The Secret Lovers (6 page)

“Your wife,” Wilson said.

Christopher though of Cathy for the first time since he had left her in Rome.

“She was in Paris while you were in Berlin?” Wilson asked.

Christopher nodded.

“She knows people there?” Wilson asked.

“She’s lived there, off and on, most of her life. You have all that on the file.”

“Untrained people like your wife think they have to explain everything. Would she mention where you were, that you were in Berlin, to an outsider?”

“She might,” Christopher said. “I’ll ask her.”

“Do that.”

Wilson had drawn his chair closer to Christopher’s for this exchange. When he looked up and smiled, parting his tight lips over his teeth, his eyes came into focus. He seemed to be seeing
Christopher for the first time, as if his status as Cathy’s husband had made him visible.

“I
hate
it when families get mixed up with the work,” Wilson said.

Wilson put his papers back into his attaché case and locked the case itself in a safe concealed in the nightstand where the picture of his family stood. He straightened
the frame, smiled at the photograph.

“Someone wanted to do poor old Horst harm,” Wilson said. “Who knew him? On our side, you knew him, Patchen knew of him. The Berlin base knew of him. Otto Rothchild knew of
him.”

“That’s your short list of suspects?”

Wilson remained as he was, on his knees by the safe. He worked the combination again and put the photograph of his family inside.

“That’s the list of people who might have been careless,” he said. “Once I had a job where I arrested people for murder or filed charges against ’em for being
accessories before the fact. But I wasn’t chasing Harvard boys in those days. The worst you guys can do is to be found guilty of a security violation.”

“And if nobody is guilty of that?”

Wilson looked at his damp palms, wiped them on the carpet. “Somebody will be. Those guys in the black Opel had to know where Bülow would be, and at exactly what time. They had to find
out somehow.”

Wilson handed Christopher his raincoat. He had looked at the label when he hung it up, hours before. Now he ran his eyes over Christopher’s standing figure, the English shoes, the Brooks
Brothers suit, the plain tie. He was amused. He touched his own stomach. Wilson was as tall as Christopher but not so muscular; his brawn was already going to fat, though he was, like Christopher,
still in his thirties.

“Are you guys going to run this operation anyway, to see what happens?” Wilson asked.

“Ask Patchen”

“Of course you’re going to, Paul. You think there’s a cheat in the officers’ club, don’t you?”

Wilson went to get his own coat; he did not expect an answer. Finally he unlocked the door and led Christopher out of the building, into a cold rain that glistened in the rays of the
mer­cury lights that still burned in the parking lot at seven in the morning.

4

After they had passed through the gates of the Army post and were back on German territory, Wilson held out his right hand while he steered with his left. Christopher returned
the wallet containing the false documentation. Wilson, shifting his eyes from the road, flipped the plastic windows to make certain that all the papers were still in the wallet. He switched on the
radio and moved the dial until he had the early news on the American station; he turned the volume high. He sat squarely in the driver’s seat, shifting and steering with great sureness, like
a fine rider on a horse that trusts the man in the saddle.

“It’s harder than you think, killing a man with a vehicle,” he said. “It’s got to be done just right.”

They were passing through the outlying streets of the town, past gray buildings, under rows of young plane trees pruned for the winter so that they looked like cactus growing in the wrong
country. Wilson asked, again, for the details of Bülow’s death. Christopher remembered no noise at all; the Opel had lifted Bülow, almost gently, out of the place where he had been
alive and put him down in the place where he was dead.

“That was because they hit him square, with the bumper and the radiator,” Wilson said. “Probably there was a thud, but you wouldn’t have heard it in your car with the
windows closed. He hit solid metal. There must have been very little damage to the Opel. In the old days, the opposition used to like to crush the victim into a wall. Fly-swatting, it was called.
It’s surer, but sometimes they’d bang the car up so bad they’d have to leave it, boiling water running out of the radiator all over the corpse, and leg it out of there through the
ruins.”

“But they’ve changed technique.”

Wilson nodded. “We wondered why. We had a defector, one of their case officers from Berlin, and we asked him. He said they’d gotten a lot of static from their finance section about
the cost of smashing up cars. That was postwar, when they had captured a whole bunch of German vehicles whose owners could not, shall we say, be traced. So they were killing people with nice old
Mercedeses and BMWs that were state property. They had to retrain the drivers.”

Wilson cleared his throat. “Q. K. Bowstring met a professional,” he said.

Now that they had left the secure environment of the Army base, Wilson had ceased using true names. He would speak of Patchen as your friend back home; Bülow as Q. K. Bowstring; Rothchild
as the fellow who had the operation.

“I’m not telling you anything you don’t know,” Wilson said abruptly. “There are only two ways to go. We talk to everyone at our end. Probably that will produce
nothing. You, for example, don’t seem to make mistakes.”

“What about the other end?”

“Well, that’s a little trickier. Maybe we can put the daisy chain together—find out who carried the package and where to. Then do name checks on everyone. We can watch the
fellow your man talked to on the train and see what happens to him.”

“What’s your guess?”

Wilson looked steadily into the rearview mirror. A car in the street behind them made a right turn. Wilson, too, turned right and arrived at the intersection of the next parallel street in time
to watch the other automobile park in the driveway of a house. A woman wearing a belted coat got out of the car and walked quickly into the house. Wilson grunted and drove on.

“Guessing is a waste of time. We’ll see. That chain of couriers may go off like a string of firecrackers. If so, that’s the end of your friend the scribbler at the other end.
It would be logical to expect that.”

“Not so logical. If they make a martyr of him, that would be good from our point of view. They’d want to avoid unfavorable propaganda.”

“They could leave him alone and still blow up all the post offices. They wouldn’t want all those guys hanging around waiting for the next masterpiece to come into the
pipeline.”

“Yes, they could do that.”

“Lets see if they do. We’ll look for blood on the snow.”

Wilson pointed at the sky to the west. A silver airplane dropped into a bank of ground fog on the approach to the airport. They heard its engines fade, then resume power. The same plane rose out
of the fog and made a steep climbing turn. “I’ve been watching them do that for the last five miles,” Wilson said. “You may not get out on the early flight.”

“I can have breakfast and read the paper.”

“Don’t talk about this to the fellow who had the operation,” Wilson said. “I want to make my own contact with him.”

“All right.”

“We go back to the war, the old days. He and I knew each other. We were worlds apart then, of course.”

“He hasn’t changed, except for his illness.”

“I’m not surprised,” Wilson said.

In the airport parking lot, Wilson pulled the car into a space in a long rank of empty vehicles. He turned in the seat, using the steering wheel to help shift his bulky body in the small
passenger compartment. He shook hands. The gesture surprised Christopher.

“There’s one thing,” Wilson said. “I know how you are, because I’ve read everything we have on you. You have this reputation for never giving up, for going after
things. Don’t do it this time.”

“Why?”

Wilson drummed a parade rhythm on the steering wheel. “Just don’t go looking for them. Just leave it alone,” he said. “You’re out in the open, like your friend was
when he was waiting for the streetcar. Somebody knew about him, somebody knew where he’d be. That’s all it takes.”

Wilson turned his head and looked into Christopher’s eyes for the first time. The overheated passenger compartment of the BMW smelled, as the room on the Army base had smelled, of bay rum,
Brylcreem, tuna sandwiches, American coffee, American cigarettes. Christopher wondered if he smelled, to Wilson, like a member of another race. Wilson winked at him.

1

Otto Rothchild refused the costume and the manners of the invalid. He wore a gray tweed jacket and an open shirt with a silk scarf at his neck. Maria had crossed his right leg
over his left, and the perfect crease in his flannel trousers had been arranged so that four inches of dark blue stocking showed between the cuff and the top of his suède shoes. He sat in a
high-backed chair, with his head pressed against the upholstery and his hands clasped. Before the surgeon had severed his nerves, Rothchild had trembled in moments of excitement. Afterward, his
body lost the power of involuntary movement. He sat very still, moving his lips only. The loss of his gestures was very strange; the Rothchild who confronted Christopher was like an impersonator
who had not got things quite right: the telling characteristics were missing. Still, Christopher thought, the man had not changed in any important way. He had lost energy, not intelligence. The
surgery had given him back the use of his mind; he could control his thoughts again, now that the blood no longer pumped itself without warning into his brain. From his chair, alert and wary, he
watched Christopher.

Christopher said, “Have you had a chance to read Kamensky’s book?”

“Some of it,” Otto Rothchild replied, “It’s very long. Kamensky has tried to put fifty years of Russia, everything about it and everything about himself, into one novel.
No one will ever be able to comprehend it all.”

“What do you think?”

Rothchild began to speak. Midway through a sentence his throat dried; a healthy man would have cleared it or coughed. Rothchild went on speaking, his lips moving silently as bits of his
sentences disappeared.

“. . . work of genius,” he said. “Of course, Kamensky has always had it in him, no Russian of my generation had such gifts. . . . curious old-fashioned quality to it, not just
the language but the attitudes. Paul, he writes like Tolstoy or like Lawrence in English . . . clumsy language, a kind of invincible stupidity so that everything they observe, though it’s
worn and familiar to a normal man, is an incredible surprise to them. They make us see life through the eyes of a fool, so we see it as it really is. Only the greatest writers have that
gift.”

Rothchild closed his eyes; a smile came onto his face. Maria looked at him without anxiety.

“Otto has read almost all of it,” she said. “It’s terribly exciting for him. He reads himself unconscious, day after day.”

“Unconscious?”

“Yes. When he does too much, has too much excitement, he just drops off. He’s done it now. It was scary at first, but I’ve learned he’ll come out of it and go right on
with what he was doing.”

“Isn’t it bad for him, the excitement?”

“Being turned into a wreck by that operation was bad for him. He’s happy again. I turn the pages for him. He reads like the wind. ‘Turn, Maria, turn!’ he says. His eyes
gallop down the page. It’s as if he expects to find something; it’s like a chase.”

Christopher glanced at Rothchild’s figure, collapsed in the chair, the smile still on his lips.

“What do you think Otto’s looking for in Kamensky’s book?” he asked.”

“Himself,” Maria said. “What else could it be?”

2

“The amazing thing is,” Maria said, “Otto’s mind is better than it’s ever been. He can only stay conscious for ten minutes or so, if he’s
working with his brain, but he’s so lucid in those periods that it’s practically supernatural. He’s been relieved of his anger. To that extent, the operation accomplished what the
doctors promised.”

Rothchild opened his eyes. “This novel,” he said, “if we handle it correctly, will shake the world. It’s a matter of designing the right operation, Paul. You and David
and I can do it. Headquarters must be kept out of it as much as possible. Those people are bulls in the china shop. They don’t understand the world. They don’t have to live with what is
done.”

“David is at Headquarters.”

“Yes, but he has the power to put Headquarters’s trust in you and me.”

Rothchild’s eyes moved from Christopher’s face to Maria’s. He tapped his thigh with the reading glasses he held in his hand. Maria poured Evian water into a crystal wineglass
and held it to her husband’s lips. Rothchild made little noises as he drank. She masked his face with her body, but Christopher saw that she was holding a napkin under Rothchild’s chin,
and wiping away the drops of water that ran from the corners of his mouth.

“The first translation,” Rothchild said, “must not be into English. Do you agree?”

Christopher said, “If we publish.”

Maria sat beside Christopher on the sofa. He felt her body stiffen as he spoke. She threw Rothchild a glance, but he ignored her.

“
If
we publish?” Rothchild said. “We will publish.”

“What are Kamensky’s wishes?”

“Kamensky? What does Kamensky know? When he came back from Spain they locked him up for twenty-two years. Politically, he’s a deaf man. He always was.”

“So are a lot of artists, Otto. But this is his book. It’s not ours.”

Rothchild’s voice vanished and Maria gave him more water.”

A book such as this is not anyone’s property,” Rothchild said. “It’s a work of art. Or will be. Now it is merely the seedbed of a work of art.”