“Let me amuse you before we get down to brass tacks,” said Patchen. They were outdoors again in Paris, by the aviary in the Jardin des Plantes. Rain, falling the night before while Patchen was airborne from Washington and Christopher from Berlin, had laid the dust and left a fresh smell in the air. The tropical birds tumbled inside their great cage in the sunshot morning, their colors brighter than usual, as though the rain had washed them, too.
“I had lunch with Hopkins from the British service last week,” Patchen said, “and he remarked that I was looking rather peaked. ‘Been flying a lot, have you?’ he said. ‘In and out of time zones, in and out of climates?’ I was professionally noncommittal, but you know the Brits. Hopkins is like all the rest, not shy about asking questions.‘The jet aeroplane,’ he said, ‘really is the fatal weakness in American foreign policy. In our day, my dear fellow, we went out to those godforsaken places in gunboats–gave us weeks to think up what we were going to do to the Wogs when we got there. But you poor chaps can get to the Guinea Coast or Vietnam or wherever in a matter of hours. No time to think. That’s your dilemma. Like the birds you were given wings. You lost the need for ratiocination.’ I’d never heard that word used in conversation before.”
Patchen had shaved and he wore a fresh shirt, but his seersucker suit was rumpled after his night in the seat of an airplane. He was haggard, his eyes were bloodshot, and there remained on his breath the last faint odor of the alcohol he had drunk the night before. Christopher knew that Patchen must have something unpleasant to say if he would begin, as he had done, with small talk.
“I have come to tell you,” Patchen said, “that what you predicted would happen has begun to happen. Captain V. I. Kalmyk was arrested by the KGB in Warsaw ten days ago, and taken to Moscow to the cellars at No. 2 Ulitza Dzherzhinskogo. He broke after forty straight hours of interrogation. We had a further report, during the night, that Kalmyk was shot late yesterday.”
“That must mean they’ve picked up the next link in the courier chain.”
“Yes, and broken that man, too. If we knew how long the chain was, we’d know how much time we have to play with. But we don’t. Dick Sutherland says there may be only two or three roaches to step on–that’s KGB lingo, I’m told.”
“The broadcasts began after they broke Kalmyk. They won’t need to unravel the whole courier network in order to guess what Kalmyk gave to Horst.”
“No, but they don’t like loose ends. They’ll want to roll it up just to make things orderly.”
The Jardin des Plantes lay between the river and a railroad junction, and some of Patchen’s words were smothered by the drone of morning traffic on the quais of the Seine and the squeal and clatter of trains entering and leaving the Gare d’Austerlitz. Otto Rothchild had sounded as Patchen sounded now, in the days after his operation in February, when words and phrases were snuffed out by the aftereffects of what the surgeons had done for him in Zurich.
“Have you seen Cerutti since you got back from Berlin?” Patchen asked.
“No. There’s no hurry about it now. Wilson will pull off the surveillance when he gets back this afternoon.”
“I suppose there’s no point in going on with it.”
“None It’s served its purpose. But the girl may stay with him. She’s a competent translator, and I think we’ll need her. It’s not a bad thing to have an ear inside the house.”
“Even when it’s falling down,” Patchen said. “Tell me about Berlin.”
This time it was Christopher who took Patchen’s arm. Patchen flinched almost imperceptibly; Christopher thought that it must be distaste, to have even the hand of his best friend laid upon him, because Patchen knew already what Christopher was going to tell him. The death of Kalmyk in the punishment cells of the KGB’s center in Moscow had forewarned him.
“We’re not just speculating any longer,” Christopher said. “We can see their faces now.”
Patchen listened. There was no need to ask questions; Christopher gave him the details, one after the other–dates, places, methods.
“Everything but motive,” Patchen said at the end of Christopher’s report. “It’s quite a feat to do what you and Wilson have done, to work backward. Detectives are supposed to solve crimes by finding the motive.”
“I plan to go on a little longer.”
“Do that. I want to know. I don’t understand wanting the death of others–a poor fool like Bülow is the worst. You were right about that from the beginning. What could be worth it?”
“I don’t know. They’ll never tell, of course. It’s too deep. Barney, who ought to know, told me even torture can’t get a human being to confess a personal act that’s covered him with shame. Anything else, but not that.”
“You think that’s what it is?”
“Yes,” Christopher said.
Two attendants carrying cleaning tools entered the aviary. Patchen and Christopher moved away, toward the elephant cage. Patchen had saved the foil packages of nuts that he’d been given on the plane. Taking them from his pocket, he handed one to Christopher and kept one for himself. They fed the fancy nuts to the elephants.
“You think you can find out why in Spain?” Patchen asked.
“Even with Cathy right there? It’s not the ideal operational climate, is it? Bullfights and big luncheons and lazy afternoons in the hotel room?”
Patchen crumpled the empty package and threw it in a trash barrel. “Why does something as small as a nut mean so much to something as large as an elephant?” he asked. “I’m left with nothing to say except crap like that.”
“I’m meeting Cathy in Madrid day after tomorrow.”
“Because you can’t live without her, or because she can introduce you to this man Jorge de Rodegas?”
Christopher answered half of Patchen’s question. “Cathy knows Rodegas very well. Not only is he her godfather, he breeds Thoroughbreds. These horse people are worse than we are for living in each other’s pockets.”
“Everyone’s world is special,” Patchen said. “It’s funny, isn’t it, how outsiders, unwitting damned dreamers, are usually the ones who drive the last nail for us?”
Wilson had not learned to relax with a man of Patchen’s rank. He sat on the edge of his chair while he made his report. Patchen and Christopher had come first to the safe house, in the early evening, and they were drinking Scotch when Wilson arrived, straight from the airport. He refused whisky but got himself a can of beer.
“The fellow in the Turkish bath instantly made both photographs,” Wilson said. “Bülow and the female target.”
“Her, too?” Christopher said.
“I thought that would surprise you. It seems she came to the Schaefer Baths as a customer, to make the first contact. Evidently she had bona fides that she had to present in person.”
“Which were?”
“Details of an old operation during the last war. Schaefer let somebody slip through the Gestapo’s fingers in return for certain considerations–cash on the barrelhead and a good word for him in the right places after the war. This was in 1944–even SS sergeants had figured out who was going to win by that time.”
“Can we cross-check?” Patchen asked.
Wilson hastily swallowed a mouthful of beer, almost choking on it. He nodded deferentially to Christopher.
“My suggestion would be to have Paul draw it out of Cerutti. He was involved. Schaefer remembered that cover name of his, Frère éméché. He said he knew a literary type must be using it–no one has used a word like éméché in French since Rabelais.”
“I want to go back to something,” Christopher said. “She came to the Schaefer Baths as a customer?”
Wilson was truly embarrassed. “Yes, according to Schaefer. She walked in stark naked, sat on the edge of his desk, and laid it all out. Wolkowicz was amused. He asked a lot of questions.”
“What sort of questions?” Patchen asked.
“About her appearance. Schaefer was impressed. He said she was like a ripe peach. I guess he doesn’t get many women in his establishment with bodies like hers.”
“I’m surprised she’d show it to Schaefer,” Christopher said.
“Technique,” said Patchen, once more the misogynist. “Women are born with a sense of it.”
Wilson’s file cards made a thick pile now, frayed at the edges. He slipped the heavy rubber band that held them together over his wrist and began to read. The woman had contacted Schaefer on January 14, almost three weeks before Wolfram’s surveillance had begun.
“Where was Christopher on that date?” Patchen asked.
“In the Congo,” Wilson said. He pointed a finger at Christopher. “Did the target know that?”
“That I was not in Europe, yes.”
Wilson made another notation, nodding. He rubbed his eyes before he spoke again. “The woman had two sets of photocopies –one to reassure Schaefer and let him know that her principal was his old pal from Occupied France,” Wilson said. “The second was incriminating documents, signed by Bülow at the Hotel Lutetia in ‘44. They were death warrants for a bunch of Resistance leaders.”
Wilson repeated Schaefer’s description of the scene. The woman, naked, sat with her legs crossed, watching him at his desk as he read the photocopies that could send him to prison for twenty years. She asked him for a cigarette and then for a light. Schaefer thought she wanted to see if his hand trembled, because she snuffed out the cigarette after one puff.
“Then she asked Schaefer if he knew anyone in Berlin who could kill with a car,” Wilson said. “He told the gal he didn’t know such people any longer. She wouldn’t take no for an answer. After some special persuasion, as Schaefer called it, he gave her a phone number. He tried to suggest the special persuasion included sex–but, Paul, I don’t believe that.”
“Have you a tape of this conversation?” Patchen asked.
“No. Schaefer will only converse with naked people. Barney made him strip, too. We talked in the outdoor swimming pool. I must say it’s good protection for him.”
“Schaefer claims that was the end of the deal, on his side–giving her the phone number?”
“Tried to,” Wilson said, “but Barney wouldn’t buy it. Finally Schaefer said, okay, so I passed a little money for this woman. That’s what he did–set up the kill, paid the killers. He was the broker. The target gave him the whole scenario.”
Wilson went on in his level tone of voice. His words were transformed in Christopher’s mind into a running series of illuminations: Horst Bülow hearing from his old sergeant, his obsequious old under-headwaiter at the Jockey Restaurant. Horst coming to the baths, naked and sweating in a room with strangers, being told that his past in the Abwehr could be brought to the attention of the East Germans; perhaps even that his present position as an American spy could be exposed. Horst being given bait–money, the promise of a girl, the flattery of being the key to a big operation that would hurt no one, the lost pleasure of working in secret again with Germans instead of foreigners. Being given, finally, the phone number to call to set up his own murder.
“That’s how it was,” Wilson said. “Simplicity itself. The night before he went into East Germany to pick up the package, he phoned and set up a meeting at the zoo at 0618 the next morning. He thought they were going to ram your car, take the manuscript, and run with it.”
“Didn’t he think they’d kill Paul?”
“Horst tried to protect Christopher, according to Schaefer. Horst said Paul was his agent, a mere courier. Bülow implied that he was pretty big stuff in the spy game still. Killing Christopher would be unprofessional, he kept on saying.”
Patchen waited, to see if anything would be added. Wilson went through his cards, checking off the items he had covered.
“Who did Schaefer think the naked lady was?”
Wilson shook his head in admiration. “He has no more idea than the man in the moon. She spoke French to him with a Russian accent. She turned him into a cut-out on the first night. He hired other cut-outs. There were three layers of soundproofing between the killers and this dame.”
“What did Schaefer think she was?”
“Dynamite. Scary. He figured her for the opposition right from the start. It was her cold-bloodedness.”
Wilson had arranged to have the surveillance logs for the past forty-eight hours brought to the safe house. He met the courier in the hall and shut him up in there with a second radio playing at high volume.
It didn’t take Wilson long to go through the material; he had been given synopses, not the minute-by-minute, word-for-word raw logs. Twice he got out a fresh file card and recorded new facts. He put the papers back in the envelope, sealed it, went into the hall, and saw the courier out the door before he spoke again to Patchen and Christopher.
“Two new items,” Wilson said, holding up the white cards one after the other. “First, Moroni is in Spain, shooting his movie. The German girl says he did some crowd scenes in Pamplona during the fiesta and then went on to Madrid.”
He cleared his throat and, quickly, sipped beer from his can of Schlitz.
“And, believe it or not, audio surveillance finally turned up something. The target, talking to her case officer. They’ve had a surprise, Paul. They’re upset. But, Jesus, they’re professional– they want to turn it back on us. On you. They don’t miss a trick.”
Wilson didn’t read aloud from this card, but handed it to Patchen, who read it and passed it to Christopher. Wilson took the card back and tapped it against his front teeth.
“We know she’s a cold one,” Wilson said. “But, Paul, will she really try to use this on you?”
Christopher was tired. His bones ached–ankles and shins and the reconstructed joint of his knee. He wanted to eat something and go to sleep.
“I guess I’ll find out when I see her,” Christopher said.
Cerutti met Christopher at the mouth of the Metro station at Porte Dauphine. He carried all the morning papers under his arm, and his face was reddened by agitation. But he kept discipline and followed Christopher at a discreet ten paces into the Bois de Boulogne. When they were alone, on a bench beneath a plane tree, Cerutti threw the stack of newspapers onto the wooden seat between them.
“You’ve seen the wire service stories?”
“Yes.”
“Kamensky’s novel is being read over the propaganda radio. They are broadcasting his name!”
“That’s what the papers say.”
Cerutti pounded his small fist into his palm. There was ink from the fresh newsprint on his fingers, and it was smeared on his face as well.
“Who is responsible?”
“Whoever stole the proofs from the printer, I suppose,” Christopher said.
“But to know it was Kamensky’s work? Who knew that?”
Christopher, who had been looking upward into the dappled interior of the spreading tree, slowly turned his head and gazed without expression into Cerutti’s eyes. Cerutti recoiled.
“You’re maddened by your trade if you think that of me,” he said.
“Am I?”
In one of his darting movements, Cerutti rose from the bench and crossed to the other side of the path. From there he stared at Christopher.
“Yes, crazy,” he said, “like every one of you I’ve ever known since 1918. It doesn’t matter where you come from, what government sends you out. You’re a nationality to yourselves, a species to yourselves. You think everyone is like you. Merely to be in the thoughts of men like you is an insult.”
Christopher neither moved nor spoke. Cerutti came back and sat down. He was breathing rapidly. He continued to hold Christopher’s eyes. There really was no fear in him; if the file on his long life in an age of political panic showed anything, it showed that.
“It didn’t occur to me to accuse you, Claude,” Christopher said. “The harm is done. It has nothing to do with our arrangement. There’s no point in chewing it over. We need each other. We’ll go on with what we were doing.”
“But this changes everything.”
“It restores everything to what it was at the beginning. Put Kamensky’s name back on the book.”
“And then?”
“Behave like a publisher. Obviously this situation is going to generate its own publicity. Act normally, as you would if all this were honest. If you need money, call. I won’t advise you further on how to handle the book. Sell it to whoever wants it for whatever you can get for it. Just run with it.”
Cerutti, fingering the rosette in his lapel, went blank for a time.
“What a joke the past seems,” he said. “When I saw what Kamensky had entitled this novel which says everything about the torment of my generation, I was angered. He had spat on our lives and on his own great work with such a title–how can you translate it? ‘Death, My Pet,’ ‘Deathikins’? But then I saw. Kamensky went down deeper into this age of idealism than any of us. Despair, anguish, betrayal, sacrifice–my God, Paul, some submitted to castration, the actual surgical removal of the testicles, and went on like steers, loving their masters, believing in the humanity of the Party. We thought it meant something to die for an idea. In the last moment, it’s all a joke, the kiss of a whore.”
Bit by bit, as the morning passed, Cerutti told Christopher about the past.
“It’s kind of you to get my mind off Kamensky, and what this is going to mean for him.”
“I’m interested,” Christopher said. He asked a question about the Hotel Lutetia. He mentioned the name Schaefer had had when he was an SS sergeant. Cerutti was alert again.
“You know a great deal, don’t you?” he said. “We’re pickled, all of us, in the ink of those secret clerks.”
Cerutti related the story. In 1944, before the invasion of Normandy, the German security apparatus was rolling up Maquis networks all over France. But Cerutti’s network, with Otto Rothchild handling security, was untouched. Then, somehow, Otto had learned that the network had been penetrated. A woman, one of their best operatives, was working for the Germans. Otto confronted her. She made no attempt to resist his suspicions. Before the war, she had had a Jewish lover; her child belonged to the Jew, who was already cremated in Auschwitz. The Germans knew where the child was hidden in the countryside. She would kill the whole network to save the child.
“Otto came to me; I had a certain feeling for this girl,” Cerutti said. “He asked me how to handle it–the only occasion in all our time together he ever asked advice. It was because I loved the girl. I had no ideas; I said I’d do anything to help. I thought of killing her myself, as a favor to a comrade. For the others who trusted her to find out what she was would be like leaving her wounded on the battlefield.”
Rothchild, as always, had had an idea. He decided to redouble the woman, play her back against the Germans. She was terrified for her child. Rothchild told her he would rescue the child at night from the farm where he was staying near Pau, and get him across the Pyrenees. The woman was terrified for herself. Rothchild guaranteed her life. A person detected in treason will believe anything of a man who shows no anger. Patiently questioning, putting details together, Rothchild identified the German officer who was handling her.
“This man was a Gestapo type,” Cerutti said. “In early ‘44 he was still wearing Wehrmacht uniform and Abwehr badges, but he had the power of life and death over any non-German in France. He was in Abwehr Section III F at the Hotel Lutetia, the section that killed Resistance fighters after suitable torture. But Otto had found a key. He’d known this Abwehr officer in Berlin before the war.”
“He showed himself to this German?”
“No, Otto played him with the girl. Otto knew something about this German officer. I don’t know what it was. A weakness.”
Rothchild had found a way. He came back to Cerutti, reminding him that he had offered to do anything. Rothchild asked him to put himself, for one day, into the hands of the SS.
“What were Otto’s words to you?”
“He said, ‘You may die. We both know that. But if you don’t, we can save everything, and have more besides.’ “
At this period, vast sums of money were coming into France from Britain for the support of the Maquis. Rothchild was a handler of money. Here Cerutti hesitated.
“This is terribly difficult, even after all these years,” he said.
Christopher stopped walking. Cerutti halted as well, and spoke into the air, with his face averted.
“Rothchild, by now known by the German to be the man beyond the girl, found out what networks were going to be rolled up by the Germans. He warned London about all but one–the one that was expecting a large shipment of funds on a certain day. He gave the German the date on which the money was coming in.”
“How could he have known?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps Otto was the backup in case the man who was supposed to receive it was lost. Perhaps someone in the doomed network just told him. Security was not always the best in the Resistance. Otto, even then, had lines out everywhere. On the night the money came, he gave me and the girl to the Germans–that is, to the Abwehr officer and the SS sergeant, who were splitting the money. It was a vast sum. They wanted a true hostage, me; they assumed that Otto didn’t care what they did to the girl, after what she’d done to us.”
Cerutti, with the girl, spent the night with Schaefer in a Maquis safe house in a warehouse behind the Gare de Lyon. Schaefer, without removing his uniform, used the girl several times as they waited for the money to come.
“The idea of the money excited him, the girl could feel no more shame,” Cerutti said. “You must remember, I’d loved this woman. It wasn’t easy.”
All had gone according to Rothchild’s plan. The Germans had got their money. They let Cerutti and the woman go, and even gave them papers to travel to the Pyrenees.
“I’m surprised they didn’t kill you,” Christopher said. “They had what they wanted, and you were witnesses.”
“I was amazed. I can only assume that Otto had promised them something else. The war was ending, the Germans were losing.”
Rothchild preserved his network. When the Americans came he put it at the disposal of their newborn intelligence service, as if the British and the Gaullists didn’t exist. The Americans accepted, and Otto did invaluable things for them in France and later in Germany.
“What happened to the girl and her child?” Christopher asked.
“I took them myself through the mountains to the Spanish frontier,” Cerutti said. “It was night and I was carrying the child on my back. The guide was ahead of me, and the girl, Solange was her name, was behind. When we got to the frontier, I handed the child–it was hardly more than a baby and we’d given it cognac to make it sleep–to the man who met us, and turned around to say good-bye to Solange.”
The woman wasn’t there. Cerutti went back down the path, feeling his way around rocks on the strange terrain, and at last he found her. She was lying in a patch of snow that hadn’t yet been melted by the April sun, and she had cut her own throat with a razor blade.
“I went into Spain with the child,” Cerutti said. “It couldn’t be left alone.”
He remained in Spain until the end of that summer, crossing back into France when the Americans had cleared the German army out of the south. He left the child with a Spanish family.
“Otto raged at me when he found that out,” Cerutti said. “He hated Spain, the very dust and stones of it. I wanted him to cross the Pyrenees for safety’s sake, after that business in Paris, but no. There had been too much shame and defeat in Spain for him ever to set foot in it again, he said. I’ve often wondered–what could have been so much worse that happened to him, and to all of us, in Spain, than what happened in France during the war?”
“Maybe it was winning in the end, the second time.”
Cerutti smiled, the first time he had done so since he and Christopher had met in the early morning.
“Very possibly,” he said. “Victors are washed of their sins.”
Maria Rothchild, in another part of the Bois, had coaxed a squirrel to eat from her hand. Christopher stopped at the turning of the path, so as not to frighten the animal, where he caught sight of her. Maria wore a flowing summer dress, the skirt spreading around her in a perfect circle on the grass. She saw Christopher at once; her white teeth flashed in her tan face and she stood up in a swirl of pastels. The squirrel scampered away, scolding. Maria gave Christopher the second signal to approach; she lifted an arm and grinned again, the spontaneous gesture of a woman delighted by the sight of an old friend.
“You’re getting quite a tan,” Christopher said. “Have you been slipping away to the Côte d’Azur for weekends?”
“No, lunch on the terrace, and reading in the park on the afternoons when I can get Otto to take his pill and sleep.”
She appraised Christopher.
“You look like you need a vacation.”
“I’m going to take one,” he said. “If you don’t prevent it.”
“Me?”
“The message said you wanted an urgent meeting, Maria. Here I am.”
Slung on a strap over her shoulder, Maria carried an airline bag–Royal Thai Airlines; she was not immune, she said, to the chic of having flown to romantic destinations.
“Let’s go a little way off the path,” she said.
Christopher followed her across the grass. She wore a sundress, and the bared skin of her back, with columns of muscle along the spine, was smooth and as brown as her face. She found a place that suited her, in a glen, and knelt on the grass. From the airline bag she took a light picnic blanket, shook out its folds, and spread it.
“You’ve nothing better to do for lunch, I hope?” she said.
She laid two large ham sandwiches on the blanket, and some fruit and cheese. She handed Christopher a bottle of wine and a corkscrew and produced two wineglasses, wrapped in napkins.
“No paper cups,” she said. “I remember your foibles, Paul, quite as if we’d been more than friends once upon a time.”
She held up her wineglass to be filled, and lifted it to him. “To ties that bind,” she said.
Holding the glass at arm’s length so that it could not spill on her dress, Maria reached into her bosom, groped for a moment, biting her lip in embarrassment, and produced a soiled envelope, folded in three. She handed it to Christopher.
“Otto got this in the mail,” she said.
She held out her hand for Christopher’s wineglass; there was no level place to set it down. Christopher opened the envelope.
Inside, in the same tiny, nearly illegible hand in which he had written his novel, was a letter from Kiril Kamensky. Christopher turned his body until the sun, which fell only in spots in the glade where he and Maria were picnicking, shone fully on the flimsy page.
“You can translate at sight, can’t you?” Maria asked.
“Yes, I’m used to his style now.”
The letter bore the date of the first broadcast of Kamensky’s novel into the Soviet Union. He had noted the time at the top of the sheet: 6:30 in the morning. Kamensky opened with a description of the dawn: the birches marching into the eye as the light revealed them, the temperature of the air, the smell of the lumber dacha, the sounds of a woman rattling pots, snapping a sheet as she made the bed, throwing open windows, beginning a song and interrupting it for a new task. Then, on the back of the sheet, Kamensky wrote:
As I love you, I know it cannot be you who betrayed me. I heard my life in the air an hour ago, or heard the end of it, as one hears thunder a long way off, and sees the flash long before lightning or shrapnel pierces the flesh. I had hoped to appear harmless, to have “last years,” to be quiet, to be old, to be alone. Foolishness. I know the world too well to have dreamt as I did of playing at happiness. Don’t torment yourself with what has been done. Don’t imagine that my trust in you is broken. Don’t imagine that I have forgotten anything, not the smallest detail of our province of the past; it is like a bar of music in the skull of a man long since deaf. No sense shouting poetry at the howitzers. No sense in any of it except the meeting of man with man. Stop them now if you can. Perhaps then I’ll live a little longer. If you cannot, I forgive you. And the others, too. I brought my book to life; it sent me to my death. It was a long, long march. I took the first step of it before my murderers were born; they were waiting, invisible as ova, to be fertilized by the blind swimmers that gushed from the brutal ape that was our new age.
Christopher held the letter in his hand, a badly made sheet of foolscap that soaked up the ink of Kamensky’s pen. “Is this all?”
“I mean just this one sheet. There’s no salutation, no signature.”
“His other letter was the same.”
“This came to your house? When? What postmark?”
“No, not to the house. To a poste restante, one of Otto’s accommodation addresses. Day before yesterday. The postmark was Helsinki, like the other.”
“How did Kamensky get hold of an accommodation address?”
“I’ve no idea, nor has Otto. This mail drop was used strictly for nonsensitive material. Otto gave it to a lot of people. Anyone, traveling in Russia and meeting Kamensky, could have given it to him. You knew this.”
“No.”
“Then Wilson-Watson-Wharton did. I remember going over it, Otto going over it.”
Maria gave Christopher back his wineglass. She held her hand out, palm flat. “Otto would like to keep the original,” she said. “I’ve brought you film of it so you’ll have all the copies you need.”
Christopher folded the letter, put it back into the envelope, and gave it to Maria. She tucked it back into the neck of her dress. “This is a damn uncomfortable secret hiding place,” she said. “I only own one bra, and only wear it when I’m smuggling supersensitive stuff. So it’s been years.”
Christopher drank a little of the wine and ate some cheese. Maria had been eating while he read. She wrapped the remnant of her chewed sandwich in its waxed paper and put it away. Then she turned her face to the sun as Christopher had turned Kamensky’s letter, and, shaking back her hair, closed her eyes against the heat.
“What was Otto’s reaction to this?” Christopher asked.
“Devastation. He didn’t understand at first what Kamensky was saying. He didn’t know the broadcasts had begun–didn’t know there were going to be broadcasts. Who’s responsible for that?”
“Not I.”
“I didn’t suppose so, after that scene you played the last time you saw Otto.”
“What would Otto do, if he were still doing things?”
Maria opened her eyes and spun round on the blanket. She crossed her legs modestly under her full skirt.
“What anyone would do–nothing. The situation is irretrievable, isn’t it?”
“I’d say so.”
“But you wouldn’t say, would you–being the sort of chap you are–that you were right from the beginning, that there was nothing in this for Kamensky but death?”
Maria waited a moment, her eyes bright with the stony control she had learned in her years as a professional. When Christopher didn’t answer, she said, “You’re not eating.”
“No.”
“Otto asks me to tell you this: You were right, he was wrong. He apologizes and wishes to see you soon.”
Christopher gave her back his wineglass, still half full. He stood up; Maria remained on the bright blanket, woven of the lightest wool, designed by an artist–like all the Rothchilds’ possessions, it was a ceremonial object.
“My part of the message is this,” she said. “I’m not quoting Otto but my intuition as a wife. Otto, for the first time, is feeling the sorrow of death. I’ve never seen him as he’s been since that letter came.”
She paused. She drank Christopher’s wine. She was not like herself; she went on talking, as if Christopher were a man for whom explanations had to be rephrased.
“Do you feel what Otto’s feeling–perhaps a little of it?”
“I don’t think so,” Christopher said. “I’m not a Russian, after all.”
Maria took what he said as a statement of fact, nothing more. Insult was not possible between them. She burrowed in her airline bag and brought out a zippered leather case of the kind that men use for toilet articles when traveling. She opened the zipper and showed Christopher what was inside–yellow spools of undeveloped film, each with a number pasted on it. “My pictures of The Little Death,” Maria said, “the ones I took for Otto. The film has never been developed.”
“What would I do with it?”
“Otto thought you might like to know it wasn’t our copy of Kiril Alekseivich’s novel that was sent to the radio operation.”
“Tell Otto I never thought it was,” Christopher said. “I’ll be around to see him in a week or so.”
Maria was on her knees again, packing the picnic back into the bag.
“Then you really are going to take some time off?”
“A few days.”
“Sunshine and Cathy?”
Christopher nodded.
“Who could ask for anything more?” Maria inquired.
Maria slung her airline bag over her shoulder. She lifted a hand, as if to touch his face; he wondered if the first signs of loss showed in him as new love was supposed to do. Why else was everyone moved to touch him? Maria didn’t complete the gesture. She blew him a kiss, and swung away through the trees with her rippling athlete’s stride.