Christopher's Ghosts

by Charles McCarry

  Paul sipped it. “I do,” he said.

  “Then you should cultivate a taste for it. It’s good for the brain. Not to mention the appetites.”

  When the ticket arrived, Paul attempted to pay for it. Sebastian waved him off again—Paul’s account would be debited. He gripped Paul’s hand tightly. This was twice in two days that Paul had been surprised by the strength of a man who seemed old to him.

  Paul said, “Have you any message for my father?”

  “Only my love to him and your mother,” Sebastian said. “We’ll see each other soon.”

  They rose to their feet. Sebastian smiled up at Paul, who was inches taller than he was. The smile was a merry conspirator’s smile. Oddly enough, it was not a solemn moment. Paul did not try to thank Sebastian again.

  5

  Aboard the Bremen Paul was treated as an invisible passenger. He was given the same tiny single cabin in the bow of the ship that he had occupied on the westbound voyage. The crew gave no sign that they remembered him. The passengers with whom he was seated at meals ignored him. It was no great feat to read these minds that were all alike. He was of no interest to these people. His case was in the hands of others who were high above them. Soon enough, they believed, so would his body be.

  Paul sat on deck by day or lay in his bunk by night, reading Baedecker guides to north German cities. He concentrated on streetcar routes, which, like every other aspect of the country, were described by Baedecker in minute detail. Paul knew that it was possible to travel across the length and breadth of almost any country in the world by streetcar. You simply took a trolley to the opposite edge of any city, then walked a short distance to the first streetcar stop inside the next city and repeated the process until you reached your destination.

  When Paul went ashore in Bremerhaven the official on duty stamped his passport but asked no questions, not even the routine ones. On the quay in Bremerhaven Paul did not see Stutzer’s apprentices or anyone else who looked as if they had been assigned to follow him. He walked into the city, and at the first streetcar stop on Havenstrasse got aboard a squealing yellow trolley and began his journey across the most efficiently policed country in the world. Still no one took a visible interest in him. The secret police had no need to follow him. He was inside the Reich by his own choice, but he could not get out again unless the security apparatus permitted him to do so. For him, the Reich was a vast trap. The cheese was in Berlin. They knew where he was going and how he must get there. All they had to do was watch the bait and wait for him to spring the trap. Their routine surveillance at the Bremerhaven train station would report which train he had taken to Berlin. Their counterparts in Berlin would report his arrival. Blümchen would let Miss Wetzel know when he walked past her door on his way to his parents’ apartment and she would let them know. It was summer. Paul was dressed as a Wandervögel, a youth on holiday, in shorts and knee socks and walking shoes, with the sun bleaching his dark blond hair and a rucksack on his back. He had acquired a tan during his round trip across the Atlantic. He was the picture of young Aryan manhood as imagined by the party’s poster artists. The streetcar he boarded on Havenstrasse was empty except for the driver and conductor, who took Paul’s pfennigs gave him the first friendly smile he had seen since saying goodbye to Sebastian Laux in New York. He got off, after changing cars, at the northern city limits. From there, on foot and by streetcar, he traveled to Cuxhaven, Stade, Hamburg, Lübeck and Rostock and Stratsund and several towns in between. He walked on country roads at night and slept in the open. He ate sausages and bread that he bought from street vendors and drank clean water where he found it. He smiled and answered the polite questions of the kindly people and the flirtatious girls he encountered, but engaged in no long conversations. No one he encountered seemed to think that he was anything but a German boy on a lark. Some found it strange that he was traveling alone; the whole point of wandering was to be part of a group, to sing, to work your way, to celebrate friendship and culture. Paul explained that he was meeting his friends farther down the road.

  In Hamburg he wrote a postcard and mailed it to Rima. If she received it, and if she was free, and if she understood its unwritten parts, she would know where to find him. She would understand. He trusted her intelligence, her intuition, her knowledge of him. They had made no secret arrangements in which she might be entrapped. Rima could not confess what she could only guess.

  Paul arrived in Rügen by night. Mahican was back, tied up at the mooring below Schloss Berwick, sails furled, centerboard and rudder stowed, with enough water and food aboard for a weekend sail. It was the dark of the moon, but this was luck. Paul had had no control over his time of arrival. He knew his destination, but even that was a shortlived secret, and he knew it. If he did not turn up in Berlin, Stutzer would know, Heydrich himself would know, that there was only one other place he could be.

  Paul slept in a beech tree on an old platform he had built years before. At dawn S-boats came home and others put out to sea, trailing white wakes and rainbow spray. Moments after the sun rose, Paul caught sight of Paulus and his wolfhound Bismarck, out for their morning march along the cliffs. He wondered briefly if the dog would recognize his scent and bark him down from his tree, but Bismarck had no interest in any human being except Paulus. Paul ate some cheese and an apple, drank water from his canteen, munched on a chocolate bar. Like a scout in enemy country, he left no crumb or other sign that he had been present.

  After dark, because he knew that Rima would come only after dark and would know of no place to meet him except aboard Mahican, he climbed down and waded to the boat. The blackout on Rügen was total. No lights showed in the windows of the schloss or any of the other houses within eyeshot. He felt the boat move as someone came aboard. The newcomer had a light step. The hull dipped only slightly. The intruder came below, making no sound, and found him in the pitch-dark space where he lay. He smelled a trace of sweat, a hint of soap, hair, and when Rima whispered in his ear, moist breath along with all the other scents that she emitted when they were together in the dark. He drew breath to speak. She put two fingers on his lips. “First, us,” she whispered.

  They whispered in English as usual. Rima had known that Paul’s message meant that he had returned for her, and that this could only mean that he had a plan of escape, and that the only possible starting point for their flight must be Rügen. She had told no one about the postcard from Lübeck, not even her father. She knew what her escape from Germany would mean for him, but she knew, too, that he would never consent to go with her, would never break the law. He would never stop trusting his country. He still thought that Germany, his Germany, was just having a little breakdown. Soon the outlandish men from Mars, who had always before been invisible to educated people, would go back to being invisible. Germany would stop being the Reich and become the Fatherland again—hard work for all, just rewards, band music in the park on Sunday, honest boys and good girls walking together under the trees. Stern fathers and loving mothers—the real, the natural German police—would take over again. Peace and order would return.

  Rima believed the opposite. Never in her lifetime would there be another Germany filled with kindly people whose stupidities were harmless.

  She whispered, “Are we going to escape?”

  “We’re going to try, if you want to do it. But think carefully.”

  “Do you think it’s impossible?”

  “I know it is not. But the odds aren’t favorable.”

  Rima knew this. The S-boats were still out there. No doubt Stutzer was out there, too. The secret police would be on the watch. Paul had disappeared. By now they knew that she had disappeared also. They might have followed her to Rügen. If not, it was because Stutzer knew her destination. He would certainly have deduced where they were headed next. A nice young soldier had given Rima a ride on his motorcycle all the way from Berlin to Stralsund and had not asked for so much as a kiss in payment. Stutzer would find this soldier. Someone on the empty p
lain between Berlin and the Baltic would have seen them riding by and made a report. Rima said nothing to Paul about the soldier. Did he know about jealousy? Rima knew all about it. She had imagined temptresses on the Bremen. She had fantasized rich American girls, blond and blue-eyed like himself, making eyes at him in New York.

  Paul estimated their chances at fifty-fifty. He was not, after all, a novice. For the hundredth time he reminded himself that he had been present at other escapes when his parents had been in charge, so he knew that success was possible. He told Rima nothing about these secret voyages. It was dangerous for her to know. Next time, Paul knew, Stutzer’s patience would be exhausted. He would take the information he wanted from them both, no more games, no more coaxing. If Rima knew a little and was forced to tell the little she knew, Stutzer would believe that she knew more than she had told him and his men would beat what she did not know out of her. No one could protect her.

  The conditions necessary for escape were simple—a dark night, a good wind, luck. Hubbard in his love for simplicity had never considered installing an engine in Mahican. She was a sailboat, the wind was her element, and in Hubbard’s mind it connected Mahican and everyone who sailed in her to the first human being who thought of stepping a mast in a cockleshell and hanging a piece of hide on it to catch the air. Paul and Rima had darkness and wind aplenty. A thirty-knot breeze moaned in the hollows of the chalk cliffs. The hull of Mahican pitched and rolled in a strong chop. The night was so black that they could not even see the schloss hovering above them. It would be next to impossible to sail into such a wind. The only feasible destination was the Danish island of Bornholm, fifty miles to the northeast of Rügen. They could run before the wind and be ashore on free territory in four hours or less.

  “Unless?” Rima said.

  “Unless we capsize or an S-boat finds us,” Paul said.

  “What are our chances?”

  “Of capsizing, small if we sail by the rules, but in this weather that will be a problem. I don’t know about the S-boat. It depends on where they’re patrolling tonight, but they know as well as we do which way the wind is blowing.”

  “But how can they see us in this weather?”

  “Our sails are white. They have lookouts with good glasses. There’s no such thing as invisibility at sea unless there’s thick fog. No chance of that tonight.”

  “So everything depends on their not seeing us.”

  Paul and Rima could not even see each other’s faces. She took his face between her hands—as he already knew, her palms were slightly rough—and placed her forehead against his. “Then let’s go now before they find us here,” she said.

  Rima remembered from their last outing how to rig the boat. She worked efficiently in the dark with Paul to fit the centerboard and the rudder and cast off. He raised the mizzen sail and the jib and as the wind pushed them out to sea, Rima could see the white triangles of canvas. The fabric glowed in the pitch dark like the phosphorescent combers into which they were now sailing. The pale cliffs of Rügen glowed also. She realized that Mahican would be visible as a silhouette against the cliffs. Her throat tightened with fear.

  Rügen remained visible for a long time as a smudge on the horizon, and when at last the boat passed over the horizon and the island was lost to sight, Rima feared that they must be even more visible to those who were hunting them. Mahican, heeled over, seemed to be flying now. The mainsail ballooned. When touched it felt as tight as a drumhead. When the boat yawed and the canvas snapped, it seemed that the sound must be audible miles away. Rima had never been so frightened in her life—not by the boat or the wind, which were the angels of this experience, but by whatever else might intrude. By the searchlight that might suddenly blind them, by the smell of burnt diesel that might suddenly fill the nostrils, by the bow of the S-boat or who knew what else suddenly looming in the darkness, suddenly visible, but only for the moment that it took to ram Mahican into splinters.

  Rima’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness, but she did not look into it. She was seated on the windward rail, lashed to a cleat on the tilted deck, her body stretched out to balance the boat. Nothing it seemed but her slight weight kept it from overturning. She looked back at Paul at the tiller. His eyes were on the compass, then on the sails, then on her. He smiled. His teeth were brilliantly white like everything else in this picture that was not darkness. She was inside the picture, therefore outside the world. So was Paul. There they would remain for the rest of their lives. For an instant she actually believed in this enchantment.

  The S-boat was waiting for them about a mile outside Danish territorial waters. Its searchlights found Mahican instantly. Its small boat, already in the water, set off with engine hammering in pursuit of the sailboat. A parachute flare ignited, signal flags were hoisted. A signaling lamp winked the command to stop. No nautical ritual was omitted except shots across Mahican’s bow. There was no hope of outrunning this mechanized enemy. A moment before, Mahican had been running before the wind at thirty knots, a giddy speed for a small sailboat. Now she seemed to be wallowing dead-slow in a bathwater sea. Paul turned the yawl into the wind and dropped the sails.

  Stutzer himself and his two apprentices were aboard the small boat. Paul saw their faces clearly by the harsh light of the flare. The sailors who were operating the craft brought it alongside Mahican and made it fast. The apprentices boarded immediately with pistols drawn. One of them carried a large glass jug and a flare gun. Without a word or a gesture, he opened the forward hatch and hurled the jug into the hold. The glass broke, releasing the smell of kerosene. He fired a flare into the hold. Flames and smoke belched from the hatch. Blisters popped into being all over the varnished deck.

  The apprentices picked Paul up bodily and threw him into the small boat. Rima, who was still lashed to Mahican, struggled to loosen the bowline around her waist. Paul tried to leap back aboard Mahican to help her but was tripped and held fast by the apprentices. Mahican was an old vessel, her wooden hull and decks and masts dried by seasons in the open and covered with many coats of varnish and paint. The small boat, bobbing violently in the chop, backed away from the intense heat. Rima freed herself from the rope at last. She dove overboard and swam underwater to escape the flames. The sails caught fire, then the masts. The entire hull burst into flames.

  Rima surfaced several meters from the burning yawl, but the heat was still too intense to bear and she dived again. Paul fought toward the small boat’s gunwales, meaning to go to Rima’s rescue. In response to a small gesture from Stutzer, a tiny movement of his head, one of the apprentices pulled Paul’s legs out from under him, and as he sprawled backward, the other caught him as expertly as an acrobat executing a tumbling routine. He put a forearm against Paul’s throat and tightened the choke hold. Paul felt his consciousness slipping away.

  “Careful with him!” Stutzer said.

  The apprentice relaxed his forearm and let Paul breathe again.

  One of the S-boat’s searchlights was now focused on Rima. She was treading water on the other side of the burning Mahican. Completely alight now, masts and spars and hull outlined by flame, the yawl was being blown into the darkness as if under sail. The small boat came about, describing a circle with the girl at the center. She raised one hand to show them where she was. Her face was white, her movements sluggish. Only weeks before, the water in which she swam had been frozen solid. It was still just above the freezing point. No one could live in it for long. The helmsman steered toward Rima. A sailor clambered into the bow, a coiled line attached to a life preserver in his hands.

  In a loud officer’s voice, Stutzer said, “No. Leave the Jew.”

  Rima heard Stutzer’s command—Paul was sure of this. She knew what it meant. Her eyes were fixed on Paul. He was sure of that, too, though he knew that she must be blinded by the searchlight. She continued to tread water, trying to see Paul through the blinding light. He was trying to break free, trying to join her, but the apprentices, under orders to do him no harm
, restrained him with remarkable gentleness, canceling his physical efforts with their own strength, as if it was their duty to keep him from making a fool of himself.

  Rima raised both arms above her head in the glow of the searchlight. For a long moment she held them aloft. Then, by an act of the will, she slid into the sea as if returning to it, as if it were a place where she could breathe at last.

  PART TWO

  1959

  SIX

  1

  Twenty years later on a winter night, as he passed beneath a streetlamp in a gray European city, Paul Christopher glimpsed, just briefly, the face of a man who was walking in the opposite direction. It was raining hard. The light was feeble, but Christopher knew at once that this person, though thinner and more gray-faced than before and dressed in threadbare clothes, was Franz Stutzer. Christopher turned on his heel and followed him. The cobblestone streets were narrow and steep, with flights of granite stairs. Stutzer wore an old fedora, a short mustard-yellow raincoat with a frayed hem, and socks with holes in the heels. Little half-moons of pallid flesh appeared above the backs of his shoes at every step. He smelled of wet wool, rank sweat and cheap cologne. Through the rain Christopher saw his quarry indistinctly, as if he were on the other side of a smudged sheet of glass. Stutzer knew he was being followed. He glanced fearfully over his shoulder, he quickened his step.

  Perhaps Stutzer did not, at that moment, realize who Christopher was. After all, he had been a boy the last time he saw him. But he feared strangers. He could not possibly remember all the faces he had ever seen, but there were people still alive all over the world who had reason to kill him. Why should this young man not be one of them? Besides, he saw by the way his pursuer moved how good he was at this game, how keen his senses were, and how used to winning he was. He was a savage, a hunter. Stutzer had just become his quarry. He was weaker than this stranger, older. He feared death. He feared pain, feared the humiliation of being caught by a stronger animal. Christopher could overtake him whenever he chose, kill him with his bare hands or take away his pistol and shoot him with it—not mercifully in the heart or the head, but in the foot or knee or intestines or all three so that pain would give him a motive to talk. He would wring him out and finish the job before anyone in this cold, damp, sleeping city woke up and interrupted him.