The Secret Lovers (37 page)

Christopher folded the clippings and gave them back to Patchen.

“So, from that point of view,” Patchen said, “it’s a picture-book operation, a Rothchild special.”

2

When Wilson joined them, by the Orangerie, Christopher repeated what he had already told Patchen about his findings in Spain. The Security man listened, inclined his head to
catch Christopher’s words; his low voice was lost sometimes in the sudden yowls of traffic in the Place de la Concorde.

“That’s almost the last thing I would have guessed,” Wilson said. “You’re sure Rodegas is believable?”

“Either that or he’s a better novelist than Kamensky.”

“But nothing ever showed up even to hint that Rothchild was queer,” Wilson said. He couldn’t accept that twenty years of files, scrupulously kept by men like himself, could
omit the central fact about a subject.

“Otto is not a homosexual. Neither was Kamensky. Something happened between them in Madrid—time and place and circumstance. What if they hadn’t been drunk that first night?
What if they hadn’t spoken the same language? What if Solange had not aroused them sexually to begin with? What if, what if? It happened by accident.”

“And Rothchild has been paying for it in his soul ever since.”

This observation, coming from Wilson, startled Christopher. He looked sharply into the Security man’s face, to see if it was the joke he had expected from him, but he saw only an
expression of pity.

“No wonder he eluded the polygraph,” Wilson said. “The two unforgivable sins—a homosexual act that laid him open to blackmail and a past connection to the Russian
intelligence service—were crawling under his skin, waiting for the machine.”

Patchen asked Wilson what he was going to do.

“Report.”

“Of course,” Patchen said, “but when?”

“After Paul’s report moves. This is your asset, and you two got him. Christopher did much more than I did. He was the one who flushed the bird and shot it. I’m just the
retriever.”

Patchen, in the presence of Wilson, had covered the signs of his physical pain, and of whatever else he felt. Wilson had little to tell them. He had sent Jöelle and her companion on an
operation in French Africa; they’d be gone for at least six months. “We’ll keep moving them as long as it seems wise,” he said, “there’s plenty for them to do in
faraway places.” Patchen nodded; he wasn’t really interested. He assumed that Wilson, having been instructed to do so, would clean up all the contacts with Cerutti. Jöelle, in her
last report, had told Wilson that Cerutti had picked up the Soviet surveillance. “I really don’t think he ever noticed that we were dancing with him,” Wilson said. Somewhere,
Christopher thought, a Soviet security man is telling himself the same thing.

“If I may ask,” Wilson said, “what are
you
going to do?”

He knew already that Patchen and Christopher were on their way to call on the Rothchilds.

“Do?” Patchen replied. “What is there to do? Talk. See what we can salvage.”

“There’s this question—has Rothchild been working for the opposition all along, for the whole twenty years? It’s unlike them not to move in on a man they’ve got
something on.”

Wilson was addressing himself to Christopher. Patchen waited for the reply, as interested as Wilson.

“That’s a question someone else will have to ask,” Christopher said. “We always assume, about everyone, that the answer is yes. Everyone is considered to be opposition.
If, then, it turns out, the one time in fifty thousand, that they really are, the safeguards are in place.”

“That’s not really the assumption everyone made about Rothchild in your shop, Paul. He knows everyone.”

“Not quite everyone,” Christopher said.

Patchen and Wilson discussed technical arrangements. The exchange lasted longer than Patchen thought necessary, but he controlled his impatience. Wilson explained everything
that had to do with equipment very carefully, and then repeated it. Men who lived with secret mechanical paraphernalia were like the natives of a great city—they didn’t believe that
strangers could find their way through lighted and well-marked streets. At another time Christopher might have laughed at the expression, somewhere between courteous patience and murderous
exasperation, that flickered in Patchen’s eyes as Wilson, staring at the ground, made sure that he understood the obvious.

There would be no need, after today, for Wilson and Christopher to see one another. Both knew it was possible that they could work for twenty years in their own compartments and never catch
sight of each other again. Wilson, finished with Patchen, gave him an embarrassed little nod and walked to where Christopher was leaning against the base of a statue. Wilson put an arm across
Christopher’s shoulders and led him to the other side of the pedestal.

“I don’t know what to say to you,” Wilson said. “It’s been a pleasure working with a professional. This ought to be a great moment for me. If it’s worth
anything to you, I don’t feel any better about the way this has turned out than I imagine you do.”

“I know that.”

Wilson tapped, through the shiny cloth of his suit, the stack of index cards that he carried in his inside pocket. “Nothing goes back to Washington from me except what’s on these
cards,” he said. “Only what’s relevant. Cathy’s private life is not relevant.”

Wilson looked into Christopher’s face—he had given up altogether the habit of avoiding his eyes—and began a phrase. He broke it off. “I’ll be glad to get
home,” he said, “it’s been one hell of a long TDY. I miss my kids. I don’t know how you do it, moving around all the time the way you do.”

“You get used to it.”

“I wouldn’t.”

Wilson shook hands. Christopher was surprised—the act was insecure; Wilson believed that public contacts drew less attention if they were broken off without any sign of a good-bye. Wilson
took a step away and then came back. He decided, after all, to say what he had to say.

“Moroni is back in Rome,” he said. “The station sighted him with Klimenko. And there’s this, from the German girl—Moroni’s taking Dexedrine by the bottle,
he’s raving about Cathy; the German girl thinks he’s crazy. Your wife did something to him in Spain, humiliated him somehow. He’s looking for Cathy. If I were you, if you could
find a way, I’d lock the door.”

Christopher nodded. He thanked Wilson, to make him feel less uncomfortable. Wilson touched him again, two soft punches on the arm. One for my agent, one for my wife, Christopher thought.

“Life’s a bastard,” Wilson said.

3

Cathy, after they had heard Don Jorge de Rodegas’s tale at the estancia, had taken Christopher into the gardens, and with the moon on one horizon and the dawn on the
other, had enumerated for him all of her acts. He didn’t try to stop her. Something in the story that Rodegas had told had released her from her idea that she must make a life for herself
that was as dark as she imagined Christopher’s to be.

“I don’t want secrets, Paul,” she had said. “I never wanted them. I never wanted lovers. I don’t want someone telling my story when I’m old like Maria’s
husband, and trying to
guess
the truth. I want it known that it wasn’t love with anyone but you. I want you to know why. You can bear anything, can’t you?”

“Not very much more of this.”

“Say that again.”

“Not very much more of this,” Christopher repeated. He felt tears on his cheeks. Cathy watched their track on his face. Even she looked pallid and drawn after the long sleepless
night listening to the dry voice of Rodegas. That I should cry, Christopher thought, and she should look less than beautiful—we must have escaped from the galaxy. She began a long, slow
smile, and so did he; all around them the waters of Don Jorge’s garden played, catching the light and breaking the silence.

1

Patchen went upstairs first, and Christopher, waiting in the street below, saw him come onto the balcony of the Rothchilds’ apartment and look for a moment at the sunset.
When he went inside again, he closed the french doors behind him so that the noise of the evening traffic would not interfere with the microphone Wilson had installed in his briefcase. Christopher
waited a little longer, to give Patchen time to tell Rothchild that Kamensky had killed himself.

When Christopher entered the sitting room, Otto Rothchild pulled himself out of the depths of his chair and stood on his feet. The effort shrank his skin; his nostrils opened and his lips pulled
back, exposing the teeth. The lamps had not been lighted and the room, filled with Rothchild’s treasures, was in shadow except for two pools of sunlight falling through the west windows.
Rothchild, leaving his walking sticks against the arm of his chair, groped his way across the dim room, moving from one piece of furniture to another like an exhausted swimmer floundering in the
debris of a shipwreck. He seized Christopher’s shoulders. There was real strength in his bony hands but no temperature. The two men had not been so close together for a year. Rothchild no
longer smelled like a male, of liquor and smoke and sweat; his breath and skin emitted a bitter odor, not quite bile and not quite urine, that came from deep within his body.

“David has told me about Kamensky,” Rothchild said. “You were right, Paul.” He swayed and tightened his grip; Christopher felt a tremor of physical weakness run through
Rothchild’s body like a shiver of disgust. “But, Paul,
I
was right, too,” he said. “Kamensky wanted his work and his name to live—believe me, that’s the
truth. We made that possible for him.”

Rothchild tugged at the cloth of the younger man’s coat; he wanted to return to his chair. Christopher, his arms hanging at his sides, made no move to help him. Maria put down her glass
and crossed to them. Frowning, she supported Rothchild, step by shuffling step, and when he was sitting again, smoothed his clothes and rearranged the things on his table—the Evian water, the
crystal goblet, the reading glasses, the copy of the Russian version of Kamensky’s novel, fresh and smelling of ink. Rothchild’s place was marked by a silver paper knife.

Breathing in through his mouth and out through his nose, Rothchild waited until he had recovered his voice. Then he tapped the cover of Kamensky’s book, printed on coarse yellow paper like
that used in the packages of cheap French cigarettes, and pointed a finger at Christopher.

“If one had to die for a book, for one piece of work,” Rothchild said, “would you say Kamensky chose well?”

“
Chose
to die?”

Rothchild’s eyes, now that he was rested after his journey across the carpet, were bright with interest. Waiting for Christopher to speak again, Rothchild’s gaze rested on Patchen,
as if he could read the meaning of Christopher’s words on the other man’s face. Maria made a drink for Christopher and brought it to him; he waved it away. Rothchild watched; a smile
came and went on his lips.

“Not drinking, Paul?” Maria said; and, smiling at Patchen: “It’s a bad sign when Paul doesn’t drink his Scotch. It means he’s going to stop being
quiet.”

Patchen cleared his throat, as if he were going to spit. The noise seemed doubly rude, coming from this fastidious man, and Maria, still bent at the waist, turned her head to look at him. Her
dark hair, heavy and gleaming from the brush, fell away from her cheek. She frowned in puzzlement, then began to smile, ready to turn the sound Patchen had made into a joke. But when she saw his
face, the expression drained from her own. There exists a device, used in safe rooms where secrets are stored, that senses the body heat of an intruder and sets off an alarm. Maria’s nervous
system worked in the same way. She waited, frozen, for Patchen to speak.

“Any other intelligence service,” Patchen said, “would kill you both.”

Maria, Christopher knew, rarely smoked in Rothchild’s presence, and never in this room where he kept his carpets and his paintings. But now she took a Gauloise from a package in the pocket
of her skirt and lit it. Just as she always did, she inhaled one enormous lungful of smoke. Her breasts swelled and her diaphragm expanded; she exhaled the rank smoke in a long, thin plume and
snuffed out the cigarette. With the same gesture, she picked up Christopher’s glass. Her face was no more than a foot from his. Her teeth clicked and Christopher heard this sound; he caught
the scent of shampoo in her hair.

“Maria,” Christopher said, “didn’t you think it was odd, all these months, that there was no surveillance on you at all?”

Maria put Christopher’s brimming drink back on the table. She spilled only a little of it. She walked away from him, backward across the patterns in the carpet, and sat down in her own
chair. She crossed her legs, the fine ankles, the swelling calves, the long straight bone of the shins. Her eyes widened and she gave a shriek of laughter. Rothchild flinched. Moments passed; Maria
watched Christopher, the muscles in her face tight with the effort of suppressing another outburst of laughter.

“All right, Paul,” she said. “What was the mistake?”

Christopher took the long butt of her cigarette out of the ashtray and showed it to her. “Smoking like that, when you were setting up Horst Bülow in the Tiergarten,” he
said.

Maria uncrossed her legs. She smiled—not her quick white smile but the slow, tight-lipped one that let her mind show in her eyes. She was concealing nothing now. Her body relaxed, she
sipped her drink, and when she spoke there was a current of mirth in her voice.

“The man in the Tyrolean hat,” she said.

“In the Tiergarten, the week of Otto’s surgery. Yes.”

“I thought he was opposition. Why would you have surveillance on Bülow? Otto agreed—play the odds, he said.”

Rothchild spoke Maria’s name and then he coughed and spoke to her again in a stronger voice. Maria shook her hair, flushed, looked at herself in the mirror beyond Rothchild; he took the
chain of mannerisms for an apology and subsided.

Patchen said, “I want Maria to talk, Otto. We don’t know quite everything yet.”