Christopher's Ghosts

by Charles McCarry

  Christopher read these thoughts as if Stutzer were speaking them aloud, smelled his panic just as he smelled his sweat beneath the cologne. The street made a sharp turn. Stutzer disappeared from view. He began to run. Christopher knew this even before he turned the corner himself because he heard him splashing through the ankle-deep torrent that rushed over the cobblestones. Christopher himself broke into a run, and athlete that he was, was moving at full speed within two or three steps. Ahead of him, Stutzer lost his footing. His mustard raincoat billowed, his hat flew off. He fell on his back with a cry of panic and skidded downhill, hands and feet flailing. Christopher stopped in his tracks and watched. Stutzer was heading toward a flight of stone stairs that had been turned by the downpour into a waterfall.

  Stutzer’s momentum turned him onto his stomach. He looked at Christopher, held out a hand as if he was about to go over Victoria Falls, and shouted, “In the name of God!”

  Christopher moved. He caught up with Stutzer when he was very close to the edge and seized one of his frantically waving arms. This was enough to save Stutzer, who grabbed a railing, but Christopher himself, as if on ice, slid onward toward the stairway, feet together and arms outstretched for balance. At the last moment he grasped the banister and stopped himself. Stutzer got to his feet. He stared wild-eyed at Christopher and clawed at his coat pocket. He found his pistol, but it was entangled in wet cloth and he could not draw it. He stood in front of a thick padlocked door. He kicked it, nearly knocking himself over backward, but the door did not yield. He drew his weapon at last. By now Christopher had regained his balance. He was no more than half a dozen steps away and coming fast. Stutzer fired—not at Christopher, but at the padlock. The sound was weak, not much louder and no more identifiable than a single running footstep, not loud enough to wake even a light sleeper.

  The padlock, an old iron one, shattered. Stutzer threw open the door and plunged through it. Christopher, running at full speed, launched himself into the air, and hit the door with his body before Stutzer could bolt it from inside. The door, with Christopher’s weight behind it, burst open and knocked Stutzer headfirst down a long flight of stairs. The stairs were carpeted. His soaked raincoat slowed him down, so that he came to rest gently on a landing. A tiny bulb at the top of the stairs shed a little light. Stutzer rolled over and lifted the pistol, aiming at Christopher. His hand shook violently. Christopher plunged down the stairs. Stutzer did not fire, but instead got to his feet and fled heavily down another flight of stairs, then another, with the cocked pistol held above his head. Christopher followed, moving faster than Stutzer, whose thin hair did not stir as he ran. Christopher remembered the brilliantine, the smell of it, and smelled it again. Because the stairs were carpeted, the two of them made very little noise. Now and then Stutzer took sobbing breaths. Once or twice his weapon slammed into the wall, but somehow did not go off. He nudged a round table and almost, but not quite, upset the tall rose-colored vase that sat upon it.

  There were people in the darkened house. No one appeared, there were no sounds, but Christopher was aware of warm bodies, of locked rooms full of breath. These sleepers did not awaken—or if they did, they had no time to put on their dressing gowns and open their bedroom doors before Stutzer reached the front door. Christopher was only a few steps above him, but he did not attack or interfere in any way as Stutzer fumbled with the locks. He did not want to kill him inside this strange house. It seemed, as if in a dream, the worst of bad manners even to think of doing such a thing.

  Stutzer could not solve the dead-bolt. He swore in German and pointed his pistol at the lock. In the same language, Christopher stage-whispered, “No. Turn the knob to the right.” Stutzer did as he was told. The door flew open, he went through it and slammed it behind him. The noise was enormous. Christopher opened the door, showed himself, then flattened himself against the wall beside the door, waiting for the gunshots. A small girl in pajamas appeared at the top of the stairs. Christopher slammed the door shut. He heard the bullets, five of them, strike its thick planks.

  Stage-whispering again, Christopher said, “Go back to bed now, dear.”

  The child nodded obediently and disappeared.

  Christopher flung open the door and let himself out. It was dawn now, or what passed for it in these sunless latitudes, but there was no sign of Stutzer except for the empty pistol he had dropped onto the pavement. The house stood on a square. Three streets led from the square in three different directions. There was no way to know which one Stutzer had taken.

  The city was beginning to wake. Windows filled with buttery electric light. Alarm clocks went off, radios played. A woman dropped a pot and cursed. These were muffled noises, but Christopher heard them distinctly above the falling rain. Stutzer’s pistol was empty, the action locked open. Christopher picked it up by the barrel, put it into his pocket, chose one of the streets, and set off at a run.

  The street led to the train station. Had Stutzer, too, followed his instincts, or his knowledge of the city, and gone to the station hoping to catch a train, any train, hoping to disappear again? If so, he could not be more than a minute ahead. Christopher reckoned that he had now run about half a mile. He was still a couple of hundred yards from the station. He searched the street ahead for another running man and saw Stutzer’s sticklike figure crossing the station plaza. He had discarded his yellow raincoat and his battered hat, but even a naked Stutzer would have been unmistakable. In front of the station he caught his toe on something and stumbled. He staggered and spun and seemed to be about to fall headlong, but somehow he kept his balance. He looked behind him and saw Christopher coming fast. He looked downward, panicked as if he had lost something irreplaceable, but then abandoned whatever it was and ran for the doors of the station. He was limping now.

  Christopher heard the whistle of a train approaching the station. He was only seconds behind Stutzer. Where Stutzer had tripped he saw one of his worn-out shoes lying on the cobblestones. Although train stations were heavily policed, a running man attracted little attention. He sprinted through the door into the ticket hall. It was empty except for a cleaning woman and one ticket agent inside his cage. He heard a train entering the station. Christopher took a platform ticket from the machine and went through the turnstile onto the platform. The locomotive, a coal burner, chuffed slowly down the track, half-hidden in its own smoke. This part of the station was covered by a lofty curved glass roof. Birds flew beneath the panes, some of which had been broken in the bombing and still awaited repair all these years after the war. The rhythmic noises made by the train—smoke belching, steam hissing, steel wheels screeching on steel rails—were amplified.

  A dozen bored travelers waited for the train. Most of them were reading newspapers or deep in thought. No one paid the slightest attention to Stutzer, who stood behind the crowd with his back turned to the track, watching the entrance. When Christopher entered he put his right hand inside the left sleeve of his nubbled tweed jacket. The jacket was too large for him and its padded shoulders made his head look small. His pink skin showed through the soaked cloth of his thin white shirt. His chest heaved. He shivered uncontrollably—not from fear alone, Christopher thought, but also because he was chilled to the bone, exhausted, cornered. His left foot was bare, yellow nails visible. Had he, or the dandy he used to be, taken time to remove his holed sock to hide the shame of it? The bare foot twitched along with the rest of his body. He was emaciated.

  The fingers of Stutzer’s right hand remained hidden in his left sleeve. In a pleasant voice, Christopher addressed him by his name and the secret police rank he had formerly held. He said, “If I see a weapon, you will die immediately. Put your right hand where I can see it, please.”

  Stutzer obeyed. He said, “I don’t know you.”

  Christopher said, “It will all come back to you.”

  In a loud but unsteady voice Stutzer said, “Papers! I want to see your papers.” His tone was commanding, as if it were he who was making the arrest.r />
  Christopher stepped forward, seized Stutzer’s right wrist, then removed the knife from the sheath strapped to his left forearm inside his coat sleeve. It was a dagger, two-edged, razor sharp, a workman’s tool, plain and useful with a taped handle. Christopher threw it under the train. Stutzer twisted his arm against Christopher’s thumb but wasn’t strong enough to break his grip. He uttered a sound—a loud whimper, the noise a spoiled child makes when frustrated. The train was almost stopped now. Another train, approaching from the opposite direction, sounded its whistle.

  Stutzer’s face twisted. He screamed, “Help! Help! This man is going to kill me!”

  Above the noise of the trains—down the tracks, the second one was sounding its whistle again—he was barely audible even to Christopher. One or two of the passengers looked at the disturbance over their shoulders. They saw a fine-looking young man in good clothes confronted by a derelict who wore only one shoe and was screaming in dumb show, drowned out by the train. His face was twisted. Gobs of spittle shot from his mouth with every word. He was the picture of insanity. He cried, “He has a knife! He has a knife. He has a gun! He is a criminal! Help me!” No one listened.

  The incoming train was still rolling, but barely. Stutzer spun around and with a desperate effort, broke free. He fell down, got up again, and made a dash for the train, arms and legs awry. Just as it stopped, he leaped in front of the locomotive and dashed across the tracks toward the opposite platform. Just as he reached the middle of the other set of tracks, another whistle blast sounded and the second train entered the station from the opposite direction. Smoke swirled, machinery howled. Stutzer kept limping toward the opposite platform. The train rolled onward, windows aglow, passengers drinking coffee in the dining car. It was a long train and though it was moving fast it seemed to Christopher that it took a long time to clear the station. When the track was empty again, there was no sign of Stutzer, no mangled body, not even a bloodstain on the ties.

  SEVEN

  1

  The Reich and the war remade both O. G. and Christopher. After the death of Rima and the disappearance of his mother, Christopher had gone back to the United States, finished school, joined the Marines, been wounded on Okinawa, then gone to college. Days before Germany declared war on America, O. G. went from Berlin to Switzerland and there, as a member of the Office of Strategic Services, became in fact what he had previously been suspected of being. He was good at the work. Some of the German army officers he had invited to dinner in Berlin in the thirties almost succeeded in assassinating the Leader with a bomb whose silent timer (acid burned through a trip wire) was provided by O. G. Others who had come to his parties passed him information from inside the Reich. He mentioned Lori’s name to people interested in murdering Heydrich, and Heydrich was murdered in Bohemia.

  After the war, O. G. ran into Christopher in New Hampshire at a prep school reunion. The two men had not seen each other for ten years—not since the day in Elliott Hubbard’s New York house when Christopher’s chilly behavior froze O. G.’s tongue to his sled. O. G.’s greeting was cordial, but no trace of their godfather-godson relationship remained. O. G. was almost an old man. His hair was white. He had a paunch. He still wore his gold Wilsonian pince-nez and pink neckties. He displayed in his buttonhole the rosette of a decoration Christopher did not recognize. O. G. invited Christopher to lunch at a gentleman’s club on Beacon Hill and offered him a job in his new organization. Christopher accepted immediately, but the ice never melted entirely. During the recruitment lunch and ever since, O. G., calling him by his surname, had treated him as a stranger whom he scarcely knew. That was, of course, the reality.

  Now that O. G. was the director of the newborn American intelligence service and Christopher was one of the handful of agents he handled personally, their contacts were fairly regular, though on a new, more formal footing. At the time of his encounter with Stutzer, Christopher was posted to Geneva on O. G.’s orders. He was engaged in an operation to recruit a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer. The target, a KGB colonel named Yuri Kikorov, was the highest-ranking Russian who had ever, in the short life of the Outfit, come so close to defecting to the Americans. O. G. handled every detail of this project personally. Christopher was his man and acted on his orders. This break in protocol ruffled feathers in the Outfit’s Geneva base. The Geneva people felt left out, unconsulted, ineligible for credit if the operation turned out well, but in danger of taking the blame if it did not.

  The Russian had shown every sign that he was willing to be recruited, but for reasons unexplained he hesitated to take the final step. O. G. flew over from Washington to discuss the problem. At dinner with the chief of the Geneva base and Christopher, he remarked that what was needed to fix the problem was a fellow like Ezra Stubbins, the jack-of-all-trades who had been on call to his grandfather’s cotton mill in upstate New York. “A hundred years ago my grandfather bought some fancy new spinning machines but they soon broke down,” O. G. said. “Gramps sent for Ezra. Ezra studied the machines for awhile, then pulled a hunk of bailing wire and a pair of pliers out of his hip pocket and fixed ’em. Five minutes later the mill was humming again. My grandfather asked Ezra how much he owed him for the repair job. ‘One hundred dollars and five cents,’ said Ezra. He was asked to itemize his curious invoice. Ezra said, ‘The nickel’s for the bailing wire, the hundred’s for the horse sense.’”

  The chief of base laughed appreciatively, even though he knew that this was O. G.’s way of suggesting that he was having dinner with a slow thinker.

  O. G. said, “Bailing wire, anybody?” Silence ensued. “Nobody wants to be Ezra?” O. G. said. “What about you, Christopher? You’re closest to this thing.”

  Christopher had been the dangle in this operation—that is to say, he had attracted the interest of the Russian colonel by giving him the impression that he himself might be recruitable. After this dropping of the handkerchief, the hoped-for friendship with Yuri developed. This began with invitations to public events. Several times a year, Yuri gave fisherman’s parties like the ones O. G. had hosted in Berlin, and Christopher was nearly always on the guest list. Soon Christopher was dining alone with Yuri in restaurants in the old city and sailing with him on Lake Leman. They played chess in a coffee house on Wednesday afternoons and became members of the same weekend rugby team. They discussed their wars. Yuri had fought with the partisans in Ukraine and like Christopher had been wounded in the legs. He insisted on pulling up the legs of his trousers and comparing wounds. Yuri’s scars were larger. “Red Army surgery, not enemy bullets,” he said. He often made little jokes about his country’s backwardness. Once or twice Christopher and Yuri went together to the casino at Annecy. Yuri bet recklessly on roulette and lost far larger amounts of money than a colonel in the Russian intelligence service could handily afford. Opinion in the Outfit was divided as to his motivation. The Outfit’s counterintelligence division in its deep respect for the Russians believed that it was all an act. In its opinion, no compulsive gambler could ever be promoted to colonel by the Russians. More likely he wanted Christopher, who—no offense—was no match for a Russian of Yuri’s vast experience, to think he had a chink in his armor. Christopher wondered what difference it could possibly make, but held his tongue.

  O. G.’s first principle in running the Outfit was freedom of speech. Everybody had it, regardless of rank, and was expected to exercise it. O. G. had gone to the trouble of enlisting the brightest young men in America, and he wanted to know what they thought. In theory the most junior officer could speak his mind to the director himself or any other superior. The principle was not, of course, always the practice where lower-ranking, less self-confident superiors than O. G. were concerned, but outspokenness was the watchword, so when O. G. asked him what was wrong with the operation, Christopher told him.

  He said, “We’re too hesitant.”

  O. G. said, “Explain that, if you please.”

  “Yuri expects us to ask him the question,
to make ourselves clear. We don’t do that because we’re not sure that he’s genuine. This game of cat and mouse confuses him.”

  The chief of base said, “But what if he’s a dangle?”

  O. G. turned to the chief of base. “Do you know for certain, Monty—for certain, mind you—that your wife is not a Soviet agent?”

  “My wife?”

  “For certain, Monty.”

  “No, but… .”

  “Thank you,” O. G. said. “Christopher, ask the colonel tonight, straight out, if he would like to join us.”

  The following evening, with Yuri already on his way to Washington on a black Outfit aircraft, O. G. invited Christopher for drinks in his hotel suite overlooking the lake. At minimal taxpayers’ expense, they drank a half bottle of Mumm’s Cordon Rouge, neither man’s favorite champagne, and ate what the room service menu said was Iranian caviar. The room was almost certainly equipped with listening devices, so no toasts were made to bailing wire and horse sense. Christopher had simply done what he was paid to do. However, O. G. went so far as to lift his glass with one hand, give a thumbs up with the other, and say, “Well done.”

  They talked baseball. Christopher had in fact taken O. G.’s advice and played the game for his American school, but neither O. G. nor Christopher mentioned the many times O. G. had counseled the young Paul to take up ball and bat. Hubbard’s name was not mentioned. Neither was Lori’s or Rima’s. O. G.’s duty as a Christian gentleman and honorary godfather placed him in loco parentis now that Hubbard was dead and Lori had disappeared and was presumed by everybody but her son to be dead, too. O. G.’s gaze was gentle when he looked at Christopher, but it was just as sympathetic when pigeons on the windowsill caught his eye. Christopher suspected that the old gentleman was happy enough to have, as an agent, a fellow who was reckless enough to get back on the Bremen in time of war and sail to the Reich. But maybe he was less enthusiastic about having him as a godson.