Page 81 of The Other Woman

“It was part of my original arrangement with Kim and Sasha. I had no desire to live in the Soviet Union.”

“Perhaps it wasn’t such a Marxist utopia after all.”

Charlotte Bettencourt suffered his rebuke in penitential silence. All around them, Seville was beginning to stir. There was music in the air, and from the bars and cafés in a nearby plaza came the chiming of glasses and cutlery. Evening breeze swirled in the courtyard. It carried the scent of oranges into the room and, quite suddenly, the sound of a young woman’s laughter. Charlotte Bettencourt cocked her head expectantly, listening as the laughter faded. Then she stared at the Victorian box resting on the table.

“It was a gift from Kim,” she said after a moment. “He found it in a little shop in the Christian quarter of Beirut. It’s rather fitting, don’t you think? Leave it to Kim to give me a box to lock away my secrets.”

“His, too,” said Gabriel. He lifted the lid and removed a stack of envelopes bound by a faded ribbon of Lenten violet. “He was rather prolific, wasn’t he?”

“During the first weeks of our affair, I sometimes received two letters a day.”

Gabriel reached into the box again. This time, he withdrew a single sheet of paper, a birth certificate from Saint George Hospital in Beirut, Lebanon’s oldest, dated May 26, 1963. He pointed to the child’s given name.

“Was it ever changed?” he asked.

“No,” she answered. “As fortune would have it, it was sufficiently English.”

“Like yours.” Gabriel reached into Kim Philby’s box of secrets again. This time, he withdrew a British marriage certificate dated April 1977. “A spring wedding. It must have been lovely.”

“It was quite small, actually.”

Gabriel pointed to the groom’s family name. “I assume you both took it.”

“For a time,” she answered. “I became Charlotte Bettencourt again after the divorce.”

“But not—”

“That would have been counterproductive,” she said, cutting him off. “After all, the entire point of the marriage was to acquire a name and a pedigree that would open the doors of an elite university and eventually the Secret Intelligence Service.”

Gabriel laid the marriage certificate next to the birth certificate and Philby’s love letters. Then he reached into the box a final time and removed a Kodak snapshot dated October 1984. Even Gabriel could see the resemblance—to Philby, unquestionably, but to Charlotte Bettencourt as well.

“You took the photograph and then walked away?” he asked. “You didn’t speak?”

“What would I have said?”

“You could have begged for forgiveness. You could have put a stop to it.”

“Why would I have done a thing like that, after everything I’d sacrificed? Remember, the Cold War was at a low point. Reagan the cowboy was in the White House. The Americans were pouring nuclear missiles into Western Europe.”

“And for this,” said Gabriel coldly, “you were prepared to give up your daughter?”

“She wasn’t mine alone, she was Kim’s, too. I was only a salon militant, but not her. She was the genuine article. She had betrayal in the blood.”

“So do you, Madame Bettencourt.”

“Everything I did,” she said, “I did as a matter of conscience.”

“You obviously don’t have one. And neither did Philby.”

“Kim,” she said. “He’ll always be Kim to me.”

She was staring at the photograph. Not in anguish, thought Gabriel, but with pride.

“Why?” he asked. “Why did you do it?”

“Is there an answer I could give that you would find satisfactory?”

“No.”