Page 76 of The Other Woman

“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,” she 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. TheDolmatova. 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.