The Secret Lovers (19 page)

Cerutti lapsed into a mood. Christopher did not disturb him. The waiter brought more beer and a plate of cold sausages.

“Were you in battle in the last war?” Cerutti asked.

“Yes.”

“Then you know it’s bad enough to see your friends fall, and know that they are dead. It’s worse when they go back to the country they were fighting for, Soviet Russia in this
case, and die, or perhaps do not die, there. You don’t know. They are swallowed up by the earth. You hear rifle shots in your sleep.”

“I thought the purges came later.”

“They began in ’37, in Russia. Practically everyone who had been in Spain was shot when he got back to the Soviet Union. The comrades went from one abattoir to another.”

Cerutti lifted a piece of sausage from the plate, then put it back. He pushed the plate away.

“We all lost friends,” he said. “Even Otto lost friends.”

“Otto had the same friends as you?”

“One or two. Otto, even then, was ubiquitous. He knew everyone in Madrid. Once, even, I found him talking to Konev—Paulito, he was called in Spain—who was in charge of training
Spanish terrorists. And Otto and a young Russian, also a journalist but a Soviet citizen and a Communist, were close. I suppose the fellow died for it along with all the rest, when he got
home.”

Christopher asked no more questions. Cerutti blinked his eyes and gave a little laugh.

“That Hollywood director took me back,” he said. “The blacklist. He thinks it’s
chic
to play around with politics. ‘Épater les
États-Unis.’ He thought he was speaking my language. He’d have done better to study Esperanto.”

They went on to dinner at the Coupole. The walk through Montparnasse cheered Cerutti, and in the noisy brasserie with its throng of garrulous people he took off his coat and
loosened his tie. “After all,” he said, “this is a better ambience than Lasserre. One has to prefer soap to perfume.” He ordered carafe after carafe of rough wine and ate
the simple food with appetite. He seemed to have a different set of manners for every situation. Christopher felt affection begin to stir within him. He was glad to have this sign. He had never
been able to seduce anyone, a woman for her body or an agent for his fantasies, with a cold heart.

Finally, drunk, Cerutti tapped the package Christopher had left between them on the table. It was a question.

“It’s a manuscript,” Christopher said.

“And you think I ought to read it.”

“If you read English.”

Cerutti put on his glasses and ripped open the package. He read the opening paragraph aloud. His English was accented but perfect, and to demonstrate something to Christopher he translated what
he had read back into French, at sight. Then, quickly, he read the first five or six pages of the typescript. There was no title page and no author’s name. Cerutti said nothing about
this.

“Not bad,” he said in English. He looked at the number on the last page of the manuscript and raised his eyebrows. “But if I’m going to read seven hundred pages in
English, my friend, you are going to pay for dinner.”

At the taxi rank outside, he borrowed another fifty francs. He didn’t give the driver his destination while Christopher was still in earshot.

6

When it happened, it happened quickly, as it always did. Christopher waited in his hotel room, leaving only to eat, and once to meet a man from the Embassy. On the third
morning, Cerutti phoned from the reception desk. Christopher told him to come upstairs.

Cerutti laid the bulky manuscript on the table, but he kept the palm of his hand pressed upon it, as though he wished to prevent its being put back into hiding.

“This is a translation,” he said. “Where is the original?”

“I have it.”

“Who is the author?”

Christopher said, “It’s a nice morning. Let’s go outside.”

Cerutti, with the manuscript clutched to his breast, followed him down the stairs. Christopher took him to the Seine embankment, and they walked along the river in the gentle spring
sunlight.

Under the Pont de la Concorde, Cerutti stopped. Traffic soughed and thudded above them; the pylon of the great bridge quivered like a wooden stake driven into the ground by a sledgehammer.

“Who?” Cerutti said.

“Kiril Kamensky.”

Agents are seized, at the moment of submission, with a certain emotion. The transaction, the decision to give up resistance, causes the face to twist with something like humor, and the eyes to
look back, as Christopher sometimes thought, upon an earlier, more innocent person than the one the agent has just become. Now this happened to Cerutti.

“Kamensky is alive?” he said.

“Yes.”

“And he wants to publish this novel in the West?”

Christopher, unresponsive, watched Cerutti’s eyes as a hunter will watch a covert, waiting for an animal to give way to fright and break into the open. Cerutti walked past Christopher to
the water’s edge. He gazed for a moment into the discolored river.

“Have you the Russian original?”

“Yes,” Christopher said.

“There’s no question of authenticity?”

“Its in his own handwriting.”

Cerutti spat into the moving water, turned around. He knew what Christopher was.

“What are you offering me?” he asked.

“World rights. You’d get three-fourths of all profits, according to whatever arrangements you make with publishers in other countries. One quarter goes into a Swiss
account.”

“How quickly must we publish?”

“Quite soon. You’ll be told. You must be able to print at once, if necessary.”

“In French? Is there a translation?”

“No, you’ll have to do that. You must publish it in Russian at the same time. Even a little before the French, if it seems that that’s better.”

“In
Russian?
”

Christopher did not repeat himself.

“Do you know what that could mean for Kamensky?” Cerutti asked.

“I’ve described the situation.”

Cerutti had been standing with his heels on the edge of the embankment, the Seine at his back. There was no one in sight on either side of the river. He was a much smaller man than Christopher;
he was almost an old man. He moved away from the water before he spoke again.

“I’ll need capital,” Cerutti said. “For the printers, the binders, the distributors. You must leave everything about the technical side in my hands.”

“All right.”

“And the publicity?”

“It’s best that you do everything. You know better than anyone how to arrange things in France.”

“You want no control?”

“I didn’t say that. Someone will come to you with contracts and the money you’ll need.”

“Evidently I’ll be a rich man before I know it.” Cerutti let himself be himself for an instant. “In memories as well,” he said, in a voice filled with scorn.

A pair of young gendarmes walked by, arguing about the Tour de France. The newspapers were full of advance stories on the great bicycle race.

“There’s one question before we part,” Christopher said. “Who was the Russian journalist in Madrid? The young fellow Otto was so friendly with?”

Cerutti held the manuscript more loosely now. He looked away, in thought.

“Everyone in those days had a nom de guerre,” he said. “This fellow called himself Kolka Zhigalko. Ask Otto, they were always together. Zhigalko used to go wild on cognac. He
was a poet. He’d shout out his poems in Russian during a Fascist bombardment, stand on the roof of the hotel and do it, as if he were firing back at the enemy batteries.”

“Who else knew him?”

“Everyone, but they’re all dead. There was a Spaniard who hung around them a lot. He was some kind of lackey for Comrade Mediña, the Comintern instructor in Spain.”

“Name?”

“Carlos. He was a high-bred fellow, like Otto. Zhigalko called them the duke and the marquis. Zhigalko had learned to put his face in his plate and make noises like a dog when he ate, he
was a real member of the proletariat. It was while observing Otto and Carlos watch Zhigalko at table that I saw they were both fallen aristocrats. They were excited by their
disgúst.”

“You don’t know what became of Carlos?”

Cerutti said again, “Ask Otto.”

Christopher took a fifty-franc note from his pocket, tore it in half, and gave one portion of it to Cerutti.

“Tomorrow, at nine in the morning,” Christopher said, “by the columns in the Parc Monceau. The man will give you the other half of this. And a copy of the Russian
manuscript.”

“And the money.”

“Some of it.”

“How will I keep in touch?”

“The man will tell you all that.”

“Have you any last recommendation?”

“Be silent. Wait. Act openly, once Kamensky’s book is in the open.”

Cerutti fingered the torn money, shifted his grip on the manuscript.

“It’s wonderful, dealing with a professional,” he said. “You took me by surprise. I’d forgotten what a mistake it is to think another man is stupid.”

7

Christopher was out of the Hotel Vendôme in half an hour. He took his suitcase to the Aérogare des Invalides and left it in the baggage room. At noon he met Wilson
in the safe house where Christopher and Patchen, weeks before, had first spoken of the possibility of Kamensky’s death. The secretary’s gown, smudged at the collar, still hung on the
bathroom door.

Wilson took back Christopher’s false Canadian passport and the other identification describing Paul Cowan. He gave him back his own passport and wallet in a sealed envelope.

“Did you make Cerutti this morning?” Christopher asked.

“I watched the two of you saunter through the Luxembourg Gardens. I’ll know him.”

Wilson drew the blinds and turned on a reading lamp. He handed Christopher a plain file folder; inside it were Agency forms with the headings clipped off. The material dealt with the death of
Horst Bülow.

“You read” Wilson said, “I’ll wait.”

Christopher went through the pages rapidly. The material was terse. For the most part it was raw, but at the head of a page, sometimes, were numerals and letters of the alphabet that signified
the degree of reliability the analysts had assigned to the source, and the degree of truthfulness they assumed for the material itself. No symbol existed to denote absolute reliability or absolute
truth.

Christopher read the material twice over, then looked up at Wilson, who was peering at a stain on the ceiling.

“What do you make of it?” Wilson asked.

“It’s interesting. But it’s all hearsay, all speculation.”

“Sure it is. But the times and places fit. Contact breeds contact.”

Christopher asked another question. Wilson answered. In Christopher’s ear their voices sounded thin, because of what they were discussing.

“Do you think,” Christopher asked, “that I can talk to this German in Berlin, the one who saw Horst with the woman in the Tiergarten?”

Wilson, stolid, said, “I don’t know. It’s bad procedure. You’d have to let him see you. Why can’t I ask for you?”

“Because the fault was mine, for not foreseeing the problem. Because I know so much better than you do what the patterns of behavior would have been. I’d pick up on things you might
not.”

Wilson drummed on the cover of his attache case.

“Besides, I have another idea, something from a long time ago,” Christopher said. “I’ll give you that.”

Wilson didn’t ask what it was. He had no more desire than Christopher to go on talking about what the two of them suspected.

“I’ll try to fix you up with Berlin,” Wilson said. “Let’s meet here again, same time, next Friday. I think we ought to move slow, Paul.”

“Yes. But not so slowly that it happens again.”

Wilson gathered up the papers and put them back into his attaché case. He made a tour of the apartment to make sure nothing had been left behind. He washed the glasses they had used.
Christopher left first; Wilson locked up.

Christopher wired Cathy that he would be home the following night, on the late flight. The telegram said nothing of flights or times; any phrase containing the word “love,” she
understood, meant that he would land in Rome on the flight that arrived from Paris at one o’clock in the morning.

Next day, back in the safe house, Wilson showed Christopher the contracts Cerutti had signed.

“He’s hard-nosed,” Wilson said. “He wanted the handwritten Russian manuscript. Our fellow let him look at it, but not take it away. It’s got more fingerprints on it
than a whore’s backside.”

Christopher read the contracts. He hadn’t seen them before, but they obligated Cerutti to deposit the moneys for Kamensky in a small bank in Lucerne. It was all laid out as Patchen had
described.

Wilson put a receipt for twenty thousand dollars, in hundred-dollar bills with the serial numbers noted, in front of Christopher. There was a thumbprint, Cerutti’s, at the bottom of the
page.

“He’s not going to remain unwitting for very long,” Christopher said, “if you have him signing for money with a thumbprint.”

“I cleared the procedure with Patchen. Cerutti’s better off realizing from the start that this is real life.”

“Patchen thought it was all right to blow me?”

Wilson was rummaging in his briefcase. “Cerutti knew what you were before he ever put his thumb in the ink,” he said. “He’ll never know
who
you are, and
that’s what matters.”

Wilson found what he was looking for—a cheap French envelope from a bureau de tabac. He handed it, still sealed, to Christopher. “From Cerutti.” he said.

Inside, on a sheet of paper, was a typed name. Christopher looked away, then read the name again. He didn’t know how well he was controlling his face; had the man himself burst into the
room he would have been all right, but the name, lying alone on the page, had taken him unawares. Cathy was infecting him.

Christopher showed the name to Wilson. The Security man copied it onto a file card and spoke the name aloud. “Jorge de Rodegas. Who’s that?” he said.

“Someone from the past, maybe a connection. Someone Cerutti knew in Madrid, when he knew Otto.” Wilson massaged his face and when he raised it he looked like a man tired to the
bone.