The Other Woman Page 34

  She smiled at the absurdity of his remark. “It doesn’t bother you?”

  “To meet with someone who once tried to kill me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I seem to make a habit of it.”

  “You have many enemies in Moscow,” she pointed out.

  “More now than ever, I suspect.”

  “Perhaps I’ll be able to temper the SVR’s opinion of you when I take up my new post at Moscow Center.”

  “I won’t hold my breath.”

  “Don’t.” She smiled without parting her lips. Perhaps Gabriel had been wrong about her. Perhaps she belonged in a cage. “Actually,” she continued, “I doubt I’ll be dealing much with the Middle East. The Great Britain desk is the most natural place for me.”

  “All the more reason why your government shouldn’t even consider handing over a traitor like you.”

  “It’s not my government, and I’m not a traitor. I’m an agent of penetration. It’s not my fault the British were foolish enough to hire me and then promote me up the line to H/Washington.”

  Feigning boredom, Gabriel pondered his wristwatch. “Graham said there was something you wanted to discuss with me.”

  She frowned. “You disappoint me, Monsieur Allon. Is there really nothing you wish to ask me?”

  “What would be the point? You’d only lie.”

  “It might be worth a try, no? Going once,” she said provocatively. “Twice . . .”

  “Heathcliff,” said Gabriel.

  She pouted. “Poor Heathcliff.”

  “I suppose you were the one who betrayed him.”

  “Not by name, of course. I never knew it. But Moscow Center used my reports to identify him.”

  “And the address of the safe flat?”

  “That came directly from me.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Who do you think?”

  “If I had to guess,” said Gabriel, “it was Alistair Hughes.”

  Her expression darkened.

  “How did you know he was seeing a doctor in Switzerland?”

  “He told me that, too. I was the only person inside Six he trusted.”

  “Big mistake.”

  “Alistair’s, not mine.”

  “You were lovers?”

  “For nine dreadful months,” she said, rolling her eyes. “In Baghdad.”

  “I assume Alistair felt differently.”

  “He was quite in love with me. The fool actually wanted to leave Melinda.”

  “There’s no accounting for taste.”

  She said nothing.

  “Your romantic interest in him was professional in nature?”

  “Of course.”

  “Moscow Center suggested the affair?”

  “Actually, I undertook it on my own initiative.”

  “Why?”

  She stared long and deliberately at one of the cameras, as if to remind Gabriel that their conversation was being monitored. “On the day my father died,” she said, “Alistair and I were working at Brussels Station. As you might imagine, I was quite distraught. But Alistair was . . .”

  “Pleased by the news?”

  “Overjoyed.”

  “And you never forgave him for it?”

  “How could I?”

  “You must have noticed the pills when you were sleeping with him.”

  “They were rather hard to miss. Alistair was a mess in Baghdad. He was even worse after I broke off the affair.”

  “But you remained friends?”

  “Confidants,” she suggested.

  “And when you learned he was making secret trips to Switzerland without telling Vauxhall Cross?”

  “I filed the information away for a rainy day.”

  “The rain began to fall,” said Gabriel, “when VeeVee Gribkov tried to defect in New York.”

  “Torrentially.”

  “So you told Sasha about Alistair, and Sasha put in place an operation to make it appear as though your former lover was the mole.”

  “Problem solved.”

  “Not quite,” said Gabriel. “Did you know they were planning to kill him?”

  “This isn’t beanbag, Monsieur Allon. You know that better than anyone.”

  The British desk at Moscow Center, thought Gabriel, would soon be in capable hands; she was more ruthless than they were. Gabriel had a thousand more questions, but suddenly all he wanted was to leave. Rebecca Manning appeared to sense his restiveness. She crossed and uncrossed her legs and ran a palm vigorously over the rails of her corduroy trousers.

  “I was wondering”—her British accent had returned—“whether I might impose on you.”

  “You already have.”

  She frowned in consternation. “Sarcasm is surely your right, but please hear me out.”

  With a small movement of his head, Gabriel invited her to continue.

  “My mother . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “She’s well?”

  “She’s been living alone in the mountains of Andalusia for almost forty years. How do you think she is?”

  “How is her health?”

  “A heart problem.”

  “A common affliction in women who knew my father.”

  “Men, too.”

  “You seem to have developed a rapport with her.”

  “There was little pleasant about our meeting.”

  “But she told you about the—”

  “Yes,” said Gabriel, glancing at one of the cameras. “She told me.”

  Rebecca was rubbing her palm over her trousers again. “I was w-w-wondering,” she stammered, “whether you might have a word with her on my b-b-behalf.”

  “I signed a piece of paper a few minutes ago declaring, among other things, that I would not deliver any messages from you to the outside world.”

  “The British government has no power over you. You can do as you choose.”

  “I choose not to. Besides,” added Gabriel, “you have the SVR to deliver your mail.”

  “My mother loathes them.”

  “She’s entitled.”

  A silence descended between them. There was only the humming of the lights. It was making Gabriel cross.

  “Do you think,” said Rebecca at last, “that she m-m-might . . . once I’m settled in Moscow . . .”

  “You’ll have to ask her yourself.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “Hasn’t she suffered enough?”

  “We’ve both suffered.”

  Because of him, thought Gabriel.

  He rose abruptly. Rebecca also. Once again, the hand shot between the bars. Ignoring it, Gabriel tapped a knuckle against the one-way window and waited for the guards to unlock the outer door.

  “You made one mistake in Washington,” said Rebecca as she withdrew her hand.

  “Only one?”

  “You should have killed me when you had the chance.”

  “My wife told me the same thing.”

  “Her name is Chiara.” Rebecca smiled coldly behind the bars of her cage. “Do give her my best.”

  It was a few minutes after two when the transport plane set down at RAF Northolt in suburban London. Heathrow was three miles to the south, which meant Gabriel arrived in plenty of time to catch the 4:45 British Airways Flight to Tel Aviv. Uncharacteristically, he accepted a glass of preflight champagne. He had earned it, he assured himself. Then he thought of Rebecca Manning in her cage, and Alistair Hughes in his coffin, and Konstantin Kirov on a snow-covered street in Vienna, and he returned the glass to the flight attendant untouched. As the plane thundered along the runway, rainwater pulsed along Gabriel’s window like blood through a vein. Everyone loses, he thought as he watched England sinking away beneath him. Everyone except the Russians.

  88

  Zahara, Spain

  The exchange took place six weeks later, on the tarmac of a desolate old airfield in far eastern Poland. There were two planes present. One was an Aeroflot Sukhoi; the other, a chartered
Airbus from British Airways. At the stroke of noon, twelve men, all prized assets of the British and American intelligence services, all prison thin, came filing down the steps of the Sukhoi. As they tripped happily across the tarmac toward the Airbus, they passed a single woman walking soberly in the opposite direction. There were no cameras or reporters present to record the event, only a couple of senior Polish secret policemen who made certain everyone played by the rules. The woman passed them without a word, with her eyes downcast, and took the place of the twelve men aboard the Sukhoi. The aircraft was in motion even before the cabin door had closed. At twelve fifteen it entered the airspace of friendly Belarus, bound for Moscow.

  It would be another week before the public was informed of the exchange, and even then they were told very little. The twelve men, they were assured, had supplied invaluable intelligence about the New Russia and consequently were well worth the price. In America there was outrage in the usual quarters, but the reaction in London was characterized by tight-lipped resignation. Yes, it was a bitter pill to swallow, the mandarins of Whitehall agreed, but probably for the best. The only bright spot was a report in the Telegraph that said the exchange had gone forward despite the fact the Russians had wanted two prisoners rather than one. “At least someone had the backbone to stand up to them,” a retired British spymaster groused that evening at the Travellers Club. “If only it had been us.”

  The Russians waited another month before putting their prize on public display. The venue was an hour-long documentary on a Russian television network controlled by the Kremlin. A press conference followed, presided over by the Tsar himself. She extolled his virtues, praised Russia’s return to global prominence under his leadership, and railed against the British and the Americans, whose secrets she had happily plundered. Her only regret, she said, was that she had failed to become the director-general of MI6 and thus complete her mission.

  “Have you enjoyed your time in Russia?” asked a member in good standing of the Kremlin’s docile press corps.

  “Oh, yes, it’s perfectly lovely,” she replied.

  “And can you tell us where you’re living?”

  “No,” answered the Tsar sternly on her behalf. “She cannot.”

  In a pueblo blanco of Zahara in the hills of Andalusia, the events in Moscow were an occasion for a brief celebration, at least by adherents of the anti-immigrant, anti-NATO far right. The Kremlin was once again the mecca toward which a certain type of European prostrated himself. In the twentieth century, it had been the guiding light of the left. Now, perversely, it was the extreme right that toed Moscow’s line, the political brutes who sneered at Charlotte Bettencourt each afternoon as she made her way through the streets of the village. If only they knew the truth, she thought. If only . . .

  Not surprisingly, she followed the case of the female British spy more carefully than most in the village. The Kremlin press conference was a spectacle, there was no other word for it—Rebecca sitting on the dais like some specimen under a bell jar, the Tsar next to her, grinning and preening at his latest triumph over the West. And just who did he think he was fooling with that starched and pressed face of his? Real fascists, thought Charlotte, did not use Botox. Rebecca looked worn-out in comparison. Charlotte was shocked by her daughter’s gaunt appearance. She was shocked, too, by how much she looked like Kim. Even the stammer had returned. It was a miracle no one had noticed.

  But just as quickly as Rebecca surfaced, she vanished from view. Charlotte’s Israeli houseguests departed Andalusia soon after. Before leaving, however, they scoured the villa one final time for any trace of Rebecca and Kim among her keepsakes. They took the last of Charlotte’s old photographs from Beirut and, despite her objections, the only copy of The Other Woman. It seemed her brief literary career was over before it started.

  By then, it was late June, and the village was besieged by sweating, sunburned tourists. In her solitude, Charlotte retreated once more to her old routine, for it was all she had left. Forbidden to complete her memoir, she decided to write the story as a roman à clef instead. She switched the setting from Beirut to Tangier. Charlotte became Amelia, the impressionable daughter of a collaborationist French colonial administrator, and Kim she cast as Rowe, a dashing if somewhat world-weary British diplomat whom Amelia discovers to be a Russian spy. But how would it end? With an old woman sitting alone in an isolated villa waiting for a message from the daughter she had abandoned? Who would believe such a story?

  She burned the manuscript in late October, using it as kindling to light the autumn’s first fire, and took up Kim’s mendacious autobiography. He had reduced his time in Beirut to five vague, dishonest paragraphs. My experiences in the Middle East from 1956 to 1963 do not lend themselves readily to narrative form . . . Perhaps hers did not, either, she thought. Then she burned Kim’s book, too.

  That same afternoon she walked along the paseo through a swirling leveche wind, counting her steps, aloud, she realized quite suddenly, which surely was a sign she was finally going mad. She took her lunch beneath the orange trees at Bar Mirador. “Did you see the news from Palestine?” asked the waiter as he brought her a glass of wine, but Charlotte was in no mood for an anti-Zionist polemic. Truth be told, she had changed her opinion of the Israelis. Kim, she decided, had been wrong about them. But then Kim had been wrong about everything.

  She had purchased a day-old copy of Le Monde on her way to the café, but the wind made it impossible to read. Lowering the paper, she noticed a small bespectacled man sitting alone at the next table. He looked very different. Even so, Charlotte knew at once it was him, the silent friend of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the bellman who had accompanied her to Seville for the confession of her secret sins. But why had he returned to Zahara? And why now?

  Nervously, Charlotte considered the possibilities as they each consumed a moderate lunch while assiduously avoiding one another’s gaze. The little Israeli finished first and as he was leaving slid a postcard onto Charlotte’s table. It happened so furtively it took her a moment to notice it, tucked carefully beneath the serving platter so the leveche wouldn’t carry it away. On the front was the inevitable streetscape of whitewashed houses. On the back was a brief note, in French, written in beautiful script.

  Calmly, Charlotte drank the last of her wine, and when the bill came she left twice the requested amount. The light in the square dazzled her eyes. It was twenty-two steps to the entrance of the church.

  “I thought it would be you.”

  He smiled. He was standing before the votive candles, gazing upward toward the statue of the Madonna and Child. Charlotte glanced around the nave. It was empty except for a couple of quite-obvious bodyguards.

  “I see you’ve brought along an entourage.”

  “No matter how hard I try,” he said, “I can’t seem to get rid of them.”

  “It’s probably for the best. The Russians must be furious with you.”

  “They usually are.”

  She smiled in spite of her nerves. “Did you have anything to do with the decision to send her to Moscow?”

  “Actually, I did my best to prevent it.”

  “You’re vengeful by nature?”

  “Pragmatic, I like to think.”

  “What does pragmatism have to do with any of this?”

  “She’s a dangerous woman. The West will live to regret the decision.”

  “It’s hard for me to think of her in that way. To me, she’ll always be the little girl I knew in Paris.”

  “She’s changed a great deal.”

  “Has she really? I’m not so sure.” She looked at him. Even in the red glow of the candles, his eyes were shockingly green. “Have you spoken to her?”

  “Twice, in fact.”

  “Did she mention me?”

  “Of course.”

  Charlotte felt her heart begin to flutter. Her pills . . . She needed one of her pills. “Why hasn’t she tried to contact me?”

  “She was afraid.”

/>   “Of what?”

  “Of what your answer might be.”

  She lifted her gaze toward the statue. “If anyone has anything to fear, Monsieur Allon, it’s me. I gave away my child and allowed Kim and Sasha to turn her into that creature I saw sitting next to the Tsar.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “For me, yes, but not for Rebecca.” Charlotte crossed the nave to the altar. “Have you spent much time in Catholic churches?” she asked.

  “More than you might imagine.”

  “Do you believe in God, Monsieur Allon?”

  “Sometimes,” he answered.

  “I don’t,” said Charlotte, turning her back to him, “but I’ve always loved churches. I especially like the smell. The smell of incense and candles and beeswax. It smells like . . .”

  “Like what, Madame Bettencourt?”

  She didn’t dare answer, not after what she had done. “How long will it be until I hear from her?” she asked after a moment, but when she turned she found the church deserted. Forgiveness, she thought as she went into the square. It smells like forgiveness.

  Author’s Note

  The Other Woman is a work of entertainment and should be read as nothing more. The names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed in the story are the product of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The headquarters of Israel’s secret intelligence service is no longer located on King Saul Boulevard in Tel Aviv. I have chosen to keep the headquarters of my fictitious service there, in no small part, because I like the name of the street much more than the current address. As we learned in The Other Woman, Gabriel Allon shares my opinion. Needless to say, he and his family do not live in a small limestone apartment house on Narkiss Street, in the historic Jerusalem neighborhood of Nachlaot.

  Frequent travelers between Vienna and Bern undoubtedly noticed that I manipulated the airline and train schedules to meet the requirements of my plot. Apologies to the management of the fabled Schweizerhof Hotel for running an intelligence operation in its lobby, but I’m afraid it couldn’t be helped. There is a private medical facility in the picturesque Swiss village of Münchenbuchsee, birthplace of Paul Klee, but it is not called Privatklinik Schloss.