The estancia of Don Jorge de Rodegas lay many miles from Madrid, and Christopher and Cathy left the city before first light. They drove with the top down in the chill of the dawn, and then northward into the kiln of the summer morning, through the scorched, rising country of Old Castile. On the horizon were lines of trees, bent by the shimmering heat as the spinnakers of a sailing squadron are tilted by the wind. Nearer were the villages, cubes of earthy masonry with their blind walls turned toward the road. Cathy imagined twisted dwarfs in their streets, and widows in black, and a corrupt priest, also in black, commanding the parents of beautiful virgins to marry them to the humpbacked sons of rich fathers. Christopher tried to make her see in the bleached sky and the bleak landscape and the severe peasant architecture the colors and forms in the painting of Picasso and Juan Gris. But Cathy preferred ghosts and monsters. Wrapped round her head she wore a scarf of the same changing blue shades as her elongated eyes; as the heat increased she took it off, and knotted one end to her new necklace. Her hair and the silk, gold and blue, flew behind them like pennants. She had bought a guitar in Madrid, and when she could no longer get music on the radio she played the instrument and sang. Her small, true voice sounded, in the rushing open car filled with wind, like that of a person singing in a wood–muffled, and coming from no direction that could be identified. She could not bear the lunar silences of Spain’s empty places; she had only recently begun to learn to bear silence at all.
There was a ringing silence when Christopher turned off the engine of the car in the flagged outer courtyard of the country house of Don Jorge de Rodegas. They were expected for the midday meal, and they had arrived at one o’clock, a polite hour. The great stone house, lying at the end of a pebble road in a deep valley, was shuttered. They had driven down an avenue of olive trees; there was a lake made from a dammed river below the house, and they had seen water spraying gardens beyond high green hedges, and smelled flowers growing. On the irrigated green hillsides, little herds of horses grazed in the shade of trees. Everywhere on this land trees had been planted for the comfort of the horses. Here, there was everything for the eye, but nothing for the ear. Christopher and Cathy heard no sound at all; even the horses, drugged by the heat, did not snort or stamp or whinny. A pair of large Scotch deerhounds loped around the corner of the house; they sat down side by side and looked at the humans, but did not bark. Cathy spoke to them. They didn’t move or pant or wag their tails. Like hidalgos who never remove their coats, the dogs took no notice of the heat.
Christopher and Cathy got out of the car, and at that moment two young servants in livery, wearing white gloves, emerged from the house. They were followed by a grander servant in a tailcoat. “Mendoza, the butler,” said Cathy. “I thought the first time I came here and saw him in his buttons that if Don Jorge was a duke, then Mendoza must be the king.” Mendoza was very tall, with the blond hair and the light eyes of Navarre; they were on the borders of that province. He spoke gravely to Cathy, with a shading of familiarity: “Senorita Caterina.” He had known her from young girlhood. Cathy spoke to him in French; he understood all that she said, but answered in Spanish. He made no sign, when Christopher addressed him in Spanish, that he had noticed that husband and wife were talking different languages. Don Jorge was in the pastures with the horses, but he would return for luncheon at three.
Mendoza led them through the door and into the inner courtyard, flagged and tiled, with loggias on all four sides and a high fountain playing in the center; citrus trees grew within the walls, oranges, lemons, and limes, filling the air with a scent so heavy that it was apprehended not so much in the nostrils as in the roof of the mouth. They followed Mendoza down a long dim corridor, over carpets that Otto Rothchild, Christopher imagined, would have bent to kiss. Except for the portraits that lined the walls, the house reminded Christopher of the palace of an amir where he had once stayed in the Sudan. It had the same stillness, the same sense that the house and everyone in it were suspended out of ordinary time and place. Each was ruled by a man whose absolute authority was never exerted because it was never questioned.
Their luggage somehow reached their rooms before they did, and the maids were unpacking it as they came in; other maids were drawing baths. When they were alone, Cathy stood in the center of the sitting room, surrounded by vases of cut flowers on all the tables, and smiled in triumph.
“How long have you been coming here?” Christopher asked.
“Every fall, after the Paris racing season, since I was thirteen. Twelve years. I came down last October to be with Mama and Papa for a weekend while you were in Asia.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“I wrote. It was one of those letters that never found you, and it came back. You never opened it.”
There was a Velázquez on one wall, a Goya on another, portraits of Don Jorge’s ancestors–females and children. Cathy drank a glass of mineral water. She peeled an orange and gave half of it to Christopher. The moist green leaves were still on the stem to show that it was freshly picked. While she ate her portion she wandered around the room, looking at the pictures and removing her clothes, as if she were in a hotel suite. Naked, squinting with the pleasure of biting into each sweet section of orange, she walked into the bathroom, and soon Christopher heard her settle with a sigh into the tub. He went into a separate bathroom and bathed himself. The absolute silence was broken by the voice of a woman, singing as she swept the flagstones below his window.
It was evident that Don Jorge de Rodegas loved Cathy. He shook hands gravely with Christopher and looked him in the eye without a flicker of expression. But his face, tanned like a fine hide by decades of exposure to the weathers of the Meseta, glowed with joy when he turned to Cathy. He gathered her into his arms and kissed her on the forehead and both cheeks, then stood back from her, with his hands on her elbows, and examined her musing face.
“Perfect,” he said. “My dear Christopher, you have married the only perfect woman who has lived on this earth since ancient times.”
He spoke English like an Englishman. Cathy had named his English public school and his college at Oxford.
Champagne was brought to them and they drank, standing. The room was lined from floor to ceiling with paintings by the Spanish masters; most of the men, conquerors, were painted full-length. They all looked like Don Jorge–thin figures in close-fitting black, like columns of smoke against the landscapes behind them, with cruelty sleeping in their immobile faces.
At luncheon Rodegas asked Christopher to excuse his rudeness while he asked Cathy a number of questions about her parents and about horses. He seemed to know by name every animal on the Kirkpatricks’ farm. He and Cathy discussed bloodlines and speed, and Christopher had never seen her so much at ease. Nothing showed in Rodegas’s face when, upon asking, he learned that Christopher could not ride.
“What luck for me,” Don Jorge said; “I can ride in the morning alone with my cousin. With your permission.”
Rodegas told them that he had arranged nothing special for the weekend; there was not much suitable company nearby, and he had supposed that the usual country-house entertainment in Spain, the fighting of heifers and the shooting of game birds, wouldn’t interest them.
“You are,” he said to Christopher, “a poet?”
“He is,” said Cathy.
“Your mother-in-law was kind enough to send me a copy of one of your books. I liked the sonnets very much.” He quoted lines from two of them. “I’ve had the volume bound; perhaps you’d sign it for me.”
Rodegas studied Christopher. Cathy took his attention away with a description of Paco Camino’s fight, just before San Fermin, in the ring at Barcelona. The corrida had been held in the rain, Camino had been gored by the second bull, but not badly, and had continued, bleeding, and taking greater and greater chances, until even the Spaniards in the crowd were moved. One man, sitting beside Cathy at the barrera, had wept openly.
“There have been others like Camino,” Don Jorge said. “I wonder if the old ones were as classical as they say?”
“Surely you’ve seen some of the famous ones of the last twenty or thirty years?”
“Most of them. They’re not so wonderful in memory as they seemed at the time. I no longer go to bullfights.”
“You feel they’ve been corrupted?”
“They were always corrupt. Pablo Picasso is said to have remarked of some Germans who liked bullfights, ‘They would–they like bloodshed.’ Very Spanish, that–to believe that only Spaniards can understand Spanish things.”
Christopher smiled at him. “You must not have seen much of other nationalities, here in the mountains.”
“Not recently,” said Don Jorge, dabbing moisture from his lips with a napkin.
“Tonight,” Cathy said, “I have a wish. Will you two grant it?”
Rodegas turned his smile on her. “I say yes, Catherine, without even asking what it is. Tell me at dinner what it is you want.”
“All right.”
“What I shall want,” Don Jorge said, “is to hear you play, and it’s my wish that you should wear a white dress, if you have one with you.”
After the dessert, Cathy left them; it was a Spanish house after all, she said. Rodegas smoked a cigar while he and Christopher drank coffee. He chose to speak of poetry; he believed that only two languages, English and Russian, were capable of producing great poetry. Christopher asked if he spoke Russian as well as English; Rodegas let the question go by and pressed Christopher for his opinion on this idea.
“I’ve heard that said, often,” Christopher replied. “Always, before this, by Englishmen or Americans or Russians.”
“Well. I’m a sort of Englishman, my mind was formed in England. It always seemed odd to me that Russian should be the other language of great poetry, when the Russians are, generally speaking, so contemptuous of self-control. Poetry ought to deal with what did not happen.”
Rodegas led Christopher out of the dining room. In the great hall, he showed him a portrait of a young woman in ringlets; a large ruby glowed between her fine breasts. “My father called this the sacred heart portrait,” Rodegas said. “It’s Eugenie, of course. My ancestress, and Catherine’s. They do look rather alike, don’t they? But Eugenie, poor woman, seems a bad copy of a masterpiece beside Catherine.”
That evening, they strolled in the garden. It was a hodgepodge of the Moorish, French, and Italian styles, with avenues of trees, beds of flowers planted in elaborate designs, a maze, and many fountains. One of Don Jorge’s ancestors had come back from Versailles in the eighteenth century and installed a number of water jokes–jets that sprayed upward from the paths into women’s skirts, or outward from the walls into the face and hair. Don Jorge, cautioning them to stand well back, sprang some of the traps. “These devices to mock and shatter dignity were never a great success with Spaniards,” he said. “My grandfather used to demonstrate them on foreign servants specially hired for the purpose. I remember him doing so when I was a child.”
Mendoza and two footmen brought them cocktails, dry martinis containing olives stuffed with almonds. They drank two very large ones each, seated on a bench in a grotto with cool water running down the walls and bubbling out of the floor everywhere but on the stone island where they sat. One of the footmen stood just outside the grotto; the other, returning to the house with Mendoza, sang as he went. Rodegas asked Cathy what her wish was.
“I want you to talk about yourself, for a whole evening, Don Jorge,” she said. “Especially about your youth–love and war.”
The footman returned with more martinis, in fresh glasses, and another plate of canapes.
“You wouldn’t be amused,” Rodegas said. “There was no love and too much war.”
“I insist.”
“Then I surrender. But not tonight. You must first play for me. Tomorrow morning we’ll ride. Then we’ll see.” He turned to Christopher. “Perhaps she’ll forget by tomorrow.”
“She never forgets an appetite.”
“So she doesn’t.”
At dinner, an elaborate meal with long pauses between the courses, Rodegas asked about their life together. Cathy spoke of the journeys they had taken, of their meetings in Paris and Madrid and London, and how once she had come to Nairobi and Christopher had taken her up into the hills to see the game, and read to her from Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa the account of the death of the author’s lover. Rodegas nodded and quoted from the book: “ It was fit and proper that lions should come to Denys’s grave and make him an African monument. . . . Lord Nelson himself, I have reflected, in Trafalgar Square, has had his lions made only out of stone.’ ” Cathy, wearing the long white gown that Don Jorge had asked to see her in, said that it was unbearable that Christopher and Rodegas, the two men she loved beyond reason, should both be in love with the ghost of this Danish girl who had lived in the Ngong Hills when the one was a schoolboy and the other a child.
“I should think you would find it unbearable, to be apart so much,’ ” Rodegas said, “and to live so much in public when you’re together.”
“Those parts are no great fun,” Cathy said.
Rodegas studied her with great seriousness, but if he saw her unhappiness he said nothing about it.
“I didn’t realize,” he said to Christopher with a smile, “that poets traveled quite so much as you seem to do.”
“Most don’t, I suppose,” Christopher said.
“And what is he looking for, Catherine, in Germany and in Africa and in Indochina, and following the bulls in Spain?”
“I don’t know,” Cathy said. “He has his reasons.”
Cathy began to play at midnight. Rodegas and Christopher, drinking French cognac, sat in deep chairs at the other end of the room, so that they could hear the full resonance of the piano. Rodegas had a taste, surprising in so arid a man, for Chopin and even Schumann. These were easy exercises for Cathy; she played for hours. It rained, a sudden downpour, outside the open window behind her. She played on through the storm. The wind blew the music off the rack and she completed the piece without an error. Don Jorge applauded and a servant, responding to the handclaps, came in and collected the scattered sheets.
“That was much more pleasant than memories of war,” Rodegas said.
“Nevertheless,” said Cathy. “I demand a story tomorrow night.”
Their bedroom was at the end of the house, so that one set of windows opened on the courtyard with its fountain and the other looked out on the slope of the mountain, which was strewn with white boulders. There was a bright moon and for a while they watched the horses, some of them dozing and some grazing in its light.
In bed, Cathy said, “Listen, Paul–the fountain on one side, dead silence on the other.”
Like the Trevi and the Piazza Oratorio, Christopher thought.
“That was a stupid thing to say,” Cathy said, as if he had thought aloud. “I forget I can’t be completely honest with you anymore.”
Neither of them could sleep, they had had such a long siesta and eaten so much food. Cathy spoke to Christopher about her ride with Don Jorge the following morning. She knew they would talk about Christopher. She did not want to deceive him.
“Can’t you tell him what you are, before I make him tell you what you want to know?”
“No. It’s not done; I can’t do it, literally cannot speak the words to an outsider. Anyway, I think Don Jorge already has a good idea of what I am. He himself has been something like me in the past.”
Still, Cathy worried. It was wrong to trick a man in his own house, especially a man one knew and loved.
“Can’t I tell him, while we’re riding in the morning?” she asked. “Believe me, nothing will make him betray you; you’re married to me.”
“All right,” Christopher said; it was what he had wanted her to do.
At dinner, Cathy wanted Don Jorge to begin his confessions with the history of his loves.
“Why, for example,” she asked, “do you and Paul pine for that Danish woman who wrote about Kenya?”
“Because of the beauty of her mind, because she accepted her womanhood, and in her books, at least, took no revenge on anyone for it,” Don Jorge said. “Weren’t you moved by what she wrote, Catherine, when Paul read it to you?”
“I wept. But I get so sick of that word beauty. It’s a male word. Do you live for anything else, any of you?”
Rodegas gave her a serene look, as if the sight of her were answer enough to the question.
“That look!” Cathy said. “All my life I’ve seen it. If it comes from someone I love, such as either of you, I don’t mind; in fact I adore it. But others, all my life, have made me feel like an animal that has the power of speech. As a little girl, I was called by the names of animals–Pussycat, Bunny Rabbit. Papa called me Filly.”
Rodegas and Christopher waited for her to continue, but she drank champagne and ate her souffle instead. Tonight she wore nothing that Christopher had ever given her, and indeed had not since they had arrived; in Rodegas’s house she wore the jewels that had been passed down to her in her family: pearls, rubies, diamonds that had become hers as a bride.
After supper, Rodegas showed them pictures in room after room of the house; Mendoza went ahead of them, turning on the lights. Cathy cared little for painting. “Tell Paul what the duchess said,” she asked.
“This woman has the greatest private collection in Spain, portraits of her ancestors,” Rodegas said. “She was asked by a journalist if she was not filled with awe, to possess the works of all those dead geniuses. ‘Awe?’ she replied, ‘Genius? Goya, Velázquez, Rembrandt, were simply the people my family hired before the invention of photography.’ “
Cathy would not let Rodegas stray from his promise. She pulled him into a room where candles burned in an old chandelier.
“Begin somewhere interesting in the story of your life,” she said. “You don’t have to begin at the beginning. But, Don Jorge, begin.”
Rodegas took her hand. “One of the reasons I was so affected by the writing of Karen Blixen, Isak Dinesen as she called herself–that Danish woman in Kenya,” he said, “was the manner of her lover’s death. Denys Finch-Hatton was killed in an airplane crash; he capsized with his machine, as the author put it. That happened to my own parents, you know, when I was a small child. My father was mad to be the first to fly from Barcelona to Constantinople. He and my mother crashed on the day they set out, in the mountains between here and Barcelona. Capsized.”
It was because of that that Rodegas had been sent to England to be educated; his father, one of a type, weakened by strange enthusiasms, that appeared from time to time in the family, had ordered it in his will. Rodegas was sent to a preparatory school near London when he was eight, then to a public school, then to Oxford; he spent the long vacations at the estancia, but hardly ever went into Spanish society. One of his father’s brothers was in a diplomatic post in London, another was a high officer in the army, a third was an archbishop. They gave leave to seedy Englishmen to teach Don Jorge Latin and Greek. But in the summers, they made him into a Spaniard.
“That didn’t include marriage and the production of an heir?” Cathy asked.
“I failed to find the woman I wanted. Karen Blixen was born too soon, and you, Catherine, too late.”
“Be serious.”
“I am perfectly serious. No woman I met was suitable. Spanish girls of my class were, in my day, unknowable, though I was engaged to one for a time. The English were too rude–that is their good manners among themselves, but it would not be understood in this country. Americans are too easily bored to live as I live.”
“Was it the civil war in Spain that made marriage difficult for you?”
“I didn’t fight in that war as a soldier.”
“But you were in it?”
“Yes. Everyone in Spain was in it–and, worse, thousands of foreigners. Civil wars are always very much worse, Catherine, when foreigners take an interest in them.”
Then he told the tale, in the third person, using the artificial names that the characters in his story had employed, but describing real places and real acts in a real time.
Carlos, the young hero of the story, was born in 1910, of noble parents, who soon left him an orphan. He was sent to England in 1919. His uncle, the diplomatist, had a Spaniard’s abiding suspicion of the British espionage service; it seemed inevitable to him that the English would, sooner or later, attempt to make use of a Spanish noble who had been wholly educated in their country and who might, the force of nature being what it is in young men, even marry an Englishwoman. Therefore Carlos was registered at his schools, and later at the university, not under the name that his family used–the one that went with his duke-dom–but under the name that belonged to one of the minor titles the family had acquired in antiquity through marriage. He had no need of credentials, such as diplomas, in his true name. His uncle sent a car for him every week while he was in school and had him brought to London for the weekend, to speak Spanish and to learn about Spain. In summer, he returned to Castile to the remote country house that was the seat of his family. Here he was visited by relatives and trained by servants, but he saw almost no one else. There was no time for it; he had only three or four months out of each year to live his true life as a member of the Spanish ruling class. The result was that, though Carlos knew a lot of people in England, none of them knew him by his real name; and though everyone in Spain knew his famous name, almost no one in that country knew him by sight.
Between school and Oxford, he performed his military service. His uncle the general arranged that this should be done in a remote post in Morocco. The idea was to show him blood. At that time there was war between the Spanish colonial forces and the desert tribesmen. Carlos, as a lieutenant of cavalry, killed five men in the course of a year and was himself wounded twice, once by a spear, once by a bullet. Spain was in political uproar. Carlos took no particular interest in the rise and fall of dictators, the rebellion of garrisons on the peninsula. This had always gone on. The Bourbon king abdicated. It had nothing to do with his family, or with the other ancient families connected to his family. His uncles believed that the real threat to Spain–and to Catholicism, which was the same thing in the mind of the archbishop and probably in the minds of the others as well–came from outside Spain. They were greatly afraid of communism. Of anarchism, too, and socialism. All were the same thing in their eyes. Carlos’s uncle the archbishop, then only a monsignor, had seen forty-eight churches burned in 1909 in Barcelona, and drunken workers dancing in the streets with the corpses of nuns they had taken from the catacombs.
“In that tragic week,” the archbishop would tell his brothers, and his nephew, “I looked the Antichrist in the face.”
They were Spaniards, nobles and prelates. They decided that they needed an agent in the enemy camp. Carlos was engaged, by arrangement, to the daughter of another duke who was a party to the conspiracy, and sent to Oxford. He studied Arabic for his own pleasure, and Russian in preparation for his mission. He was instructed to ingratiate himself with the English Communist movement that was flourishing at Oxford in the 1930s. It was an easy job; many of the people the Communists were recruiting at the university were from the aristocracy or its fringes, class renegades. Outwardly, Carlos became like them. In 1934 he was introduced by one of his dons to a Russian, who recruited him as an agent of the Comintern. The resources of the NKVD were not sufficient to discover Carlos’s real identity, much less his real purposes. The Russians knew that nations had intelligence services; they never suspected that a class, even the class they were hoping to destroy in Spain, should send secret agents against them.
Carlos went down from Oxford in that year. He spent the next months in Barcelona being trained as a terrorist; there he met many other Spaniards, all of them of a different class and all of them going under false names. He memorized all their faces. In 1935 he was sent away from Barcelona with a false English passport supplied by the Russians, with instructions to go to Madrid and wait. He did so. When the war broke out, in the summer of 1936, Carlos was in place.
That fall, his fiancée, whom he had not seen for two years, decided to join him at the estancia. No one ever knew why she imagined he was there. (“She was a simple girl, Carlos hardly knew her,” Rodegas related. “In order to get from where she was to the estancia she had to cross the front lines. She decided that she would certainly be safe, even from Communists and Anarchists, if she disguised herself as a nun. She had led, as you can see, a very cloistered life. She set out, walking, like a heroine of the Middle Ages. Of course she was raped and killed by the first Loyalist patrol she encountered; her maid, too.”)
Carlos learned nothing of this until the war was over. He became a successful spy, and had many adventures.
(“One in particular will, I think, satisfy Catherine’s curiosity because it is, like the romantic death of Carlos’s betrothed, a story that combines love and war,” said Rodegas.)
During the siege of Madrid, in the autumn and early winter of 1936, Carlos was, at one and the same time, an important agent of the Comintern, and the leader of the Fascist fifth column in Madrid. Carlos met with Comrade Medina, the fat Italo-Argentine who was the Comintern’s “instructor” in Spain, and with Mediña’s assistant, a Bulgarian named Stepanov; he worked with Konev, called Paulito in Spain, who was chief of terror for the Soviet apparatus. At the same time, he sent out information to his family–lists of names, lists of supplies, lists of the condemned. And scrupulous lists of all his own acts of terrorism, which were undertaken to build and protect his cover. He lived both his roles fully, murdering efficiently to win the trust of those he was betraying.
(“That is why he lived,” said Rodegas.)
Because Carlos had so many languages–Spanish, English, Russian, German, French–and had them so well, he was assigned to Madrid to the foreign community. Foreigners were pouring into the capital–journalists, spies, soldiers. Moscow wanted them watched; sometimes it wanted one of them killed. The Soviet controllers especially wanted a watch kept on Russians. It was better for a Spaniard to do it than a Russian, because Russians generally believed that Spaniards were children, and they would speak in front of them as they never would in the presence of others.
Carlos was assigned to observe and report on a young Russian poet who had been sent to Spain as a journalist. That was truly all he was, a journalist. He was brilliantly talented as a writer and he had been very brave as a boy soldier in the Russian civil war. But he had no gift for intrigue. He was, perhaps, the one Russian in Madrid who was what he seemed to be.
(“The Russian boy’s name was Zhigalko,” Rodegas said, “Kolka Zhigalko.”)
Carlos was puzzled, before he met Kolka Zhigalko, that everyone called him a boy; according to his dossier, he was older than Carlos. No one thought Carlos a boy.
When Carlos met Zhigalko, he understood. Zhigalko, pink and curly and smiling, exuded sexuality. Even Spanish girls were eager to sleep with him. There was a wild light in him, which was his talent. He was prodigally generous with his body, his money, his thoughts. Carlos saw him sweetly–and he supposed, when the time came, passionately–accept the advances of ugly girls. He saw him permit transparent knaves to cheat him, because he saw that it gave them pleasure. He composed songs for people he took a fancy to, played and sang them, and forgot them; he said they were for the person to whom he sang them and it would be wrong to preserve them. Zhigalko would go out to observe the fighting in the university city–remember, he was a journalist and a noncombatant–and he would join in, rescuing the wounded. He had type O blood, the most usable kind; he gave so much of it to wounded men that he became translucent. He had no fear of anything–not of embarrassment, not of disgrace, not of failure, not of punishment, not even of death. He had the gift of knowing, all the time, in his mind and in his blood, that he was alive. Carlos asked him, when he knew him better, how he could bear to go to sleep and lose touch with his waking self. “But I dream!” Zhigalko cried.
It was no wonder that the NKVD worried about Zhigalko. To him, they meant nothing. Kolka Zhigalko was a Communist, almost an old Bolshevik, he had gone to war with the Red Army in his teens. But he had been formed, like all Russians, in the Church and in the language and in those vast spaces of mystical Russia that everyone always uses to explain the fatalism of the Russian character. Kolka cared nothing for the secret police. How could they imprison him? He thought himself a beam of light.
In one of his songs, he made it up in his room in the Gran Via for an English girl whose lover had been killed by a shell, he sang quite openly about God. Carlos never forgot the lines: “What is one instant of pain to a man, one passage through its darkness / When he comes from the bright face of his love for a woman / Into the heart of the Savior?” What did it matter to Kolka if the secret police killed him? They had nothing to do with what he was.
Carlos understood that Kolka Zhigalko, living as he did, could not survive long. The temptation to protect him was very great, and for a while Carlos did. After all, Kolka was harmless by the standards of any sane man. He was a passionate Russian patriot, a passionate lover of the international working class. What Kolka did, everything he did, he did for love. He was the only Communist Carlos ever met–indeed, he may have been the only political zealot who ever lived–whose beliefs made him lovable because they rose from the truth and sweetness of his character in the same way that the actions of Saint Francis rose from his faith. That was the basis of his genius, and there was no doubt, even among the secret agents who were watching him and pondering whether or not to kill him, that he was a genius. His battle dispatches were extraordinary; every line he wrote was made flesh as soon as it was read by another person. Of course, what he wrote was not printed in Pravda as he wrote it. He cared nothing for dialectics, for jargon, for official terminology. Kolka thought that revolution had to do with life, and life with humanity, and humanity with language. The censors removed all that from Kolka’s stories. The odd thing was, Kolka was a true peasant, the son of a brute and a slattern; one of those aberrations that crops up in all breeds of animals, the one random masterwork in a hundred generations.
Carlos was pressed for incriminating material on Zhigalko. He held back. The pressure was increased. Kolka was in the machine; it was impossible to release him. Anyone who has had to do with secret life will know that this is the unbreakable truth about it, that once a thing is started, once a case is opened, it can never be abandoned. The file must be completed. The spy longs for the final fact as the monk yearns for the last Host. Carlos, it must be said, lost his coldness where Kolka was concerned. He saw that Kolka was an artist, and that weighed. He saw that he was good, in the antique meaning of that word, and that weighed, too. But what weighed most was that Carlos was disgusted by the idea of having a hand in the destruction of such a creature as Kolka. Carlos, remember, was doing what he was doing because he was a Catholic, coming from fifty generations of Catholics. It is an interesting fact about Carlos that he prayed silently all the time he was doing murder, or betrayal, or whatever the day’s work brought him. He thought that Kolka’s was one death that God would not forgive him; Carlos was, after all, only the same age as Kolka. He thought in these terms.
The atmosphere in Madrid that winter was extraordinary. It was cold, Madrid is so cold in winter; there was no fuel to speak of, there was little enough food. One saw people in bandages everywhere, working and fighting. Shells were falling in the streets. The Moroccans and the Spanish troops of Generalissimo Franco were at the gates of the city. There were three great battles in November, and bombing by airplanes at night. The people were in something that resembled a religious hysteria. They went about the streets crying incessantly, “ No pas-ar-án! No pas-ar-án!”–they shall not pass! It was a murmur, a buzzing, like the chant of some primitive religion coming out of a sealed tomb. Carlos felt that he had come to the rim of existence. He was exalted, against his will, by the bravery of these Madrilenos, by their obstinate refusal to submit. On the other hand, always remember, he was their deadly enemy, a wolf among them. What in God’s name would happen to Spain if those people–so courageous, so maddened by their hatred of all that Carlos was in his true self–should conquer? For a month or two in Madrid, in the winter of 1936, he thought that they might be irresistible.
At about this time, Carlos saw a way in which he might save Kolka Zhigalko from the secret police–or, if not save him, then at least prevent his death. A few weeks before, another journalist, traveling under a League of Nations laisser-passer, had come to Madrid and got a room at the Gran Via Hotel, directly below Zhigalko’s. This man wrote for French and Belgian newspapers, and also sent feature stories to the English and American weekly papers. Like Carlos, he spoke a great many languages. He was ten years older than Carlos and Zhigalko, or perhaps a little more. A handsome man, a splendid conversationalist. He had a cynic’s wit; faith and emotion in others amused him. He knew something about everything. Soon he knew everyone in Madrid. It was extraordinary how he got about. It was a gift quite as great, in its way, as that of an artist; this man could meet a man or a Woman once, speak three sentences, and stay in the other person’s mind forever. Had he been an American or an Englishman he would have become the head of government. But, as Carlos found out, this man had no country.
Naturally the NKVD was interested in him. They couldn’t believe that ànyone who operated as this man operated was not a master spy for some imperialist power. They opened a dossier on him. He went about, almost alone in Madrid, under the name on his papers, which Carlos took to be his own name. The NKVD gave him a code name. In their secret conversations he was called Kiril Alekseivich Kamensky. Sometimes, secret symbol within secret name, “K.A.K.” But usually Kamensky. He maddened them; they could not get a grip on him. Who was he? Where did he come from? They learned some things about him–that he was a man of the Left, that he was not using his baptismal name after all. Finally they learned that he was a Russian. Before, they had been curious about Kamensky. Now they hungered for him. Carlos was told to befriend him, entrap him, take the bones out of his flesh.
Kamensky was the most approachable man in Madrid. There is a kind of intelligence operative called an antenna–he makes himself visible so that information will come to him. That’s what the NKVD thought Kamensky was. They gave Carlos information to feed him, thinking that it would be transmitted to his masters. It was thought that he must be working for the British secret service; the Russians were, if anything, more convinced of the omnipotence of English espionage than Carlos’s uncles. Perhaps, too, they thought, he was a Nazi agent, but they held that theory in reserve. Kamensky hadn’t the Nazi style–he was too fine. His looks, his speech, his mind, his manners all argued that he could not be a follower of Hitler. So the NKVD, louts judging louts, looked at the matter. The information Carlos gave to Kamensky appeared in his newspapers. That, thought the NKVD, only proved how clever he was. They instructed Carlos to give him more information, chicken feed as they called it; Kamensky printed some of it, and told Carlos he hadn’t used the rest because he hadn’t been able to verify it. There was consternation. What deep game was Kamensky playing? If he didn’t want our false information, what true information must he be obtaining for his masters, and how was he obtaining it? Kamensky became their obsession. Carlos urged them to consider the possibility that Kamensky was what he said he was, a genuine journalist. Impossible, they said. He must be trapped.
It was, in the end, easy. Through Carlos, Kamensky met Kolka Zhigalko. Kamensky had brought with him to Madrid a French girl, also a journalist, who was obviously in love with him. He, less obviously, for he was a man who masked his special passions with a general amiability, was fond of her. The four of them– Kamensky, Zhigalko, Carlos, and the French girl–fell into the habit of meeting in Kamensky’s room during the bombardments. It was a gathering place for a large group of people, mostly foreigners, who wished to show their contempt for the guns and the bombers by refusing to take shelter. There was always a lot of French cognac to drink, the only supply of it in Madrid in private hands.
The language of this group was French, sometimes English. Zhigalko was no linguist. He limped along in Spanish. In French and English he was worse. But he liked the atmosphere, and because of his ear–most artists are able to learn languages rather easily, it has to do with their heightened powers of observation, perhaps–he understood a great deal more than he was able to say. He would sit there, golden curls and blue eyes, the ideal human form incarnate, his face shimmering with the heat of his interest in life, and listen to languages he could not really understand. Oddly, everyone spoke to Kolka–addressed their best remarks to him, as if he could apprehend meanings, even in foreign tongues, that others would miss. Kolka would smile his innocent smile, and sometimes make up a song. Sometimes, too, he would struggle with French or English, attempting to say what was in his heart. One night they had all had a lot to drink and the bombs had fallen quite near. Kolka made a song. Then he tried to translate it; it was in Russian, of course. He tried Spanish; no luck. Then French and English; worse and worse. Carlos had understood the Russian, but of course, drunk as he was, he dared not reveal his knowledge to the group.
Suddenly Kamensky, who up to this time no one had suspected (except Carlos, who knew) of understanding a word of Russian, addressed Kolka in that language. He spoke it beautifully; it was evident to all in the room that Kamensky was reciting a poem. At the end of it, Kolka, with Russian tears running over his cheeks, threw his arms around Kamensky and kissed him on the lips. Russians do that, or did. Kolka said something in Russian; Kamensky said something back. Carlos understood that they were proposing to go up on the roof of the hotel in the midst of the air raid. The Heinkels were flying over in the dark, dropping high explosive, the antiaircraft guns were firing, shrapnel was falling back on the city. Enemy artillery shells passed overhead, gasping, and exploded in the streets. These two Russians, very drunk, of course, on cognac, raced together to the roof of the hotel. For the others in the room, that was carrying drunken bravado too far. It was the duty of Carlos to follow them; his drunkenness was excuse enough to do so.
On the roof he found them, standing at the very edge, facing the flashes of the rebel guns beyond the university on the horizon, shouting poetry in Russian. They remained there until the bombardment ended, and came back down, shivering–they had been sweating in the crowded room where the party was, and their soaked shirts were beginning to freeze–and with their throats scraped raw by their counterattack on the Fascist batteries.
Kamensky’s French girl crawled in between the two of them, and kissed them both. When Carlos, the last to leave, departed, they were lying, all three of them, on the bed. Kolka was singing. After each verse, the French girl, her voice muddy with drink, would ask for a translation. Kamensky only smiled and stroked her hair.
They remained together all night. It was a thing that drunken people in a dying city might easily do. The French girl was desirable, and she belonged to that emancipated class of young women which existed in the thirties. These girls believed that they had absolute sovereignty over their own lives and bodies, that they could do as they liked, and deal with the consequences. That night she slept with both Russians. The next day she left, because during the night, out of Kolka’s generosity and Kamensky’s drunken release of his real self, the two men became lovers.
It was the French girl who told Carlos. She came to him to ask if he could arrange transport for her to the French frontier. It was early in the morning, Carlos had just awakened, and, yawning, he was removing the blackout curtains from the windows of his room when he saw the girl approaching in the street below. She wore the uniform of her type: belted raincoat, high-heeled shoes, a felt hat with a round brim pulled down on one side of her head, plucked eyebrows, lipstick. She was carrying a heavy valise and she teetered under its weight on her high heels.
Upstairs, Carlos gave her tea. Really, he thought, she is attractive, she would be something to subdue, with all that intelligence showing in her face, and all that unveiled hostility to men. There was a great deal of anger in her. She described, in a rush of French like a jet of bile, what had happened: the three bodies in the dim light, the two men caressing her, the strangeness of it and the terrible excitement, for this sort of woman lived for forbidden things. And then she opened her eyes to find the two men kissing not her, but one another. They went on as if she weren’t there, murmuring to one another in Russian. She was fascinated, the mysteries of the male body were being revealed to her in the way they handled each other. But she let it go too far. Kolka, after he had rested, came back to her and she admitted him, but as soon as he had satisfied her she was filled with disgust. Kamensky woke, he had fallen asleep, and found Kolka and the girl together; he had flown into a rage, speaking only Russian. The girl realized that it was Kolka he refused to share, not her.
Carlos heard the story with less surprise, and with much less repulsion, than would have been possible in most Spaniards. He had grown used to homosexual practices at school in England; he saw nothing wrong in them in others. He understood that most men, when they love most deeply, love other men, though not usually with a sexual dimension. The French girl, a woman scorned, was less tranquil. She told Carlos she wished to leave Madrid, leave Spain, because she feared that she would kill the lovers if she remained. He arranged passage for her within the week; he could have sent her sooner but he wanted to know more about Kamensky. She told him all that she knew–willingly, sometimes with tears, sometimes with sudden shrieks of fury that burst from the depths of her body. She meant Kolka and Kamensky no harm–she was heartsore and she thought that Carlos was a friend.
Carlos told his controller in the NKVD about the love affair. Now the secret agents saw a way to use the man they called Kamensky. They let the affair between Kamensky and Kolka Zhigalko run on. The two were discreet–after all, there was nothing strange about a man becoming Kolka Zhigalko’s inseparable friend. No one but Carlos, and the people to whom he sent his secret report, knew that they were secret lovers. The meetings in Kamensky’s room went on as usual. No one much missed Solange, the French girl. Journalists, soldiers from the International Brigades, every class and type of foreigner came every night to drink cognac and talk. Now that Kolka had an interpreter, everyone loved him more. It became evident that he had, in addition to his body and his face, an incandescent mind. Carlos, of course, had known this all along, and everyone else had felt it; Kamensky made it visible to all, translating Kolka’s long drunken speeches, interpreting his poems, explaining his silences.
One night, when Kolka had fallen into a melancholy mood, a little Frenchman, an officer in the International Brigades, wandered into the room looking for Kamensky. He’d been wounded and he carried his arm in a sling. Kolka had been lying on the bed with his eyes closed. He sat up and saw this Frenchman and leaped to his feet with a bellow of joy. It appeared that he and the Frenchman had fought together against the tanks of the White Army in front of Petrograd. They embraced and the Frenchman uttered a howl of pain as Kolka crushed his shot arm between them. Torrents of Russian ran between Kolka and Kamensky and this Frenchman, whose nom de guerre was André Girard. Soon André was a nightly visitor; when he was wounded again, Kolka gave him his room and moved down to Kamensky’s room. Kolka nursed Andre, who had a head wound, by day. By night he slept with Kamensky. Soon the Frenchman was up and around. Kolka remained with Kamensky.
Carlos was ordered by the NKVD to make friends with André Girard as he had done with Kolka and Kamensky. But Andre knew nothing of Kamensky, and of Kolka he would only say that he was the most important man in the Russian Revolution, because one day he would write about it. Andre had perfect literary judgment; he read languages as easily as Carlos and Kamensky spoke them, and when he saw genius he recognized it. Kolka, he said, was the sort of writer who appeared once in a century. Someday he would put Russia, all of it, onto the page. Kamensky tolerated the attachment between André and Kolka; Andre was a plain, small man, there was even something comical in his looks–you saw that he was going to be fat in a few years. He was no sexual threat; besides, Andre was ravenous for women. Oddly enough, he had a great deal of success. He was amusing, intelligent–and wounded. Girls came to him.
Carlos’s controllers in the NKVD wanted to have access to Kolka’s room. Andre was seldom in it at night; usually he went to a woman’s room after the party in Kamensky’s room. Kolka’s room, one will remember, was directly above Kamensky’s. The spies made a hole in the floor, under the bed, and installed a microphone and a camera in such a way that they could not be detected. With the camera they took hundreds of photographs of Kolka and Kamensky on the bed below. Kamensky took such pleasure in the sight of his lover that he had him with the lamps lit. He made things easy for the photographer. A stenographer, one of those coarse-bodied Russian girls, sat in Kolka’s room with a pad on her knees and earphones on her head, taking down in shorthand the things that Kolka and Kamensky said to each other in Russian when they were alone. Carlos observed this scene once; it was enough.
One day the NKVD man showed the photographs to Kamensky. While Kamensky looked at these travesties of his form and Kolka’s, the NKVD man read him excerpts from the transcript of the stenographer’s shorthand notes. Carlos was told that Kamensky sat through it all, unmoving. Then, like a snake, as the NKVD man put it to Carlos, Kamensky struck. He slapped the spy’s face, a half-dozen rapid, stinging blows. As a boyar would strike a serf, Carlos thought; in the depths of the NKVD man’s mind that image was awakened, too. Kamensky had made an error. Now the NKVD man, who had simply wanted to use him, had a personal reason to destroy him. He showed no sign, or believed that he showed no sign, that Kamensky’s blow had stung him. He smiled at Kamensky.
“Done like a prince,” he said. “When you’ve done what I am going to tell you to do, I will have something to tell you.”
“For you I will do nothing.”
“No? Someday, perhaps, you will go back to Russia. It is ours.”
“Not yours forever.”
“Perhaps not. But Kolka Zhigalko will go back. You know how puritanical the government of the proletariat is. What if the Cheka”–he used the old term for the secret police, so that Kamensky would understand–“were to have these pictures, these transcripts, our testimony?”
Kamensky saw that he was being made the instrument of Kolka’s death. He didn’t hesitate. He bargained: one act on behalf of the NKVD in return for the pictures and the transcripts, and for Kolka’s safety. It was a delusion; nothing would save Kolka now and Kamensky knew it. But Carlos, thinking on the matter, decided that Kamensky, abandoning himself to emotion, felt that he had to make the effort. He had to do something, and he had the sort of mind that would perceive the lasting damage to himself of committing an act of treachery and disguising it as an act of atonement. There was no question of Kolka staying in Christendom; he was an incurable Russian, he longed to return to Russia, he would never leave it once he did go back. Kamensky knew all that because he was the same. Later, Kolka told Carlos that Kamensky had told him that he, Kolka, was the breathing apparatus that Kamensky needed to live in the poisonous air of a country other than Russia.
What the NKVD wanted was simple. Some time before, the secret police of the Spanish Republic had found several hundred bourgeois hiding in the deserted Finnish embassy in Madrid. The NKVD had located another abandoned building, also a former embassy. They were going to hoist the flag of some remote Asiatic country over it, and hope that secret Nationalists would seek refuge there. There was a list of people, some of them Fascist agents, some of them Anarchists whom the Soviet apparatus wanted to destroy, some of them Social Democrats, some of them merely men the NKVD wanted to kill for their own reasons. Many of these last two classes were friends of Kamensky. The NKVD wanted Kamensky to warn them that death warrants were out for them, and to tell them where the false embassy was so that they could take refuge there. The bargain was struck; it would have terrified a man who had a smaller appetite for guilt than Kamensky, or who loved the man he was saving less than Kamensky loved Kolka Zhigalko.
Kamensky lured his friends to the embassy, one after the other. The NKVD listened to their conversations with hidden microphones. Then they killed them–twenty-seven murders altogether. The victims were taken into the basement and shot. Their last sight was the heap of the dead who had come down the stairs before them. Before each execution–the executioners had the condemned kneel in order to receive a revolver bullet in the spinal cord in the descabello style of the NKVD–they told the man who was to die that Kamensky was the one who had betrayed him.
At the end of it, the NKVD man delivered the transcripts and the pictures and the negatives to Kamensky. He told him what had been done in the cellar of the false embassy.
“Your class believes in God,” the NKVD man said. “Think of it, highness–twenty-seven souls ascending to the Heavenly Father, cursing your name as they fly to Him.”
“Go away,” said Kamensky.
“Before I do,” said the NKVD man, “I wish to tell you that you were entrapped. Kolka Zhigalko is, and always has been, our agent. Be —ed you on our orders and —ed you, and —ed you.”
As he spoke these words, the NKVD man turned over the photographs of the acts that he was describing with his obscenities. Another man might have attacked. Kamensky had already made his gesture. Now he sealed himself from the NKVD man. He stared at him, absolutely cold and absolutely silent, until he went away. Of course what Kamensky had been told about Kolka was a lie; it was payment for the slaps on the face he had delivered to the NKVD man. But how could Kamensky ever be certain? All Carlos’s life he had heard the phrase, never knowing what it meant, but now he saw it in reality: Kamensky’s heart was broken.
He stayed in Madrid for a few more days, until the siege was lifted. He remained with Kolka, who of course suspected nothing. He thought Kamensky’s sadness had to do with the fact that he would be sent by his paper to some other city, and thus be separated from Kolka. But Kolka told him not to worry, he’d find a way to be sent where Kamensky was, nothing could part them. He pleaded with Kamensky to return to Russia; Zhigalko had powerful friends in the Party, even in the NKVD, he said, and he could make things all right. Kamensky knew nothing could make him acceptable in Russia, but to please Kolka, he agreed that he would, perhaps, go back.
Then Kamensky, one night on a dark street, walked up behind the NKVD man and shot him in the head. He immediately left Madrid. He did not say good-bye to Kolka, he took no clothes, none of his things. He just left.
Of course there was an uproar in the clandestine world. Kamensky was sought everywhere in Spain, but he got away. Kolka was inconsolable. He lived in darkness–darkness of two kinds, the despair of the loss of love, and ignorance of why the loss had befallen him. No one told him the truth. Not Kamensky, not the other Russian Communists, not Carlos. To console himself, Kolka Zhigalko, with manic energy, wrote a cycle of poems and short stories, beautiful things. Andre Girard read them and told Carlos about them. He made copies for safekeeping. Andre did not trust the revolution; he knew that it would burn the books and slash the paintings of its artists.
Carlos read Kolka’s work. It burned the page in his untidy, almost illiterate handwriting, tiny and cramped, as if no sheet of paper were large enough to contain all that Kolka wanted to put down on it. Out of this crabbed pen flowed the whole of human passion, the whole of the landscape of our time.
Carlos went to see Kolka, to express his admiration. The loss of Kamensky and, Carlos supposed, the expenditure of energy in the writing of the wonderful stories and verses, had left Kolka exhausted. He was translucent again, as he had been when he gave too much of his blood to the wounded. There was no gaiety left in him. To Carlos, he said, “I have lost everything.” Carlos asked him what he meant. In that innocent, reckless way of his, Kolka told him of the love affair with Kamensky.
“You may think it filthy, but I tell you it was love!” Kolka said.
“I know it was love,” Carlos replied.
Carlos had decided that Kolka, to be saved, must know the truth. Carlos took a hideous chance: he told Kolka what had been done to Kamensky, and what Kamensky had done for him. Kolka slumped. The life, the optimism, the force of hope–whatever it was he had that made him believe that he and his comrades had made a new world, ran out of him. Illusion drained from Kolka. It was like watching a man bleed to death from a heart wound. Kolka said nothing, he had no last words as the old Kolka. Carlos, by telling him the truth, had killed what he had been.
“The secret police,” Kolka said, and this was his only question, “they must have had a code name for him. What was it?”
“Kiril Alekseivich Kamensky,” Carlos replied.
“Thank you, Carlos,” said Kolka.
Kolka Zhigalko took the pages of his stories and crossed out his own name. In its place, under each title, he wrote, in cyrillic characters twice as large as any others on the page, BY KERIL ALEKSEIVICH KAMENSKY. Later he instructed André Girard to change the author’s name on his copies of the works; he didn’t tell Andre the reason, merely that he had decided to write under a pseudonym.
A month or two later, Kolka went back to Russia. He did have powerful friends, and through their intervention he changed his name in a Soviet court to Kiril Alekseivich Kamensky, which is the name under which he has been known ever since.
(Don Jorge de Rodegas ceased speaking; Cathy was sitting at his feet, gazing up into his face, over which no emotion had moved while he spoke. “Go on,” Cathy said, “don’t stop. What happened to them all?”)
Kolka Zhigalko published his stories, under his new name, in the Soviet Union when he returned there. In a matter of months his work was seized and burned, and he was sentenced to prison. Most Russians who had been in Spain were shot or imprisoned in the great purge of 1937, the Yezhovschina, a bloodbath named for Yezhov, then head of the NKVD. Evidently not even Yezhov could bear to kill Kolka; he merely sent him to prison for life.
Carlos was arrested by the victors at the end of the war. He was sent: to prison for an interval. There he learned a number of things, a prisoner’s skills and tricks.
(Don Jorge folded a sheet of writing paper into an intricate pattern and made a little cup; he poured wine into it, held the paper cup over a candle flame, and showed Cathy that the wine was boiling while the paper did not burn.)
After a time, Carlos was condemned to death. He was taken out of his cell by the guards. The other prisoners saw a man killed by a firing squad in the prison yard. It was not Carlos. Elsewhere in the prison, he was being fitted secretly into the uniform of a major in the Nationalist Army, and in those clothes he walked out of the prison and back into his true identity. He returned to the estancia. He rejoined his uncles. From them he heard the story of his fianceé’s death, almost four years before. They thought it a most pathetic tale. Carlos was not much moved by it. He had lost the habit of judging people by the way they died.
Carlos wanted silence; he wanted to be alone. He remained on the estancia. He was haunted by the work he had done during the civil war and tried to train himself not to dream. In 1941 he volunteered for the División Azul, the Spanish force that fought in Russia with the German army, and was wounded again. Each time his troops liberated a prison camp on Soviet territory he looked for Kolka, but of course he never found him.
Carlos did have communication of a sort with Kolka. While he was recovering at the estancia in 1944 from the wounds he had received in Russia, he had a visitor. One spring afternoon, the man he had known as André Girard walked up the drive, carrying a child. Andre had seen a photograph of Carlos at a sporting event in a Spanish magazine, and had recognized him. He knew his true identity. There was no question of his betraying it; he was sick of revolution and reprisal. Like Carlos, he had given up politics. The child belonged to the woman, Solange, who had been Kamensky’s lover in Madrid before Kolka. André knew nothing of what had happened between Kolka and Kamensky. Carlos told him nothing. Solange had told him nothing, even though she had taken André as a lover–the tale she had told Carlos when she was still hot with scorn is not one a woman would tell to a new bedmate. Andre said she had died in the mountains on the escape from France. André did not know what to do with the child. Carlos took it and kept it until the war was over; afterward he sent it to France, to Solange’s people. Andre made the arrangements.
Carlos asked André if he still had in his possession Kolka’s stories and poems from Madrid. He did. Carlos gave Andre money, after the end of the European war, to have these things published in the West, in Russian and in other languages. They were, of course, published under the name Kamensky. Carlos was pleased to think that Kolka’s work, some of it at least, had been kept alive.
“That can’t be the end of the tale,” said Cathy. “What about the original Kamensky? You haven’t told us what happened to him.”
“Carlos never heard news of him.”
“What: was his real name? Did he go back to Russia?”
“His real name was Prince Boris Donskoy. He was of the oldest Russian nobility. It was impossible for him to go back to his own country.”
Christopher spoke. “Under what name did Carlos and Zhigalko and the others know Kamensky, in Madrid?”
“Otto Rothchild,” replied Don Jorge de Rodegas.