Claude de Cerutti wore the rosette of the Resistance in the buttonhole of his sober blue suit. He was a short round man with a rubicund face and a halo of gray curls around his bald skull.
“In the Resistance,” Otto told Christopher, “one of Cerutti’s cover names was Le Frère éméché, the Tipsy Friar.”
“What was Otto’s?”
“That’s still a secret,” Rothchild said.
“Jaguar,” said Cerutti. “He was head of counterintelligence in our réseau. A stealthy night-living animal, much feared by those who had reason to be afraid.”
Cerutti, when he was introduced to Christopher, stood back and examined his face, a puzzled look in his bright eyes. Maria had forewarned Christopher that it was one of Cerutti’s poses to pretend that he had previously met everyone to whom he was introduced, but could not quite remember the new person. He asked Christopher where in the United States he came from.
“I’m a Canadian, from Toronto.”
“Surely not? You don’t speak French like a Canadian.”
“French is not spoken in Toronto.”
Cerutti, when he spoke to Otto Rothchild or made a remark Rothchild was meant to overhear, had a way of raising his voice. “It’s extraordinary,” he said in a piercing tone, “how all the North Americans I meet at the Rothchilds’ talk French like natives. No Frenchman will believe it. They say I am the only man in France who has ever met a comprehensible American.”
Cerutti had brought a bottle of champagne, carrying it from his car in a silver ice bucket, and he rose from his chair to give more wine to Maria and Christopher. He brushed Maria’s hand as he filled her glass.
“It was that touch of Maria’s skin for which I traveled all the way from the avenue Foch,” he said. “Otto thinks I am performing a corporal act of charity, visiting him each Wednesday as I do. The truth is more corporeal. I hope to persuade Otto’s wife to come away with me to the South Sea islands. I am mad for American girls, a Neanderthal entranced by a female of the Cro-Magnons. Such exquisitely cruel beauty; they are the first examples of another stage of mankind.”
Cerutti, standing above Christopher’s seated figure, asked him a series of questions about himself. He spoke still in the light tone of voice that he had used when flirting with Maria, but with the faint hostility of a European speaking to a foreigner whom he cannot define by the standards of his own circle. Christopher answered easily with his cover story: his name was Paul Cowan, he was the orphaned son of a banker from Toronto, he was unmarried, he had gone to McGill University, he was hoping to write.
“One must not hope to write,” said Cerutti. “One must write. It is necessary to wring an apology from Gide.”
“I’m not aiming to be Proust. I think it’s better to get out of the cork-lined room, to travel. Even to catch cold. I’ve just been to Russia.”
Cerutti’s interest was aroused. “And what is Russia like? I haven’t been there since I was younger than you. As Otto was coming out, a dispossessed aristocrat, I was going in, a young firebrand who thought he’d inherited the future. Ah, the Russian Revolution! All my friends died of it.”
“Not quite all,” Rothchild said.
“No, Otto, there’s you, but ex–Social Democrats hardly count. I speak of the Red heroes. You were a pink hero–the only one ever, so far as I know.”
Cerutti returned his attention to Christopher. “Tell me about your trip,” he said. “Was it one of the Intourist things where you see no one and look at all those pictures of boys and girls on tractors?”
“Mostly. I tried to get off the beaten track a little. You can slip away if you’re not too obvious. I talked to some of the ordinary Russians.”
“Talked to them? You speak Russian?”
“A little. I had a Russian mother.”
The real Paul Cowan, who had died at Dieppe, had in fact been the son of a woman who had been brought out of Petrograd in 1917.
Cerutti’s eyes, shining but opaque, never wavered. “To what sort of people did you speak Russian in Moscow?” he asked Christopher.
“All sorts. Of course everyone thought I was an American, it’s the bane of Canadian nationality. The Russians seem to feel about Americans as you do about American women, that they are one stage ahead of everyone else in the evolutionary process.”
“Do you agree with that view?”
“Not quite. I come from the most anti-American country on earth.”
“Canada? Ah, no. America is the most anti-American country on earth. When you speak of public opinion, young man, you speak of the opinions of the intellectuals because they are the only ones who publish and broadcast. The masses are dumb. Intellectuals always hate their own country, but the United States has produced an intelligentsia that is positively bloodthirsty.”
“You see America as a benevolent force?”
“What does it matter what it is?” Cerutti asked. “It’s what it symbolizes. Food, clothes, cars, dancing. Money. These are the things mankind lusts for. If one country shows that these things are available to the common man, all others will have to become like it, or fall.”
Otto Rothchild cleared his throat. “This is the young Communist who fought the Whites in Russia, Franco in Spain, the Gestapo in the streets of Paris,” he said.
“Yes,” Cerutti said, raising both short arms above his head, “with these little fists. One day I unclenched my hands and wondered why I had not preferred the itching palm all my life.”
Cerutti resumed his questions. Christopher told him that he had tried to meet other writers and artists. There was, he had found, a considerable underground. Stories, poems, even whole novels were passed from hand to hand. Their readers copied them on typewriters so that extra copies could be circulated.
“They confided this to you, a foreigner? Showed you the manuscripts?”
“There’s not much to confide. It’s well known that this goes on. The Russians, the literary sort of Russians anyway, are dying to speak to the rest of the world. Their country is a huge cloister, intellectually speaking, with everyone in involuntary celibacy.”
“And you got in the window, among the novices?”
Christopher grinned. “I hadn’t thought of it in quite that way. We talked, drank, stayed up all night. It was like being back at the university.”
“Surely it was very dangerous for these young Russians?”
“We were careful.”
“Careful? You’re very innocent. Probably one in five of your young rebels was a KGB informer.”
“That I doubt.”
Cerutti shrugged. “Good luck to your friends, then.”
Descending in the lift, Cerutti clasped his silver champagne bucket, elaborately chased and decorated like a coarse enlargement of a Cellini miniature, to his chest. His chatter had ceased as the door of the Rothchilds’ apartment closed behind him.
For two hours, Cerutti had barely interrupted himself. He had flirted with Maria, told stories of Russia and Spain during their civil wars–he had fought for the Communists in both conflicts. He spoke of his ancestry: he was descended on one side from a Jesuit philosopher of the French Revolution, on the other from the chef de cuisine Catherine de Médicis had brought to Paris when she married Henri II. “How can one be descended from a Jesuit?” Maria asked. “Don’t ask rude questions,” Cerutti replied; “my ancestors introduced cooking and even the fork to France, and, having civilized this country in the sixteenth century, radicalized it in the eighteenth.” In the lift with Christopher, however, Cerutti was quiet.
“You’ve known Otto a long time, I gather,” Christopher said.
“During two wars.”
“Don’t tell me you met in the First World War as well as the Second?”
“No. In Spain in 1936 and then during the last war with the Germans.”
They were very close together in the tiny cage. Christopher smiled, reflecting how little Patchen, who had arranged this situation, would have enjoyed feeling the heat of Cerutti’s body, smelling the wine on the Frenchman’s breath and the cologne beneath his sweaty clothes. Cerutti stood back and permitted Christopher to struggle with the doors of the lift after it had groaned to a stop. The two men shifted their bodies to make room for the inner doors to swing into the cabin with them; Cerutti held his silver bucket aloft to protect it.
“How do you happen to know Rothchild?” he asked. “Of course, he knows everyone.”
“My mother. Russian émigrés all know one another.”
“Was she, too, a member of the old nobility?”
“Weren’t they all?”
Cerutti pursed his lips; he was beginning to look upon Christopher with interest.
“Otto is quite genuine, a descendant of Demetrius Donskoy, who defeated the Golden Horde on the Kulikovo Plain in 1380,” he said. “Much better than being a Romanov. For years I doubted Otto’s lineage. His behavior was all wrong for a displaced boyar.”
Christopher, with a change of expression, asked for the completion of the joke.
“He never borrowed money,” Cerutti said.
In the street, they shook hands. Christopher hesitated for a moment, then asked Cerutti if he would care to have dinner with him one night that week. Cerutti handed him the ice bucket and took a date book from an inner pocket. He studied it, holding it at arm’s length.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “I have no other free night this week.”
Christopher agreed. Cerutti uncapped a large fountain pen. “It’s Paul what?” he asked.
“Cowan.” Christopher spelled the name. “Hotel Vendôme.”
Hearing the name of this hotel, Cerutti showed new signs of alertness.
“What restaurant do you prefer, and what time?” Christopher asked. He smiled. “You’re my guest, of course.”
“Something simple,” Cerutti replied. “Lasserre, for example.”
“Fine. Eight o’clock.”
Cerutti disappeared around the corner. Christopher, walking more slowly in the same direction, saw him drive away in a battered Simca.
As they rose in the elevator at Lasserre, an even smaller cage than the one at the Rothchilds’, Cerutti ran a fingertip over its walls lined with red and gold cut velvet. “The perfect place in which to ravish a virgin, I’ve always thought,” he said. “But when to do it–going up, with all the senses undulled, or going down, with all appetites satisfied except the sexual one?”
Cerutti was known to the headwaiter; Christopher, as usual, was not recognized. They were moved from the small table that had been reserved for an unknown named Cowan to a more favorable location. Cerutti, tonight wearing the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole, ordered the dinner and the wines; he explained to Christopher how each dish was made, and instructed him to search for the taste of the ingredients. He told him anecdotes about the wine they were drinking. In the war, he said, he had watched from a hiding place while German troops with flamethrowers destroyed a whole field of vines at a château famous for the white wine they were now drinking. The German commander posted a notice explaining that the chatelaine had given food to the Maquis. “In fact, she had been the German colonel’s mistress, and they had quarreled,” Cerutti said. “I thought I’d never drink this wine again.”
Christopher listened. He had done what he was doing a hundred times before. Cerutti was an intelligent man, and according to the files he had been a brave one. As he talked, observing Christopher for signs of admiration, making himself a familiar of the waiter, Christopher began to see his weakness. It could not be called vanity; it was worse. Cerutti was a man who had had to settle for the mere forms of recognition. He knew that he was more than the headwaiter in Lasserre, or the cabinet minister who had done him the offhand favor of putting him up for medals, realized. Cerutti was too small, too funny, too reckless in showing his intelligence. The fault had cost him his place as a man among serious men. It was so evident that Christopher, reviewing in his mind all that he had read and heard about Cerutti, felt a pang of anxiety. It seemed impossible that this man had not already been ensnared by another intelligence service. It made no difference; Christopher, often enough, had found use for men that others had believed worn out. It was thought that Cerutti had not been part of a network since the Resistance disbanded. But a lifetime was not long enough to kill the taste for secret life; no one who had ever lived it believed that he could lose his skills.
“You say you’re a writer,” Cerutti said. “You are, I take it, as yet unpublished?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Cerutti drew a circle in the air above his head, to encompass the voluptuous decor. “You are not a starving artist, evidently. This is the most orgiastic restaurant in Paris.”
Christopher gave Cerutti no more information about himself.
“Did you describe this debauchee’s life to your underground friends in Moscow?” Cerutti asked.
“They only asked about Hemingway, and the movies.”
Cerutti spoke earnestly to the headwaiter about dessert, then turned back to Christopher.
“I have a professional interest in what you’ve done,” he said. “I don’t know if Otto mentioned that I own a small publishing house.”
“I knew that you discovered Kiril Kamensky and published his work.”
“Ah. Then you know I used to publish a lot of Russian books. At one time my imprint was quite famous in that regard. But there’s no money in it.”
Cerutti, touching his lips with a napkin, watched Christopher begin to say something, then change his mind. His eyes shone, for an instant, with curiosity. Then he spoke of other things.
Christopher paid the enormous bill. Cerutti suggested they walk to the Crazy Horse Saloon; inside the door there, he gave money to the greeter to get them a table near the stage. There was a new act: a very tall German girl who began her striptease in a Wehrmacht helmet and ended it with a swastika on her G-string.
They drank Scotch whisky. Finally Cerutti, his speech faintly slurred, began to ask questions again.
“Otto says you really found your way to interesting people in Russia. The luck of the innocent, was it?”
“As I said, I just met people, and they introduced me to other people. It’s the same the world over.”
“For the young and beautiful, perhaps.”
The music had begun again, and the master of ceremonies introduced another girl. Cerutti called the waiter and watched him make his way among the tables, putting his hands on the customers to move them aside because their attention was fixed on the girl. Cerutti’s face, like the flesh of the dancer, went from pink to blue to green to stark white as the filters were changed on the spotlight.
“Otto was hinting to me,” he said, his voice straining to penetrate the throbbing music, “that you got through to someone very interesting in Russia. One of the great lost writers. Otto was very mysterious.”
Christopher smiled, as if in the din he could not hear what Cerutti was saying.
“Did you? Who was it?”
Cerutti made a megaphone of his hands and asked his insistent question again.
Christopher ceased smiling. “There are some things,” he shouted into Cerutti’s ear, “that you just don’t ask. I’m sorry I said anything to Otto.”
Cerutti shrugged, but he held Christopher’s glance for a long moment before he turned his chair around in order to have a better view of the girl, now almost naked, who danced in the changing colors of the limelight.
Maria Rothchild met Christopher in the bar of the Hotel Scribe. Christopher heard her brisk unmistakable footsteps as she came down the corridor. She wore a tartan skirt and before she sat down at his table she spread its pleats and made a curtsy. “I forgot that this bar is upholstered in the Campbell plaid, or whatever,” Maria said. “It wasn’t my intention to match my costume to the room.”
She ordered a Bloody Mary and then brought the waiter back with a crooked finger. “Make it two, both for me,” she said. “Otto had a spell last night,” Maria said, “and after I put him to bed I was so bloody depressed I sat up till three drinking gin and listening to Vivaldi. I’m turning into a housebound alcoholic.”
“What sort of spell did Otto have?”
“Petulance. It’s hard to be an invalid. He resents my youth and my glowing good health. Life is getting to be like a novelette in a Hearst magazine.”
“Or the Bronte sisters.”
“Same thing,” Maria said. “Everything in nature, if I may quote you in the long ago, Paul, is the same unless it’s touched by genius.”
“I wonder what I meant by that?”
Maria, eagerly consuming her second Bloody Mary, did not reply. She had a reputation, as Christopher did, for remembering with great exactness everything that was said to her. Unlike Christopher, she liked to quote sentences back to the people who had spoken them; sometimes Maria waited years for the opportunity.
She finished drinking and sat back with a hand on her stomach. “I can feel it consuming the evil humors,” she said. “God bless the discoverer of alcohol.” She took a Gauloise from a blue package, lit it, and inhaled her one long drag with such force that Christopher could hear the paper burning. Then she snuffed out the cigarette, three-fourths of it unsmoked.
“Your small friend, the descendant of the Jesuit philosopher, enjoyed his dinner at Lasserre,” she said. “He wanted to know where you got all that money. We said we thought you had inherited young. Cowan was an only child, wasn’t he? David left that detail out.”
“Yes. Tell me the rest.”
“About Claude? He brought you into the conversation very casually. Slyly, I’d call it. Otto thought that that was quite telling; so do I. Evidently you gave him just enough to make him want more.”
“I found a message from him at the hotel today. He wants to meet for a drink tomorrow afternoon.”
“Only a drink?”
“It’s his turn to pay. I’ll stretch the evening out, somehow.”
“He’s not bad company,” Maria said, “but of course it’s business. God, the pain of eating rich food with poor fools. When I resigned from the Company I promised myself I’d never again have a meal with someone I didn’t really like. It hasn’t turned out that way, living with Otto. The agents still come for lunch. Maybe when he retires.”
“Give me the rest on Claude,” Christopher said.
Cerutti, Maria reported, had said very little when he came by with his weekly bottle of champagne, but he had come two days early. Cerutti had wanted to know, in detail, who Paul Cowan’s Russian mother had been.
“Otto was vague. Like a lot of reformed revolutionaries, Cerutti is an awful snob–where the ‘de’ came from in his name is a mystery to all–so he thinks it’s natural that Otto wouldn’t have taken notice of anyone who had a Russian title granted after the reign of Peter the Great.”
“What else?” Christopher asked. It was unlike Maria to chat instead of reporting.
“He mentioned several times what a dish you are. I asked Otto if Claude was maybe a little bit queer, but Otto says no. It’s not a tendency Otto admires. He’s brutal to fairies, always has been.”
“Otto’s brutal to a lot of people.”
“So they say,” Maria replied, “but especially to fools and queers. Claude, believe me, is neither or they wouldn’t have stayed in touch, when there was nothing in it for Otto, for all these years.”
Maria’s habit of putting a finger on her husband’s flaws interested Christopher; she spoke to him of Rothchild as a liberal in America might speak to another liberal about the fecklessness of Negroes, knowing that his credentials were too good for him to be mistaken for a bigot. Christopher seldom knew what to say in return.
“The important thing,” Maria said, “is that Claude believes, or is beginning to believe, that there may be something for Cerutti in Paul Cowan, the Canadian. He’s keen to know what you know about the new Russian writers. He made some money out of those books in Russian he used to publish, including Kamensky’s. He’s sniffing the air for the scent of easy money again.”
Christopher let her drink. While the glass was still at her lips he said, “Sniffing the air, Maria? According to Claude, Otto has already let him smell the bone.”
Maria put her glass back on the table, dabbed at her lips with a paper napkin.
“Otto did tell Cerutti that I had met one of the great Russian writers,” Christopher said, “or was Cerutti just putting a little blood in the water?”
“Yes, Otto told him that.”
“Why? David told him not to interfere, not to show his hand.”
Maria Rothchild began putting things back into her purse.
“Because, Paul, my husband does things his way. Not David’s way or your way or my way.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“And done nothing.”
“So far,” Christopher said.
Maria closed the snap on her purse.
“Is that a message?” she asked.
Christopher helped her with her chair and walked with her in silence out of the bar and up the stairs. Outside, Maria studied the façade of the Opera House.
“You know,” she said, “before you ever met Otto, David came around to describe you. Otto asked how good you were. ‘Better than you, Otto,’ David said, ‘because he has the power of honesty.’ What a remark. What an error in handling. Otto has never forgotten.”
She kissed Christopher’s cheek and left him.
Christopher was alone when he wasn’t with agents. He woke at dawn and went out of the hotel for breakfast. He liked the backstreet cafes that catered to the gruff early-morning trade. Often, near the Madeleine in the morning, he would be stopped by smiling young women, as fresh as Cathy, who would ask him if he wanted them. He refused; he felt not even the ghost of desire.
Waiting for Cerutti, Christopher sat alone in his high white room in the Hotel Vendôme and tried, for the first time in years, to write poetry. The lines came to his pen as easily as ever, but they were about flowers, trees, the sky, streets; he wrote a sonnet that described the hill at Pontoise as Pissarro had painted it. He could not make verses about anything that had a voice or warm flesh.
He wrote to Cathy. He could send nothing through the mail that might give someone who intercepted the letter insight or advantage. He didn’t think that Cathy would believe in a love letter. He made up a long joke about a woman who would not answer her telephone and woke up one morning to find, as Kafka’s hero had found himself turned into a cockroach, that she had been transformed into a telephone. Strangers shouted into her ear and listened at her mouth and punched her nostrils and eyes with dialing fingers.
He mailed the letter at the post office in the sixth arrondissement and asked at the window if poste restante had anything in his name. He was given an envelope addressed in Cathy’s round handwriting.
I’ve heard the phone and knew it was you but I don’t know what we’d say if I picked up the receiver. I’m terrified to think of you but I’m trying to get over that. I’ve been asked to go away to Capri for the weekend, and I may. Wherever I am, I’ll be with you. I do believe you see me in everything I do. If you haven’t the sight, then what is the explanation? What I must do is to become like you. I’m making a project of it and Christ it can be painful. When you come back, come on the late flight. Wire me. I’ll meet you at the airport. Don’t be anxious about how I’ll be. I’m all through talking. I know it’s a fool’s way of speaking love.
Cerutti had suggested meeting in the bar of the Crillon at five o’clock, an hour when it was frequented by English-speaking journalists. Some of them, hanging together in an atmosphere of sad gossip, knew Christopher in his own name as the correspondent of a great American magazine. Christopher avoided them when he could, and when he could not, he bought them drinks with his own money. It was against regulations to spend secret funds on the American press.
He asked Cerutti to meet him instead at the Brasserie Lipp, on the other side of the Seine. They had to wait, standing up, for a table. Cerutti made no attempt to cover his annoyance. When at last he and Christopher sat down, Cerutti looked contemptuously at the clientele. “Tourists,” he said. He mopped his face with a handkerchief and drank off half of his tall glass of Munich beer at a swallow.
Christopher had brought the English translation of the Kamensky manuscript with him, wrapped in cheap paper and tied with string. Cerutti eyed it as it lay on the table, but said nothing about it. He described an encounter he had had that day with an American film director who was interested in one of the novels on the backlist of Cerutti’s publishing house. “It’s about the Spanish Civil War,” Cerutti said. “I asked him how he expected to get money from American bankers to make a film on that subject. ‘No problem,’ he said, ‘I’m on the Hollywood blacklist. That makes me a hero in Europe and I can get money over here, pour épater les États-Unis.’“
“Is it a good book? You said you were in the Spanish war.”
Cerutti grunted. “There were no good books about that war. Too much ideology. Even the best writers were scared of losing their friends; they had to write what was expected of them, not what they saw and felt.”
“Did you know Otto in Spain?”
“Very slightly. I was in a fighting unit, the XI International Brigade, in Madrid in ‘36. Otto was a journalist, living at the Gran Via Hotel. He always had Martell cognac, I don’t know where he got it all, so we were glad to be interviewed by him.”
“Did you tell Otto what you saw and felt?”
“I told him true stories about the valor of the Spanish workers. Otto in those days was one of the deluded; he professed to believe in the Popular Front.”
“You didn’t?”
Cerutti gave Christopher a sharp look; up till now, it had been he who had asked all the questions, chosen the shades of meaning.
“I was a Communist, and one who had fought with the Reds in Russia. I understood what fun it was going to be shooting Otto and all the other romantic Social Democrats and Socialists after the war.”
“Yes, and my faith. I’m a defrocked zealot. Franco did the job for us–he shot a lot of Otto’s kind.”
“What did Otto lose?”
Cerutti made a kissing noise. “Ask Otto. The odd thing was, all the Spaniards thought Otto was a Frenchman and I was a Russian. The Madrileños thought every armed foreigner was a Russian. They used to shout at all of us in the streets, Viva Rusia! It was the slogan of the war that winter–in Spain the Germans tested aerial bombing tactics; the Soviets, propaganda. You see who won in the end. In 1945 there was no more Luftwaffe. No one has yet found a way to shoot down the illusions of the Left.”
“Or of the Right?”
“The Right doesn’t need illusions; it has factories and mines and banks.”
“You’re still part-Communist, my friend.”
Cerutti showed his yellowing teeth. “A very small part, withered like an old man’s penis,” he said. “It was once the seat of pleasure, but that was a long time ago.”
Cerutti lapsed into a mood. Christopher did not disturb him. The waiter brought more beer and a plate of cold sausages.
“Were you in battle in the last war?” Cerutti asked.
“Yes.”
“Then you know it’s bad enough to see your friends fall, and know that they are dead. It’s worse when they go back to the country they were fighting for, Soviet Russia in this case, and die, or perhaps do not die, there. You don’t know. They are swallowed up by the earth. You hear rifle shots in your sleep.”
“I thought the purges came later.”
“They began in ‘37, in Russia. Practically everyone who had been in Spain was shot when he got back to the Soviet Union. The comrades went from one abattoir to another.”
Cerutti lifted a piece of sausage from the plate, then put it back. He pushed the plate away.
“We all lost friends,” he said. “Even Otto lost friends.”
“Otto had the same friends as you?”
“One or two. Otto, even then, was ubiquitous. He knew everyone in Madrid. Once, even, I found him talking to Konev–Paulito, he was called in Spain–who was in charge of training Spanish terrorists. And Otto and a young Russian, also a journalist but a Soviet citizen and a Communist, were close. I suppose the fellow died for it along with all the rest, when he got home.”
Christopher asked no more questions. Cerutti blinked his eyes and gave a little laugh.
“That Hollywood director took me back,” he said. “The blacklist. He thinks it’s chic to play around with politics. ‘Épater les Etats-Unis.’ He thought he was speaking my language. He’d have done better to study Esperanto.”
They went on to dinner at the Coupole. The walk through Montparnasse cheered Cerutti, and in the noisy brasserie with its throng of garrulous people he took off his coat and loosened his tie. “After all,” he said, “this is a better ambience than Lasserre. One has to prefer soap to perfume.” He ordered carafe after carafe of rough wine and ate the simple food with appetite. He seemed to have a different set of manners for every situation. Christopher felt affection begin to stir within him. He was glad to have this sign. He had never been able to seduce anyone, a woman for her body or an agent for his fantasies, with a cold heart.
Finally, drunk, Cerutti tapped the package Christopher had left between them on the table. It was a question.
“It’s a manuscript,” Christopher said.
“And you think I ought to read it.”
“If you read English.”
Cerutti put on his glasses and ripped open the package. He read the opening paragraph aloud. His English was accented but perfect, and to demonstrate something to Christopher he translated what he had read back into French, at sight. Then, quickly, he read the first five or six pages of the typescript. There was no title page and no author’s name. Cerutti said nothing about this.
“Not bad,” he said in English. He looked at the number on the last page of the manuscript and raised his eyebrows. “But if I’m going to read seven hundred pages in English, my friend, you are going to pay for dinner.”
At the taxi rank outside, he borrowed another fifty francs. He didn’t give the driver his destination while Christopher was still in earshot.
When it happened, it happened quickly, as it always did. Christopher waited in his hotel room, leaving only to eat, and once to meet a man from the Embassy. On the third morning, Cerutti phoned from the reception desk. Christopher told him to come upstairs.
Cerutti laid the bulky manuscript on the table, but he kept the palm of his hand pressed upon it, as though he wished to prevent its being put back into hiding.
“This is a translation,” he said. “Where is the original?”
“I have it.”
“Who is the author?”
Christopher said, “It’s a nice morning. Let’s go outside.”
Cerutti, with the manuscript clutched to his breast, followed him down the stairs. Christopher took him to the Seine embankment, and they walked along the river in the gentle spring sunlight.
Under the Pont de la Concorde, Cerutti stopped. Traffic soughed and thudded above them; the pylon of the great bridge quivered like a wooden stake driven into the ground by a sledgehammer.
“Who?” Cerutti said.
“Kiril Kamensky.”
Agents are seized, at the moment of submission, with a certain emotion. The transaction, the decision to give up resistance, causes the face to twist with something like humor, and the eyes to look back, as Christopher sometimes thought, upon an earlier, more innocent person than the one the agent has just become. Now this happened to Cerutti.
“Yes.”
“And he wants to publish this novel in the West?”
Christopher, unresponsive, watched Cerutti’s eyes as a hunter will watch a covert, waiting for an animal to give way to fright and break into the open. Cerutti walked past Christopher to the water’s edge. He gazed for a moment into the discolored river.
“Have you the Russian original?”
“Yes,” Christopher said.
“There’s no question of authenticity?”
“It’s in his own handwriting.”
Cerutti spat into the moving water, turned around. He knew what Christopher was.
“What are you offering me?” he asked.
“World rights. You’d get three-fourths of all profits, according to whatever arrangements you make with publishers in other countries. One quarter goes into a Swiss account.”
“How quickly must we publish?”
“Quite soon. You’ll be told. You must be able to print at once, if necessary.”
“In French? Is there a translation?”
“No, you’ll have to do that. You must publish it in Russian at the same time. Even a little before the French, if it seems that that’s better.”
“In Russian?”
Christopher did not repeat himself.
“Do you know what that could mean for Kamensky?” Cerutti asked.
“I’ve described the situation.”
Cerutti had been standing with his heels on the edge of the embankment, the Seine at his back. There was no one in sight on either side of the river. He was a much smaller man than Christopher; he was almost an old man. He moved away from the water before he spoke again.
“I’ll need capital,” Cerutti said. “For the printers, the binders, the distributors. You must leave everything about the technical side in my hands.”
“And the publicity?”
“It’s best that you do everything. You know better than anyone how to arrange things in France.”
“You want no control?”
“I didn’t say that. Someone will come to you with contracts and the money you’ll need.”
“Evidently I’ll be a rich man before I know it.” Cerutti let himself be himself for an instant. “In memories as well,” he said, in a voice filled with scorn.
A pair of young gendarmes walked by, arguing about the Tour de France. The newspapers were full of advance stories on the great bicycle race.
“There’s one question before we part,” Christopher said. “Who was the Russian journalist in Madrid? The young fellow Otto was so friendly with?”
Cerutti held the manuscript more loosely now. He looked away, in thought.
“Everyone in those days had a nom de guerre,” he said. “This fellow called himself Kolka Zhigalko. Ask Otto, they were always together. Zhigalko used to go wild on cognac. He was a poet. He’d shout out his poems in Russian during a Fascist bombardment, stand on the roof of the hotel and do it, as if he were firing back at the enemy batteries.”
“Who else knew him?”
“Everyone, but they’re all dead. There was a Spaniard who hung around them a lot. He was some kind of lackey for Comrade Mediña, the Comintern instructor in Spain.”
“Name?”
“Carlos. He was a high-bred fellow, like Otto. Zhigalko called them the duke and the marquis. Zhigalko had learned to put his face in his plate and make noises like a dog when he ate, he was a real member of the proletariat. It was while observing Otto and Carlos watch Zhigalko at table that I saw they were both fallen aristocrats. They were excited by their disgust.”
“You don’t know what became of Carlos?”
Cerutti said again, “Ask Otto.”
Christopher took a fifty-franc note from his pocket, tore it in half, and gave one portion of it to Cerutti.
“Tomorrow, at nine in the morning,” Christopher said, “by the columns in the Parc Monceau. The man will give you the other half of this. And a copy of the Russian manuscript.”
“And the money.”
“Some of it.”
“How will I keep in touch?”
“The man will tell you all that.”
“Have you any last recommendation?”
“Be silent. Wait. Act openly, once Kamensky’s book is in the open.”
Cerutti fingered the torn money, shifted his grip on the manuscript.
“It’s wonderful, dealing with a professional,” he said. “You took me by surprise. I’d forgotten what a mistake it is to think another man is stupid.”
Christopher was out of the Hotel Vendôme in half an hour. He took his suitcase to the Aérogare des Invalides and left it in the baggage room. At noon he met Wilson in the safe house where Christopher and Patchen, weeks before, had first spoken of the possibility of Kamensky’s death. The secretary’s gown, smudged at the collar, still hung on the bathroom door.
Wilson took back Christopher’s false Canadian passport and the other identification describing Paul Cowan. He gave him back his own passport and wallet in a sealed envelope.
“Did you make Cerutti this morning?” Christopher asked.
“I watched the two of you saunter through the Luxembourg Gardens. I’ll know him.”
Wilson drew the blinds and turned on a reading lamp. He handed Christopher a plain file folder; inside it were Agency forms with the headings clipped off. The material dealt with the death of Horst Bülow.
“You read,” Wilson said, “I’ll wait.”
Christopher went through the pages rapidly. The material was terse. For the most part it was raw, but at the head of a page, sometimes, were numerals and letters of the alphabet that signified the degree of reliability the analysts had assigned to the source, and the degree of truthfulness they assumed for the material itself. No symbol existed to denote absolute reliability or absolute truth.
Christopher read the material twice over, then looked up at Wilson, who was peering at a stain on the ceiling.
“What do you make of it?” Wilson asked.
“It’s interesting. But it’s all hearsay, all speculation.”
“Sure it is. But the times and places fit. Contact breeds contact.”
Christopher asked another question. Wilson answered. In Christopher’s ear their voices sounded thin, because of what they were discussing.
“Do you think,” Christopher asked, “that I can talk to this German in Berlin, the one who saw Horst with the woman in the Tiergarten?”
Wilson, stolid, said, “I don’t know. It’s bad procedure. You’d have to let him see you. Why can’t I ask for you?”
“Because the fault was mine, for not foreseeing the problem. Because I know so much better than you do what the patterns of behavior would have been. I’d pick up on things you might not.”
Wilson drummed on the cover of his attaché case.
“Besides, I have another idea, something from a long time ago,” Christopher said. “I’ll give you that.”
Wilson didn’t ask what it was. He had no more desire than Christopher to go on talking about what the two of them suspected.
“I’ll try to fix you up with Berlin,” Wilson said. “Let’s meet here again, same time, next Friday. I think we ought to move slow, Paul.”
“Yes. But not so slowly that it happens again.”
Wilson gathered up the papers and put them back into his attaché case. He made a tour of the apartment to make sure nothing had been left behind. He washed the glasses they had used. Christopher left first; Wilson locked up.
Christopher wired Cathy that he would be home the following night, on the late flight. The telegram said nothing of flights or times; any phrase containing the word “love,” she understood, meant that he would land in Rome on the flight that arrived from Paris at one o’clock in the morning.
Next day, back in the safe house, Wilson showed Christopher the contracts Cerutti had signed.
“He’s hard-nosed,” Wilson said. “He wanted the handwritten Russian manuscript. Our fellow let him look at it, but not take it away. It’s got more fingerprints on it than a whore’s backside.”
Christopher read the contracts. He hadn’t seen them before, but they obligated Cerutti to deposit the moneys for Kamensky in a small bank in Lucerne. It was all laid out as Patchen had described.
Wilson put a receipt for twenty thousand dollars, in hundred-dollar bills with the serial numbers noted, in front of Christopher. There was a thumbprint, Cerutti’s, at the bottom of the page.
“He’s not going to remain unwitting for very long,” Christopher said, “if you have him signing for money with a thumbprint.”
“I cleared the procedure with Patchen. Cerutti’s better off realizing from the start that this is real life.”
“Patchen thought it was all right to blow me?”
Wilson was rummaging in his briefcase. “Cerutti knew what you were before he ever put his thumb in the ink,” he said. “He’ll never know who you are, and that’s what matters.”
Wilson found what he was looking for–a cheap French envelope from a bureau de tabac. He handed it, still sealed, to Christopher. “From Cerutti.” he said.
Inside, on a sheet of paper, was a typed name. Christopher looked away, then read the name again. He didn’t know how well he was controlling his face; had the man himself burst into the room he would have been all right, but the name, lying alone on the page, had taken him unawares. Cathy was infecting him.
Christopher showed the name to Wilson. The Security man copied it onto a file card and spoke the name aloud. “Jorge de Rodegas. Who’s that?” he said.
“Someone from the past, maybe a connection. Someone Cerutti knew in Madrid, when he knew Otto.” Wilson massaged his face and when he raised it he looked like a man tired to the bone.
“Pretty soon,” he said, “you and I are going to have to tell someone else about all this.”
Christopher rose to leave. He coughed on Wilson’s cigarette smoke.
“When you run the name check on Rodegas,” he said, “you’ll find that he’s my wife’s godfather.”
“You know him?”
“Cathy will introduce us,” Christopher said.