Authors: Charles McCarry
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.”
1
“There’s too much of the Sybarite in you,” Patchen said, as a plate of quenelles was set before Christopher. Patchen had ordered raw spring vegetables as his
first course. Rich food annoyed him in the way that cigarettes annoy a nonsmoker. Patchen himself had made this comparison. Years before, when he and Christopher had been undergraduates, Patchen
had come back to their room after buying a Radcliffe girl an expensive meal in Boston. “She smelled of food all through the theater and all the way home,” Patchen had said. “Like
a full ashtray the morning after a party.” In the end he had married another Radcliffe girl, one as thin as he and almost as still. Christopher had dined with the Patchens in Washington a
dozen times, and had never been given anything but rare roast beef, green salad, and Stilton cheese that Patchen bought in England to set off the clarets he had shipped to him from France.
“What did you think of Kamensky’s book?” Patchen asked.
He had given the rough English translation to Christopher the night before, at midnight. It did not occur to him that Christopher might not have read all seven hundred typed pages in the twelve
hours since.
“It’s a pedantic translation, but you can see what the novel must be. I want to read the Russian.”
“Yes,” Patchen said, “but can it play the guitar?”
This was a joke between them from their first days in secret life; they had been trained by a man who had once run, or had invented for their education, an agent inside Nazi Germany who had
gained entry into the highest circles of the regime because he could play the guitar and was always welcome at parties. “Always ask yourself,” their trainer would tell them,
“whether your asset can play the guitar.”
Christopher said, “Of course it can play the guitar. Otto said so when he read it in Russian.”
“But?”
“But how to do it.
Whether
to do it, David. What’s the news from the author?”
“Kamensky is just as he was, rolling about in bed with his young Bohemian girl in his dacha.”
“No one has bothered him?”
“Not a whisper, not a hand raised in anger.”
“You speak as if you’re completely sure.”
“I am,” Patchen said. “We have certain . . . technical resources inside the dacha.” He rolled his eye. Patchen held the gadgetry of espionage in amused contempt, in the
way that an old-fashioned mountain climber might despise pitons hammered into virgin rock. He whispered the next word: “
Microphones.
”
There was nothing for Christopher to say. The risk to Kamensky, and to their operation, was appalling.
“The Moscow station is very proud of those wires,” Patchen said. “They’ve got hours of Kamensky reciting poetry to his mistress, sounds of dishes being washed, teakettles
bubbling. The real stuff.”
“Why?”
“Why what? Bug the dacha? Because it was there. They didn’t know Kamensky was a CA target.”
“Do they know now?”
“I’m afraid so,” Patchen said. “CA ops inside the Soviet Union! It makes their blood run cold.”
Patchen explained. The report of Bülow’s death had been circulated within Headquarters to the head of the Soviet Russia Division, a man called Dick Sutherland. “Dick came to see
me,” Patchen said. “He loves being chief of SR, he has a keen sense of ownership. He was not pleased that Kalmyk, a captain in the Red Army, had been part of the picture. You’re
putting another turd in my soup,’ Dick said to me.”
“That was his expression?”
“Yes. He calls CA agents Turds. He calls our division the Turd Shop. I want you to know where we stand.”
“I know where we stand.”
“You do? Well, Dick is one of those wastebasket cleaners who’d rather lose the Cold War than accept help from covert action to win it. Someday this inner tension in the outfit is
going to cause an explosion and we’re going to be spattered, Turds and Sutherlands together, all over the scenery. But not today. I want to go on with this, because it’s something you
have to know.”
Before Patchen spoke again, he cut all the lamb on his plate into pieces and ate it. When the watchful waiter started toward the table to serve him more, Patchen held up a palm to keep him
away.
“Sutherland told me that Kamensky’s mistress is in the employ of the KGB,” Patchen said.
“What a surprise.”
“Ah, but there
is
a surprise. She is also in Sutherland’s employ. She was a KGB party girl. Her employers sent her to Stockholm last year to perform disgusting acts with an
American colonel for their cameras, and Sutherland set her up. He got pictures of her enjoying a Swedish girl when she should have been munching on the colonel, doubled her, and sent her back to
Moscow. When the KGB assigned her to make friends with old Kamensky, Sutherland thought
he’d
get first look at any manuscripts, and all the credit.”
“And now he knows we got in before him?”
“Yes. It appears there are some things Kamensky doesn’t tell young Masha, or whatever her name is. No doubt he learned caution the hard way.”
“Or else there are things Masha doesn’t tell Sutherland, but does tell the KGB.”
“Dick says no. Evidently he has a control of some kind on her reporting to the Russians.”
“So the KGB doesn’t know we have the book?”
“If it was the KGB that killed Bülow, then they know. We simply don’t know what they know.”
Christopher asked for more wine. Patchen put a finger on the rim of his glass to stop the sommelier from pouring claret into it.
“We seldom
know
anything,” Christopher said. “What are we assuming?”
“Dick Sutherland talks about something called gaming. It’s what used to be called the scenario. The way Dick games it, the opposition knows everything, the opposition is responsible
for the event in Berlin.”
“Therefore?”
“Therefore publishing
The Little Death
will protect Kamensky rather than put him in hazard because, if they kill him as a punishment for being a genius who wrote the truth, they
will have to kill him in full view of the world public.”
“That’s assuming a great deal.”
“Yes, but don’t we always?”
What Patchen said was true. For the most part, men like him had nothing to go on but assumptions. They guessed at the truth, seizing facts as a pack of hunting animals will rip mouthfuls of meat
from a large beast they have surrounded in the dark. They assumed that everyone was an enemy and a liar. They believed nothing, especially not a concrete fact. Concrete, Patchen was fond of saying,
could be poured in any shape. He and his colleagues never knew anything for certain. They had a dangerous weakness, and Christopher spoke of it now.
“I have a feeling I’ve been here before,” he said. “Headquarters wants this operation. Therefore they are making the only assumption that makes the operation
inevitable.”
“You really don’t have to go on, Paul. I know how angry our frailties make you.”
“Men die. You gamesters are always a long way away when that happens.”
Patchen pointed at Christopher’s untouched food. Christopher didn’t pick up his silverware. They were almost alone in the restaurant, and the sound of traffic came into the room.
“Aren’t you going to tell me that we’re making the precise assumption that Otto wants us to make?” Patchen asked.
“Otto usually pushes the right buttons.”
“Sometimes he’s right, Paul. He’s an old hand.”
“If he’s wrong this time, we’ll have killed Kiril Kamensky,” Christopher said, “I don’t give a shit what Dick Sutherland wants to believe.”
Patchen stretched and put a hand on the small of his back. He sat straighter in his chair, watching impassively while Christopher ate the food that had gone cold on his plate.
At last Patchen said, “The significant fact is that the smuggling operation was airtight until it got to Berlin and Horst Bülow.”
“Yes. Don’t you find it curious that the Soviet service would let the manuscript get that far if they knew what it was? Doesn’t Dick find it odd?”
“It’s Dick’s job to blame everything on the Russians,” Patchen said. He broke off some bread and put it into his mouth and chewed while he spoke; the crudity of the act
suggested Sutherland, as it was supposed to do. “The KGB makes Dick possible, after all,” Patchen said.
A young black dressed as a Moorish servant brought coffee. Patchen drank his at a gulp. He tapped his watch; they were due at the Rothchilds’ in twenty minutes, and Christopher knew that
he wanted to discuss ways of stimulating Rothchild to speak of his feelings about the Kamensky operation. There was time enough to do that on the walk to the Île Saint-Louis. Patchen called
for the bill.
“There is,” Christopher said, “another possibility, of course. That Horst was set up by somebody from our side.”
“Yes,” Patchen said, counting out bright French banknotes onto the tablecloth. “I’d thought of that.”
2
A bell system had been installed in the Rothchilds’ apartment so that Otto could summon Maria, or the maid, when he needed something. Now, as he pressed his foot on the
concealed button, he explained apologetically to Patchen that he did not like the idea of having uninspected wires of any kind in his house, but the bells were a necessity because he could no
longer speak loudly enough to be heard from room to room. Maria came in, and he said, “Give David and Paul to drink.” There were small lapses in Otto’s flowing English, as in his
French. He spoke both languages with a faint German accent, because German had been the first foreign language he had learned.
Rothchild was alert, almost nervous. Christopher thought that he must scent something in the way Patchen was treating him. Patchen was more aloof than usual, less interested in Rothchild’s
small talk. Rothchild was wary of small changes in men. He watched Patchen and Christopher, his head at one side as if he could hear, very faintly, the dying sounds of the words they had spoken to
each other about him as they approached the apartment. Patchen was looking at a painting. Rothchild spoke his name sharply; Patchen turned.
“Time is going by, David,” Rothchild said. “Why aren’t we moving faster?”
“There are always delays, Otto. The bureaucracy worries about taking risks.”
“There will be
risk
,” Rothchild said, “any way we do it. If you don’t take risks you don’t get anything done.”
Patchen turned his eye from Rothchild to Christopher. “Otto’s Law,” he said.
“I am trying to teach you,” Rothchild said. He closed his eyes. Patchen went on talking to him; he had discovered that Rothchild heard what was said to him even when he seemed to be
unconscious.
“It’s Christopher who’ll be taking the risks,” Patchen said. “You and I will stay inside while he does all the work. It’s his skin, and I want him to control
the temperature of the operation.”
Rothchild awakened. With a weak movement of his head he invited Christopher to speak to him.
“Otto,” Christopher said, “I have to tell you that I have misgivings about this project.”
“We’d all be astonished if you did not, Paul,” Rothchild said. “What bothers you?”
‘'Security. We’ve had a man killed. Usually we take that as a sign that something is wrong.”
Rothchild glared at Christopher. It was evident, whatever Maria thought, that the surgeons had not got all the anger out of him.
“Paul,” he said, “I’m tired of hearing about Horst Bülow being run over in Berlin. The idiot from Security has been here half a dozen times, asking this, asking
that, gnawing the bones of this dead German. The incident is irrelevant. Horst Bülow was irrelevant. He always was.”
“You knew him?”
Patchen, who had gone back to the bar, waited with an empty glass in his hand for Rothchild’s answer.
Rothchild lifted a trembling hand, the shadow of his old fierce gesture of impatience. “Of course I knew him,” he said. “I recruited him. He was a prisoner in the French zone
and he thought they would shoot him if they found out about his Abwehr connection. It’s all in the file. I keep telling that person from Security that simple fact—everything is in the
file.”
He began to cough. Maria strode across the room and held a glass of water to his lips.
“This is very upsetting to Otto,” she said. “Do you have to talk about this particular subject?”
“Yes,” Patchen said.
“Bülow’s death doesn’t seem irrelevant to me,” Christopher said. “If it was the opposition. . . .”
“Who else would it be?” Rothchild asked. “A careless driver?”
“If it was the opposition,” Christopher continued, “then we have to assume they knew what Bülow was carrying, and that they’ll take reprisals.”
“Reprisals? Against whom—Kamensky?”
“Yes, and his friends who took the risk of getting the manuscript out for him.”
“You keep forgetting. It was Kamensky who initiated this situation. He sent me the book. I didn’t ask him to do so.”
“So you’ve said before. But, Otto, he instructed you not to publish while he was still alive.”
“We can’t let ourselves be controlled by any such sentimentality as that.”
Rothchild slumped in his chair again. His mouth was open, and he ran his pale tongue over his lips. Maria gave him another drink of water. Christopher sat back in his own chair and crossed his
legs. He looked at Patchen but as usual could read nothing in his friend’s deadened face.