The 34th Degree

40

A s the cab turned down the Kornhausplatz and passed the Ogre Fountain, Andros leaned back against his seat and closed his eyes, going over in his mind his conversation with Pierre Gilbert.

If the Swiss banker was puzzled by his cover, he didn’t show it. Nor did the quiet Monsieur Guillaume, who Andros guessed was the bank’s link to von Berg. He had to be-always silent, always listening in on Gilbert’s conversations. Who else could there be? Well, now Monsieur Guillaume had something to talk about.

When Andros opened his eyes, they had arrived in front of the colonnaded Beaux Arts facade of the Bellevue Palace Hotel. He got out of the cab and went inside, passing between the Ionic columns that supported the lobby’s stained-glass ceiling. On his way to the elevator, he saw several patrons of the Bellevue bar in deep leather chairs, diplomats from the Federal Palace next door, eyeing him over the rims of their drinks.

Perhaps they knew what he was up to, perhaps not. At this moment, as Andros stepped off the elevator and approached his Louis IV suite at the end of the floor, he didn’t care. He was tired of his cover, and tonight, for the first night in several, he would get some good sleep.

He slipped his key into the lock and was about to turn it when he heard water running inside. He looked up to make sure he was at the right suite and listened again. This time he heard nothing. He turned the key and pushed the door open.

She was sitting on the bed, the blond head-turner from the bank, wrapped in a towel. Across her lap lay his May issue of Esquire, which she had fetched from his wide-open and most likely thoroughly searched trunk. So he had guessed wrong. He owed Monsieur Guillaume an apology.

“Did Monsieur Gilbert send you?” he asked her in French, closing the door. “Or are you really a little French tart with a well-heeled clientele, Elise? It is Elise, isn’t it?”

Her pale blue eyes glanced down at the Esquire. “‘Hollywood’s Best Bet,’” she said in broken English, reading from the racy American magazine. She smiled and turned a page, revealing a striking pinup girl: one in an evening dress who literally was pinned to a target by arrows. “‘Warner Brothers’ newest starlet, Dolores Moran, eighteen, blonde. Five foot seven of proportions. Waist twenty-five inches, hips and bust thirty-five inches, weight one-twenty.’”

Whether she was one of Baron von Berg’s lethal spies or Swiss Bupo, Andros couldn’t be sure. Knowing Prestwick, Andros wouldn’t be surprised if she was one of Dulles’s OSS agents and they were testing him to make sure he could keep his cover as a playboy. Of course, he couldn’t be sure and had to play the game. The game was what disgusted him.

She tossed the magazine on the nightstand and picked up the pack of playing cards Prestwick had packed, the backs of which depicted the Varga Girl striking various poses as Elise riffled the deck. “Naughty, naughty, Chris,” she said, then switched to her sensuous French. “A man like you doesn’t have to look.”

Andros shrugged and walked over to the dresser. He began to take off his suit coat, then his cuff links, all the while watching her in the mirror. “A man like me is too busy to do much else.”

“Too busy to make love to me?” She loosened her towel to proudly display her full, round breasts.

Andros looked at her in the mirror and cringed inwardly at this deja vu. His first time with a woman had been in a hotel room in Geneva, a present for his sixteenth birthday from his grandfather Basil. She was a sensuous brunette who took special pleasure in initiating him into manhood and later begged him not to leave. At Harvard, there had been a couple of cold, stiff New England girls from Vassar. They were much less exciting than the French woman and incomparable to what Aphrodite would offer him on their wedding night. No sooner. He could never press Aphrodite for that; he had demanded angelic purity from her.

“What are you waiting for?” Elise asked, sounding impatient.

So this was the way it would be, Andros thought: He must break either his cover or his faithfulness to Aphrodite. The irony was that the success of his mission, which he equated with saving Aphrodite, hinged on the Germans buying his cover. He wondered what Aphrodite felt when she faced this decision with von Berg. He was losing only the purity of his devotion to her. She had lost her virginity.

“I haven’t even had dinner yet,” he told Elise, “and already we indulge ourselves with dessert?”

He loosened his tie and turned off the light so he couldn’t look at his face in the mirror before he turned around. He hated games. He hated Prestwick and this whole spy business. Most of all, as he thought of Aphrodite, he hated himself for what he was about to do.

As he approached the bed, he could see her shape in the darkness and her arms reaching out to embrace him and pull him into her.

“Love me,” she groaned. “Love me.”

He thought of Aphrodite and the first time they had kissed under the mango tree that night in Kifissia. He thought of their subsequent secret rendezvous at the top of Likavitos Hill and her guilt-ridden expression when the priest from the nearby chapel caught them kissing. He thought of that night in New York when they could have made love but hadn’t, deciding they would wait for their wedding night. That wedding night now seemed further beyond their reach than ever.

Aphrodite, he thought, please forgive me.