Christopher's Ghosts

by Charles McCarry

  Notwithstanding the telephone call and the rucksack, the girl seemed perfectly proper. She radiated good health and good nature. Her smile was enchanting. With her creamy complexion and thick black hair she was different from the blond, blue-eyed ideal of the moment. Still, she was altogether lovely. Hilde thought so, and Hubbard and Paulus were stunned by Rima’s face and figure. They called her immediately by her actual baptismal name, Alexa. Hilde called her Miss and nothing else.

  Lori did not even know that Rima was in the house. She was in a deep sleep and had been for hours. Hubbard believed that she must have taken a sleeping pill. He thought that a good long sleep would do her good. He left her undisturbed.

  Rima had eaten on the train. No, she wasn’t thirsty. But she was very tired. Might she be permitted to say goodnight? Hilde showed her to her room. It was exactly what Rima had expected—turned-down bed, chair, wardrobe, writing table with pen and ink and crested stationery, a vase of spring flowers, a bowl of apples, a pitcher of water for washing, a carafe of water for drinking, a washbowl, a chamber pot. In all of Schloss Berwick with its sixteen rooms, there was only one bathroom, one lavatory. Hilde did not mention this, but Rima already knew it, thanks to Paul’s detailed briefing on the schloss.

  As soon as the door closed behind Hilde, Rima undressed and got under the featherbed. She had brought a nightgown but she did not put it on. She had come here to make love and her first experience of lovemaking had taught her that removing twisted clothes was an awkward process which wasted moments that might be better spent. She blew out the candle by her bedside—only the ground floor of the schloss had electricity—and waited.

  On the station platform, during their only moment alone, Paul had said with a smile, “I’ll come to you tonight. I know the house, and what if you got lost?”

  Rima really was exhausted. She was asleep when Paul arrived. She heard the latch click. She opened her eyes immediately. Rima felt that she had been deep in sleep and that it had taken her a long time to climb out of it. No clock struck. She had no idea what time it was. A fat moon lit the room. They could perceive if not see each other in the dark—eyes, teeth, hints of skin. Paul relit the candle.

  “What if someone comes?” Rima said. “Not that this scene would surprise your great aunt, judging by the looks she’s given me.”

  “No one will come,” Paul said.

  “Can you open the window? This featherbed is like a steam bath. I’m swimming in sweat.”

  Paul did as she asked. It took all his strength to lift the sash. It squealed, wood on wood. Cold air and the brackish smell of the Baltic Sea came in with the draught. When Paul turned around Rima put a finger to her lips and beckoned him closer. They lay down together, face to face.

  Whispering, Rima said, “I have something to tell you.”

  Paul said, “Wait. I have a question. Why did you come here? It’s dangerous. They’ll find out, if they don’t know already.”

  “That’s what I have to tell you,” Rima said. “They sent me.”

  “Who?”

  “Who do you think? Stutzer. He gave me money for the ticket.”

  “Why?”

  “To spy on you. So please don’t tell me anything you don’t want them to know.” Paul started to speak. Rima put a finger on his lips. “Listen,” she said.

  Omitting no detail, she told him about her arrest, and then what had happened to her at police headquarters and later at No. 8 Prinz-Albrechtstrasse. However, she left out all mention of Lori’s meeting with Reinhard Heydrich. She described the proposal that Stutzer had put to her: Watch the Christophers, ingratiate herself with them, report to him everything they said and did.

  “What did you say to that?”

  “I agreed, of course.”

  “Agreed to spy on us?”

  “Yes. Otherwise my father will be sent to Dachau. It will kill him and I’ll never see him again. Stutzer made that plain.”

  “Did they beat you?”

  ”No, just the things I’ve told you about.”

  Paul remembered the way in which Stutzer stared at his mother. How had he looked at Rima? He cleared his throat. His voice shook. “They didn’t. . . .”

  “No. They’re serious about being Aryans. They fear pollution from such as me. That was obvious. Besides, I wonder about your man Stutzer.”

  “Wonder what?”

  “If girls even interest him. He dresses the way a woman dresses, for the affect. We must make plans if this is going to work.”

  “If what is going to work?”

  “Our deception.”

  Paul said, “How can it possibly work?”

  “We’ll fool them,” Rima said.

  “Have you lost your mind?”

  Rima nodded and whispered on. She believed that they could fool Stutzer, lead him in the wrong direction.

  “Tell him harmless scraps of the truth but keep the real secrets to ourselves?” Paul said. “He’d know. He’d take revenge.”

  “What’s the alternative? Shall I betray you? Or go back to Stutzer and tell him I’ve changed my mind? Or what?”

  All this in whispers.

  “But what could they possibly want to know?” Paul said. “My parents hide nothing. I’m not old enough to have secrets.”

  “What about me?”

  “They must know all about you, and all about you and me. Who do you think Stutzer thinks your Aryan lover is if not me? Otherwise why would they even think you could be their spy?”

  In the flickering light of the candle, Rima gave him a long, steady look. Then she looked away. “What answer to that question do you want?”

  “The truthful one.”

  “That’s the answer that frightens me, the truthful one.”

  What was she saying? Their eyes locked. Something strange had happened. He was lying in bed beside the loveliest creature he had ever seen, and she was his at the price of a gesture. But his flesh was not responding.

  “Tell me what you’re afraid of,” he said.

  She described what she had seen near the bridle path in the Tiergarten. “The man inside the Daimler was Reinhold Heydrich,” she said.

  Paul said, “How do you know it was him?”

  “I saw him. I’ve seen his picture. He’s at the bottom of this. He wants something from your mother, and everything that’s happening results from that.”

  “But he can just take anything he wants. Kill anyone he wants, put them in prison.”

  “Nevertheless, I think he’s blackmailing your mother.”

  Paul leaped to his feet and walked to the window. Rima thought that she had lost him. He would think that she was lying, that she really was a spy, that she was in league with Stutzer, that Paul would remember how she had spied on him in the Tiergarten and think that even then she was on duty. That the love she offered him was a lie, too. How could he not think these things?

  But he knew better. Rima had seen nothing more than he himself had seen, but somehow she had seen more. She had seen that the man who waited for Lori was Heydrich. The hangman. The man in charge of assassination, torture, imprisonment in three countries now and who knew how many more yet to come. If Lori Christopher was paying blackmail for something, what else could that be besides Paul’s safety? She was buying his escape from this country, from those people.

  Why would Stutzer, holder of a lofty rank in the secret police, personally interrogate a couple of children like Paul and Rima? Stutzer is a high muckamuck, no question about that, O. G. had said. One of Heydrich’s boys. These thoughts were difficult to bear. Paul put his face in his hands. Rima, nude, still stood behind him with her arms around his waist. He shuddered. She placed her lips against his bare back.

  This was the candlelit scene that met Hilde’s eyes a moment later when she threw open the bedroom door without knocking. She gasped, but she was not surprised by it. It, or some variation on it, was what she had expected to find. Paul was not in his room. Given the blood that flowed in his veins and th
e incorrigible nature of the human male, where else could he be but bewitched in the arms of this girl, what else might he be doing? Why else had Rima come here? This was by no means the first such living tableau that Hilde had stumbled upon in her forty years in this house.

  In frigid tones she said, “Please don’t turn around, Miss. Paul, your father needs you. Come at once.”

  Rima released Paul. He ran from the room as he was, in pajama bottoms. He found a commotion in the hall. Hubbard and Paulus held Lori between them. She wore one of her knee-length nightgowns, a pale blue one this time with yellow flowers embroidered on the bodice. Paul had seen her ready for bed many times before, but never when she was not quicker and more alert than anyone else in the room. It appeared that the men were trying to make her walk, but she was unconscious. Her legs dangled, her head fell forward, her hair hung in her eyes. The transition between the painful thoughts Paul had just been having about his mother and this incomprehensible scene shocked him to the core. It defied the laws of experience, but it was all too believable.

  Now that Paul was here, he was ignored. Neither his father nor his uncle offered an explanation for Lori’s condition. Neither seemed to have any idea what to do about it. They were not talking to Lori or even to each other. The did not shake her or call her name or throw water in her face. They simply carried her back and forth, up and down the hallway, hoping apparently that she would suddenly wake up and start walking. This was as likely, Paul thought, as that a doll should wake up and walk. Hubbard and Paulus asked for no help or advice. Perhaps, Paul thought, they had summoned him to witness his mother’s death. Lori might be dead already. Paul couldn’t understand what the grownups thought they were doing. Hilde had vanished down the stairway. She must be calling a doctor, he thought. But then he heard her rattling pots in the kitchen.

  Paul said, “She’s unconscious. What’s the matter with her?”

  Hubbard said, “We know she’s unconscious, Paul. We think she’s taken too much of something by accident.”

  “Too much of what?”

  “Sleeping pills. We don’t know.”

  Lori’s eyelids were closed, long thick lashes against her cheek. She was deathly pale. Paul could not tell if she was breathing. He realized that Hubbard was not sure, either. Hubbard fell to one knee and placed his ear against Lori’s lips. For once no smile lingered just behind his long bony face, ready to break out.

  Paul knew this: someone must act. “Car keys!” he said.

  “I don’t know where I put them,” Hubbard said. He seldom did; the family spent hours looking for things he had misplaced. He was always writing, always in his trance, even when he did not have a pen in his hand. But he was not writing now. He was within this moment in this world and nowhere else.

  Where was Lori? Paul wondered. Was she thinking, dreaming, was her mind empty for the first time in her life, did she know where she was or what was happening or how far gone she was? No more than a minute had elapsed since Paul had rushed from Rima’s room. Now Rima appeared, barefoot and barelegged but otherwise fully clothed. Without asking permission, she walked past Paul and between the two men. She took Lori’s face in her hand. She was not gentle. She peeled back an eyelid and looked into the eye, took a pulse in the neck, listened and then smelled at the mouth. She took Lori’s lower lip between her finger and thumb and squeezed it hard, then twisted. Lori uttered a sound and recoiled from the pain.

  “There is no time for the car,” Rima said. “How long has she been like this?”

  Hubbard did not reply. His face was slack, his hands trembled. It was obvious that he could not think, let alone speak. Paulus answered Rima’s question. “She was still awake at nine. I heard her coughing when I walked past her room.”

  It was one-thirty in the morning now.

  Rima said, “What did she take?”

  “Something to make her sleep, we think. Only she knows what or how much.”

  Rima said, “Paul, get a bowl. Be quick.”

  He was back in an instant with a heavy china wash basin. “Bend her over,” Rima said to Paulus. “Paul, hold the bowl. She’s going to vomit.”

  Rima opened Lori’s mouth, holding the jaw with one hand, and thrust her forefinger down her throat. Watery vomit shot into the bowl. Lori threw back her head and gasped for air. “Don’t let her do that,” Rima said. “She could inhale her own vomit and suffocate. Keep her throat straight.” Rima said. Paulus complied. Rima wiped the inside of Lori’s mouth with a forefinger, snapped it clean over the bowl, then with the same finger massaged the back of Lori’s throat again. She vomited once more, less explosively. She was breathing visibly now, gasping for air, and moving in small ways—her face changed expressions, her head jerked, her limbs twitched.

  Rima said, “Paul, run a cold bath. Lots of water. Be quick. Gentlemen, please take her to the bathroom.”

  Hubbard lifted her into his arms. The bathroom was downstairs, off the kitchen. Cold water, tinted with rust, gushed from the big iron faucets.

  Rima said, “Into the water, on her back.” The men hesitated. “Now,” Rima said. Hubbard and Paulus did as they were told. Lori moaned, thrashed, tried weakly to escape from the freezing water.

  “Someone bring towels and blankets,” Rima said. “Make coffee.”

  “She hates coffee,” Hubbard said.

  “Tea, then.”

  The water was now up to Lori’s chin. Her blue nightgown wafted around her legs in the water as if stirred by a current.

  “She’s shaking like a leaf,” Hubbard shouted. “She’ll catch her death of cold.”

  He made as if to lift Lori from the tub. Rima said, “No. Not yet. First she has to wake up.”

  Lori’s eyes opened, as if she had heard Rima’s words. Rima said, “Look at me.”

  “I don’t know you,” Lori said, coughing.

  “No, but I’m trying to help you.”

  They were speaking German. Rima held up three fingers. “How many fingers, dear lady?”

  “Three.”

  “What is the name of your son?”

  Lori did not answer.

  “Good girl,” Rima said. “You’re being careful. You’re awake. But now you must stay awake. Do not go back to sleep. It is strictly forbidden. Do you understand?”

  Lori glared at her but did not answer.

  To Paulus, Rima said, “Get her out of the water now. The baroness—where is she?—and I will get her out of that nightdress and dry her and wrap her in blankets. After that she must get dressed and walk until she is completely awake. That may take hours. We will take turns, Paul and me first, then you and Herr Christopher, Herr Colonel Baron. Do not let her go back to sleep. And, Paul, get rid of the sleeping powders immediately.”

  “At your orders, Miss,” Paulus said. Rima smiled at him, a small polite smile. He said, “If ever I need resuscitation, my dear, I will call on you, if I may.”

  Hilde appeared, bearing teapot, sugar bowl, milk pitcher, and cup and saucer on a silver tray. The china was paper-thin, with blue Chinese scenes painted on it. Rima’s mother had had dishes very much like these. Rima, kneeling by the tub, held Lori’s head above the water. “Wake up, Lori!” she said over and over. “Stay awake!”

  Lori’s large gray eyes stared at her with hatred, then closed. Rima shouted at her, “Open your eyes at once!” Lori lifted a hand to strike this impertinent stranger, but her muscles would not obey her and her arm fell helplessly into the water.

  “Baroness, please help me,” Rima said. Hilde looked for a place to set down her tray. Paul took it from her.

  To the men Rima said, “Out, please, gentlemen.”

  When the women emerged from the bathroom, Lori was dressed in slacks, a turtleneck sweater, a headscarf, and stout shoes. She staggered as she walked. By turns her eyes were empty or suspicious or burning with anger, as if controlled by a switch. Her jaw was slack. She still breathed through her mouth. Despite her elegant clothes she was a shocking sight to Paul. He had
never before seen his mother when she was not in complete control of herself and everything around her.

  Paul said, “Does she need a jacket?”

  “You’re not taking her outside?” Hilde said. “It’s dark, it’s damp. Her hair is wet. It is dangerous to her health. This is a sick woman.”

  “The moon is out,” Rima said. “The night is warm. Breathing fresh air will be good for her.”

  Hilde said, “You don’t know our sea air, young lady. Nor is the moon a healthy influence.”

  Hilde had taken enough orders from this impertinent stranger who was hardly more than a child. The tea that Hilde had made for Lori had gone cold while she carried out one incomprehensible instruction after another. Now Lori would have nothing on her stomach. She needed something hot to drink. She needed a doctor.

  Paulus said, “The girl is right. Lori needs fresh air. Exercise!”

  “How do you know she’s right?” Hilde said. “We don’t even know who she is.”

  Paulus lifted his eyebrows. Did Hilde think that Rima was deaf? However, Rima, her arm around Lori as if she had known her for years, seemed unaffected by what had just been said about her. She waited for a decision, her eyes on Paulus.

  Paulus said, “She’s been right about everything else so far. Also, she is a guest in this house and she is a friend of Paul’s.”