The Secret Lovers (21 page)

The next morning they left the city. Cathy wanted to be near the sea. They drove through the mountains straight across Italy to Pescara on the Adriatic. They found a hotel by
itself on a long sand beach. The weather turned windy; danger flags flew all along the shore, keeping swimmers out of the water. They walked on the sand for hours; Cathy stopped sleeping so much
and rose at dawn with Christopher. “I don’t know why I gave up the early morning for so long, I used to love being up and out at sunrise with my papa on the farm,” Cathy said.
“I love this, too, it really is the sweetest time of the day, anywhere in the world.”

Cathy teased Christopher and laughed. There was no great change in her, or in the times they had together. She bought a lot of cheap jewelry made of shells from an old man who overcharged her
for it. “I love to let him cheat me, he’s such a transparent villain,” she said. “Eight thousand lire—how much is that in real money?”

Christopher asked her, driving back to Rome, what Maria Rothchild had been like as a girl.

“Strange and alone,” Cathy said. “Maria was a funny combination of things. She was a super athlete, but she was clumsy off the playing field—she bumped into things. She
was an honors student, but she didn’t know things everyone else knew, like who was in what movie. No trivia for Maria. The main thing about her, though, was that she could only have one
friend at a time. She’d be all tooth and claw about someone and absolutely wear the person out, and then she’d find another and do the same. But never did she have two human beings in
her life at any one time.”

“Girls, you mean.”

“Well, Miss Porter’s is a girls’ school. Maria was not exactly fixated on the opposite sex. I couldn’t have been less surprised when I found her nursing that wrinkled old
Russian in Paris, and married to him. Why, Paul, he looks like somebody who died for the love of Bette Davis and was stuffed, and Maria found him in a cute little shop on the Left Bank near the
Pont des Arts.”

Cathy was bouncing in her seat, loving every syllable of this wicked gossip about a woman she had never liked.

“Otto wouldn’t be amused to hear you say that,” Christopher said. “He’s led an adventurous life.”

“Yes, he told me. Maria says the blood of Ivan the Terrible runs in his veins. All he talked about the night I met him, in the periods when he would come back to the world of the living,
was Oriental carpets. Shah Abbasi and Kashan and Beluchi prayer rugs. He does know the subject. And Berlin between the wars. All the colorful decadence and politics of it, it sounded like Fayette
County. It was carpets, carpets, carpets, and Berlin, Berlin, Berlin. I tried to mention other things, like you, and what an expert
you
were on Berlin, which was where you were at that
very moment. But they just went on as if they didn’t know you. What actors you spies become. Maria’s husband kept reeling off the names of people he knew in Berlin before they went to
Buchenwald. It was like a telephone book of the dead.”

“You mentioned that I was in Berlin?”

“I expect so—it was the subject of the hour,” Cathy said. She was eager to go on with her gossip.

In Rome, Cathy was quiet again. She sat with Christopher while he wrote or read a book. Looking up from his work, he would find her eyes on him sometimes; but sometimes, now,
she looked elsewhere—out the window at the city as its colors changed in the light of the strengthening sun, or at herself. She would spend long periods turning her hand or her bare leg,
studying the flow of the muscles and tendons under the skin, the articulation of the joints. She had read in a novel of a girl, also from the South, who, when she wished to do so, could visualize
the interior of her body—heart, lungs, the miles and miles of veins and arteries and blood vessels, the brain filled with tiny leaping charges of electricity.

“I wish I had that gift,” Cathy said. “In the old days I used sometimes to begin to see
your
flesh melt away, Paul, and I’d get a look at the shadow
inside.” They had been married a year; she spoke of the time before her adultery as the old days. “In the old days,” she told Christopher, “I was trying to write my life on
the pages of your absence, like a bride in wartime would keep a diary while her husband was off somewhere with the cavalry.”

On the anniversary of their marriage, on the night before Christopher had to leave again, they had dinner at Dal Bolognese, sitting outside so as to inspect the Piazza del Popolo again; Cathy,
each time she saw this square, discovered some object of beauty that had escaped her notice until then. She believed that one could spend one night a week for a lifetime in the Piazza del Popolo
and still not notice everything that artists and architectural pranksters had done, century after century, to make it more beautiful. Christopher agreed.

The shops were still open when they finished eating, and they strolled down the Corso. In the via Condotti, Christopher saw a bracelet in a window and took Cathy inside and put it on her wrist.
Cathy asked, seeing the row of figures on the check that Christopher wrote, how much it was in real money. Christopher put a hand over her mouth and she seized it and kissed the palm.

Cathy, paying no attention to the little cars that darted through the narrow street, walked along with her wrist before her eyes, turning the bracelet so that it caught the light; the gold was
not very different in hue and texture from the skin of her arm. Christopher put his arms around her, turned her body, and kissed her.

Farther on, they found a pet shop. Cathy went inside. She asked the clerk to open a cage and let her hold one of the Siamese cats inside. “It’s a risk, signorina, these cats
don’t like strangers,” said the clerk. But the Siamese lay in Cathy’s arm, purring, and rubbed its head against her hand.

Christopher bought it for her. Cathy unclasped the bracelet and put it around the cat’s neck like a collar. “Look, Paul, the stones match her eyes. The color’s brilliant, but
the stones have more depth in them. And more warmth.” She touched Christopher under one blue eye, then under the other.

There was a second cat in the cage. Cathy bought it. She hadn’t enough money with her to pay for it, and wouldn’t take any from Christopher. She left ten thousand lire as a deposit
and said that she’d be back the following afternoon. Christopher, by that time, would be in Paris.

“I need two of almost everything now, one for our place, one for the other place,” Cathy said.

She put the bracelet back on her wrist. She carried Christopher’s cat home in her arms, refusing the cardboard box the shop offered.

Cathy wore her new bracelet all night. But in the morning, at the airport, he saw her take it off and put it into her pocket as she walked away after kissing him good-bye.

1

Wilson had been to Zurich, and he carried the data he had gathered there on an index card in an inside pocket. Christopher noticed changes in the Security man; he spoke more
gently, he had begun to look Christopher in the eye. As he collected information, he abandoned mannerisms. He believed now that he was close to the truth.

“The dates fit,” he said. “The phony passport Bülow had on him when he died could have been made in Zurich. There’s a fellow there, a former Abwehr forger, who does
similar work.”

“What about the airlines, the hotel, car rentals?”

“Zero. I’d have used phony paper, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, but the hotel clerk might have remembered a night’s absence.”

Wilson shook his head in bewilderment. “It’s hard. We have this liaison thing with the Swiss, that we won’t operate on their territory. Bern takes it seriously. They
wouldn’t let me talk to the hotel fellow without informing the Swiss. I wanted to send him some money in an envelope and have him meet me in Germany. Bern said that that would transgress the
parameters of liaison proprieties.”

“What about the money? It went from Zurich to Berlin.”

Christopher had no hope that Wilson or anyone else could breach the security of the Swiss banking system. But Wilson smiled in triumph. Years before, he said, when he was in the FBI, he had
found an embezzler that the Swiss had wanted, and the man had been brought back to Zurich, money and all, in the most discreet possible way.

“Embezzlement, to the Swiss, is what arson is to the Japanese,” Wilson said. “Cops have a kind of freemasonry—catch a crook, make a friend. The embezzler I caught made me
a true friend of one particular Swiss cop. I had supper with my friend. He was able to help, because there is
nothing
in Switzerland that the Swiss police don’t know. It makes you
envious. The money, Paul, went to Berlin from a numbered account in the Swiss Credit Bank. This is a photo of the transfer order, with one of the authorized signatures. It’s a funny name, of
course, but do you know the handwriting?”

Christopher looked at the card. He felt no anger, no surprise. It was what he had expected. His talent, the gift of the operative, was to separate from years of talk the one phrase that betrayed
the truth, and from miles of action the single deed that revealed the person.

“Yes,” he said, “I know the handwriting.”

Wilson took the photocopy back. He looked at Christopher with undisguised sympathy. When he spoke there was tenderness, almost a caress, in his hoarse voice.

“What now?” he asked.

“You’ll have to put it in the mill. But knowing who had Bülow killed is no good to us.
Why?
I’d want to know that before I swept them up.”

“So would I. I think we ought to let it run. Maybe even make something happen.”

“I want to talk to Patchen.”

Wilson took a cable out of his briefcase and handed it to Christopher.

“He wants to talk to you,” Wilson said. “But it can’t be about this. I haven’t put anything on this subject into the traffic.”

The cable told Christopher that Patchen would be in Paris in the morning; it set up a meeting for ten o’clock in the zoo in the Bois de Vincennes.

“Can you brief me afterward?” Wilson asked. “I think you and I had better move together on this as much as we can.”

“All right. I’ll phone when Patchen is through with me.”

Wilson held up the photograph of the bank form he had brought back from Zurich.

“Do you want to show him this? I think you ought to tell him what we know, instead of my doing it. After all, I’m a stranger to you two, and I guess you’d have to say this is a
private grief.”

Christopher shook his head. “David can look at it when he gets back to the Embassy,” he said. “I wonder if he’ll want to.”

2

When Christopher arrived on the dot of ten, Patchen was waiting by the great artificial rock in the center of the zoo, watching the mountain goats. It was summer, and Patchen
had changed from his black chalk-stripe suit to blue seersucker; he had Brooks Brothers send him one of each in September and May, and every other year he bought a tweed jacket for winter weekends
and a linen blazer for summer. Christopher, who had been his roommate in a naval hospital and later at their university, had seen him sometimes without a necktie. Few others had done so.
“David undresses in the dark,” Patchen’s gaunt wife had told Christopher one evening after too much drink; “it’s his wounds, you know—he thinks being disfigured
makes him unattractive sexually.” Laura Patchen was an intellectual woman. “I’ve wondered,” she added, “if some race memory isn’t involved—there
is
a biological alarm system that warns one not to mate with defectives. But war wounds’ve never bothered the ladies—tell him that, Paul, will you?”

In the zoo, Patchen caught sight of Christopher and clasped his hands behind his back, the signal that he had seen no surveillance and it was safe to approach. Christopher smiled, his signal.
Patchen thought these precautions foolish, but he took them automatically. He knew that Christopher, failing to see a signal, would break the contact and make him wait for an hour and go to another
place to meet him.

Patchen waved a hand at the jagged concrete alp with goats clinging to its side; no verbal joke was necessary. They walked on. It was not too early in the day for crowds; the paths of the zoo
were filled with children, being herded from species to caged species by scolding adults. Patchen and Christopher went back outside the gates and walked down a wooded path until they found a bench
where they could talk undisturbed.

“I’m afraid I have some unhappy news for you,” Patchen said. “Two things have happened about Tuning Fork since we talked, and neither is going to make things easier for
you.”

“I’m listening.”

“First, the swap for Kamensky. We can’t do it. We had a heavyweight of theirs and they had a collection of small fry, ours and the Brits’, and we were going to work up a
package. We were going to say, as sort of an afterthought, ‘Oh, by the bye, we have something else to sweeten the pot. Why don’t you make yourselves some propaganda hay by letting some
of your unhappy intellectuals out? We’ll even pump a little applause into the Free World’s press. No question of defection, you understand; you just give them exit visas and say how
anyone
can travel to the outside world from the great Soviet Union. Like, uh, Blank and Blank—and what’s that fellow’s name? Kamensky.’ ”

“You thought that would work?”

“Dick Sutherland did. They want their master spy back. But then, last week, the Soviets snatched one of ours. One of Sutherland’s. If they publicize it, it’s sure going to look
like we’ve been meddling in the internal affairs of the U.S.S.R., because this fellow they’ve got in Lubianka has been giving us everything except the time and duration of
Khrushchev’s erections.”

“He’s a Russian?”

“He is indeed. But one of their fellows in Delhi, of all places, has come to our man out there and told him that just as soon as they wring out our agent they’d be quite glad to
deliver him to us on neutral ground in exchange for their fellow, who’s languishing in prison.”

I see.

“Yes. Dick Sutherland may have faults, but leaving one of his assets in the hands of the KGB’s interrogators is not among them. He went for the deal like a hungry muskellunge. The
swap will take place before I can get back home, probably.”