The Secret Lovers (40 page)

She behaved like someone preparing for a voyage. In places where she and Christopher had been happy, she recalled the exact words spoken on the earlier occasion, the food they had eaten.
Christopher saw that she was wearing the clothes that she had worn in the past to certain restaurants and theaters. He interrupted her reminiscences one night:

“Yes, I remember. You were wearing the same things you have on tonight—the blue linen suit, and your grandmother’s pearls, and the same perfume.”

Cathy leaned across the table—they were in a theatrical restaurant called the Flavia where she was mistaken for a film actress—and kissed Christopher.

“Oh, it’s a joy to love a man with a perfect memory,” she said.

“Why the costumes, Cathy, and all this time travel to the things we did together last year? What’s wrong with now?”

“It was you who told me,” she said, smiling, “that there’s no such thing as the present. I’m just thinking of my future, storing up things.”

When, after a week, Christopher told her that he had to go to Africa, she showed none of her old temper. In his pursuit of Rothchild he had neglected his other agents; he would have to travel
more than usual in order to see them. He told Cathy so, but she didn’t want to talk about it. She wanted to go to the Arlberg in the fall, to walk in the mountains. She wrote to the manager
of the Mooserkreuz to book a room. “Won’t it be wonderful to be in the mountains?” she asked. “There’ll be snow on some of them, Paul; maybe we can ski, early in the
day.”

Driving him to the airport, she turned and smiled as they passed Ostia Antica; it was the first time they had gone past the ruins together since the night they had gone inside in the rain.

In the bar at Fiumicino she asked for champagne. It was after midnight, all flights to Africa left in the night, and they were alone with the bartender. The shriek of the jets and the stink of
burnt kerosene activated Cathy’s old feelings about Christopher’s departures.

“Christ, I’ll be alone,” she said, and bit her lips.

“So will I, and in the Congo.”

“There’s a difference. You’ll tell me nothing when you come back, if you do. Men go out like candles when they go away. You could die down there, a war is going on, without
ever telling me what I’ve told you.”

“What do you call what you’ve told me?”

“Everything.”

Christopher’s patience broke. Horst Bülow was dead, and Kolka Zhigalko and Masha, and he might find a dead man awaiting him in the Congo. What did Cathy know about being alone?

“Everything?” he said. “Where is the other cat?”

3

In the Congo, Christopher found his agent, a man called Alphonse Nsango, sickened by magic. An enemy had put a juju curse on Nsango. His tribe believed that the liver was the
seat of life, and within him Nsango felt his liver being devoured. He told Christopher, in a matter-of-fact tone, that he sometimes saw the spirit that was destroying him.

“It’s a woman, all bones; I see her, just a wink of her, when she goes into me at night.”

Christopher didn’t doubt what he was told. Nsango’s face was haggard, the flesh was falling from his tall body. He was seized by violent fits of trembling. Outside the hut in the
forest where Nsango now lay was an encampment of his followers. Nsango had been driven out of the capital, but many believed that he would come back as the head of his nation. Christopher had paid
boys to write Nsango’s name on walls in Léopoldville and Élisabethville; he had given journalists money to write stories about him. Nsango acted out the necessary legends, as he
told Christopher in sardonic French, and Christopher transferred them into public consciousness.

Nsango had met him at a road junction, miles from his camp, and driven with him in a Jeep through the dark trees. In an abandoned village the headlights had picked up something that did not have
a natural shape. The two men walked across the beaten earth inside the circle of conical huts that had been the central place of the village. Nsango beckoned the Jeep nearer. In the stronger glow
of its headlamps they saw what they had found: a heap of human hands, the right hands of men, women, and children, with bloody stumps for wrists; the fingers were curved and delicate and, except
that they were black, might have been Cathy’s, mutiplied by mirrors, ready to strike a chord on a piano. “Someone cut off all the right hands in the village, it’s a punishment
from the old Belgian days,” Nsango said. He put his hand on the pile of hands. “Is this country an insane mind?” he asked.

It took a long time to heal Nsango. The local juju men could do nothing. Christopher knew of a man in the Ivory Coast who had powerful gifts. Nsango could not be taken there. The kind of juju
that afflicted him could only be cured at the place where the spell had been cast. Christopher was three hundred miles from the nearest American and he had no reliable communications. He went
himself to Abidjan and brought the sorcerer back to the Congo. It took several days to drive the evil spirit out of Nsango’s body and into the body of his enemy. There was fear among the
Africans that Christopher’s presence would diminish the powers of the witchman, and he remained inside a hut, some distance from the others. He heard drums and incantations in the night, and
when he looked out he saw, outside the chief’s house where Nsango lay, figures darting, like Cathy’s jealousies, from the darkness to the firelight and back again. By day, in the heat,
he began to write a long poem for Cathy in his notebook.

Nsango, freed of his curse, regained his humor. “What happened to me, Paul, will show you that I am still truly of my people,” he said. When he was within his tribe he wore its
dress, spoke its language, and lived by its customs, but he had been educated by Christians and sent to a university in Europe. “The Jesuits separated my mind from my body,” Nsango
said; one part of his nature taunted the other. He and Christopher spoke about revolution. Nsango wanted guns. “You and I have had enough ideas,” he told Christopher, “the time
for ideas has not come in this country.” When they first met and became friends, Nsango had spoken of something he called revolution without rage. Now he wanted to kill—he had changed
no more than Christopher.

Christopher gave the sorcerer gold and sent him back to his own country. Nsango did not thank Christopher or speak of the incident; he feared that the juju might not truly have been broken,
because Christopher was involved. Without his friend and the gold Nsango would have died; but he didn’t know what might befall him in the future in retribution for having brought an outsider
into secret things.

4

Cathy’s other cat remained, with her other clothes and her other jewelry and scent, in her apartment in the Piazza Oratorio. Christopher never went there. Sometimes, if he
came home without warning, Cathy would still be in the other place and he would wait for her to call. She phoned their apartment at noon each day to see if he had returned, and when he answered she
would hang up without speaking; in an hour she would appear, bathed and dressed in the clothes she kept for him.

Her hysteria recurred and grew worse. Christopher went back to Africa, and to Asia, and to northern Europe. Each time he returned she came to him from a lover. She went back to being the lover
she had been at the beginning of their marriage, frenzied and taking what she wanted. She made love with her eyes open and watchful—waiting for the instant, she said, when Christopher would
be drawn out of himself.

They went to the Arlberg as Cathy had planned and walked, with a picnic lunch in a rucksack, along paths in the evergreen woods. It snowed and they skied. Christopher was sick, he had relapsed
into dysentery while he was with Nsango, and when he stayed in the room one afternoon Cathy found someone in the hotel to go to bed with. It was the first time this had happened. Always before, she
had kept herself to Christopher unless he was in another country. She was shaken by what she had done; she blamed it on drink—she had had wine with her lunch and cognac afterward, and the man
had begun to talk to her in bad English.

“I don’t know what’s happening, Paul, I’m beginning to want the others,” she said. “I have to talk to you.” She told him again what she had told him in
Spain: name after name. “I always know their names,” she said, in a voice as brittle as Maria Rothchild’s. Moroni, the first man she had taken, was jealous of the others; her
other lovers had made him impotent. “He’s mad and bad, Paul, hard to control.”

Christopher listened to her as he would have listened to an agent’s complaints, with the surface of his mind. He knew she wouldn’t change. He told her that he wanted a divorce.

“Because I’m bad and mad, too? I love you, and I’m trying to ruin you.”

“Cathy, it’s not me you’re doing this to, it’s my work. You think you can end my other life if you make a catastrophe of our life.”

“But it won’t work?”

“No. The other is too strong, Cathy.”

“What if I stop now?”

She sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed with her hair capturing most of the light in the darkened room and a wreath of painted flowers behind her on the polished wood of the door;
Christopher was always seeing her framed like a girl in a painting, enclosed by a window or by a space between trees or fountains.

“Cathy, you can’t stop,” he said.

He kept speaking her name with every sentence, as if the sound of it would soften the rest of what he was saying. Cathy said she would stop. She was going to close her place in the Piazza
Oratorio, sell the other clothes. She had used fictitious names with all of her lovers except Moroni: she could escape from them.

“When you come back from the Far East, it’s only two weeks from now, all the traces of the others will be gone,” she said. “I have a plan.”

5

In Indochina, while he waited for agents, Christopher worked on the poem for Cathy.

When he returned to Rome he found a bottle of wine cooling in an ice bucket. Cathy had left it on the low table where the cat liked to sleep, and both Siamese were curled up beside it. At the
sight of Christopher, the animal that did not know him leaped down and ran into hiding.

There was a note from Cathy, two lines saying that she had one last errand to run. “The Plan is working perfectly,” she wrote. “The cure is complete.”

Christopher waited. He had flown from Saigon, nearly twenty-four hours in airplanes and airports. All that he had heard and done in the Orient was in his mind, intermixed with lines from
Cathy’s poem. He began to write his report so that it would not prevent him from listening to Cathy when she came home.

The phone rang, and when he lifted it he did not recognize the voice at the other end. It was Cathy; her words were distorted and she was taking great sobbing breaths. Finally a male voice came
on the line; it was the waiter in the coffee shop on the Piazza Oratorio. He told Christopher to come quickly.

Christopher found Cathy leaning against the peeled wall of a building with a group of chattering Italians around her. Her face was bloody and swollen. She cradled her own body, half-crouching
when she moved with her arms wrapped around it, as if her pain was an injured child.

“I think something’s pierced inside me,” she said. When she spoke, blood ran from the wounds inside her mouth. Her heavy hair was stained with blood and she had vomited on her
clothes. Christopher carried her to the car and put her in and started for the hospital.

“Paul,” she said in her blurred voice, “put up the top.”

Christopher took her hand and kept driving, very fast, through the streets of Rome—over the Tiber, through Saint Peter’s Square, up the steep narrow road on the Janiculum, toward the
international hospital.

“Put up the top,” Cathy said, “put up the top. Paul, put up the top.”

At the door of the hospital he lifted her out of the car and she wakened, he saw intelligence come back into her eyes for an instant. She put a stained finger on his lips. She wanted him to kiss
her. He did so, longing for her; hours later, when he looked in a mirror, he saw the bloodstains she had left on his mouth.

Cathy’s teeth had been broken, and bones in her face. Her spleen had been ruptured. Because she was a foreigner, the police did not investigate. Christopher sat with her,
sleeping in her room for several nights, until she was able to let him leave without crying from fear. Mostly while she was still drugged, she told him what had happened.

Cathy had taken almost everything from the apartment in the Piazza Oratorio. She had gone back, on the day that Christopher returned, to give away her clothes; Franco Moroni had a German girl
who wanted them. When she arrived she found Moroni in the apartment with a dozen of his friends, including three or four foreign girls. They were seated in a circle, like a theater in the round, in
the room where the huge photographs of Cathy were hung. They were drinking spumante.

When Cathy entered, one of the girls slipped behind her and locked the door. Then Moroni, removing his jacket and shirt, beat Cathy with his fists while the other women watched and sipped their
wine. She saw her own blood flying, little clouds of red droplets, and she realized why Moroni had stripped to the waist: he didn’t want to spoil his clothes. At the end, he knelt beside
Cathy where she lay on the floor, ran a finger into the blood on her face and, making certain that she was watching, licked his finger. Then he pushed her out the door. Through her ringing pain she
heard him, inside, smashing the objects in the apartment.

Christopher could not find Moroni. He had the German girl’s name from Wilson. He called her and asked her to meet him in Cathy’s flat. Moroni had ripped the
photographs from the wall and they hung in tatters. The furniture was overturned, the glasses smashed, Cathy’s clothes torn and dirtied.

“Were you among the spectators?” Christopher asked.

The German girl stood with her hand on the doorknob, trembling.

“No. I would have warned her. I didn’t know. Franco brought some Swedish girls.”