Christopher's Ghosts

by Charles McCarry

  Hubbard led her to a desk in the sitting room. Rima took writing paper and a pen and set to work immediately and in a few moments handed him a sheet of stationery on which she had written the details of her confession to Stutzer and his instructions to her. When Hubbard reached the end of this document, he opened his mouth to speak. Again Rima put a finger to her own lips. On another scrap of paper she wrote, Please bring Paul to me. Hubbard vanished, and a moment afterward reappeared with his son in tow. Paul was rumpled, sleepy-eyed. He looked like a child in his pajamas. He held her note in his hand. In a normal tone, in English so rapid that Rima had difficulty following it, Hubbard said to Paul, “Pity we don’t know Indian sign language better than we do, Paul. Very useful if you’re a Mahican and Mohawks are lurking in the forest, ears to the ground. Sign language was the Esperanto of the American Indians. It was a code everyone knew. No words, just concepts. Each tribe seems to have had its own private tongue that only they could understand, but they all understood the signs, from Cape Cod to the Pacific Ocean. Your great-grandfather Aaron Hubbard was fluent in it. His Mahican friend Joe, the one who was hanged for a murder he didn’t commit, taught him. They were the same age, grew up together at the Harbor after Joe’s people died of white man’s diseases, spoke a secret language that made no sound, had no words. As a result of having this secret code they were under constant suspicion of boyish deviltry, of course, but the fun of the thing must’ve made up for that.”

  As Hubbard spoke, he leaned over the desk and wrote rapidly on a fresh sheet of writing paper. His beautiful American handwriting, sentences connected by graceful end strokes, was strange to Rima’s eye, but as legible as a typeface. He wrote, “It’s a lovely day for a bit of motoring. Why not take your little dog for its walk as usual? We’ll have a rendezvous and go for a spin in the countryside.”

  Rima nodded vigorously and whispered a few words in Paul’s ear. She then left by the front door. An instant later Hubbard and Paul heard her ringing Miss Wetzel’s doorbell. Blümchen barked joyfully, drowning out whatever Rima and Miss Wetzel on the floor below were saying to each other.

  Hubbard and Paul picked Rima up in the Horch twenty minutes later as she walked Blümchen along Bismarckstrasse. The front seat was broad and Rima sat between them with the squirming dog on her lap. She described her half-morning in the hands of Stutzer. Her account was impersonal. She was abducted, she was interviewed, she betrayed Paul and his parents, she was dragged around the room by her braid and trampled, she was heaved through a door into the street.

  “What swine they are,” said Hubbard.

  Rima said nothing. There was no need to confirm Hubbard in his opinion of Stutzer and his apprentices. So far the whole of Germany and Austria and half of what used to be Czechoslovakia knew them for what they were. Tomorrow, the world.

  In the same dispassionate language she had used to describe the way in which she had been abused, Rima told them what her assignment was.

  “They want you to steal my manuscript?” Hubbard said. “Why on earth would they want that?”

  “Because I was weak and told them what Paul had told me because he trusted me.”

  “Never mind. They were torturing you, after all.”

  “The hair pulling came later. I have no excuse.”

  “What exactly did Paul tell you?”

  “That you called it The Experiment, that it was a fictionalized description of everything that actually happened to the three of you and everyone you met. That in actuality it was all true.”

  “Paul told you all that?”

  Rima nodded. “And I told Stutzer. What I did was unforgivable.”

  Hubbard needed no time to reflect on his answer. “Nonsense,” he said. “In the same circumstances I would have done the same. So would anyone else. Don’t blame yourself. Of course you must give the manuscript to them or who knows what Stutzer might do? Maybe we can photograph the pages. I only have the one copy.”

  Paul said, “You’re talking about a thousand pages. More.”

  Hubbard nodded, deep in thought. Paul was examining his father as if meeting him for the first time. What would a stranger think of this man who seemed to be driven by some inner goodness he could not control?

  “You can’t just hand it over,” he said. Hubbard, deep in thought, seemed not to hear. Paul said, “I’ve read it, Dad.”

  Hubbard woke up. “You have? How much of it?”

  “All of it, as you wrote. I found the key to your cabinet years ago.”

  “You don’t say. Including what I’ve written since you came home from school?”

  “Not that part. I’ve fallen behind.”

  The reason why Paul had fallen behind sat between them on the vermilion leather seat. Hubbard smiled at her and then at Paul. “And you said not a single word about it till now?” he said. “You truly are a wonder. Does your mother know about this?”

  “I don’t think so, but who knows what Mama knows?” Paul said.

  “Who indeed?” Hubbard said.

  Paul said, “Dad, listen. If they read what you’ve written, they’ll shoot you. Mama, too. Maybe Paulus and Hilde.”

  Hubbard smiled benevolently. But there was something in his eyes that Paul had never seen in them before. “No need to worry about your mother coming to harm,” he said. “She’s quite safe.”

  Silence fell. Even Blümchen calmed down. All three of the human beings stared straight ahead. They were deep in the Grunewald now, trees all around, birds swooping, picturesque restaurants crowded with happy people, accordions playing good German music.

  9

  “This is a bad figure of speech, maybe, considering the cast of characters,” O. G. said to Hubbard, “but this is a heaven-sent opportunity.”

  Hubbard waited to hear more. The two of them, wearing tennis whites and drinking lemonade, were relaxing in the garden of the embassy after their weekly match. On this day, as sometimes happened when he had mastery of his serve, Hubbard had overwhelmed O. G.’s guile and mobility with brute strength. Now they were both in a good mood for the same reason—Hubbard’s pleasure in his victory.

  “It makes the psychology easier,” O. G. said. “If Paul is given the secret mission of smuggling your immortal work out of the Reich, he may be less reluctant to go.”

  “Maybe,” Hubbard said. “But he and this girl of his are in love. She’s lovely, with a mind as quick as a cat’s tongue.” Hubbard paused. “A dark Lori.”

  In the depths of his being, O. G. hoped that she wasn’t, really. He said, “Ah. Then we’ve got our work cut out for us.”

  Hubbard said, “I don’t like lying to Paul.”

  “Sometimes lying is God’s work,” O. G. replied. “If he stays here it will be the end of him, especially if he’s got a girl he thinks he has to protect. Young lovers are easy meat. Stutzer and Heydrich’ll predict his every move.”

  “‘The end of him?’ you say? He’s an American.”

  “That may not be the advantage it used to be,” O. G. replied, “and if I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t want to take the chance.”

  His tone was mild. Hubbard was cut to the quick nevertheless. He took a deep breath of air that smelled of coal smoke even on a summer day, then let it out through his nose. He knew exactly what O. G. meant by in your circumstances. He would never come right out and say it, but both men knew that Hubbard was responsible for putting the boy in danger in the first place. His nighttime sails in Mahican with Lori and their fugitive friends had been romantic folly. In O. G.’s book of maxims, nothing was worse than that.

  “Won’t Paul be compromised by carrying such dangerous contraband?” Hubbard said. “He’ll be aboard a German ship, after all.”

  “Everything is arranged,” O. G. said. “Wrap your package.”

  “It will be large—seventeen hundred foolscap sheets, covered on both sides.”

  O. G. whistled softly—what industry! “Do you still have your cello?” he asked.

  Hubbard snorted.
“My cello? Yes.”

  O. G. had spent many miserable hours at school and in college listening to his roommate practicing chords and glissandi that he seemed to make up as he went along. Even as a schoolboy Hubbard had been so large that his cello had looked like a violin between his knees.

  “Do you and Lori ever do duets together?” O. G. asked.

  Hubbard said, “Jack Benny and Clara Schumann? No.”

  The important thing, O. G. said, a bit impatiently, was that Hubbard still had the case for his cello. Did he or did he not? He did.

  “Good, then I’ll send a car to your place tonight with a discreetly armed U. S. Marine at the wheel and another in the front seat beside him,” O. G. said. “They will pick up the cello case, which will by then be packed with every last page of your literary masterpiece. They will bring it to the embassy, where it will be safe even from the Leader himself.”

  Immortal work? Literary masterpiece? Twice in a space of seconds O. G. had used a term of mockery for Hubbard’s novel. Obviously O. G. thought that the chances that Hubbard’s work might actually be a masterpiece were pretty remote. He was condescending to this work without having read a word of it. Hubbard was thin-skinned in such matters. He had reason to be. On the best of Hubbard’s days the ratio of insult to praise for his work was five to one, or worse O. G. had had no idea that he was giving offense by his affectionate kidding, and he watched in puzzlement as he read the resentment in Hubbard’s eyes. He laid a hand on Hubbard’s forearm and gave it a tiny shake. They finished their lemonade. Neither wanted to end this conversation just yet, but neither knew just how to go on with it.

  O. G. said, “There’s still some heat in the sun. One more set?”

  They played for half an hour, giving each other every chance to make the shots. By the time they quit, the embassy was almost deserted. They bathed and changed in the tennis shack.

  “You remember Timberlake,” O. G. said as he tied his necktie.

  “I think so,” Hubbard said. “Young fellow with the tall smiley wife. They’re new.”

  “Fairly new to Berlin, arrived last fall. Yale ’29, college was J. E. And so on. Hard worker. His light’s still on. Let’s have him join us for a martini before you go home.”

  O. G. prided himself on his cocktails. English gin and French vermouth stood on a side table in his office. While Timberlake and Hubbard chatted about writing—Timberlake hoped to write novels himself after he had put in his time in the Foreign Service—O. G. poured four parts Beefeater’s and one part Noilly Prat into a glass pitcher, added ice, and stirred the mixture gently with a long glass rod. He strained the cocktails into chilled glasses. Then, turning his back to his guests, he removed a small medicine bottle from his waistcoat pocket, and with an eyedropper placed one drop of absinthe in each glass. This was the secret ingredient he never disclosed, not even to Hubbard.

  Hubbard and Timberlake enjoyed O. G.’s martini and said so. Both knew they would get only one. O. G. believed that drinking a second martini was most unwise. Drinking a third was a sign of idiocy. Timberlake and Hubbard chatted about Yale. O. G. had introduced this third party into the conversation so that there could be no more talk of Paul. The boy must leave the Reich. He must do it now. How he felt about it did not matter.

  Timberlake discovered that Hubbard had known his older brother when both were at New Haven. “Wonderful voice, sang like an angel in chapel,” Hubbard was saying. O. G. smiled and sipped his martini. The absinthe really did make all the difference. As the cocktail warmed, the undertaste of wormwood was more noticeable. Hidden differences were the best things, he thought. The best fun.

  FIVE

  1

  Everyone agreed that O. G.’s office in the embassy was the only safe place in Berlin to discuss the plan. That is where the principals—all but Lori, for whom attendance would have constituted treason to the Reich—met on the Fourth of July. Once again the garden was full of men in morning coats and spats and others in splendid uniforms and plump women in summer hats, and because it was a sunny day and Berlin was famous for its exhibitionists, even a parasol or two. Hubbard’s cello case, packed with the 1,786 handwritten pages of his manuscript, stood in the corner of the office, behind an overstuffed chair.

  Timberlake had been given the job of explaining the plan to Paul. It was best, O. G. felt, if the details came from an official of the embassy to whom he had no emotional attachment. Timberlake recited the particulars, raising his voice a little to overcome the noise of the party outside the window. Paul would spend the night in the embassy and leave in the morning with O. G. An exit visa had been arranged.

  “Arranged? How?” Paul asked.

  “We have been informed of official approval,” Timberlake said.

  Paul did not like this young man who was so sure of himself. He wondered why this total stranger was revealing his fate to him—his puzzlement showed on his face—but he listened intently. Timberlake left practically nothing unsaid. When he was done, a silence gathered. Paul looked from one adult face to another. He was very pale, so pale that Hubbard thought he might be sick.

  He said, “How do you feel, Paul?”

  “Like I just fell off the Empire State Building,” Paul said.

  The men smiled. “I don’t wonder,” Timberlake said in his hearty voice. “If you have any further questions I’ll try to answer them.”

  Paul examined his elders, studying one face after another as if checking their identity against photographs. If he was angry it did not show. If he was sad, as they all knew he must be, that did not show, either. The men saw no sign of fear. The silence seemed long, but in fact it lasted no more than half a dozen breaths.

  To Timberlake Paul said, “I do have a question. Why would the secret police let me just leave the country with my father’s manuscript, which they want a friend of our family to steal for them, under my arm?”

  “We have reason to think they will not interfere.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We must ask you to trust us in this matter.”

  A silence gathered. O. G. and Timberlake waited for Paul to speak again. Their faces were bland. Hubbard had turned his face away.

  At last Paul said, “I’m sorry. I know you have my best interests at heart and that you’ve all gone to a lot of trouble. But I refuse to do this.”

  Hubbard examined Paul and as always saw in his face Lori’s steely eyes and Paulus’s jaw line, and kept his peace.

  O. G said, “You refuse, Paul? May we know why?”

  “There are a number of reasons,” Paul said. On the end table at O. G.’s elbow stood a photograph of O. G. standing beside a Spad biplane. He wore an aviator’s helmet and goggles, a sheepskin coat, a happy grin. The camera had caught him at a moment in which, in the midst of life, he was in a book for boys, where he had always been happiest. Paul looked up and caught his father’s eyes. He expected to see the old wryness there, but in fact detected nothing but the gleam of utmost seriousness. He had seen this look before, but only when grave issues were involved and Hubbard’s passions were engaged—the sanctity of art as the strong-room of truth, the puzzle of religious faith, the politics of friendship. Love, death, betrayal, the American dream.

  Paul loved Hubbard. He was fond of O. G., whom he had known as an honorary uncle all his life, and for the sake of those two he felt obliged to give Timberlake the benefit of the doubt. But none of them, certainly not Hubbard in his incurable optimism, understood what a disaster could ensue if the plan they had concocted was actually put in motion. O. G. and Timberlake lived in isolation, shielded from such realities as Heydrich and Stutzer by the cotton batten of diplomatic life. They were immune from arrest, protected from insult, officially untouchable. How could they imagine being dragged around a room by the hair, how could they conceive of being asked if they considered themselves to be human beings—and if they did, being required to specify exactly how human they thought they were? Fifty percent? Twenty-five? Or full-blooded su
bhuman?

  These thoughts produced a long silence. The older men watched Paul carefully, waiting for his next words. O. G. leaned forward and squeezed his knee. He said, “Maybe we should let the clock tick for a while longer before we get started, Paul.”

  Paul said, “I meant what I said.”

  “We know that,” Hubbard said. “But we don’t know your reasons.”

  “To begin with, Mother. How can we do this to her?”

  “She also thinks you should get out of Germany at the first possible moment and by any possible means.”

  “I know she does, but that’s because she thinks the only way out is to sacrifice herself. I understand why. But we should all get out. Especially her.”

  “Easier said than done, Paul,” O. G. said. “Your mother is a citizen of the Reich. If you stay and the secret police insist that you are a German, too, nobody can help you. Nobody.”

  Paul let the words fade. Then he said, “And who would help me if I’m arrested on the quay in Bremerhaven?”

  “The short answer is nobody,” Timberlake said. “But no such thing will happen.”

  “I can’t see why not,” Paul said. “Forgive me for saying so, sir, but you don’t know these people.”

  “Ah, but we do, Paul,” Timberlake said with a smile.

  “And you trust them just the same?”

  Hubbard had had no idea that his son was capable of such brusque behavior. All his life Paul had been quiet, agreeable, pleasant, polite in all circumstances. Even as an infant he had been well mannered. There was no other term for it. He had always from his first moments on earth taken the feelings of others into consideration. It was not like him to argue; always before in case of argument he looked for something he could agree with. If that was not possible he did not resist; he withdrew. But he lost few arguments. He seemed to know what his parents and others were going to say next, what they were likely to do or not do. But when he did not want to do something, he did not do it. He did not make a fuss. He simply refused, and in such moments he was immovable. This was one of those moments.