EIGHT

1

The early sun began to warm the earth, and a gusting wind blew streams of ground mist, like the breath of an animal in winter, over the green lawns of the racecourse. Cathy stood by the rail with her hands in her pockets and a long red scarf down the back of her coat. She had been awake for less than half an hour but her eyes were clear and her skin was touched with color; after sleep or passion or grief, her face at once regained its perfection, showing no traces of the changes that had passed over it.

“They’re going to breeze him now,” she said. Her fathers Thoroughbred, moving onto the track at the opposite side of the infield, was invisible, cloaked in mist to the stirrups. The horse was a bright bay, and seemed to carry its rider, an exercise boy wearing a yellow sweater and a cloth cap turned backward, through a cloud. Proof that the horse was not in fact flying came to them in a moment, as they first felt the vibration and then heard the sound of its hoofbeats on the turf. Cathy hugged Christopher’s arm in both of hers. “Oh, come on!” she whispered, and the young stallion burst out of the mist and bore down on them with clods of earth flying from his shoes. They smelled the animal, sweat and breath, as he flashed by. Cathy watched him until the boy turned him off the track and the grooms led him back to the stables.

She and Christopher walked toward the gates. “I like horses better in the morning, when you’re in private with them, than when they’re racing,” Cathy said. “Once, at home, when I was little, Papa and I watched a gray colt breezing. He held me up so I could see. It was a perfect morning, sunburnt, the way it can be in Kentucky in the springtime. Watching the colt run—he’d named him Owen Laster after a friend—my father had tears in his eyes. He said, ‘Catherine, a blooded horse is the only thing in the world lovelier in my sight than you.’ I’ve never forgotten those words. It’s strange how you don’t get the things you want most. I always wanted Papa to name a horse for me and he never did. Just as you wont write a poem about me, Paul.”

Back at the Ritz, they ate breakfast in their room. Cathy kept silent; she had spoken very little since the day before. Christopher found her eyes on him.

“Paul,” she said, “where did you go yesterday?”

Christopher refolded the newspaper he had been reading and dropped it on the floor. “I had to go see a man who’s sick.”

Cathy said, coldly, “You had to sit up with a sick spy.” She bit into a croissant. “Just as you went out the door yesterday,” she said, “you had a phone call. It was a female.”

“Females make up half the human race, Cathy. If you answer the phone, you’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of hearing a woman’s voice on the line.”

Cathy gave him a tight smile. She did not like his way of treating her jealousy lightly. In Cathy, it was a force, like the flow of blood to the brain, that was in play all the time. When Christopher looked at another woman in the street, Cathy would strike him; once, in the Grand Vefour, she had diverted his attention from a slender French girl at another table by pouring most of a bottle of Pommard into his lap. If he sang a love song she demanded to know what woman from an earlier life he was thinking about. “To be the way you are,” she told him, “not to feel jealousy at all, to be that heartless, is a form of madness.”

“I knew the voice of this female,” Cathy said. “It was Maria Custer. We were at Farmington together. She was three years ahead of me. I thought I knew her voice. I said, ‘Maria, isn’t that you?’ And she said, ‘Who’s this?’ ‘Paul’s wife, Catherine Kirkpatrick Christopher,’ I replied. Maria went dead silent and then she said, as if I didn’t exist, as if only she and you existed, she said, ‘Tell Paul I called.’ That was the whole conversation.”

Cathy was sitting with her back to the tall window, her hair gathering the light.

“I knew that you had been at school at the same time,” Christopher said. “Maria remembers you.”

“I’m not surprised. She was famous as a field hockey player, and she used to knock me down in practice every chance she got.”

Cathy spread jam on a bit of croissant, then placed it uneaten on her plate.

“Is Maria married?” she asked. “Does she have children?”

Christopher answered the questions. Cathy asked how long he had known Maria.

“Five years, more or less.”

“And you never thought it would interest me that you and my old schoolmate were friends? Paul, why did she call? Why did you go see her yesterday?”

Christopher returned Cathy’s steady look. At last she broke her stare and let her hands fall helplessly into her lap.

“Don’t tell me,” she said. “Maria is a lady spy.”

Christopher did not respond.

Cathy turned her profile toward him. She tossed her head as if to throw back a lock of hair; it was a gesture she seldom made, and one of the few false ones she used.

“Maria,” Cathy said, “is married to an older man, a White Russian who looks like someone in a silent movie. His name is Otto Rothchild. They live in a place on the Île Saint-Louis that costs four thousand francs a month if it costs a penny, and he’s had a stroke or something so that he’s partially paralyzed.” She paused. “That’s just so you’ll realize you don’t know everything.”

Christopher laughed at Cathy’s animation. She snatched the croissant from her plate and ate it, and drank greedily from her coffee cup.

“How did you find out about Maria being married to Otto?” Christopher asked.

Cathy grinned. “I have my ways.”

“Seriously, Cathy.”

She licked her fingertips. “Well, I don’t exactly live in a vacuum, you know. I’d heard from some of the girls that Maria had married an old man. And I knew she was in Paris because people had seen her, to say hello.”

“So you hunted her down remorselessly.”

“No. I was shopping one day in the Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, looking for a scarf for me and those nice gloves I got for you, and when I turned around in a shop there was Maria. We were eye to eye. She looked like she wanted to jump through the window for a minute, and then she smiled. We chatted away and then she said it was four o’clock and why didn’t we trot down to Queenie’s for some tea. Trot down to Queenie’s is how she put it. These muscular women are always so arch. So we trotted. We told each other all our news. I said I’d married this delicious man named Paul Christopher and got out all my pictures of you. She said hmmmm when she saw you, but she never let on that she knew you. Not a hint.”

“And Maria showed you her pictures of Otto in his wheelchair?”

Cathy shook her head. “No. After a couple of hours in Queenie’s, Maria said she was having so much fun talking to me after all those years she wondered if I was free to have dinner at her house. She said she wanted me to meet her husband and they were having something that the cook could stretch for three, and would I come as I was. I had nothing to do except wait for you, so I said sure. The Rothchilds have a very good cook. He, Otto Rothchild that is, did his best to be hospitable. But he really was ill, poor man. He kept lapsing into a stupor, and coming out of it. It was sad. I don’t want to go back there.”

Christopher gave himself another cup of coffee. “When was this?” he asked.

“When you were in Germany,” Cathy replied.

2

On Palm Sunday, Cathy’s father’s horse fell early in the race. The family stayed late at the American Hospital with the injured jockey and missed the party they had hoped to attend as victors. “Your father is positively grateful to Fernando for having broken his leg and rescued us from the Bourbon de Blamonts’ soirée,” Cathy’s mother said. “He says the French are a young man’s vice. He likes them less and less as he grows older and older. He doesn’t understand why they think they’re flattering him when they insult his nationality. Eleazer Kirkpatrick does not take it as a compliment to be told that he is, heureusement, not like the other Americans. I have to bind him hand and foot to get him to go inside a French house.”

Cathy and Christopher dined at home with the Kirkpatricks and afterward watched the older couple play cribbage. Cathy’s father broke his silence only to count his cards and peg his score on the board. Her mother had the Southern belle’s gift of releasing butterflies of wit each time she spoke. Her name was Letitia, and she and her husband were both called Lee. They were cousins, and even before they were married they were named Lee Kirkpatrick and Lee Kirkpatrick. The male parent seldom spoke. On first meeting he had established that he and Christopher had been in the same regiment of Marines in different wars and in the same house at Harvard; he had never asked Christopher another question. “He knows everything about you, knowing those two things, that he needs to know,” Cathy said.

Letitia Kirkpatrick was a storyteller. “Aunt Elizabeth came to stay the week before Ash Wednesday,” she said of an aged relative. “She likes to be with us before Lent begins, so that she can drink Maker’s Mark for her winter ailments without giving offense to the Lord.” She gave an exclamation when she saw the cards her husband had dealt her. “Eleazer is going to be skunked!” she cried. “Aunt Elizabeth kept fondling your wedding photograph, Cathy, and one night, finally, she said. ‘Oh my, Lee, what a pity that you did not require Catherine to have a white wedding as every one of our other brides has done since dear dead Ambrose Kirkpatrick came to these lands from Virginia before the Revolution. Dear Catherine looks so much like dear beautiful cousin Eugénie.” Cathy’s father knocked peremptorily on the table and his wife counted her score, moving her peg to the last hold.

“My husband is a hateful man,” said Cathy’s mother, “who doubts the genealogy of our family. He believes in the bloodlines of horses because there are witnesses to their acts of procreation, but he is convinced that humans lie about their sex lives. However, and what luck it is for us, Aunt Elizabeth has the family tree by heart. Eugénie was our cousin through her Southern mother, and even after she married the emperor of France she never ceased to long for us. ‘I have been saving a dozen of Eugénie’s crystal goblets,’ Aunt Elizabeth told me; ‘dear Eugénie entrusted some of her lovely things into our care after Napoleon lost everything and she had to move to England and didn’t entertain nearly so much as she had in Paris. I wanted to give them to Catherine, but of course I had thought she would marry one of us, and I don’t know if that Northern boy she ran away with would understand.’ Understand what, I asked. ‘That his lips were touchin’ the goblet that had been kissed by dear cousin Eugénie,’ she explained. I said if Cathy was anything like the rest of my branch of Kirkpatricks she would not want a necrophile for a husband, and poor Aunt Elizabeth packed her bags on the instant. She ran wild-haired and weeping down the drive, and I thought we’d have to send the dogs to bring her back. But she came by herself after sitting on her valise for a while under the willow tree.”

Cathy’s accent, never entirely subdued in northern schools, returned to her when she was with her family. As her mother talked, Cathy’s eyes shone with the recollection of a childhood in a great creaking house, with packs of dogs in the dooryard and mad cheerful relations in the remodeled slave quarters in the back garden. When her father finished his game of cribbage, she sat on a sofa with her head on his shoulder, asking for more family stories. An amiable ghost called General Wellington Kirkpatrick, Letitia said, lived in the Kirkpatricks’ stables. He had fallen from a horse and broken his neck while recuperating from wounds received at the Battle of the Wilderness. Each year, on the night before the Kentucky Derby, the ghost went into the paddocks and frightened the horses at midnight. “It’s one of the sights of the countryside, and relatives come from miles around on the first Friday in May to hang on the fence and watch the horses flying around,” said Cathy’s mother. “Of course, the general is invisible.”

Cathy, fighting tears, said good-bye to her parents. They were packed to fly back to America the next morning. Christopher held her face in his hands as they descended in the elevator. Her eyes had turned a deep bruised blue. Loneliness was, as she had always tried to tell him, a knife in her heart.

3

They moved from the Ritz to a flat in Montmartre that was used as a safe house. Christopher rose at dawn and went each day to a different meeting place, where Kamensky’s novel, a photographic copy of the original and a typescript of the rough English translation, was handed to him by a messenger from the Paris station. At the end of the day he went out again and gave the pages back to the messenger so that they could be locked overnight in the station’s safe.

While Cathy slept, Christopher worked on the book. He read Kamensky’s manuscript, and read it again. The Russian language flooded back into his consciousness. At the end of a week he was able to read Kamensky’s sentences almost as fluently as he read English, and to feel the rhythm of the language.

The translation into English was the work of technicians and it had come from several hands. Christopher worked on it, as Patchen had ordered him to do, with a red pencil, restoring as best he could Kamensky’s original meanings. The beauty of the writing could not be transposed from Russian to English. Reading Kamensky, re-creating his echoing sentences, Christopher grew to love him.

Cathy wakened just before noon each day and went out to the market. She would come back with charcuterie and cheese and bread and fruit. She bought wine for herself and beer for Christopher. She arranged the food on white plates, folding the cold meats, having bought them as much for color as for taste, into the shapes of flowers and animals. She liked to see Christopher’s amusement. “What I miss, away from home, is the laughter,” she said. “You and I laugh all the time, or used to. But no one over here seems to find things funny. I feel impolite when I laugh in public in Europe.”

The weather had turned cold again, and in the afternoons, Cathy wrapped herself in a blanket and curled her legs beneath her in a chair. The dome of Sacré Coeur rose just outside the windows of the apartment, and Cathy gazed at it for hours on end through the blurring rain. She played the piano, softly, at the other end of the long room where Christopher worked. In Kamensky’s book was a girl who played the piano. She was blond like Cathy, and melancholy. Christopher was startled to find Kamensky’s girl speaking in Russian to her lover a phrase that Cathy had spoken in English to Christopher. The Russians in the novel were walking in a forest, while Christopher and Cathy in life had been standing on a beach, but the words were almost exactly the same. “What do you want?” the real girl and the imaginary one had been asked. Both had replied, “Not what other girls want. No children, no career. I want a perfect union with a man.”

Cathy found the mechanics of secret life ridiculous. Christopher would not let her use the telephone in the flat, or leave letters that came to her parents’ apartment lying about in the safe house, or have deliveries made from shops. One night the messenger had been ill, and Christopher had carried Kamensky’s heavy manuscripts with him in a briefcase to a restaurant and the theater and had gone to sleep with them on the bedside table.

“Really, Paul, it’s like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn swearing oaths in the haunted house.”

“Yes. It’s asinine. The whole idea of secret life is asinine, but if you don’t live it by these rules you make mistakes. Others are involved, and to them it’s no joke.”

“More and more it seems to me it’s a mistake to live it at all. You can live any life you want to, Paul. You can, you know.”

“This is the life I want, not any other.”

“If this is what it is, sitting around in a shabby apartment watching it rain, I don’t see why you love it so.”

“It’s not always so tranquil.”

Christopher had finished his work for the day. Cathy crossed the room, bringing her blanket, and sat on his lap; she covered them both with the rough woolen robe. “My papa used to tell me that my bones were filled with air, and that I was no heavier than a hummingbird when I sat on his lap,” she said. “Did he lie?” Christopher nodded. “Southern men are perfect,” Cathy said.

The happy days with her mother and father, the long quiet hours in the apartment, the simple pattern of work and music, eating in plain restaurants, going to the movies, had begun to take Cathy back to what she had been before she had gone to bed with Franco Moroni. Christopher did not speak to her of her adultery, and after a few days, Cathy stopped talking about it as well. She made love more shyly now, she waited for Christopher to move toward her in bed. He asked her why.

“I’ve lost the right to ask you for love,” she said.

“You’re wrong.”

“You keep on saying it’s all right, Paul, that I’m the same. But I’m not. You can’t really think that I am.”

They were lying in the dark. The bedroom in the safe house had no windows; some earlier owner had torn out the whole interior of the apartment in order to make an enormous salon and dining room, but he had left only one small dark corner in which to sleep and another for a kitchen.

“Cathy, you think of that night you spent with Moroni as a mutilation.”

“You are so right.”

“What do you need to be healed?”

“Paul, the only thing I need is for you to care that it happened.”

“I care.”

Sentences formed in Christopher’s mind: It’s your body, you can do anything you like with it. I don’t own your flesh or your mind because I love you. He didn’t speak; Cathy would never abide such thoughts.

“I know you care,” Cathy said. “But for me, not for yourself. If you did to me what I’ve done to you, I’d kill you in your sleep.”

Christopher gathered her body into his arms. She lay inert for an instant before she responded. In daylight, now, she sometimes looked away when she spoke to him.

“I wish I had another life, the way you do, Paul,” she said. “Maybe I could stay inside it, as cold as you, and learn the secret you told me when I told you about Franco.”

“The secret?”

“Of how to love, and feel nothing.”

4

Christopher finished his work on the Kamensky manuscript and gave it to the Paris station to be retyped.

Christopher, meanwhile, waited for an agent to come from Dakar for a meeting in Paris. The man had been instructed to meet him on the last Wednesday in April at noon, by the tomb of the unknown soldier beneath the Arc de Triomphe. If the meeting failed, he was to come to the same place again at ninety-minute intervals until he made contact with Christopher. The African was six hours late. Christopher watched his tall figure, swathed in a heavy overcoat, as it dodged through the traffic of the Place de l’Étoile. Tires shrieked, horns sounded in violation of the law.

“I assure you,” the African said, “that I was not followed for the last hundred meters of my journey.” He offered no explanation for being late and Christopher asked for none. He led the agent into the underground passage, then into the crowded Métro. When he was satisfied that they were alone, he took the man into a brasserie and ordered dinner. The man’s name was Iboudou; he sent his steak back to be cooked again; he had the horror of the civilisé for rare meat.

The debriefing took a long time, as it usually did with blacks. The man was a rising politician. Christopher had given him money and technical assistance to found a party newspaper. He had financed trips abroad for the politician’s supporters, and arranged scholarships for promising young men. The politician had gradually, with Christopher’s secret funds and Christopher’s secret advice, built up a base of support. Christopher had recruited him because he was intelligent and self-interested, qualities he had derived from a European education. Also, he was from a minor tribe that was acceptable to the two large ones which contended, sometimes bloodily, for control of their new nation. It was thought that Christopher’s agent might even, if a compromise became necessary to avert civil war, be made prime minister. He was already in the government.

In Iboudou’s country, Christopher had seen one man mounted on a writhing woman while a second waited to cut her throat, and yet another man, his white robe spotted with blood and his face dazed as if by a powerful drug, walking down a dusty road with the severed heads of children swinging from either hand. When all the members of the rival tribe had been hunted through the streets and killed in this village, Christopher had seen a grave containing a hundred bodies. All the young girls, and many of the women, had been disemboweled. There had been no reason for the massacre, no spark that could be said to have set off the carnival of rape and murder; it had just happened, as it happened again a week later, with the tribes changing places as victims and murderers, in a village at the other end of the country. Iboudou was the alternative to slaughter. That was the policy conceived in the brain of the American government. Christopher, executing policy deep in its body, had lost his trust in ideas. In a pissoir, he gave Iboudou the money he was owed, and required him to sign the receipt with a thumbprint. “Do you,” asked Iboudou, “use invisible ink for white men?”

5

The safe house in Montmartre was at the top of a flight of stone stairs, and Christopher mounted them slowly, so as to remain behind the pair of policemen who climbed ahead of him. There was no light in the windows of the flat on the top floor. Christopher entered the darkened hallway. The concierge, a gray bony woman who seemed never to sleep, came out of her lodge and switched on the motor of the elevator. Christopher thanked her, and exchanged a word with her about the cold rain while he waited for the lift to descend; she told him that the weather made her joints ache. Cathy, accustomed to her parents’ concierge who had been made servile by large tips, was disconcerted by this suspicious female, and after the first few days in the safe house had ceased speaking to her. Christopher, going up in the cage of the elevator, watched the concierge below, shivering in the night air. When she heard him close the gates at the top, she brought the lift back down and turned off its motor again.

The flat was empty. Cathy’s music, sheets that she had bought in a neighborhood shop, was still on the rack of the piano, and the plate she had used for lunch was on the table with the remains of her food drying on the surface of the china.

Her clothes were gone, and her suitcase. Christopher looked for a note, but found none. He went over the apartment foot by foot. There was no sign that Cathy had come to any harm.

Downstairs, he found the concierge still loitering in the hall. She pressed the light switch; the dim bulb was on a timer, designed to give the tenants time enough, and no more, to pass from the outer door to the lift. As she and Christopher spoke, the light went on and off repeatedly. The bulb, when it was burning, buzzed like an insect trapped between the panes of a double window.

“Mademoiselle departed at about five o’clock,” said the concierge. “She had a large bag, and there was no one to help her with it. It took her quite a long time to go down the steps. She found a taxi at the bottom,”

“She left no envelope for me?”

The concierge gave Christopher a sardonic look and shook her head.

“We were expecting a visitor,” Christopher said. “Did anyone come?”

“Male or female?”

“One of each, a man and his wife.”

“Evidently the wife remained at home. The gentleman came at noon, only minutes after you yourself had left. He remained for two hours, perhaps longer. No doubt Mademoiselle invited him to lunch.”

Christopher nodded. “I’ll be leaving myself in the morning,” he said, “and I wanted to thank you for your kindness to us.” He gave the concierge a fifty-franc note. Without looking at it, she crumpled it in her fist like an unwelcome letter.

“The gentleman who came,” Christopher said. “Describe him.”

“American, not handsome, middle-aged. His clothes did not fit. He was evidently a strong man. He went up the stairs instead of using the lift. He ran all the way up.”

From a telephone in a bar, Christopher called the Kirkpatricks’ apartment and asked the maid, in French, for himself. Then he asked for Madame Christopher.

“Neither Monsieur nor Miss Catherine is here.”

“May I leave a message?”

“But they are in Rome, monsieur. I don’t know when they will be back, it may be weeks.”

Christopher dialed the home number of the chief of the Paris station. He identified himself, and using Wilson’s telephone name, asked where he was staying.

“I don’t know.”

“I want to see him now.”

There was a silence. “All right. Inside, in an hour.”

The crowd of French police lounging outside the American Embassy watched Christopher idly as he walked through the front door. The duty officer was waiting for him by the Marine guard’s desk. Upstairs, in an empty corridor, he stopped and faced Christopher. “The French may have taken your picture,” he said. “We gave them some infrared equipment, and it would be like them to try it out on us. Was the police van parked where it usually is?”

“Yes, down the avenue Gabriel.”

“Too far away, then. But we’ll sneak you out the back. Bud is here, working late. He awaits. Call me when you’re ready to go.”

Wilson was using an office in which the entire ceiling was covered with fluorescent light fixtures. He sat with his feet on a green steel desk, covered with file folders with ‘secret’ labels on them. The burn basket, a transparent plastic tube, was half filled with fragments of torn paper. Wilson pushed his reading glasses onto his forehead and reached inside his shirt to scratch his chest. He wore no tie and a thick tuft of graying hair curled at his unbuttoned collar.

“It’s two o’clock in the morning,” Wilson said. “Don’t you ever go to bed?”

Christopher sat down and moved the burn basket to one side in order to have an unobstructed view of Wilson.

“You called on my wife this afternoon,” Christopher said.

Wilson nodded.

“You didn’t think it was necessary to tell me beforehand?”

“I assumed you’d be there. When you weren’t, I thought I’d come to the point anyway.”

“Which was?”

Wilson laced his hands behind his head and examined the canopy of light on the ceiling. In the absence of shadows, he looked older, more pallid. His beard showed patches of white.

“I ask you,” Christopher said, “because I found her gone and I don’t know where she is.”

Wilson put his feet on the floor and looked at the burn basket.

“I’m sorry,” Wilson said. “She was upset. Sometimes you touch a nerve when you don’t expect to.”

Christopher moved the burn basket again, putting it out of sight on the floor. He watched Wilson.

“Putting pieces of paper together,” Wilson said, “I saw that she and Maria Rothchild had once known each other. I asked her about that.”

“And that upset her?”

“No, it was the other connection.”

Wilson picked up a cardboard coffee cup and turned it between his fingers, delicately, as he had handled the cards at gin rummy.

“I’m telling you what I’m telling you as an officer, not as a husband,” he said. “You and your wife know an Italian named Franco Moroni. He’s a filmmaker in Rome. He calls himself a Communist. A romantic. I had a piece of paper from Rome. The station there is running a German girl who likes to screw Communists and movie producers, sometimes both at the same time.”

“Come on,” Christopher said.

“The German kid has been doing it for Moroni, with us paying her the fee. We want to know where he gets the money for his movies, and so on. To make it as short as I can, the German asset reports that Moroni is boasting that he’s sleeping with the wife of a prominent American journalist named Paul Christopher.”

Christopher did not move. “You asked Cathy about that?”

“Not directly. I asked how well she knew Moroni, and if she had ever discussed your whereabouts with him when you were out of town.”

“Why?”

“You know why. I’m trying to find the blown fuse. Maybe if Moroni knew you were in Berlin, he told somebody like our German girl and the word got passed to Moscow or somewhere. If they’ve got him on the string, they’ve got someone talking to him.”

“What did Cathy reply?”

“She didn’t. She just ran into the other room.”

“You were there for two hours.”

“Your wife gave me a nice lunch, and played the piano. We talked about you. She acted like a woman who really loves her husband. It was only in the last five minutes that we discussed Moroni.”

“What’s your conclusion?”

Wilson put down the empty coffee container. “I don’t know. I told her it wasn’t you who had told us about Moroni. I had to shout through the closed door. She wouldn’t open up. I don’t know if she believed me.”