The Secret Lovers (3 page)

Rothchild exploded, rising to his feet, screaming, his face swelling, blood inflating the skin. He shouted at his wife in French, as if Christopher, sitting quietly across the table, could not
understand that language. The tantrum lasted for five minutes. When Maria left to get the champagne, Rothchild followed her; Christopher could hear his shrill voice at the other end of the
apartment.

When Rothchild came back to the table, he resumed his monologue as if nothing had happened. With eagerness he spoke the names of famous men he had known as boys, and who now did him invaluable
favors, never asking for whom he worked. “It takes a lifetime to build up this kind of trust and friendship, and then the lifetime is over, or nearly so.” He touched his pill bottles
with his dessert spoon. “This is the revenge my body takes on me for putting it in hazard for forty years. The Russian Revolution, the Nazis in the streets of Berlin, the civil war in Spain,
Madrid with the shells falling like rain, France with the Maquis and the OSS. Never a wound, but it seems I am not immortal after all.”

He put his arm around Maria’s hips when she came back with the champagne and poured it into his glass. “Kiss your husband,” he said. Maria drew away; Rothchild held her against
him, smiling upward into her eyes. She kissed him and he released her. Her face was flushed and for the remainder of the meal she ate in silence and avoided Christopher’s eyes. Rothchild
ignored her.

Maria, when she let Christopher out, looked over her shoulder at Rothchild’s straight figure, still seated at the table in the sunlight. She took Christopher’s hand and went into the
outer hall with him. She rang for the elevator and while it lumbered noisily up the shaft she spoke to Christopher. The blush came back to her face.

“Paul, Otto is in a bad way physically. He doesn’t know what his illness does to his personality.”

“You’re very good with him.”

Maria dropped Christopher’s hand. “
Good
with him? I’m not his case officer any longer,” she said. “You don’t handle someone you love.”

Christopher nodded and turned to go. Maria caught his sleeve.

“Paul, all those stories of Otto’s are true, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“All his closest friends are world-famous. He made them that way, and even they forget it. It’s hell to be a great man in secret. He’s sick, it’s hypertension, high blood
pressure. The wine makes it worse.”

Her face was controlled. “You see what it is, don’t you?” she said. “He thinks he’s going to lose everything. It happened in Spain; it may have been my fault for
being so much younger. I couldn’t make him see I loved him better than I could ever love a boy. He just woke up in Seville twenty years after his friends lost the civil war and knew that he
was old.”

Finally, Rothchild had an operation at a clinic in Zurich to relieve his high blood pressure. The surgeons performed a sympathectomy, severing the ganglia of the nerves down the length of his
spine. Afterward he had greater control of his emotions. But he could not walk without collapsing, or read more than five pages of type without exhaustion, or drink wine or stand the cold.

“His mind is exactly what it was,” Maria told Christopher, after the surgery, “but it’s perched on a column of dead nerves. He can’t feel his own flesh.”

4

Patchen and Christopher left the Tuileries and walked along the Seine.

“The ghost from Otto’s past, in this case, was a Russian named Kiril Kamensky,” Patchen said. “We’ve been hearing about him for years. He’s supposed to be the
new Tolstoy.”

“It’s his manuscript Horst brought out of East Germany?”

“Yes. The only copy. Kamensky’s friends in the literary underground carried it across Russia and Poland. We wanted to break the bucket brigade in East Germany, so that the
destination of the package could not be known by our friends in Moscow.”

“That seems not to have worked out,” Christopher said.

“We’ll see.”

“They killed Bülow.”

Patchen stopped walking and tugged his gray scarf higher on his throat. “Paul, I know your man is dead and I’m sure it was a bad thing to witness. But you’ve told me about it.
Once is enough. We have to go on to the next thing.”

Patchen coughed, a gloved hand over his mouth, one eye streaming tears and the other, paralyzed by his war wound, open and dry and alert. “Let’s get you something to drink,”
Christopher said. They had just crossed the Pont des Arts.

“The Deux Magots?” Patchen said.

“No, Cathy’s waiting for me there.”

“Singing in the rain?”

It amused Patchen to pretend that Christopher’s wife had danced out of a musical movie. He had not imagined that his friend would marry a girl who looked so much like a starlet. A Japanese
grenade had scarred Patchen and crippled him. Believing himself ugly, he was embarrassed by beauty. In Cathy’s presence he talked intently to Christopher about music, or about men they had
known at Harvard who had gone into Wall Street. He ignored Cathy, as if she were a girl who, knowing no one, had been foolish enough to come to a house party of lifelong friends.

Christopher led Patchen into a small bar in the rue Jacob and ordered a toddy. Patchen sipped it and his cough quieted. The place was deserted, so they sat at a table in the corner and went on
talking.

“Kiril Kamensky and Otto are old friends,” Patchen said. “One day, just after Christmas, comes this letter, postmarked in Helsinki, telling Otto that Kamensky wants to entrust
him with the novel he’s been writing for the last twenty years.”

“Just like that? Through the open mails?”

“Yes.”

“Kamensky must be a simple fellow.”

“Very Tolstoyan, I’m told. He was a Bolshevik as a young idealist. You’ve read his early stuff, I know. It was published in Paris after the war, stories and poems. You brought
it into the room at Harvard.”

“Yes, but I thought he was dead.”

“So did a lot of people. In the thirties purges he was denounced and tried and sent to a camp. The KGB erased his work. It hasn’t been in print in the Soviet Union for years. I
don’t know how long he was in prison, but evidently he kept writing.”

“Writing? In a labor camp?”

“In his head, according to Otto. It’s the way he kept from going crazy. When he got out last year, he only had to copy it down.”

“And he made only one copy?”

“Yes. I suppose he figured he could always write out another. We’ll make a photocopy or two.”

French workmen began to drift into the bar for a noontime glass. Patchen and Christopher went out the side door. Patchen, with his ruined face and his limp, attracted some notice, as he always
did. He showed signs of nervousness; in his own country, at Headquarters where everyone was used to him, he forgot his wounds. Foreigners made him remember. Besides, he wasn’t used to talking
outside an office where he was absolutely certain there were no listening devices.

“Why did Kamensky pick Otto?”

“Who knows? Otto doesn’t feel he has to explain everything. Besides, who else did Kamensky know in the West? He wants his work preserved.”

“He doesn’t know what Otto has become.”

“I shouldn’t think so. I don’t imagine Kamensky would want us as literary agents.”

“How does Otto feel about that?”

“Well, Otto pretty well feels we’re a great force for good in the world.”

“That’s not the view of the KGB, and Kamensky is inside the Soviet Union.”

“Yes. I believe he has children in Russia from an old marriage, and he’s taken up with a young woman since they let him out. He and Otto have that in common.”

Patchen had begun to cough again. Christopher waited for him to finish.

“I should think Otto would be worried about his friend,” Christopher said.

“As far as I can see, Otto is happy just to be busy again. Getting the manuscript out gave him an interest in life.”

Patchen looked at his watch. “I have a lunch date,” he said. “Is there a taxi stand nearby?”

“Across the street. What about Kamensky’s manuscript?”

“The manuscript,” Patchen said. “Yes. Well, now that we have it, we will read it. Maybe it’s the masterpiece Otto keeps telling me it is. The people in SR have had
reports from Russia, gossip of the literati. The novel is supposed to rip the black heart right out of the Soviet system. If it’s a work of art as well, all our trouble will be
justified.”

“And Kamensky’s trip back to Siberia, too?”

“That presents a problem. In his letter to Otto, he asks that Otto put the book away until after Kamensky’s death.”

“Then we’ll have to do that.”

“Otto’s not so sure that’s a good idea.”

“He wants to
publish?
”

“He hasn’t said that,” Patchen said. “He wants you, and only you, to handle the outside work. Otto wants to sit in his bedroom with the shades drawn, and send you out
under radio control.”

“Does he?”

“You’re the logical one. If we go ahead.”

Christopher and Patchen, standing in the Place de Saint-Germain-des-Prés, looked without expression into each other’s faces. Patchen broke off his gaze.

“Look,” he said. “Do you suffer from jealousy?”

Cathy was sitting next to the glass wall of the covered terrace of the Deux Magots, a tumbler of mineral water in front of her. A man was smiling down at her, talking animatedly. As they
watched, she sent him away. She put the fingertips of both hands lightly against her drink and watched her own gesture with an intent smile. Her blond hair touched her cheek; her profile was
perfect. Christopher and Patchen stood only a few feet away from her, but Christopher knew there was little chance she would notice them. When Cathy was alone, she looked into space or watched
parts of her own body. It was not her way to pass the time by reading, or by studying the faces of strangers. She wore the dreaming look of one who is amused by a memory.

Patchen touched Christopher’s arm. “Forget about Otto and Kamensky for a while, forget about Berlin,” he said, nodding at Cathy beyond the glass. “Go wake her with a
kiss.”

Patchen walked away. Christopher went into the Deux Magots. Cathy rose to meet him, and as he held her in his arms he watched Patchen get into a taxi across the street, grimacing as he lifted
his long stiff leg into the rear seat of the undersized car.

1

They lay together in the narrow lower berth of a first-class compartment of the Blue Train to Rome. Though they had completed the act of love, Cathy continued to press her
tense body against Christopher’s, her fingertips digging into his back, as if pleasure would escape if she relaxed her grip upon his flesh. The compartment was overheated and they perspired.
An empty champagne bottle rolled over the floor. Cathy pressed her lips against Christopher’s chest and murmured wordlessly. He looked down at her body, rosy even in the dim light of the
reading lamp at the head of the berth. She lifted her face. He closed his eyes.

“Where are you?” Cathy asked.

“Somewhere in France.”

“Don’t joke, Paul. I mean in your mind. You’re not with me.”

He tapped her temple with his forefinger and smiled.

“But you’re not with me,” Cathy said. “You almost never are. I can’t hold on to you at all.”

They passed another train. Speech was impossible while the two fast trains ran side by side. Cathy lifted herself onto her elbow and gazed into Christopher’s face, her vivid eyes
unblinking. She stroked his chest and stomach and smiled brilliantly, then put both palms over his ears to shield him from the noise. Cathy knew how beautiful she was. She had told Christopher that
she had fallen in love with him because he made her forget this fact about herself. When they were together, she stared at him for minutes on end.

“It’s fascinating to look at you,” she said. “
You’re
beautiful.” It gave her pleasure to speak these words, which she had heard repeated endlessly in
her own ear since childhood.

The trains passed. Cathy took her hands away from Christopher’s ears and ran her thumbs over his cheekbones, the ridge of his jaw.

“Tell me what’s in your mind right now, at this exact moment of the present,” she said.

Christopher closed his eyes. Cathy said, “Don’t escape.” She rolled back his eyelid and put her own eye close to his. She continued to stare into his face. Christopher passed
his hand between her eyes and his; her glance did not shift but she began to smile again.

“Cathy, look out the window for a while, will you?”

“I want to look at you.”

It didn’t trouble Cathy that her behavior annoyed Christopher. She chose to understand everything he did as a sign of love. “You don’t give me very many signs,” she told
him, “so I have to make up for what you leave out, for what you won’t say. Why should I stop what I’m doing just because you don’t like it? I like everything you do, Paul. I
want you to learn to like everything
I
do. I’m searching for you.”

“You’re training me.”

“Ah, you’re beginning to understand.”

Christopher, whose work was a game, hated games. Cathy loved them: “Let’s pretend this. We’re from different planets, but we’re almost, not quite but almost, the same
species. We’ve been asleep in our two spaceships and everyone we ever loved on our two planets has been dead for thousands of years. We meet in space and want to make love but we aren’t
sure if we can. We
look
like people on earth and on the other world, but what will happen if we try? We have to make up a language. We’re very intelligent and still as young as ever
we were though we’ve been asleep through most of the history of our planets. We have to find a way to
ask
one another. We’d be like kids, Paul, filled with desire, unable to
make the first move. Let’s. You make up the first word of our new language. You have to make me understand. We’re suspicious, like human lovers at the beginning. We don’t touch. .
. .”

But Cathy wanted to touch Christopher. All her life she had been stroked, kissed, dressed in clothes so expensive that they were like another skin against her own. She believed that the sense of
touch was the key to all the other senses, and she was interested only in sensation. Like the astronauts of her fantasy, she needed speech only to arrange for the opening of the flesh to pleasure.
As she lived in her body, Christopher lived in his mind, She knew it. “I have to know your thoughts,” she told him again and again. “Whether you want me to or not, I am going to
become you,” she said.