Paul Christopher is forced to choose between the destruction of a loved one and the intelligence agency for which he works
ALSO BY CHARLES MCCARRY
Old Boys
The Tears of Autumn
The Miernik Dossier
The Secret Lovers
The Better Angels
The Bride of the Wilderness
Second Sight
Shelley’s Heart
Lucky Bastard
Copyright
To Rod MacLeish
Molly
In his dream, Paul Christopher, thirteen years old, wore a thick woolen sweater with three bone buttons on the left shoulder. His father’s yawl Mahican was sailing before the wind, her port rail awash in the swelling waters of the Baltic Sea. The weak northern sun was just rising astern, behind the mist that hid the coast of Germany: not the mainland, but the island of Rügen, whose white chalk cliffs rise four hundred feet above the sea. Aboard the yawl, the man the Christophers called the Dandy scampered, quick as a rat, down the ladder into the cabin. Paul’s mother was alarmed. “Our guest is hiding in the picnic basket,” she said. “Ssshhh, every time a secret is told, an angel falls.”
Paul went below and opened the wicker picnic basket. The Dandy crouched inside among the fitted plates and food boxes and thermos bottles. He was striking their guest on the kidneys with a rubber baton and forcing him to eat the buttons from Paul’s sweater. The Dandy wore a Gestapo badge. The guest was dressed as a rabbi; he smelled of the dust of books and of strange food. The Dandy made a sympathetic face to show Paul that he too was disgusted by this alien stench. Then he fed the rabbi another button.
A storm came up. Paul’s father shouted, “Paul, take the helm!” The jib broke loose and they struggled with it; the canvas billowed and snapped in the howling wind. Paul’s mother fell overboard. He dove after her. In the pewter light at the bottom of the shallow sea, among rocks bearded with seaweed, he found his mother’s body with buttons sewn to its eyes.
In a chilly room in Paris, Paul Christopher’s lover, a girl named Molly, kissed his fluttering eyelids. He woke from his dream. Molly sat up in bed. She had beautiful breasts, with large aureoles that were the same color as her unpainted lips. Though it was January and the window was open, she sat for a long moment in the cold draft, looking into Christopher’s eyes, before she pulled the quilt to her chin.
“You spoke in your sleep, in German,” Molly said. “What did you dream? You have such amazing dreams.”
“I was sailing with my parents.”
“Sailing? In Germany?”
“In the Baltic. My mother was drowning.”
“Oh, dear. Did you save her?”
Beneath the covers, Molly shivered. Her skin was cold to the touch. Christopher got out of bed and closed the window. It had begun to rain, the gray cold rain of northern Europe wetting the gray stones of the city.
Molly wrapped herself in the quilt and came to the window. She put her chin on Christopher’s shoulder and spoke into his ear. She was an Australian who had been taught in an English boarding school to speak like an Englishwoman; when she was sleepy, as she was now, her native accent was just discernible, like a thready scar concealed in a wrinkle by a plastic surgeon.
“Did you save her?” Molly asked.
Christopher nodded.
“Good. I was worried that I’d waked you at the wrong moment.”
“At the wrong moment?” Christopher smiled at Molly’s reflection in the windowpane. She dug the point of her chin into the muscle of his shoulder.
“You don’t know that dreams go on after we wake up?” Molly said. “Why should they stop just because they’re interrupted? We can only see the people in our dreams when we’re asleep, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t always there. Perhaps they can see us when we’re awake.”
Molly saw that Christopher wasn’t listening to what she said. He was staring into the street below. Molly followed his gaze. There was little to see: the rain falling through the dim streetlight onto the shiny cobbles, the stubby branches of a plane tree pruned for the winter. The brake lights blinked on a parked Citroen.
“Is that Tom Webster’s man in that car?” Molly asked.
“Yes.”
“Is he really going to guard me all the time you’re gone?”
“It won’t always be the same car or the same man, but the car will always be in that parking place. They’ll blink the brake lights on the hour and the half hour to let you know they’re there.”
“Wonderful Tom. That will buck me up tremendously.”
Molly opened the quilt and put her arms around Christopher from behind, enclosing him in the folds of the coverlet. Her skin was warm now. She stroked his naked back with the length of her own body.
“You have such a sweet body,” she said.
Christopher turned inside the quilt and put his arms around her.
Later, in bed, Molly got to her knees and turned on the lamp. The Japanese, when they paint on silk, sometimes mix pulverized gold into the pigment, so that the depths of the painting will gather light and magnify it. Molly’s auburn hair had this quality. Christopher touched her and smiled. Seeing the male pleasure in his eyes, she shook her head, impatient with her own beauty.
“No,” she said. “Just this once, don’t look at me. Listen.”
“It’s difficult,” Christopher said. The bedroom walls were mirrored and everywhere he looked he saw the reflection of Molly. The whole apartment, borrowed as a hiding place, was mirrored. It was furnished with glass tables and cubical black leather chairs. The vast bed in which Molly and Christopher now lay was circular, like a bed in a movie about a movie star, and the quilt Molly had wrapped around their bodies was a reproduction of a playing card, the jack of hearts. All these images, and especially Molly’s nudity, were reflected from mirror to mirror.
“Your plane leaves in three hours,” Molly said. “I don’t want to send you off in a sad mood, but really, Paul, I’m filled with dread.”
She was very pale. The lamplight shone directly on her face. Christopher had lived with Molly for nearly two years but he had never until this moment seen the faint constellation of freckles on her cheekbones; always before, the surrounding skin had had enough color to conceal them.
“It isn’t just being left alone,” Molly said. “I’m used to that, you’re always going up in smoke right in the middle of things, I hate it.” Molly shuddered and pulled the quilt around her body. “Why does it always have to be so cold in France, so damp?” she asked. “Why is there never any light? It’s like a tomb.”
She heard herself speaking and for a moment the light of amusement came back into her face. She hated melancholia.
“It’s not France, it’s not being left alone,” she explained. “I’ll tell you what it is, Paul. I’m eaten up by suspicion. I suspect you of something.”
Christopher sat up and began to speak.
“Don’t say anything,” Molly said. “Let me finish. I’m going to make a charge against you. If what I suspect is true, I want you to admit it to me. It’s the least you can do.”
Molly cried easily, but usually from happiness. Her eyes were dry now.
“What I suspect is this,” she said. “I think you’re going to go out and get on an airplane in three hours’ time and fly out to bloody Saigon and I’ll never see you again. You have no notion of coming back. You’re going to let them kill you so that they won’t kill me.”
Molly examined Christopher’s face. He would not look into her eyes, so she gazed at him in the mirror.
“All right,” she said. “Don’t answer; I knew you wouldn’t. But if you leave me in that way, with such cruelty, I’ll never forgive you. I won’t, Paul, not even in death.”
She turned off the lamp and drew close to him. In the darkness he could smell her skin, soap and the forest odor of lovemaking. They had just come back from the mountains and the scent of woodsmoke lingered in her hair; there had been a fireplace in their room; Molly loved all sorts of friendly flames: candles, burning logs.
“It isn’t true,” Christopher said, now that it was dark.
“Then don’t leave without saying good-bye,” Molly said. “Don’t do that again. Paul, don’t vanish. I mean it. Really I mean it.”
She turned on the lamp again so that he could see how serious she was. Christopher kissed her eyes; she was crying now. Molly lifted his arm and wrapped it around her body. Her muscles were tense. He knew that she meant to stay awake until it was time for him to go. But soon the warmth of the bed relaxed her and she fell asleep.
At midnight, Christopher slipped out of bed and put on his clothes. There was very little light in the room, just the reflection of a streetlamp, but he had been lying awake in the dark and his eyes had adjusted. He could see Molly quite plainly. Her face was buried in the pillow. She was dreaming. She pushed a long bare leg out of the bed, muttered a few words, and resumed her soft breathing. Her left hand turned on the sheet; she was wearing all the rings Christopher had ever given her: emerald, topaz, scarab, opal, one on each finger. He always brought her a ring when he came home from a journey; she never took them off.
Molly spoke again in her sleep. Christopher could not make out the words. He knelt beside the bed and slipped his hand beneath the covers, but he could not bring himself to wake her. He stood up. Molly had left her purse on the dressing table. He took an envelope out of his coat pocket and crossed the room, walking softly over the thick white carpet. Molly moved in the bed. In the mirror, Christopher could see her sleeping face. He opened her purse and placed the envelope inside. He paused in the doorway and looked once more at Molly’s sleeping faces, dozens of them, reflected in the mirrors.
Then he went into the living room. A fur coat lay in a heap by the door where Molly had left it. He picked it up and draped it over a chair. Then, just as Molly had feared, he left without saying good-bye, locking the door behind him.
The sound of the key in the lock woke Molly. Naked, she ran into the living room. The elevator whined in its shaft. She tried to open the door, but the complicated locks defeated her; she broke a nail, twisting the bolt. Sucking the wound, she went to the window. In the street below, Christopher was talking to the man in the Citroen. He had got out of the car and the two of them stood in the rain, chatting. They looked up at Molly’s window, but it was at the top of the house and they didn’t see her, a pale stripe of flesh against the darkness of the room.
Christopher finished talking and walked away. He had an American walk; he did not hold himself in any particular way as Europeans did, he simply walked as if it didn’t matter to him what class strangers thought he belonged to.
“Damn you,” Molly said, watching him.
Her eye fell on the fur coat. She put it on, meaning to follow Christopher into the street, and struggled with the locks again. She could not get them open.
Molly ran back to the window. Christopher had vanished, but the man in the Citroen was still out in the open. He looked upward at the window. Molly stepped back into the dark. The man searched in his pocket for something, found it, looked up and down the street, then hurried away.
Molly knew what he had had in his pocket: a telephone token. He was going to use the public telephone at the Metro station, around the corner on the Boulevard Beauséjour, to report Christopher’s departure. He would be out of sight for ten minutes: Molly had timed him earlier in the day, when he had made another phone call.
“Damn you,” Molly said again, speaking to Christopher.
She turned and walked rapidly out of the room, dropping the fur coat to the floor. It wasn’t hers; it was a borrowed coat—rabbit pelts, she thought, dyed to resemble some more elegant dead animal. In the bedroom, she put on a skirt and sweater, ran a comb through her hair, and pulled on a pair of boots. She opened her purse, looking for French money for a taxi, and found the envelope Christopher had left.
She tore it open. There was no note inside, just a thick sheaf of hundred-dollar bills, thousands of dollars in American currency. Molly looked helplessly at the money; it seemed insane to carry such a sum into the street. She dropped the envelope onto the unmade bed and pulled the sheet over it.
Struggling with the locks again, Molly turned the knobs the other way. The bolts slid open at last.
At the airport, Christopher presented his ticket at the baggage room and claimed his battered leather suitcase, then carried it through the deserted terminal and into the men’s toilet. In a cubicle, he opened the bag. It was exactly as he had left it: two tropical suits, a set of rough clothes with boots, shirts, toilet articles. The lining was undisturbed. He closed the brass locks, flushed the toilet, and opened the door of the cubicle.
Tom Webster stood at the sink, combing his cropped hair. In the mirror, Webster turned his earnest, bespectacled face toward Christopher. “I thought I’d see you off,” he said. He held up a soothing hand, as if he expected Christopher to be angry or frightened by his presence. “It’s all right,” he said. “I checked all the crappers. We’re alone in here.”
Christopher put his suitcase on the floor and leaned against the tiled wall, watching the entrance.
Webster spoke in a husky whisper. “It’s not too late to change your mind,” he said.
The loudspeaker system chimed and Christopher’s flight was called in French and Vietnamese.
“I checked the passenger list. Kim is on the plane with you,” Webster said. “They’re waiting for you out there. You can still turn around.”
Christopher shook his head and picked up his suitcase.
“I’ll help you, we’ll all help you, fuck Headquarters,” Webster said.
“Take Molly and get lost. Enough is enough.”
Christopher started to speak to his friend. At that moment, a man carrying a rolled newspaper came into the brightly lighted room. He gave the two Americans an incurious glance, then went to the urinal. Christopher walked swiftly out the door. They were calling his flight again.
Webster remained at the sink, washing his hands, until the man with the newspaper finished at the urinal. Then, wiping his wet hands on his raincoat, Webster followed him.
Still clutching his newspaper, the man hurried out the doors leading to the roadway in front of the terminal.
Webster followed him outside. The man was behaving exactly like the French businessman he appeared to be, brusque and self-important. But Webster was curious about him. At two o’clock in the morning, his suit was perfectly pressed; had he been returning from one of the long flights from Africa and Asia that arrived in Paris at this time of night, his clothes would have been rumpled. He would have had a growth of beard, but he was clean-shaven.
When the man with the newspaper got outside, he didn’t hail a taxi. He stood patiently on the curb, holding his newspaper like a baton, waiting.
A taxi stopped on the wrong side of the roadway. The passenger was a girl. She paid the driver and didn’t wait for her change. The taxi door on the traffic side was flung open and she got out, her skirt riding up as she slid across the seat. Her legs were long and extremely beauti...
