1
In Rome the winter rains were over. Christopher, riding into town from the airport, rolled down the window of the taxi. Even at four in the morning, the air was balmy and he could smell the earth of the farmlands along the Via Ostiense. He looked out the rear window of the speeding taxi and saw that the long straight road behind him, with the moon at the end of it going down into the sea, was empty. He had slept and eaten too little and drunk too much, and was left with a bitter taste in his mouth and a ringing in his ears. The operation, like the imagined form of a child not yet born, passed through his mind, a series of pictures: Kamensky’s tattered manuscript, Rothchild in his tall chair, Maria Rothchild with tradecraft bringing the light of passion back into her face, Patchen’s cold even voice. And beyond that, the future, with Christopher himself moving from place to place, talking, acting out the patterns of deceit that only he could execute because he possessed the talent that Otto Rothchild had once had, the gift of inspiring trust in others. Saying good-bye before he went to Zurich for his surgery, Rothchild had been especially garrulous, telling tales of agents he had had to sacrifice. “Betrayal is an act of strength, Paul,” he had told Christopher; “a man with your gifts will learn, in time, to disguise it as an act of love, and you’ll be astonished to find how much more you’ll be loved, afterward, by the person you betray. Human beings are perverse creatures.” Maria, seated on the floor beside Rothchild’s chair, traced the pattern in the carpet as her husband spoke; Rothchild stroked her hair. Her cheeks burned. In the hall, as Christopher left, she told him that Rothchild, though he had never said so even to her, believed that he was going to die in Zurich. “I know,” Maria had said, “because he talks about all the times he’s almost died in the past, and mentions the things he’s ashamed of in his life. Betrayals, Paul, and failures.” Christopher had touched her eyelids gently with his knuckle; when she spoke to him of Rothchild, she had a way of closing her eyes.
Now Christopher saw Bülow die again, and knew that he would see this picture once an hour, awake and asleep, until the Kamensky operation was over. Afterward, he would see it only when he was very tired, or when he glimpsed a man in the street who had one of Horst’s foolish mannerisms. All the images he had just seen began to flash through his mind again, in slightly different order. Christopher stopped them running and cleared his head.
By the time the taxi passed through the wall of the city at Porta San Paolo there was light in the east. The streetlights were still burning; the city smelled of coffee and flowers and crowds. “You said Lungotevere,” the driver said. “Where on the Lungotevere?” Christopher gave him an address ten blocks from his own apartment.
Christopher, alone, strolled along the Tiber. His bones ached. Years before, he had been shot in the knee and when he was tired the wound throbbed; compared to Patchen’s injuries, the bad knee was nothing, but the pain reminded him that he had a body. From childhood, Christopher had had a tendency to forget that he existed in physical form; he came out of his mind only for brief periods, as an animal will come out of its burrow, in order to eat or make love. He felt pleasure with great intensity but he did not desire pleasure all the time, as Cathy did. He thought of it only when he was in the midst of it.
The light increased; he walked onto a bridge, the Ponte Sisto, and watched the domes of the city come out of the shadows, taking on mass at first, and then, gradually as the sun rose, color. The sun’s heat could not yet be felt on the skin, but it was stirring the mist on the Tiber. Pigeons, roosting on the bridge and almost the color of its stones, stirred and began to murmur. In the limpid light, which lasted only for moments before the full sunrise, each building, each line of roof, became distinct. Church and palace and house drifted apart, as a couple asleep in the same bed will drift into dreams, and become what each really is until they wake. The sun rose above the horizon; Rome flowed together again, hues of rose and terra cotta. Christopher began to hear the sounds of traffic, music from radios, dishes clattering.
He walked away from the river to a coffee bar near the Piazza Navona that he knew to be open early. He was the first customer. The sleepy fat girl at the cash register took his money and gave him the printed stub from the machine. At the bar, he drank a double caffè latte and ate a bun. When he went back outside, the day had begun. The narrow street was filled with people, and the cool new air, which had been so still only half an hour before, quivered with the sound of their voices.
2
The bed in Christopher’s apartment was empty. It was neatly made, as the maid had left it the day before. Cathy’s clothes, the ones she had worn during the day, were scattered across the bedroom floor. She had left the bathroom light on, and a brush filled with her hair lay on the sink. She wore no makeup, used no hairpins, so she left little trace of herself, except for a trail of clothes, and dishes and glasses still half-filled with the food and drink she had thought she wanted but could almost never finish. There was no note. Christopher, remembering her angry mood when he had left her two nights before, opened her closet. Her clothes and shoes were where they had been, her suitcases were stored on the shelf. She had left her jewelry, as she always did, scattered on her dressing table; she often tried on every ring, every necklace, every bracelet that she owned before finding the ones she wanted to wear. She left the rejected pieces—pearls and rubies from Cartier that had belonged to her grandmother, a dead aunt’s great diamond ring—where she had dropped them, as though she would never want to wear them again. Cathy had been raised in a house where it was taken for granted that the rich were too much admired to be robbed.
Christopher took the phone off the hook and undressed. Naked, he carried Cathy’s damp towels and his own soiled linen from the bathroom to the clothes hamper in the kitchen. He took a shower and got into bed. He thought, with great concentration, of a baseball game in which he had played as a schoolboy. The bat stung his hands; he saw a fly ball, hit to him in center field twenty years before, descend slowly out of the dull sky into his glove, felt the loss of breath like broken glass in his lungs as he ran the bases. He went to sleep.
What woke him was not Cathy’s weight in the bed, or the touch of her body, or his awareness, as he might be aware of another presence in a dark room, that she was staring into his sleeping face. It was the scent. Her face, lowering toward his own, was cold, and in her hair was the smell of the city. Cathy drove, night and day, with the top down on the convertible. There was a trace of perfume on her skin, all that was left of what she had worn when she went out the night before; it was almost too faint to be apprehended. Overwhelming all these aromas was another, rising from within her body, that Christopher knew. She had been making love.
Christopher, wide awake, saw through closed eyelids that the room was flooded with sunlight. He was lying on his side with his back to Cathy. She grasped his shoulders and moved him onto his back. He felt her watching him intently. “Don’t wake up,” she whispered. He didn’t know whether she really believed him to be asleep, or if she was playing dolls with him. She lay on her back beside him. Lifting his inert hand, she placed it between her thighs. She was still wet from the stranger she had left. Christopher moved his hand away. Cathy whispered again, “Don’t wake up.” She moved lightly over the bed. He felt her lips on his body.
“No,” he said.
Cathy went on trying to arouse him. She lifted her head and said, in a firm voice, crouching with her whole body flinching and rigid, “Please!” She wept, and put her eyes against his body so that her tears, warmer than her tongue had been, wet his skin.
Christopher lifted her and turned her rigid body toward him. He kissed her. Her lips moved against his. “Oh, Paul, Jesus, I can’t bear to be alone and I can’t bear what I’ve done,” she said. She trembled violently in his arms. “I couldn’t finish,” she said. “It went on for hours and I couldn’t. Couldn’t. Help me, Paul.”
Cathy lay absolutely still beneath him, accepting his body. She reached orgasm, as she always did, with her eyes open and staring into his. A long cry escaped her, growing louder and louder. Christopher put his hand over her mouth; she snatched it away and went on uttering the hysterical sound. She seized his hair so that he would look at her eyes. He realized that she was making an accusation. She was repeating the word “love” over and over again, as if they were, indeed, from different galaxies and life depended on making him understand the meaning of this monosyllable in her language.
3
Christopher woke when the late-afternoon sun came through the west windows of their bedroom. Cathy did not stir. She lay on her back, her limbs composed, her hair framing her face. Not even sleep could blur her beauty; she was as perfect unconscious as awake. No trace of her tears remained; the only mark on her body was a faint blue bruise on her neck where she had been bitten by her lover. Christopher looked at his watch; they had been asleep for ten hours. He went into the bathroom and shaved, and took another shower.
When he emerged, he found Cathy rushing through the bedroom. Her hair was still uncombed, but she was fully dressed except for the shoes she carried in her hand. At the sight of him, she paused in mid-flight, tottering for a moment on one stockinged foot. Finally she completed the step and staggered with hand outstretched for the support of the wall. Then she stood there, in silence, with both high-heeled shoes clutched to her stomach. Her eyes widened as Christopher approached her. He kissed her softly on both cheeks, his hands resting on her shoulders; she wore a soft woolen sweater, blue-gray like her eyes. Cathy did not move; it was the first time he had ever touched her without feeling a response.
“I’m going now,” she said. The sentence began in a whisper and ended in a sob. She shook her head violently, as if to drive away a voice, and lifted first one foot and then the other, putting on her shoes.
Christopher sat on the disordered bed. His hair was still wet and he rubbed it with a towel. Cathy’s head was turned away; she bit her lower lip. Christopher saw that she was watching Christopher’s face and her own in the mirror. He caught her eye in the glass.
“Stay until I get dressed,” he said. He put nothing into his voice. Cathy was waiting for a sign. Her face turned toward Christopher’s as if an invisible hand had grasped her chin and forced her to look at him.
“We’re going out together,” she said, “is that it?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s all?”
Christopher moved her away from the dresser; she misunderstood the reason why he put his hands on her, and resisted. “I want a clean shirt,” he said. Cathy clenched her fists and tightened her eyes. “I want to tell you things,” she said. “Paul, listen to me.”
“No. Cathy, I think we’ll both feel better if we do normal things for a while—walk, have a drink, have some dinner. Then you can say anything you like to me.”
In a breaking voice, she said, “Nothing touches you.” As she spoke, she watched in the mirror. Christopher’s eyes changed and he turned away. Still watching herself (Christopher could feel her behind him, facing the glass), she said, “It was Franco Moroni. You ought to be willing to hear the man’s name.”
“Later,” Christopher said. “Not now.”
Cathy was trembling. “His body is covered with black hair,” she said. “It was no good. In the end, he wanted me to lie to him about it. Do you know what I said to him, Paul? I said, It’s not really adultery if the man can’t give you a climax.’ He slapped me and threw my clothes at me and told me to get out. He takes pills, pep pills, handfuls of them.”
Christopher waited for her to stop speaking. “Do you feel changed?” he asked. “Are you different than you were before this happened?”
Cathy put both palms flat against her stomach. “I don’t know,” she said.
She shuddered. “Nothing touches you,” she said again. “Nothing.
She undressed quickly, pulling the sweater over her head, kicking off her shoes, turning her skirt and slip inside out as she pulled them off by the hems. She saw the look in Christopher’s eyes and laughed.
“No,” she said, “not that. Don’t worry. I need a shower.”
In the bathroom door she paused and looked over her shoulder at Christopher. The smile she gave him was a smile of forgiveness; he had not given Cathy the anger and jealousy she wanted, but she was ready to pretend that all was once again as it used to be.
“Make us a drink,” Cathy said, in her lightest tone. “We’ll have it in the living room and watch the sunset. The sky is beginning to be nice again in the evening.”
4
Cathy wanted to dine in Trastevere. Christopher knew that she thought she would be safe there from Franco Moroni, who spent his evenings on the Via Veneto. There he could be seen by motion picture people and by foreign girls who wanted to be in his films. He had begun as an actor. Discovering politics, he went on to make movies about revolutions in which the creatures he loathed—American millionaires, American spies, American girls—died screaming for mercy. “In Franco’s films,” a Communist journalist called Piero Cremona had told Christopher, “only Arabs have virtue—a view of the human race that is unique to Moroni.”
It was warm enough to eat outdoors, and Cathy and Christopher sat at a table in the Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere. Cathy finished all of her fettucine and most of her scampi. She drank no wine in Italy. She had a sensitive mouth and could taste each ingredient in even the most complicated dishes. “I haven’t really eaten anything since you left,” Cathy said, “you take my appetite with you when you go.” Then she put down her fork and stared at her hand, palm upturned on the tablecloth, as if she had lost the right to say such things to Christopher. A group of strolling musicians came to their table and the singer, an ugly youth with a true tenor voice, gave Cathy a rose after he had sung to her.
Christopher paid the bill and they walked back to the river, then northward along its banks with the mass of the Janiculum Hill, lights on its face like droplets of rain on a windowpane, rising to their left. Cathy walked a step ahead of Christopher. She didn’t know the streets, and she gave a little gasp of surprise when she found that she had led them into Saint Peter’s Square. It was deserted. She went on walking, with Christopher following after, until they were among the tall columns under Bernini’s colonnade. Cathy put her hand on one of the columns, as high as she could reach, and stood in that position, motionless. With her back to Christopher, she said, “May I speak?”
Christopher made no gesture. Cathy, sighing, turned around and held out her hand to him. He took it, and she pulled him toward her. The light from the street was yellowish and weak, and the mass of the basilica absorbed most of it, so that Cathy and Christopher, under the colonnade, stood in darkness.
“You’ll have to put your arms around me,” Cathy said. “Otherwise I can’t do it.” He did as she asked, and she slid her arms around his waist. She shook her hair away from her face so that their cheeks touched, and with her lips against his skin, began to speak. Christopher moved a step to the right so that they could lean against a column; Cathy’s whole weight hung in his arms. She stumbled when he moved, then righted herself and again found the position she wanted.
“Ever since I’ve known you, Paul,” Cathy said, “I’ve realized that you don’t like the things between us to be said out loud. Maybe everyone is that way if you love them. I don’t know. I’ve never loved anyone else. I know you don’t believe that. But with you, Paul, I feel like a person who wants life desperately, but knows she’s dying. That’s how you make me feel, it’s nothing you do or intend, but all the time I’m with you, I’m frightened, terrified, because I believe that no one can feel what I feel for you and go on living. I think I’m dying. All the time.”
Her voice was a murmur. Christopher could barely hear her. “You think no one can know anything about you,” she said, “but I can read your body. I know, and I’ve known ever since we went to Cannes together and made love for the first time, that you think I’m a clumsy lover. And selfish. Isn’t that true?”
Christopher said, “Yes.”
“Still you want me a lot, really want me, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“But I disappoint you in bed every time, no matter what I do or try to do for you, because I don’t know how to make you happy.”
“That’s not true, Cathy. You lose yourself, I think. I’ve never seen anyone like you.”
“You’ve had better girls than me.”
“Cathy, I’ve never had a girl I wanted as much as I want you.”
She hung in his arms, fragrant, breathing softly; he felt the twin streams of breath from her nostrils against his neck. Christopher shifted his own weight.
“Don’t move,” Cathy said, “please don’t move. I think there was, at some time in the past, a girl.” Her voice broke. “Don’t move, I’m not going to cry. One girl out of all the ones you’ve had. I think you loved her the way I love you, Paul. I think she spoiled you for me. She poisoned you. You wrote those poems to her, and now you never write poems.”
“Cathy, there was no such person.”
“Paul, I can’t believe that, it’s a lie.”
Christopher tried to push her away so that he could look at her but she resisted. He put his hand on her face and spoke into her hair.
“Cathy, I don’t lie in our part of life. I tell you the truth, and only the truth.”
Cathy uttered one harsh sob. As if the sound had released her, she stepped back out of Christopher’s arms.
“But if it’s not a lie you’re telling me, if there was no girl, then what does that make me?” she asked.”
5
Someone in Paris, Christopher never discovered who, had given Cathy the book of his poems. After reading them, she had flown to Rome; he found her waiting in his apartment when he returned, exhausted, after a long operation in Africa. Cathy had persuaded the portiere to let her in; she had only had to smile at him, she said, and give him five thousand lire.
“How much is that in real money?” she asked Christopher. He told her; he didn’t like the phrase, but it was one of Cathy’s favorites. “It expresses exactly what I mean,” she said, “dollars are real money—if I were an Italian I wouldn’t accept that funny-looking stuff.”
Christopher’s poems had excited Cathy. When she first read them in Paris, a month or two after they met at Saint Anton, she and Christopher were not yet lovers. A few weeks before, he had called her in Paris and taken her to dinner. She told him she was perfecting her French and studying the piano. She lived with a maid and a cook in an apartment owned by her parents in Auteuil. Her father liked to be in Paris for the racing season; he bred Thoroughbreds in America, and his friends were horsemen too. “Papa likes to know what a man is going to say to him before he starts to talk,” Cathy told Christopher. “If there’s no horse in the first sentence, he knows he’s in the wrong company.”
Cathy invited Christopher to lunch in the apartment. He expected to find other guests, but they were alone. Facing each other across the center of the table, they ate fresh salmon in midwinter. The maid, a bony woman in uniform, clucked over Cathy, urging her to finish the food on her plate. The dining room had an enormous north window, and Cathy sat facing this source of light. There were no shadows on her face, and her eyes, which changed from gray to blue according to her mood as the pupils enlarged or shrank, were fixed on Christopher’s face. She wore a blue frock and a scarf at her neck. Behind her was another window, and its white frame enclosed her like a figure in a painting, with the city in its winter mist brushed into the background. It seemed impossible that she could be a living woman: Botticelli might have imagined her color, Gainsborough her bones. Cathy, watching Christopher’s amusement, asked him, for the first time, “What are you thinking?” For the first time, Christopher refused to respond.
They kissed lightly when he left. His hands were on her waist. She moved her body inside her clothes, and with this small gesture awakened him sexually. In the street below her apartment, he laughed aloud at the strength of the desire he felt for her; he had never felt such heat for a woman, or known so surely that it was returned.
While Christopher was in the field, and actually operating, he had no sexual thoughts. Cathy did not change that in the weeks that followed, but when he found her waiting for him in Rome, he told her, truthfully, that he had been thinking about her and about nothing else during the long plane ride from Léopoldville. “I know, I think of nothing but you, and I’ve been sending out messages to you,” Cathy said. “Reading your poems told me what I guess I already knew. I love you. I want us to make love, and afterward I want to watch us making love in the poems you’ll write about us.” Christopher explained that he had stopped writing poems. Cathy paid no attention. She did not at that time doubt the power of her beauty. “We mustn’t become lovers in a city where we know anyone,” she said. “We have to be alone. Let’s go to Cannes, now.” They took the five o’clock plane.
In the hotel room, unclothed, Cathy changed. She lost her lighthearted way of speaking, her smile, her grace of movement. She ceased flirting. Giving Christopher her body was the most serious act she had ever carried out. She tried to say so. “When I look at you,” she told Christopher, “I see only you, I don’t see myself. That’s never happened to me before.” She asked Christopher if she had made him happy. He didn’t reply.
Next morning, at breakfast, Christopher watched Cathy peel an orange. She turned the fruit against the knife so that the skin came off in one long unbroken spiral. He wondered how she could do everything else with such effortless skill and be so blundering a lover. She told him that she was a virgin. He thought that she would learn technique. She came around the breakfast table with her mouth filled with food and kissed him and led him back to the bed. They spent a week together on the Cote d’Azur. At the end of it he handed in her name to Headquarters for clearance. A month later they were married.
He told Patchen, his best man, that he had spent less time and thought in taking a wife than he had ever done in recruiting an agent. “With the agents,” Patchen had said in his uninflected voice, “you were doing the seducing.”
6
Beneath the colonnade of Saint Peter’s, Cathy came back into Christopher’s arms. They swayed slightly, like a couple waiting on a dance floor for the next song to begin.
When she spoke again her voice was stronger. “I thought I could swap Franco for that girl in your past,” she said. “Hurt for hurt was my idea. I wanted to make an exchange, the way you do with captured spies, on a bridge between the free world and the beastly world.”
Cathy did not speak for a long time. “It was the loneliness,” she said at last.
Christopher waited. He knew well enough what she was going to say, and what she meant.
“You never take me with you into yourself, and that’s the only place I want to go,” Cathy said. “You never understand what I mean when we talk about this.”
Christopher sighed; Cathy put her fingers on his lips, hiding his displeasure for him, as if she knew he would not want her to see it.
“I’m lonely even when we make love, Paul,” Cathy said. “I know you don’t know what wanting someone you love can be like. I know because I love you. You can’t love, can you?”
“Yes,” Christopher said, “I can.”
“Then you can’t show it, you can’t let go. I feel it in you. It’s that God-damned work you do. Paul, what happens when you go away?”
“Mostly nothing happens, Cathy. It’s a question of control. I try to control circumstances. That’s what I’m trained to do.”
Cathy stepped away from him again. “When does the control stop?” she asked.
Christopher made no effort to touch her. “I’m going to tell you something,” he said. “I don’t know if you can understand. I doubt if anyone can who hasn’t lived the life. Cathy, I use people. I make them trust me, sometimes they even love me, and I betray them. I make traitors of them. I give them money and advice and they sign for it with their thumbprint, their actual thumbprint. That way, if they get out of line, we have incontrovertible proof that they’ve taken money to commit treason. We can mail the evidence to their secret police. They know they’re agreeing to blackmail in advance. Sometimes they’re ruined, sometimes they go to their deaths. I make these things happen. I couldn’t do it if I felt anything while I was doing it. To stay sane, if that’s what I am, I’ve learned to put my emotions somewhere else while I’m committing an act with another human being.”
Cathy stared at him, nodding, as he spoke. “What do you think of these people, these agents, that you’re manipulating?” she asked.
Christopher said, “In my way, I love them. I love secrets, we all do. That’s why we do the work. While we’re working, we’re together in a region of experience where very few humans have ever gone.”
“Love them? You just said you feel nothing while you’re with them.”
“No. I said that I put my emotions aside. Because what I feel is so strong that I couldn’t do the job if I let myself go free.”
“And you’re telling me that this—what do you call it?—this technique spills over into our lives and into our bed?”
“Yes.”
“I understand,” Cathy said. “Then there’s no difference. Absolutely no difference.”
“In what?”
“In loving you, Paul, and in lying down and letting Franco Moroni masturbate in me.”