Christopher's Ghosts

by Charles McCarry

  OTHER NOVELS BY CHARLES MCCARRY

  Old Boys

  Lucky Bastard

  Shelley’s Heart

  Second Sight

  The Bride of the Wilderness

  The Last Supper

  The Better Angels

  The Secret Lovers

  The Tears of Autumn

  The Miernik Dossier

  Copyright

  First published in the United States in 2007 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  Woodstock & New York

  WOODSTOCK:

  One Overlook Drive

  Woodstock, NY 12498

  www.overlookpress.com

  [for individual orders, bulk and special sales, contact our Woodstock office]

  NEW YORK:

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  Copyright © 2007 by Charles McCarry

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN: 978-1-4683-0028-4

  For my sons

  Contents

  Other Novels by Charles McCarry

  Copyright

  Part One 1939

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Part Two 1959

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  PART ONE

  1939

  ONE

  1

  In the summer of his sixteenth year, in the last weeks before the second World War began, Paul Christopher kept seeing the same girl in the Tiergarten. She was about his age, maybe a little older. She was slender, dark-eyed, pale, and even in sunlight her hair was black with no hint of brown. She wore it in a long plait. She dressed in blue—a short coat, skirts that swung as she walked, white knee socks, sometimes a beret. She never smiled or made a gesture. She seemed to be watching him, just as he was watching her. Paul, dribbling a soccer ball or sailing a model boat or reading in the sun, would look up and there she would be, close enough for him to see her face but too far away for conversation. They would catch each other’s eyes, blue gazing into brown. It was always Paul who looked away first. When he looked again, she would be gone like a ghost. Once or twice he took a step toward her. She immediately turned around and walked away without so much as a look over her shoulder. She was sad, or so Paul thought from a distance. He was reading Balzac that summer. The girl reminded him of Victorine in Le Père Goriot. She was pretty. If she had been happy, she would have been beautiful.

  Like Paul, the girl was always alone. He had no friends his own age in Berlin. Until he was ten he had gone to school with other boys, but when the dictatorship came to power his parents sent him to school in Switzerland. His father was an American. Paul traveled on an American passport, but because his mother was German and he had been born in Germany, his nationality was an open question to the authorities.

  Twice this summer—it was now early July—the secret police had summoned all three Christophers to its headquarters at No. 8 Prinz-Albrechtstrasse to inquire about Paul’s case.

  A major named Stutzer recorded their answers in the three thick files containing the information that the secret police had gathered on them so far. Because he asked the same questions over and over again, as if they had not already been answered, it took Stutzer more than two hours to cover three or four questions. Why was Paul not a member of the Hitler Youth as all German boys his age were required to be? Did he associate with the decadent Jews and communists who frequented his parents’ apartment? Was he allowed to listen to their treasonous talk, to their insults to the Leader? Why had he been sent to a school where French was spoken, where hatred of the Reich was taught as part of the curriculum, where history was falsified, where decadence was the order of the day? Why was he not attending a German school?

  Paul’s father refused to answer these questions on grounds that they were not questions but provocations, and that they were irrelevant because Paul was an American citizen who could not, under the laws of his own country, take an oath to serve and obey a foreign potentate—that was the term he used—without automatically losing his citizenship. Hubbard Christopher’s mannerisms were American, and worse than that he had acquired them at an Episcopalian prep school and at Yale College. He exuded untouchability. He looked amused when being questioned by Stutzer, as if he had bought a ticket to a play that was so bad that it was interesting. It was hard to imagine a more dangerous look to have on your face when visiting No. 8 Prinz-Albrechtstrasse.

  The last time they were interviewed, Stutzer had lost his temper. “Whatever your theories on nationality,” he shouted, “you must not assume, Herr Christopher, that you can laugh at our questions and not be asked harder questions that will bring you under even deeper suspicion. Remember that.”

  The Christophers were suspected of crimes against the Reich, and they had in fact helped several enemies of the dictatorship to escape from Germany. There was no real need for the secret police to prove these charges. On his own authority Major Stutzer could send them to a concentration camp or even summarily execute them, but for reasons of his own he wanted to prolong the questioning, to maneuver them into full confessions. His interest in the Christophers, especially in Paul’s mother, was deeply personal. They had a history. Always Stutzer’s eyes were fixed on her, staring hard, when he fired his questions and threats, as if he was deeply interested in the impression he was making on her. He rarely looked at Hubbard or Paul.

  The Geheime Staatspolizei, or secret state police, abbreviated as Gestapo, have been imagined by later generations as a collection of freaks, but in fact they looked like any other Germans. Stutzer was a recognizable type—bony, erect, triangular face, long nose, thin wet pink lips, quick mind. He spoke educated German. He was not, however, educated in the sense that Lori Christopher was educated. She spoke German, French and English with equal fluency. She knew Latin and ancient Greek and had read the greatest books in all those languages, she recognized almost any European musical work immediately and played the piano expertly, she knew painting and sculpture as well as she knew music, she had memorized the poetry of Goethe and other giants of German letters, she remembered mathematics through the calculus. Stutzer had no need for such a body of knowledge. As Hubbard said, secret policemen were like all tribal peoples—they might not know a lot, but they all knew the same things. The Christophers called Major Stutzer Major Dandy because Dandy was what his surname meant in English and because he was almost comically dapper.

  Because the questions asked by the secret police were always the same, even when they seemed different, Paul thought of other things while they were being asked and answered, or not answered. Mostly he thought about the girl in the Tiergarten. Why was she always there? Why was she always alone? In his experience, girls traveled in pairs, one of them pretty, the other one plain. Why was she watching him? Why did she always wear blue? Why did she never give him a sign apart from her entrances and exits? Who was she?

  A day or two after an interview at secret police headquarters, Paul was flying a kite in the park when a half-dozen Hitler Youth appeared. They wore campaign caps, brown shirts, neckties, ornamental belt buckles, shorts, knives on their belts. Paul was in a large open space. He saw them coming a long
way off. Because there was nothing else to do except run, he went on flying his kite, a large box kite that he had made himself. The Youth advanced in a column of twos, led by their section leader, marching in step, ankles turning on the rough ground, apprentice soldiers on serious business.

  Just then, at the edge of a grove of trees, the dark-haired girl appeared. One moment she was not there and the next moment she was, as if someone had turned on a magic lantern and projected her image onto a screen. She stood beside a large linden tree and watched. The section leader, whose shoulder boards bore a single crosswise narrow stripe instead of being plain like the other boys’, shouted orders to halt, make a left face, and stand at ease. He then marched over to Paul.

  “Papers!” he shouted. He had a voice that had recently broken, grave blue eyes under thick smudged eyebrows, a large straight nose, shiny patches of healed acne, a thin neck. Behind the bully stood his audience. Paul ignored him. He had met others like him in three different countries. He had his own instructions on how to deal with the type. “Don’t argue, don’t hesitate,” his American boxing instructor, Fighting Jim Cerruti, had advised. “Feint with the left and then hit the bum on the nose with a straight right hand. Hard. You gotta break his nose with the first punch, understand?”

  “Papers!” the leader said again, louder this time, and with a pinker face.

  Again Paul ignored him. His kite was climbing. He paid out string. The wind was strong at the kite’s altitude and the taut string quivered. The leader made a movement. He had a knife in his hand. He cut the string. The kite escaped and climbed rapidly, blowing east toward the River Spree. With the severed string still in his right hand, Paul faked with his left, then punched the leader on the nose with a straight right.

  It was a short, hard punch, delivered with a lot of force because Paul’s feet were already set as a result of his work with the kite. He felt the cartilage split under his fist, saw blood fly, saw the leader’s cap fly off. The knife spun away, nickeled hilt glinting in the sun. The leader fell to his knees, hands to his face, blood flowing onto his brown shirt and necktie. He shouted a strangled command, his voice breaking. The others attacked. There was nothing to do but fight. Paul had no chance against six attackers even if they were unskilled. He knew this, but he also knew that he could not escape, so he stood his ground. He landed a few punches, drawing more blood, before he was subdued. Two of the boys held his arms behind his back while the others took turns punching him in the face and stomach. Paul kicked his attackers until they threw him to the ground and began to kick him. With no adult present to call them off, Paul thought they might kill him, but before that happened they wore themselves out. They were short of breath, panting.

  The leader, nose still bleeding, delivered several kicks of his own.

  “Next time obey orders!” he said. “This will teach you to answer questions.”

  The Youth fell into formation and marched away. Paul knew that his beating had not lasted as long as it seemed. He understood, vaguely, that the leader and his detachment had been messengers from Stutzer. Deputizing for the secret police was a great honor for these boys. Paul lay on his back and looked upward into the cloudy sky, wondering where his kite was now. Far to the east, he thought, perhaps over Hellersdorf or even beyond. He had been kicked in the stomach, in the groin, in the back, in the kidneys. Every bruise throbbed. He realized that he was losing consciousness.

  Fingertips touched his face. The girl was kneeling beside him. He revived a little. The pain was worse. She said, “You’re conscious. Good. Is anything broken?” He thought, How would I know? but said nothing. He didn’t want to say the wrong thing and frighten her away. Up close she had a wonderful face—dark liquid eyes, full lips, perfect teeth, pale skin that was nevertheless faintly brown, as if another complexion lay beneath the one on the surface. She was speaking English, not German. She had an accent like his mother’s, barely detectable and unmistakably Prussian. She had gone to good schools.

  In German Paul said, “I don’t think anything is broken.”

  In English she said, “I speak no German.”

  Paul said, “Why not?”

  “Look at me, then think about it,” she said. “Stay here. Don’t move.”

  She leaped to her feet and ran. After a moment she returned with a water-soaked handkerchief and began cleaning his face. Her touch was gentle but efficient. She concentrated deeply on what she was doing. Paul smelled blood, wet linen and the water it contained, the girl. Especially her hair. He put a hand in front of his face to stop her from continuing the first aid and said, “Thank you, but I should go now.”

  “Go where? No one will help you. They will take one look at you and know you have been beaten up and think you’re a Jew or a Bolshevik.”

  “They can think what they like.”

  “My father is a doctor,” she said. “I’ll take you to him.”

  Paul got to his feet. Standing up, he was overcome by dizziness and nausea. When he leaned over to vomit, it seemed to him that he was falling into a bottomless abyss. His legs would not obey him. He lost his balance and fell. He tried to get up again but couldn’t. He felt the girl’s hands on his arm, guiding him.

  The girl said, “You have a concussion. That’s a serious matter. Let me take you to my father.”

  “Does your father speak German?”

  “He wouldn’t dream of speaking anything else,” she replied.

  2

  The father who was a doctor determined that none of Paul’s bones had been fractured. However, four lower ribs had been broken. Paul, stoic up to that moment, shrieked when the doctor poked each of them with a stiff forefinger.

  Better the lower than the upper ones, the doctor told Paul. The upper ones, when shattered, could pierce the lungs or the liver or the spleen. “The ribs will be painful for a few weeks but there is no treatment, they must heal themselves,” the doctor said. “Try not to make sudden movements. No sports for a month. You must make yourself cough fifty times every day.” He demonstrated the deep, phlegm-clearing cough that he was prescribing. “Now you,” he said.

  Paul coughed. The pain was excruciating. This showed on Paul’s face. He gasped and seized his side. The doctor said, “Yes, it will be painful at first. But it is absolutely essential to clear the lungs. Otherwise they can become congested and that could be fatal. You could drown from the fluid in your own lungs. Drown! So cough! Ten times when you wake up, ten times at mid-morning, ten times at noon, ten times in the afternoon, ten times before you go to bed. Do you ever wake in the night?”

  “Sometimes, not often.”

  “If you do, put your face in the pillow and cough ten more times before you go back to sleep.”

  The doctor found no other sign of internal injury. The ribs had not splintered and punctured the lungs. The spleen seemed to be intact. The liver felt normal.

  “Nevertheless you must be watchful,” the doctor said. He spoke very rapidly, as he did everything else. He spoke in a mumble, something rarely heard in the old Germany where everyone was exhorted to speak to strangers at the top of their lungs. “If you notice blood in your urine or stool,” he continued, “or if you cough up blood or bleed from your anus, penis, nose, or ears, you must go to a doctor immediately. At once, without delay. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Herr Doktor.”

  “Herr Professor Doktor. Your family has a regular doctor?”

  “Yes, Herr Professor Doktor.”

  This doctor was a small lean man with a bald crown with two puffs of graying black hair growing on either side of it. He was sure of his skills, unsmiling, abrupt in his speech. It was obvious that he expected meek obedience from his patients. Paul thought that he was angry about something—an injustice, an insult—at the center of his being. Whatever it was, he quivered under the weight of it. Paul had seen this condition in some of his parents’ friends and in certain of the brainier masters at his school.

  “Sit up,” the doctor said.
/>   Paul obeyed.

  The doctor cut several long strips of adhesive tape, then taped Paul’s ribs, sternum to spine, on each side. He pulled the tape very tight. It was a painful process. Paul did not make a sound or a face.

  “It’s all right to gasp,” the doctor said when he had finished one side. “We’re alone here. I know it hurts.”

  Paul nodded.

  “You’re good at hiding your feelings,” the doctor said, cutting tape for the other side of Paul’s chest. “That’s a useful quality in life, as you will find.”

  Paul could think of no answer to this that would not be disrespectful, so he said nothing.

  The doctor said, “Did you cry when you were a baby?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Your parents didn’t tell you?”

  “No.”

  “Then you must have cried. Or maybe you didn’t but they thought it would be bad for your character for you to know that. Do you think the Leader cried when he was a baby?”

  “I never imagined that he ever was a baby, Herr Professor Doktor.”

  “Ah, a wit! Do you think it wise to make such jokes, young man?”

  “There’s nothing funny about the Leader, Herr Professor Doktor.”

  The doctor looked up. He was enjoying this conversation. “Then you are a loyal German even if you are a wit?”

  “I’m not a German, sir.”

  “You’re not? You certainly sound like one. And look like one. They could paint you in the uniform of a hussar and hang you in a museum. If you’re not German, what are you?”

  The pain of having his ribs strapped made it difficult for Paul to hear what the doctor was saying, much less answer.

  “American,” Paul said.

  “What luck. How did that happen?”

  “My father is an American, my mother German.”

  “Your mother doesn’t mind your being an American instead of a German?”