Authors: Topaz
“Stop it, Olga!”
“Boris,” she said in the first outright defiance of him in her life, “you are going to tell the Americans everything.”
“No ... never ... never!”
Tamara was in the doorway, her eyes filled with tears. “Papa. I was raised as a good Communist and I loved Russia, too. I loved Russia until I was ordered to spy and report on you. I love you and Mamma more. Since I found out they meant to kill you, I’ve grown to hate them. Oh, Papa, do you know what it is like outside in this country? I’ve almost died from wanting it.” She knelt beside the fallen model of the woman they could create of her. “I want so much to be her.”
Tears streamed down Boris’ cheeks.
“Boris,” his wife said, “you must talk to the Americans. Tamara and I will not spend our lives running.”
He was boxed in. The choices were clear. The great secret within him was being squeezed out. The secret of Topaz.
“M
ICHELE, LITTLE DARLING!”
André embraced his daughter; they exchanged kisses on both cheeks. Robespierre, a scented, rhinestone-collared, silver-gray miniature poodle, bounced and yapped. Picasso, a mournful beagle, planted all four feet firmly and wagged so violently his whole body went into motion.
André held Michele off at arm’s length to inspect her and smiled. They moved through the house, upstairs, arms about waists trading the usual amenities. Everything at college was just fine. The New York theater was barely decent, but the Comédie Française would be playing a limited engagement.
“Will you come up for a few shows, Papa?”
“I’d love to, but I hate to promise. The work load ...”
“Promise. And I promise I won’t be disappointed if you can’t make it.”
“In that case, I promise to try.”
She branched off to her own room, to apply the last icing to perfect herself for the Franco-American Legion of Honor dinner at the French Embassy. Being many years the senior of her daughter, Nicole had started her routine two hours earlier. Nicole’s tension was apparent, particularly to Robespierre, who reflected her nervousness in his nonstop prancing. Nicole labored meticulously, plucking each brow, penciling the lines with a Da Vinci-like skill and creaming away the creases.
André grunted a hello and retreated to his sanctuary, donned his smoking jacket, fixed a bourbon, settled in his leather chair, and snapped open his briefcase.
Now came the microscopic search. The un-romantic stomach-turning labor necessary to an intelligence man in a day that never really ended, using amounts of stamina that could not be measured.
In the twilight hours, long after offices closed and other breeds of men took pause to reflect, he turned to just another phase of the day’s work. Now to pore through the cross section of clippings from some fifty magazines and newspapers of ten countries. There were stacks of memorandums, communiqués, and letters that came in the late transmission to study for possible action.
He set the trash basket at chairside, petted Picasso, and began going through the clippings with the dazzling speed of the highly trained eye. Most of them ended in the basket. A few were marked and kept.
What did he look for? The awarding of a new government contract. A riot in Africa. Ship movements. Transfer of military personnel. Publication of a technical study. Anywhere and nowhere could be that clue to fill in a space of the great, shifting, eternal puzzle.
Nicole’s bedroom door opened sharply. Robespierre was shooed in. “Do take him, André. He is being such a bother.”
The animal flitted across the room and leaped on André’s lap. He flicked the dog off as though it were an unwanted fly. After a second and third rejection, Robespierre bore a destroyed expression and took his place on the floor beside the always serene Picasso. Picasso lifted his sad face, sniffed the perfume on the poodle and moved away, contemptuously.
With a side glance André could see Nicole at the dressing-room table, pondering into the mirror in deep concern over a wrinkle that had not been there yesterday, and astutely applying the bottled and boxed beauty.
Michele came in in her robe and fingered through her mother’s cosmetic assortment, and they chatted rapidly as the hour of truth approached.
Matched book ends, André thought. Michele was her mother twenty years ago. He sipped his bourbon and watched them help each other in the hairdo ritual.
That oaf, that clod, that stupid ass Tucker Brown IV would soon be clomping up the steps for his date. What made Tucker palatable was the hundred-million-dollar Brown shipping fortune. Yankee traders or some such. Tucker Brown IV, crewcut yachtsman, Princeton, State Department career man. If he were on my staff, André thought, I wouldn’t trust him to zip his own fly.
But ... Michele loves him. Or rather, finds him decent enough to marry.
If Tucker Brown IV applies himself diligently and the family donates enough money to enough political campaigns, he might make it as ambassador to some island kingdom in ten years or so.
Now my Michele. There’s a catch! French! Impeccable taste. Magnificent hostess, multilingual. Chic! When this girl dresses!
Maybe it’s not such a bad match. God forbid anyone think me a snob, André acquitted himself. Only, some times I wish Michele would find a boyfriend I could converse with. The terrible thought passed through him that Michele Devereaux would fall in love with a poor intellectual. Maybe I am a snob. A few years with Tucker, a child, a divorce and a good settlement! What the devil am I thinking of! After all, a man only wants what’s best for his daughter. What a little charmer.
“André.”
“Eh?”
“Start to get ready, darling.”
He went to the safe in the closet floor and deposited the contents of his briefcase, then made for the bathroom. A cordless razor, a new gadget, zipped over his face. So damned clever, these Americans, he thought. How in the hell do they manage to produce clods like Tucker Brown IV?
He shaved in meditation of his own hot situation. Words with Ambassador René d’Arcy were becoming more and more acid. D’Arcy belonged to the President, General Pierre La Croix. Once he, André, had been a La Croix man, but he had joined that narrowing circle of independent thinkers in top diplomatic positions. André had stretched his pro-American attitudes to the limit and watched the constant slide of relations with France, helplessly.
Yet André Devereaux held a position of unique strength within the Embassy. His integrity as a Frenchman was beyond question. Conversely, he was held in great esteem by the Americans. For SDECE to tamper with André’s office would be to further sour relations with the Americans. He still had great use to Paris as the honest broker.
He entered the shower.
The business with Kuznetov was again placing him squarely in the middle of an uneasy situation. How much longer could he go without reporting his knowledge of the defector to headquarters?
Every time he had made the decision to send the cable to French Secret Service he remembered the Russian’s warning and he justified another delay.
He emerged from the shower.
His mind suddenly switched to that sound of music he usually heard when he entered the compound of Camp Patrick. Tamara Kuznetov. What a difference between daughters.
The Russian girl was rough-hewn and without an ounce of sophistication. On the other hand, she desperately devoured books and lived deeply in her music and dreamed to be able to teach or to play in a symphony orchestra. Lack of nonsense in that girl. A life of constructive contribution. Perhaps his little Michele had much to learn from her.
In the end, what would Michele’s life be? A good marriage to a wealthy man and to continue life in the world of drones. Lord help her if she had to do an honest day’s work. But I am to blame. Nicole and I. This is the way we created Michele. What is her sense of values? Where will her iron come from in the crisis?
He grumbled to himself over the lack of assistance as he went through the awkward business of maneuvering into studs, links, black tie, suspenders, cummerbund, and the cumbersome device to keep one’s shirt from spilling out.
Without benefit of a final mirror check, André placed on the big horn-rimmed reading glasses he used when his eyes were tired, and began going through the New York and Washington newspapers.
In about an hour, his women were ready and presented themselves at his door simultaneously.
“You are glorious. Both of you. How can I be so lucky?”
He kissed his wife’s cheek, and he meant it. The front doorbell rang. That would be the idiot, Tucker Brown IV, in his punctual American way.
André placed his arm through theirs, and they made off to the Legion of Honor dinner to preserve and defend the glory of France.
I
T IS ARGUED THAT
the great mansion housing the Embassy of France on Kalorama Road is even more splendid than the White House. This would be a difficult point to debate on this night of the occasion of the Legion of Honor dinner.
A two-block-long trail of limousines was passed through the police cordons on to the semicircular driveway to deposit the most elegant cargo of the season before the massive iron grille doors.
The most delicate of battles was to ensue in that war called protocol. Sides chosen, five hundred combatants. Two hundred Americans of the highest diplomatic, cultural, military, and political rank to be found in Washington versus two hundred of the cream of the French colonies of New York and Washington. A hundred more top-rank strays of other nations were there, along with the usual clever contingent of crashers whose sole diet consisted of what they could scrounge up at the nightly cocktail parties in Washington.
France, indeed, was at subtle war this night to preserve, defend, and perpetuate the legends of French superiority, its army a few million Parisians, its banners a bit tattered and faded. What was missing in numbers was offset by the zeal and arrogance of the Parisians.
André and Nicole swept into the grand foyer. At the far end of the great room, Ambassador and Madame René d’Arcy anchored the receiving line near a massive Louis XV chest. A string of aides hovered about smartly, plucking the very important from the receiving line and moving them effortlessly and directly to the Ambassador and his wife.
Claire d’Arcy was fluid and French and beamed beneath high smartness. D’Arcy, a small, rotund, and lively person, greeted each guest with the fervor of finding a long-lost brother. They had created a meaningful protocol, far from many of the burdensome, stiff receptions of Washington. Yes, the French could show them a few things about protocol.
Michele and Tucker Brown IV made for the relative quiet of the canopied balcony overlooking the sweeping lawns behind the embassy.
Here, they fell into the first of the subdivisions of bores and snobs. This was the lowest group of the snob order. They were the pseudo sophisticates—the French food and wine snobs (Americans, for the most part).
The duel opened with the ground rules that only French wine could be considered. It was all merely a case of which French wine was superior to which French wine.
But Tucker Brown IV owned appalling bad taste. Unfortunately, he shot the same blanks he generally did in the State Department. Looking and acting much like an eager, uncoordinated Newfoundland puppy who tripped over its own outsized paws, Tucker made a feeble case on behalf of German wine. Then he compounded the blunder by the mention of a California wine! Noses sniffed contemptuously. Michele giggled. An unbearable silence was broken by another of the lowly order, a food snob.
Tucker Brown IV then proceeded to put his other foot in his mouth. “There’s some really great French restaurants in New York, and for my dough, the Rive Gauche right here in Washington is tops.”
“But, Tucker, it’s more than French. It’s run by a Corsican!”
Laughter.
Misfortune continued to plague Tucker Brown IV, who a little later found himself standing squarely in the middle of the French-language snobs. French, as spoken by Frenchmen, was the only language. The world standard for diplomacy and culture.
So Tucker tried out a bit of butchered French. They grimaced in pain, then smiled indulgently.
But then everyone corrupted French, the language of poets and of the greatest literature of man.
André stifled his yawns as he drifted from sortie to sortie. The back-hacking this night was but a more elaborate showcasing of the kind of thing that went on endlessly. As usual, the Americans were getting mauled. After all, they were only trying desperately to imitate the French and were forced into playing a game the French had invented and mastered.
Unfortunately for France, André thought, snobbery and conversation were not the things that made for world domination. As American domination became ever more apparent, French words grew ever more acid.
The Americans were swamped in matters of art, literature, perfume. Paris was the hub of the universe, leather goods, materials, and fashions. France was the arbiter of man’s good taste, love songs, love-making, crystal, silver, and political aplomb.
The French astutely avoided counterattacks in sports, education, science, production, democracy, and military strength, which indeed was a sore point with Frenchmen.
The French used the word “pedantic” quite often to describe a number of things non-French. The Americans insisted Paris had the rudest, most self-centered, gouging citizenry in the world.
André became hungry.
He mounted the stairs to the grand dining room and pecked away at the banks of caviar, pâté de foie gras, salmon, cheese soufflé, truffles, feuilletée, remindful to him of waste. André, the tired man at the embassy, disdained a civil service in which half the time of a French official was spent at ceremonies and the other half at parties, and they weren’t the people’s servants, but rather their masters. He wanted to go home. There was a half-night’s work undone.
The Ambassador wended his way to the grand foyer, walked up the staircase to the balcony. The orchestra sounded out for attention. Guests drifted in from the music room, the salons, from the terrace and lawns and dining room. Fat little René d’Arcy was framed between a tricolor and an immense portrait of President Pierre La Croix. He raised his glass.