find the blown fuse. Maybe if Moroni knew you were in Berlin, he told somebody like our German girl and the word got passed to Moscow or somewhere. If
they’ve got him on the string, they’ve got someone talking to him.”

“What did Cathy reply?”

“She didn’t. She just ran into the other room.”

“You were there for two hours.”

“Your wife gave me a nice lunch, and played the piano. We talked about you. She acted like a woman who really loves her husband. It was only in the last five minutes that we discussed
Moroni.”

“What’s your conclusion?”

Wilson put down the empty coffee container. “I don’t know. I told her it wasn’t you who had told us about Moroni. I had to shout through the closed door. She wouldn’t
open up. I don’t know if she believed me.”

1

Christopher telephoned Cathy at six in the morning. She must still have been awake because she answered on the second ring. He heard music, a tape recording of Cathy’s
own performance of Schumann, playing in another room of the Rome apartment. When she heard his voice she hung up the phone. Christopher told the telephonist that he had been cut off. But Cathy did
not answer when the call went through again, and in the days that followed he heard the busy signal again and again, and knew that she had taken the telephone off the hook.

Christopher met an agent in Casablanca and walked with the man through the dark shuttered city which might have been, except for the smell of dust and the deathly nighttime silence, a French
town in the provinces. The Arab held Christopher’s arm like a petty French functionary imparting a confidence, and murmured his report as they strode with measured step back and forth for an
hour in the same narrow street. Christopher listened, and responded, with the surface of his mind. In its depths he listened to Cathy and heard himself reply. He glimpsed her in his imagination as
she knelt in a bed and lifted her breast toward the lips of a stranger.

Christopher stopped in Rome on his way back to Paris. Cathy wasn’t in the apartment on the Lungotevere, though her jewels were scattered on the dressing table and there were other signs of
her presence. Christopher looked for her on the via Veneto and in Trastevere. The car was gone, and he supposed that she was driving around the city with the top down in the mild night. He went
back to the apartment and left a letter for her. At first he laid it on her pillow; then he moved it to the dressing table.