Christopher's Ghosts

by Charles McCarry

  After the sherbet she escaped, making a graceful excuse to the brigadier and the person on her right, and locked herself in the library. Two or three times someone rattled the doorknob, once or twice somebody knocked. Then she was left in peace. Conclusions had been drawn. Someone, more likely two someones, required privacy. Lori was not at the table, Heydrich was not at his place. Everyone had seen them talking, had seen Heydrich’s outrageous flirting. What could be more obvious? This man could order the immediate death of anyone in Germany and beyond. What woman could resist such power?

  Lori read Dickens while waiting for the guests to leave. O. G. owned the complete works, bound in leather, so she read passages from several novels. She did not like Dickens, did not like the way he made the monstrous entertaining. She resented happy outcomes that could not possibly have arisen from the hopeless circumstances in which the author placed his characters. She disliked the palimpsest that was his style, so that all the sentiment was in the ink and all the truth was between the lines.

  The last guests departed, the last peal of laughter faded. Hubbard’s frisky American knock, shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits, sounded. She turned the key and let him and O. G. in. Hubbard gave her a searching look. She was distraught, head thrown back, eyes red, throat ligaments taut. In earlier days he would have smiled at her, but he had long since learned how much she disliked this American reassurance when there was nothing to smile about, so he kept his teeth beneath his lip. O. G. locked the door, then poured scotch whisky from a decanter, added to each drink a squirt of seltzer from a siphon, then handed the glasses around. Lori put hers down on the table beside her chair.

  “Drink, my dear,” O. G. said. “You look like you need it.”

  To the surprise of neither man, Lori did not obey.

  To O. G. she said, “You know what happened to Paul today?”

  “I’ve heard a version of it,” O. G. said. “Heydrich told me.”

  “Heydrich?” Hubbard said. “He knows?”

  “I’m afraid so. He takes an interest in the Christophers. Speaks of you as if you are dear friends.”

  Lori’s eyes were wide, her body rigid. A quick pulse beat in her blushing chest, above her décolletage. Hubbard avoided looking at her, as if he could make things worse by noticing what was happening to her.

  He said, “But why on earth should Heydrich know?”

  “Because charades are his business,” O. G. said. “Also, they are his nature. He plays games.”

  “He sent the Youth to attack Paul?”

  “It’s not impossible. Everyone knows what he is capable of doing, but who knows for sure what he actually does or orders to be done? He’s a man of mystery. That’s why he has risen so far so fast.”

  “But why Paul?” Hubbard said.

  “He wants something from you.”

  “What could he possibly want from me, for heaven’s sake?” Hubbard asked.

  O. G. shrugged. “Does it matter? Whatever it is, he’s licensed to take it whenever he wants.”

  He drank, his mild gaze fixed on Lori’s face. Hubbard drank. Lori remained as she was, staring at nothing, rigid in her chair, silent, face averted, heartbeat visible. Hubbard had never seen her so withdrawn. Her genes and her upbringing discouraged displays of emotion, but now her face was a map of her fears, whatever they were.

  Suddenly Lori said, “It is not safe to discuss these matters.”

  “It’s perfectly safe to talk here…” O. G. said.

  “Ha!” said Lori.

  “… so I will come to the point,” O. G. continued. “I think we should get Paul out of Germany as quick as we can, and then get the two of you across a frontier as soon after that as possible.”

  “How?” Hubbard said.

  “In two weeks’ time I sail home on the Bremen for consultations in Washington. Paul can go with me. He can stay with Elliott in New York.”

  Lori said, “They’ll grab him at the passport control.”

  “Not if he’s under my protection.”

  “What protection?” Lori said. “Do you think they care about diplomatic immunity? You just got through saying there is no immunity from them.”

  “They’re ruthless, but there are rules just the same,” O. G. said. “I have a plan.”

  “What plan?”

  “It’s better that you don’t know the details.”

  “He’s our son!”

  “Yes, he is,” O. G. said. “And what if the next time you are invited to the Prinz-Albrechtstrasse they decide to get rough? If they beat Paul—I’m talking about grown men, trained thugs, taking turns with fists and feet and clubs—which secrets will you decide not to tell them?”

  6

  By now Paul was in love. This had not happened to him before, but he was a reader and an observer; he knew the signs. Nevertheless the power of the thing astonished him—the feeling that he never had enough breath in his lungs, the long hours and days of anxiety, the longing, the suspicion, the raw craven fear of loss, punctuated by fleeting moments of happiness when the girl appeared. She was more apparition than human. Except for the moments she had knelt beside him, bathing his cuts and bruises, he had always seen her at a distance. He still did not know her name.

  Having one’s wounds treated by a beautiful female is a powerful aphrodisiac. Paul was beginning to feel symptoms that had little to do with the pure love between man and woman about which he had read so much. Until he had felt her fingers on his battered face, smelled her skin and hair, seen the light in her eyes, she had been like Rima the Bird Girl in his favorite novel, W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions—free, innocent, unattainable, a child of nature. But when he thought of her now, he visualized the thing that he remembered best about Rima—that she was naked in her rain forest (at least in Paul’s imagination) when the hero first caught sight of her. Recalling those passages had a physical effect on him. This troubled him. He wondered if he had a dirty mind; he apologized to both of the lovely wraiths who had somehow become one in his imagination.

  Haunted by the girl and tormented by his injuries, Paul slept fitfully on the night after he was beaten up by the Hitler Youth. He heard his parents come in late after their party. They were awake for a long while, speaking in whispers in the sitting room, his father pacing. Finally they went to bed and Paul drifted into sleep—dreamless sleep, to his surprise. When he woke soon after dawn, he could tell by the feel of the house that his mother had gone out and that his father was writing. This was their routine. Hubbard rose at five every morning, and after drinking a bowl of coffee and milk and eating toasted bread and cheese, began to write the latest passage of The Experiment. This morning he had a great deal to write about. He finished, usually, in time for lunch at one-thirty. During the hours he spent at his writing table, Waterman fountain pen in hand, he was in another dimension. Time dissolved, he had no thought or perception of the real world. Paul knew this because he had seen his father in this state nearly every morning of his life, and also because his parents joked about it all the time. When he was writing, Lori said, Hubbard was andeswoher—elsewhere, unreachable. That was why she did her shopping and other womanly chores in the morning. Her husband did not even know that she was gone. And when he came back up the rabbit hole she was always present, saying something new to his ears, the table set, food ready to be served, that day’s bottle of wine, his reward for outstanding industry, open and breathing or chilling in an ice bucket.

  When Lori was happy or upset, she went riding. Paul had never seen her so upset as she had been since he came home after his beating. Last night’s whispers told him that she hadn’t recovered. Their elderly horses —Lori’s Lipizzaner mare and his father’s elderly hunter—were stabled near the park. Hubbard had bought them and their elegant tack during the great inflation of the nineteen-twenties. He had arrived in Berlin at a moment when one American dollar was worth two trillion Reichsmarks and a single egg sold for eighty billion marks. Now that the Reichsmark was four to the dollar once again, k
eeping the animals was a foolish extravagance, but Hubbard refused to give them up. His trust fund yielded enough to live on, and—always a surprise—he sometimes made a little money from writing. He dipped into his meager capital, a sin against which he had been warned all his life, so that they could have their horses and their yawl, Mahican, which was docked at Lori’s family home on the island of Rügen on the Baltic Sea.

  By the time Paul got out of bed, the clock told him that his mother had already departed. There was no possibility he could join her, even if his injuries had not prevented it. His entire body ached where it had been punched and kicked, especially his insides. The mere thought of being in the saddle, riding at a trot, was agonizing. Paul had not been forbidden to go back to the park. His parents never forbade him anything. They had trusted his judgment ever since he was old enough to go out on his own. He had crossed busy streets by himself when he was barely able to talk. Nevertheless he felt that he might be doing something that they had trusted him not to do when he decided to go to the Tiergarten. He went anyway. He had no choice in the matter. He usually caught his first glimpse of the girl in the morning. This time, if he saw her, he would walk up to her, look her in the eye, shake her hand, thank her. He would take the second step now that she had taken the first. Or so he told himself. In minutes Paul was dressed and on his bicycle, eating bread and butter with one hand and with the other steering around streetcars and automobiles and steaming heaps of horse manure. The Christophers lived in Gutenbergstrasse, only a few blocks west of the park. He was through the gates of the Tiergarten in no time, drifting on his bike down a gentle hill that led to the meadow where the girl usually appeared.

  He locked his bicycle to a rack and continued on foot. It was a sunny day in June. A breeze from the west and the horses on the bridle path (Paul could feel hoof beats in the turf beneath his feet) had stirred the dust. It hung like gauze in the slanting silvery light that shone through the trees. Such birds as were still singing this long after the sun had risen seemed far away and muted. In the distance—everything seemed distant—someone played “My Blue Heaven” on a harmonica. Paul sang along, silently. It was one of his father’s favorite shaving songs. Hubbard woke up every morning with a song on his lips. In an off-key baritone, he sang all his songs as if they had been written about him and Lori and Paul: Yes sir, she’s my baby/no sir, don’t mean maybe. Paul wondered what yesterday’s leader would have done about these decadent songs, written perhaps by Jews, if he had heard them. Taken names and reported them to No. 8 Prinz-Albrechtstrasse? Thrown the harmonica into the Neuer See? He smiled. He knew that there was nothing funny about National Socialists, but he could not help it. They were so serious, so absurd, so numerous.

  Then he saw her. She stood on a slope above him, the hazy sunlight in her face. Behind her stood a line of trees. He expected her to move back into them as usual and for an instant, before he smothered the image, he thought of the innocent nude Rima in her Venezuelan fastness. Then the girl came walking down the hill. She moved like an athlete and looked like one too, long-legged, erect, natural, unselfconscious. Not marching at all, just walking like a natural person. Paul let her come to him. When she reached him she did not offer to shake hands, nor did she smile. She looked him over with minute attention. His face was still a mask of iodine and bandages.

  “You don’t look quite as bad as I expected,” she said. She spoke English, as before.

  Paul said, “Nothing serious.”

  “Yesterday I thought they might have killed you.”

  “As you can see, I survived,” Paul said. “Thanks to you.”

  “What did I have to do with it?”

  “A lot. The first aid, taking me to your father, taking me home.”

  “I did it for my own sake. You owe me nothing.”

  “That’s not true.”

  She ignored the protest. She looked behind her, then behind Paul. The park was all but deserted at this hour. “We shouldn’t talk now, not here of all places,” she said.

  “But I want to talk,” Paul said. He smiled at her. He was tall for his age, but she was too, and she stood slightly above him on the hillside, so that they looked directly into each other’s eyes.

  “There are things that you should tell me,” she said.

  “I agree,” Paul said. “And vice-versa. Can we start with names?”

  “I know your name. I have known it for a long time.”

  “How? We’ve never seen each other before.”

  “I have my ways.”

  “Which are?”

  “We used to live around the corner from each other. I have always known who you are, Herr Baron.”

  “My name is Paul. I’m no baron. What shall I call you?”

  “That’s up to you.”

  “You don’t have a name?”

  “I want a new one.”

  “You want me to baptize you as well? We can use the lake.” Where did this lame witticism come from?

  “Nothing so religious as that,” she said.

  Paul wondered if she felt as awkward as he did. Her face was grave, but for the first time he saw a smile—a tiny one that lifted one corner of her mouth and changed her eyes. She was flirting with him, but doing so in a way no girl he had ever known could have imagined flirting.

  Paul said, “Okay, but first I’ll have to know you better. What should I call you in the meantime?”

  “‘Miss’ will be fine.”

  “No. It doesn’t suit you.” He paused, then said, “Rima. Do you like that name?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  “Then Rima you are.”

  She looked at her watch, not a wristwatch but a round gold lavalier pinned to her blouse. “We’ve been out in the open long enough,” she said. “Meet me tomorrow at half-four in the ice cream place in the Ausburgerstrasse.”

  Half-four. It was the first mistake in English she had made. Paul didn’t correct her.

  7

  Paul rode home by way of the stables. As he pedaled, horses moved apart. He rode through them, and after a couple of hundred meters, to his delight, saw his mother. She was mounted but she had stopped her horse to speak to somebody on the other side of the railing that enclosed the bridle path. This was no surprise. The morning ride was a social occasion and Lori had many equestrian friends. The person she was talking to had his back to Paul. He wore a brown fedora, cocked slightly to one side, and despite the warm weather, a long black leather coat with a belt. A second man, stumpy and stolid and clearly a subordinate, stood by. Lori’s Lipizzaner shied. The man turned, keeping eye contact with Lori, and Paul saw that the man was Stutzer. He was speaking to Lori in an unsmiling way, and he was doing all the talking. She was perfectly silent, but Paul, who knew her every expression, could tell that she was resisting whatever suggestion the man was making to her. Paul thought that he understood what was happening. Her beauty created embarrassing situations. Paul had been a witness to this all his life. For his mother, this encounter with a man she loathed was hateful. Paul did not want to make it worse by interfering, but he had a duty to protect his mother. Why did she not just ride away? Then Paul saw that the smaller man, the assistant, had hold of the Lipizzaner’s bridle. The horse, a coal-black animal, obeyed him; he must know about horses. Anger rose in Paul’s chest. A uniformed Berlin policeman stood on the sidewalk on the other side of the railing, watching the scene. Not far away, another policeman loitered. They did not interfere as they would have done if anyone else was bothering a respectable woman. Paul looked more closely and saw two other men, both young and both dressed in identical fedoras and belted leather coats. An SS trooper in uniform stood beside a gleaming Daimler. A second uniformed trooper sat behind the wheel. Paul had seen this tableau before in the streets of Berlin, and he knew what it signified—a secret police operation.

  Suddenly his mother dismounted, ducked under the rail, and walked toward the Daimler. No one touched her or spoke to her. There was no sign that she w
as being arrested. She seemed to be acting of her own free will. The SS trooper opened the rear door of the Daimler. A man in uniform sat inside on the leather upholstery. Paul could not see his face, just his lean long legs in riding boots, crossed at the ankles. His mother got into the car. The man inside lifted her hand, rolled back the top of her riding glove, and kissed the inside of her wrist.

  The SS trooper closed the door and the big car with its curtained windows moved away. The policemen stopped traffic for it. The fellow who had been holding the bridle of Lori’s Lipizzaner mounted the animal and rode off toward the stables. He brought the animal to a trot, its best pace. He rode competently, back straight, head erect, eyes straight ahead. He must have been a cavalryman at some point in his life, before Germany changed.

  8

  Next day, on his way to the ice cream shop, Paul was accosted by brownshirts—big jovial political street-fighters with bony fists and wily eyes who made jokes about his battered face. Had he run into a door, a husband? Ah, he could smile, he was a good loser! They were collecting for yet another National Socialist Party charity. There were many such charities and new ones were being invented all the time. The contributions were in reality a political tax levied by the party. Everyone understood this, and knew that refusal was unwise. The brownshirts specified the contribution they wanted from Paul, one mark. Paul handed it over and they gave him a tin swastika pin to show that he had contributed.