Christopher's Ghosts

by Charles McCarry

  “She and my father decided before I was born that I would be an American.” Paul did not know why he was telling this strange little man about whom he knew nothing things that no one outside the family had a right to know.

  “Why did they make such a decision?” the doctor asked.

  “I wasn’t there.”

  “But maybe a fortune teller was and she saw the future.”

  Paul said nothing. In fact there was a fortune teller in his family’s life, a friend of his mother’s. She lived with the Christophers when she was in Berlin. Perhaps the doctor was collecting tidbits for the secret police. Living in the Reich made you think such thoughts even when you hadn’t been beaten within an inch of your life in the last half-hour.

  The doctor finished taping. He had already put iodine on Paul’s skin where it had been broken. “There,” he said. “Done. Your parents will be surprised when they see you. You live nearby?”

  “Not far,” said Paul, cautiously.

  The doctor sat down at a desk, unscrewed the cap of a thick black fountain pen, and wrote for a minute or two with great speed. When he finished, he blotted the paper, folded it, and handed it to Paul.

  “This is for your parents,” he said. “It describes your injuries and the treatment. If you have severe pain, not twinges but pain, take one aspirin dissolved in water every four hours.”

  “And your fee?”

  The doctor waved away the clumsy words. “No need.”

  “Thank you, Herr Professor Doctor.”

  “Since you’re an American you can dispense with the honorifics. In your country, I understand, you call doctors ‘doc.’”

  “That’s true, doctor. I will say goodbye now.”

  “Let me ask you a question before you go,” the doctor said. “Why did they do it?”

  “Who? Do what?”

  “Have you forgotten? The Youth. Why did they beat you up?”

  “They didn’t explain.”

  The doctor bit his lower lip, nodded his head. “Then all is in order,” he said. “Nothing has changed.”

  3

  After Paul told them the story of the beating and his medical treatment, his parents read the doctor’s letter, written on plain stationery. It was unsigned.

  Lori said, “What is this doctor’s name?”

  “It was never mentioned.”

  “No diplomas on the wall, no name on the door?”

  “His office was small, too small for the furnishings.”

  “What did his daughter look like?”

  “Dark hair, pale skin, pretty. My age, I think. She was alone.”

  “Anything else?”

  Lori knew that there must be something else. And there was—or was there? He had seen the girl at a distance. He saw no need to mention these sightings, or to list the small details of her appearance that he had memorized so that he could reassemble her in his imagination when she was not present.

  He said, “She spoke English to me.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s against her principles to speak German, she said.”

  “Her father must be a Jew, hiding his professional life,” Lori said. “We have put the poor man in danger.”

  Under the Nuremberg Laws dealing with the legal status of Jews in the Reich, Jewish doctors were permitted to treat Jewish patients only. Treating an Aryan patient, even in an emergency, was a serious offense.

  “The girl should not have taken you to her father,” Lori said.

  Hubbard said, “Let’s not assume too much. They may not be Jewish at all.”

  “She had a reason,” Paul said. “She told me that no one would help me if they saw me beaten up, because they would think I was a Jew. Or a Communist.”

  Lori looked steadily at her son for a long moment. “Sensible girl,” she said. “I’d like to meet her.”

  Paul told himself that he would never let that happen. His parents would be a danger to her. The authorities knew too much about them and wanted to know more. The thought of the girl being questioned in No. 8 Prinz-Albrechtstrasse by Stutzer, just the two of them alone in that airless cubicle, was already unbearable, though he did not even know her name.

  Hubbard called the novel he was writing The Experiment. No matter what happened on any particular day, he sat down at his writing desk and recorded the whole experience as fiction. The result was a new kind of novel in which nothing was made up—a truth novel. Its action consisted of the minutiae of his daily life, the characters were his family and friends. It was a lampoon of the National Socialists and the world they were creating. It was a supremely dangerous document to have lying about the house but it was his work. It was art.

  Hubbard did not write about Paul’s beating in that day’s chapter of his novel-in-progress. It was too dangerous. Even Hubbard in his zeal to sacrifice everything for art understood this. Stutzer had made it plain that he intended to frighten them, to break them, to ruin them by threatening Paul. Hubbard said, Secret police work is not complicated: find the weakness, get your finger in it, make notes.

  Hubbard and Lori and everyone else they encountered appeared in Hubbard’s manuscript under their own names, including even certain National Socialists they ran into while out on the town or at dinner parties given by conservative friends. Lori was distantly related to some of them and she might as well have been related to them all. They had grown up together, they did not judge each other, at least not yet. To them, Lori’s political passions were an eccentricity, like her marriage to an orphaned American who wrote novels because he had no property and no prospect of ever having any. Lori was a romantic. It was in her blood. She was forgiven almost everything by those who knew her family because she was beautiful and intelligent and her heroic father had been killed by political fools. Her weakness for the dregs of society notwithstanding, she was a member of an ancient family, descended from ancestors who had fought and dined with Charlemagne during the First Reich. Her friends thought that she was immune from the dictatorship no matter how foolishly she behaved. They believed that they were all immune. People like themselves always had been. But both Hubbard and Lori knew by now that nobody except the Leader himself was immune from the new justice.

  Hubbard had friends of his own in Berlin, American friends. His connections to them were pretty much the same as Lori’s to her own cohort. That evening Hubbard and Lori were dining at the house of a friend, O. G. Sackett, who was the first secretary of the American embassy. With his dark suits and white shirts he always wore a pink necktie. He and Hubbard were connected by the long-ago marriage of great-aunts and -uncles. They had been roommates and teammates in boarding school, they belonged to the same secret society at Yale. They were as much bound together by a web of blood and oaths as any two Germans ever had been. Hubbard’s friend was called O. G. because these were the first two initials of his given names, Osborn George, and because his strongest cussword was “Oh, golly!” Later in life, when he commanded thousands of Americans and others during the Cold War, the initials would come to mean “Old Gentleman.” He was an honorary godfather to Paul Christopher, a duty he took seriously.

  “O. G. is our best hope,” Hubbard said.

  “A very faint hope,” Lori said. “They’ll never let Paul out of the country now. He has assaulted the Hitler Youth.”

  “They assaulted him first.”

  “True but meaningless.”

  “There are ways to deal with these matters, Lori.”

  “You think they don’t know all about us? All about Paul? Their noses are everywhere.”

  This was also true. Hubbard did not understand why they had not yet been arrested. Lori understood only too well, but the secret was not one she could share with her husband.

  O. G.’s house was not far away, so they walked from their apartment in Charlottenburg. They did not trust taxi drivers or people who rode on streetcars, or even their own car in which they were alone, because it might be wired by the resourceful technicians of the secr
et police. Only in the open air, speaking in whispers, could they talk freely. Lori was convinced, in fact she knew, that microphones had been hidden in the walls of their flat. She had heard the sounds of them being installed in the walls they shared with the loyal Germans who lived in adjoining apartments. Germans who always before had been delighted to know and say hello to the charming Frau Christopher now passed her on the stairs in silence, with eyes averted. She had not confided this information to Hubbard, either. It could only lead to questions that would be overheard by the listeners. Hubbard was irrational about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He thought that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution applied to him no matter where he found himself in the world. He had a right to say, to write, to publish anything that came into his head. No one had a right to eavesdrop on him, especially no foreign government. Damn their microphones.

  Rank and lineage notwithstanding, several of Lori’s ancestors, some quite recent, had been beheaded. Until recently the guillotine had still been the punishment of choice for treason in Germany, and she knew that many people, including some no older than Paul, had lost their heads for less serious crimes than punching a Hitler Youth on the nose when he was on official Reich business. Outwardly Lori was the picture of confidence and calm. But she dreamt of the guillotine. In her heart she did not believe that any of her family, not herself, not Hubbard, not Paul, not the uncle and aunt who had raised her, were likely to live much longer. She knew as realities things that Hubbard could not imagine. Paul knew some of the same things, having learned them by accident.

  But Lori did not know that he knew.

  4

  The dinner at O. G.’s house was a black-tie party, which in Berlin meant dress uniforms and medals. There were the usual army, navy, air force and SS uniforms, but also several different types of party uniforms, the SA in dromedary brown, others in coats of many colors. The foreign office had its own uniform. So did other government departments, the government of Prussia, and many others. Hubbard was virtually the only guest in a dinner jacket.

  “Dear Lord, O. G.,” Lori said, shaking her host’s hand. “Don’t you know anyone who can afford evening clothes?”

  “Imagine what it was like in the kaisers’ time,” O. G. replied with his gay Rooseveltian smile. “Every regiment designing its own dress uniform. All those different kinds of swords and hats stacked up in the hall.”

  It was his job to entertain the ruling class, to get to know them and their minds, to encourage them to like him, if not necessarily trust him. The men and women with whom he chatted and joked gave every sign that they did like him. As an American he was a racial grab bag, of course, and besides that a bachelor, which was an iffy state of being at a time when homosexuals were being sent to concentration camps, but he had excellent manners and he spoke German just well enough to be taken seriously rather than resented. In the reception room, Lori took a glass of sparkling wine from a waiter and gazed into the middle distance, hoping that she would be shunned, as sometimes happened to her at these affairs. However, she was soon joined by a man she knew. He was the only man in the room besides Hubbard who wore evening clothes—in his case, a tailcoat and white tie, as if he were going to play the violin after dinner. He clicked the heels of his gleaming patent leather shoes and snapped his narrow head forward, then back.

  “Good evening, Baronesse!” he said. “Your husband and I seem to have the same tailor. But then we have always had similar tastes.”

  He was blond, long-faced, tall, though not as tall as Hubbard, with military posture and, except for broad womanly hips, quite slim. The tailcoat drew attention to his large behind. On other occasions, so did the short skirt of his belted SS uniform jacket, the clothing in which Lori usually saw him.

  “Good evening,” Lori said. She did not address him by his rank, major general. This was a grave breach of manners. He was the chief of the SS intelligence service and also the Prussian secret police, who controlled Berlin. These two offices gave him the powers of freedom or confinement and life and death over everyone in the Reich. He was thirty-five years old.

  But he ignored Lori’s slight, in fact showed by subtle signs that he was amused by it. “I had not intended to come tonight,” he said with another smile—white but uneven teeth, eyes that challenged Lori’s idea of herself. “But then I read the guest list, saw your name on it, and realized that I was far too weak to stay away.”

  Across the room, Hubbard was talking to the plump wife of a Wehrmacht general who was one of the few people in Berlin or anywhere else in the world who had read every one of his books. She liked his work—adored it, in fact, to the point where Hubbard feared that she would drag him to a sofa and have her way with him despite the difference in their ages. But even as she paid Hubbard fulsome compliments, holding his right hand in both of hers, her eyes worked the crowd.

  “Oh my,” she said. “Your wife has bagged the star of the evening, Reinhard Heydrich himself. Why would he be here when we are all so far below him? Watch out, dear man! The major general has a terrible reputation, and Mrs. Christopher is so very attractive.”

  One of O. G.’s assistants was passing by. Hubbard seized him by the arm. “Timberlake, what a coincidence,” he said. “I was just telling Mrs. Halder, here, about your wonderful poetry.”

  “About my what?” said Timberlake. But it was too late for him; the lady was already asking him the first of a hundred questions.

  “Ah, we have been spotted by your watchful husband,” Heydrich was saying to Lori. “He is rushing toward us, he will be here in no time, and there will go our conversation out the window. May I see you tomorrow?”

  Lori gave him a cold stare.

  “No response?” Heydrich said. “How delicious. I must find a way to make you be kinder to me. Otherwise I will have no tomorrow.”

  “Go!” Lori said.

  “She speaks!” Heydrich replied. “She fears embarrassment. The husband draws ever nearer. What will he suspect? I hold her fate in my hands.”

  Hubbard was now close enough to make out their words above the babble of the party. Heydrich smiled, snapped his head forward an inch or two, but did not offer his hand to Hubbard.

  “You have interrupted us too soon, Herr Christopher,” he said. “Your wife and I have been discussing Bach. Do you not agree that the E major concerto for violin is dazzling in its key changes? Six different keys in the fifty-two opening bars! Those astonishing dissonances, those diminished sevenths!”

  “My wife is the musician.”

  “She plays an instrument?”

  “The piano.”

  “Beautifully, I’m sure. One day perhaps I will have the pleasure of hearing you play, Baronesse.”

  Baronesse was the title of an unmarried daughter of a baron. The title, by which Heydrich always called her when he called her anything at all, erased her husband.

  Lori said nothing.

  Heydrich said, “Perhaps we could even play together sometime, though I am a mere amateur.” The whole Reich knew that Heydrich came from a musical family. It was said that he played several instruments.

  Again, silence from Lori. She looked straight at Heydrich, but as if he wasn’t there.

  Heydrich clicked his heels and headed straight for the front door.

  “He does admire you, that dancing partner of yours,” Hubbard said. “You hurt his feelings just now, you know.” Last year she had danced with this man at a tea dance in a hotel, not knowing who he was. Heydrich had flirted with her ever since. This was permitted if a woman was married. It was regarded as gallantry, reassurance, a harmless form of flattery. No one actually believed this. It wasn’t true even in operettas. But Hubbard’s tone was light. He feared nothing from other men where Lori was concerned.

  “Or do you actually like him a little?” He teased. “He makes you blush.”

  “I loathe him,” Lori said.

  At her elbow O. G. murmured, “Maybe you should try not to let it show qu
ite so plainly, my dear.”

  5

  At dinner Lori was seated next to a one-armed Wehrmacht brigadier general who had served under her Uncle Paulus in the World War. He wore the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross at his throat and told her tales about Paulus’s feats of arms and merry pranks in the regimental mess. Like many of the soldiers Lori had known, this one was frozen in boyhood. He was too much the gentleman to frighten a lady with descriptions of the horrors of combat. “The battle line is less gory than people think,” he said. “The smoke hides those awful sights you see in Bolshevik films.”

  “But when the smoke clears?”

  “By that time you have advanced a kilometer or two and all you see are cows in green fields and the backs of the enemy.”

  In the brigadier’s stories the war had been fun—Lori’s Uncle Paulus chasing a Russian in a horseback duel during the Battle of Tannenberg that ended with Paulus lopping off the Russian’s hand with his saber and then, noblesse oblige, dragging the vanquished enemy to a burning house and thrusting the stump into the flames to cauterize the wound. The brigadier had known Lori’s father, too—he and Paulus had been in the same regiment of lancers—and would have told her stories about him, too, if he had fallen in battle instead of being beaten to death by a gang of Bolshevik rabble. On the day of his death, her father had gone for a stroll from the hospital in Berlin where he was recovering from wounds received in the last battle on the western front. Because of his injuries he had been too weak to defend himself. No one ever spoke of his death—a German officer must always go down fighting—but Lori had often imagined it, and she imagined it again now, except that it was Paul’s death she envisioned while surrounded by the smiling people, now gorging on food and the latest gossip, who were most likely to kill him.

  She was obsessed by the possibility—in her heart, the inevitability—of Paul being murdered by the politically insane. One side or the other would slaughter him, then march on, singing “The Internationale” or “Die Wacht am Rhein.” She had felt this in her bones even before she conceived her child. She knew then that she herself was somehow going to be responsible for her son’s death. The fact that she would devote her life to trying to save him from his fate would make no difference. She listened to the brigadier, who was now talking about his schooldays with the irrepressible Uncle Paulus. If Lori’s photograph had been taken at that moment the image would have been that of a gently smiling, perfectly composed woman. What was going on in her mind was another matter.