The Other Woman: A Novel Page 22

  “Is it yours?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “This house.”

  “I’m afraid,” said Gabriel, “I am oftentimes forced to rely on the kindness of strangers.”

  “We have that in common.”

  Gabriel smiled in spite of himself.

  “Who owns it?” she asked.

  “A friend of a friend.”

  “Jewish?”

  Gabriel shrugged indifferently.

  “He’s obviously wealthy, this friend of yours.”

  “Not as wealthy as he once was.”

  “What a pity.” She said this to the ormolu clock. Turning, she scrutinized Gabriel carefully. “You’re smaller than I imagined.”

  “So are you.”

  “I’m old.”

  “We have that in common, too.”

  This time, it was Charlotte Bettencourt who smiled. It faded quickly when at last she noticed the antique box. “You had no right to break into my house and take my things. Then again, I suppose my offenses are of a far greater magnitude. And now it seems someone else is going to pay the price.”

  Gabriel didn’t respond, he didn’t dare. Charlotte Bettencourt was staring at Christopher Keller, who was comparing the time on his wristwatch to the time on the clock.

  “Your friend told me he was British,” she said. “Is that true?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “And what is your interest in this affair?” she demanded to know. “On whose authority are you here?”

  “In this matter,” said Gabriel, his tone judicial, “the British and Israeli intelligence services are working together.”

  “Kim would be turning in his grave.”

  Again Gabriel chose silence as his response. It was far more useful than telling Charlotte Bettencourt how he felt about Kim Philby’s opinions regarding the State of Israel. She was still watching Keller, with a mildly bemused expression on her face.

  “Your friend also refused to tell me how you managed to find me. Perhaps you would.”

  Gabriel decided there was no harm in it, it was so long ago. “We found your name in an old MI6 file.”

  “From Beirut?”

  “Yes.”

  “Kim assured me no one knew about us.”

  “He was wrong about that, too,” said Gabriel coolly.

  “Who was it? Who found us out?”

  “His name was Arthur Seymour.”

  She gave a mischievous smile. “Kim loathed him.”

  “The feeling was mutual.” Gabriel felt as though he were conversing with a figure in a historical diorama. “Arthur Seymour suspected Philby was a Soviet spy from the beginning. His superiors in London thought you might be a spy, too.”

  “I wasn’t. I was merely an impressionable young woman with strong beliefs.” Her gaze fell upon the wooden box. “But you know that, don’t you? You know everything.”

  “Not everything,” admitted Gabriel.

  “Am I in legal jeopardy?” she asked.

  “You are a French citizen of advanced age living in Spain.”

  “Money has changed hands.”

  “It almost always does.”

  “Not in Kim’s case. Oh, he took a little money, just enough to survive when he needed it. But his actions were motivated by his faith in communism. I shared that faith. So did a great many of your coreligionists, Mr. Allon.”

  “I was raised on that faith.”

  “Do you have it still?” she pried.

  “Another matter for another time.”

  She was staring at the box again. “And what about my . . .”

  “I’m afraid I can’t offer you any guarantees,” said Gabriel.

  “Will there be an arrest? A prosecution? Another scandal?”

  “That’s a decision for the chief of MI6, not me.”

  “He’s the son of Arthur Seymour, is he not?”

  “Yes,” said Gabriel, surprised. “He is.”

  “Imagine that. I met him once, you know.”

  “Arthur Seymour?”

  “No. His son. It was at the bar of the Normandie. Kim was being naughty and trying to buy him a pink gin. I’m sure he doesn’t remember. He was only a boy, and it was so long ago.” She smiled wistfully. “But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Perhaps we should start at the beginning, Monsieur Allon. It will help you to better understand why it happened.”

  “Yes,” agreed Gabriel. “Perhaps we should.”

  49

  Seville

  The beginning, she said, was a small village near Nantes, in the Loire Valley of western France. The Bettencourts were an ancient family, rich in land and possessions. Charlotte was old enough to recall the sight of German soldiers on the streets of her village, and the well-mannered Wehrmacht captain who was billeted in the family’s château. Charlotte’s father treated the German occupiers respectfully—too respectfully, in the opinion of some in the village—and after the war there were whispers of collaboration. The communists were very powerful in the département. The children of the working class taunted young Charlotte mercilessly and on one occasion attempted to cut off her hair. They might well have succeeded were it not for Monsignor Jean-Marc, who intervened on her behalf. Many years later, a historical commission would accuse the monsignor, a family friend of the Bettencourts, of being a collaborator, too.

  In 1956 Charlotte moved to Paris to study French literature at the Sorbonne. It was an autumn of seismic political events. In late October, Israeli, British, and French troops attempted to seize control of the Suez Canal from Egypt’s Nasser. And in early November, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to crush the Hungarian Uprising. Charlotte sided with Moscow on both issues, for by then she was a committed communist.

  She left the Sorbonne in 1960 and spent the next year and a half writing reviews and political commentaries for a small literary magazine. Bored, she asked her father for enough money to move to Beirut so that she might become a foreign correspondent. Her father had grown weary of Charlotte’s politics—they were barely speaking at that point—and was more than pleased to be rid of her. She arrived in Lebanon in January 1962, took an apartment near the American University, and began filing stories for several left-leaning French publications, for which she was paid almost nothing. It didn’t matter; she had her family’s money to support her. Still, she longed to make her mark as a real journalist. She frequently sought advice from members of the large community of foreign correspondents, including one who drank at the bar of the Hotel Normandie.

  “Philby,” said Gabriel.

  “Kim,” replied Charlotte. “He’ll always be Kim to me.”

  She was seated at the edge of a brocade chair, her hands folded neatly atop her knees, her feet flat on the floor. Eli Lavon sat in the chair next to her, gazing absently into the middle distance like a man on a rail platform waiting for a long-delayed train. Mikhail, it seemed, was having a staring contest with a figure in one of the darkened paintings, a poor copy of an El Greco. Keller, feigning indifference, had opened the back of the ormolu clock and was tinkering with the mechanism.

  “You were in love with him?” asked Gabriel, who was pacing the room slowly.

  “With Kim? Very much.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he wasn’t my father, I suppose.”

  “Did you know he was a Soviet spy?”

  “Don’t be silly. Kim never would have entrusted his secret with me.”

  “But surely you must have suspected.”

  “I asked him the question once, and I never asked it again. But it was obvious he was in a great deal of pain. He used to have the most terrible nightmares after making love to me. And his drinking was . . . like nothing I had ever seen.”

  “When did you realize you were pregnant?”

  “The beginning of November. I waited until the end of December to tell him.”

  “How did he react?”

  “He nearly killed us both. He was driving at the time,” sh
e explained. “A woman should never tell her lover that she is pregnant when he is behind the wheel of a car. Especially when her lover is drunk.”

  “He was angry?”

  “He pretended to be. Actually, I think he was heartbroken. Say what you like about Kim, but he adored his children. He probably thought he would never see the one I was carrying in my womb.”

  Probably, noted Gabriel. “Did you make any demands of him?”

  “Of Kim Philby? I didn’t bother. His finances were in dreadful shape. There was no possibility of any support or of marriage. I knew that if I had the baby, I would have to look after it myself.”

  Philby’s birthday was on New Year’s Day. It was his fifty-first. Charlotte had hoped to spend at least a few minutes with Kim, but he telephoned to say he couldn’t come to her apartment. He had fallen the night before, twice, and had split his head open and blackened both his eyes. He used his dreadful appearance as an excuse to avoid seeing her for the next two weeks. The true reason for his absence, she said, was Nicholas Elliott’s arrival in Beirut.

  “When was the next time you saw him?”

  “The twenty-third.”

  “The day he fled Beirut.”

  She nodded. “Kim came to see me in the late afternoon. He looked worse than ever. It was pouring rain, and he was soaking wet. He said he could stay for only a few minutes. He was supposed to meet Eleanor for dinner at the home of the first secretary from the British Embassy. I tried to make love to him, but he pushed me away and asked for a drink. Then he told me Nicholas had accused him of being a Soviet spy.”

  “Did he deny it?”

  “No,” said Charlotte pointedly. “He did not.”

  “How much did he tell you?”

  “Much more than he should have. And then he gave me an envelope.”

  “What was in it?”

  “Money.”

  “For the baby?”

  She nodded slowly.

  “Did he say where he’d got it?”

  “No. But if I had to guess, it was from Petukhov, his KGB contact in Beirut. Kim left later that night aboard a Soviet cargo ship. The Dolmatova. I never saw him again.”

  “Never?”

  “No, Monsieur Allon. Never.”

  When the news of Philby’s defection broke, Charlotte continued, she briefly considered writing a personal exclusive. “The Kim Philby I knew and loved, that sort of drivel.” Instead, she filed a couple of stories that made no reference to their personal relationship and waited for their child to be born. She delivered in a Beirut hospital, alone, in the late spring of 1963.

  “You never told your family?”

  “Not then.”

  “The French Embassy?”

  “Appropriate declarations were made, and a passport was issued.”

  “There was a birth certificate, I assume.”

  “Of course.”

  “And what did you put down as the name of the father?”

  “Philby,” she answered in a mildly defiant tone. “Harold Adrian Russell.”

  “And the child’s name?”

  “Bettencourt,” she replied evasively.

  “And the first name?” pressed Gabriel. “The Christian name?”

  Charlotte Bettencourt stared at the wooden box. “You already know the child’s name, Monsieur Allon. Please don’t make me commit another act of betrayal.”

  Gabriel didn’t. Not then, not ever. “You returned to France in 1965,” he prompted her.

  “The winter.”

  “Where did you go?”

  To a small village near Nantes, she said, in the Loire Valley of western France.

  “Your parents must have been surprised.”

  “That’s putting it mildly. My father sent me away and told me never to come back.”

  “Did you tell your parents the name of the child’s father?”

  “Had I done that,” she said, “it would have only made the situation worse.”

  “Did you tell anyone?”

  “No. I told no one. Ever.”

  “What about the birth certificate?”

  “I lost it.”

  “How convenient.”

  “Yes.”

  “What really happened to it?”

  She glanced at the wooden box, then looked away. In the courtyard a trio of security guards stood like statuary in the gathering darkness. Eli Lavon was still waiting for his train, but Keller and Mikhail were now staring at Charlotte Bettencourt, rapt. The clock had stopped working altogether. So, too, it seemed, had Gabriel’s heart.

  “Where did you go next?” he asked.

  Back to Paris, she answered, this time with a small child in tow. They lived in a garret room in the Latin Quarter. It was all Charlotte could afford now that she had been cut off financially by her father. Her mother used to give her a few francs whenever she came to visit, but her father did not acknowledge the child’s existence. Neither, it seemed, did Kim. With each passing year, though, the child looked more like him. The very blue eyes, the unruly forelock. There was even a faint stammer, which faded by the age of eight. Charlotte forsook journalism and devoted herself to the Party and the revolution.

  They had no money to speak of, but they didn’t need much. They were in Paris, and the glorious city was theirs. They used to play a silly game together, counting the steps between their favorite landmarks. How many steps from the Louvre to Notre-Dame? How many steps from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde? From the Tour Eiffel to Les Invalides?

  There were eighty-seven steps between their garret apartment and the courtyard of the building, Charlotte explained, and another thirty-eight to the door leading to the rue Saint-Jacques. Which was where, on a warm summer’s day in 1974, when most Parisians had wisely fled the city, a man was waiting.

  “What was the date?” asked Gabriel.

  “August,” Charlotte answered. “It was the day after Nixon resigned.”

  “That would make it the tenth.”

  “If you say so.”

  “And the man’s name?”

  “On that occasion, he introduced himself as Comrade Lavrov.”

  “And on others?”

  Sasha, she answered. He called himself Sasha.

  50

  Seville

  He was thin—gulag thin, said Charlotte—and pale as candle wax. A few strands of lank unwashed hair lay plastered to his skull, which was wide at the forehead, conferring upon him the appearance of superior intelligence. The eyes were small and rimmed with red, the teeth were gray and jagged. He wore a tweed jacket, too heavy for the broiling heat, and a formerly white shirt that looked as though it had been rinsed out too many times in a kitchen basin. His beard was in need of a trimming.

  “Beard?”

  “He wore a small one.” She moved her thumb and forefinger from her upper lip to her chin.

  “Like Lenin?” asked Gabriel.

  “A younger Lenin. Lenin in exile. Lenin in London.”

  “And what brought him to Paris?”

  “He said he had a letter.”

  “From Philby?”

  “He never uttered the name. He said the letter was from a man I had known in Beirut. A famous English journalist.” She dropped the register of her voice to a masculine pitch and added a thick Russian accent. “‘Would it be possible for us to speak somewhere private? The matter I wish to discuss is quite sensitive in nature.’ I suggested the brasserie across the street”—her normal voice again—“but he said my apartment would be better. I explained it was modest. He said he already knew this.”

  “The implication being that he had been watching you for some time.”

  “He comes from your world, not mine.”

  “And the letter?”

  It was typewritten, which was not like Kim, and unsigned. Even so, she knew the words were his. He apologized for having deceived her in Beirut and said he wished to renew their relationship. As part of that renewal, he wished to see his child. For obvious re
asons, he wrote, the meeting could not take place in France.

  “He wanted you to come to Moscow?”

  “Not me. The child only.”

  “And you agreed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  She gave no answer.

  “Because you were still in love with him?” suggested Gabriel.

  “With Kim? Not then, not any longer. But I was still in love with the idea of Kim.”

  “And what idea was that?”

  “Commitment to the revolution.” She paused, then added, “Sacrifice.”

  “You didn’t mention betrayal.”

  Ignoring his remark, she explained that Sasha and the child left Paris that very night, on a train to Germany. They crossed into the eastern sector by car, drove to Warsaw, and then flew to Moscow, the child on a false Russian passport. Philby’s apartment was near Pushkin Square, hidden away on a narrow lane near an old church, between Tverskaya Street and the Patriarch’s Ponds. He lived there with Rufina, his Russian wife.

  “His fourth,” Charlotte Bettencourt added acidly.

  “How long did—”

  “Three days.”

  “I assume there was another visit.”

  “Christmas, that same year.”

  “Again in Moscow?”

  “Ten days,” she said, nodding.

  “And the next visit?”

  “The following summer. A month.”

  “A month is a very long time.”

  “It was hard on me, I admit.”

  “And after that?”

  “Sasha came to Paris to see me again.”

  They met on a park bench, the way Philby had met Otto four decades earlier. The bench was not in Regent’s Park, but in the Jardin des Tuileries. Sasha said he had been ordered by Moscow Center to embark on a historic endeavor on behalf of international peace. Kim would be his partner in this endeavor. It was Sasha’s wish, and Kim’s, for Charlotte to join them.