The Secret Lovers (38 page)

Neither does Maria, Christopher thought. She was enjoying the moment; her eyes, glowing with intelligence, searched the faces of the three men. She was flushed, a little short of breath.
Christopher thought that she looked disheveled, like a woman who had heard her husband’s key turn in the lock as she lay in the arms of a lover, and, moments later, having thrown on her
clothes and thrust the pins back into her hair, was making small talk with the cuckold. She gave Rothchild a look filled with mischief and Christopher saw why she loved him. No one had ever
outwitted Rothchild. She thought he was invulnerable.

“Have you an accusation to make?” Rothchild asked.

“You murdered Bülow,” Patchen said. “You caused Kamensky’s suicide.”

Rothchild nodded his head, an abrupt movement, after each of Patchen’s sentences. Patchen’s voice was calm.

“You did what you did for reasons of ego,” Patchen said.

This time Rothchild made no gesture of assent. Maria gave Christopher a sardonic glance, to see if he realized how laughable Patchen’s statement was.

“You lied to Paul, you lied to me, you lied to the outfit,” Patchen said.

Rothchild’s throat was dry. Laboriously, he swiveled his torso, lifted his arm, picked up his glass, drank.

“On the contrary,” he said, “I tried from the beginning to make you listen to the truth.”

2

“Maria will talk, I haven’t voice enough,” Rothchild said. “First, Paul, let me pay you the compliment of saying that you’re a dangerous man. We
always knew it. Maria and I saw that you’d be maddened by the idea of sacrificing Kamensky. Murder drives you crazy, everyone knows that about you. Evidently you can only cure yourself of the
psychosis by solving the crime. It’s a weakness, this refusal to let well enough alone. In the end it may kill you.” Rothchild turned his smile—undamaged teeth, square and white
against his sallow skin—on Patchen. “It
will
kill him,” he said, a reasonable man stating a reasonable proposition. He waved his hand, an apology for having taken up time
in putting words to something they all knew. Maria waited, the smile of affection for Christopher lingering on her lips, until Rothchild told her to begin speaking.

“I can’t speak for Otto,” she said, “but what I thought was this: Kiril Kamensky, with this novel, had done his one last great thing. Why shouldn’t Otto do his? As
young men they were side by side, genius and genius. Let them end in the same way.”

When Kamensky’s letter came in the Christmas mail, Rothchild had trembled with excitement. He had recognized the handwriting on the envelope as one would know the face of a friend seen by
chance after many years—changed but still the same. Only days before, Rothchild had spoken to his medical specialists. They had told him that his blood pressure had begun to destroy his
kidneys, that it could explode blood vessels in his brain, that it would kill him. They offered him a reprieve: the surgery in Zurich.

Maria said, “The chief doctor told me this, I have the words by heart: ‘The body of Monsieur Rothchild, if he consents to the surgery, will be like a sleeping foot. His brain will be
salvaged, he can live a life of the intellect, if not of the senses. Madame, at his age what do the senses matter?’ ”

Rothchild went out of the specialist’s cabinet ready to choose death. For days afterward, Maria watched Rothchild pass through spasms of drunkenness, sexual passion, eating; he commanded
Maria to telephone to restaurants and order veal Orloff, tournedos Rossini, Chartreuse de perdreaux, sweetbreads à la financière au vol-au-vent—the glutton’s dishes he had
eaten at his father’s table in his vanished Russia. To Maria he spoke only Russian. All his life Rothchild had lived in episodes, dwelling for a while in the intellect so as to be able to
gratify the senses; he had always believed that his exceptional brain made exceptional pleasure possible. “What I’m offered,” he told Maria, “is a choice between two kinds
of death, one where I will perceive light and one where I will not.”

Kamensky’s letter, the image of Kamensky’s novel, hidden like an infant cancer in the hated body of Soviet Russia, sending out signals to summon the blood supply that would make its
growth possible, brought Rothchild back to life again. He would arrange the needed transfusion. “This is too simple a way to say this,” Maria said, “but Otto stopped seeing his
surgery as the disconnection of his appetites. He began to see it—and how could anyone be more professional than this?—he began to see it as
cover
.” Rothchild saw a way
to execute a brilliant operation, the last of his career, while he lay unconscious in a hospital. The elegance of it, the humor, were irresistible.

Rothchild had Maria arrange a date for his surgery. He thought no more about the invasion of his body. His mind was fully engaged in planning the operation that would bring Kamensky’s book
out of Russia, publish it in the West, put a seal on fame for both of them, overturn the security of the Soviet apparatus and the American service at the same time.

“For Kamensky,” Maria said, “Otto wanted just what he’s told you he wanted—his true place among the great writers. What I wanted for Otto, what I know he wanted for
himself, was his own true place. After all he’s done, David, after all he’s meant to the world, Otto may lie in an unmarked grave. But some of us, the ones Otto cares about, ought to
know where it is. That’s not so much to desire.”

Rothchild told Patchen about Kamensky’s letter. Patchen agreed to have the manuscript brought out. Rothchild suggested having it received in East Germany by an American asset; Maria,
knowing the files, knowing that Patchen would trust no one but Christopher to handle the courier, knew that no agent except Bülow could possibly be used.

“We never spoke Bülow’s name to David,” Maria said. “Otto knew he’d give the job to Paul; I knew Paul had no one except Horst Bülow who could do the
job.”

Otto and Maria, on the day before Epiphany, took the train to Zurich. Christopher imagined them: rising early, taking a taxi to the Gare de Lyon and then the express to Switzerland, Otto buying
newspapers and magazines even as the train began to move out of the station, running after it with Maria pulling his hand, making incessant witticisms, eating too little and drinking too much,
refusing to look out the window of the train as it passed through France because even the loveliest country in Europe was not worth looking at; he had not seen beauty, except in paintings, since he
left Russia.

“David was resisting us, and we knew why,” Maria said. “Paul was Otto’s case officer, and David knew what Paul would say—wait, as Kamensky had asked, wait for
Kamensky to die; keep him safe. Otto doesn’t like scruples. Paul is too American for him. David is a little better—he’s a scrupulous man who does unscrupulous things for practical
reasons. He’s under the spell of his ideals—America is the good guy, so anything goes as long as America wins. Paul
hates
ideals, he believes that nothing matters except
keeping absolute faith with other human beings, each as an individual, one at a time. That’s Paul’s strength, but Otto is right—one day he’ll die of it.”

Maria was sitting on the sofa now, with her legs curled beneath her skirt, and she picked up Christopher’s hand and patted it, as though her touch was necessary to take the sting from her
words. “Otto saw that we had to have a more powerful argument than the ones Paul would make,” Maria said. “We knew that if Bülow was killed before Paul’s eyes, even he
would have to consider the possibility that the Russians had done the murder. I told Otto Paul would find out the truth in the end. He knew I was right. All Otto wanted was a few weeks of grace, so
that we could do what had to be done, stay ahead of Paul if only by a step, run the operation right. It took cold hearts to do what had to be done. But we had to do it. Kiril Kamensky, alive, was
an obscure ex-convict, living in a dacha, fornicating with a young girl. Dead, he was a martyr—and we could make him into an immortal.”

Maria was still holding Christopher’s hand. “We had to find a way to block you out, Paul,” she said. “I’m sorry. I
hated
using you, using what’s so
good in you, this passion you have for the idea of trust, your conscience. But friendship is friendship, and business is business.”

Maria would have stopped here; she had replied at great length to Patchen’s terse accusation. Christopher knew the Rothchilds; he knew that they had rehearsed this scene, divided their
confession into segments. Maria wouldn’t lie, but she demanded evidence of her own guilt before she would confirm it. She watched her face in the looking glass; she squeezed
Christopher’s hand. Her palm was damp, her fingers twisted in Christopher’s, but these were her only involuntary reactions.

“Maria,” Christopher said. “The transfer from Otto’s numbered account to the Berliner Bank. The passports you got from the Abwehr forger in Zurich. Schaefer.”

Rothchild roused. “All that was my work,” he said. “The bank transfer wasn’t much of a risk. You surprise me, Paul. Nothing is secure. That’s the old, best
rule.”

In Zurich, Rothchild went openly from the train to the bank and transferred the funds for Bülow to Berlin.

“Maria was taking all the chances,” Rothchild said. “I thought I might die in the clinic; after all, they were opening me up from pubis to jawbone. I wanted to leave a trace of
evidence, not enough to be easily discovered, but enough to make it possible for you to think I’d done it all, for Maria to go away from this clean.”

While Rothchild was prepared for surgery, Maria picked up the false passports: one for Maria, one for Bülow. She sat in the clinic during the surgery. Rothchild was unconscious. (“I
was riding on billows of morphia,” Rothchild said, “I thought I saw Maria lean over me, kiss me, then go; it may have been a delusion. I was hallucinating. I thought they had
disemboweled me, that the tubes in my arms and legs were electrical, that I had been made into a machine; I smelled ozone as if my breath were electrically charged. Sometimes I still smell
it.”)

While Rothchild lay in the clinic, Maria flew to Berlin. She took an early flight, leaving Zurich just after dawn; she had lunch on the Kurfürstendamm, too much vinegar on the beef,
half-cooked potatoes, pale bitter beer. She took the S-Bahn to East Berlin and mailed Otto’s frightening letter to Horst Bülow, typed on a German machine in perfect German. It mentioned
names, a long neat list of them, men and women Bülow had sent to their deaths in France, names taken from records that Bülow had been promised would be destroyed. The letter told
Bülow to await another contact.

Maria had to do the whole job in a single day. She had to be back at Rothchild’s bedside when he regained consciousness, she had told the doctor she was going to sleep while her husband
did not need her. She was, in fact, exhausted when she reached the Schaefer Baths. “It wasn’t a bad place to rest,” Maria said. “I
ached
. The steam took some of the
kinks out, and I slept for a while, waiting for Schaefer to come to work before the nighttime crowd. You can just stretch out on a bench, like a derelict.”

There was no difficulty in arranging for the murder of Horst Bülow. Maria showed Schaefer a series of 35 mm contact prints, photographs of documents that could send Schaefer to prison for
life; he read them with a magnifying glass. He spoke Rothchild’s wartime cover name, Jaguar. Schaefer ran his eye over Maria’s body, cupped his hands in the empty air as if he were
holding her breasts. “I saw he meant it as a compliment to Otto, that Otto was still alive and had a woman as young as I, but God, it was disgusting,” Maria said.

Schaefer, after he recovered from the shock of blackmail, was amused. Maria had never arranged for the death of another person before that night with Schaefer. “When we first began talking
about it, never uttering the specific words—murder, killing, what
do
you say? I wasn’t trained by the outfit for this work—at first, I was a little sick. I knew
Bülow from the files. It was odd, Paul, like going through the looking glass
into
the files and becoming one of the assets. Killing a paper man. The reality he had for me was the
reality Gunga Din had for me when I was a kid, or Nigger Jim. I had no clothes on. This flabby German was staring at my breasts and belly. How could it be real?”

Christopher looked down at their joined hands, lying on the brocade of the sofa cushion. “It was real enough for Horst,” he said, “when he signaled your friends in that black
Opel, and they broke him in two. You should have seen the blood running in the rainwater.”

Maria moved, tried to take her hand away. Christopher tightened his grip on her slippery palm. A pulse was beating in her forehead, her skin showed pink through her tan, her breathing had
quickened. Patchen watched these signs of her agitation as if they were needles tracing jagged peaks on the tapes of a polygraph.

Rothchild spoke. “Bülow was supposed to think that the black Opel contained friends,” he said. “Schaefer’s fellows showed him the car in Schiller Park—you know
about that, I suppose—and a couple of other times. They wanted him to recognize it. Otherwise he might have jumped out of the way.”

3

Maria spoke Russian to Bülow, she met him at eighteen minutes after the hour, she made him use elaborate wasteful tradecraft, she controlled every movement, every code
phrase. She used Christopher’s name, she described Christopher’s tradecraft, she named five men Horst had spotted and the Americans had recruited. He showed terror, then relief, then
servility.

“Why the KGB tradecraft?” Patchen asked.

“We knew he’d recognize it. Otto hoped he might tell Paul the Russians were trying to double him,” Maria said. “That would have reinforced the purpose of the
op—made it seem certain that the opposition had killed him, that the smuggling of the manuscript was blown, that we couldn’t protect Kamensky.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t tell me,” Christopher said.

“So was Otto—he thought he’d run to you with it. Maybe if I’d been a man he would have been scared enough to tell you. What he did do, Paul, was ask for money. He thought
we ought to snatch you, pump you out. He was willing to deliver you for ten thousand pounds. He insisted on English money.” Maria grinned. “You’d be flattered at the value he put
on you; he said he could tell from your manners that you were at least a colonel; I guess that’s the highest rank Horst could imagine. I told him you were more than that, I couldn’t
resist. Then the price is fifteen thousand, Horst said.”