Christopher's Ghosts

by Charles McCarry

  He said, “You’re not going to tell me anything, are you?”

  Christopher shook his head no.

  Wolkowicz fished a key from the thumb of one of his fur-lined gloves and tossed it to Christopher. “Lock up when you leave and throw away the key before you go through the checkpoint,” he said. “Don’t ditch it in this neighborhood, and not too close to the checkpoint.”

  Christopher nodded his thanks.

  With his hand on the doorknob Wolkowicz said, “Don’t put beans in your ears.”

  He left, but as Christopher listened to him descending the stairs at a heavy trot, he knew that he would be seeing more of Wolkowicz. Or of people Wolkowicz knew.

  4

  When Christopher left the apartment at about ten that night he looked for surveillance but saw none behind or ahead of him. He wasn’t surprised. This was a desolate neighborhood with practically no cover. Anyone attempting to following him would stick out like a sore thumb. Wolkowicz would have stationed his scouts farther away, somewhere between here and the checkpoint Christopher was likeliest to use when crossing the line that separated the two Berlins. Christopher understood this and had expected it. If he would not tell Wolkowicz where he was going and why, Wolkowicz would put a team on him and find out for himself. If Christopher ran into trouble in the East, then in the worst-case scenario the Outfit would know at least that he had been taken hostage. In the best case, Wolkowicz’s men would help him in case of need.

  At this time, the Berlin Wall and the long period of quarantine it symbolized were in the future, though not very far in the future. With the proper papers almost anyone could walk across the frontier from west to east. Christopher had all the documentation he could possibly need, all of it false and all of it forged in the Outfit’s shop, located in one of the temporary buildings on the Mall. Patchen had handed it over. “You are an obscure toiler in the vineyard of world socialism,” he said. “You are an employee of the Ministry of State Security. How’s that for chutzpah?” Christopher gazed at his own picture on an official Stasi identity card and tasted bile.

  Wolkowicz’s sidewalk man picked up Christopher in the Kochstrasse U-bahn station. Two of his friends were posted outside and fell into position as soon as Christopher emerged. All were shabbily dressed and of average size. All were gray-faced men of a certain age, war veterans probably, Z Group possibly. They wouldn’t know who Christopher was, only that Wolkowicz was interested in him. As Christopher walked briskly toward Checkpoint Charlie, they followed him, working with tired efficiency like figures from a mechanical clock, changing positions at every crosswalk. They could do this with their eyes shut. Their eyes, thought Christopher, might as well be shut.

  At the checkpoint, no one on the American side paid attention to Christopher—the job of the young military policemen was to watch people coming from the other side, and besides they spoke almost no German. The Vopos on their side of the neutral strip looked at Christopher’s Stasi ID and asked no questions. The whole process took perhaps three minutes, and then he was walking down Friederich-strasse, but not too briskly because only two of Wolkowicz’s men were following him and he did not want them to lose him before the third joined up and he could ditch him, too.

  Patchen’s had shown Christopher pictures of his target—the building in East Berlin that Patchen called the Mosque, a place where Arabs came and went. Some of these images were mystifying high-altitude aerial photographs. A handful were snapshots taken at ground level. The Mosque was not actually a building, but rather something that used to be a building, a bombed-out wreck whose missing top stories resembled a row of ragged triangles scissored from a sheet of cardboard by a small child. It appeared that two or three rooms on the ground floor of the Mosque had been cleared of rubble to make a sort of cave. Tons of shattered masonry rested on top of this space that was, according to the Outfit’s hypothesis, the trigger mechanism of a coming explosion of terrorism in the Middle East. The snapshots were badly underexposed, taken perhaps by a miniature camera hidden under an agent’s coat, so that they were not much more informative than the U 2 photos. Nearly everything about the building had to be deduced. Not even its exact address was known, only the street on which it stood and the name of the nearest cross street. Christopher had long since ceased being surprised at how little the U. S. espionage service, and presumably all other such agencies in the world, knew for certain. Their wasteful methods—photographs taken through buttonholes by furtive cameramen trembling in fear of arrest and torture—were so cumbersome that the smallest scrap of knowledge was treated as the bluest of diamonds. Combined and rightly arranged with some of the millions of other scraps of information that rained down daily on headquarters, and with the right luck, this speck of knowledge might someday become a treasure trove. At least that was the theory. Christopher wanted to see the Mosque, which lay near the River Spree, not far from the Ostbanhhof, with his own eyes.

  By now it was almost midnight, late to be out in East Berlin, and other pedestrians hurried past, trying to catch the last train from the Underground station a block away. In minutes, if he did not hurry like the others, Christopher would be the only figure on the most patrolled street in this half of the city. Only one of Wolkowicz’s men was still behind Christopher. The second had overtaken him and was now bustling ahead, on his way to cover the entrance to the Underground station on the next corner. The third man, easy to spot because he wore a tightly cinched trench coat, had disappeared.

  Christopher hung back. The other pedestrians were not numerous enough to make a crowd, but just the same it would be hard to single him out. He wore dark clothes, a dark hat, an end-of-the-day stubble on his chin. He carried a worn briefcase that contained that day’s party newspaper, a piece of hard cheese, a half-eaten sausage. He walked with self-importance, like a German who in his youth had been taught to march and stand up straight. He looked and moved and smelled like any other citizen of the German Democratic Republic hurrying home after a long day at work or an evening in a beer hall. When he was close to the station, perhaps twenty steps away, he felt the train rumbling beneath the pavement. He broke into a run. Wolkowicz’s lookout waited at the top of the stairs. Christopher stamped on the arch of his foot as he went by, felt limber bones bending under his heel and heard the man gasp in pain. He ran headlong down the stairs, flashed his Stasi ID at the ticket-taker, who saluted, and at the last possible second wriggled sidewise through the closing doors of the crowded car. All eyes were on him for the first second. Like the Stasi man he was pretending to be, he glared back at these inquisitive nobodies, ostentatiously studying their faces as if he intended to recognize them if ever they met again. After that no one met his eyes. He got out his newspaper and read it until it was time to get off. Actually reading the mind-deadening thing was a sign of loyalty to the regime. No one else seemed to have a copy.

  He got off the train at the Frankfurter Tor station. There were few streetlights in this bleak quarter of the city. The night sky was overcast. Christopher was in darkness, and as far as he could tell, alone. This had been a squalid neighborhood even before the bombing by the RAF and the shelling of the Red Army. The damage had been so great and the local population so scattered that the Russians had not even attempted to clean up the damage, except to clear the streets. Because property had no commercial value in a socialist economy, no one else had done so, either. Fires that had burned here fifteen years before could still be smelled on the stones, as if like fossils of the Nazi regime they had colonized the pores in the brick and granite.

  Before the war there had been an indoor public swimming pool nearby and on winter Saturdays he had come here with Hubbard, who as a sailor and a former member of his school’s swimming team set great store by water sports. He taught Paul the Australian crawl, the breaststroke, the backstroke, the butterfly, even a muscle-twisting, breath-burning Civil War era stroke called the trudgeon that sent water flying for many meters when Hubbard slammed the surface with his long arms
and legs. The two of them had always walked back to the streetcar with wet hair smelling of chlorine, stopping along the way at a coffee shop for hot chocolate with whipped cream. Christopher had studied maps to refresh his memory of this neighborhood, to pinpoint the Mosque, but as he walked through the streets leading from the railroad station, he remembered them even though the landmarks had vanished.

  The Mosque was on a short street close by the River Spree. By the time Christopher reached it—the way was roundabout and he reckoned he had walked more than a mile—his eyes had adjusted to the darkness. The glow of West Berlin, just across the river, cast a helpful light. He saw that the Mosque in the photograph was not the only one that was occupied. Caves in the rubble had been made in two or three others. On closer inspection he saw that all these were empty. The people who had lived there, perhaps for years, had been cleared out. Stronger doors, clearly brand-new, had been installed and padlocked. Windows had been bricked. Signs had been posted: Entry Strictly Forbidden.

  It began to rain, softly. Outside the blacked-out Mosque Christopher saw no light but knew that lights burned inside because he heard the putt-putt of a small electric generator and smelled its exhaust. He heard the faint clatter of a typewriter being operated by a fast typist. He looked for a place to conceal himself but spotted no cover. The padlocked caves, let alone the Mosque itself, would be checked regularly by whoever from the Ministry of State Security was responsible for guarding them. He decided that the best observation point was the roof of the Mosque.

  By now his night vision was good, and all around him, wet and gleaming, he saw hillocks of rubble. It would be difficult, he knew, to climb them without dislodging stones and making noise, but after studying the vertical face of the building he could think of no other way to hide himself and see what he had come here to see. Gingerly, he began to climb. The mountain of rubble to which he clung was a landslide waiting to happen, but as on a real mountain there were solid bits to hold onto—old cornices and sills and beams and fragments of chimney. Christopher groped for these handholds and footholds, and moving as slowly and cautiously as if he had been climbing the rock face of a peak in Austria, made his way to the roof. He perceived, rather than saw or heard, some of the scores of feral cats who made their home on the roof bounding soundlessly into the darkness. The smell of cat urine and feces was overpowering. Where there are cats, he thought, there are rats, but what do the rats eat? He took up a position between two of the saw-tooth fragments of wall atop the roof and watched the street below. He was directly above the entrance to the Mosque.

  Hours passed. The rain stopped. He heard what he thought might be a pack of rats scurrying across the roof. The smell of the cats’ droppings nauseated him. He thought about living the life of a librarian in a small New England town—the harmlessness of it, the seasons, the scent of old books, the walk home under elms that filtered the afternoon sun. A wife, a child who liked to listen to stories, iced tea and soft American sandwiches on a screened porch. Rima. He hadn’t pictured her in years. He forced her from his mind now. Two uniformed men on bicycles came by and checked the doors of the Mosque and the padlocked caves. They shone flashlights, too feeble for the job, on the rubble and stirred up some cats. One held his torch on a scampering cat while the other pegged stones at it, missing every time.

  Shortly after three in the morning, two new figures approached. They shared an umbrella. One of them carried a flashlight. Clearly they knew where they were going, but they did not move with the assurance of Germans, who in this part of town were still conditioned to make an impression even when they were not being observed. Talking incessantly, these fellows sauntered carelessly, following the bull’s eye of the flashlight beam as it moved before them over the pavement. The light turned them into silhouettes so that it was difficult to make them out in detail. They were bundled up in heavy coats and what looked in the dimness like knitted ski caps. One of them clapped his gloved hands together. As they drew closer Christopher could see their breath in the beam of the electric torch and wondered about the visibility of his own exhalations. When the two were directly below him, he made out the throat-clearing sounds of Arabic, and even understood a few words. They were talking about women, German women, and the hasty way in which they made love instead of waiting, instead of enjoying the prospect of pleasure, instead of letting themselves be brought to a proper pitch. They were interested only in themselves, they just lay there and waited for the pop. What was wrong with them? As they studied their watches with the flashlight, waiting for the minute hand to move, Christopher glimpsed their faces—dark men, young, one of them bearded. They knocked on the door of the Mosque—two loud bangs, a pause, four taps.

  The door opened. No light shone outward. In German a man said, “You are exactly on time. Good.”

  The door clicked shut. A key turned in an oiled lock. Christopher looked at his watch. It was thirteen minutes past three. The voice he had just heard was a bit thinner, a trifle higher than before, but the tone, the placement of words, the undertone of regal aggrievement as if like Louis XIV he had only just escaped waiting—all those were the same as they had been the last time he heard this man speak.

  Climbing down a mountain is more difficult than climbing up it. Even the cats sent bits of masonry bouncing when they leaped by squads and platoons across the rubble. Christopher swung over the edge of the roof, and pressing his body against the damp wall which was slimy with mildew, found a foothold, then a handhold, then another foothold. He missed the next foothold and fell half a meter or so before grabbing a windowsill, swinging for a moment on his painfully stretched arms, and finally continuing the descent. He put his ear to the door. He could hear men speaking inside the mosque, but so faintly that he could not make out words.

  He walked away from the Mosque and at a curve in the street half a block away, pressed his back against a saw tooth of wall that was still standing, and waited.

  The Arabs left the Mosque at four-thirty, while it was still dark. They walked away in the same leisurely way in which they had arrived, talking animatedly to each other. Christopher caught no words—the men were too far away—but from their hoarse laughter he imagined that they had resumed their conversation about the sexual behavior of German women. One of the men walked with a slight limp. The other, who swung an umbrella, did not hurry him. From the relaxed way in which they moved, the unguarded way in which they talked in half shouts about things that could do no harm even if overheard, Christopher decided that they were probably not so young as he had earlier supposed. These were men on the brink of middle age, old enough to become the leaders in whom their handlers would naturally be interested. On behalf of their masters the Russians, the East Germans were building a network, designing an instrument. The reckless youths, the ones who were willing to die, would come later. The limping man and his friend with the umbrella were being trained to find them, to recruit them, to set them in motion.

  Half an hour later a woman departed, letting the door of the Mosque slam behind her as if she wished to make a point to whoever remained inside. If she was the typist he had heard, she walked as rapidly as she typed and as confidently as though she were moving from streetlight to streetlight instead of plunging ahead into pitch darkness. She was out of sight in moments, heels clattering on the pavement, a sturdy figure in an ankle-length raincoat, carrying a man’s furled umbrella at shoulder arms.

  Still Christopher waited. He was not being patient in any conscious sense. He was not aware of being wet and miserable. He did not feel his wounds, as he usually did in weather like this. Concentration had put him into a kind of trance. The same thing happened to him when he was writing poetry. In a sense he was enjoying himself. He had seldom in his life been so interested in what he was doing as he was now. All five of his senses were working. Cat stink and the acid smell of long-dead fires lingered in his nostrils. He heard tiny noises in the rubble—the cats again and the rodents. In the velvety darkness he apprehended movement, sh
apes, the first signs of first light. He tasted and felt a fragment of sausage lodged between two of his teeth. He felt the rough ground beneath his feet. His head itched.

  His eyes were fixed on the door of the Mosque. Little by little the light increased as the rays of the rising sun grew stronger on the other side of the thick clouds that sealed off the city. The dimly perceived hillocks of brick and stone, the shells of buildings changed gradually into silhouettes, then into visible objects. Christopher waited to see what he expected to see, the matchstick man he had pursued through the rain. He knew Stutzer was inside because he had heard his voice. This was his place of business. Was he waiting for the light because he did not want to go out into darkness in which an enemy might be hiding? Sooner or later he would have to come out, unless he never came outside, or came and went by some other route.

  Christopher had focused so hard on the door of the Mosque that he had shut down all but the particle of intelligence that was needed to imagine a thin man with a large head, the last man from Mars, opening a door and walking through it. He had seen the whole picture, detail after detail, in the developing fluid of his imagination. All that was needed was for Stutzer, who had already stepped out of the past, to step out of the real world into the one in which Christopher was waiting for him. Now he heard a dog bark, heard a sharp human voice speak a single word to the animal. The sounds were distant, distorted. He realized that dog and man were in another valley of rubble on a street parallel to this one. Suddenly Christopher understood the reason for the padlocked doors on the vacant caves. Stutzer wanted no neighbors. The one room in these smashed buildings that would still be intact would be the cellar. A man who wanted to come and go in secrecy would find a way through this labyrinth of cellar rooms, old sewers, and who knew what hidden passages. There might be a dozen exits. The ones to look for would be those that were not padlocked from the outside.