As the Peugeot sped away, fragments of smashed chrome fell off it and rang on the concrete. A policeman blew his whistle. Down the roadway more whistles sounded, shrill and thin. Overhead, Christopher’s jet climbed steeply, losing the lights of Paris as it passed through a layer of clouds.
When Webster, running clumsily, reached Molly, he saw that she had lost her boots; a porter, standing thirty feet away, picked one up, as if to return it to her.
A shaft of white bone, jagged at the end, had punctured the skin of Molly’s thigh. She lay on her face, her hair thrown forward, her neck bare. The blood ran out of her body in a long thick ribbon, meandering among the cobbles of the gutter and collecting in a pool against the curb.
She wore a ring on every finger of her outflung hand, Christopher’s gifts.
Hubbard
One
— 1 —
The first link in the chain of events that led to the murder of Molly Benson, an innocent young woman who happened to love Paul Christopher, was forged on an August afternoon in 1923, on the island of Rügen, before either of the lovers was born. On that day, a young American named Hubbard Christopher, Paul’s father, walked up a steep path toward Berwick, the home of a Prussian family called Buecheler. Hubbard Christopher, then twenty-one years old, intended to pay a courtesy call on Colonel Baron Paulus von Buecheler, the current occupant of Berwick. Forty years before, Buecheler had been at school in Bonn with Hubbard Christopher’s father, and the two men, both soldiers, had kept up a lifelong friendship.
As Hubbard approached Berwick, tramping through a forest of ancient beeches, he felt a peaceful delight in the natural beauty of the island. There was a leafy scent in the air, the sea was a deep painterly blue. For the past six months, Hubbard had been living in Berlin, but he had grown up in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts and he was happiest in country places. He attracted a certain amount of attention. Hubbard was six feet four inches tall, a great height in those days even for an American, and according to the German idea, he was not dressed for exercise. He wore a blazer and flannels, white buckskin shoes, and a straw hat. The Germans he encountered on the path were more suitably attired in hiking boots, short leather pants, and open shirts. All possessed rustic walking sticks with sharp metal points, and the path, riddled by these implements, looked as if a myriad of birds had hopped along it, leaving innumerable tracks. Many of the Germans bore rucksacks. Hubbard’s only burden was a parcel tied with gold string. The Germans strode purposefully among the beeches, chests heaving as they did breathing exercises. Hubbard sauntered, an expression of good humor suffusing his long, horsey face.
When Berwick came into view, Hubbard recognized it at once; he had seen the house often in photographs. Nevertheless, he was surprised by its appearance. It was smaller than he had imagined, a simple square structure in the Italian Renaissance style. Though he admired its chaste beauty, Hubbard would not have called it a castle; it seemed smaller than many Massachusetts houses. The Buechelers did not call it a castle, either; they always referred to it simply as Berwick; it was the local people who called it Schloss Berwick: nobility lived within, and life was more orderly if there was a castle with a noble in residence, a badge of rank against which everyone else’s position could be measured.
Hubbard had been invited for coffee at five o’clock. He was precisely on time. The front door of Berwick was flung open and Paulus von Buecheler came out to greet him. Pebbles crunched beneath his brogans as he marched down the gravel path. Paulus was a shiny man: bald head, shaved cheeks, polished old shoes, one watchful intelligent blue eye, a glittering monocle covering the other eye.
“Christopher?”
His hand, gripping Hubbard’s, was rough and strong.
“Yes,” Hubbard said. “I’m delighted to meet you, Herr Colonel Baron.”
“ ‘Herr Colonel Baron’? After all those birthday presents I sent you?”
“Uncle Paulus, then.”
“That’s better.” Paulus von Buecheler pumped Hubbard’s hand again and gazed upward into his face. Paulus’s belted tweed jacket fitted like a military tunic, and he had a loud soldierly voice. He was clearly pleased by Hubbard’s punctuality. Gripping Hubbard’s elbow, he set off for the house.
“You speak like a Prussian,” he said. “You can’t have learned German from your father. He had a terrible Rhinelander accent.”
“I had a Prussian tutor.”
“Very wise of your father. Now you must meet my wife and my niece.”
Paulus stood aside, gesturing for Hubbard to go through the open door. Once inside, Hubbard saw that Berwick was larger than it appeared to be from the outside, and this camouflage pleased his Yankee soul. The entrance hall, thirty feet square, rose to the roof. Hubbard paused in the middle of a frayed Persian carpet and looked around him. Boars’ heads and suits of armor decorated the walls. A large Flemish tapestry, bathed in sunlight, hung on the landing of a double staircase. Hubbard gazed at it, transfixed.
“Would you like to go up?” Paulus asked.
“Yes, if you don’t mind.”
On the landing, Hubbard examined the tapestry more closely. A unicorn, its horn in profile, gazed over its shoulder into the room. Behind the unicorn, elephants, giraffes, leopards, and barnyard animals all grazed together in a field of wildflowers. Hubbard smiled in pleasure at the childlike innocence of the dead weaver who had made the picture.
A female voice said, in English, “Do you like the tapestry?”
Hubbard looked up and saw a gloriously pretty girl of eighteen descending the stairs. She was small, with delicate feet and ankles. She had auburn hair and a face that only a German girl could have: utterly smooth creamy skin, unblemished and unwrinkled, with the nose, the mouth, the perfect line of the jaw fresh from the sculptor.
“It’s wonderful,” Hubbard replied.
“My niece, Baronesse Hannelore von Buecheler,” Paulus said.
“Lori, in the family,” the girl said, extending her hand.
Hubbard had never met such impetuously informal Prussians. The skin on Lori’s palm felt the way the skin on her neck looked: fresh, firm, untouched. She had very large gray eyes, heavily lashed. These looked gravely into Hubbard’s face.
“Do you know about tapestries?” Lori asked, continuing to speak English. She did so with a slight Scottish intonation; Hubbard supposed that she had learned the language from a nanny. Perhaps the nanny had come from Edinburgh. He imagined the poor woman, happy enough with the Buechelers, caring for this lovely child, then caught in Germany by the war: Hubbard often reconstructed whole biographies from the single toe bone of such fossil hints; he was a writer.
“You learned English from a Scot?” Hubbard asked.
“From my mother, who was a Scot. We were discussing the tapestry.”
“I know very little about tapestries,” Hubbard said.
“This one is from Arras, sixteenth century.”
“A mille fleurs? Not late fifteenth?”
Lori gave him a sharper look. “Perhaps so. My grandfather brought it home after Sedan in 1870; he wasn’t an art expert.”
“Hubbard speaks German,” Paulus said.
Lori changed languages. “You live in Berlin, I hear,” she said. “Why?”
“It’s a good place to work.”
“What sort of work are you doing in Berlin?”
“I am trying to write.”
Lori von Buecheler smiled for the first time, eyes shining, lips pressed together. “To write?” she said.
In the library, Paulus’s wife put cream and sugar into Hubbard’s coffee and offered him a plate of pastries. Hubbard had brought the pastries from Horcher’s restaurant in Berlin, wrapped in the elegant package he had carried through the beech forest.
“All the way from Berlin! How clever of you to get Horcher’s to give you these wonderful pastries,” said Hilde von Buecheler. “However did you persuade them?”
“I have an account at Horcher’s,” he said.
>
The uncomfortable chair, upholstered in horsehair, on which Hubbard was sitting was too small for him. He squirmed. Lori’s amused eyes registered his discomfort. Paulus took an éclair.
“An account at a restaurant?” he said. “Amazing.”
“Is that unusual?” Hubbard asked. “A man I met, a Russian, advised me to make a deposit of twenty dollars on account. It was a very good investment; I eat at Horcher’s every day and never seem to get to the bottom of that twenty-dollar bill.”
Paulus laughed. “You’re not likely to get to the bottom of your twenty dollars, either,” he said.
The summer of 1923 was the time of the great inflation in Germany. The Reichsmark, before the war, had been exchanged at four to one American dollar. Now, nine years later, one dollar was worth two trillion Reichsmarks. An egg, which had sold for eight pfennigs in 1914, cost eighty billion marks. The price of a single match was 900 million marks.
Paulus cut a plum tart with knife and fork and ate it all up in a matter of seconds, like a soldier in the field wolfing his rations between sorties. “Your father’s pocket money, if we had it today, would probably buy Horcher’s,” Paulus said. “Kitchen, dining rooms, silverware, secret recipes, pastry. He had two dollars a week, in 1885. The wealth of the Indies.”
Hilde von Buecheler blinked. Talk of the inflation made her nervous; beneath her marcelled steel-gray hair, the baroness had the profile of a falcon, but she was a timid woman who had lost three sons in the war and feared to lose what was left of her family. This year the Buechelers had come to Rügen from Berlin even before the start of the summer, in order to escape the madness that had seized the city. People, friends of the family, not strangers, were selling everything—paintings, sculpture, jewels, even their houses—for a handful of American dollars. Families lived and, Hilde supposed, died by the valuta, the hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute rise and fall of the exchange rate against the dollar. Near the Potsdamer Platz, Hilde had seen a working-class woman with a laundry basket filled with money, billion-mark notes, going into a bakery to buy one day’s bread. The woman was distracted by some sort of commotion in the street and put down the basket to watch. Thieves stole the basket, dumping the money onto the sidewalk. It was a windy day; the money fluttered along the pavement and nobody bothered to pick it up. That night Hilde dreamed of banknotes blowing in the wind along the Unter den Linden during a parade, drifting against the boots of the soldiers like snow, whispering. Before her husband could finish his pastry and take up anew the topic of inflation, she changed the subject.
To Hubbard, who had just taken a mouthful of éclair, she said, “Your father fell in battle?”
Hubbard chewed rapidly and swallowed his morsel of crust and custard.
“Not exactly,” he said, getting out the words just as Paulus put down his knife and fork, making the china plate ring. “My father went out with a cavalry patrol in Mexico, was captured by Pancho Villa’s men, and executed by a firing squad. He was wearing civilian clothes. The Mexicans thought he was a spy.”
“Yes. Unfortunate,” said Paulus. “Tell me, Hubbard, have you finished university?”
“I left a bit early.”
“And why have you come to Berlin? Is it such a good place to be a writer?”
“Berlin is a very cheap place to live” Hubbard said.
“That’s your only reason for being there?”
“No, not the only reason,” Hubbard replied. “Also, I’m interested in disorder.”
Paulus snorted with laughter. “You will find a great deal to interest you in Berlin, then,” he said. “Our money is worth nothing, our victories have been erased from the pages of history, and the country is being run by a pack of Socialists.”
“It’s all very sad,” said Hilde.
“On the contrary, it is an excellent thing,” said Paulus. “You will not find many people in Berlin who will tell you the truth. Five years ago, all the people who now believe in nothing believed in the Prussian orthodoxy. That orthodoxy evaporated in 1918. A new orthodoxy will arise; human beings cannot live without an orthodoxy.”
Hilde took her husband’s plate from his hand. She smiled nervously at Hubbard. “If you are interested in art, you must look at the pictures,” she said. “Perhaps Lori would like to show you.”
“If he is interested in art,” Lori said, “he certainly doesn’t want to see a lot of portraits of old men in uniform. We’ll go for a walk instead.”
“Excellent,” Paulus said. “Where are your bags?”
“I left them at the station.”
“We’ll send for them. You’ve brought walking clothes? Do you sail? You must stay for several days.”
“That’s very kind of you, but I must go back to Berlin. . . .”
“Berlin in August? Nonsense. You’ll be company for Lori. She hardly ever sees a man who has all his parts. Only Americans have them, it seems.”
Paulus, erect in his tweed suit, threw his old shoulders back a fraction of an inch farther, a suggestion to Hubbard to stand a bit straighter. Americans did not teach their children to command the muscles of their own bodies; they permitted them to slouch.
“Lori is also interested in disorder,” Paulus said. “You will have a great deal to agree upon.” He smiled fondly at the girl. “Lori is an example of the adventurous new woman,” he said. “Fortunately, she’s pretty enough to be able to say whatever comes into her head and be forgiven for it. That’s in her genes—the frankness, not the forgiveness.”
Hilde had been waiting her turn to speak. “We’d be very happy if you’d stay through the weekend,” she said. “The weather will be fine. Young people should be outdoors, Lori is taking the train back to Berlin on Monday. Perhaps you could travel with her.”
Hubbard looked once again into Lori’s huge gray eyes. “I’d be very glad to accept,” he said.
— 2 —
Walking swiftly, swinging her arms, inhaling and exhaling deeply so as to derive maximum benefit from her exercise, Lori led Hubbard through the forest. Diagonal shafts of watery seaside light fell through the lacy branches of the beech trees. Had Lori been less pretty, Hubbard would have been amused by her energy, so solemn and Prussian, but instead he found her endearing, a maiden in uniform. Like the other Germans, she was properly equipped. Before leaving Berwick, she had put on walking boots and thick woolen knee socks and a leather jacket. Hubbard, in his tea-party clothes, ambled along beside her, stealing glances at her profile. He had spent his childhood playing in the steep Berkshire woods, full of thorns and wild berries and wild game. By comparison, this forest—trees planted at intervals of thirty feet, rank on rank—was like a park. Nothing at home was so well kept outside of cemeteries.
“Does anything live in these woods?” Hubbard asked.
“Stags,” Lori said, marching along. “Wild boar. My father used to bring me on boar hunts when I was a child. They speared them, you know. It was tremendously exciting.”
“You don’t go on hunts now?”
“Not since I was twelve.”
“Why?”
“It’s dangerous for everyone after a female reaches puberty. There is always the possibility that one’s flow will start unexpectedly. The boar scents the blood and charges at the wrong moment.”
Hubbard lost step for an instant. He had never before discussed menstruation with a woman; it had never occurred to him that such a conversation was possible. Fortunately, Lori displayed no desire to pursue this mysterious subject. She had stopped doing her breathing exercises, but still she strode along, straight into the forest. She seemed to have an objective in mind.
“Your father is also dead?” Hubbard said. He did not know why he had asked such a question; maybe the bluntness of his hosts was contagious. Lori was not startled.
“Yes, dead,” she said. “Since 1918. Like your father, he was murdered by fools. A gang of Bolsheviks beat him to death in the Tiergarten. He was out for a Sunday walk. They tore off his epaulets, broke his swor
d, trampled on his decorations, the entire ritual.”
“Why?”
“They were killing officers that day. It’s said that he laughed at them. It’s the curse of the Buechelers, blurting out the truth and laughing at the wrong time.”
They had arrived at the shore of an unruffled pond, deep in the wood.
“Here is the Borg, as it’s called,” Lori said. “We can sit down for a moment and look at the water.”
Old stones lay scattered near the edge of the dark water. Lori sat on one of them and waited for Hubbard to take his place on another. As he settled his bony body on a stone, Lori grinned at him.
“Is this more comfortable than the horsehair chair?” she asked.
“Considerably,” said Hubbard.
“There is a reason why the furniture at Berwick is so uncomfortable,” Lori said. “For forty years there were not many visitors. In the summer of 1860, Bartholomäus von Buecheler, the son of the builder of Berwick, invited Otto von Bismarck to dinner. Bartholomäus adored Bismarck’s wife, Johanna, because she was a woman who had absolutely no sense of humor and was therefore indecently amusing. He sat himself next to her and got her onto the subject of adultery. Bartholomäus had heard that Bismarck wrote letters to his wife about his love affairs, and he wanted to confirm the existence of these dispatches from the field. After an illuminating conversation, during which a lot of champagne was drunk, Bartholomäus called a question down the table to Bismarck. ‘Prince, your wife has just been telling me that in your letters from France you wrote her every detail of your love affair in Biarritz last summer with that Russian woman, Ekaterina Orlova,’ he bellowed. ‘An excellent principle. Now that you are back in your wife’s bed, do you write to Orlova as well, describing your conjugal exertions?’ Bismarck was an egomaniac, as you may know; insults drove him into fits of hysteria. He mistook Bartholomäus’s joke for an insult and threw one of his tantrums. Without taking another sip of wine, he rose from the table and dashed out of the house. On the way, he tipped over all the suits of armor in the hall; you can see the dents in some of them still. Thereafter, the Buechelers dined alone at Berwick until official mourning for Bismarck ended.”
The Last Supper Page 2