Page 75 of The Other Woman

“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 thedépartement. 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.”