The Secret Lovers by Charles McCarry

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.
    “What do you mean, Otto, by sentimentality?” Patchen asked.
    “I’ve