The Secret Lovers (28 page)

“Paul,” Wolkowicz said, “for whatever it’s worth, I don’t take any pleasure in this. We have different philosophies and different methods and all that. But I
don’t like to see you kicked in the crotch.”

Christopher took a cold shower and dressed. His locker had not been disturbed, the marks he had left were untouched. The man at the desk, a battered middle-aged German with the manners of a
clever servant, called a taxi. He paid no obvious attention to Christopher, who had come in fifteen minutes before Wolkowicz and Wilson, and was leaving while they remained. The man wore a white
singlet with the name of the bath house printed across the chest. On the inside of his heavy biceps was the tattooed double lightning flash of the SS. Schaefer might have been rewarded with a new
name, but he had kept the real marks of his identity.

1

“Let me amuse you before we get down to brass tacks,” said Patchen. They were outdoors again in Paris, by the aviary in the Jardin des Plantes. Rain, falling the
night before while Patchen was airborne from Washington and Christopher from Berlin, had laid the dust and left a fresh smell in the air. The tropical birds tumbled inside their great cage in the
sunshot morning, their colors brighter than usual, as though the rain had washed them, too.

“I had lunch with Hopkins from the British service last week,” Patchen said, “and he remarked that I was looking rather peaked. ‘Been flying a lot, have you?’ he
said. ‘In and out of time zones, in and out of climates?’ I was professionally noncommittal, but you know the Brits. Hopkins is like all the rest, not shy about asking questions.
‘The jet aeroplane,’ he said, ‘really is the fatal weakness in American foreign policy. In
our
day, my dear fellow, we went out to those godforsaken places in
gunboats—gave us weeks to think up what we were going to do to the Wogs when we got there. But you poor chaps can get to the Guinea Coast or Vietnam or wherever in a matter of hours. No time
to think. That’s your dilemma. Like the birds you were given wings. You lost the need for ratiocination.’ I’d never heard that word used in conversation before.”

Patchen had shaved and he wore a fresh shirt, but his seersucker suit was rumpled after his night in the seat of an airplane. He was haggard, his eyes were bloodshot, and there remained on his
breath the last faint odor of the alcohol he had drunk the night before. Christopher knew that Patchen must have something unpleasant to say if he would begin, as he had done, with small talk.

“I have come to tell you,” Patchen said, “that what you predicted would happen has begun to happen. Captain V. I. Kalmyk was arrested by the KGB in Warsaw ten days ago, and
taken to Moscow to the cellars at No. 2 Ulitza Dzherzhinskogo. He broke after forty straight hours of interrogation. We had a further report, during the night, that Kalmyk was shot late
yesterday.”

“That must mean they’ve picked up the next link in the courier chain.”

“Yes, and broken that man, too. If we knew how long the chain was, we’d know how much time we have to play with. But we don’t. Dick Sutherland says there may be only two or
three roaches to step on—that’s KGB lingo, I’m told.”

“The broadcasts began after they broke Kalmyk. They won’t need to unravel the whole courier network in order to guess what Kalmyk gave to Horst.”

“No, but they don’t like loose ends. They’ll want to roll it up just to make things orderly.”

The Jardin des Plantes lay between the river and a railroad junction, and some of Patchen’s words were smothered by the drone of morning traffic on the quais of the Seine and the squeal
and clatter of trains entering and leaving the Gare d’Austerlitz. Otto Rothchild had sounded as Patchen sounded now, in the days after his operation in February, when words and phrases were
snuffed out by the aftereffects of what the surgeons had done for him in Zurich.

“Have you seen Cerutti since you got back from Berlin?” Patchen asked.

“No. There’s no hurry about it now. Wilson will pull off the surveillance when he gets back this afternoon.”

“I suppose there’s no point in going on with it.”

“None. Its served its purpose. But the girl may stay with him. She’s a competent translator, and I think we’ll need her. It’s not a bad thing to have an ear inside the
house.”

“Even when it’s falling down,” Patchen said. “Tell me about Berlin.”

This time it was Christopher who took Patchen’s arm. Patchen flinched, almost imperceptibly; Christopher thought that it must be distaste, to have even the hand of his best friend laid
upon him, because Patchen knew already what Christopher was going to tell him. The death of Kalmyk in the punishment cells of the KGB’s center in Moscow had forewarned him.

“We’re not just speculating any longer,” Christopher said. “We can see their faces now.”

Patchen listened. There was no need to ask questions; Christopher gave him the details, one after the other—dates, places, methods.

“Everything but motive,” Patchen said at the end of Christopher’s report. ‘It’s quite a feat to do what you and Wilson have done, to work backward. Detectives are
supposed to solve crimes by finding the motive.”

“I plan to go on a little longer.”

“Do that. I want to know. I don’t understand wanting the death of others—a poor fool like Bülow is the worst. You were right about that from the beginning. What could be
worth it?”

“I don’t know. They’ll never tell, of course. It’s too deep. Barney, who ought to know, told me even torture can’t get a human being to confess a personal act
that’s covered him with shame. Anything else, but not that.”

“You think that’s what it is?”

“Yes,” Christopher said.

Two attendants carrying cleaning tools entered the aviary. Patchen and Christopher moved away, toward the elephant cage. Patchen had saved the foil packages of nuts that he’d been given on
the plane. Taking them from his pocket, he handed one to Christopher and kept one for himself. They fed the fancy nuts to the elephants.

“You think you can find out why in Spain?” Patchen asked.

“Possibly.”

“Even with Cathy right there? It’s not the ideal operational climate, is it? Bullfights and big luncheons and lazy afternoons in the hotel room?”

Patchen crumpled the empty package and threw it in a trash barrel. “Why does something as small as a nut mean so much to something as large as an elephant?” he asked.
“I’m left with nothing to say except crap like that.”

“I’m meeting Cathy in Madrid day after tomorrow.”

“Because you can’t live without her, or because she can introduce you to this man Jorge de Rodegas?”

Christopher answered half of Patchen’s question. “Cathy knows Rodegas very well. Not only is he her godfather, he breeds Thoroughbreds. These horse people are worse than we are for
living in each other’s pockets.”

“Everyone’s world is special,” Patchen said. “It’s funny, isn’t it, how outsiders, unwitting damned dreamers, are usually the ones who drive the last nail for
us?”

2

Wilson had not learned to relax with a man of Patchen’s rank. He sat on the edge of his chair while he made his report. Patchen and Christopher had come first to the safe
house, in the early evening, and they were drinking Scotch when Wilson arrived, straight from the airport. He refused whisky but got himself a can of beer.

“The fellow in the Turkish bath instantly made both photographs,” Wilson said. “Bülow and the female target.”

“Her, too?” Christopher said.

“I thought that would surprise you. It seems she came to the Schaefer Baths as a customer, to make the first contact. Evidently she had bona fides that she had to present in
person.”

“Which were?”

“Details of an old operation during the last war. Schaefer let somebody slip through the Gestapo’s fingers in return for certain considerations—cash on the barrelhead and a
good word for him in the right places after the war. This was in 1944—even SS sergeants had figured out who was going to win by that time.”

“Can we cross-check?” Patchen asked.

Wilson hastily swallowed a mouthful of beer, almost choking on it. He nodded deferentially to Christopher.

“My suggestion would be to have Paul draw it out of Cerutti. He was involved. Schaefer remembered that cover name of his, Frère éméché. He said he knew a
literary type must be using it—no one has used a word like éméché in French since Rabelais.”

“I want to go back to something,” Christopher said. “She came to the Schaefer Baths
as a customer?
”

Wilson was truly embarrassed. “Yes, according to Schaefer. She walked in stark naked, sat on the edge of his desk, and laid it all out. Wolkowicz was amused. He asked a lot of
questions.”

“What sort of questions?” Patchen asked.

“About her appearance. Schaefer was impressed. He said she was like a ripe peach. I guess he doesn’t get many women in his establishment with bodies like hers.”

“I’m surprised she’d show it to Schaefer,” Christopher said.

“Technique,” said Patchen, once more the misogynist. “Women are born with a sense of it.”

Wilson’s file cards made a thick pile now, frayed at the edges. He slipped the heavy rubber band that held them together over his wrist and began to read. The woman had contacted Schaefer
on January 14, almost three weeks before Wolfram’s surveillance had begun.

“Where was Christopher on that date?” Patchen asked.

“In the Congo,” Wilson said. He pointed a finger at Christopher. “Did the target know that?”

“That I was not in Europe, yes.”

Wilson made another notation, nodding. He rubbed his eyes before he spoke again. “The woman had two sets of photocopies—one to reassure Schaefer and let him know that her principal
was his old pal from Occupied France,” Wilson said. “The second was incriminating documents, signed by Bülow at the Hotel Lutetia in ’44. They were death warrants for a bunch
of Resistance leaders.”

Wilson repeated Schaefer’s description of the scene. The woman, naked, sat with her legs crossed, watching him at his desk as he read the photocopies that could send him to prison for
twenty years. She asked him for a cigarette and then for a light. Schaefer thought she wanted to see if his hand trembled, because she snuffed out the cigarette after one puff.

“Then she asked Schaefer if he knew anyone in Berlin who could kill with a car,” Wilson said. “He told the gal he didn’t know such people any longer. She wouldn’t
take no for an answer. After some special persuasion, as Schaefer called it, he gave her a phone number. He tried to suggest the special persuasion included sex—but, Paul, I don’t
believe that.”

“Have you a tape of this conversation?” Patchen asked.

“No. Schaefer will only converse with naked people. Barney made him strip, too. We talked in the outdoor swimming pool. I must say it’s good protection for him.”

“Schaefer claims that was the end of the deal, on his side—giving her the phone number?”

“Tried to,” Wilson said, “but Barney wouldn’t buy it. Finally Schaefer said, okay, so I passed a little money for this woman. That’s what he did—set up the
kill, paid the killers. He was the broker. The target gave him the whole scenario.”

Wilson went on in his level tone of voice. His words were transformed in Christopher’s mind into a running series of illuminations: Horst Bülow hearing from his old sergeant, his
obsequious old under-headwaiter at the Jockey Restaurant. Horst coming to the baths, naked and sweating in a room with strangers, being told that his past in the Abwehr could be brought to the
attention of the East Germans; perhaps even that his present position as an American spy could be exposed. Horst being given bait—money, the promise of a girl, the flattery of being the key
to a big operation that would hurt no one, the lost pleasure of working in secret again with Germans instead of foreigners. Being given, finally, the phone number to call to set up his own
murder.

“That’s how it was,” Wilson said. “Simplicity itself. The night before he went into East Germany to pick up the package, he phoned and set up a meeting at the zoo at 0618
the next morning. He thought they were going to ram your car, take the manuscript, and run with it.”

“Didn’t he think they’d kill Paul?”

“Horst tried to protect Christopher, according to Schaefer. Horst said Paul was
his
agent, a mere courier. Bülow implied that he was pretty big stuff in the spy game still.
Killing Christopher would be unprofessional, he kept on saying.”

Patchen waited, to see if anything would be added. Wilson went through his cards, checking off the items he had covered.

“Who did Schaefer think the naked lady was?”

Wilson shook his head in admiration. “He has no more idea than the man in the moon. She spoke French to him with a Russian accent. She turned him into a cut-out on the first night. He
hired other cut-outs. There were three layers of soundproofing between the killers and this dame.”

“What did Schaefer think she was?”

“Dynamite. Scary. He figured her for the opposition right from the start. It was her cold-bloodedness.”

Wilson had arranged to have the surveillance logs for the past forty-eight hours brought to the safe house. He met the courier in the hall and shut him up in there with a
second radio playing at high volume.

It didn’t take Wilson long to go through the material; he had been given synopses, not the minute-by-minute, word-for-word raw logs. Twice he got out a fresh file card and recorded new
facts. He put the papers back in the envelope, sealed it, went into the hall, and saw the courier out the door before he spoke again to Patchen and Christopher.

“Two new items,” Wilson said, holding up the white cards one after the other. “First, Moroni is in Spain, shooting his movie. The German girl says he did some crowd scenes in
Pamplona during the fiesta and then went on to Madrid.”

He cleared his throat and, quickly, sipped beer from his can of Schlitz.

“And, believe it or not, audio surveillance finally turned up something. The target, talking to her case officer. They’ve had a surprise, Paul. They’re upset. But, Jesus,
they’re professional—they want to turn it back on us. On you. They don’t miss a trick.”