Christopher's Ghosts

by Charles McCarry

  Lori went straight home from the station in a taxi. She went upstairs, sat down at the piano, and in case Miss Wetzel somehow missed her arrival, played a passage from a Liszt sonata. Then, still wearing her Paris suit, Lori clattered in high heels down the stairs, catching a glimpse of Miss Wetzel’s watery blue eye in the peep hole, and strode off in the direction of the Tiergarten. Within fifteen minutes a large black car drew up beside her. A door opened. Lori got into the empty backseat. The usual pair of SS troopers occupied the front seats. Heydrich had sent a couple of underlings to collect her just as he might have sent them to make the day’s fiftieth arrest. No words were exchanged. No siren or klaxon sounded, either, but the traffic parted before the Daimler on its way to the hunting lodge as if a regiment of invisible policemen were directing traffic.

  3

  In secret police headquarters on Rügen, Stutzer was still awaiting Rima’s answer to his last question when one of the apprentices entered the room and whispered something in his ear. Stutzer broke eye contact with Rima. The look on his face, half cajolery and half naked threat, changed abruptly to naked rage. He leapt to his feet and rushed from the room. Through the thick door Rima heard the shrill noises of his tantrum.

  Minutes later, Rima and Paul were released from custody. No explanation was given; in fact no one said a word to either of them. They were taken in a car to the station, provided with tickets, and escorted aboard the fast train to Berlin. Their luggage was already in their first-class compartment. So were the apprentices, fresh-faced young fellows in blue serge suits that still smelled of the flatiron. Rima had never imagined that secret policemen, trained to torture and kill, could be so young, or look so little like brutes. These two looked not much older than Paul and no less harmless. You could picture their mothers combing their wet hair in the morning and giving them pocket money before sending them out into the world.

  When Rima took down her rucksack and disappeared into the lavatory, one of the young men followed her. He waited outside the door until she emerged in one of her navy-blue schoolgirl costumes, her hair in a braid down her back and a book in her hand. Paul remained as he was, where he was, until she returned.

  In German she said, “Shall we read to each other to practice our English?”

  She opened an American novel and began to read aloud. The apprentices gave them searching looks, then feigned loss of interest. They were undercover, after all.

  With no change of tone, as if still reading, Rima said, “Let’s test the English of these louts.”

  “Okay,” Paul replied, eyes fixed on the page before them. “Do you think they’re as likeable as they look?”

  “They are the big brothers of your friends from the Tiergarten. In my opinion they’re both Jewish. Characteristic simian skulls, and look at those noses.” The apprentices made no sign that they understood these insults.

  As if reading from her book, Rima said, “I think we can speak freely in this language. What happened to you back there?”

  “Nothing. I was left alone in the room the whole time. You?”

  “I was questioned by the madman. He was beautifully dressed.”

  “What did he want to know?”

  “Our secret destination. He gave the impression that he already knew everything. He just wanted confirmation that we were trying to escape to a foreign country.”

  “He said that?”

  “He was sure we had a plan.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “Nothing. He gave me very little chance to talk. It was like watching a man have an epileptic fit. I was scared to death.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell him whatever he wanted to hear?”

  “I might have. You have no idea what he’s like, red in the face, showering spit, shrieking like a stuck pig. What was he going to do next? But while I was trying to think of something that would do you no harm but not make him beat me or shoot me, someone came in and whispered in his ear. I heard some of what was whispered, just words—‘Berlin, highest authority, immediately.’ Obviously he was being given orders. The messenger expected death—you could see it in his eyes.”

  “How did Stutzer react?”

  “Another fit. He leaped up and rushed out of the room. Then he started screaming in the hallway. Right after that they took us to the train.”

  “I wonder what happened.”

  “My love, don’t you understand?” Rima said. “Somebody rescued us.”

  “Who, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Someone with power over Stutzer. Someone in Berlin.” Paul looked baffled. Rima wanted to say, Think! But she looked into his eyes instead and saw that he did not require instruction.

  Paul said, “It can’t be true.” He turned his head and looked out the window.

  Rima said, “Then there must be some other explanation.”

  She closed the book. They rode the rest of the way to Berlin in silence, They parted at the station. One of the apprentices followed Rima home, the other Paul. Then they vanished back into the apparatus.

  4

  Late that afternoon, as soon as she was set free from the hunting lodge, Lori went straight to the American embassy and told O. G. everything. The confession was a rite of exorcism. Demons flew from her mouth. She breathed naturally again, without thought. For the first time in months her lungs gave her heart enough oxygen. O. G. listened without expression, and when she was finished offered neither blame nor sympathy, but sat for a long moment with his fingertips touching and his eyes fixed on a point a few inches above Lori’s head.

  He said, “Forgive me for asking, but am I right in supposing that you haven’t given Heydrich what he desires?”

  “Of course I haven’t. But in his imagination this is a courtship, and all the usual things occur. The man tries, the maiden demurs. But however… .”

  O. G. held up a hand: tell me no more. He said, “It looks as though he’s put a price on what he wants. Paul goes free, and maybe Hubbard too. You go to Heydrich.”

  “Clearly that’s what he has in mind, but you can never be sure with him, and he would never come right out and tell me that that was the arrangement.”

  “He wants to hide his hand? Why?”

  “Because in his own mind he’s not the sort of man who pays for it. He loves me, he says. He is dizzy with love. It’s an operetta. What he wants is sweet surrender. Quid pro quo would ruin everything.”

  “I see,” O. G. said. “Then consider this. If in fact Heydrich is using Paul as a way to frighten you into making him a gift of yourself… .”

  “If in fact he is doing this?” Lori said. “I just told you that’s what he’s doing.”

  “I heard you, and I believe you,” O. G. said. “And since this seems to be the case, it seems to me there are two solutions. First, you surrender. I assume that is not a possibility. Second, we find a way to get Paul out of harm’s way as quick as we can.”

  “In what way is that a possibility?”

  “If Heydrich thought you were, forgive me, testing his love, he might let Paul just sail away.”

  “On the Bremen? It’s a German ship. Paul would still be in Heydrich’s power. If I didn’t surrender in the four days it takes to steam from Bremerhaven to New York, they would throw him overboard.”

  “Yes. But he has to go on a German ship. Otherwise Heydrich loses all control.”

  “Precisely. Do you imagine he’s going to let Paul go if he does not already have what he wants?”

  “I need hardly tell you that if he has what he wants he will do as he pleases,” O. G. said. “What I imagine, Lori, is that you are a resourceful woman.”

  “And Heydrich is a monster of resourcefulness. You have no idea.”

  “I’m sure you’re right. But this is the best I can do in the way of advice even though I have given the same counsel several times already.”

  Lori said, “Is it really as hopeless as that? Surely you have ways.”

  Slowly, O. G. shook his large shag
gy head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I do not.”

  For years Lori, like many others, assumed that O. G. was chief of the embassy’s espionage operations. She was wrong; despite his air of conspiracy he was, officially, as cherubic as he seemed. It was true that he was a gatherer of information, but the larger truth was that in 1939 the United States of America had no foreign intelligence service, and therefore posted no political spies in its Berlin embassy or anywhere else in the world. Diplomatists such as O. G. gathered political fact and rumor; military attachés found out what they could about the Reich’s armed forces. But there were no thugs, no letters in invisible ink hidden in hollow trees, no blackmail or murder or kidnapping or even bribery. No intelligence service was rich enough to match the bribes the National Socialist German Workers’ Party routinely paid to its important members in the form of property confiscated from Jews and other official enemies of the state. Secrets of the Reich sometimes fell into American laps. True, O. G. gave his dinner parties and played tennis and cards with high officials and hoped for confidences. Americans seldom went so far as to adopt the British practice of trying to jimmy locked tongues by asking rude, persistent, detailed questions of their hosts or guests. They were unfailingly polite, seemingly as neutral individually as their country was, even though they knew that war was coming and America could not possibly stay out of it.

  Lori said, “If you’re as helpless as you say you are, why am I here?”

  “You came for advice,” O. G. replied. “I’ve given you advice. If I didn’t think it was feasible I wouldn’t suggest it.”

  “What if they won’t let him off the ship in New York?”

  “A foreign ship berthed in an American port is not an embassy. American authorities can come aboard in defense of an American citizen.”

  “In other words, ‘Trust me and don’t worry your pretty little head.’”

  O. G. swallowed the taunt. “Yes to the trust, no to the rest,” he said. “Of course you have a right to be worried. You have a lot to be worried about, if I may say so.”

  “Even if Paul gets off in New York he will be out in the open, unguarded and exposed. Heydrich has men everywhere.”

  “True. But America is a big place, and when Paul arrives in New York he will be in the United States of America and under the protection of the Hubbards and their friends. He will be beyond Heydrich’s reach.”

  “Nothing is beyond his reach.”

  O. G. made no answer to this. What Lori said was true enough, at least in theory. Heydrich was young. He was exalted by the power that ruthlessness had brought to him. He was certainly ruthless enough to kidnap an American boy on American soil and somehow smuggle him back to Germany as a way of gluing a mistress to him. But in the United States this could not happen under cover of silence. The police would tell the press, the press would tell the world. Heydrich did have superiors even if there were only two of them, and Himmler and Hitler would not be pleased by the unfavorable publicity. It would also turn Heydrich into a laughingstock—a man who tried to make a woman love him kidnapping her son.

  O. G.’s sinuous mind played for a moment with that scenario. Was it actually possible to destroy or at least diminish this fat-assed monster at the cost of sacrificing his best friend’s wife and the boy who was his godson? Could such an exchange be defined, if not defended as a moral action? O. G. liked moral conundrums; at Yale, ethics had been his favorite course. It instilled in him the habit of thinking like a spymaster long before he became, a few years hence, the most powerful one in the world.

  Lori’s eyes, therefore her mind, were focused on something outside the room.

  “Lori,” O. G. said, as if awakening her. He realized that was exactly what he was doing. He had to speak her name again, sharply, before she heard him and returned from wherever she had been. He decided that he must speak to her in a way that would keep her mind focused.

  “We’ve got to agree on a plan,” he said.

  “So you keep saying,” Lori replied. “But they can take Paul anytime. They can take any one of us, or all of us.”

  “I don’t think they’ll do that,” O. G. said. “Obviously Heydrich has nothing to gain if he makes you hate him… .”

  “Hate him? I’d assassinate him tomorrow if someone would show me how to do it.”

  “Maybe someone will. Meanwhile, there is Paul to think about. Also, if I may say so, there is Hubbard to think about. Not to mention yourself.”

  He looked her straight in the eye as he talked. And as he talked, she slipped away again. Her eyes dulled, the expression left her face. O. G. realized that there was no prospect of ever reviving the person she used to be. She had lost hope.

  He said, “We’re going to get this done, my dear. Chin up.”

  No response from Lori. He feared for Hubbard.

  He said, “Lori, think about our talk. If you need to, come talk to me again. Come as often as you want, any time of the day or night. But confide in no one else. And I implore you, no confessions to Hubbard. It would be the end of him.”

  He might as well have been talking to the chair Lori sat in, her lovely legs crossed at the knees.

  5

  “Can they hear whispers over their microphones?” Rima asked. “Can they hear me at certain moments? Is someone in earphones writing everything down? How do you spell… .” Much more softly than usual she uttered the howl of joy she made when having an orgasm. “Before you, I had no idea that I had such noises in me,” she said.

  “What did you expect?”

  “Something more ladylike,” she said.

  They laughed in whispers. Even if there had been no Stutzer and no Heydrich, Paul thought, Rima would have contrived this world of whispers. She was alive when they were alone together, never otherwise, she said. Now they met every morning in Paul’s room. Rima came up the back stairs while it was still dark, even before Hubbard got up. Paul met her at the kitchen door, in case she was surprised by Lori, who roamed through the apartment most of the night. Rima brought oranges, bananas, tangerines, apricots. These were exotic items in Berlin. He had no notion where she found them. “I know where the lemon tree blooms,” Rima said. The fruit was incredibly sweet. They kissed with sugary mouths. They licked sugar and citrus off each other’s fingers. Rima took the peels with her when she left, as if Paul were a fugitive in hiding and the peels were evidence of his existence.

  “It’s amazing what the party has done in six short years,” Rima said. “They have made this Reich of theirs into a world in which there’s a reason for everything. All is explained by their theories. Soon everything any citizen of the Reich needs to know will be printed on the back of identity cards. In doubt about the Jews? Confused about Strength through Joy? Can’t remember the Leader’s immortal words about something or other? Just turn the card over and you will know what to think, what to say.”

  It was reckless to meet as they did, but they agreed that if they did not take the chance they would lose the thing they could not live without. Each wasted moment was gone forever, said Rima. It continually astonished Paul, who had imagined romantic love as something on a page of its own—bittersweet moments, lovely light falling on a fully dressed woman, chaste kisses in a garden—that physical intimacy could create such wild emotion, such desperation, such fear of loss, such joy, such moments of hopelessness. Both he and Rima were sure that sooner or later someone would burst into their room and put a stop to their happiness. Even before the dictatorship this would have happened. Parents would have done it, or clergy, or servants would have informed on them—the eternal love police and their snitches. “But until it does happen,” Rima whispered, “we mustn’t waste a moment. Better to remember what we’ve done than what we were afraid to do. Oh, far better.”

  Paul had no inkling that plans were still being made by those who loved him to save him by separating him from Rima forever. The fact that his parents never knocked on the door, that his mother—even Hubbard in his writing trance—coul
d not help but hear Rima’s trills of pleasure puzzled Rima.

  “Maybe they want us to be happy,” Paul said.

  “Then they’re very unusual parents,” Rima said. “My father would shoot you with his Mauser army pistol if he knew what goes on in this bed.”

  In the week that Paul and Rima had been back in Berlin, they had heard nothing from the secret police, nor had they seen any sign of them. Stutzer had given Rima no further spy missions. But of course they were being watched. A hand in a leather glove could fall on his shoulder or hers at any time. They could be taken away separately or together. They might be released again, they might not be. They might be beaten. Rima’s father had been punched in the face during the first moment of his first interview with the secret police. His nose—of course his nose—was broken. It was their way of telling him that he was no longer entitled to respect and never would be again, that he had no protection, that they could kill him if they wished and throw him into the gutter to be picked up by the night sweepers. Her father had never actually told her what had happened. The shame of it was too much for him. But she saw his smashed nose and his black-and-blue face, and she knew. Anyone would have known. They were meant to know.