The Secrets We Kept(56)

Plus, I knew there was no path that wouldn’t dead-end. I’d had friends who were picked up during their late-night walks in Lafayette Square, locked up, their names printed in the newspaper. I’d had friends who were fired from their government jobs, their reputations destroyed, disowned by their families. I’d had friends who convinced themselves the only way out was to step off a chair, a noose wrapped around their neck. The Red Scare had dwindled, but a new one had taken its place.

And yet I kept going. I kept asking her to grab lunch at Ferranti’s, or check out the new Korean art exhibit at the National Gallery, or try on hats and fascinators at Rizik’s.

I kept seeing how far I could go before needing to step back.

So when Frank asked me for another favor, I told myself that work would be a good distraction, a necessary distraction.



* * *





The night before I left for my next job, I put on a Fats Domino record and felt a jolt of happiness every time I placed an item inside my mint-green Lady Baltimore luggage. After years of last-minute jaunts, I’d learned the art of packing light: one black pencil skirt, one white blouse, one nude bra and panty set, one cashmere wrap for the flight, black silk hose, my Tiffany cigarette case, toothbrush, toothpaste, Camay rose soap, Crème Simon face cream, deodorant, razor, Tabac Blond, notebook, pen, my favorite Hermès scarf, and Revlon lipstick—in Original Red. The gown I’d wear to the book party would be waiting for me when I arrived. After years away, it felt good to be back in the game, to know secrets, to be useful.

I arrived the next evening at the Grand Hotel Continental Milano, just hours before the party started. Minutes after I entered my hotel suite, there was a knock on the door and a bellhop brought in my gown. I pointed for him to lay it on the bed, and he did so as gently as laying down a lover. I tipped him generously, as I always did when someone else was footing the bill, and sent him on his way. I’d ordered the red-and-black floor-length Pucci as soon as I heard the words Milan and party. Running my hand across the silk, I was quite pleased I’d secured a clothing budget from the Agency. After a bath, I applied a drop of Tabac Blond to each side of my neck, then to my wrists, then under my breasts, and slipped on the gown that had been tailored to my exact measurements.

That was the best part: the moment you become someone else. New name, new occupation, new background, education, siblings, lovers, religion—it was easy for me. And I never broke my cover, even down to the smallest details: whether she ate toast or eggs for breakfast, whether she took her coffee black or with milk, whether she was the type of woman to stop in the street to admire a crossing pigeon or shoo one away in disgust, whether she slept nude or in a nightgown. It was both a talent and a survival tactic. After assuming a cover, I found it harder and harder to go back to my real life. I’d imagine what it would be like to completely disappear into someone new. To become someone else, you have to want to lose yourself in the first place.



* * *



—

I’d timed my entrance to exactly twenty-five minutes after the party began. A waiter handed me a flute of bubbly as I entered the gilded room, and I immediately located the guest of honor: not the author of the novel whose publication was being celebrated, as he could not possibly attend, but the novel’s publisher. Giangiacomo Feltrinelli stood in the middle of Milan’s finest-dressed intellectuals, editors, journalists, writers, and hangers-on. He wore thick black glasses, had a high widow’s peak, and was slightly too thin for his height. But all the women, and more than one man, couldn’t take their eyes off him. Feltrinelli’s nickname was the Jaguar, and indeed, he moved with the confidence and elegance of a jungle cat. The majority of the party guests were in black tie, but Feltrinelli wore white trousers and a navy blue sweater, the corner of his striped shirt beneath untucked. The trick to pinpointing the man with the biggest bank account in the room is not to look to the man in the nicest tux, but to the man not trying to impress. Feltrinelli pulled out a cigarette, and someone in his orbit reached to light it.

There are two types of ambitious men: those bred to be ambitious—told from a very young age that the world is theirs for the taking—and those who create their own legacy. Feltrinelli was cut from both cloths. Whereas most men born into great wealth carry the burden of preserving their inherited legacy, Feltrinelli hadn’t started a publishing company just as another notch in his empire, but because he truly believed literature could change the world.

In the back of the room was a large table covered in books stacked into a pyramid. The Italians had done it: Doctor Zhivago had made it into print. Within a week, it would be in every bookstore window across Italy, its name splashed across every newspaper’s front page. I was to take one of those books and hand-deliver it to the Agency so they could have it translated and determine if it was indeed the weapon the Agency thought it might be. Frank Wisner had also tasked me with getting close to Feltrinelli to see what we might find out—about the book’s publication and distribution, about the publisher’s relationship with Pasternak.

I took a copy of Il dottor ?ivago and ran my fingers across its glossy cover: a design of white, pink, and blue scribbles hovering above a tiny sleigh making its way to a snow-covered cottage.

“An American who reads Italian?” a man standing on the other side of the book pyramid asked. “How fetching.” He wore an ivory tuxedo with a black pocket square and tortoiseshell glasses with frames too small for his broad face.