Second sight, p.5
Second Sight, page 5
“You’re a long way from Philadelphia.”
“Ah,” said the caller. “I thought it was you, but you sound different in French.”
It was David Patchen.
“Is something wrong?” she said.
“No, everything is all right,” Patchen said. “I don’t mean to upset you, but I’d like to talk to you.”
Cathy nearly hung up the phone. Why should she want to talk to Patchen? “I’m not sure that’s possible,” she said.
“I’m afraid it has to be possible,” Patchen replied.
Cathy took a deep breath, exhaled into the mouthpiece, and said, “All right.”
“Good. Are you free for dinner tonight? I’m only in town for a limited time.”
Patchen, like many people from the Outfit, seemed to prefer discussing secrets in expensive restaurants while surrounded by eavesdroppers. Cathy had never understood this.
“I don’t go out at night,” she said. “Why don’t you come here for tea at five o’clock?”
“Tea,” Patchen said, drawing out the word in a parody of enthusiasm. “That would be lovely.”
David Patchen had been Christopher’s best man, the only attendant, at Cathy’s wedding. He and Christopher had been wounded in the same battle on Okinawa, Patchen far more seriously than Christopher. After the war they had been roommates in college, and now they were both members of the Outfit, the most exclusive fraternity in American history. Cathy felt sorry for Patchen because of his disfigured face and his withered limbs, but she did not like him.
Patchen realized this, and he wasted no time on polite greetings or expressions of regret. Because he had the full use of only one hand, he had trouble with the mechanics of afternoon tea. He took the cup that Cathy poured for him, but refused sandwiches and cakes.
“They’re delicious,” Cathy said, offering the plate.
“I’m sure they are,” Patchen replied. “But no thank you.” “Paul always said you were an ascetic.”
Cathy ate her usual egg and toast and fruit; she was scrupulous about her diet, and she had an appetite. She had walked all the way to the Pont Neuf that day, counting her steps in an attempt to keep from thinking about Patchen’s phone call and what it might mean.
Patchen had no small talk even when it was appropriate, so he simply waited in silence while Cathy finished her food, holding his teacup in his good hand. He made no effort to conceal his interest in her new appearance. She had put on a full skirt, a loose blouse, and a blazer to conceal her slightly thickened abdomen, but he was completely uninterested in her clothes, or anything else except her damaged face.
Cathy wiped her unpainted lips with a napkin, and said, “Well, how do you like my face job?”
“You look a little different,” Patchen said.
“Better or worse?”
“Less perfect.”
“It’s a great experience, having a new face.”
Patchen smiled sardonically. “I know,” he said.
His face had been shattered on Okinawa, along with his arm and leg. He had lost an eye.
“What did you look like, before?” Cathy asked; she had always wondered, and now she had the right to ask.
“Incredibly handsome,” Patchen said.
He cleared his throat and said, “Can we talk about your condition for a moment?”
“My condition?”
Cathy’s throat tightened. It was impossible to guess what he might know.
“I mean in regard to us,” Patchen was saying, “now that you and Paul aren’t together any more.”
“ ‘Us’?”
“The Outfit.”
“What does the Outfit have to do with it?”
“Divorces can be bitter,” Patchen said. “I don’t know how you feel about Paul at this point.”
“You don’t? Neither do I. How does Paul feel about me?” Patchen went on as if she had not spoken. “Or how you feel about the Outfit,” he said.
“That’s easy. I think it’s a joke.”
Patchen was looking for a place to put the cup in which his tea had gone cold. Cathy reached across the table and took it from him. Patchen picked up the attaché case he had brought with him and opened the catches with a loud double snap. The case was black, like all of Patchen’s accoutrements.
“Paperwork,” he said. “I’m sorry to inflict this on you.”
“Then why are you doing it?” Cathy said. “Why you? I thought
you were too high-ranking to deal with abandoned wives.”
He took a thick file of papers out of his case, closed the lid, and sighed.
“I’m here because I’m Paul’s friend,” he said, “and even though I don’t expect you to believe me when I say this, I’m not your enemy. The Outfit has certain procedures when one of its officers parts from his wife, even when the circumstances are less dramatic than they are in this case.”
“Why isn’t Paul doing this himself?”
“Because he’s one of the parties to the situation, and because he doesn’t know everything that we know.”
“What do you know?”
Patchen removed a thick file from his attaché case and handed it to Cathy. “More, frankly, than I wish we knew,” he said.
Cathy had never seen an Outfit file before; she had imagined that they were stamped Top Secret and sealed with ribbons and wax inside impressive covers, but this one was just a plain manila folder filled with typed pages. There were no stamps, no labels, no titles, not even a name on the cover. It was absolutely sterile. It even smelled sterile, because of the faintly antiseptic odor of the fresh ink left by typewriter ribbons that were used only once, then burned.
“Am I supposed to read the whole thing?” Cathy said.
“You’re not supposed to know it exists, but you can read it if you want to. Everything we know, officially, is in there. There are some things you don’t know.”
“That’s an official warning?”
“I wouldn’t call it that, but you should prepare yourself.”
Cathy took the file to her father’s desk, where the light was better. It took almost an hour to read it. Everything was there: her lovers’ names; the dates and places on which she had seen them, transcripts of what they had said during the acts they had performed on her body and what she had said in reply; dry, neutral comments about her behavior and appearance by the anonymous people who had been watching her and listening to her with hidden microphones. As she read, a clot of nausea rose into her throat. Had these acts been photographed by secret cameras?
She handed the file back to Patchen.
“What? No photographs?” she said.
“I didn’t bring them,” Patchen said.
“But they exist?”
Patchen nodded. Cathy could barely breathe. What had been photographed? What exactly had Patchen seen? Had Paul seen her with her lovers? Had he ordered the pictures to be taken?
“Was it Paul who told these people to follow me?” she asked.
Insofar as Patchen was capable of registering shock, he registered it now.
“Of course not,” he said. “A surveillance team was on your friend for other reasons. Moroni—the one who hit you. Is that the right name?”
He knew it was. Cathy refused to confirm information by so much as a nod.
“He’s a parlor Stalinist, a useful idiot,” Patchen said, “a believer, somebody who does favors for the other side; he was servicing interesting people. You just happened to walk into the picture.”
“Were all the others enemy agents, too?”
“You mean your other … friends? No. Just Moroni. You were an object of interest because of the interest in him, so they surveilled you and everybody you came in contact with. That’s the way it’s done. They didn’t even know who you were until they saw you with Paul.”
“How could they not know that?”
“You weren’t living at home. You rented your hideaway in a false name. You read the file: they didn’t identify you until you went through a passport control, on your way to meet Paul in Spain.”
“But Paul knew who I was, and after they told him what I was doing, he must have sat around discussing it with them. Wouldn’t that be his duty?”
“That’s not the way it was,” Patchen said. “Paul was told be cause he needed to know, that’s all. It turned out he knew already.” “Why did you think he needed to know?”
“Because the investigation of this man Moroni, the one who injured you, was connected to something Paul was working on.” “You mean Otto and Maria.”
Patchen hesitated. “Yes, or so we thought at the time. Paul told you more than I thought.”
“Don’t worry. He didn’t tell me anything I didn’t need to know. I guarantee you.”
Patchen was holding another paper in his hand. This one was a legal document, stapled into a blue backing.
“This is an agreement between you and us,” he said, handing it over. “You agree never to reveal Paul’s real occupation to anyone, and never to disclose any classified information that may have come to your knowledge as a result of your relationship with him. That includes the identity of other members of the Outfit you may have met.”
“I’m making a contract with you to forget the whole thing. Is that it?”
Patchen nodded. “You could say that. It’s the routine form.” “Give me your pen.”
Cathy signed the document without reading it.
Patchen took it back and held it open, waiting for the ink to dry.
“If it isn’t too late to ask,” Cathy said, “what do I get out of this? When you pay blackmail you’re supposed to get the incriminating evidence from the blackmailer, aren’t you?”
“Moroni is in prison. He was caught smuggling opium into Turkey.”
“Into Turkey? I thought that was where opium came from.” “Then I guess he was carrying coals to Newcastle.”
“How long will he be in jail?”
“The sentence was twenty years.”
“You-all paid him back. Not for me, but for what he did to Paul’s wife. He damaged Outfit property. Was that it?”
Patchen did not argue with her. “To answer your earlier question,” he said, “there is no quid pro quo for signing the agreement. However, the report you read is the only copy in existence. I’ll burn it tonight,” he said. “The original, which is identical, will remain in the files. But now that Moroni is out of the way, the case is closed. I’ll send this file to the warehouse. It will be buried under tons of paper. Nobody will ever look for it there unless there’s some compelling reason to do so.”
“You can send it to the Herald-Tribune as far as I’m concerned.”
A long time had passed since Patchen’s arrival and he was beginning to show fatigue. His face was drawn and colorless. He closed his attaché case and twirled the combination locks. He stood up, painfully. He and Cathy looked dully at each other.
“There’s one more thing I want to say to you, for old times’ sake,” Patchen said. “It would be a mistake to think that the people you visited in Switzerland are your friends.”
“You mean Otto and Maria? I’ll bear that in mind.”
Patchen nodded; a brisk Germanic movement of his ruined head, and without uttering another sound, walked out of the room. He left the door open behind him. Cathy watched him hobble through the dimly lit salon on his way to the foyer, carrying his attaché case. Even from the back, he looked wasted, worn out. If he saw Lla Kahina in the shadows of the room, he gave no sign.
THREE
1
DAY BY DAY, CATHY TRIED TO CURE HERSELF OF CHRISTOPHER. IT was late March now, and her pregnancy was finally obvious. She was no longer able to ride comfortably, so she played the piano in the morning and took longer walks in the afternoon. She paid no attention to the weather, sometimes trudging through snow along the footpaths of the Bois de Boulogne, sometimes striding in a winter rain through miserable quarters of the Left Bank where she had never set foot before.
She always wore her Loden cape. Its thick wool kept out the water and the damp northern European cold that seeped through other garments. When it rained too hard, she went into a café and ordered a cup of tea and read whatever book she happened to have with her. She had her hair cut short, like Jean Seberg’s in A bout de souffle and dyed it black. This, combined with the cape and its deep hood, made a good disguise. In her own neighborhood, people she knew walked by her with hardly a glance, mistaking her battered face inside the woolen cowl for that of someone who merely resembled her.
Every evening after tea, Lla Kahina told her fortune. The cards always said the same thing—Christopher would never come back.
All right, Cathy thought, walking along the Rue Saint-Sulpice on a day in March. Go. Leave me in peace. It was a bright, cold day, with light flashing from every glass surface. Cathy threw back the hood of her Loden cape and saw her own reflection in a shop window.
“Good God!” she said aloud. She looked like a nun with her cropped hair, her victim’s face, and her enveloping cloak. Behind the glass, all kinds of religious objects were displayed, crucifixes and miters, chalices and wimples. She threw her head back and looked upward at the strip of pale sky above the narrow street.
“He works in mysterious ways,” she said loudly, this time in clear French, and a woman passing by, noting her condition, smiled and responded, “Vraiment, Madame!”
Because of the sunshine that suffused their dreary city that day, the Parisians were in good humor. Cathy walked on between the shops filled with ecclesiastical apparatus until she came to the Rue Tournon. She turned right without thinking, and a moment later found herself looking at the Florentine mass of the Palace of Luxembourg.
How had she got here? She never went to the Luxembourg Gardens on her walks. It was a place where she had often met Christopher in the first days of their love. He had the use of an apartment, a safe house, only steps away in the Rue Bonaparte, and sometimes they would meet here, always by the puppet theater, and then go to the safe house and then to bed.
Cathy entered the gardens. The grass was still brown and the flower beds were muddy, but because of the bright weather, the gardens were crowded with mothers and children, students reading books and young couples walking under the leafless trees, kissing.
She walked along the broad curving path beside the fountain, picking her way among baby carriages and exchanging smiles with placid, sunbathing mothers. She turned toward the puppet theater. The first time she had met him here, Christopher had come up behind her and stood very close, not quite touching her body with his.
“Did you like Punch and Judy as a child?”
“No. It scared me.”
“Maybe you didn’t know enough about life.”
I do now, Cathy thought.
She sat down on a bench with two mothers, who gave her resentful looks for invading their territory. A sharp little breeze was blowing, so she put up the hood of her cape.
“Look,” one of the mothers said to the other. “She’s in love.”
Cathy looked. A girl about her own age was hurrying down the path. She was too spontaneous to be French, too happy to be American. She had long, very beautiful legs, and reddish hair that captured the sunlight. Her clothes were wrong, as if left over from school, but it made no difference what she wore. She looked like a woman who had made love that morning to someone she loved, and could not wait to meet him so that she could make love to him again in the afternoon. Whoever she was, the girl had found happiness; it was written all over her.
Just then she saw her lover, raised her hand, and began to walk more slowly, as if to prolong the moment. Cathy turned around to look at the man, and saw that it was Christopher. He was close enough so that Cathy heard the girl’s name when he spoke it, “Molly.”
The girl answered in what seemed to be an English accent, then touched the back of Christopher’s hand with the tips of her fingers. It was a brief, almost furtive gesture. She did not kiss him or cling to him as Cathy would have done: Christopher hated to be embraced in public, and this girl already knew what Cathy had never been able to learn. How much more did she know in private?
Christopher seemed to have no idea that Cathy, wrapped up in her cloak, was watching them. He and Molly walked away together toward the Rue Bonaparte, still not touching, her titian head bobbing along beside his blond one, her lovely legs keeping step with his.
Cathy had always believed that Christopher could have any woman he wanted, and never doubted that he wanted other women. She was jealous of women who passed in the street, jealous of women’s voices on the telephone, jealous of women in Asia and Africa who were flesh and blood to Christopher but invisible to her. In the last stages of her jealousy, before she decided to take real lovers to fight his imaginary ones, she became a detective. She examined his dirty clothes when he returned from the field for signs of infidelity, and while he was away, searched his car, collecting evidence—a long hair that was the wrong color to be Christopher’s or her own, a cigarette butt smeared with lipstick, common pins, traces of mud that could only have come from shoes that had been walking in the woods, a clipped fingernail. When Cathy told him about her desperate plans to take lovers (for she had warned him before she did it), she wanted him to say, “If you let another man touch you, I’ll kill you!” But he answered, instead, that her body belonged to her, that she could do with it as she pleased. She had done as he advised, and even in the first moment of her first adultery, she thought that she could never forgive him for letting her do what she was doing.
This Molly was the woman in the cards—the one who had been waiting for Christopher, the one he would really love for the rest of his life, the one whose existence she had never expected. The worst had happened; she knew the final secret, that he did not love her anymore, that he would never love her again, that he had never really loved her because he had been waiting for his true love all along, just as she had always suspected. Inside the cape, she put her hands on her children.
