The Secret Lovers (18 page)

Cerutti spoke earnestly to the headwaiter about dessert, then turned back to Christopher.

“I have a professional interest in what you’ve done,” he said. “I don’t know if Otto mentioned that I own a small publishing house.”

“I knew that you discovered Kiril Kamensky and published his work.”

“Ah. Then you know I used to publish a lot of Russian books. At one time my imprint was quite famous in that regard. But there’s no money in it.”

Cerutti, touching his lips with a napkin, watched Christopher begin to say something, then change his mind. His eyes shone, for an instant, with curiosity. Then he spoke of other things.

Christopher paid the enormous bill. Cerutti suggested they walk to the Crazy Horse Saloon; inside the door there, he gave money to the greeter to get them a table near the
stage. There was a new act: a very tall German girl who began her striptease in a Wehrmacht helmet and ended it with a swastika on her G-string.

They drank Scotch whisky. Finally Cerutti, his speech faintly slurred, began to ask questions again.

“Otto says you really found your way to interesting people in Russia. The luck of the innocent, was it?”

“As I said, I just met people, and they introduced me to other people. It’s the same the world over.”

“For the young and beautiful, perhaps.”

The music had begun again, and the master of ceremonies introduced another girl. Cerutti called the waiter and watched him make his way among the tables, putting his hands on the customers to
move them aside because their attention was fixed on the girl. Cerutti’s face, like the flesh of the dancer, went from pink to blue to green to stark white as the filters were changed on the
spotlight.

“Otto was hinting to me,” he said, his voice straining to penetrate the throbbing music, “that you got through to someone very interesting in Russia. One of the great lost
writers. Otto was very mysterious.”

Christopher smiled, as if in the din he could not hear what Cerutti was saying.

“Did you? Who was it?”

Cerutti made a megaphone of his hands and asked his insistent question again.

Christopher ceased smiling. “There are some things,” he shouted into Cerutti’s ear, “that you just don’t ask. I’m sorry I said anything to Otto.”

Cerutti shrugged, but he held Christopher’s glance for a long moment before he turned his chair around in order to have a better view of the girl, now almost naked, who danced in the
changing colors of the limelight.

3

Maria Rothchild met Christopher in the bar of the Hotel Scribe. Christopher heard her brisk unmistakable footsteps as she came down the corridor. She wore a tartan skirt and
before she sat down at his table she spread its pleats and made a curtsy. “I forgot that this bar is upholstered in the Campbell plaid, or whatever,” Maria said. “It wasn’t
my intention to match my costume to the room.”

She ordered a Bloody Mary and then brought the waiter back with a crooked finger. “Make it two, both for me,” she said. “Otto had a spell last night,” Maria said,
“and after I put him to bed I was so bloody depressed I sat up till three drinking gin and listening to Vivaldi. I’m turning into a housebound alcoholic.”

“What sort of spell did Otto have?”

“Petulance. It’s hard to be an invalid. He resents my youth and my glowing good health. Life is getting to be like a novelette in a Hearst magazine.”

“Or the Brontë sisters.”

“Same thing,” Maria said. “Everything in nature, if I may quote you in the long ago, Paul, is the same unless it’s touched by genius.”

“I wonder what I meant by that?”

Maria, eagerly consuming her second Bloody Mary, did not reply. She had a reputation, as Christopher did, for remembering with great exactness everything that was said to her. Unlike
Christopher, she liked to quote sentences back to the people who had spoken them; sometimes Maria waited years for the opportunity.

She finished drinking and sat back with a hand on her stomach. “I can feel it consuming the evil humors,” she said. “God bless the discoverer of alcohol.” She took a
Gauloise from a blue package, lit it, and inhaled her one long drag with such force that Christopher could hear the paper burning. Then she snuffed out the cigarette, three-fourths of it
unsmoked.

“Your small friend, the descendant of the Jesuit philosopher, enjoyed his dinner at Lasserre,” she said. “He wanted to know where you got all that money. We said we thought you
had inherited young. Cowan
was
an only child, wasn’t he? David left that detail out.”

“Yes. Tell me the rest.”

“About Claude? He brought you into the conversation very casually. Slyly, I’d call it. Otto thought that that was quite telling; so do I. Evidently you gave him just enough to make
him want more.”

“I found a message from him at the hotel today. He wants to meet for a drink tomorrow afternoon.”

“Only a drink?”

“It’s his turn to pay. I’ll stretch the evening out, somehow.”

“He’s not bad company,” Maria said, “but of course it’s business. God, the pain of eating rich food with poor fools. When I resigned from the Company I promised
myself I’d never again have a meal with someone I didn’t really like. It hasn’t turned out that way, living with Otto. The agents still come for lunch. Maybe when he
retires.”

“Give me the rest on Claude,” Christopher said.

Cerutti, Maria reported, had said very little when he came by with his weekly bottle of champagne, but he had come two days early. Cerutti had wanted to know, in detail, who Paul Cowan’s
Russian mother had been.

“Otto was vague. Like a lot of reformed revolutionaries, Cerutti is an awful snob—where the ‘de’ came from in his name is a mystery to all—so he thinks it’s
natural that Otto wouldn’t have taken notice of anyone who had a Russian title granted after the reign of Peter the Great.”

“What else?” Christopher asked. It was unlike Maria to chat instead of reporting.

“He mentioned several times what a dish you are. I asked Otto if Claude was maybe a little bit queer, but Otto says no. It’s not a tendency Otto admires. He’s brutal to
fairies, always has been.”

“Otto’s brutal to a lot of people.”

“So they say,” Maria replied, “but especially to fools and queers. Claude, believe me, is neither or they wouldn’t have stayed in touch, when there was nothing in it for
Otto, for all these years.”

Maria’s habit of putting a finger on her husband’s flaws interested Christopher; she spoke to him of Rothchild as a liberal in America might speak to another liberal about the
fecklessness of Negroes, knowing that his credentials were too good for him to be mistaken for a bigot. Christopher seldom knew what to say in return.

“The important thing,” Maria said, “is that Claude believes, or is beginning to believe, that there may be something for Cerutti in Paul Cowan, the Canadian. He’s keen to
know what you know about the new Russian writers. He made some money out of those books in Russian he used to publish, including Kamensky’s. He’s sniffing the air for the scent of easy
money again.”

Christopher let her drink. While the glass was still at her lips he said, “Sniffing the air, Maria? According to Claude, Otto has already let him smell the bone.”

Maria put her glass back on the table, dabbed at her lips with a paper napkin.

“Otto
did
tell Cerutti that I had met one of the great Russian writers,” Christopher said, “or was Cerutti just putting a little blood in the water?”

“Yes, Otto told him that.”

“Why? David told him not to interfere, not to show his hand”

Maria Rothchild began putting things back into her purse.

“Because, Paul, my husband does things his way. Not David’s way or your way or my way.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“And done nothing.”

“So far,” Christopher said.

Maria closed the snap on her purse.

“Is that a message?” she asked.

Christopher helped her with her chair and walked with her in silence out of the bar and up the stairs. Outside, Maria studied the fa9ade of the Opera House.

“You know,” she said, “before you ever met Otto, David came around to describe you. Otto asked how good you were. ‘Better than you, Otto,’ David said,
‘because he has the power of honesty.’ What a remark. What an error in handling. Otto has never forgotten.”

She kissed Christopher’s cheek and left him.

4

Christopher was alone when he wasn’t with agents. He woke at dawn and went out of the hotel for breakfast. He liked the back-street cafés that catered to the gruff
early-morning trade. Often, near the Madeleine in the morning, he would be stopped by smiling young women, as fresh as Cathy, who would ask him if he wanted them. He refused; he felt not even the
ghost of desire.

Waiting for Cerutti, Christopher sat alone in his high white room in the Hotel Vendôme and tried, for the first time in years, to write poetry. The lines came to his pen as easily as ever,
but they were about flowers, trees, the sky, streets; he wrote a sonnet that described the hill at Pontoise as Pissarro had painted it. He could not make verses about anything that had a voice or
warm flesh.

He wrote to Cathy. He could send nothing through the mail that might give someone who intercepted the letter insight or advantage. He didn’t think that Cathy would believe in a love
letter. He made up a long joke about a woman who would not answer her telephone and woke up one morning to find, as Kafka’s hero had found himself turned into a cockroach, that she had been
transformed into a telephone. Strangers shouted into her ear and listened at her mouth and punched her nostrils and eyes with dialing fingers.

He mailed the letter at the post office in the sixth arrondissement and asked at the window if poste restante had anything in his name. He was given an envelope addressed in Cathy’s round
handwriting.

5

Cerutti had suggested meeting in the bar of the Crillon at five o’clock, an hour when it was frequented by English-speaking journalists. Some of them, hanging together in
an atmosphere of sad gossip, knew Christopher in his own name as the correspondent of a great American magazine. Christopher avoided them when he could, and when he could not, he bought them drinks
with his own money. It was against regulations to spend secret funds on the American press.

He asked Cerutti to meet him instead at the Brasserie Lipp, on the other side of the Seine. They had to wait, standing up, for a table. Cerutti made no attempt to cover his annoyance. When at
last he and Christopher sat down, Cerutti looked contemptuously at the clientele. “Tourists,” he said. He mopped his face with a handkerchief and drank off half of his tall glass of
Munich beer at a swallow.

Christopher had brought the English translation of the Kamensky manuscript with him, wrapped in cheap paper and tied with string. Cerutti eyed it as it lay on the table, but said nothing about
it. He described an encounter he had had that day with an American film director who was interested in one of the novels on the backlist of Cerutti’s publishing house. “It’s about
the Spanish Civil War,” Cerutti said. “I asked him how he expected to get money from American bankers to make a film on that subject. ‘No problem,’ he said, ‘I’m
on the Hollywood blacklist. That makes me a hero in Europe and I can get money over here, pour épater les États-Unis.’ ”

“Is it a good book? You said you were in the Spanish war.”

Cerutti grunted. “There were no good books about that war. Too much ideology. Even the best writers were scared of losing their friends; they had to write what was expected of them, not
what they saw and felt.”

“Did you know Otto in Spain?”

“Very slightly. I was in a fighting unit, the XI International Brigade, in Madrid in ’36. Otto was a journalist, living at the Gran Via Hotel. He always had Martell cognac, I
don’t know where he got it all, so we were glad to be interviewed by him.”

“Did you tell Otto what you saw and felt?”

“I told him true stories about the valor of the Spanish workers. Otto in those days was one of the deluded; he professed to believe in the Popular Front.”

“You didn’t?”

Cerutti gave Christopher a sharp look; up till now, it had been he who had asked all the questions, chosen the shades of meaning.

“I was a Communist, and one who had fought with the Reds in Russia. I understood what fun it was going to be shooting Otto and all the other romantic Social Democrats and Socialists after
the war.”

“But you lost the war.”

“Yes, and my faith, I’m a defrocked zealot. Franco did the job for us—he shot a lot of Ottos kind.”

“What did Otto lose?”

Cerutti made a kissing noise. “Ask Otto. The odd thing was, all the Spaniards thought Otto was a Frenchman and I was a Russian. The Madrileños thought every armed foreigner was a
Russian. They used to shout at all of us in the streets, ¡Viva Rusia! It was the slogan of the war that winter—in Spain the Germans tested aerial bombing tactics; the Soviets,
propaganda. You see who won in the end. In 1945 there was no more Luftwaffe. No one has yet found a way to shoot down the illusions of the Left.”

“Or of the Right?”

“The Right doesn’t need illusions; it has factories and mines and banks.”

“You’re still part-Communist, my friend.”

Cerutti showed his yellowing teeth. “A very small part, withered like an old man’s penis,” he said. “It was once the seat of pleasure, but that was a long time
ago.”