1
Wilson had been to Zurich, and he carried the data he had gathered there on an index card in an inside pocket. Christopher noticed changes in the Security man; he spoke more gently, he had begun to look Christopher in the eye. As he collected information, he abandoned mannerisms. He believed now that he was close to the truth.
“The dates fit,” he said. “The phony passport Bülow had on him when he died could have been made in Zurich. There’s a fellow there, a former Abwehr forger, who does similar work.”
“What about the airlines, the hotel, car rentals?”
“Zero. I’d have used phony paper, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, but the hotel clerk might have remembered a night’s absence.”
Wilson shook his head in bewilderment. “It’s hard. We have this liaison thing with the Swiss, that we won’t operate on their territory. Bern takes it seriously. They wouldn’t let me talk to the hotel fellow without informing the Swiss. I wanted to send him some money in an envelope and have him meet me in Germany. Bern said that that would transgress the parameters of liaison proprieties.”
“What about the money? It went from Zurich to Berlin.”
Christopher had no hope that Wilson or anyone else could breach the security of the Swiss banking system. But Wilson smiled in triumph. Years before, he said, when he was in the FBI, he had found an embezzler that the Swiss had wanted, and the man had been brought back to Zurich, money and all, in the most discreet possible way.
“Embezzlement, to the Swiss, is what arson is to the Japanese,” Wilson said. “Cops have a kind of freemasonry—catch a crook, make a friend. The embezzler I caught made me a true friend of one particular Swiss cop. I had supper with my friend. He was able to help, because there is nothing in Switzerland that the Swiss police don’t know. It makes you envious. The money, Paul, went to Berlin from a numbered account in the Swiss Credit Bank. This is a photo of the transfer order, with one of the authorized signatures. It’s a funny name, of course, but do you know the handwriting?”
Christopher looked at the card. He felt no anger, no surprise. It was what he had expected. His talent, the gift of the operative, was to separate from years of talk the one phrase that betrayed the truth, and from miles of action the single deed that revealed the person.
“Yes,” he said, “I know the handwriting.”
Wilson took the photocopy back. He looked at Christopher with undisguised sympathy. When he spoke there was tenderness, almost a caress, in his hoarse voice.
“What now?” he asked.
“You’ll have to put it in the mill. But knowing who had Bülow killed is no good to us. Why? I’d want to know that before I swept them up.”
“So would I. I think we ought to let it run. Maybe even make something happen.”
“I want to talk to Patchen.”
Wilson took a cable out of his briefcase and handed it to Christopher.
“He wants to talk to you,” Wilson said. “But it can’t be about this. I haven’t put anything on this subject into the traffic.”
The cable told Christopher that Patchen would be in Paris in the morning; it set up a meeting for ten o’clock in the zoo in the Bois de Vincennes.
“Can you brief me afterward?” Wilson asked. “I think you and I had better move together on this as much as we can.”
“All right. I’ll phone when Patchen is through with me.”
Wilson held up the photograph of the bank form he had brought back from Zurich.
“Do you want to show him this? I think you ought to tell him what we know, instead of my doing it. After all, I’m a stranger to you two, and I guess you’d have to say this is a private grief.”
Christopher shook his head. “David can look at it when he gets back to the Embassy,” he said. “I wonder if he’ll want to.”
2
When Christopher arrived on the dot of ten, Patchen was waiting by the great artificial rock in the center of the zoo, watching the mountain goats. It was summer, and Patchen had changed from his black chalk-stripe suit to blue seersucker; he had Brooks Brothers send him one of each in September and May, and every other year he bought a tweed jacket for winter weekends and a linen blazer for summer. Christopher, who had been his roommate in a naval hospital and later at their university, had seen him sometimes without a necktie. Few others had done so. “David undresses in the dark,” Patchen’s gaunt wife had told Christopher one evening after too much drink; “it’s his wounds, you know—he thinks being disfigured makes him unattractive sexually.” Laura Patchen was an intellectual woman. “I’ve wondered,” she added, “if some race memory isn’t involved—there is a biological alarm system that warns one not to mate with defectives. But war wounds’ve never bothered the ladies—tell him that, Paul, will you?”
In the zoo, Patchen caught sight of Christopher and clasped his hands behind his back, the signal that he had seen no surveillance and it was safe to approach. Christopher smiled, his signal. Patchen thought these precautions foolish, but he took them automatically. He knew that Christopher, failing to see a signal, would break the contact and make him wait for an hour and go to another place to meet him.
Patchen waved a hand at the jagged concrete alp with goats clinging to its side; no verbal joke was necessary. They walked on. It was not too early in the day for crowds; the paths of the zoo were filled with children, being herded from species to caged species by scolding adults. Patchen and Christopher went back outside the gates and walked down a wooded path until they found a bench where they could talk undisturbed.
“I’m afraid I have some unhappy news for you,” Patchen said. “Two things have happened about Tuning Fork since we talked, and neither is going to make things easier for you.”
“I’m listening.”
“First, the swap for Kamensky. We can’t do it. We had a heavyweight of theirs and they had a collection of small fry, ours and the Brits’, and we were going to work up a package. We were going to say, as sort of an afterthought, ‘Oh, by the bye, we have something else to sweeten the pot. Why don’t you make yourselves some propaganda hay by letting some of your unhappy intellectuals out? We’ll even pump a little applause into the Free World’s press. No question of defection, you understand; you just give them exit visas and say how anyone can travel to the outside world from the great Soviet Union. Like, uh, Blank and Blank—and what’s that fellow’s name? Kamensky.’ ”
“You thought that would work?”
“Dick Sutherland did. They want their master spy back. But then, last week, the Soviets snatched one of ours. One of Sutherland’s. If they publicize it, it’s sure going to look like we’ve been meddling in the internal affairs of the U.S.S.R., because this fellow they’ve got in Lubianka has been giving us everything except the time and duration of Khrushchev’s erections.”
“He’s a Russian?”
“He is indeed. But one of their fellows in Delhi, of all places, has come to our man out there and told him that just as soon as they wring out our agent they’d be quite glad to deliver him to us on neutral ground in exchange for their fellow, who’s languishing in prison.”
I see.
“Yes. Dick Sutherland may have faults, but leaving one of his assets in the hands of the KGB’s interrogators is not among them. He went for the deal like a hungry muskellunge. The swap will take place before I can get back home, probably.”
“There’s nothing else he could do.”
“No. And the other thing is, the Tuning Fork Working Group, taking into account the possibility, the probability even, of a lot of bad press because of the arrest of Sutherland’s agent, wants to publish Kamensky’s book as quickly as possible. Yesterday, for example.”
“To show what a hero our spy was, to try to kill the Soviet system?”
“By indirection, yes,” Patchen said. “It’s not fully appreciated outside our profession that it’s sometimes an honorable act to commit treason.”
In the shade where they were sitting it was many degrees colder than it had been in the sunlit zoo. Patchen shivered in his thin suit and stood up, ready to walk again.
“What word would you use to describe the act we’re about to carry out against Kamensky?” Christopher asked.
Patchen walked away.
Christopher followed. Patchen asked for a report on the Rothchilds, and Christopher told him of his conversation with Maria.
“Did I say such a thing?” Patchen asked. “Place you, place anyone, above Otto?”
“It sounds like you, and Maria never misquotes.”
Christopher led Patchen through the maze of footpaths. They went on talking about the Rothchilds. Christopher told him Cathy’s story about her evening with them, and Patchen stopped in his tracks to guffaw at the idea of Otto in a Bette Davis film. “You know,” he said, “Maria looks a little like Bette Davis, the bangs and the eyes. I wonder if she knows it.”
Christopher didn’t laugh. He let a silence collect, and then, on a bench in the sun, he told Patchen in a few sentences what Wilson had found in Zurich, what they both suspected. Patchen’s body jerked as though he had taken a physical blow. Then he listened coldly. When he had heard it all, he made his perfunctory protest. It was a last word of loyalty to people who had betrayed him.
“There doesn’t need to be a connection,” he said. “It’s an indication, Paul. It’s not proof.”
“That’s true. David, do you think I want to believe it?”
Patchen shook his head, looked at nothing for a time, shook his head again. Nothing astonished him. What Cathy believed she must develop occult powers to achieve, Patchen did every day with paper and money and radio transmissions—saw the shadow inside the flesh.
“Cuckolds never want to believe it,” he said to Christopher now.
“We have to know, David.”
“What does Wilson want to do?”
“Let them run. Maybe feed the baby and watch it grow.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I’m going to Berlin myself to check out as much of it as I can. I may make a second trip, to Spain, with Cathy. But I think Wilsons right. We have to set up a reaction, and read it.”
“All right. But I suppose you want to keep it in the family. You’re closest to it.”
“Until we’re sure, yes. Then it will have to be handled however these things are handled. I insist on the consequences. No rescues, David.”
He told Patchen what action he wanted to set in motion. Patchen listened, nodding; at one point he smiled at the cruel humor of what Christopher was doing to himself in the name of something that he held to be more real than he.
“All right,” Patchen said, and in addressing Christopher he used his secret name again. “I’d like to ask you this: is there any limit on what you’ll pay for the truth?”
Christopher turned his back.
“I don’t know why it surprises me,” Patchen told his friend, “but it always does, when you decide to show what a cold-blooded son of a bitch you are.”
3
Otto Rothchild permitted Christopher and Patchen to see him walk. They heard his wheezing breath in the hall and the shuffling tread of his shoes on the carpet before they saw him. He leaned on two canes with his elbows locked, the weight of his body pushing the bones against the stretched flesh of his shoulders. He nodded to them as he entered the sitting room. Patchen, whom Christopher had watched in the hospital as he learned to walk again after the war, ran his eyes up and down Rothchild’s ruined body. Emotion flickered in Patchen’s deadened face—kindred feeling, the memory of disgust; Christopher heard again, like a shout coming into a house from the street, Patchen’s cries of loathing for his own body, fifteen years before, when it would fail to obey the commands of his brain.
Rothchild sat in his chair, arranged his clothes. He was breathing rapidly, shallow inhalations, strong exhalations through the nose—an athlete after a run. His eyes did not close. While he waited for his voice to return he rested his eyes on the small Klee that was the pride of his collection.
“The canes,” he said to Maria, “are not good for the rugs. You must get some of those rubber tips.”
Rothchild turned his gaze toward Patchen.
“You seem to be making progress, Otto. Everyone will be glad to hear that.”
“Yes, David. Part by part I am hauling my body out of the grave. What brings you here? You’re commuting from Washington these days.”
“The Kamensky business.”
Rothchild lifted a glass of water, using both hands, and wet his mouth.
“Paul is handling it extremely well,” he said. “He has Cerutti under contract, if not under discipline. It’s all going according to the scenario.”
“That part, yes. But more and more, Otto, I worry about the effect on Kamensky. So do the others at home.”
Maria, seated with ankles crossed, did not bother to watch Patchen as he spoke; his face showed nothing. She had her eyes on Christopher, who was listening passively as usual, and when Christopher caught her glance she gave him a smile, a crinkling of the skin around the eyes, a widening of the full lips; it was the grin a sister might give to a favorite brother.
“Each time we meet, David, this subject arises,” Rothchild said. “But it never advances. We are worried; we see what the consequences for Kiril Kamensky may be—probably will be. What, my dear David, can we do about it?”
“We had a plan, Otto. We thought we could get him out.”
“Get him out? How? Send in parachutists and kidnap him? Really, David.”
“Trade goods, Otto.” Patchen named the captured Russian spy that Headquarters had been willing to exchange for Kamensky. Rothchild’s hands twitched in surprise. Then, preparing a reply, he looked from face to face. When he spoke, he was gazing at none of them but at his Klee: a flower, a stick figure, a line of color like a cancellation; it was a picture with no depth, it suggested nothing but its surface. Christopher wondered why Rothchild, of all people, loved it so.
“I can’t believe it,” Rothchild said. “Exchange a man of that stature for a writer, a forgotten writer? It would never have worked.”
“There were permutations. It would have worked.”
“Do I understand that the plan has been abandoned?”
“Yes.” Patchen explained what had happened, as he had explained it to Christopher.
“Then it’s a dead issue. Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Not at all. We’re afraid that Kamensky, if he came to a bad end, would be an operational liability. One way or another, we have to save him.”
“You’ve just said that’s gone by the boards,” Maria said.
Rothchild lifted a hand, forbidding another interruption. He nodded to Patchen.
“There are two things we can do, it seems to me,” Patchen continued. “We can postpone publication of the novel. We can orchestrate the world intelligentsia in a campaign to release Kamensky. It would take a long time, maybe, but in the end I think we could get him out that way, by hard-nosed public pressure. Paul has a head of state on the string in Africa who’d put Kamensky’s name in for the Nobel Prize. That’s Option One. What do you think?”
Rothchild put his head back and lapsed into one of his stillnesses. Maria cocked her head, examined her husband. She asked Patchen and Christopher if they wanted tea. They refused.
“I think it’s possible, David,” Rothchild said, opening his eyes. “But the time element is a strong, strong negative. It might take ten years. Kamensky could die in the meantime. Also, and I know you’ve considered this, it would certainly arouse the suspicions of the Soviet security apparatus. Why, they would ask, why? So you might put Kamensky in greater hazard. Besides, I don’t know if we could keep up the campaign long enough. Intellectuals are like children; they’re passionate about the interest of the moment, but they’re easily diverted. They wouldn’t stay with it.”
“So you think this is not a viable option?”
“No. Because of all I’ve said, and because of another, much more important element.”
“Yes,” Maria said in her hard-edged voice, and gave a knowing smile. “The fatal flaw is pretty obvious.” Rothchild waited, with his new patience, for her intrusion to end.
“Kamensky wouldn’t come,” he said. “He would never consent to leave Mother Russia. Bone and blood, brain and flesh, Kiril Kamensky is a Russian. He’d rather be in a prison camp in Siberia or in Lubianka than wear silk and eat caviar with foreign earth under his feet.”
Rothchild, having finished this speech, looked again from Patchen to Christopher to Maria, his eyes glinting with amusement, as if he had told them some delicious joke. Patchen, unresponsive, broke Rothchild’s pose with a question.
“What would induce him to break this mystical bond with Holy Russia?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, Otto. Fame. I got the idea you thought he hungered for it.”
“He does. But fame among Russians. He cares about no one else.”
“A woman?”
“At his age?”
Patchen moved his head toward Maria. She bit her lips and flushed; pushed back a strand of hair.
“Let me ask you this,” Patchen said. “If we found a secure way to communicate with Kamensky, would you, as his friend, plead with him to come out? A letter.”
“Of course,” Rothchild said. “I’m under discipline. I’ve done many silly, futile things for that reason. David, it would not work.”
Patchen stood up abruptly. “Excuse us a moment,” he said. He took Christopher by the arm—Christopher saw that Maria was as astonished as he that Patchen should touch another man—and led him to the far corner of the sitting room. There, Patchen, with his eyes fixed on a tiny fragment of old carpet in a heavy gold frame, whispered at length in Christopher’s ear. They returned to the sofa and sat down.
“What’s that scrap of rug you have framed, Otto?” Patchen asked.
Rothchild had closed his eyes again. Maria answered for him. “It’s supposed to be a bit of a seventh-century carpet called the Springtime of Chosros. The Arabs cut it into sixty thousand pieces as booty when they sacked Ctesiphon. It belonged to Otto’s family. He brought it out with him in 1917.”
“A piece of the True Cross, in carpet-worshiper’s terms,” Rothchild said. “If you have faith that it’s what you think it is, it’s priceless.”
Christopher said, “Otto.”
Rothchild opened his eyes. The light of interest had gone out; fatigue whitened his face.
“Otto, everything you’ve said makes sense,” Christopher said. “David agrees.”
“David is letting you speak for him?”
“Still we’re worried. I don’t like the atmosphere of this operation. I have a feeling, just a feeling, that something is going to go really wrong. I’m not thinking about Kamensky, I’m thinking about ourselves.”
“I’m growing very tired, Paul.”
“This won’t take long. Option Two is to print Kamensky’s book under a pseudonym. No one except those of us inside, and Cerutti outside, will know who wrote the book.”
Rothchild’s lax body stiffened. He stared first at Christopher, then at Patchen. He started to speak, coughed, covered his mouth. Maria rushed across the room and gave him water. He pushed her body aside as if it were an object of furniture.
“That’s monstrous,” he said. “It’s theft from Kamensky. You’re proposing to steal his lifework, give him nothing, take everything for our dirty little purposes. This novel is a work of art.”
Christopher crossed the room, knelt at Rothchild’s feet, took his hand.
“Otto, I’m trying to save his life,” he said.
Rothchild extricated his hand which had lain, boneless as a glove, for a moment in Christopher’s. In a man who had any strength left in him, Rothchild’s gesture would have been a brutal one.
“His life?” Rothchild said. “Kamensky’s life is in his book. What other life has he had, first as a fool of the revolution, then as its prisoner? And you, Christopher—you want to throw him into an unmarked grave.”
Rothchild again moved his eyes from Patchen’s face to Christopher’s. The irises were hidden and then revealed by Rothchild’s blinking lids, as though a camera lay behind them inside Rothchild’s skull and he was recording their features on film.
“From the first day,” Patchen said, “Paul has been trying to keep Kamensky out of the grave. I think he’s found a way. The book won’t be signed with Kamensky’s name. I won’t kill this man. Otto, accept it.”
Rothchild turned to Maria and spoke to her, peremptorily, in Russian. She helped him from the room.
Christopher went to the window, open to the warm breeze, and stood between the billowing curtains, looking down on the Seine. Once again he had the illusion of sailing in this building on the prow of the island.
Maria returned. She went to the bar and filled three glasses with ice cubes and poured Scotch over them. She handed out the drinks.
“Permit me to offer you the hospitality of Otto’s house,” she said.
“He’s gone back to bed?”
“Yes. I gave him a pill to make him sleep.”
They were standing, like a conversational group at a cocktail party, in a little circle in the center of the room.
“How do you explain Otto’s being so angry?” Patchen asked.
Maria finished her drink, rattled the ice in the empty glass, went back to the bar and poured herself more Scotch.
“After all,” Patchen went on, “it’s not such an irrational thing to do, to protect Kamensky. And the book will exist. Sooner or later, as soon as it’s safe, we’ll let the author’s name out. I should think it would intensify his fame, to have this work of art, as Otto calls it, wrapped in mystery for a while.”
Maria finished her second whisky, looked quizzically at the empty glass, and resolutely put it down on a table.
“I don’t know exactly what goes on inside Otto,” Maria said. “But he really feels that the book ought to be Kamensky’s monument. Kamensky was a friend of his youth. Evidently he genuinely loved him. You two, of all people, ought to be able to understand the nature of friendship between males. It’s a mystery to my sex, but voilà.”
“When and where were they such friends?” Patchen asked. “I’ve never been clear on that point.”
Maria made one of her husband’s gestures. “Otto doesn’t speak of times and places any more than you do, David. It’s training. They were young, I know that.”
“It doesn’t matter. Go on.”
“The rest is obvious. Otto saw that you were, finally and irrevocably, taking all control of this operation away from him. He feared that. You knew he feared it. I don’t see what it would have cost you to keep up the illusion. It’s a mistake, David, hurting a man like Otto for no good reason.”
Patchen made no effort to fill the silence that followed Maria’s last sentence. Thinking that she wouldn’t speak again if no one replied, Christopher said, “There was no intent to injure him, Maria. We thought he’d be glad of a way to save Kamensky.”
“You have some indication that Kamensky’s in danger? Now, at this moment?”
Christopher answered easily. The exchange of information, the low unhurried voices of the two men, had soothed Maria. Patchen watched her fixedly, as he had watched Rothchild. Each time one of them looked up it was to look into Patchen’s opaque eyes. Christopher didn’t like Patchen’s unveiled watchfulness; he liked nothing that was obvious.
“No, that’s just it,” he said to Maria. “Horst was killed. But the whole string of couriers that brought the manuscript out, from that Red army captain, Kalmyk, who handed Bülow the baby in Dresden on March 24, all the way back to Kamensky himself, has been left untouched by the KGB.”
Maria was keeping a careful hand on her emotions, and she let it show in the hard-eyed way she was receiving Christopher’s information.
“And what does that say to you, Paul?” she asked.
“That they don’t know who the couriers are, or what was in the package. If we publish the book under a pen name, it will have just as much impact in the West. We’ll accomplish our objective and also keep Kamensky alive. Or at least increase his chances of staying alive.”
Maria nodded. “That’s what I thought. Otto sees it too—intellectually. But his emotions are involved in this operation.”
“Otto’s not the only one,” Christopher said. “Everyone wanted this operation too much from the start. We jumped to conclusions, we went too fast.”
Patchen made a sound of disgust. He began to speak to Christopher, then turned away.
“Even David,” Christopher said. “Everyone believed as soon as Horst Bülow was killed that the opposition had done it. Therefore we could go ahead, Kamensky was already a target for the Soviets.”
Patchen faced them. “Paul doesn’t believe the Russians killed Bülow,” he said. “He never has.”
Maria glanced at the closed door of the sitting room, listening for sounds of Rothchild beyond it. She said, “What’s your opinion, David?”
Patchen had stopped watching her, and she had to move across the room in order to look into his face.
“I think,” Patchen said, “that it’s very odd that the Soviets would kill Bülow and just let it go at that. Why not this Kalmyk? Why not the other couriers? Why not Paul, for that matter?”
“Have you thought that from the start, or has it been just Paul, alone again?”
“I haven’t Paul’s instincts.”
“Very few people have, even Otto says so. He almost thinks Paul is a reincarnation of himself. But I don’t have to tell you two about that—you use Otto’s weakness well enough.”
She took the empty glasses out of their hands.
“Every time David wants to do something brutal,” she said, “he has Paul do it. That kneeling on the carpet at Otto’s feet was a lovely touch. Otto should have laid a hand on your golden head, Christopher—the ‘verray parfit gentle knight . . . he was as fressh as is the month of May.’ As if Otto doesn’t know, as if I don’t know, what Paul is capable of.”
4
An hour later, waiting in the safe house for Wilson, Patchen passed the time by discussing marriage. “It’s analagous to tradecraft, you know—there’s that helpless love of the other partner, as of an agent,” he said, “and still either of the two will deceive, betray, revile the other with a third party. Take Maria as an example. Or my own Laura. Bitterness runs like an underground river in women. Laura had an aunt whose husband lost every penny of her inheritance in the stock market; she went out within the month and got some other man to father a baby on her. Never told her husband—just watched him love the child to distraction for thirty years. The sweetest moment of her life, she told Laura, was not revealing the secret to him on his deathbed.”
“Interesting blood in Laura.”
“In all of us.”
Wilson was five minutes late. He let himself in with a key. “I’m sorry about the time,” he said. “The secretary who housekeeps this place was out. I waited, so I could send her to the movies. It must be hell, living in a safe house and being sent out to play all the time; these girls earn the rent.”
Patchen said, “Christopher has briefed me on your conversations in Zurich. I’ll let him tell you what’s happened since then on our side.”
Christopher recounted their meeting with Rothchild.
“You think he accepts the decision?”
“Even Otto has to accept Headquarters decisions,” Christopher said.
Wilson nodded. In Patchen’s presence, he was making no notes on his file cards.
“We’ve finished the wiring on Cerutti,” Wilson said. “There’s a twenty-four-hour audio surveillance—phones, office, apartment, car. We had to rig a tape recorder in the car because of all the interference from mobile transmitters; you just can’t read anything from a moving vehicle in a city this size. We’ve glued a bleeper on the car, too, in case we want to follow.”
“What have you picked up so far?”
“Routine. He’s been talking to the woman who’s translating the novel from Russian into French. She’s gaga over the book, wants to know who the author is. Cerutti won’t answer He’s not what you’d call pally with people who work for him.”
“Nothing else?”
“Everyday life. Of course we’ll always be twelve to twenty-four hours behind. It takes time to listen to the tapes, pick out the significant segments, transcribe. It takes manpower, and manpower I don’t really have.”
“Audio surveillance is not enough,” Patchen said. “He has to be covered, surveilled by a team, twenty-four hours a day.”
“That’s impossible. There aren’t that many men in the whole Paris station who have the expertise.”
Patchen, for the second time that day, put a hand on Christopher. “Paul will watch him at least half the time.”
“Alone?”
“He’ll just be with him. They can hole up somewhere and talk and talk and talk about this publishing project. Paul can give him some more money, take him to some more three-star restaurants.”
“When is Christopher going to tell him about publishing under a pen name?”
“Right away,” Christopher said. “He’s not going to be any happier about it than Otto was.”
“We don’t think he’s going to do anything tricky while Christopher’s with him, is that it?” Wilson asked.
“That’s it. But when they part, you and whoever you can rustle from the Paris gumshoe stable will have to keep an eye on him.”
Wilson nodded. “He’ll not be alone.”
Christopher spoke for a moment, reminding them what the objective of the surveillance was.
“If something develops in Berlin, I’ll go,” he said. “Someone else will have to baby-sit Cerutti.”
Wilson nodded. Patchen, immobile, asked if any additional men were needed in Rome.
“No,” Wilson said, “Franco Moroni is no Cerutti. We have the German girl on him, and audio surveillance. It’s enough. Besides, we know his Soviet case officer—a friend of yours, Paul, that Tass man called Klimenko. We have the Russian covered all the time.”
“Paul shouldn’t have anything to do with the Rome part of it. He lives there; he has to stay clean.”
Wilson showed nothing. “Agreed. I’ve already accepted Christopher’s reasons for not wanting to get involved down there.”
Patchen asked Wilson to leave the room. He went into the secretary’s bedroom and closed the door behind him, but they heard the clasps of his attaché case snap open.
“All that remains, I guess, is to spring the news on Cerutti,” Patchen said.
“And wait for the mousetrap to spring.”
“Your mouse, Paul, and your trap. You’re looking a little haggard. It’s a costly business, curiosity.”