Christopher's Ghosts

by Charles McCarry

  He went shopping. He wanted a flashlight, a ball of string, a pair of rubber boots, a bicycle. It was wearisome to shop in a city whose stores had almost nothing to sell. It wasn’t a question of bargaining. What the state stores offered for sale was what they had and what they displayed was all they had. It was pointless to ask if the store might have a particular item in the storeroom or whether it might come in sometime in the future. The clerks had no idea what they might have next or when they might receive it. Whatever they offered, no matter how shoddy, people lined up to buy.

  Having found nothing that he was looking for, he went back to the Red Orchestra Inn. “A ball of string?” Heidi said. “You think there is such a thing in this country as a ball of string? Or in the name of God a flashlight? A bicycle we already have. It’s the hotel bicycle. The next time you want to take French leave, just borrow it.”

  Except for tone of voice, Heidi did not reproach Christopher for his brief escape. She did not even mention it. Nevertheless she wished him to know that she was annoyed. There were spots of color on her prominent, almost Slavic cheekbones, and behind the circular lenses of her glasses her eyes were wifely in their cold resentment. She had more reason than most real wives to expect and demand good behavior from Christopher. He was safe with her and with no one else. She was utterly responsible for him to whomever she worked for, no matter who that was. If he got himself into trouble in a country where trouble was a very dark business, she would be in trouble too. For the rest of the day they did not speak.

  Before going out the following morning, Christopher put the Makarov and its ammunition back where he had found them. The hidden compartment in the lavatory was empty—no Bulgarian Makarovs, no ammunition, no weapons of any kind. He wondered if his Makarov would disappear, too, and hoped that it would. It was a great inconvenience, heavy and difficult to conceal. In case of an encounter with other armed men he could not fire it without being riddled with bullets. He had no use for the thing, no plans to shoot anybody under any circumstances. He had other plans than sudden death for Stutzer.

  Just after dawn Christopher rode the hotel bicycle down Stalinallee in the general direction of the Mosque. The streets, even this broad main thoroughfare, were virtually empty at this hour and the city was so quiet that he could hear the bike’s tires humming on the pavement. The note was high-pitched and steady and pleasant to hear; no doubt Wolkowicz could have told him its key and other musical particulars. A few blocks farther on he saw in the watery light another cyclist riding ahead of him. Christopher drew a little closer. The other rider was a youngish man and like Christopher he was dressed for the soaking cold in a heavy overcoat, but instead of a fedora he wore a black fur cap. He rode in an unselfconscious way, slumped in the saddle, paying no attention to his form, not like a German at all. Christopher fell back. His bicycle had no mirrors, but while circling the Strausberger platz roundabout he glimpsed a second bicycle behind him. Its rider also wore a fur cap—brown rather than black like the other rider’s, but similar in shape. Instead of turning into the continuation of Stalinallee, Christopher left the roundabout at the next big thoroughfare and farther on made a right turn into a narrow street that ran parallel to it. After a couple of blocks he saw ahead of him the slumped rider, who had exchanged his fur hat for a Red Army field cap with the red star removed and the earflaps tied under his chin. At the next intersection the second rider, still wearing his fur cap, again fell in behind. Apparently the other cyclists wanted him to know that they were there. Christopher speeded up a little. So did the other bikers. He slowed down with the same result. The maneuvers were executed with something like a sense of humor. This was not the behavior of secret policemen, who were either invisible or putting their hands on you. Christopher rode on. He pedaled past streets leading to the neighborhood where the Mosque was located, then made a series of left turns. Now he was only a short distance from the Mosque. The cyclist ahead of him, accelerating, turned off into the first cross street. The other rider turned into the same street, but in the opposite direction.

  Up ahead, in the next block, Christopher saw Stutzer and his Alsatian. Three men with two-way radios stood on the sidewalk. Two or three more were posted beyond Stutzer. Christopher heard radio static and distorted voices. Stutzer unleashed the Alsatian, which stood beside him, ears and tail raised, awaiting orders. Christopher heard a car behind him and smelled its exhaust—Stutzer’s Volga, he presumed, but he did not look back.

  Pedaling steadily, Christopher swept by the first three men and out of the corner of his eye saw the last one produce a submachine gun from beneath his coat. There had been no signal from Stutzer, so no one made a move to stop him. Stutzer, standing erect—more than erect, actually bent slightly backwards—watched him approach. Like his human protectors, the Alsatian, still awaiting orders, was frozen in place. Christopher looked directly into Stutzer’s eyes. He saw in them everything he already knew about the man and new things besides. He was acquainted with his own vulnerability now, and for an instant Christopher saw it flicker. In their last encounter, in the rain, it had been too dark to see so much. Stutzer’s face was thinner now, his eyebrows almost invisible, his lips less girlishly pink. His chin quivered slightly, also the hand that was not holding the leash. No spark of recognition showed in his eyes for a long moment, and then he remembered Christopher’s face.

  As in their last encounter, memory resembled dream. The moment was curiously peaceful. Had Christopher brought the Makarov, if he had believed in guns, if Stutzer’s death could have been payment enough for him, this would have been the perfect moment to make the kill—a single shot to the heart. Instead, as though he had never seen Stutzer before and had no idea who or what he was, Christopher nodded politely as he rolled by, and rode on. He expected the black Volga to overtake him, or the men posted up ahead to dash into the street with drawn weapons, or the dog to attack. But none of these things happened. He pedaled onward at the same steady speed, in the same gear, hearing the same purr of the tires, until he was out of sight.

  4

  Among the things Christopher had carried into East Berlin to simulate innocence was a cheap German wallet stuffed with the cards and tickets and snapshots that Patchen’s forgers had supplied. In his room at the Red Orchestra Inn he extracted a passport-sized photograph of Yuri Kikorov that he himself had added to the collection, and on its back, in German, he wrote a date, a time, and a place in the angular Teutonic script he had learned as a child. He sealed the picture in an envelope and put it into his pocket. At midnight he went out. It was another pitch-black night. The cold was too saturating to be borne without exercise and there was no place to get warm. With hours to kill, Christopher walked. In his mind he reviewed what he knew—not much, but more than he had known only a couple of days before. He knew from Heidi some of Stutzer’s habits—how he divided his hours between MfS headquarters and the Mosque, where he went on Saturday night and what he drank. From his own observations he knew where Stutzer walked in the morning and who stood guard over him, what he wore when in public. By the sound of their voices he knew two of the people who visited Stutzer at the Mosque. He knew that Stutzer rewarded them with women. He knew that Stutzer could be surprised. He was beginning to know larger things, the largest of all being that the new Stutzer was different from the old one. At the core the creature was the same but it no longer believed itself to be immune from harm. It could be startled, perhaps even frightened. Possibly it could be controlled—or if not actually controlled, then influenced to behave in a predictable way by playing on its old illusions and its new doubts.

  He walked through the silent city like the native that he was, knowing when to turn before a street ended, avoiding parks, stopping to listen for voices, for footsteps. The Berlin his brain had mapped in his youth still existed. Landmarks may have vanished but for the most part, the streets were the same. In the dark it made no difference that their names had been changed or that monuments and steeples had been demolished. T
he neighborhoods and their parks were still there. In the absence of dogs and horses the smells were less recognizable than before. It was strange to hear so little noise. But even though it was half dead, Berlin in some respects did remain Berlin, as the song promised.

  By three in the morning Christopher had worked his way back to the street on which the Mosque was located. He took up a position and waited. He heard the Palestinians talking long before he saw them. Their topic was the same as before—the sexual behavior of German women—and they were discussing it at the top of their lungs. Christopher’s grasp of their speech was far from perfect. The only Arabic he knew was a dialect spoken in the Maghrib. In childhood he had learned it in fragments from a Berber friend of his mother, who during long visits to Gutenbergstrasse and Rügen had taught him words and phrases and rewarded him with dollar bills when he remembered them and made sentences of them. The difference between the dialect he half knew and the one these men spoke was the difference between the English spoken in York and New York.

  He followed the men by listening to them. He could not see them. Even though rain was not yet falling, its chilled moisture was present in the air. It soaked its way through Christopher’s woolen overcoat, jacket, sweater and shirt, then through his pores and all the way to the bone. Perhaps these men thought and talked about fornication as a way of avoiding thoughts about the miseries of the German winter in the way that a Christian ascetic might do the opposite. In and of themselves they were of no more interest to him than their conversation. His mission to identify them and neutralize them was a fiction. O. G. had sent him out to rid himself and the world of Stutzer. He was interested in these Arabs because they were on their way to Stutzer. Christopher wanted them to deliver a message to him. When they were close to the Mosque, he opened his clasp knife and uttered a loud hiss. This sound stopped the Arabs in their tracks. He was near enough to see them now, darker shapes in the seamless night, and they froze as if a shot had been fired into the pavement behind them and they were listening to the ricochet. They did not turn around.

  Christopher had rehearsed the words he wished to say to them. He pressed the point of the knife against the neck of the man on the left and said, “Take off your right glove and hold your hand behind you. I am going to give you something.”

  The man did as he was told. Christopher pressed the envelope into his hand. He said, “Give this to the skinny German you are going to see. Don’t fail.” The Palestinian took the envelope. Christopher said, “Go.” Then he walked backward into the dark, and when the door of the Mosque opened to admit them, he watched them go inside. Then he turned around and walked rapidly away.

  TEN

  1

  The ruins of No. 8 Prinz-Albrechtstrasse lay against the demarcation line just inside East Berlin. Christopher had already scouted the neighborhood from the other side of the line. Now he reconnoitered it again. There was little to see. The buildings had been bombed during the war, then further demolished afterward. The name of the street had been changed. Obliteration of the site had proved to be impossible, but almost nothing remained above ground. Underneath the rubble on both sides of the demarcation line, cells still existed in which Stutzer had done his work and Christopher and Hubbard and Rima—though never Lori, who on Heydrich’s orders was always kept in a room that had a window—had been held for questioning. No plaque or stone commemorated the wraiths that lingered here. It was because of these spirits, perhaps, that this neighborhood was so lightly patrolled, especially at night. Free Berlin was only steps away. It was possible to slip across the frontier in either direction without being challenged. Over the years, as part of his work, Christopher had done it a dozen times, sometimes in daylight, without being accosted or so far as he could tell, even noticed. Tonight he had stood in the ruins for the better part of an hour without seeing a single patrol.

  It was dark now and in the emptiness of the site Christopher felt the ghosts. Often, in dreams, he was one of them and met his parents again, and Paulus, and Rima and Dr. Kaltenbach and others he had known in his boyhood. Sometimes in dreams the phantoms of his childhood summers were also present. He had encountered them at the Harbor, the homestead of the Christophers and the Hubbards in the hills of western Massachusetts. Generations of the two families had been aware of these beings, whom they called the Cousins. There were many stories about the Cousins and Christopher had heard them all. One of them followed living relatives around the attic, breathing coldly on their necks. Another climbed the wooden back stairs on Christmas Eve, scuffling up and down, up and down. Some of them had actually been seen by the living—male ancestors in the uniforms of half a dozen American wars, a drowned maiden, a hanged Indian and a murdered bride, children lost to disease. He knew them all by name from family legend. All had died before their time and were believed to resent this. They were treated with affection by the living family, and the belief that these visitors so badly wanted some sort of relationship with the living was a poignant one. One patient ghost stood at the foot of Christopher’s bed night after night, waiting to be seen. Paul never opened his eyes and looked at it because he was sure that such an act would make the visitor visible, perhaps empower it in some unknowable way. As a child Christopher had formed the opinion that the dead were not happy.

  The sense of kinship with the dead was strong in Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, too. He fancied that he walked through an invisible crowd, rudely bumping into beings he could not see and who could not see him. He was sure that they were present, but they did not seem to notice him. He was irrelevant. They were waiting for something—who knew what?—but not him. He realized that these were wildly inappropriate thoughts for someone who did not believe in an afterworld, but he had them nevertheless. While he waited he was once again chilled to the bone, but that was the rain, the winter.

  Christopher chose a sheltered spot close to the demarcation line and waited. It was after midnight. His watch did not have a luminous dial and there was no light, so he wasn’t certain of the exact time. On the back of Yuri’s picture he had scribbled 1:13 as the time of the meeting. This was Soviet practice. Communist intelligence services nearly always held clandestine meetings at an illogically precise minute after or before the hour. Even the most stupid agent was expected to be exactly on time. It seemed to be a principle of Leninism that punctuality was the mother of discipline. In the early days of the revolution, when clocks were erected by the party on factories and collective farms though few workers and peasants could tell time, the tardy were sometimes shot as an example to the others. The Outfit and most other Western services met agents on the hour or half-hour, or at least hoped to do so. Agents were more often late than not, or appeared at the wrong time or on the wrong day or in the wrong place or not at all.

  Christopher did not expect Stutzer to be late. Depending on what he believed or suspected when he saw Yuri Kikorov’s picture and read the instructions on the back, he might not come, he might send someone else, he might surround himself with bodyguards. But whatever was going to happen would happen on time.

  At 1:13, prompt to the second, Stutzer or his decoy appeared, more sensed than seen. Whichever he was, the man paused as instructed on a certain spot and lit a cigarette. In the flare of the lighter Christopher saw a face that might be Stutzer’s, a marionette body that might be his. He smelled cigarette smoke, not his elegant tobacco of yesteryear but coarse stuff, stronger than a caporal, a cigarette for a street sweeper. No doubt this was part of Stutzer’s new persona. Just as Stutzer’s wardrobe was different, so were his habits—he now drank raw brandy in a worker’s bar instead of aged Martell from a crystal goblet, smoked ditch-digger’s tobacco instead of Dunhill’s. In his earlier life he had impersonated an officer and gentleman. Now he played the lowly worker. Alone, unprotected, slouched instead of soldierly, he waited, smoking the reeking cigarette as if he enjoyed it, inhaling deeply so that its coal glowed red.

  Christopher could make out not only Stutzer’s stork-like figure but al
so the outlines of the rubble and the reconstructed buildings across the street. He saw no movement. He himself did not move. He and Stutzer were no more than fifteen feet apart and if Christopher had wanted to assassinate him he could easily have done so. Stutzer could have killed him with equal convenience had he been able to see him. The fact that Stutzer had come alone, or seemingly alone, suggested … what? That against all logic he believed that he was meeting Yuri Kikorov? That he knew after seeing Christopher’s face earlier in the day that it was he who lay in wait for him? Christopher remembered Yuri’s words about Stutzer: He was so sly that he was predictable.

  Stutzer flicked away his cigarette. It spun across the rubble, shedding sparks. Christopher knew immediately that this was a diversion but before he could react he was caught in the beam of a flashlight. At first he heard no shots and because he was blinded by the flashlight, saw no muzzle flashes, but he heard bullets slam into the wall beside his head and then heard others ricocheting off the rubble. He heard the popped-cork sound of the silenced pistol.

  Christopher was unarmed except for his clasp knife. He dodged to his left, then to his right, in and out of the beam of the flashlight. He picked up a piece of masonry the size of a tennis ball and threw it hard at the flashlight. Stutzer fired twice more and Christopher felt one of these rounds strike his head. He saw stars as if he had been punched and felt warm blood gushing from the wound. He was conscious but his ears rang from the impact of the bullet and his head filled with pain, as if pain were a syrup being poured into his skull. He was running straight at Stutzer. This surprised him. He had no memory of having willed his body to do this. Despite the ringing in his ears he heard the sound of a magazine being ejected and that of another being snapped into place.