Christopher's Ghosts

by Charles McCarry

  She had never in her life been so angry at herself, so ashamed, so furious with her own stupidity, her own weakness. How could she have let herself be driven to this by mere humiliation? What had she been thinking? Her death would have been a death warrant for the others. Had she died, Heydrich would have avenged the insult of her escape by charging her jealous husband with murder. Everybody at Schloss Berwick this weekend would now be lying in a cellar with bullets in their brains or their heads in baskets.

  “Stupid!” she said to herself. “Stupid!” It was the worst insult she could imagine.

  These thoughts passed through Lori’s mind as she sat in a strip of sunlight in Hilde’s sewing room. She had no one to whom she could speak of such matters. Nor would she ever have anybody, no matter how long she lived. Hilde stayed near, slyly watching Lori over her flying knitting needles, on the lookout for another suicide attempt. But in reality she was as disinterested in Lori as a cat in some other cat’s kitten. She had always been kind to Lori, the orphan who grew up in her house, because it was her duty to be kind to her and because Paulus, who adored his brother’s child, commanded her to be kind. But Hilde had never had feelings for Lori. By the time the child came to live with them, Hilde’s sons, every one of them, had fallen in Russia or France. Hilde had no feelings left.

  A shaft of sunlight fell on Lori’s legs. Perversely, she shivered again. Hilde looked up from her knitting, alert for any sign that she could tuck another coverlet around Lori or fetch the hot-water bottle that Lori had so far refused. Lori was already wearing a sweater and a shawl and her lower body was wrapped in an afghan.

  “I’m not cold,” Lori said quickly, to forestall more wrappings. “I just have the shakes.”

  She gave a foolish smile as if what she suffered from was too much red wine the night before. For the first time in her life Lori, who had never believed in the supernatural, wished that she was a Catholic. She would then have someone to talk to. But would even a priest believe, let alone understand the confession that would spill from her mouth? If he told her she was forgiven, would she believe that? What right did any human being have to forgive her? One of the most evil men in the history of the world was in love with her. Her beauty, her personage, which had always given her such pleasure, had brought about this horror. She loved her husband, she had loved him from the moment she saw him walking into this very house sixteen years before. The sight of him—tall, horse-faced, absurdly sure of himself, delighted by everything, foreign in every possible way—had made her laugh so hard within herself that the only way to conceal the joy he gave her was to be harsh with him, to be distant, to show no interest in this oversize boy who fascinated her. Now, she knew, he was upstairs at his writing table, recording everything that he had witnessed the night before. This was as necessary to him as morphine to an addict. When he was done, everything would be recorded, nothing about Lori would ever be forgotten. He left nothing out, except what he didn’t know.

  “Dear God, Lori,” Hilde said. “You’re crying.”

  She was truly alarmed. The old woman had never seen such behavior in this dry-eyed girl. Lori, as a child, had not wept even when her father was murdered. Hilde gave her her own handkerchief, one of the scores she had embroidered with tiny thread replicas of every flower ever known to Germans.

  6

  By the time Paulus returned from his morning march, Midsummer Day had turned sunny and warm. Paulus’s pocket thermometer gave him the exact temperature. By Rügen standards it was subtropical—25.5 degrees centigrade at eight in the morning. What would noontime bring? he asked Paul while they ate their morning sausages and toasted cheese and Paulus drank his breakfast beer. Whatever the weather was, blistering heat or blinding light, Paul must take advantage of it.

  “Right after breakfast you must take your charming little nurse for a long walk in the forest,” Paulus said. “This is the day for young people. Then in the afternoon take her to town. Buy her ice cream. They’ll be wearing costumes in the villages and dancing in the streets. Tonight, bonfires for you two to leap through, shadowy places for lingering. Nothing to worry about. All the priests and ministers and even some of the policemen are locked up until dawn tomorrow.”

  From across the table Hilde said, “Kindly stop such talk. A child is present.”

  “A child, ha!” said Paulus. “He’s exactly the right age, Paul, you may not see another Midsummer Day like this one in your lifetime. Take advantage.”

  Under the indigo sky the Baltic was calm and almost blue. The nighttime ban on sailing had been lifted for the holiday, and pleasure craft were permitted inside a three-kilometer limit. Amateur sailors raced one another, tacked too hard and overturned or collided. One or two boats were blown ashore. Rima and Paul watched this higgledy-piggledy regatta from the cliff tops. The Christophers’ yawl Mahican bobbed at its mooring a few meters offshore.

  Rima said, “When will we sail?”

  Paul had promised her this. “Later,” he replied. “Too many Sunday sailors now.”

  “After dark, maybe?”

  Rima looked up at him with dancing eyes to make her meaning plain. She was as spontaneous as an American. Paul had never known anyone remotely like her, except on summer vacations in the Berk-shires. When among themselves, his Hubbard and Christopher relations and their children said whatever came into their heads, they swung from ropes over river gorges and let go at the apogee, plummeting feet-first into swimming holes surrounded by great gray rocks.

  Paul told Rima all this as they strolled along the cliff path. She said, “Tell me about your mother.”

  Paul said, “They say she’s always been the way she is.”

  “And how is that?”

  Paul smiled. “Wonderful.”

  “Because why?”

  “The way she is, the way she looks. She’s afraid of nothing.”

  “Really, of nothing?”

  “Of nothing. Paulus is the same, so is the entire family.”

  Which must be why so many of them are dead, Rima thought. “Not long ago I saw an example of that family characteristic in the Tiergarten,” she said.

  Paul looked puzzled. Rima read his face and saw her mistake. She said, “The Youth. Were you afraid?”

  “There wasn’t time.”

  “Angry?”

  “No.”

  “Then why did you attack seven enemies single-handed?”

  “I’ve been taught to hit the other fellow hard before he hits you,” Paul said. “It works, usually.”

  “Taught by your American relations or the Germans?”

  “Both, actually. They think alike about most things.”

  “Including beating the stuffing out of the Leader’s followers?”

  “I think so. Neither family ever talks about him, or them.”

  They were out of sight of the house, on a walking path crowded with other hikers. One of the walkers, a stout man wearing lederhosen, knee socks with garters, and a Tyrolean hat with a large brush of deer’s tail-hair sewed to its braided hatband and a large swastika badge pinned next to it, heard this exchange and stopped in his tracks.

  “What was that about beating the stuffing out of the Leader?” he asked in English. He had a ruddy beer-drinker’s face, skin stretched tight over fat.

  Rima looked puzzled. Paul said, “We were practicing our English, sir.”

  “And talking treason!”

  “I’m sorry, but you are mistaken.”

  Now that Paul was speaking German, the man placed his accent. “Do you talk treason in Berlin?” he asked.

  He himself was from Munich. Paul could hear it in his vowels. He was not shouting, but his voice was loud. Other hikers hurried past, eyes averted. No one wished to get involved in this. Paul did not answer. The man from Munich produced a pencil and a notebook. “Names!” he said. “Addresses!”

  Rima said, “We were talking about our dog, Schatzi. She’s very naughty.”

  The man said, “You are lying. I understoo
d every word you said.”

  “I’m sure your English is perfect, sir,” Paul replied. The sun was shining and the sky was cloudless. Paul was happy. He held hands with the girl he loved. He had slept with this wonderful creature the night before and he was going to sleep with her again tonight, if not before. Paul put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “March on, sir,” he said in German. “Enjoy the beautiful day. You have made a mistake. Let’s part as friends.”

  “I’ve made a mistake, have I? We’ll see about that, you snot. I have your descriptions.”

  Paul bowed. “And we will always remember you, sir.”

  Paul led Rima to the edge of the cliff. It was more than one hundred feet high at this point. “Follow me,” he said. He swung over the edge. Rima followed. There were many handholds and footholds in the chalk, and in moments they were on the beach.

  “You’re mad,” Rima said. “How do you know he’s not the Gauleiter of Bavaria?”

  “That’s exactly who he is,” Paul said. “You can tell by the hat.”

  She laughed. They embraced and kissed in full view of scandalized people who were walking along the beach. The chalk on their hands came off on each other’s clothes.

  “Not only do you insult the flower of the great National Socialist party,” said Rima, leaning back in his arms. “Now there is this immoral behavior.”

  7

  Under Frederick the Great and earlier princes, Paulus’s ancestors had possessed a large part of Rügen as well as lands in Pomerania and Prussia, but over the generations bad luck and bad management reduced these holdings to a few hectares. Among the remnants of the family’s prosperity was a small, shallow lake called the Borg—a pond, Hubbard said—with an island in its center. On the island stood a circle of flat rocks, some of them tumbled, others tilted, one of two still upright after hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. The circle was believed by Hubbard to be an artifact of a druidic cult that flourished before the time of Christ. Little Stonehenge, he called it.

  “According to Julius Caesar, the word druid meant wisdom in old Celtic,” he said. “Caesar also tells us that druids believed in the immortality of the soul, and that the soul passed from one person to another on the death of the body.”

  Rima, who had never before encountered a walking encyclopedia like Hubbard, or an agnostic either, smiled demurely. This encouraged him to go on.

  “Midsummer must have been the druids’ great day,” he said. “The sun’s longest shining of the year, imagine. Lady Flavia Anderson, an amateur scholar we met at a dinner party in London, had a theory, based on a lot of research into ancient sources, that the druids lit their Midsummer Day fires by focusing the rays of the sun through a glass ball filled with water. She believed that this burning glass was—pay attention, now—nothing other than the Holy Grail.”

  “Fascinating,” Rima said.

  “Yes, isn’t it?” Hubbard said, delighted by her interest. “Lady Flavia also believed that Joseph of Arimathea brought this object to England not long after the Crucifixion. Of course its existence immediately became the greatest secret of the realm, not to mention the world. Thus Le Morte d’Arthur et cetera.”

  “Who was Joseph of Arimathea?”

  “Didn’t you go to Sunday school? He buried Jesus, which of course gave him first dibs on worldly belongings. According to Lady Flavia, the glass ball probably started out as Thummimm or Urim, the sacred dice used by the ancient Israelites to ask God questions.”

  Rima said, “But…”

  Lori said, “Don’t ask him questions, dear. It only makes things worse.”

  They were building a bonfire. The island was the safest place to have such a fire, being surrounded by water, and in Hubbard’s opinion the circle of stones added mystery to the ceremony. The pond was no more than knee-deep in any one place, and Hubbard and Paul, feet sinking into oozing muck, had spent an hour wading back and forth between the shore and the island, carrying armloads of fallen beech limbs. They built an enormous heap of dry beech wood and fir to make the fire and, to replenish it, laid up more twigs and branches and logs nearby. The result looked like a huge beavers’ lodge, but more unkempt.

  “Fir on the bottom, beech on top,” Hubbard chanted in druidic tones. “May the fire of the sun never stop.”

  It was late in the afternoon. The sun was sinking but the day was still bright. “Most people light their bonfires after dark, which comes very late today,” Hubbard said. “But that eliminates the burning glass, which is the whole point of the thing. Besides, light made by man answering light made by the gods must have been the basic druidic idea. Sir Perceval, the grail!”

  Paul produced a small magnifying glass marked with the fleur-de-lis of the Boy Scouts of America. Like many of the things Hubbard treasured, it was an heirloom. He knelt and focused the rays of the sun into a pinpoint. Tinder smoked, glowed red and then, when Hubbard breathed on it, burst into flame. Hubbard fed it twigs until it was a considerable fire in its own right, then pushed it into the brush pile. In minutes the whole brush pile was aflame, sending smoke and sparks upward and with its heat driving Rima and the Christophers back to the water’s edge.

  From a silver bucket Hubbard produced a bottle of sparkling wine and popped the cork, which splashed in the lake.

  “This is actual French champagne, rather than good old Schaumwein like the druids drank,” Hubbard said with a wink, filling glasses. “Krug 1929, courtesy of Uncle Paulus.”

  “Actually the druids drank mead,” Lori said wanly. She was not yet recovered from the night before. Her hand shook, spilling wine from the glass.

  They drank the wine and watched the fire burn itself out. After supper, at which Paulus flirted chastely with Rima like an uncle with a niece and Hubbard held forth on Celtic folklore, the two young people went for a walk.

  “Your family is very jolly,” Rima said. “Are they always this way?”

  “My father and Uncle Paulus, yes. My mother too, usually.”

  Rima said, “Look, northern lights.”

  Suddenly the northern sky was irradiated with color—the whole spectrum, from horizon to horizon. Rima had never seen such a display. Gigantic brushes might have been dipped into lakes of paint by the gods and wiped across the heavens.

  “Oh, beautiful,” she said.

  “Solar wind,” Paul said, “mixing with the earth’s magnetic field.”

  “You are your father’s son,” Rima said, but she threw her arms around Paul and pasted her body to his. “It’s the druids, you fool.”

  Clouds of pink, plumes of green, columns of orange, swaths of purple. Rima gasped as each appeared.

  “Where is the sailboat from here?” she asked.

  “Not far.”

  “Then let’s sail, Paul. Imagine seeing this from the surface of the sea with no other light, no other people. Just us.”

  The wind was brisk. Paul took the yawl out to sea with the jib and the mizzen sail. In the after-daylight they ghosted through small boats that still stood offshore, sails lowered, crews and passengers transfixed by the aurora borealis. When they were a couple of miles from shore, out of sight of the other boats, Paul dropped the sails and let the yawl drift. The aurora continued to explode. When he was a small child his parents had taken him to the studio of an eccentric painter. This man made his art by throwing whole buckets of paint onto a large canvas, then energetically shoving the colors around with a push broom. The flying paint, the vivid splashes, the joyful artist had been delightful sights for a child.

  “How far are we from the Arctic circle?” Rima asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Paul replied. “You can ask my father when we go back.”

  “Go back? Who said anything about going back?”

  Sails down, they sat in the bow with their arms around each other. The northern lights were sometimes visible from Berlin, but this was unlike anything Rima had ever seen before. It was a white night on the Baltic, at this hour not so much light as pale darkness. Had the earth
tilted, had the solar wind blown itself out?

  “I feel as if someone has painted cataracts on my eyes,” Rima said.

  The display began to fade. “Look, the lights going out,” she said. “How can such a thing happen so fast?”

  Mahican pitched gently in the low chop, water thumping against the hull. They couldn’t see the shore or any evidence of its existence. Rügen did not have enough electric lights to make a glow in the sky and the moon had not yet risen.

  “Where would we go if we put up the sails and just went?” Rima asked.

  “The wind is from the west,” Paul replied. “We’d end up in Danzig, maybe.”

  “Not Danzig, please.”

  “Lithuania, then, if we used the helm or started from farther out to sea. Maybe Sweden. Or Helsinki.”

  “Helsinki sounds good. Can you ski?”

  “Yes, but it would take a long time to get there, we’d be hungry and thirsty, and it would be a long beat back.”

  “Beat?”

  “We’d have to sail against the wind. Lots of zigzags.”

  Rima drew him closer. “Can we go farther out and just let it sail? Can you lash the helm? I don’t mean all the way to Finland.”

  “Why?”

  “To make the lights come back on,” she said.

  “The aurora borealis?”

  “Something similar.”

  Paul did as Rima asked. They were lying together on the deck, Rima’s hair unbound, their clothes scattered around them, when the searchlight of the S-boat hit them an hour or two later. This light was so intense that it seemed to make a noise like a huge captive insect. There was just the light—no siren, no loud hailing. Also laughter from the darkness. The sailors were enjoying what they had discovered.