The Secret Lovers (2 page)

Christopher left the car in a parking space near the new Hilton Hotel and loosened the coil wire. At the airport, Christopher told the Hertz girl that the car had broken down, and where it was.
She apologized and deducted the cost of the taxi from his bill.

Christopher got aboard the early flight to Paris. He had no luggage except an attache case. In it he carried a clean shirt, a toothbrush and razor, and the manuscript in Russian that had been
handed from idealist to idealist in a long line that had begun in Moscow and had not quite ended in Berlin. Was Bülow the first of them to die, or the last? None of the others had been agents.
They had been friends of the author, men with a higher opinion of Russian literature than Horst Bülow had had. They were unknown to Christopher and his people. They would disappear unnoticed
as soon as they were known to the Soviet security apparatus.

On the airplane, Christopher refused breakfast and went into the toilet to escape the smell of food. He shaved and brushed his teeth, and put his shirt, sweaty from being worn all night, on top
of the smeared manuscript. The title,
CMEPTEHbKA—The Little Death—
was printed in large cyrillic capitals in the careless hand of the Russian who had begun all this by wanting
to write the truth.

2

“Bülow,” said David Patchen, “at least had the satisfaction of dying a professional death.”

Christopher described the look of Bülow as he died. “It would be a mercy if that were true,” he said. “Horst always wanted to be important enough to be killed. But I
don’t think he had time.”

“He didn’t see it coming?”

“I don’t think so. It was very quick. One second he was waiting for the streetcar, the next he was ten feet in the air with a broken spine. I’d never seen it done
before.”

“Stupid.”

“Yes. Why didn’t they just pull him into the car? He would have told them where their package went. Now they have a dead end to deal with.”

Patchen and Christopher were strolling in the Tuileries Gardens. Two young men had taken the manuscript into the Embassy, on the other side of the Place de la Concorde. Christopher had handed it
to them inside the Jeu de Paume while Patchen, at the other end of the long gallery, limped from painting to painting. He didn’t linger; the Impressionists annoyed him. “Picnics
explain
nothing,” he said, when he joined Christopher in the open air.

Now, considering the death of Bülow, Patchen sighed. “This is going to be a pain,” he said. “Berlin is going to see it as a security problem.
I
see it as a
security problem. If you had no surveillance, if no one followed you, if you hadn’t made a habit of dropping him by the zoo, how did they know?”

“There are ways. Maybe Horst told them. He was a born security problem. Maybe they bugged my car and followed on parallel streets. Maybe Horst told someone who told them. He was hell-bent
on getting off at the Zoo station. I couldn’t talk him into taking the S-Bahn from a quieter neighborhood.”

Christopher described Bülow’s behavior in the moments before he died; the untidy clothes, the unshaven cheeks, the giddy speech, the military manners copied from Nazis who had copied
them from films. “The Zoo,” Horst had said, voice trembling with anxiety; he had to get back to his office in East Berlin before 7
A.M.
“Only the Zoo will
give me time, the S-Bahn line is direct to my stop.” Patchen cut Christopher off; even in death Bülow had the power to exasperate.

“I wanted a quieter operation than this,” Patchen said. “That’s why I used Bülow and you to bring the book the last few miles. Now we’ll have gumshoes from
Security all over us. I wish I knew who was responsible for this.”

A street photographer snapped a picture of a couple walking ten yards ahead of them. Patchen and Christopher turned into a path that led toward the Seine. It was not quite spring. The trees were
bare, the fallow flower beds beside the walk were cold mud. Patchen coughed. In the war he had been wounded in the lungs. He was subject to colds and always caught one when he came from Washington
to Europe in winter. He and Christopher could not talk inside. They continued to walk in the bitter wind.

“There’s no understanding this,” Patchen said. “Why run over that poor ass
after
he had been with you for three hours, and then let you go, not even following?
If they wanted the manuscript, the Russians could have taken both of you. It would have been easy.”

“Why does it have to be the Russians?”

“No one else has an interest.”

Christopher put out a hand, showing Patchen which way to turn.

“Now that I’ve let a man be killed,” he said, “maybe you can tell me what exactly their interest is.”

Patchen turned his stiff body to stare at Christopher. “You’ll have to know,” he said. “I want this kept among three people—you, and me, and Otto
Rothchild.”

“I thought Otto was going to retire.”

“Not quite yet. As Otto will tell you, he has ghosts in his past, and more ghosts. One of them wrote him a letter, and that’s why you went to Berlin, and why poor old Bülow. . .
.” Patchen broke off the sentence with a shrug.

3

Grinning, Christopher reproduced Patchen’s gesture and mimicked the self-mocking tone in which the other man had spoken Otto Rothchild’s name. It was an old joke,
and Patchen was tired of it; shivering in the soaking cold, he looked beyond Christopher to the dome of Sacré Coeur, white as an erasure on the smudged winter horizon. Too much talk of
Rothchild embarrassed Patchen. He had a weakness for this agent, and he was overcoming it more slowly than he usually did. Rothchild was old now, and sick, but in his day he had been a legendary
operative; his successes, coup after brilliant coup, had made the careers of other men, hidden away in Headquarters, brighter than they would otherwise have been. Rothchild had temperament. He
insisted, as the price of his work and friendship, that others see him as he saw himself. He hunted down and destroyed those who insulted his idea of himself; time after time, he had forced
Headquarters to make a choice between him and a case officer who had tried to control him. Headquarters had always chosen Rothchild. Patchen named some of Rothchild’s old agents:
“Lazarus. Rainbow. Sailmaker. Thinkingcap.” These were the cryptonyms of famous men; Rothchild had recruited and handled them all. To the unwitting, they were prime ministers and
statesmen. In fact they were aspects of Rothchild. Patchen said, “Otto may be a bastard, but he gets results. I know you think we love him too much.” Christopher didn’t want to go
over the old ground onto which Patchen was leading him; Rothchild’s secret fame, the more delicious because it was known only to a handful of the most trusted men in America, fascinated
Patchen. Once again he wanted to explain it. “An intelligence service is like a frigid woman,” he told Christopher. “It waits such a long time between orgasms that it thinks of
nothing else. When a man is found who, like Otto, can give consistent results, the outfit tends to be blind to his faults.”

Patchen saw the danger in admiring any human being, and he wanted to be reminded of Rothchild’s flaws. Four years before, he had made Christopher Rothchild’s case officer.
Christopher, as Patchen had expected, saw Rothchild as he was, and kept Rothchild from realizing it. Like many daring men, Rothchild was a hypochondriac. As he grew older, his illnesses became
real; he had severe hypertension, and his physical weakness reduced his intellectual power. Rothchild sought to conceal this condition as an alcoholic, moving and speaking with exaggerated care,
attempts to hide the signs of drunkenness.

Christopher and Rothchild met once a month. In the past year, the physical change in Rothchild had accelerated; over the course of a dozen meetings he had turned, stage by stage, into an old
man. He could no longer handle his agents; his physical weakness took away the illusion that he could protect them, and one by one they were reassigned to Christopher and other case officers.

Rothchild, when he saw Christopher, had little to report. He spoke about himself constantly, watching Christopher’s face for some flicker of impatience. Nothing bored Christopher; he had
learned to accept all experience and all information, false or true, without emotion. Rothchild’s past was very deep, and only he knew everything about it. “If I talk too much about my
life, I don’t mean to weary you,” Rothchild had said to Christopher. “I’m getting older. I’ve spent all my life in this work. I’ve lived so many cover stories
that I feel a need, Paul, to describe my real life, my original self, over and over again. It’s a way of keeping these things alive. Someday, if you go on living in secret, you’ll feel
this need too.”

Rothchild had been born in Russia. He was just old enough for the Great War, and he was commissioned at eighteen and invalided out of the Imperial Army before he was twenty as a result of a
wound. Recovering in Moscow, he and other young wounded officers spoke to one another of the shame of defeat after defeat. “It was incomprehensible,” Rothchild told Christopher forty
years afterward. “How could the Germans, who were already fighting the French, the English, the Italians, and finally the Americans, still thrash the Imperial Russian Army? Russia was like
some great whale attacked by clever savages with stone spearheads. By the time news of a wound had traveled through the nervous system to the brain, it was too late. It was fatal.”

Rothchild, born into the nobility, became a man of the Left, a Socialist, plotting against the Czar, fighting in the streets. He had a saber wound running into his scalp, delivered, he said, by
one of the Imperial Horse Guards during a riot. He and others like him brought an end to the Czarist autocracy. They brought Kerensky to power. Otto had no kind memories of this man. “He
looked sick all the time, and everyone thought him a dying man. But he’s still alive in America. I had a friend, a lady’s man, who was his aide-de-camp. Kerensky would tease girls who
called this young man on the phone. He’d change his voice, baby talk. No wonder Lenin chewed him up and spat him out.”

In those days, Rothchild’s name had not been Rothchild. He changed his Russian name when he went to Berlin after the Bolsheviks took power. “I had lost my house, my family, my
political cause, my emperor, my birch forests, my connection with the soil—this means a lot to a Russian, though foreigners smile, you, Paul, can smile. Losing all that, what good was my
name? I thought it comic to take a Jewish name. I was beyond the pale. That was in 1920. Ten years later, in Berlin, it wasn’t so funny to be a Social Democrat with a Jewish name.”

In Paris, Rothchild had an apartment on the Île Saint-Louis. Christopher had been sent there by Patchen to see if he and Rothchild, whose contacts had begun to overlap, could work
together.

Rothchild, for their first meeting, had invited him to lunch. They sat on a small balcony overlooking the Seine. The flow of the river gave the illusion, after they had drunk wine in the mild
autumn sun, that Rothchild’s apartment building was under way, like a ship. Rothchild was pleased when Christopher remarked on the effect; he was proud of this trompe l’oeil. On the
white tablecloth by his plate, Rothchild had a row of pill bottles. He took several before the meal, several more afterward, making an apologetic face as he washed them down with Evian water.

His skin was very red and there was a pulse in his forehead. Wine excited him; he told anecdote after anecdote. Christopher realized how interesting Rothchild must once have been. He was still a
handsome man, fine-boned, with a thin arched nose and melancholy eyes. He ate very lightly—two pieces of tinned white asparagus, four bites of cold chicken—but he drank most of the two
bottles of wine he and Christopher shared. When the sun grew hotter he removed his jacket and sat opposite Christopher in a short-sleeved shirt. Arteries throbbed in his forearms and the skin moved
as if unable to interpret incessant signals from the nerves beneath it.

So that Christopher would not be seen by an outsider, Rothchild had sent the maid away. Lunch was served by Rothchild’s wife, an American many years younger than he. She was an Agency
person; Christopher had helped to train her when she had come to Paris from Vassar. He had worked with her later. She had been an officer, not a secretary, and when she had been assigned to
Rothchild’s project she had fallen in love with him. No one was surprised: Maria did not like young men.

She and Rothchild had married only the year before, and she spoke to Christopher about their honeymoon in Spain. Rothchild had not been on Spanish soil since the civil war. All his friends had
been on the losing side. The Rothchilds stayed at the Hotel de Madrid in Seville. “The entire downstairs is a garden, a greenhouse,” said Maria Rothchild. “I sneezed the whole
time, but it was heaven, wasn’t it, Otto?” He smiled and covered her hand with his long gray fingers. Maria was happiest when she and Rothchild were in the company of someone who knew,
as Christopher knew, who Rothchild really was. She loved his importance and charged the atmosphere with it; living with him, she became part of it. “I
exult
in being Otto’s
wife; Otto doesn’t mind that at all,” she had told Christopher on her wedding day. Maria treated her husband with joshing equality, but made him see that she never forgot for a moment
who he was, and what he had been. (“The second Mrs. Wilson must have treated Woodrow in about the same way,” Patchen had said. “Maria has a lot of the nurse in her. That’s
why I sent her to Otto in the first place.”)

As she left the table to fetch dessert, Christopher said something that made her snort with laughter. “I almost didn’t marry her because of that laugh,” Rothchild said.
“Her father paid a fortune to send her to Miss Porter’s. You’d think they would have cured her.”

Throughout the lunch the Rothchilds had flirted. Maria gave Otto the best pieces of asparagus, a special cut of glazed chicken. Now she brought strawberries and crème fraîche.
“Berries are out of season,” Maria said, “God bless the expense account.” Rothchild raised his eyebrows and tapped the table with a forefinger. “Strawberries without
champagne?” he asked. His wife put a hand on the back of his neck. “The expense account has limits,” she said. “Champagne,” Rothchild said peremptorily. Maria stroked
his neck. “Otto, the wine is making your veins throb. . . .”