The Secret Lovers (12 page)

“I apologize for this meeting place,” Wilson said. “No safe house was available at this hour, and your tall friend with the war wounds wouldn’t hear of your coming into
the Embassy.”

Wilson, after a pause, began to speak again, then fell silent as a robed man padded down the aisle and nodded to them with a cordial American smile. He knelt, on one knee, in front of the altar
and prayed in a whisper. The acoustics were excellent. Wilson, too, changed to a whisper, and his sibilants mixed with those of the priest in the vault of the nave.

“I wanted to give you a little report,” Wilson said, speaking behind hands clasped for prayer. “I’m puzzled by the way things are going.”

The clergyman finished his prayers. Wilson went on whispering.

“I’ve got nothing definitive,” he told Christopher. “You and your tall friend ran this thing so close to the vest that no one on our side
could
have known where
Bülow was going to be when he was zapped. Even you didn’t know until almost the moment before he was hit, isn’t that right?”

“Yes. We’ve been over that.”

“I don’t want to go over it again. I just want to know if you agree with something. If no one knew except Bülow where Bülow was going to be at 0612 on the morning in
question, then nobody but Bülow himself could possibly have told the killers where he was going to be.”

“Unless there was surveillance and I missed it.”

“At that hour of the morning? Is that possible?”

“No.”

“You’re absolutely certain that no one except Patchen knew you were meeting the asset.”

“Yes, and Patchen didn’t know the place or time.”

Christopher spoke Patchen’s name aloud. Wilson flinched. He had been using true names, but he mouthed the syllables rather than whispering them. Wilson, Christopher thought, must believe
that he is safe in church from lip readers, if not from microphones.

“That’s all I wanted to confirm,” Wilson said. “Thanks. I’ll go first. I’m going to turn toward the Champs when I go out, so maybe you should head down the
other way.”

Wilson started to rise. Christopher gripped his forearm and he sat down again.

“What are you onto?” Christopher asked, again in a normal voice. He knew that its tone would carry less well than a whisper in the stone building. Wilson hesitated, lips pursed.
Christopher insisted.

“Are you thinking that Horst was turned around?” he asked.

“Horst,” Wilson replied, “or somebody. Most likely Horst.”

“Doubled by whom? He was fluttered six months ago and nothing showed up.”

“Six months can be a long time in a life like Horst’s.”

“You’ve got something new on him.”

Wilson sighed. “You always paid him in cash. West German marks in a sterile envelope, sterile receipt. Right?”

Christopher nodded.

“Horst had some extra money,” Wilson said. He took a breath before he spoke again, in a flat tone. “We have a sort of arrangement with a little German unit in West Berlin, and
this unit took an interest in Horst,” he said. “They wanted to run him themselves, and the Berlin base had a time flagging them off. Of course they knew why we were fidgety, so they
kept an eye on Bülow from time to time to see which American was handling him—professional curiosity. They never picked him up with you, your meetings were too secure. But a few weeks
before he died they saw him in the Tiergarten with a woman. They talked, Horst and the female, for fifteen minutes, Horst nodding all the time. An envelope passed between them. It was morning,
eight o’clock. Horst went to the nearest branch of the Berliner Bank and deposited the money to an account in the name of Heinrich Beichermann. One thousand West German marks. The file says
that Heinrich Beichermann was a cover name Horst used during the war, when he was an amateur spy with the Abwehr. The bank says someone from Zurich opened the account for Horst, through the
mail.”

“Are there photographs of the woman?”

“Our Germans say not.”

“Description?”

“Youngish, prettyish. It was winter. She was all bundled up.”

“What language did she and Horst speak?”

“Russian.”

Wilson cleared his throat.

“Where did they go after the meeting?”

“Horst left the bank and got on the S-Bahn and went back to work in East Berlin,” he said. “The lady took a walk down the K-damm, then made a right turn into the American
Consulate.” Wilson smiled.

“Did she come back out?” Christopher asked.

“They don’t know. The kid following her got cold and figured she must be an Ami who’d stay inside till nightfall, so he went somewhere for a cup of coffee.”

“Didn’t he think it was curious that someone speaking Russian to an East Berliner would go straight into the American Consulate?”

“He wasn’t paid to think. You don’t have to be an American to get past the Marine guards at the door.”

The priest rose from his prayers and spoke to them, his hearty voice filling the nave. “Gentlemen,” he said, “if you’ve finished your devotions, my wife will be wondering
where I am.” He smiled across the ranks of the pews, and gave them a small ironic bow.

Wilson left as the clergyman came down the aisle, still smiling urbanely, but too far away to see Wilson’s face clearly. Christopher smiled back and walked out the door less quickly than
Wilson had done. Christopher heard the lock turn and saw that Wilson, on the way out, had taken time to wipe away his chalk mark. Christopher watched the burly figure of the Security man as he
sauntered up the avenue. Christopher turned in the opposite direction, toward the Seine.

There were few pedestrians this far away from the Champs-Élysées, and Christopher heard the hurrying footsteps behind him when they were still some distance away. He put himself
close to the wall and turned the sharp corner, almost reversing his direction, into the avenue Marceau. Once around the corner, he stepped into a deep doorway and waited. The footsteps, running
now, turned the corner behind him.

Wilson reached the doorway, went by. Christopher heard him stop. He came back and peered into the shadows. He was panting slightly and his flowered necktie had worked its way out of his coat. He
handed Christopher an envelope. “Almost forgot,” he said. He touched his forehead and went back the way he had come, still panting.

Inside the envelope was a typed note, unsigned. “Your wife called,” it read. “She’s in Paris, and will meet you in the bar of the Ritz at 5:00 this evening.”

Christopher’s watch read 5:10. He got into a taxi as it let a passenger out. He rested his head on the back of the seat and closed his eyes. Cathy, when he had left her in Rome, was asleep
and frowning as she dreamt. She had always insisted that she had no dream life.

2

Even before he became a spy, Christopher had disliked being recognized by headwaiters and bartenders. As a youth he had never exchanged a word with the New York Irishmen who
tended bar at P. J. Clarke’s or the Frenchmen behind the zinc bar at the Dôme, though others seemed to attach importance to being known by name to these contemptuous men. Now, as a
matter of professional caution, he booked table reservations in a false name and made certain that he did not eat at the same restaurant, or drink at the same bar, more often than two or three
times a year. He broke these rules in Rome because he lived in that city, and never operated there; it was important to his cover to live as much like a normal man as possible when he was at
home.

Cathy made caution difficult when she traveled with him. She had favorite bars, favorite drinks, favorite restaurants and dishes. She refused to give them up. In the Ritz Bar, when Christopher
entered, he did not see her. A waiter approached.

“Madame has gone into the foyer for a moment,” he said.

He took Christopher to the table; Cathy’s purse hung by its strap over the back of the chair, and a bottle of champagne stood in a bucket with two glasses chilling in the ice. Cathy had
been drinking Perrier water as usual, and bubbles still rose in her half-empty glass. Christopher saw the men at the bar watch her come into the room behind him. A moment later she put a hand on
the back of his head and kissed him softly on the cheek. The waiter was at her chair back, smiling. He filled their glasses. It was the most expensive champagne sold by the Ritz; Cathy told
Christopher, as she did each time they met there, “This is the very first wine my father let me drink, when I was fourteen, here in this bar. ‘Cathy, my dear, let Dom Pérignon be
your standard,’ he said.” She was a fine mimic, and Christopher grinned at the deep voice and the scowl of affection that for an instant turned her face into her father’s.

“What made you think of coming to Paris?” Christopher asked.

“Thinking of you. I took the next plane after you left. We can have the weekend together.”

Cathy ran a wetted finger around the rim of her champagne glass and it gave off a musical note. She listened, drank some wine, and did it again, producing a slightly different tone. “I
played the piano today,” she said. “I haven’t played in months, but really I’m not bad, Paul. I feel the music more. I had a teacher who used to tell me that I’d never
have anything except technique until I’d suffered.
She’d
suffered, from the look of her, but still she couldn’t play worth a nickel.”

“The difference between talent and genius,” Christopher said.

“No, the difference between being alone and being with you. When I woke up and saw that you were gone the heart fell right out of me.”

She put both of her hands on the table, asking for Christopher’s. Tears rose in her eyes; they ran over her cheeks to the corners of her unpainted upper lip. Cathy licked them away, tongue
as quick as a cat’s.

For dinner, Cathy had duck in orange. She and the sommelier had a running joke at Christopher’s expense; the wine waiter believed that white wine should be drunk with duck in orange, but
Christopher would have nothing except red Bordeaux. Cathy would take a half bottle of Sancerre and remark, each time the sommelier refilled her glass, how remarkably it cleared the palate and
intensified the sweet flavor of the duck. She would tell him that he must convince Christopher. “Monsieur is a man of principle,” the sommelier would reply, and leave him to pour his
own wine.

When they were alone, Cathy had little to say. They walked along the river. She led him up the steps to a café near the Beaux-Arts, and there they drank coffee and Cathy ordered
Cointreau. “I can’t get enough of the taste of orange tonight,” she said. They crossed to the right bank and went down to the Seine again and walked in the dark, past men sleeping
under the bridges and lovers embracing against the rough stones of the embankment. The electric glow of the city made the stars invisible, but there was a moon behind dark cirrus clouds on the
horizon. Cathy walked with her eyes on her feet, as if the white shoes that she wore came into her circle of vision one after the other by some force independent of her body. They climbed back to
the street at the Grand Palais, and walked onto the Pont Alexandre III. Midway across the bridge, Cathy stopped and looked over the railing. She placed Christopher’s hands on her breasts.
Turning, she kissed him, and the taste and scent of orange passed from her mouth into his own. “I love you,” she whispered. Christopher tightened his arms around her. “Can’t
you answer?” Cathy asked.

Cathy’s parents were using their apartment. They had come over for the race meeting that began on Palm Sunday at Auteuil; they had a horse running in the President of the
Republic Stakes. “Papa would like to have an American horse win that particular race while de Gaulle is president of France,” Cathy had said in the Ritz Bar. “He plans to show the
general his shrapnel scars from Château-Thierry and ask him if
he
was ever wounded for France.”

Christopher and Cathy slept at the Ritz. They had not made love since the night she had come to Christopher from Franco Moroni. Wine had left Cathy peaceful; she lay in the broad hotel bed, her
face in shadow and then in the lamplight that came into the window from the Place Vendôme, and accepted pleasure quietly. But afterward she moved to the edge of the bed and shuddered, as
Christopher had done on the train when he remembered the death of Bülow. He touched the skin of her hip. “Paul, don’t talk,” she said. She lay in silence, and when she spoke
again, her voice was under control. “I used to watch you remember things and I could never understand why you wanted to keep secrets that caused you so much pain,” she said. Christopher
stroked her hair.

“Jesus,” she whispered, “I wish I didn’t understand now.”

3

While they were having breakfast the next morning, the telephone rang. Cathy answered, made no reply into the instrument, and handed it to Christopher.

“Sorry to disturb you at the Ritz,” Bud Wilson said, “I hope it’s all right.”

“It’s no disturbance.”

“That’s good. I heard you were there with your wife and I remembered that we had a loose end with her. You never got back to me with the answer to that question. You know, about her
circle of friends in Paris.”

“Yes, I remember,” Christopher said. “I haven’t had a chance to ask her.”

“Can you do it now?”

Christopher put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Cathy,” he said. She turned a page of her newspaper and looked up.

“When we met in Paris and went home on the train,” he said. “Did you tell anyone you saw here that I was in Germany?”

She frowned. “Why would I?”

“You didn’t talk to any outsider about me, about where I was?”

“No. I know I’m not supposed to say, unless it’s someone with the Company I’m talking to.”

“And you didn’t see anyone else?”

“I saw you. I saw David walking with you in Saint-Germaindes-Prés. People like that, in passing. I’m more observant than you think. But I didn’t tell any secrets to any
outsiders. Okay?”

Christopher spoke into the telephone. “The answer is no,” he said.

“Good. That makes things easier.”

“Tell me,” Christopher said. “How did you happen to know to call me here?”