“All of them, one after the other,” Patchen said. “Dick Sutherland, each time he had news of another killing, would lay a cable from Moscow on my desk like a cat bringing a dead mouse into the parlor.”
After the searing light of the Castilian Meseta, the August sun in Paris seemed feeble to Christopher; it hardly penetrated the cloth of his coat, but there was perspiration on Patchen’s face. He had been waiting, alone with the consequences of their plans, for Christopher to return. As much as anything could be for Patchen, this operation was a personal matter. In the months since the death of Bülow, he had acknowledged to himself, bit by bit, that he had put his trust in the wrong people. His picked assets had gone bad. The worst thing that could befall an intelligence officer had happened to him.
Patchen had intellectual stamina and emotional control, but his body displayed the strain of sleeplessness and incessant travel. He had lost weight and the stringy musculature of his neck showed above his collar. He limped more than usual and sometimes he caught himself as he began to stammer.
“First there was Kalmyk,” Patchen said. “You were right. That was the opening. Then they rolled up the other couriers; there were two of them. Sutherland has their names, not that it matters. They were patriots. One of them was even a KGB man of medium rank, a Scandinavian specialist, so that he must have been the one who mailed the letters from Helsinki for Kamensky.”
As a matter of routine, the KGB took Kamensky’s girl, Masha, in for interrogation. She knew nothing of the courier network, nothing of The Little Death. Naturally her interrogators didn’t believe her. Masha had been dealing with the KGB for ten years, since she was sixteen; she knew what they were. She held out for a long time. Sutherland’s source said they used the soft method on her–kept her standing and sleepless, stripped, without food and water, with relays of interrogators repeating the questions, never stopping. What was her name? Her father’s name? Her mother’s? School? Who was her KGB trainer when she was recruited for special work? What were the names of the men and women she had entrapped for the KGB? What was her grandfather’s name? What was the cover name used by her American case officer? What was her blood type? At what age did she lose her virginity? When was her last meeting with her Agency contact? Did she masturbate? How much did the Americans pay her? What was her grandmother’s father’s name? Where was she born? What did Kamensky’s Agency contact look like?
Finally she broke. She had almost nothing to tell them. She had been cleanly handled by a good officer–brush contacts in the subway, dead-drops behind a radiator in an apartment building where her KGB handler met her. That particular insult, a typical Agency prank, infuriated them. They kept hammering away at The Little Death–how did Kamensky get it to the Americans? Masha must have carried it, handled it. She could tell them less than the couriers had told them–she didn’t even know that the book existed. The couriers had had no contact with any American. Captain Kalmyk described Horst Bülow, but he couldn’t identify him in the photo album. Of course he couldn’t put a name to him. Kalmyk was an army officer, not a trained observer. Bülow, from his description, could have been any of ten thousand shabby East Germans.
They killed Masha as they had killed the couriers; they knew that all of them were utterly wrung out, that they could not tell the KGB the one thing that would make sense of this whole shameful defeat for Soviet security–that treason had been committed, that the smuggling of Kamensky’s manuscript and its publication in the West was an American operation. Even the surfacing of Cerutti did not tell them that; whatever else he had been, he had never been an asset of the Americans. Now the Soviets put surveillance on him, replaced the wires that Wilson had removed. But Cerutti was in quarantine. He’d never see another American operative–not Christopher, not Joëlle, not a young man in a park, not anyone. Even under torture, Cerutti could not reveal that he had been dealing with the Americans, because Christopher had never disclosed his true nationality or his true name or his true purpose.
“Maria knew well enough what the Russians would be up to as soon as the news of Kamensky’s death hit,” Patchen said. “She picked a fight with Cerutti when he came around with his weekly bottle of champagne, threw him out. She called him a disgusting little fat Frog who made her skin crawl. Told him Otto had never liked him, thought he was a joke.”
“What was Cerutti’s reaction to that?”
“He put the question to Otto: Is that what you feel, my friend? Otto said yes. Maria, he said, you didn’t need to be so brutal, I asked you not to be insulting. She said, what other method would have worked with this cretin? Cerutti left. He made no reply to them.”
“So the opposition won’t connect him to Otto at all?”
“Not unless they’ve done it in the past. He sure won’t go back to the Ile Saint-Louis.”
Christopher asked about Kamensky’s death. He and Patchen were walking slowly toward the Orangerie, with the morning light behind them and the greenery of the Tuileries ahead. Patchen was breathing more heavily than usual, suppressing the grunt of pain that rose in his throat each time he swung his wounded leg. Christopher had to ask him again for details. Patchen stopped by the stairs that divide the long riverside terrace and surrendered momentarily to his body; he sat down on a bench and stretched his bad leg before him. He looked around. They were quite alone, the city was empty of Frenchmen this month and it was too early in the day for tourists.
“What Kamensky did,” Patchen said in his toneless murmur, “was to ask Masha to get him a death pill.”
Christopher, when he was examining data in his hotel room, had studied a photograph of Kamensky, the only one in the possession of American intelligence. It was a good clear picture, taken in strong sunlight, of an old man with the shaved head of a prisoner, sitting on a bench against an unpainted lumber wall. Now Christopher saw Kolka Zhigalko, young and passionate, moving within the old man.
“Masha was stung by the request,” Patchen said. “She used her emergency procedure–a God-damned chalk mark on a Moscow wall her American case officer has to drive by on the way to work wouldn’t you know?–to ask for a meeting. She asked us for two cyanide pills.”
“She was going with him?”
“That’s what Sutherland says. She told the case officer that she loved the old man. If he dies, there’s no sense in scum like me living, she said.”
Of course Kamensky’s request was never considered. To have him die and to have cyanide found in his body tissue at the autopsy would have been all the confirmation needed by the KGB that a foreign intelligence service was involved with him. Where else would he get cyanide? Besides, Kamensky’s request shook the Moscow station. Did Kamensky know, somehow, of Masha’s connection with our side? Masha said no–he must have assumed, as any rational man would, that she was a KGB asset. Why he thought the Soviet service would give Masha poison was not explicable. Perhaps he thought she had a sexual hold over a senior officer; perhaps he thought they’d be happy to have him out of the way. That was what Masha told the interrogators in the cellars of the KGB. She stuck to that point to the end. Nothing would make her accept the possibility, even, that Kamensky had a connection with an imperialist secret service. In the end she admitted everything, would have done anything. She was too tired to resist death, and she was only twenty-six years old. But she stubbornly insisted, up to the instant that she fell like a stone with a bullet in her spine, that Kiril Alekseivich Kamensky was incapable of treason. “He is a Russian!” she had cried over and over as they had pounded the question into her.
“It says quite a lot about Kamensky,” Patchen said.
“Yes. How did he die, finally?”
Patchen shrugged. “Here Sutherland’s magical sources within the Kremlin break down. We don’t know. The Russians say heart attack. Of course, Masha was gone by the time he died, so we had no eyewitness. He may have killed himself in some more orthodox way.”
“He wasn’t arrested?”
“No. Absolutely not. The Politburo was running the show after Kamensky’s novel went on the air. It was a major policy decision –kill Kamensky as a lesson to others and take the punishment in the Western press, or let, him live for a year or two and take the ten thousand lashes of his novel? They didn’t know what to do.”
“Why would a man like that kill himself?”
Patchen held out a hand. Christopher took it and helped him to his feet. They watched a pleasure boat move down the brown river.
“I don’t know, Paul. To do it himself.”
The state had permitted a funeral. Brave friends of the dead man had come to the grave. Some of them were writers, painters, poets, musicians who had been in the camps for decades along with Kamensky. No one had seen them in all that time; Kamensky had summoned ghosts as his pallbearers. Some of them fell to their knees in the dirt by the grave and prayed. One man recited a long poem of Kamensky’s, written years before and suppressed in the U.S.S.R. since the purges of the thirties. A secret policeman had taken motion pictures of the scene, standing on one side of the grave with his whirring camera while the mourners stood on the other.
There had been a long, emotional story about the funeral in the Western papers. In the Soviet press, Kamensky’s death had not been noticed. Patchen, knowing that there had been scant coverage in the Spanish newspapers, had brought some clippings. Christopher read them while Patchen waited.
“The Russian text is out, the French will be published in three weeks,” Patchen said. “Cerutti has made agreements for translations into English and all the European languages plus Japanese. He’s sold serial rights in German and French. He’s going to New York to offer your English translation to the big magazines.”
Christopher folded the clippings and gave them back to Patchen
“So, from that point of view,” Patchen said, “it’s a picture-book operation, a Rothchild special.”
When Wilson joined them, by the Orangerie, Christopher repeated what he had already told Patchen about his findings in Spain. The Security man listened, inclined his head to catch Christopher’s words; his low voice was lost sometimes in the sudden yowls of traffic in the Place de la Concorde.
“That’s almost the last thing I would have guessed,” Wilson said. “You’re sure Rodegas is believable?”
“Either that or he’s a better novelist than Kamensky.”
“But nothing ever showed up even to hint that Rothchild was queer,” Wilson said. He couldn’t accept that twenty years of files, scrupulously kept by men like himself, could omit the central fact about a subject.
“Otto is not a homosexual. Neither was Kamensky. Something happened between them in Madrid–time and place and circumstance. What if they hadn’t been drunk that first night? What if they hadn’t spoken the same language? What if Solange had not aroused them sexually to begin with? What if, what if? It happened by accident.”
“And Rothchild has been paying for it in his soul ever since.” This observation, coming from Wilson, startled Christopher.
He looked sharply into the Security man’s face, to see if it was the joke he had expected from him, but he saw only an expression of pity.
“No wonder he eluded the polygraph,” Wilson said. “The two unforgivable sins–a homosexual act that laid him open to blackmail and a past connection to the Russian intelligence service– were crawling under his skin, waiting for the machine.”
Patchen asked Wilson what he was going to do.
“Report.”
“Of course,” Patchen said, “but when?”
“After Paul’s report moves. This is your asset, and you two got him. Christopher did much more than I did. He was the one who flushed the bird and shot it. I’m just the retriever.”
Patchen, in the presence of Wilson, had covered the signs of his physical pain, and of whatever else he felt. Wilson had little to tell them. He had sent Joelle and her companion on an operation in French Africa; they’d be gone for at least six months. “We’ll keep moving them as long as it seems wise,” he said, “there’s plenty for them to do in faraway places.” Patchen nodded; he wasn’t really interested. He assumed that Wilson, having been instructed to do so, would clean up all the contacts with Cerutti. Joelle, in her last report, had told Wilson that Cerutti had picked up the Soviet surveillance. “I really don’t think he ever noticed that we were dancing with him,” Wilson said. Somewhere, Christopher thought, a Soviet security man is telling himself the same thing.
“If I may ask,” Wilson said, “what are you going to do?”
He knew already that Patchen and Christopher were on their way to call on the Rothchilds.
“Do?” Patchen replied. “What is there to do? Talk. See what we can salvage.”
“There’s this question–has Rothchild been working for the opposition all along, for the whole twenty years? It’s unlike them not to move in on a man they’ve got something on.”
Wilson was addressing himself to Christopher. Patchen waited for the reply, as interested as Wilson.
“That’s a question someone else will have to ask,” Christopher said. “We always assume, about everyone, that the answer is yes. Everyone is considered to be opposition. If, then, it turns out, the one time in fifty thousand, that they really are, the safeguards are in place.”
“That’s not really the assumption everyone made about Rothchild in your shop, Paul. He knows everyone.”
“Not quite everyone,” Christopher said.
Patchen and Wilson discussed technical arrangements. The exchange lasted longer than Patchen thought necessary, but he controlled his impatience. Wilson explained everything that had to do with equipment very carefully, and then repeated it. Men who lived with secret mechanical paraphernalia were like the natives of a great city–they didn’t believe that strangers could find their way through lighted and well-marked streets. At another time Christopher might have laughed at the expression, somewhere between courteous patience and murderous exasperation, that flickered in Patchen’s eyes as Wilson, staring at the ground, made sure that he understood the obvious.
There would be no need, after today, for Wilson and Christopher to see one another. Both knew it was possible that they could work for twenty years in their own compartments and never catch sight of each other again. Wilson, finished with Patchen, gave him an embarrassed little nod and walked to where Christopher was leaning against the base of a statue. Wilson put an arm across Christopher’s shoulders and led him to the other side of the pedestal.
“I don’t know what to say to you,” Wilson said. “It’s been a pleasure working with a professional. This ought to be a great moment for me. If it’s worth anything to you, I don’t feel any better about the way this has turned out than I imagine you do.”
“I know that.”
Wilson tapped, through the shiny cloth of his suit, the stack of index cards that he carried in his inside pocket. “Nothing goes back to Washington from me except what’s on these cards,” he said. “Only what’s relevant. Cathy’s private life is not relevant.”
Wilson looked into Christopher’s face–he had given up altogether the habit of avoiding his eyes–and began a phrase. He broke it off. “I’ll be glad to get home,” he said, “it’s been one hell of a long TDY. I miss my kids. I don’t know how you do it, moving around all the time the way you do.”
“You get used to it.”
“I wouldn’t.”
Wilson shook hands. Christopher was surprised–the act was insecure; Wilson believed that public contacts drew less attention if they were broken off without any sign of a good-bye. Wilson took a step away and then came back. He decided, after all, to say what he had to say.
“Moroni is back in Rome,” he said. “The station sighted him with Klimenko. And there’s this, from the German girl–Moroni’s taking Dexedrine by the bottle, he’s raving about Cathy; the German girl thinks he’s crazy. Your wife did something to him in Spain, humiliated him somehow. He’s looking for Cathy. If I were you, if you could find a way, I’d lock the door.”
Christopher nodded. He thanked Wilson, to make him feel less uncomfortable. Wilson touched him again, two soft punches on the arm. One for my agent, one for my wife, Christopher thought.
“Life’s a bastard,” Wilson said.
Cathy, after they had heard Don Jorge de Rodegas’s tale at the estancia, had taken Christopher into the gardens, and with the moon on one horizon and the dawn on the other, had enumerated for him all of her acts. He didn’t try to stop her. Something in the story that Rodegas had told had released her from her idea that she must make a life for herself that was as dark as she imagined Christopher’s to be.
“I don’t want secrets, Paul,” she had said. “I never wanted them. I never wanted lovers. I don’t want someone telling my story when I’m old like Maria’s husband, and trying to guess the truth. I want it known that it wasn’t love with anyone but you. I want you to know why. You can bear anything, can’t you?”
“Say that again.”
“Not very much more of this,” Christopher repeated. He felt tears on his cheeks. Cathy watched their track on his face. Even she looked pallid and drawn after the long sleepless night listening to the dry voice of Rodegas. That I should cry, Christopher thought, and she should look less than beautiful–we must have escaped from the galaxy. She began a long, slow smile, and so did he; all around them the waters of Don Jorge’s garden played, catching the light and breaking the silence.