The Secret Lovers (39 page)

Rothchild laughed, a string of gasps like a tubercular cough. “Few men were such obvious fools as Horst,” he said. “He had a face like a bad actor’s seen in an old
nickelodeon—put a coin in his slot, put your eye to the window, and watch greed and fear and lust flip over like dirty cartoons.”

Christopher said, “Is that how you felt about him when you knew him in Berlin in the twenties? Is that why you compromised him by introducing him to the local Communists in the Jockey
Restaurant?”

Maria stirred; she picked up Christopher’s untouched glass and drank from it. Rothchild showed nothing.

“This business, Paul, is largely a matter of storing up fools for future use,” he said. “You, of all people, ought to know that.”

“Were you storing him up in Paris, Otto? Did you give him Solange in ’44? Did you arrange for him to double her, give him the illusion that he was penetrating your
network?”

Astonishment flickered in Rothchild’s face. Then it vanished and something like anger came into his eyes. These facts from his past awakened his old mannerisms: Christopher might have been
implanting nerves to replace the ones the surgeons had cut in Zurich. Rothchild had stopped closing his eyes between sentences; he spoke without rest and in a steady voice.

“You don’t imagine,” he said, “that Horst Bülow could have done it on his own, do you?”

“No more than you and Maria could have killed Kamensky on your own,” Christopher said.

Neither of them answered. They were going to go no further. Patchen had been sitting, as motionless as an animal, while the other three talked. Now he rose to his feet; he seemed taller than
usual in the unlighted room and his spectacles, reflecting the final red sunlight of the day, were bright disks on his shadowed face.

“Kiril Kamensky killed himself,” Maria said. “David told us so.

Patchen turned on a lamp. He looked at Otto’s Klee, the crude technique, the rudimentary colors.

“True,” Patchen said. “But you killed Kalmyk, Maria, and all the other couriers, and their footprints led the KGB right to Kamensky’s doorstep.”

“
I?
” She opened her mouth to laugh, then caught the sound before it emerged. There was enough light now to see into Christopher’s eyes.

“No one but you knew Kalmyk’s name, Maria,” Christopher said. “Remember.”

Maria did. With tightened lips, shaking her head, she recalled the scene. “Right here,” she said, “in this room, after you’d knelt at Otto’s feet, Paul, with that
story about putting a pen name to Kamensky’s work.” Christopher had given her Kalmyk’s name, casually, buried in a meaningless sentence, as if she already knew it. Patchen had
repeated it. Now she saw the trap, after it had closed.

“Oh, Paul,” she said, “you
bastard!
”

She looked to Rothchild for permission. He shrugged. Maria was reporting now, in an even tone, in clear sentences. She had taken Christopher’s bait, again, when they met by the Madeleine.
She had stolen the Russian proofs after he told her where they were. She had taken them to Geneva on the night train, mailed them to Munich, come back to Paris. “Even then, you knew
everything,’ she said. “I knew you must, there was no expression in your eyes, Paul.”

“And while you were in Geneva, you called the KGB resident with Kalmyk’s name,” Patchen said. “You knew the Russian from the files.”

“You can’t know that. There was no surveillance on me.”

“There was surveillance on Cerutti, surveillance on everyone else who might have done it. We know they didn’t do it. Therefore, you did.”

Maria lit a Gauloise and put it out. The smoke brought water to her eyes.

“Kalmyk’s name, giving it to me that way,” she said. “I didn’t see what you were doing, Paul. It was so simple a trick—it was almost an insult to Otto and me.
You looked so tired, you were so upset, I’d seen how you mourned Bülow when I knew he would have sold you. I imagined, even Otto imagined, that you really wanted to save Kiril Kamensky.
You
were
beside yourself.”

“Paul is never beside himself,” Rothchild said. “Isn’t that true, David?”

Patchen, before he answered, moved so that he could see all of them at the same time—Christopher and Maria and himself in the mirror, Rothchild unreflected.

“Very nearly true,” he said. “But on that occasion, when he gave Kalmyk’s name to Maria, he realized what you and she would do with it. He’d made it imperative that
you kill him, or lose everything. Paul, the death-hater, was killing Kalmyk and Kamensky and, as it turned out, three others. It was quite a price, but he wanted full value—to know the
truth.”

“Well,” Rothchild said, “now he knows.”

4

Maria turned on more lamps. The rich colors of the room, returning with the light, revived her; she went to the window and looked down into the street.
“Wilson-Watson-Wharton’s big black Citroën is parked below,” she said. “When will we see him again?”

“When Paul and I leave,” Patchen said. “He’ll have some things for you to sign.”

“The transcript of this conversation?” Maria touched Patchen’s briefcase with her foot; she was trained, she knew that it contained a transmitter, that Wilson’s
technician was minding a tape recorder in the Citroën.

“That, and an insurance policy.”

Maria frowned, looked to Rothchild for help.

“Confessions to murder,” Rothchild said. “They’d want that. Blackmail insurance. You’re an outsider now, Maria.” He held out a hand for her, but she did not
take it. “What love will do to us,” Rothchild said.

Rothchild was happy and so, in her way, was Maria. Anxiety had died for them. Christopher stood up. Maria touched the back of Rothchild’s outstretched hand, trailed her fingertips over its
veins and bones, and went to Christopher. She put her arms around his neck and pressed her cheek on his. He felt the sharp bone in her temple and her teeth beneath her lip.

“Oh, Paul,” she said. “You and Otto are so alike.”

“Are we?” Christopher said.

Maria, flushed and still smiling, stepped away from him. She knew that nothing was going to happen to her except that she was never going to see Christopher again.

Christopher turned to Rothchild; Rothchild was smiling at him. Christopher waited for Patchen to notice the silence and turn around; he was examining the paintings again.

Christopher said, “Kolka Zhigalko.”

It was Maria who was startled; up to this moment she had known everything. Her glance darted from Patchen to Christopher to Rothchild. She saw the name register in Rothchild’s eyes, and
spoke to him. He lifted a hand to silence her.

“All right, Paul,” he said.

Christopher told them Don Jorge’s tale. Rothchild’s face relaxed, he stared at a point in space, smiling in affectionate recognition as the story unfolded. Christopher stopped
speaking. Maria clutched his arm.

“To use me for that?” she said to Rothchild. She shook Christopher’s arm for a violent instant, as if she could change the patterns of knowledge in his mind, and so change
Rothchild’s past, like beads in a kaleidoscope.

“For
love
, Otto?” she said. “After a quarter of a century, you had me murder your old lover? You were ashamed of love?”

“What other reason could have been strong enough?” Rothchild asked.

Maria went to the window again. Patchen went with her; they were on the sixth floor. Maria shuddered, Patchen put a hand on her hair.

“Kolka felt strongly,” Christopher said. He told Rothchild where Kolka Zhigalko had got his new name.

“Kamensky was the name the NKVD game
me
?” Rothchild cried. His upper body sprang forward, he nearly lost his balance, saving himself by clutching the arms of his chair.
“Kolka took
my
name in Madrid?”

“Yes, and wore it like a ring back into Russia, and into the camps.”

Rothchild was transformed. He smiled without restraint, muttered a phrase in Russian. He was looking at an absent figure, hearing old conversations. For the first time since the NKVD had
photographed him and Kolka together, Otto Rothchild’s person was visible; his wife stared at him, rage rising in her face. He didn’t see her.

“Kolka,” he said, laughing, speaking in Russian, “Kolka—a secret marriage, a secret marriage.”

He went on laughing, as he had done when he had defeated the lie detector, until his voice fled and his cheeks were blistered with tears.

Christopher said, “One last fact, Otto.”

Rothchild, still laughing, nodded.

“Did you believe Kolka was an agent? Did you believe what the NKVD told you when they showed you the pictures?”

Rothchild wiped his eyes. “Of course,” he said. “I’m a professional.”

1

On their last night in Madrid, Christopher and Cathy had gone to the Corral de la Moreria for supper. The flamenco there was not authentic; the girls were too pretty and their
dresses were too new. They were decor, not dancers. But the place made Cathy happy—a guitarist she admired was playing that night, and she liked the wine and the paella. “The food in
this country is so wonderful,” she said. “You can either have paella, or all the things that go into paella, one thing at a time.” The simplicity of Spanish life made her feel
free. “The Spaniards never mix their colors,” Cathy said. “Everything is what it seems to be.” Christopher gave her a look. “So it’s an illusion; I’ll keep
it,” Cathy said.

A new performer was introduced, a young girl wearing a round brimmed hat and a male dancer’s short jacket and high-waisted trousers. Her costume shocked the Spaniards in the audience, as
it was designed to do. But the girl’s voice, when she began to sing, carried them away. She had the voice for flamenco, ardent and true, with the hoarse tone, almost hidden among the notes of
song, that Cathy called the scar on the heart. All fine singers had it, she told Christopher, and this girl had a wonderful one. The audience showed passion for her, and the girl was carried away
by it. She sang the whole repertoire of flamenco songs, with the clapping hands of the company and the guitars playing behind her. Her limelit face, simple and homely, shone with sweat, and she
listened with absorbed attention to the pitch of her own voice, as though she wished to be sure that it was fit for other ears before releasing it. She had no guile, and she made no attempt to hide
her rapture. Cathy looked at the singer, and then into Christopher’s face, and said, “Me.”

Later, when Cathy cataloged her lovers in Don Jorge de Rodegas’s garden, Christopher remembered this scene. She told him that she was finished with lovers. But Cathy’s sexuality was
like the flamenco singer’s voice, an innocent thing of the body. He hadn’t believed she had come to him a virgin and he didn’t believe that she took no pleasure from her lovers.
She carried too much of it back to him. The others had touched and changed her; he felt it in her body. They were both excited by it. Cathy, who had always wanted to talk about everything, would
not talk about this. “No one stays in my mind but you,” she said. “It’s
you
, Paul, whose memory is populated by old lovers; you never forget anything. If you
remember phone numbers for twenty years, and you do, how would you forget the exact feeling you had with every one of those girls?”

The next day, they had driven over the Pyrenees, passing near the place where Solange had died, and down into the green valley on the French side of the frontier. Cathy wanted to go to Lourdes,
she had never seen it. They agreed that she would drive back to Rome while Christopher went by train to Paris.

“Do tell Maria Don Jorge’s tale of Kolka and Kamensky.”

“That’s why I’m going to Paris,” Christopher had said.

2

Christopher, when he returned to Rome, found Cathy at home, listening to her tapes, with sheets of music spread over the tables and on top of the piano. The Siamese cat he had
bought for her on their anniversary slept on the carpet in a patch of sunlight. Cathy had found a frame, old and ornate, for the Goya drawing, and it hung above the bed.

She had been thinking about Otto Rothchild. “I don’t believe I saw all of Otto in that story of Don Jorge’s,” she said. Christopher had involved her with Rothchild and
used her against him; he told her enough of the truth to let her understand what Rodegas’s tale had explained.

“But why?” Cathy asked. “Twenty-five years of agony for
what?
”

“He was afraid of what had happened with Kolka. You say that lovers won’t let you forget them. When Otto remembered Kolka—every day, I suppose—he remembered what he
really was.”

“A queer.”

“No one cared about that. But his homosexuality, and his having done business with the NKVD in Madrid, laid Otto open to blackmail. That’s the unforgivable sin—to be
vulnerable. It puts everything in hazard.”

Cathy stroked the purring cat. Having it reminded her, she said, how much she loved animals, and she carried it with her from room to room. Now, on the terrace, it struggled to be put down and
Cathy let it go. It walked along the balustrade, uttering a shrill mew. The sun was going down; Cathy and the animal were blank figures with the last light behind them.

“Why did you have to do what you did to him, Paul? It was so cruel, so awful a punishment. Why not just find him out, tell him you knew, put it in those files you’re always talking
about? Release him from the fear of discovery.”

“If he had told us the truth, we would have done that.”

“He made you angry by keeping silent? Paul—you?”

“No. He broke trust. We can’t be what we are without absolute trust, Cathy. We live by it.”

“And you took it away from Maria’s husband because he lost control of himself in 1936 and loved another person, and kept that secret from you? You have to know every
secret?”

“You heard what Don Jorge said. He knows.”

Christopher looked at the sunset. The cat rubbed its back against his hand.

“Little by little,” Cathy said, “I’m learning from you.”

Rome, in August, was almost empty. Cathy and Christopher were the only tenants in their apartment house who weren’t out of the city on vacation. The building had once
been a palazzo and now, with its cold marble halls and staircases empty and silent, it seemed like one again. Cathy opened the doors when she played sometimes, and the sound of the piano would fill
the whole building. Christopher went to the top of the stairs to listen to her playing Haydn; the music was amplified through some trick of the palazzo’s stone. As they always had done, they
lived mostly in public. Cathy wanted to watch the sunset from the Pincio, to drink Negronis at Doney’s, to eat spaghetti at Moro and artichokes at Piperno. When the food was before her, she
ate little of it; she talked, telling Christopher stories of her family, of horses, of other animals she had owned. She made him laugh. “It’s funny, I remember everything that happened
to me as a child, and everything that you and I have done together—every detail,” she said. “But nothing in between. Will I remember anything that happens afterward?”