The Secret Lovers (17 page)

Christopher said, “David.” Patchen kept his eyes on the passing traffic.

“David,” Christopher said, “you do see that Otto is trying to kill Kamensky, don’t you?”

Patchen snapped his tongue against his teeth, softly.

“So it seems,” he said. “It must be his illness.”

“You think Otto doesn’t see what he’s doing?”

Patchen was weary. “I don’t know. Why would he want Kamensky to die?”

“Printing his novel in Russian will guarantee it,” Christopher said.

“Perhaps.”

“No, David, not perhaps. It’s a death warrant. Are you going to do it?”

Patchen turned to Christopher and this time there was emotion in his voice. “Am
I
going to do it?” he said. He spoke Christopher’s false name, the one by which he was
known inside the Agency. “Not alone. If we do it,
we
are going to print Kamensky’s book in Russian—you, me, Otto, Sutherland, Horst Bülow’s ghost, all of us.
And if it kills Kamensky, we’ll accept that and do the same thing another day. We are the apparatus, and that’s the kind of thing we do.”

1

Claude de Cerutti wore the rosette of the Resistance in the buttonhole of his sober blue suit. He was a short round man with a rubicund face and a halo of gray curls around his
bald skull.

“In the Resistance,” Otto told Christopher, “one of Cerutti’s cover names was Le Frèré éméché, the Tipsy Friar.”

“What was Otto’s?”

‘That’s still a secret,” Rothchild said.

“Jaguar,” said Cerutti. “He was head of counterintelligence in our réseau. A stealthy night-living animal, much feared by those who had reason to be afraid.”

Cerutti, when he was introduced to Christopher, stood back and examined his face, a puzzled look in his bright eyes. Maria had forewarned Christopher that it was one of Cerutti’s poses to
pretend that he had previously met everyone to whom he was introduced, but could not quite remember the new person. He asked Christopher where in the United States he came from.

“I’m a Canadian, from Toronto.”

“Surely not? You don’t speak French like a Canadian.”

“French is not spoken in Toronto.”

Cerutti, when he spoke to Otto Rothchild or made a remark Rothchild was meant to overhear, had a way of raising his voice. “It’s extraordinary,” he said in a piercing tone,
“how all the North Americans I meet at the Rothchilds’ talk French like natives. No Frenchman will believe it. They say I am the only man in France who has ever met a comprehensible
American.”

Cerutti had brought a bottle of champagne, carrying it from his car in a silver ice bucket, and he rose from his chair to give more wine to Maria and Christopher. He brushed Maria’s hand
as he filled her glass.

“It was that touch of Maria’s skin for which I traveled all the way from the avenue Foch,” he said. “Otto thinks I am performing a corporal act of charity, visiting him
each Wednesday as I do. The truth is more corporeal. I hope to persuade Otto’s wife to come away with me to the South Sea islands. I am mad for American girls, a Neanderthal entranced by a
female of the Cro-Magnons. Such exquisitely cruel beauty; they are the first examples of another stage of mankind.”

Cerutti, standing above Christopher’s seated figure, asked him a series of questions about himself. He spoke still in the light tone of voice that he had used when flirting with Maria, but
with the faint hostility of a European speaking to a foreigner whom he cannot define by the standards of his own circle. Christopher answered easily with his cover story: his name was Paul Cowan,
he was the orphaned son of a banker from Toronto, he was unmarried, he had gone to McGill University, he was hoping to write.

“One must not
hope
to write,” said Cerutti. “One must write. It is necessary to wring an apology from Gide.”

“I’m not aiming to be Proust. I think it’s better to get out of the cork-lined room, to travel. Even to catch cold. I’ve just been to Russia.”

Cerutti’s interest was aroused. “And what is Russia like? I haven’t been there since I was younger than you. As Otto was coming out, a dispossessed aristocrat, I was going in,
a young firebrand who thought he’d inherited the future. Ah, the Russian Revolution! All my friends died of it.”

“Not quite all,” Rothchild said.

“No, Otto, there’s you, but ex–Social Democrats hardly count. I speak of the Red heroes. You were a pink hero—the only one ever, so far as I know.”

Cerutti returned his attention to Christopher. “Tell me about your trip,” he said. “Was it one of the Intourist things where you see no one and look at all those pictures of
boys and girls on tractors?”

“Mostly. I tried to get off the beaten track a little. You can slip away if you’re not too obvious. I talked to some of the ordinary Russians.”

“Talked to them? You speak Russian?”

“A little. I had a Russian mother.”

The real Paul Cowan, who had died at Dieppe, had in fact been the son of a woman who had been brought out of Petrograd in 1917.

Cerutti’s eyes, shining but opaque, never wavered. “To what sort of people did you speak Russian in Moscow?” he asked Christopher.

“All sorts. Of course everyone thought I was an American, it’s the bane of Canadian nationality. The Russians seem to feel about Americans as you do about American women, that they
are one stage ahead of everyone else in the evolutionary process.”

“Do you agree with that view?”

“Not quite. I come from the most anti-American country on earth.”

“Canada? Ah, no.
America
is the most anti-American country on earth. When you speak of public opinion, young man, you speak of the opinions of the intellectuals because they are
the only ones who publish and broadcast. The masses
are
dumb. Intellectuals always hate their own country, but the United States has produced an intelligentsia that is positively
bloodthirsty.”

“You see America as a benevolent force?”

“What does it matter what it
is
?” Cerutti asked. “It’s what it symbolizes. Food, clothes, cars, dancing. Money. These are the things mankind lusts for. If one
country shows that these things are available to the common man, all others will have to become like it, or fall.”

Otto Rothchild cleared his throat. “This is the young Communist who fought the Whites in Russia, Franco in Spain, the Gestapo in the streets of Paris,” he said.

“Yes,” Cerutti said, raising both short arms above his head, “with these little fists. One day I unclenched my hands and wondered why I had not preferred the itching palm all
my life.”

Cerutti resumed his questions. Christopher told him that he had tried to meet other writers and artists. There was, he had found, a considerable underground. Stories, poems, even whole novels
were passed from hand to hand. Their readers copied them on typewriters so that extra copies could be circulated.

“They confided this to you, a foreigner? Showed you the manuscripts?”

“There’s not much to confide. It’s well known that this goes on. The Russians, the literary sort of Russians anyway, are dying to speak to the rest of the world. Their country
is a huge cloister, intellectually speaking, with everyone in involuntary celibacy.”

“And you got in the window, among the novices?”

Christopher grinned. “I hadn’t thought of it in quite that way. We talked, drank, stayed up all night. It was like being back at the university.”

“Surely it was very dangerous for these young Russians?”

“We were careful.”

“Careful? You’re very innocent. Probably one in five of your young rebels was a KGB informer.”

“That I doubt.”

Cerutti shrugged. “Good luck to your friends, then.”

Descending in the lift, Cerutti clasped his silver champagne bucket, elaborately chased and decorated like a coarse enlargement of a Cellini miniature, to his chest. His
chatter had ceased as the door of the Rothchilds’ apartment closed behind him.

For two hours, Cerutti had barely interrupted himself. He had flirted with Maria, told stories of Russia and Spain during their civil wars—he had fought for the Communists in both
conflicts. He spoke of his ancestry: he was descended on one side from a Jesuit philosopher of the French Revolution, on the other from the chef de cuisine Catherine de Médicis had brought
to Paris when she married Henri II. “How can one be descended from a Jesuit?” Maria asked. “Don’t ask rude questions,” Cerutti replied; “my ancestors introduced
cooking and even the fork to France, and, having civilized this country in the sixteenth century, radicalized it in the eighteenth.” In the lift with Christopher, however, Cerutti was
quiet.

“You’ve known Otto a long time, I gather,” Christopher said.

“During two wars.”

“Don’t tell me you met in the First World War as well as the Second?”

“No. In Spain in 1936 and then during the last war with the Germans.”

They were very close together in the tiny cage. Christopher smiled, reflecting how little Patchen, who had arranged this situation, would have enjoyed feeling the heat of Cerutti’s body,
smelling the wine on the Frenchman’s breath and the cologne beneath his sweaty clothes. Cerutti stood back and permitted Christopher to struggle with the doors of the lift after it had
groaned to a stop. The two men shifted their bodies to make room for the inner doors to swing into the cabin with them; Cerutti held his silver bucket aloft to protect it.

“How do you happen to know Rothchild?” he asked. “Of course, he knows everyone.”

“My mother. Russian émigrés all know one another.”

“Was she, too, a member of the old nobility?”

“Weren’t they all?”

Cerutti pursed his lips; he was beginning to look upon Christopher with interest.

“Otto is quite genuine, a descendant of Demetrius Donskoy, who defeated the Golden Horde on the Kulikovo Plain in 1380,” he said. “Much better than being a Romanov. For years I
doubted Otto’s lineage. His behavior was all wrong for a displaced boyar.”

Christopher, with a change of expression, asked for the completion of the joke.

“He never borrowed money,” Cerutti said.

In the street, they shook hands. Christopher hesitated for a moment, then asked Cerutti if he would care to have dinner with him one night that week. Cerutti handed him the ice bucket and took a
date book from an inner pocket. He studied it, holding it at arm’s length.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I have no other free night this week.”

Christopher agreed. Cerutti uncapped a large fountain pen. “It’s Paul what?” he asked.

“Cowan.” Christopher spelled the name. “Hotel Vendôme.”

Hearing the name of this hotel, Cerutti showed new signs of alertness.

“What restaurant do you prefer, and what time?” Christopher asked. He smiled. “You’re my guest, of course.”

“Something simple,” Cerutti replied. “Lasserre, for example.”

“Fine. Eight o’clock.”

Cerutti disappeared around the corner. Christopher, walking more slowly in the same direction, saw him drive away in a battered Simca.

2

As they rose in the elevator at Lasserre, an even smaller cage than the one at the Rothchilds’, Cerutti ran a fingertip over its walls lined with red and gold cut velvet.
“The perfect place in which to ravish a virgin, I’ve always thought,” he said. “But when to do it—going up, with all the senses undulled, or going down, with all
appetites satisfied except the sexual one?”

Cerutti was known to the headwaiter; Christopher, as usual, was not recognized. They were moved from the small table that had been reserved for an unknown named Cowan to a more favorable
location. Cerutti, tonight wearing the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole, ordered the dinner and the wines; he explained to Christopher how each dish was made, and instructed him to search for the
taste of the ingredients. He told him anecdotes about the wine they were drinking. In the war, he said, he had watched from a hiding place while German troops with flamethrowers destroyed a whole
field of vines at a château famous for the white wine they were now drinking. The German commander posted a notice explaining that the chatelaine had given food to the Maquis. “In fact,
she had been the German colonel’s mistress, and they had quarreled,” Cerutti said. “I thought I’d never drink this wine again.”

Christopher listened. He had done what he was doing a hundred times before. Cerutti was an intelligent man, and according to the files he had been a brave one. As he talked, observing
Christopher for signs of admiration, making himself a familiar of the waiter, Christopher began to see his weakness. It could not be called vanity; it was worse. Cerutti was a man who had had to
settle for the mere forms of recognition. He knew that he was more than the headwaiter in Lasserre, or the cabinet minister who had done him the offhand favor of putting him up for medals,
realized. Cerutti was too small, too funny, too reckless in showing his intelligence. The fault had cost him his place as a man among serious men. It was so evident that Christopher, reviewing in
his mind all that he had read and heard about Cerutti, felt a pang of anxiety. It seemed impossible that this man had not already been ensnared by another intelligence service. It made no
difference; Christopher, often enough, had found use for men that others had believed worn out. It was thought that Cerutti had not been part of a network since the Resistance disbanded. But a
lifetime was not long enough to kill the taste for secret life; no one who had ever lived it believed that he could lose his skills.

“You say you’re a writer,” Cerutti said. “You are, I take it, as yet unpublished?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Cerutti drew a circle in the air above his head, to encompass the voluptuous decor. “You are not a starving artist, evidently. This is the most orgiastic restaurant in Paris.”

Christopher gave Cerutti no more information about himself.

“Did you describe this debauchee’s life to your underground friends in Moscow?” Cerutti asked.

“They only asked about Hemingway, and the movies.”