The Secret Lovers (36 page)

(Don Jorge de Rodegas ceased speaking; Cathy was sitting at his feet, gazing up into his face, over which no emotion had moved while he spoke. “Go on,” Cathy said, “don’t
stop. What happened to them all?”)

Kolka Zhigalko published his stories, under his new name, in the Soviet Union when he returned there. In a matter of months his work was seized and burned, and he was sentenced to prison. Most
Russians who had been in Spain were shot or imprisoned in the great purge of 1937, the Yezhovschina, a bloodbath named for Yezhov, then head of the NKVD. Evidently not even Yezhov could bear to
kill Kolka; he merely sent him to prison for life.

Carlos was arrested by the victors at the end of the war. He was sent to prison for an interval. There he learned a number of things, a prisoner’s skills and tricks,

(Don Jorge folded a sheet of writing paper into an intricate pattern and made a little cup; he poured wine into it, held the paper cup over a candle flame, and showed Cathy that the wine was
boiling while the paper did not burn.)

After a time, Carlos was condemned to death. He was taken out of his cell by the guards. The other prisoners saw a man killed by a firing squad in the prison yard. It was not Carlos. Elsewhere
in the prison, he was being fitted secretly into the uniform of a major in the Nationalist Army, and in those clothes he walked out of the prison and back into his true identity. He returned to the
estancia. He rejoined his uncles. From them he heard the story of his fianceé’s death, almost four years before. They thought it a most pathetic tale. Carlos was not much moved by it.
He had lost the habit of judging people by the way they died.

Carlos wanted silence; he wanted to be alone. He remained on the estancia. He was haunted by the work he had done during the civil war and tried to train himself not to dream. In 1941 he
volunteered for the División Azul, the Spanish force that fought in Russia with the German army, and was wounded again. Each time his troops liberated a prison camp on Soviet territory he
looked for Kolka, but of course he never found him.

Carlos did have communication of a sort with Kolka. While he was recovering at the estancia in 1944 from the wounds he had received in Russia, he had a visitor. One spring afternoon, the man he
had known as André Girard walked up the drive, carrying a child. André had seen a photograph of Carlos at a sporting event in a Spanish magazine, and had recognized him. He knew his
true identity. There was no question of his betraying it; he was sick of revolution and reprisal. Like Carlos, he had given up politics. The child belonged to the woman, Solange, who had been
Kamensky’s lover in Madrid before Kolka. André knew nothing of what had happened between Kolka and Kamensky. Carlos told him nothing. Solange had told him nothing, even though she had
taken André as a lover—the tale she had told Carlos when she was still hot with scorn is not one a woman would tell to a new bedmate. André said she had died in the mountains on
the escape from France. André did not know what to do with the child. Carlos took it and kept it until the war was over; afterward he sent it to France, to Solange’s people.
André made the arrangements.

Carlos asked André if he still had in his possession Kolka’s stories and poems from Madrid. He did. Carlos gave André money, after the end of the European war, to have these
things published in the West, in Russian and in other languages. They were, of course, published under the name Kamensky. Carlos was pleased to think that Kolka’s work, some of it at least,
had been kept alive.

“That can’t be the end of the tale,” said Cathy. “What about the original Kamensky? You haven’t told us what happened to him.”

“Carlos never heard news of him.”

“What was his real name? Did he go back to Russia?”

“His real name was Prince Boris Donskoy. He was of the oldest Russian nobility. It was impossible for him to go back to his own country.”

Christopher spoke. “Under what name did Carlos and Zhigalko and the others know Kamensky, in Madrid?”

“Otto Rothchild,” replied Don Jorge de Rodegas.

1

“All of them, one after the other,” Patchen said. “Dick Sutherland, each time he had news of another killing, would lay a cable from Moscow on my desk like a
cat bringing a dead mouse into the parlor.”

After the searing light of the Castilian Meseta, the August sun in Paris seemed feeble to Christopher; it hardly penetrated the cloth of his coat, but there was perspiration on Patchen’s
face. He had been waiting, alone with the consequences of their plans, for Christopher to return. As much as anything could be for Patchen, this operation was a personal matter. In the months since
the death of Bülow, he had acknowledged to himself, bit by bit, that he had put his trust in the wrong people. His picked assets had gone bad. The worst thing that could befall an intelligence
officer had happened to him.

Patchen had intellectual stamina and emotional control, but his body displayed the strain of sleeplessness and incessant travel. He had lost weight and the stringy musculature of his neck showed
above his collar. He limped more than usual and sometimes he caught himself as he began to stammer.

“First there was Kalmyk,” Patchen said. “You were right. That was the opening. Then they rolled up the other couriers; there were two of them. Sutherland has their names, not
that it matters. They were patriots. One of them was even a KGB man of medium rank, a Scandinavian specialist, so that he must have been the one who mailed the letters from Helsinki for
Kamensky.”

As a matter of routine, the KGB took Kamensky’s girl, Masha, in for interrogation. She knew nothing of the courier network, nothing of
The Little Death.
Naturally her
interrogators didn’t believe her. Masha had been dealing with the KGB for ten years, since she was sixteen; she knew what they were. She held out for a long time. Sutherland’s source
said they used the soft method on her—kept her standing and sleepless, stripped, without food and water, with relays of interrogators repeating the questions, never stopping. What was her
name? Her father’s name? Her mother’s? School? Who was her KGB trainer when she was recruited for special work? What were the names of the men and women she had entrapped for the KGB?
What was her grandfather’s name? What was the cover name used by her American case officer? What was her blood type? At what age did she lose her virginity? When was her last meeting with her
Agency contact? Did she masturbate? How much did the Americans pay her? What was her grandmother’s father’s name? Where was she born? What did Kamensky’s Agency contact look
like?

Finally she broke. She had almost nothing to tell them. She had been cleanly handled by a good officer—brush contacts in the subway, dead-drops behind a radiator in an apartment building
where her KGB handler met her. That particular insult, a typical Agency prank, infuriated them. They kept hammering away at
The Little Death
—how did Kamensky get it to the Americans?
Masha must have carried it, handled it. She could tell them less than the couriers had told them—she didn’t even know that the book existed. The couriers had had no contact with any
American. Captain Kalmyk described Horst Bülow, but he couldn’t identify him in the photo album. Of course he couldn’t put a name to him. Kalmyk was an army officer, not a trained
observer. Bülow, from his description, could have been any of ten thousand shabby East Germans.

They killed Masha as they had killed the couriers; they knew that all of them were utterly wrung out, that they could not tell the KGB the one thing that would make sense of this whole shameful
defeat for Soviet security—that treason had been committed, that the smuggling of Kamensky’s manuscript and its publication in the West was an American operation. Even the surfacing of
Cerutti did not tell them that; whatever else he had been, he had never been an asset of the Americans. Now the Soviets put surveillance on him, replaced the wires that Wilson had removed. But
Cerutti was in quarantine. He’d never see another American operative—not Christopher, not Jöelle, not a young man in a park, not anyone. Even under torture, Cerutti could not
reveal that he had been dealing with the Americans, because Christopher had never disclosed his true nationality or his true name or his true purpose.

“Maria knew well enough what the Russians would be up to as soon as the news of Kamensky’s death hit,” Patchen said. “She picked a fight with Cerutti when he came around
with his weekly bottle of champagne, threw him out. She called him a disgusting little fat Frog who made her skin crawl. Told him Otto had never liked him, thought he was a joke.”

“What was Cerutti’s reaction to that?”

“He put the question to Otto: Is that what you feel, my friend? Otto said yes. Maria, he said, you didn’t need to be so brutal, I asked you not to be insulting. She said, what other
method would have worked with this cretin? Cerutti left. He made no reply to them.”

“So the opposition won’t connect him to Otto at all?”

“Not unless they’ve done it in the past. He sure won’t go back to the Île Saint-Louis.”

Christopher asked about Kamensky’s death. He and Patchen were walking slowly toward the Orangerie, with the morning light behind them and the greenery of the Tuileries ahead. Patchen was
breathing more heavily than usual, suppressing the grunt of pain that rose in his throat each time he swung his wounded leg. Christopher had to ask him again for details. Patchen stopped by the
stairs that divide the long riverside terrace and surrendered momentarily to his body; he sat down on a bench and stretched his bad leg before him. He looked around. They were quite alone, the city
was empty of Frenchmen this month and it was too early in the day for tourists.

“What Kamensky did,” Patchen said in his toneless murmur, “was to ask Masha to get him a death pill.”

Christopher, when he was examining data in his hotel room, had studied a photograph of Kamensky, the only one in the possession of American intelligence. It was a good clear picture, taken in
strong sunlight, of an old man with the shaved head of a prisoner, sitting on a bench against an unpainted lumber wall. Now Christopher saw Kolka Zhigalko, young and passionate, moving within the
old man.

“Masha was stung by the request,” Patchen said. “She used her emergency procedure—a God-damned chalk mark on a Moscow wall her American case officer has to drive by on
the way to work, wouldn’t you know?—to ask for a meeting. She asked
us
for two cyanide pills.”

“She was going with him?”

“That’s what Sutherland says. She told the case officer that she loved the old man. If he dies, there’s no sense in scum like me living, she said.”

Of course Kamensky’s request was never considered. To have him die and to have cyanide found in his body tissue at the autopsy would have been all the confirmation needed by the KGB that a
foreign intelligence service was involved with him. Where else would he get cyanide? Besides, Kamensky’s request shook the Moscow station. Did Kamensky know, somehow, of Masha’s
connection with our side? Masha said no—he must have assumed, as any rational man would, that she was a KGB asset. Why he thought the Soviet service would give Masha poison was not
explicable. Perhaps he thought she had a sexual hold over a senior officer; perhaps he thought they’d be happy to have him out of the way. That was what Masha told the interrogators in the
cellars of the KGB. She stuck to that point to the end. Nothing would make her accept the possibility, even, that Kamensky had a connection with an imperialist secret service. In the end she
admitted everything, would have done anything. She was too tired to resist death, and she was only twenty-six years old. But she stubbornly insisted, up to the instant that she fell like a stone
with a bullet in her spine, that Kiril Alekseivich Kamensky was incapable of treason. “
He is a Russian!
” she had cried over and over as they had pounded the question into
her.

“It says quite a lot about Kamensky,” Patchen said.

“Yes. How did he die, finally?”

Patchen shrugged. “Here Sutherland’s magical sources within the Kremlin break down. We don’t know. The Russians say heart attack. Of course, Masha was gone by the time he died,
so we had no eyewitness. He may have killed himself in some more orthodox way.”

“He wasn’t arrested?”

“No. Absolutely not. The Politburo was running the show after Kamensky’s novel went on the air. It was a major policy decision—kill Kamensky as a lesson to others and take the
punishment in the Western press, or let him live for a year or two and take the ten thousand lashes of his novel? They didn’t know what to do.”

“Why would a man like that kill himself?”

Patchen held out a hand. Christopher took it and helped him to his feet. They watched a pleasure boat move down the brown river.

“I don’t know, Paul. To do it himself.”

The state had permitted a funeral. Brave friends of the dead man had come to the grave. Some of them were writers, painters, poets, musicians who had been in the camps for decades along with
Kamensky. No one had seen them in all that time; Kamensky had summoned ghosts as his pallbearers. Some of them fell to their knees in the dirt by the grave and prayed. One man recited a long poem
of Kamensky’s, written years before and suppressed in the U.S.S.R. since the purges of the thirties. A secret policeman had taken motion pictures of the scene, standing on one side of the
grave with his whirring camera while the mourners stood on the other.

There had been a long, emotional story about the funeral in the Western papers. In the Soviet press, Kamensky’s death had not been noticed. Patchen, knowing that there had been scant
coverage in the Spanish newspapers, had brought some clippings. Christopher read them while Patchen waited.

“The Russian text is out, the French will be published in three weeks,” Patchen said. “Cerutti has made agreements for translations into English and all the European languages
plus Japanese. He’s sold serial rights in German and French. He’s going to New York to offer your English translation to the big magazines.”