CATHY SAW CHRISTOPHER FROM A LONG WAY OFF. HE WAS SITTING ON a bench in the Bois de Boulogne with his friend David Patchen. Cathy was cantering a borrowed chestnut mare along the bridle path near the Grande Cascade. He was looking straight at her. She slowed the mare to a trot, then to a walk, as she approached the bench.
Christopher stood up. Patchen rose, too, and turned around. He wore a black patch over one of his eyes. As soon as he saw Cathy, he limped away into the trees.
“You’re riding again,” Christopher said.
“Yes, almost every day. I’m all right again. Good genes.”
This was a joke from the past. On. being told that his daughter had married Christopher, her father had taken his new son-in-law aside and said, “You’ll never have to worry about her health. The Kirkpatricks are never sick—good genes.”
“Are you really all right?” Christopher said.
Cathy did not answer his question. “What about you?” she said.
“This is kind of a cold morning to be sitting on a park bench.” “I guess so,” Christopher said. “David likes to be outdoors.” “I remember.”
Patchen was the man Christopher reported to in the Outfit. He came over to Paris five or six times a year, and Christopher went to Washington five or six times. The two of them walked all over both cities together, talking and talking, out of the reach of microphones.
“Where are you living?” Christopher asked.
“At my parents’ place. For now. They won’t be back until spring.” Cathy’s mother and father came to Paris twice a year for the racing seasons at Auteuil and Longchamps.
“I saw your father in the bar of the Jockey Club just after you left Rome,” Christopher said. “He asked about you. He invited me to dinner. He didn’t seem to know what’s happened to you and me.”
“Who does? What did you say?”
“I said I hadn’t seen you for a while. You haven’t told them?”
Cathy shook her head. The mare fidgeted. Cathy’s legs trembled slightly from the strain of keeping her under control; she was not really strong enough to ride yet. She felt dizzy, nauseated, feverish in her turtleneck sweater, her tweed jacket, her gloves. Would Christopher, who missed nothing, notice her condition? The baby showed very little, and she was wearing one of her mother’s jackets that was a size or two too large for her.
Once again, frowning anxiously, Christopher said, “Are you all right?”
“Fine. My friend, here, doesn’t want to stand still. And to tell the truth, I’m a little shaky, seeing you like this, all of a sudden.”
“You too?”
Christopher took off his glove and held out his left hand. It trembled, something she had never seen before. He no longer wore his wedding band, but the impression it had made in the flesh of his finger was still clearly visible.
Christopher’s presence silenced her. She had always been afraid, from the day she met him, that she was not smart enough for him, that she would say something that would drive him away from her. She made jokes for other men, but never for Christopher.
“It’s hell, not knowing what to say like this,” Cathy said. “Do you want to stick to the weather, or what?”
“We can talk about anything you want.”
“Why don’t you start?”
“I don’t know what’s left to say.”
Cathy nodded, biting her lower lip again. “I was surprised when you cried that day,” she said.
He had wept at the airport, saying goodbye to her.
“Before,” Cathy said, “I was always the one who cried. I don’t do that much anymore. I’ve seen the light.”
Christopher reached out as if to touch her, remembered himself, and let his hand drop to his side.
“Oh, shit, Paul,” she said. “What did I think I was doing?”
“I don’t know, Cathy,” he said.
She kicked the mare into a gallop and rode away. Bastard, she thought. Bastard for not loving me enough to kill me for what I did to you.
WHEN CATHY CAME BACK FROM THE BOIS DE BOULOGNE SHE WENT straight to her room, locked the door, and took a hot bath. During their marriage, because of Christopher’s absences, she had fallen into the habit of talking to him when he was not there.
“God,” she said to his invisible presence now, “how I wish I hadn’t seen you today. How I wish that none of this had ever happened.”
When they were married and he was always away, she used to imagine his return, imagine love in his glance, imagine the words he would speak; imagine his passion. In this make-believe homecoming, it was Christopher who longed for Cathy, Christopher who was half-mad with loneliness, Christopher who wept as they made love. The greatest surprise of her life was her love for him; she truly had not known that a woman could love a man more than he loved her. Nothing in her previous life, in which she had always been more beautiful than anyone else, always been the object of desire, had prepared her for this. She had supposed that the gift of her body would bring her, in return, absolute power over his heart. But had Christopher ever loved her? Had he always known, as Lla Kahina had told her, that the woman he would really love was waiting for him in the future? Who was this evil stranger? How could she be more beautiful than Cathy? What did she have that he wanted so desperately? He had never wanted anything when he was with Cathy; he had merely acquiesced in what she wanted. At the time she had mistaken that for love, but now she knew it for what it was —politesse, courtesy and consideration in which the heart played no part.
“All right, I understand,” she said. “You’re all through with politeness, Paul; it’s time for love. I hope you find it.”
For all Cathy knew, he had found it already. Why shouldn’t he? Hadn’t he earned it by living with her in a state of chivalry when what he really wanted was to love somebody more than she loved him? Cathy punched the water hard; a cupful flew across the room and splashed against the full-length mirror in which she had been watching herself.
“I hope the bitch dies on you,” she said to the absent Christopher. She did not cry. “I’m all through crying,” she said. “That’s over. Lots of things are over.”
She put on robe and slippers and went to the library. Lla Kahina was already having tea. Tea was her favorite meal; she often slept through lunch, the principal meal of the day, and consumed only liquids for dinner.
“Why?” Cathy had asked.
“I’ve never liked French food. My husband didn’t like it either. He always ordered the same things in restaurants—oysters, clear soup, roast lamb, berries; things that didn’t come in disguise.”
“Is that what he called sauces? Disguises?”
“No. Paul’s father called them that, in one of his novels. It was called The Masked Ball. It was all about people making themselves important.”
“Are you in it?”
“Not in that one. He wrote it before we met.”
Lla Kahina said no more on this subject. She said little about herself, and most of what Cathy knew about her she knew from Otto’s stories or from her own observation. Lla Kahina seemed to have plenty of money; Cathy had seen her handing Maria Rothchild a huge wad of francs before they left Switzerland, and she was always telephoning shops for food and flowers for the apartment and for books for herself. She herself never went outside. She neither wrote nor received letters. She did not read the newspapers. She liked to listen in another room while Cathy played the piano. She seemed to practice no religion. This surprised Cathy; she had supposed that Moslems did their ablutions and prayed with their faces toward Mecca five times a day no matter where they found themselves. When Cathy asked questions, Lla Kahina answered them: she was separated from her husband, she had no children of her own, she came from a place in North Africa called the Idáren Dráren.
“Idáren Dráren,” Cathy said. “That’s beautiful. What does it mean in Berber?”
“The Mountains of Mountains.”
“Is it beautiful there?”
“You will think so when you see it.”
“I’m going to see it?”
“Oh, yes.”
“The cards say so?”
“Yes.”
Lla Kahina laid the deck on the table; Cathy cut and shuffled.
“Good, that’s settled. What else do they say?”
“You saw your husband today,” she said. “He was sitting on a bench with a man dressed in black. You ran your horse very fast afterward.”
“You see all that in the six of hearts?”
“I saw some of it before.”
“When?”
“In Switzerland.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“It wasn’t clear in Switzerlad. In any case, what happened would still have happened.”
“Then when is our next star-crossed meeting?”
All the cards had been turned over. Lla Kahina handed Cathy the deck to be shuffled. “He’s gone forever,” she said.
“Gone? You mean I’ll never see him again?”
“Once more, perhaps. It isn’t clear.”
“How do you know? You’re not even looking at the cards.” “No, but it was the first thing I ever saw about you, and I see it all the time; you know that.”
“Then tell me something that I don’t know; something nice.”
Lla Kahina took back the shuffled deck and laid out three cards, then three more as if to check the result.
“There is a second child,” she said.
Cathy thought immediately, with furious jealousy, of the woman in Christopher’s future. Or were they together already? Had they already made love? The thought was unbearable.
“You mean somebody else is pregnant by Paul?”
“No. You’re carrying twins.”
Cathy swept the cards off the table. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “Enough is enough.”
But when she went to the American Hospital for her next regular checkup, the doctor listened at her abdomen with a stethoscope for a long time, frowning in concentration. Finally he looked up and grinned.
“You know,” he said, “I think Junior has company.”
“What?”
“I get two heartbeats. Listen.”
He handed her the instrument and held the bell in the right place. Cathy heard her own heart, and then a sound like that made by a stopwatch wrapped in a handkerchief.
“Hear it?” The doctor moved the bell downward; she heard the muffled ticking of a second stopwatch. “Hear that, honey? That’s the other twin.”
After that, Cathy had no doubts at all about Lla Kahina’s power to know what was going to happen to her. But why was it happening? Why couldn’t she just be happy?
FOR THE TWINS’ SAKE, CATHY LIVED BY THE CLOCK. SHE WOKE UP AT eight, ate her breakfast at eight-thirty, and rode in the Bois de Boulogne from nine till ten-thirty. She was home by eleven, and bathed and dressed again by twelve. She read the inside pages of the Herald-Tribune until lunch at one o’clock, took an hour’s nap, and spent two hours at the piano. In the late afternoon she went for a long walk, usually along the Seine. She wore her Loden cape with the hood up, so that she was as unrecognizable as a nun as she strode along the embankment beneath the bridges and up and down the steep stone stairs that connected the river and the streets.
In a used book stall on the Quai Voltaire, she found a battered portfolio containing Beethoven’s last quartets, scored for the piano, and bought it for fifty francs. This music was beyond her ability as a pianist, but she decided to try to learn it anyway, as an aid to her program of forgetting. As she played, sight-reading from the yellowed pages of the score, she never knew what to expect. Tempo and tone shifted, the mood swung, texture changed without warning. The works were five long cries of abandonment and loneliness. They suited her mood.
This immensely complicated music did for Cathy what she had wanted it to do. It made it impossible to remember anything else. The effort of playing left her groggy and detached from her surroundings. Sometimes she would walk all the way to the Pont de la Concorde before her mind began to work normally again.
One afternoon in December, as she rose exhausted from the piano, she heard the telephone ringing. When she picked up the instrument an English-speaking male voice that she had heard before, but did not immediately recognize, said, “I’m trying to reach Catherine.”
No one except teachers had ever called her Catherine. Cathy responded in French. “Who’s calling?”
“A friend from college.”
These words, delivered in a dry-throated, distant tone, brought her back to reality with a rush of anxiety. This was the recognition phrase that Christopher had set up so that she would know, if someone phoned while he was in the field, that the caller was a member of the Outfit with a message from him or news of him. She changed to English and gave the answering phrase.
“You’re a long way from Philadelphia.”
“Ah,” said the caller. “I thought it was you, but you sound different in French.”
It was David Patchen.
“Is something wrong?” she said.
“No, everything is all right,” Patchen said. “I don’t mean to upset you, but I’d like to talk to you.”
Cathy nearly hung up the phone. Why should she want to talk to Patchen? “I’m not sure that’s possible,” she said.
“I’m afraid it has to be possible,” Patchen replied.
Cathy took a deep breath, exhaled into the mouthpiece, and said, “All right.”
“Good. Are you free for dinner tonight? I’m only in town for a limited time.”
Patchen, like many people from the Outfit, seemed to prefer discussing secrets in expensive restaurants while surrounded by eavesdroppers. Cathy had never understood this.
“I don’t go out at night,” she said. “Why don’t you come here for tea at five o’clock?”
“Tea,” Patchen said, drawing out the word in a parody of enthusiasm. “That would be lovely.”
David Patchen had been Christopher’s best man, the only attendant, at Cathy’s wedding. He and Christopher had been wounded in the same battle on Okinawa, Patchen far more seriously than Christopher. After the war they had been roommates in college, and now they were both members of the Outfit, the most exclusive fraternity in American history. Cathy felt sorry for Patchen because of his disfigured face and his withered limbs, but she did not like him.
Patchen realized this, and he wasted no time on polite greetings or expressions of regret. Because he had the full use of only one hand, he had trouble with the mechanics of afternoon tea. He took the cup that Cathy poured for him, but refused sandwiches and cakes.
“They’re delicious,” Cathy said, offering the plate.
“I’m sure they are,” Patchen replied. “But no thank you.” “Paul always said you were an ascetic.”
Cathy ate her usual egg and toast and fruit; she was scrupulous about her diet, and she had an appetite. She had walked all the way to the Pont Neuf that day, counting her steps in an attempt to keep from thinking about Patchen’s phone call and what it might mean.
Patchen had no small talk even when it was appropriate, so he simply waited in silence while Cathy finished her food, holding his teacup in his good hand. He made no effort to conceal his interest in her new appearance. She had put on a full skirt, a loose blouse, and a blazer to conceal her slightly thickened abdomen, but he was completely uninterested in her clothes, or anything else except her damaged face.
Cathy wiped her unpainted lips with a napkin, and said, “Well, how do you like my face job?”
“You look a little different,” Patchen said.
“Better or worse?”
“Less perfect.”
“It’s a great experience, having a new face.”
Patchen smiled sardonically. “I know,” he said.
His face had been shattered on Okinawa, along with his arm and leg. He had lost an eye.
“What did you look like, before?” Cathy asked; she had always wondered, and now she had the right to ask.
“Incredibly handsome,” Patchen said.
He cleared his throat and said, “Can we talk about your condition for a moment?”
“My condition?”
Cathy’s throat tightened. It was impossible to guess what he might know.
“I mean in regard to us,” Patchen was saying, “now that you and Paul aren’t together any more.”
“ ‘Us’?”
“The Outfit.”
“What does the Outfit have to do with it?”
“Divorces can be bitter,” Patchen said. “I don’t know how you feel about Paul at this point.”
“You don’t? Neither do I. How does Paul feel about me?” Patchen went on as if she had not spoken. “Or how you feel about the Outfit,” he said.
“That’s easy. I think it’s a joke.”
Patchen was looking for a place to put the cup in which his tea had gone cold. Cathy reached across the table and took it from him. Patchen picked up the attaché case he had brought with him and opened the catches with a loud double snap. The case was black, like all of Patchen’s accoutrements.
“Paperwork,” he said. “I’m sorry to inflict this on you.”
“Then why are you doing it?” Cathy said. “Why you? I thought
you were too high-ranking to deal with abandoned wives.”
He took a thick file of papers out of his case, closed the lid, and sighed.
“I’m here because I’m Paul’s friend,” he said, “and even though I don’t expect you to believe me when I say this, I’m not your enemy. The Outfit has certain procedures when one of its officers parts from his wife, even when the circumstances are less dramatic than they are in this case.”
“Why isn’t Paul doing this himself?”
“Because he’s one of the parties to the situation, and because he doesn’t know everything that we know.”
“What do you know?”
Patchen removed a thick file from his attaché case and handed it to Cathy. “More, frankly, than I wish we knew,” he said.
Cathy had never seen an Outfit file before; she had imagined that they were stamped Top Secret and sealed with ribbons and wax inside impressive covers, but this one was just a plain manila folder filled with typed pages. There were no stamps, no labels, no titles, not even a name on the cover. It was absolutely sterile. It even smelled sterile, because of the faintly antiseptic odor of the fresh ink left by typewriter ribbons that were used only once, then burned.
“Am I supposed to read the whole thing?” Cathy said.
“You’re not supposed to know it exists, but you can read it if you want to. Everything we know, officially, is in there. There are some things you don’t know.”
“That’s an official warning?”
“I wouldn’t call it that, but you should prepare yourself.”
Cathy took the file to her father’s desk, where the light was better. It took almost an hour to read it. Everything was there: her lovers’ names; the dates and places on which she had seen them, transcripts of what they had said during the acts they had performed on her body and what she had said in reply; dry, neutral comments about her behavior and appearance by the anonymous people who had been watching her and listening to her with hidden microphones. As she read, a clot of nausea rose into her throat. Had these acts been photographed by secret cameras?
She handed the file back to Patchen.
“What? No photographs?” she said.
“I didn’t bring them,” Patchen said.
“But they exist?”
Patchen nodded. Cathy could barely breathe. What had been photographed? What exactly had Patchen seen? Had Paul seen her with her lovers? Had he ordered the pictures to be taken?
“Was it Paul who told these people to follow me?” she asked.
Insofar as Patchen was capable of registering shock, he registered it now.
“Of course not,” he said. “A surveillance team was on your friend for other reasons. Moroni—the one who hit you. Is that the right name?”
He knew it was. Cathy refused to confirm information by so much as a nod.
“He’s a parlor Stalinist, a useful idiot,” Patchen said, “a believer, somebody who does favors for the other side; he was servicing interesting people. You just happened to walk into the picture.”
“Were all the others enemy agents, too?”
“You mean your other … friends? No. Just Moroni. You were an object of interest because of the interest in him, so they surveilled you and everybody you came in contact with. That’s the way it’s done. They didn’t even know who you were until they saw you with Paul.”
“How could they not know that?”
“You weren’t living at home. You rented your hideaway in a false name. You read the file: they didn’t identify you until you went through a passport control, on your way to meet Paul in Spain.”
“But Paul knew who I was, and after they told him what I was doing, he must have sat around discussing it with them. Wouldn’t that be his duty?”
“That’s not the way it was,” Patchen said. “Paul was told be cause he needed to know, that’s all. It turned out he knew already.” “Why did you think he needed to know?”
“Because the investigation of this man Moroni, the one who injured you, was connected to something Paul was working on.” “You mean Otto and Maria.”
Patchen hesitated. “Yes, or so we thought at the time. Paul told you more than I thought.”
“Don’t worry. He didn’t tell me anything I didn’t need to know. I guarantee you.”
Patchen was holding another paper in his hand. This one was a legal document, stapled into a blue backing.
“This is an agreement between you and us,” he said, handing it over. “You agree never to reveal Paul’s real occupation to anyone, and never to disclose any classified information that may have come to your knowledge as a result of your relationship with him. That includes the identity of other members of the Outfit you may have met.”
“I’m making a contract with you to forget the whole thing. Is that it?”
Patchen nodded. “You could say that. It’s the routine form.” “Give me your pen.”
Cathy signed the document without reading it.
Patchen took it back and held it open, waiting for the ink to dry.
“If it isn’t too late to ask,” Cathy said, “what do I get out of this? When you pay blackmail you’re supposed to get the incriminating evidence from the blackmailer, aren’t you?”
“Moroni is in prison. He was caught smuggling opium into Turkey.”
“Into Turkey? I thought that was where opium came from.” “Then I guess he was carrying coals to Newcastle.”
“How long will he be in jail?”
“The sentence was twenty years.”
“You-all paid him back. Not for me, but for what he did to Paul’s wife. He damaged Outfit property. Was that it?”
Patchen did not argue with her. “To answer your earlier question,” he said, “there is no quid pro quo for signing the agreement. However, the report you read is the only copy in existence. I’ll burn it tonight,” he said. “The original, which is identical, will remain in the files. But now that Moroni is out of the way, the case is closed. I’ll send this file to the warehouse. It will be buried under tons of paper. Nobody will ever look for it there unless there’s some compelling reason to do so.”
“You can send it to the Herald-Tribune as far as I’m concerned.”
A long time had passed since Patchen’s arrival and he was beginning to show fatigue. His face was drawn and colorless. He closed his attaché case and twirled the combination locks. He stood up, painfully. He and Cathy looked dully at each other.
“There’s one more thing I want to say to you, for old times’ sake,” Patchen said. “It would be a mistake to think that the people you visited in Switzerland are your friends.”
“You mean Otto and Maria? I’ll bear that in mind.”
Patchen nodded; a brisk Germanic movement of his ruined head, and without uttering another sound, walked out of the room. He left the door open behind him. Cathy watched him hobble through the dimly lit salon on his way to the foyer, carrying his attaché case. Even from the back, he looked wasted, worn out. If he saw Lla Kahina in the shadows of the room, he gave no sign.