Page 77 of The Other Woman

“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?”

“Ilostit.”

“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.