The Secret Lovers (25 page)

Christopher remained at his table for a long time, watching the crowds. He did not think. All that was going to happen in his mind had happened; the sequence of intuition, suspicion, evidence
had been completed. He was waiting for final proof. The soft light of evening faded from pink to gray. He wondered if Cathy—who never read, never wrote, never (as she insisted)
thought
as a conscious act—felt, as he did now, that she could not live another hour with dread.

Christopher knew that what he was making happen would happen; he hated the scenes he had invented for himself and others to live through. A week before, by the château at Vincennes, he had
said so to Patchen.

“No one is responsible for suicide except the man who commits it,” Patchen had replied.

5

In less than a week, Cerutti phoned Christopher and, using the code for urgency, asked for a meeting. Under the Pont de la Concorde, where, a few weeks before, the seduction had
been completed, Cerutti told Christopher that a set of Russian proofs of the completed novel had been stolen from the printer.

“Vanished, vanished,” Cerutti said. “They were supposed to be kept locked up at night.”

“Were they taken in the night?”

“The printer doesn’t know. He just stuffed the package into his cabinet before he went home at the end of the day; the proofreader brings them in to him at five
o’clock.”

“Where is the proofreader?”

“Still there, proofreading. An old émigré. One can’t make it seem too serious, questioning him. Anyway, what does he care?”

Christopher put his hands on Cerutti. “No one knows the author’s name? You’re absolutely certain.”

“Absolutely.”

Wilson, giving Christopher the same news two hours earlier, had made the same assurance. Wilson’s eyes were red-rimmed from reading—transcripts, reports, old files.
He carried everything that had any significance written on his little stack of file cards in his briefcase during his waking hours; when he slept, he locked the locked case in a safe at the
Embassy.

“Paul, if Cerutti’s gotten word to anyone, he’s done it by carrier pigeon while Joëlle was asleep. The tapes, everything, leave him absolutely clean.”

“Has Moroni had any contact with Klimenko?”

“No, the Russian is out of Rome, futzing around in Tanganyika,” Wilson said. “Moroni is working on his next movie. He spends a lot of time in a new place, not his own
apartment. But we have that wired.”

Wilson held Christopher’s eyes. The radio, volume turned high to drown their voices, was at Wilson’s elbow; as the news came on, he turned the sound even louder, and listened
intently to the first few bulletins.

“We can assume something will break in a few days now,” Christopher said. “As soon as it does, I want that meeting in Berlin.”

“I’ll fix it up with Wolkowicz,” Wilson said. He hesitated, one hand lifted to give notice that he intended to say something. He dropped the hand, and his eyes, and gathered up
his briefcase. But at the door, he put a hand on Christopher’s shoulder.

Christopher said, “I know about the apartment in the Piazza Oratorio. You don’t have to apologize for doing your job.”

“At this point, Paul,” Wilson said, “anything you want from me, you’ve got.”

6

Christopher, alone in a hotel room, had photographs and sanitized files brought to him, and books from the Embassy library. He read all day, histories and geographies of Russia
and Germany and Spain, old agents’ reports, operational summaries, the crude ore of espionage. He was trying to understand Kamensky and his novel, trying to understand Cerutti and Rothchild
and Bülow, attempting to put himself into their skins and into their time. He belonged to a different century, a different class, a different emotional style. He memorized a place name from
Russian history, a date from a wartime OSS report on a Maquis network in Pau, a fact from a transcript of university grades. He wrote nothing down. At the end of each day he put the papers back
into a manila envelope, sealed it, carried it back to a rendezvous, and gave it for safekeeping to a young officer from the Paris station. At night he worked with Cerutti on the translation.

When he left the agent, late, he walked the streets; in this city, in the past fifteen years, he had played out the best and the worst moments of his life. Here, talking quietly to men who had
traveled thousands of miles to meet him, he had walked under the trees in the darkness and discussed their wish to murder the governments under which they lived; they spoke always in terms of a
birth of liberty because they were talking to an American, but the violent death of their rivals was what they had in mind. Under the same trees, he had taken girls, one after the other, into his
arms, overcome by the sweetness he saw in all women; and when he could still put lines on paper, he had left poems all over this city, scribbled on napkins and tablecloths and, once, on the skin of
a girl’s arm. “You do with your poems what a gambler in cowboy films does with banknotes, lights his cigar,” the girl had told him; “one day it will be gone, mon amour, and
you’ll never get it back.” Christopher, remembering her ten years afterward—every detail, the ink on her tan skin under the fine sun-bleached hairs, the brown eyes sharp with
intelligence, the strong slightly crooked teeth that were the key to her sexuality—laughed again at her solemnity. The gift for poetry still seemed to him a trivial thing to lose; there was
nothing he wanted to describe in rhyme and image. He had learned to see things as they were and to keep quiet.

On the fourth night after the theft of the Russian proofs, Christopher returned to his hotel at two o’clock in the morning. The directional signals of a car parked across
the street blinked three times. Christopher crossed the deserted boulevard and got into the back seat. Wilson, alone, was at the wheel. He drove away without speaking, and circled through the
streets, his eyes on the mirror, before he parked again, on a dead-quiet side street in Neuilly, where the diplomatic plates on his Citroën would draw the least attention from police patrols.
Christopher got into the front seat.

“Not quite what we expected,” Wilson said.

He handed Christopher an envelope, a large bright yellow one of the kind that is manufactured only in Switzerland; it was rumpled and torn by its passage through the mail; it bore United Nations
stamps and the postmark of the Palais des Nations in Geneva. It had been addressed with a typewriter to a radio station in Germany that broadcast propaganda in Russian into the Soviet Union. The
radio was an Agency operation. The envelope was addressed to the head of the Russian section of the radio station.

“It came in through the open mail yesterday,” Wilson said. “The Russian proofs were inside, and this letter.”

The letter was in English, perfect but stilted—the sort of English Christopher might write if he wished the reader to believe it had been composed by a foreigner. The letter gave a
synopsis of Kamensky’s novel. It described without details the plan to publish it in the West. It identified Kamensky as the author. It pointed out that no copyright had been applied for, and
that the reading of the text over the air, in Russian, if it were done quickly, would infringe no legal contracts.

“No fingerprints, of course,” Wilson said, “except the proofreader’s and the printer’s. I think we can eliminate them as suspects.”

“No sighting in Geneva?”

“No, but we weren’t covering Geneva for this target. I don’t know why not—it’s the obvious place, crawling with KGB, safe mail facilities. Using the UN post office
was very picturesque, it eliminates a mail intercept by the Swiss liaison altogether.”

“What do the radio people want to do?”

“They await instructions.”

“Yes. But what do they want to do?”

“They want to read it on the air. The case officer says that his Russian wants to run the whole novel, take over the entire broadcasting schedule.”

“When?”

“Like tomorrow. They figure they can surprise the Russian jammers, get some of it through. Then they’ll switch frequencies and slip in a chapter in the middle of a music program from
time to time—drive the Soviets crazy.”

“Identifying Kamensky?”

Wilson took the envelope and the letter out of Christophers hands, and locked them away in his briefcase again.

“That’s the whole idea, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Wilson, for once, didn’t have the radio playing; he knew that this car was secure.

“We have no match on the typewriter, of course. It’s a Hermes portable—probably they bought it in Geneva and threw it in the lake after one use. I can’t match this
Russian at the radio station with the target. He says he has no idea who’d send him such a thing; his case officer believes it.”

“Will the guys from the radio project go along?”

“Oh, sure. They don’t even think they have to cable Headquarters. Just put it on the air and watch Khrushchev dance.”

“Have you cabled?”

“Yes. Flash to Patchen.” He used Patchen’s cryptonym; Wilson used everyone’s cryptonym and so did Christopher; their speech, like their written communications to
Washington, was in cipher.

“Has he got back to you?”

“Yes. Three words: ‘Christopher’s judgment applies.’ ”

“What’s the time factor for the radio?”

“They can go on the air instantaneously. The case officer is here in Paris on a TDY. He says the best hour of the day is early morning. Evidently the Russian audience gets up early for the
real goodies.”

Christopher didn’t really want this information; he wanted a moment to calm himself. The target had wakened his emotions. Hearing what he had heard, recognizing the profile of the
operative, something had broken through the surface of his mind, a sensation in which anger and humor were intermixed. Even in trapping his enemy he had been, in a way, outwitted, because the
target had acted in a way he hadn’t expected. Wilson nodded, divining Christopher’s thoughts.

“It’s really and truly admirable, isn’t it?” he said. “What a picture-book that son-of-a-gun has been.”

“Still is. We haven’t wrapped this up yet.”

“What about the broadcast? The case officer has to know pretty soon; he can lay it on by phone, but he has to call by three in the morning, because of the time difference. It’s later
in Russia.”

Christopher laid his face against the glass of the car window. His skin felt hot, as if he were drunk or sick. He’d had no alcohol for a week, had not touched the flesh of another human
being since he had kissed Cathy good-bye in the airport at Rome. He’d thought of nothing—not of Cathy wounding herself in Italy, not of Kamensky and the long storm of the
Russian’s life, not even of this moment which he had planned. He had, for weeks, simply received data. Now he had more data. It was his function to act on it.

“Tell them to go ahead,” Christopher said. “The fact that they broadcast will alert the target that were running an operation against him. He knows we control what the radio
does. But what difference does it make now?”

“He can run.”

“He wont.”

“You ought to know. But there’s always that random factor—that’s what he’s lived on all his life. He sees it—the aberration, the hole, the flaw, a long way
off.”

“Right. And what’s the hole in him, Bud?”

Wilson waited; when Christopher didn’t go on, he didn’t urge him to do so. He started the engine. He put the car in gear, but waited, with the clutch out, for another instant.

“The hole in him,” Christopher said, “is that, of all the people he’s done this to, all through his life, we’re the only ones who won’t kill him for it. When
he runs, he’ll run to us.”

1

Christopher, before he went to Berlin, collected an express letter from Cathy, and an old telegram, from poste restante. He had not written to her or tried to telephone, and he
had expected no word from her. The telegram told him that she was going to Spain; the letter was from Pamplona, written on the third day of the fiesta.