Christopher took the Métro across the river. At the PTT on the Champs-Elysées, he placed a telephone call to Cathy in Rome, and, reading the Somerset Maugham novel he carried in his pocket, waited for it to go through. At the end of an hour, the telephonist sent him into one of the booths. He closed the door behind him, and was enveloped by the odors of old sweat and stale Caporals. The telephone rang a dozen times on the crackling line; at last the operator in Rome told him that there was no reply.
He walked up the Champs through the evening crowds. A man in an open car, a Lancia like Christopher’s, kissed the girl in the seat beside him as he waited for the light to change. Christopher bought Le Monde at a kiosk and glanced down the wide street; it was impossible to spot surveillance in such a throng, but he looked from face to face in the approaching crowd, so as to remember any that he might see in an emptier street. He sat at a table on the sidewalk at Fouquet’s and drank a glass of beer. Then he walked on, turning down the rue Marbeuf, and took the long way around through quiet streets to the avenue George V. There was no one behind him. He had not expected that there would be.
On the stone wall of the American Cathedral, Christopher looked for the yellow chalk mark he had been told he would see. Patchen had apologized for it. “These fellows from Security are great believers in elementary tradecraft,” he told Christopher. “You’ll just have to be patient, they like to play spy when they go overseas.” Christopher went inside the church. Wilson was seated in the corner of the last pew, the bridge of his nose gripped between his thumb and forefinger. Christopher sat down beside him. Wilson’s eyes, the whites shining in the dim light, swiveled toward him.
“I apologize for this meeting place,” Wilson said. “No safe house was available at this hour, and your tall friend with the war wounds wouldn’t hear of your coming into the Embassy.”
Wilson, after a pause, began to speak again, then fell silent as a robed man padded down the aisle and nodded to them with a cordial American smile. He knelt, on one knee, in front of the altar and prayed in a whisper. The acoustics were excellent. Wilson, too, changed to a whisper, and his sibilants mixed with those of the priest in the vault of the nave.
“I wanted to give you a little report,” Wilson said, speaking behind hands clasped for prayer. “I’m puzzled by the way things are going.”
The clergyman finished his prayers. Wilson went on whispering.
“I’ve got nothing definitive,” he told Christopher. “You and your tall friend ran this thing so close to the vest that no one on our side could have known where Bülow was going to be when he was zapped. Even you didn’t know until almost the moment before he was hit, isn’t that right?”
“Yes. We’ve been over that.”
“I don’t want to go over it again. I just want to know if you agree with something. If no one knew except Bülow where Bülow was going to be at 0612 on the morning in question, then nobody but Bülow himself could possibly have told the killers where he was going to be.”
“Unless there was surveillance and I missed it.”
“At that hour of the morning? Is that possible?”
“You’re absolutely certain that no one except Patchen knew you were meeting the asset.”
“Yes, and Patchen didn’t know the place or time.”
Christopher spoke Patchen’s name aloud. Wilson flinched. He had been using true names, but he mouthed the syllables rather than whispering them. Wilson, Christopher thought, must believe that he is safe in church from lip readers, if not from microphones.
“That’s all I wanted to confirm,” Wilson said. “Thanks. I’ll go first. I’m going to turn toward the Champs when I go out, so maybe you should head down the other way.”
Wilson started to rise. Christopher gripped his forearm and he sat down again.
“What are you onto?” Christopher asked, again in a normal voice. He knew that its tone would carry less well than a whisper in the stone building. Wilson hesitated, lips pursed. Christopher insisted.
“Are you thinking that Horst was turned around?” he asked.
“Horst,” Wilson replied, “or somebody. Most likely Horst.”
“Doubled by whom? He was fluttered six months ago and nothing showed up.”
“Six months can be a long time in a life like Horst’s.”
“You’ve got something new on him.”
Wilson sighed. “You always paid him in cash. West German marks in a sterile envelope, sterile receipt. Right?”
Christopher nodded.
“Horst had some extra money,” Wilson said. He took a breath before he spoke again, in a flat tone. “We have a sort of arrangement with a little German unit in West Berlin, and this unit took an interest in Horst,” he said. “They wanted to run him themselves, and the Berlin base had a time flagging them off. Of course they knew why we were fidgety, so they kept an eye on Bülow from time to time to see which American was handling him–professional curiosity. They never picked him up with you, your meetings were too secure. But a few weeks before he died they saw him in the Tiergarten with a woman. They talked, Horst and the female, for fifteen minutes, Horst nodding all the time.
An envelope passed between them. It was morning, eight o’clock. Horst went to the nearest branch of the Berliner Bank and deposited the money to an account in the name of Heinrich Beichermann. One thousand West German marks. The file says that Heinrich Beichermann was a cover name Horst used during the war, when he was an amateur spy with the Abwehr. The bank says someone from Zurich opened the account for Horst, through the mail.”
“Are there photographs of the woman?”
“Our Germans say not.”
“Description?”
“Youngish, prettyish. It was winter. She was all bundled up.”
“What language did she and Horst speak?”
“Russian.”
Wilson cleared his throat.
“Where did they go after the meeting?”
“Horst left the bank and got on the S-Bahn and went back to work in East Berlin,” he said. “The lady took a walk down the K-damm, then made a right turn into the American Consulate.” Wilson smiled.
“Did she come back out?” Christopher asked.
“They don’t know. The kid following her got cold and figured she must be an Ami who’d stay inside till nightfall, so he went somewhere for a cup of coffee.”
“Didn’t he think it was curious that someone speaking Russian to an East Berliner would go straight into the American Consulate?”
“He wasn’t paid to think. You don’t have to be an American to get past the Marine guards at the door.”
The priest rose from his prayers and spoke to them, his hearty voice filling the nave. “Gentlemen,” he said, “if you’ve finished your devotions, my wife will be wondering where I am.” He smiled across the ranks of the pews, and gave them a small ironic bow.
Wilson left as the clergyman came down the aisle, still smiling urbanely, but too far away to see Wilson’s face clearly. Christopher smiled back and walked out the door less quickly than Wilson had done. Christopher heard the lock turn and saw that Wilson, on the way out, had taken time to wipe away his chalk mark. Christopher watched the burly figure of the Security man as he sauntered up the avenue. Christopher turned in the opposite direction, toward the Seine.
There were few pedestrians this far away from the Champs-Élysées, and Christopher heard the hurrying footsteps behind him when they were still some distance away. He put himself close to the wall and turned the sharp corner, almost reversing his direction, into the avenue Marceau. Once around the corner, he stepped into a deep doorway and waited. The footsteps, running now, turned the corner behind him.
Wilson reached the doorway, went by. Christopher heard him stop. He came back and peered into the shadows. He was panting slightly and his flowered necktie had worked its way out of his coat. He handed Christopher an envelope. “Almost forgot,” he said. He touched his forehead and went back the way he had come, still panting.
Inside the envelope was a typed note, unsigned. “Your wife called,” it read. “She’s in Paris, and will meet you in the bar of the Ritz at 5:00 this evening.”
Christopher’s watch read 5:10. He got into a taxi as it let a passenger out. He rested his head on the back of the seat and closed his eyes. Cathy, when he had left her in Rome, was asleep and frowning as she dreamt. She had always insisted that she had no dream life.
Even before he became a spy, Christopher had disliked being recognized by headwaiters and bartenders. As a youth he had never exchanged a word with the New York Irishmen who tended bar at P. J. Clarke’s or the Frenchmen behind the zinc bar at the Dôme, though others seemed to attach importance to being known by name to these contemptuous men. Now, as a matter of professional caution, he booked table reservations in a false name and made certain that he did not eat at the same restaurant, or drink at the same bar, more often than two or three times a year. He broke these rules in Rome because he lived in that city, and never operated there; it was important to his cover to live as much like a normal man as possible when he was at home.
Cathy made caution difficult when she traveled with him. She had favorite bars, favorite drinks, favorite restaurants and dishes. She refused to give them up. In the Ritz Bar, when Christopher entered, he did not see her. A waiter approached.
“Madame has gone into the foyer for a moment,” he said.
He took Christopher to the table; Cathy’s purse hung by its strap over the back of the chair, and a bottle of champagne stood in a bucket with two glasses chilling in the ice. Cathy had been drinking Perrier water as usual, and bubbles still rose in her half-empty glass. Christopher saw the men at the bar watch her come into the room behind him. A moment later she put a hand on the back of his head and kissed him softly on the cheek. The waiter was at her chair back, smiling. He filled their glasses. It was the most expensive champagne sold by the Ritz; Cathy told Christopher, as she did each time they met there, “This is the very first wine my father let me drink, when I was fourteen, here in this bar. ‘Cathy, my dear, let Dom Pérignon be your standard,’ he said.” She was a fine mimic, and Christopher grinned at the deep voice and the scowl of affection that for an instant turned her face into her father’s.
“What made you think of coming to Paris?” Christopher asked.
“Thinking of you. I took the next plane after you left. We can have the weekend together.”
Cathy ran a wetted finger around the rim of her champagne glass and it gave off a musical note. She listened, drank some wine, and did it again, producing a slightly different tone. “I played the piano today,” she said. “I haven’t played in months, but really I’m not bad, Paul. I feel the music more. I had a teacher who used to tell me that I’d never have anything except technique until I’d suffered. She’d suffered, from the look of her, but still she couldn’t play worth a nickel.”
“The difference between talent and genius,” Christopher said.
“No, the difference between being alone and being with you. When I woke up and saw that you were gone the heart fell right out of me.”
She put both of her hands on the table, asking for Christopher’s. Tears rose in her eyes; they ran over her cheeks to the corners of her unpainted upper lip. Cathy licked them away, tongue as quick as a cat’s.
For dinner, Cathy had duck in orange. She and the sommelier had a running joke at Christopher’s expense; the wine waiter believed that white wine should ‘be drunk with duck in orange, but Christopher would have nothing except red Bordeaux. Cathy would take a half bottle of Sancerre and remark, each time the sommelier refilled her glass, how remarkably it cleared the palate and intensified the sweet flavor of the duck. She would tell him that he must convince Christopher. “Monsieur is a man of principle,” the sommelier would reply, and leave him to pour his own wine.
When they were alone, Cathy had little to say. They walked along the river. She led him up the steps to a café near the Beaux-Arts, and there they drank coffee and Cathy ordered Cointreau. “I can’t get enough of the taste of orange tonight,” she said. They crossed to the right bank and went down to the Seine again and walked in the dark, past men sleeping under the bridges and lovers embracing against the rough stones of the embankment. The electric glow of the city made the stars invisible, but there was a moon behind dark cirrus clouds on the horizon. Cathy walked with her eyes on her feet, as if the white shoes that she wore came into her circle of vision one after the other by some force independent of her body. They climbed back to the street at the Grand Palais, and walked onto the Pont Alexandre III. Midway across the bridge, Cathy stopped and looked over the railing. She placed Christopher’s hands on her breasts. Turning, she kissed him, and the taste and scent of orange passed from her mouth into his own. “I love you,” she whispered. Christopher tightened his arms around her. “Can’t you answer?” Cathy asked.
Cathy’s parents were using their apartment. They had come over for the race meeting that began on Palm Sunday at Auteuil; they had a horse running in the President of the Republic Stakes. “Papa would like to have an American horse win that particular race while de Gaulle is president of France,” Cathy had said in the Ritz Bar. “He plans to show the general his shrapnel scars from Château-Thierry and ask him if he was ever wounded for France.”
Christopher and Cathy slept at the Ritz. They had not made love since the night she had come to Christopher from Franco Moroni. Wine had left Cathy peaceful; she lay in the broad hotel bed, her face in shadow and then in the lamplight that came into the window from the Place Vendôme, and accepted pleasure quietly. But afterward she moved to the edge of the bed and shuddered, as Christopher had done on the train when he remembered the death of Bülow. He touched the skin of her hip. “Paul, don’t talk,” she said. She lay in silence, and when she spoke again, her voice was under control. “I used to watch you remember things and I could never understand why you wanted to keep secrets that caused you so much pain,” she said. Christopher stroked her hair.
“Jesus,” she whispered, “I wish I didn’t understand now.”
While they were having breakfast the next morning, the telephone rang. Cathy answered, made no reply into the instrument, and handed it to Christopher.
“Sorry to disturb you at the Ritz,” Bud Wilson said, “I hope it’s all right.”
“It’s no disturbance.”
“That’s good. I heard you were there with your wife and I remembered that we had a loose end with her. You never got back to me with the answer to that question. You know, about her circle of friends in Paris.”
“Yes, I remember,” Christopher said. “I haven’t had a chance to ask her.”
“Can you do it now?”
Christopher put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Cathy,” he said. She turned a page of her newspaper and looked up.
“When we met in Paris and went home on the train,” he said. “Did you tell anyone you saw here that I was in Germany?”
She frowned. “Why would I?”
“You didn’t talk to any outsider about me, about where I was?”
“No. I know I’m not supposed to say, unless it’s someone with the Company I’m talking to.”
“And you didn’t see anyone else?”
“I saw you. I saw David walking with you in Saint-Germaindes-Prés. People like that, in passing. I’m more observant than you think. But I didn’t tell any secrets to any outsiders. Okay?”
Christopher spoke into the telephone. “The answer is no,” he said.
“Good. That makes things easier.”
“Tell me,” Christopher said. “How did you happen to know to call me here?”
Wilson laughed. “Elementary, my dear Watson,” he said with his heavy jocularity. “The Ritz is your kind of place, right?”
While Cathy bathed, Christopher went out to a café, bought some jetons, and used the pay telephone to call the Embassy. “There’s not much news,” the self-conscious girl at the other end told him. “Martha Riley went through a red light and she wants to know if you can fix the ticket.”
He put another token in the telephone and dialed the Rothchild’s number. Maria answered on the first ring. Christopher did not identify himself; Maria knew his voice. Her own voice was controlled.
“I’m glad you called,” she said. “I wonder if you’d be free to make a fourth at bridge today.”
“Yes, I’d like that. What time?”
“The usual time. I promise you a good tea.”
“Fine. I’ll look forward to it.”
Christopher hung up and waited for a moment before putting his last jeton into the telephone. A man waiting to use the instrument rapped loudly on the glass door of the booth. While Christopher dialed, the stranger opened the door and said in French, with exaggerated politeness, “It’s very kind of you to make all these calls while others are waiting.” Christopher pulled the door shut; the man went on gesticulating beyond the glass.
Cathy came on the line after the phone had rung many times.
“Something has come up,” Christopher said. “It shouldn’t take long.”
“Paul, it’s Saturday. My mother has asked us to lunch with them. Papa wants to show us his horse.”
“That’s all right. You go on ahead and I’ll be there in time for lunch.”
“Paul, come with me now. I don’t want to show up alone. I can’t explain to them. They don’t understand.”
Christopher waited. He could hear Cathy’s breathing. Disappointment caused her to pant, as if she were running.
“One hour,” Christopher said.
Cathy broke the connection.
Maria Rothchild was waiting in the open door, as she had been on his earlier visit. She wore a dressing gown, and a scarf covered her hair. Christopher had never before seen her disheveled. She led him into the kitchen and turned on the radio.
“Where is David?” she asked.
“He flew home yesterday, after we saw him.”
She lit a Gauloise and inhaled deeply. the cigarette trembling in her lips. She crushed it in the sink. Maria, though she disposed of a whole package of Gauloises every day, never took more than one puff from a cigarette before putting it out. Christopher had never asked why.
“Come with me,” Maria said.
She led Christopher into the sitting room where Otto Rothchild received visitors. Rothchild, fully dressed and awake, sat in his chair; Bud Wilson sat in another. Behind Rothchild, on a card table, a lie detector had been set up, and a third man stood by the equipment.
Rothchild lifted his head, as if he were much taller than Christopher, and must speak down to him.
“Explain this,” he said.
“Mr. Rothchild,” Wilson said, “Paul, here, is not involved in this procedure in any way.”
Rothchild ignored him. “Maria,” he said, “has Paul explained this to you?”
“Furthermore,” Wilson said, “your calling him here is a breach of security.”
“Answer,” Rothchild said.
“No,” Maria replied. “I didn’t discuss it with him. David is in Washington.”
“Did David authorize this?” Rothchild asked.
“His authorization is not required,” Wilson said. “This is a security investigation.”
“Paul,” Rothchild said, “were you aware that this was going to be done?”
“The possibility was mentioned to me,” Christopher said.
“What was your reaction, please?”
“Surprise that it had never been done before. And I thought you’d react to it pretty much the way you seem to be doing.”
Christopher crossed the room and looked at the machine. He touched the blood pressure cuff, the chest band that measured respiration, the device that recorded the amount of sweat on the palm of the subject’s hand. “It’s the standard box,” the technician said. “You’ve seen them before.” The paper tapes were blank. Christopher went back and faced Rothchild.
“What do you want me to do, Otto?” he asked.
“Tell these people to take their machine and go.”
“You can tell them that yourself. They’ll leave.”
“But you won’t do it?”
“I haven’t the authority.”
“Haven’t the authority? You’re a supergrade staff agent, and you’re my case officer. How can they flutter your asset without your authorization?”
Rothchild’s voice wavered. Christopher had never heard him refer to himself as an asset. Maria moved to her husband’s chair and sat on the arm.
Wilson, one hand dangling over the arm of his own chair, cleared his throat. “Christopher seems to understand the situation,” he said. “I’ll explain it to you again, Mr. Rothchild. This is a routine flutter. It happens to be taking place in the midst of a security investigation, but that doesn’t mean that we think you’ve been lying to us. It’s just a matter of making the file complete.”
“The file is complete,” Rothchild said. “You should read it. I’ve been in the employ of this organization since before it had a name. No one has ever questioned my integrity in all those years.”
“No one is questioning your integrity now,” Wilson said. “Every person in this room–Christopher, your wife when she was an officer, myself, Charlie the tech over there–all of us from the Director on down have taken the polygraph. It’s required of everyone. We regard it as an essential security tool.”
Christopher said, “Wilson, can I have a word with you?” They went into the kitchen together. Wilson did not wait for Christopher to speak.
“The answer is, yes, it really is necessary,” Wilson said. “However, he can refuse.”
“And be fired.”
“That’s the usual procedure. For all I know he’s a special case, but if he is, he’ll be the first.”
Wilson’s feet were planted firmly; he faced Christopher in the narrow kitchen as though he had been ordered to defend the room against enemy infantry.
“Otto has always been a special case,” Christopher said. “I don’t know why he’s never been fluttered. It must seem very strange to you.”
“Unbelievable. How did you guys let it happen? Jesus, Paul–he knows everyone. He could blow the whole outfit.”
Christopher saw that there was no hope of explaining this lapse to Wilson. Rothchild was too valuable to lose; no one had wanted to take the consequences of offending him. He insisted on being trusted absolutely, and so far as anyone knew he had always been absolutely trustworthy. Patchen had given Rothchild what no other employee of the Agency had, his privacy.
“All right,” Christopher said to Wilson, “get your tech out of the room and I’ll see what I can do.”
“Look,” Wilson said. “It’s just going to be a routine flutter. Is he queer, is he doubled, does he steal money. It’ll take thirty minutes, tops, if he loosens up.”
Christopher sent Maria out of the room with the technician. Rothchild slumped in his chair as the door closed behind her. His eyes remained open and fixed on a point in space between himself and Christopher’s standing figure.
“Otto,” Christopher said, “I’m sorry this is so upsetting to you. But it’s no worse than an electrocardiogram. You’ve had it done a hundred times to other men.”
“Yes, and I suspected every one of them of playing me false.”
“If you don’t agree, you’ll be terminated. No one will be able to prevent it. It’s a bad way to go out, after all you’ve done and all you’ve been.”
“It’s an insult.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“What can it possibly mean at this of all times except that suddenly I am not trusted?”
Rothchild’s eyes were still turned away. Christopher snapped his fingers. Rothchild, startled, looked into his face.
“Otto,” Christopher said, “if I had known that you’d never been on the box, I wouldn’t have trusted you. Nor would any of us.”
“That’s wonderful to hear. First I give up my health. Now my reputation goes.”
Christopher made no acknowledgment that he had heard. He stared coldly at Rothchild; something moved in the agent’s eyes. Rothchild tugged his slack body, inch by inch like a very old man putting on a heavy garment, until he sat upright again. He gazed out the window. At last he nodded.
Christopher called the technician back into the room. Maria returned and stood by with Christopher while the machine was connected to Rothchild. They removed his tweed jacket and lifted his arms while the tube was strapped around his chest. Christopher saw how wasted the muscles had become. Rothchild paid no attention to what was being done. The technician smeared a substance on the palm of Rothchild’s hand before attaching the device that measured perspiration. “The others can leave now,” the technician said. “We can make this very fast if you can relax, Mr. R.”
To Maria, Rothchild said, “Uncross my legs, please.” Maria lifted the leg, holding it at the knee and the ankle, and placed the foot beside the other. Christopher watched impassively from the doorway.
In the kitchen, Wilson suggested a game of gin rummy. He told Christopher, as he dealt the cards, that he always carried a deck in his pocket. Maria Rothchild watched the cards fall for a moment, and then, uttering an unbelieving laugh, left the room.
Wilson won the first two hands. He played with intense concentration and his broken fingers handled the cards with great delicacy. Christopher was reminded of a fat girl he had known in school who was a graceful dancer; she had had a habit of singing as she waltzed, and Wilson, too, hummed a tune as he chose cards and discarded.
Only a few minutes passed before the technician came into the kitchen and took Wilson away with him. Christopher heard the shower running on the other side of the wall, and Maria’s sharp smoker’s cough as the water was turned off. She returned to the kitchen, dressed in one of her pleated skirts, a cardigan around her shoulders. Wilson returned, putting on his coat. He gave Christopher and Maria a quizzical look.
“Charlie put me on the box,” he said. “He wanted to test it. He thought it might be out of commission.”
“Is it all right?” Christopher asked. “I don’t think this ought to be prolonged.”
“On me, the machine works all right,” Wilson said. “Maria, what kind of operation, exactly, did your husband have?”
“It’s called a sympathectomy,” she said. Her eyes widened and she put her flattened palm over her mouth. “Now that’s really funny,” she said, and began to laugh.
“They cut the nerves along the spine, and some in the neck, too,” Christopher said. “It controls his high blood pressure.”
A smile spread over Wilson’s face. “Scared the hell out of Charlie,” he said. “He thought Rothchild had died on him. Nothing on the box registered except a little bit of respiration. He’s got no readable blood pressure, he doesn’t sweat. Nothing happens. ”
Maria’s eyes danced as she listened. “Of course nothing happens,” she said. “The nerves that control sweating were cut by the surgeon, and when Otto goes unconscious he has no blood pressure. It really is too funny for words. All this pomposity, with Paul of all people having to pull rank, and then Otto’s body turns out to be an unbreakable code.”
In the sitting room, Rothchild had been rearranged in his chair by the technician. Christopher went in to say good-bye to him, and together they heard Maria’s strident laughter pealing in another part of the house.
With his arched nose and his bottomless eyes, Rothchild looked like the mummy of an Inca, skin turned to parchment by the icy air of a mountain tomb. He laughed aloud, a dozen sharp bursts of breath. A tear of merriment ran crookedly through the hatch-work of wrinkles on his cheek.