The Secret Lovers (22 page)

“There’s nothing else he could do.”

“No. And the other thing is, the Tuning Fork Working Group, taking into account the possibility, the probability even, of a lot of bad press because of the arrest of Sutherland’s
agent, wants to publish Kamensky’s book as quickly as possible. Yesterday, for example.”

“To show what a hero our spy was, to try to kill the Soviet system?”

“By indirection, yes,” Patchen said. “It’s not fully appreciated outside our profession that it’s sometimes an honorable act to commit treason.”

In the shade where they were sitting it was many degrees colder than it had been in the sunlit zoo. Patchen shivered in his thin suit and stood up, ready to walk again.

“What word would you use to describe the act we’re about to carry out against Kamensky?” Christopher asked.

Patchen walked away.

Christopher followed. Patchen asked for a report on the Rothchilds, and Christopher told him of his conversation with Maria.

“Did I say such a thing?” Patchen asked. “Place you, place anyone, above Otto?”

“It sounds like you, and Maria never misquotes.”

Christopher led Patchen through the maze of footpaths. They went on talking about the Rothchilds. Christopher told him Cathy’s story about her evening with them, and Patchen stopped in his
tracks to guffaw at the idea of Otto in a Bette Davis film. “You know,” he said, “Maria looks a little
like
Bette Davis, the bangs and the eyes. I wonder if she knows
it.”

Christopher didn’t laugh. He let a silence collect, and then, on a bench in the sun, he told Patchen in a few sentences what Wilson had found in Zurich, what they both suspected.
Patchen’s body jerked as though he had taken a physical blow. Then he listened coldly. When he had heard it all, he made his perfunctory protest. It was a last word of loyalty to people who
had betrayed him.

“There doesn’t need to be a connection,” he said. “It’s an indication, Paul. It’s not proof.”

“That’s true. David, do you think I want to believe it?”

Patchen shook his head, looked at nothing for a time, shook his head again. Nothing astonished him. What Cathy believed she must develop occult powers to achieve, Patchen did every day with
paper and money and radio transmissions—saw the shadow inside the flesh.

“Cuckolds never want to believe it,” he said to Christopher now.

“We have to know, David.”

“What does Wilson want to do?”

“Let them run. Maybe feed the baby and watch it grow.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I’m going to Berlin myself to check out as much of it as I can. I may make a second trip, to Spain, with Cathy. But I think Wilsons right. We have to set up a reaction, and read
it.”

“All right. But I suppose you want to keep it in the family. You’re closest to it.”

“Until we’re sure, yes. Then it will have to be handled however these things are handled. I insist on the consequences. No rescues, David.”

He told Patchen what action he wanted to set in motion. Patchen listened, nodding; at one point he smiled at the cruel humor of what Christopher was doing to himself in the name of something
that he held to be more real than he.

“All right,” Patchen said, and in addressing Christopher he used his secret name again. “I’d like to ask you this: is there any limit on what you’ll pay for the
truth?”

Christopher turned his back.

“I don’t know why it surprises me,” Patchen told his friend, “but it always does, when you decide to show what a cold-blooded son of a bitch you are.”

3

Otto Rothchild permitted Christopher and Patchen to see him walk. They heard his wheezing breath in the hall and the shuffling tread of his shoes on the carpet before they saw
him. He leaned on two canes with his elbows locked, the weight of his body pushing the bones against the stretched flesh of his shoulders. He nodded to them as he entered the sitting room. Patchen,
whom Christopher had watched in the hospital as he learned to walk again after the war, ran his eyes up and down Rothchild’s ruined body. Emotion flickered in Patchen’s deadened
face—kindred feeling, the memory of disgust; Christopher heard again, like a shout coming into a house from the street, Patchen’s cries of loathing for his own body, fifteen years
before, when it would fail to obey the commands of his brain.

Rothchild sat in his chair, arranged his clothes. He was breathing rapidly, shallow inhalations, strong exhalations through the nose—an athlete after a run. His eyes did not close. While
he waited for his voice to return he rested his eyes on the small Klee that was the pride of his collection.

“The canes,” he said to Maria, “are not good for the rugs. You must get some of those rubber tips.”

Rothchild turned his gaze toward Patchen.

“You seem to be making progress, Otto. Everyone will be glad to hear that.”

“Yes, David. Part by part I am hauling my body out of the grave. What brings you here? You’re commuting from Washington these days.”

“The Kamensky business.”

Rothchild lifted a glass of water, using both hands, and wet his mouth.

“Paul is handling it extremely well,” he said. “He has Cerutti under contract, if not under discipline. It’s all going according to the scenario.”

“That part, yes. But more and more, Otto, I worry about the effect on Kamensky. So do the others at home.”

Maria, seated with ankles crossed, did not bother to watch Patchen as he spoke; his face showed nothing. She had her eyes on Christopher, who was listening passively as usual, and when
Christopher caught her glance she gave him a smile, a crinkling of the skin around the eyes, a widening of the full lips; it was the grin a sister might give to a favorite brother.

“Each time we meet, David, this subject arises,” Rothchild said. “But it never advances. We are worried; we see what the consequences for Kiril Kamensky may be—probably
will be. What, my dear David, can we do about it?”

“We had a plan, Otto. We thought we could get him out.”

“Get him out? How? Send in parachutists and kidnap him? Really, David.”

“Trade goods, Otto.” Patchen named the captured Russian spy that Headquarters had been willing to exchange for Kamensky. Rothchild’s hands twitched in surprise. Then, preparing
a reply, he looked from face to face. When he spoke, he was gazing at none of them but at his Klee: a flower, a stick figure, a line of color like a cancellation; it was a picture with no depth, it
suggested nothing but its surface. Christopher wondered why Rothchild, of all people, loved it so.

“I can’t believe it,” Rothchild said. “Exchange a man of that stature for a writer, a forgotten writer? It would never have worked.”

“There were permutations. It would have worked.”

“Do I understand that the plan has been abandoned?”

“Yes.” Patchen explained what had happened, as he had explained it to Christopher.

“Then it’s a dead issue. Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Not at all. We’re afraid that Kamensky, if he came to a bad end, would be an operational liability. One way or another, we have to save him.”

“You’ve just said that’s gone by the boards,” Maria said.

Rothchild lifted a hand, forbidding another interruption. He nodded to Patchen.

“There are two things we can do, it seems to me,” Patchen continued. “We can postpone publication of the novel. We can orchestrate the world intelligentsia in a campaign to
release Kamensky. It would take a long time, maybe, but in the end I think we could get him out that way, by hard-nosed public pressure. Paul has a head of state on the string in Africa who’d
put Kamensky’s name in for the Nobel Prize. That’s Option One. What do you think?”

Rothchild put his head back and lapsed into one of his stillnesses. Maria cocked her head, examined her husband. She asked Patchen and Christopher if they wanted tea. They refused.

“I think it’s possible, David,” Rothchild said, opening his eyes. “But the time element is a strong, strong negative. It might take ten years. Kamensky could die in the
meantime. Also, and I know you’ve considered this, it would certainly arouse the suspicions of the Soviet security apparatus. Why, they would ask, why? So you might put Kamensky in greater
hazard. Besides, I don’t know if we could keep up the campaign long enough. Intellectuals are like children; they’re passionate about the interest of the moment, but they’re
easily diverted. They wouldn’t stay with it.”

“So you think this is not a viable option?”

“No. Because of all I’ve said, and because of another, much more important element.”

“Yes,” Maria said in her hard-edged voice, and gave a knowing smile. “The fatal flaw is pretty obvious.” Rothchild waited, with his new patience, for her intrusion to
end.

“Kamensky wouldn’t come,” he said. “He would never consent to leave Mother Russia. Bone and blood, brain and flesh, Kiril Kamensky is a Russian. He’d rather be in a
prison camp in Siberia or in Lubianka than wear silk and eat caviar with foreign earth under his feet.”

Rothchild, having finished this speech, looked again from Patchen to Christopher to Maria, his eyes glinting with amusement, as if he had told them some delicious joke. Patchen, unresponsive,
broke Rothchild’s pose with a question.

“What would induce him to break this mystical bond with Holy Russia?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on, Otto. Fame. I got the idea you thought he hungered for it.”

“He does. But fame among Russians. He cares about no one else.”

“A woman?”

“At his age?”

Patchen moved his head toward Maria. She bit her lips and flushed; pushed back a strand of hair.

“Let me ask you this,” Patchen said. “If we found a secure way to communicate with Kamensky, would you, as his friend, plead with him to come out? A letter.”

“Of course,” Rothchild said. “I’m under discipline. I’ve done many silly, futile things for that reason. David, it would not work.”

Patchen stood up abruptly. “Excuse us a moment,” he said. He took Christopher by the arm—Christopher saw that Maria was as astonished as he that Patchen should touch another
man—and led him to the far corner of the sitting room. There, Patchen, with his eyes fixed on a tiny fragment of old carpet in a heavy gold frame, whispered at length in Christopher’s
ear. They returned to the sofa and sat down.

“What’s that scrap of rug you have framed, Otto?” Patchen asked.

Rothchild had closed his eyes again. Maria answered for him. “It’s supposed to be a bit of a seventh-century carpet called the Springtime of Chosros. The Arabs cut it into sixty
thousand pieces as booty when they sacked Ctesiphon. It belonged to Otto’s family. He brought it out with him in 1917.”

“A piece of the True Cross, in carpet-worshiper’s terms,” Rothchild said. “If you have faith that it’s what you think it is, it’s priceless.”

Christopher said, “Otto.”

Rothchild opened his eyes. The light of interest had gone out; fatigue whitened his face.

“Otto, everything you’ve said makes sense,” Christopher said. “David agrees.”

“David is letting you speak for him?”

“Still we’re worried. I don’t like the atmosphere of this operation. I have a feeling, just a feeling, that something is going to go really wrong. I’m not thinking about
Kamensky, I’m thinking about ourselves.”

“I’m growing very tired, Paul.”

“This won’t take long. Option Two is to print Kamensky’s book under a pseudonym. No one except those of us inside, and Cerutti outside, will know who wrote the book.”

Rothchild’s lax body stiffened. He stared first at Christopher, then at Patchen. He started to speak, coughed, covered his mouth. Maria rushed across the room and gave him water. He pushed
her body aside as if it were an object of furniture.

“That’s monstrous,” he said. “It’s theft from Kamensky. You’re proposing to steal his lifework, give him nothing, take everything for our dirty little
purposes. This novel is a work of art.”

Christopher crossed the room, knelt at Rothchild’s feet, took his hand.

“Otto, I’m trying to save his life,” he said.

Rothchild extricated his hand which had lain, boneless as a glove, for a moment in Christopher’s. In a man who had any strength left in him, Rothchild’s gesture would have been a
brutal one.

“His life?” Rothchild said. “Kamensky’s life is in his book. What other life has he had, first as a fool of the revolution, then as its prisoner? And you,
Christopher—you want to throw him into an unmarked grave.”

Rothchild again moved his eyes from Patchen’s face to Christopher’s. The irises were hidden and then revealed by Rothchild’s blinking lids, as though a camera lay behind them
inside Rothchild’s skull and he was recording their features on film.

“From the first day,” Patchen said, “Paul has been trying to keep Kamensky out of the grave. I think he’s found a way. The book won’t be signed with
Kamensky’s name. I won’t kill this man. Otto, accept it.”

Rothchild turned to Maria and spoke to her, peremptorily, in Russian. She helped him from the room.

Christopher went to the window, open to the warm breeze, and stood between the billowing curtains, looking down on the Seine. Once again he had the illusion of sailing in this building on the
prow of the island.

Maria returned. She went to the bar and filled three glasses with ice cubes and poured Scotch over them. She handed out the drinks.

“Permit me to offer you the hospitality of Otto’s house,” she said.

“He’s gone back to bed?”

“Yes. I gave him a pill to make him sleep.”

They were standing, like a conversational group at a cocktail party, in a little circle in the center of the room.

“How do you explain Otto’s being so angry?” Patchen asked.

Maria finished her drink, rattled the ice in the empty glass, went back to the bar and poured herself more Scotch.

“After all,” Patchen went on, “it’s not such an irrational thing to do, to protect Kamensky. And the book will exist. Sooner or later, as soon as it’s safe,
we’ll let the author’s name out. I should think it would intensify his fame, to have this work of art, as Otto calls it, wrapped in mystery for a while.”