The Secret Lovers (7 page)

“Meaning what?”

Rothchild moved, very slightly, inclining his body toward Christopher.

“Kamensky has done his work, Paul. He’s covered a thousand pages with his handwriting. Wonderful work, all of the Russian horror is there. But to be completed, it must be read. Any
novel is a collaboration between the writer and the public. The author is the camera, his work is the film. It must be developed in other human brains, over and over again. Only a fool would say we
won’t publish.”

“A fool,” Christopher said, “or someone who thought that we had a duty to protect Kamensky.”

“Protect him?”

“He’s still behind the Curtain. Otto, he’s only been out of prison for a year. He was in the camps from 1937.”

Rothchild took a moment to compose himself. What right had Christopher, an American, to speak of the camps? Rothchild said, “Yes, and knowing the worst, having lived through it, he sent me
his novel. Why do you think he did that?”

“For safekeeping, as David understood it.”

“Maybe that was what Kamensky told himself. Very possibly that’s what he told himself, if I remember Kamensky.”

Rothchild’s voice was neutral; he was assessing Kamensky as an asset, not expressing contempt for a friend. He kept friendship and professional behavior in separate compartments.

“What exactly did he tell you, in his letter?” Christopher asked.

Rothchild closed his eyes. They sat in silence in the elegant room. Rothchild’s narrow brown shoe lay on the Kerman Ravar carpet. Books, written by his friends but unsigned, bound in
leather, lined the shelves. “Men like you and me cannot keep photographs,” Rothchild had once told Christopher; “every one of these objects suggests a friend.” Behind him on
the wall hung a sketch with which Picasso had paid the bill in a restaurant owned by one of Rothchild’s friends; the artist had scribbled the line of a cheek, an empty human eye, the movement
of a gull, on the back of the bill. The column of addition on the front had begun to show through the drawing.

Rothchild’s lips moved. “Kamensky asked me to put the book away until he dies,” he said.

“You don’t think he meant it?”

“I don’t know what he meant, Paul. I’d like to get a message to him.”

“Saying what?”

Rothchild smiled. His eyes were open, but they were looking into the past.

“Saying ‘Choose fame,’ ” he said.

“And what would Kamensky reply?”

Rothchild stirred.

“
Yes.
That’s what Kamensky would say, Paul. Like Molly Bloom, he would whisper, ‘
Yes, oh yes yes.
’ When he was young, when I knew him better than
anyone, he was a devourer of life. Yes was always his answer.”

Maria watched anxiously as Rothchild’s body slumped in the chair. His head fell slightly to one side. She went to him, touched his forehead, lifted his leg from his other knee, placed both
of his feet on the floor.

“This time he’s asleep,” she said. “I’ll cover him. He may doze for hours.”

Maria adjusted the blanket, tucking it around Rothchild’s lax frame, and removed the shoes from his bony feet.

3

“You’re right, Otto is not what he was,” Patchen said. “Since the surgery, I have the feeling that he’s in the spirit world and I’m talking
to him on the telephone.”

Christopher had met Patchen in a safe house a few blocks from the Embassy. One of the station’s secretaries lived in the apartment. Patchen had gone through each room like a cat, observing
everything. On a stiff forefinger, he lifted the girl’s quilted dressing gown from a hook on the bathroom door, and looked without expression at the faint line of dirt on the collar.
“No sex life, obviously,” he said.

In the living room, Patchen opened a cabinet and removed a bottle of Scotch whisky. “Ours, I presume,” he said. He went into the kitchen. Christopher heard the sound of ice being
broken out of the metal compartments of a freezer tray. Patchen returned with two glasses of Scotch.

“Otto has given me a complete operational proposal,” he said. “It would work. Otto’s proposals always work. Or almost always.”

“What does he tell you he wants?”

“What he always wants. Humiliation for the opposition, secret satisfaction for us. Otto and you and I will create a world best seller, maybe even an immortal classic. And no one will know
we did it. Another prank. The three of us tittering after lights out.”

“And Kamensky in his grave,” Christopher said.

Patchen waved the sentence away. “That probably wouldn’t happen. Anyway, it’s not an operational consideration.”

Christopher began to speak before Patchen finished; he had known what the words would be without hearing them. Patchen listened to Christopher with even less surprise.

Christopher said, “It’s an important operational consideration. If the KGB kills Kamensky, or locks him up, we’d love it. You couldn’t buy the publicity that would
create. He’d be a martyr.”

“Yes. It would be nice to have world opinion on Kamensky’s side.”

“Wouldn’t it be on his side anyway?”

Patchen jerked his head, as if calling Christopher’s attention to the world outside the curtained windows of the safe house.

“You haven’t read the book,” he said. “Kamensky eviscerates the Soviet, from the days of the old Bolsheviks down to Khrushchev. Every Communist saint is in the book, with
blood on his chin. He has Beria shitting his pants from overeating at a feast with Stalin during the war when the Russian people were starving in the snow. It’s the most vicious thing
I’ve ever read, and it rings with truth. Kamensky has impeccable credentials. He was one of the first members of the Party. He was there. And he’s a great writer. Everyone knows those
things about him.”

“I see.”

“Yes. I wonder if we can get away with publishing it. I think the whole intellectual establishment in the West will come down on Kamensky like a ton of bricks.” Patchen wanted no
interruptions. “Otto thinks the intellectuals can be handled,” he said. “He wants to find a way to make them read Kamensky’s book as something other than what it is. In
fact, it is an act of treason to their illusions. If the book is published cold, they’ll want to hang Kamensky for it in the press. They’re just getting over their embarrassment about
Hungary. They want to believe that Khrushchev is the man who’ll make the future work. The Mechanic-Messiah.”

“What does Otto suggest?”

“He’s still turning it over in his mind. Actually, he’s turning it over in his intestines. Otto has always been an instinctive operator. He
feels
results before they
come about.” Patchen coughed into his handkerchief. “That’s why he likes to work with you,” he said. “You’re just like him.”

Patchen held out his glass to Christopher. He would not have asked another subordinate to wait on him. Christopher had been his friend since the war; he knew what pain it cost Patchen to rise
from a chair. The two of them lived for secrets, but this was the only personal secret between them. Christopher made Patchen’s drink; the whisky melted the tiny French ice cubes before
Patchen could lift the glass to his lips.

Patchen drank and laughed. “You know,” he said, “visiting Otto the other day, it crossed my mind what a trio we make. You’re his intellectual heir, he thinks. And he and
I are heirs to the misfortunes of the flesh.”

“I’m not quite Otto’s spiritual double.”

“I know that. But Otto thinks he’s trained you up to be a paragon of operational skill and virtue. Otto, if you listen to him talk, is always betraying his belief that people are
born on the day they meet him.”

“Yes, and die when he sees the last of them.”

Patchen lifted his glass again. When he spoke, he still had whisky in his throat, and the distortion made him sound as if he were speaking through a chuckle.

“You’re describing the perfect secret agent,” he said.

4

Patchen had been in Paris for a week. He could stay away from Headquarters no longer. Rothchild had made him uncomfortable. “Otto’s ego has been reborn,” he
told Christopher, “he’s full of ideas again. He takes it for granted we’ll do things his way.” Twice, Rothchild had asked to see Patchen alone. On both occasions he had
discussed Christopher as if Christopher were the agent and Rothchild the case officer. “He’s using everything on me—the past, his illness, what he calls his friendship for
Kamensky,” Patchen said. “He told me, ‘Paul is a wonderful boy, everyone admires him, but he’s timid about risking agents, and he doesn’t understand the Russian
mind.’ ”

Rothchild had a legitimate claim on the operation: he had brought Kamensky and his manuscript into the house, after all, and he had conceived the plan. But he wanted it too much, and that was
reason enough for Patchen to deny it to him.

“You’ve got to run it,” Patchen told Christopher. “Otto can’t, he’s lost too much of what he used to be.” Patchen smiled affectionately. “He
hasn’t lost so much, Paul, that he won’t try to take it away from you.”

“Do you think we can stop him doing that?”

“We can limit what he does without telling us. After all, he’s not Jack-Be-Nimble any longer.”

“He has Maria.”

“Maria is under discipline.”

“Still?”

“She hasn’t lost the habit of trusting us.”

“She’s Otto’s wife.”

“She’s one of us. Whom do
you
trust more, Cathy or the outfit?”

Rothchild, Christopher thought, does not understand the American mind. To Patchen he said, “In the Tuileries, the other day, you used the word ‘ghosts.’ ”

“Did I?”

“Yes. You were talking about Otto’s assets. You realize that Kamensky is just that to Otto—a ghost? He thinks of him as having been dead for twenty years, or however long
it’s been since he saw him last. He knows he’ll never see Kamensky again.”

“That would be like Otto. Does Kamensky have some greater reality for you?”

“No. Not yet.”

“But you expect to be seized by fellow feeling before all this is over?”

“Maybe not before it’s over. Afterward. So will you, David.”

Patchen put on his coat and hat and prepared to go. “There’s no point in planning just now,” he said. “I wish you’d think quietly about this, away
from Otto, for a week or two. Read the Russian manuscript. I’ll get a translation to you as soon as I can, maybe in a couple of weeks if I can put a team on it. I’d like you to do the
final polish.”

“What about the planning?”

“I won’t brief Paris or Rome just yet. I guess Berlin will know pretty much what’s going on, with that fellow Wilson plodding around.”

“Yes. He doesn’t like covert action ops.”

“I know. He doesn’t like FI ops, either. Whether it’s us or the stations, we cause him trouble.”

“I wonder how he’ll get along with Otto.”

Patchen hesitated. “So do I,” he said. “He discovered something in the file. Otto, in all these years, has never been fluttered.”

“That’s impossible.”

“I would have thought so, but it’s true. Otto has always been a contract agent, it seems, and regulations don’t require the box for that category of employee unless it’s
requested for security reasons. I suppose no one ever wanted to offend Otto. So he escaped the ordeal.”

“That must bother Security.”

“That’s a mild way to describe it,” Patchen said. “Otto was born a Russian, he spent his whole youth fooling around with every leftist cause in Europe, he drank schnapps
in Berlin with members of the Red Orchestra.”

“What are they going to do?”

“Flutter Otto. How can we possibly know if he’s told us the truth about
anything
if we haven’t buckled a lie detector on him and asked him whether he’s ever had
a blow job or taken money from the opposition?”

“You’ll approve that?”

Patchen shrugged. “Security is a law unto itself. What would I say? That Otto is a dying man? They’d reply that in that case they’d better hurry.”

5

Maria Rothchild was waiting in the open door of the apartment when Christopher reached the top of the stairs. She wore a white pleated skirt; she had the smooth legs of a tennis
player, still faintly sunburnt even in winter. Christopher did not think of her as a member of the opposite sex. They had known one another always as fellow professionals. What they had in common
was their work, and a way of thinking that grew out of their work. When Maria had first come to Europe and begun to work with Christopher, the wife of a station officer had tried to make a match of
them. She had invited them both for a weekend at a rented country house, and Christopher remembered how startled he had been by a rush of sexual feeling when he had encountered her, skin gleaming
with oil in the noonday sun, beside the swimming pool. She had a lovely body, and he had seen amusement in her eyes when she observed his surprise on finding it stretched out in a bikini. The idea
of seduction had passed in and out of Christopher’s mind in a moment, but he and Maria had, without regret, remained colleagues.

“I didn’t want you to ring,” Maria said now. “Otto is up. I want to talk to you before you see him.”

They went inside. Maria closed the huge oak door softly and led Christopher into the kitchen. She closed another door behind them, and turned on the radio.

“Speak softly,” she said. “It’s odd, but he hears much better than he did before. One sense compensating for the loss of another, I suppose.”

She pointed at a tray of liquor bottles and raised her eyebrows in inquiry. Christopher shook his head. Maria gave herself a glass of vodka.

“We’ve had a visit from Security,” Maria said. “A man who told Otto his name was Bud Watson. David told us to expect somebody named Wilson. He’s an apelike creature
in a Robert Hall suit. He massages his face when he’s confused and can’t look anyone in the eye.”

“Watson?”

“Yes. These Headquarters types can never remember what cover name they’re supposed to use. I used to see him in the halls back home when I carried files from one temporary building
to another. His name is not Wilson
or
Watson.”

“Wharton,” Christopher said. “His true name is Wharton. When I saw him, he had a crayon drawing by one of his children in his briefcase. It was signed ‘Debbie Wharton,
love to Daddy.’ ”