Christopher's Ghosts

by Charles McCarry

  Hubbard said, “What else, Paul?”

  “You know what else, Papa. Rima. How can I leave Rima to Stutzer?”

  “Rima?”

  “Alexa. If she doesn’t deliver the manuscript, she’ll be sent to a camp. Her father, too. She was promised by you and me that she could give him the original, that we would photograph it first and then hand it over to her. We haven’t done that. Instead it’s safe in the embassy in a cello case and she’s alone in the world. Stutzer is waiting.”

  To Hubbard’s amazement, Paul managed to speak these words without visible emotion. His face did not change, his voice did not break. Hubbard thought Rima was a wonderful bed name for a lover. He had never been prouder of his son.

  He said, “Let’s go home. I don’t see how we can take this any further without including your mother and Rima.”

  2

  In the apartment, lamps burned, the Victrola played Tannhäuser. An empty glass on a side table, still wet inside, smelled of brandy. Hubbard switched off the music. Wagner was too ominous for him. Paul heard water running in the bath. Was his mother lying just beyond the wall in a tub of scarlet water with her wrists slit? With heavy footsteps Hubbard hurried down the hallway as if he had seen the bloody image in Paul’s mind. On his way to his own room, Paul looked into his parents’ bedroom. When she was away for most of the day, as she had been today, she always undressed as soon as she returned, hung her clothes in the wardrobe, then took a bath. Once or twice Paul had heard her retching over the sound of the running faucets. In Paul’s bedroom the scent of Rima lingered, though she had not been there today.

  Paul changed from his suit into everyday clothes and sat down to wait for whatever was going to happen next. Soon he heard his parents’ footsteps in the hallway, but no voices. Conversation in the apartment was impossible, of course. Hubbard got the Horch from the garage and they drove to a restaurant in the Grunewald. In their early days together this place had been a romantic destination for Lori and Hubbard. The waiters remembered them. In their long starched aprons and black livery they bowed and smiled. They looked like brothers all dressed alike by a managing mother. The house specialty was poached pink-fleshed lake trout. Hubbard ordered a large one with white asparagus in hollandaise sauce and a bottle of Mosel. The wine came in a matter of seconds. Happy memories were described by the waiter who poured it. He was an admirer of the new Germany; everything was better, especially business; the people were no longer ashamed.

  Hubbard tasted and accepted the wine. They waited in silence for the asparagus to be served. Lori avoided eye contact. She was grim-faced, short of words, absent. She studied her hands as if making an effort to remember what they were and who they belonged to. She made no attempt to hide her distraction. It was unsettling to see her without humor, without expression, without intelligence. Hubbard could not bring himself to look at her. It seemed impossible to Paul that his father, who collected details as a way of life, had not guessed the reason for his mother’s mood. Even though it was a Tuesday night, the restaurant was full. The talk was loud. On a small stage near the Christophers’ table, an accordionist played Bavarian music while two hairy-legged young men in lederhosen danced the Schuhplattler. The Christophers had to shout to make themselves heard across the table. It was a strange sensation after years of whispers and murmurs.

  On the far side of the room the kitchen door swung open and a waiter emerged bearing a load of plates. Behind him in the kitchen, Stutzer’s apprentices stood side by side, talking intently to the waiters who had greeted the Christophers on arrival. The faces of the waiters were deeply serious now. They were eager to please, anxious to cooperate, careful not to smile while carrying on such a serious conversation. Paul caught his mother’s eye and made a small gesture with his head. She looked and saw what he saw. So did Hubbard.

  “Time to go,” he said.

  He left money on the table for the wine and the meal he had ordered, and they got up and left.

  They had five minutes of privacy before they saw headlights in the rear-view mirror. The Horch’s convertible top was down. Lori liked to ride in the open air after dark. She was sitting in the middle. Her hat blew off. She did not seem to notice. Paul had not been so close to her in a long time. He noticed differences. Her body was clenched, she did not take his hand, her hair smelled of candle smoke, the cognac she had drunk in the apartment was still on her breath.

  As if he might not have another chance to do so, Hubbard hurriedly described to Lori what had happened at the embassy. She listened in silence. Then she said, “Your manuscript was smuggled out of our apartment in a cello case? This is not a plan. It’s a schoolboy prank.”

  They drove down a dark back street. The car behind them drew closer. It was equipped with spotlights, and these were focused on the interior of the Horch. Their strong light turned Lori’s face deathly white. The glare made it almost impossible for Hubbard to drive. The car weaved. The pursuers made no attempt to stop the Christophers’ car. Remembering the laughter behind closed doors in No. 8 Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, Paul understood that the apprentices were just having some fun while carrying out a dull assignment. They followed the Horch all the way back to Gutenbergstrasse and lighted the Christophers’ way up the steps and into the apartment building before they switched off their spotlights and parked across the street.

  Inside the building, as they climbed the stairs, Lori let Hubbard go ahead. She took Paul’s hand at last, but loosely. Her hand was cold—not like her own hand at all, Paul thought. Nothing about her was as it was supposed to be.

  Lori whispered in Paul’s ear. “You and I must talk,” she said. “Wait till you hear your father is asleep, then come to the sewing room.”

  Hubbard snored, loudly. It was a family joke. Paul nodded, but he was being asked to deceive his father and he was nauseated by guilt and shame as he watched Hubbard climb the stairs ahead of them, then unlock the door, then step aside to let them pass. His long face was a mask of sadness now. He went straight to the bedroom. Lori made a cold supper of leftovers for Paul. While he ate ham and cheese and apple tart she looked through an album of phonograph records and put one on the turntable. It was choral music, very familiar—Beethoven. Quite soon they heard Hubbard’s first snore. Lori sat down beside Paul on a small sofa.

  To confuse the microphones buried in the walls, Lori had set the Victrola’s volume to maximum. Anyone listening at No. 8 Prinz-Albrechtstrasse or in Miss Wetzel’s apartment—who knew who or where the listeners were?—would hear an orchestra and chorus, not living persons. Paul recognized the music at last, “Ode to Joy.” Words by Schiller, who if he were still alive, would certainly not be allowed to write poetry any more than Dr. Kaltenbach could practice medicine. Softly, under the music, enunciating clearly and slowly, Lori said, “Paul, listen.” He looked at her, but her face was turned away. She said, “I have something for you.”

  She handed him a package that had been hidden behind a sofa pillow. It was not sealed. Inside he found his American passport with its many German, Swiss, and American stampings and also a new exit visa. How had Lori arranged that? He found a bundle of Reichsmarks, two hundred dollars in American currency, and a second-class ticket to New York aboard the Bremen.

  Paul said, “What about you and my father?”

  “Not this time for us,” Lori said. “On this particular day, you are free to go. Your father will be free to go on a different day.”

  “And you?”

  “I will have my day, too.”

  She looked him in the eye now, but only briefly. Again he felt that he was looking at a Lori who was almost, though not quite, a different person.

  Paul said, “I don’t believe you.”

  Lori said, “What part do you think is a lie?”

  “That someday you will join us.”

  “I’m sorry you have doubts,” Lori said. “But you don’t have to believe what I say. Just do as I ask.”

  “Why should I?”

  �
�Because this is your last chance, Paul. If you don’t go now, they will take you, and they will send you somewhere else.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I know, Paul. So do you. You will never come back. Nobody ever does.”

  Her voice wavered. Paul could not have been more shocked if she had jumped out the window. It was Lori, who hated theatrics, who had taught him, commanded him, never to speak as she was speaking now. All his life he had watched her and his father make light of things. They laughed at politics, laughed at fame, laughed at power. They wanted nothing in their lives but love and work. Hubbard often said so.

  When Paul spoke, his own voice was steady. He said, “Mother, please don’t ask me to do this.”

  “I’m asking you for your own good,” Lori said.

  “You’re asking me to run away.”

  “No. I’m asking you to go on ahead, to wait for us in America.”

  “And all I have to do is abandon you. Abandon Rima.”

  “Rima?”

  “Alexa.”

  “You have your own name for her? What does she have to do with this?”

  “I love her.”

  At last, for a long moment, Lori looked Paul full in the eyes. “Dear God, of course you do,” she said. “I had no idea.”

  “What did you think was happening?”

  Lori started to answer, but caught herself. “It doesn’t matter what I thought. I was wrong. But that changes nothing. Paul, you must go.”

  Paul said, “They’ll kill her. Her father, too.”

  “They’ll kill her anyway. Sooner or later they’ll kill them both. That’s their agenda, to kill everybody.”

  The music stopped. The record still turned, needle scratching in the blank grooves at the end. Neither Paul nor Lori had noticed. How much had the eavesdroppers heard? It was too late to worry. Lori rose to her feet, wound the phonograph, turned over the record, and put the needle on the disk. The singing began again:

  All men become brothers,

  Under the sway of thy gentle wings.

  Whoever has created

  An abiding friendship,

  Or has won

  A true and loving wife,

  All who can call at least one soul their own,

  Join our song of priase.

  But those who cannot must creep tearfully

  Away from our circle.

  The chorus sang louder than before, or so it seemed to Paul.

  With some of her old wryness Lori said, “It just occurred to me that ‘Ode to Joy’ may not go too well with this conversation.”

  “I was just thinking what a good description it is of the way things are,” Paul said.

  Lori said, “It’s tommyrot. It always was, and the fact that it has come true as a historical joke doesn’t change anything. It’s still tommyrot.”

  For a moment, as she spoke her mind in the old way, Lori was herself again. In her flat new voice she said, “Paul, do you want to die?”

  “No,” Paul said. “But you’re asking me to be alone for the rest of my life. What’s the difference?”

  “The difference is that I will know that you’re alive. That will keep me alive.”

  “Alive? In what way? You’ve just got through saying that they’re going to kill everybody.”

  “Alive in you,” Lori said. “It’s important to me—you can’t imagine how important—that you carry the blood in your veins out of this madhouse and keep it alive.”

  Paul closed his eyes. The Beethoven rose to a crescendo, then came to an end once more. Lori seemed to have come to the end of her words, too. Paul was immersed in a silence. He put the passport, the money, and the ticket back into the package and laid it between them on the sofa. Lori neither looked at it nor touched it.

  She said, “Will you go?”

  “I have already refused to do that once today.”

  “Is that your last word?”

  Paul said, “I don’t know.”

  “When will you know? How will you know?”

  The question was unanswerable.

  Still whispering, Lori said, “Does this girl love you? Not what she says—what you know to be true.”

  Paul said, “Yes.”

  “Then she’s the one to ask,” Lori said.

  3

  At five in the morning Paul woke up with a start, astonished at how deeply asleep he had been. He lit his lamp as usual but Rima did not arrive. At first light he looked out of the living room window. The black car that had followed the Christophers home the night before was still parked across the street. Stutzer’s apprentices, or two others like them, were still on station. Other men would be watching the back stairway. The Christophers were surrounded. Paul and Rima were separated as effectively as if they were on opposite sides of a wall. If he went out he would be followed. If she came here or if somehow they met, she would be arrested.

  Paul got dressed and went to his father’s study. The door was open. No one sat at the desk where Hubbard ought to have been sitting. As a child, Paul had slipped into the room and watched his father work, sometimes for hours at a time. The giant at the writing table, sometimes talking to himself, sometimes laughing, even weeping, never once realized that he was not alone. Paul listened at the door of his parents’ bedroom. He heard none of the sounds that meant they were together. Knowing what he knew or thought he knew about his mother’s secret, how could they possibly be together? Along the hallway the varnished doors were closed. A deep stillness filled the apartment. He no longer felt the presence of his parents in this place as he had done all his life, but rather he was seized by a sense of absence, as if everyone had been taken away in the night, leaving nothing behind, not even their ghosts. Had Hubbard and Lori put an end to themselves as Lori had tried to do at Schloss Berwick? Had they arranged Paul’s escape, given him the documents and money he needed to go on living, and then taken poison? Or worse? What would he find if he opened the door of their bedroom, if he entered the bathroom? Paulus had told him stories of officers, friends of his, who had shot themselves after they had done something unforgivable. Their friends put them into a room with a loaded pistol. They were expected to do the honorable thing. This only happens when there is no other way out, Paul.

  Paul knocked on the bathroom door. When no one answered, he opened the door and pulled the light chain. The room leapt into view—white porcelain sink and tub and bidet in deep shadows, the glittering oval mirror over the sink in which Paul had seen himself thousands of times. Three toothbrushes stood in a glass, his father’s shaving brush was in its mug, his ivory-handled razor lay on the shelf, its strop dangled from the sink. Paul went back into the hallway and knocked on his parents’ bedroom door. Again no one answered. He opened the door. The room was empty. The bed was made. In the wardrobes, his parents’ clothes hung in neat rows. They were tidy people. They lived ashore as they lived aboard their boat, everything shipshape, with nothing more than they needed. Paul found no note addressed to himself, no explanation of any kind. He looked in all the other rooms. There was nothing there, either, except that the package that Lori had given him the night before had been moved from the sofa to a table in the sewing room. He looked inside the package. Everything was still there.

  Standing back from the windows so that he could not be seen from the outside, Paul looked down into the street. It was beginning to awaken. Gutenbergstrasse was a quiet, very short dead-end street, perhaps three hundred meters in length. It had practically no traffic. It was rare to see a stranger there or an unknown car, so the apprentices’ black Opel sedan was recognized for what it was by all who saw it. Nobody looked directly at the car. They passed it by with averted eyes as if it did not exist.

  Paul knew that he himself could not get past the car unless the men inside had orders to let him pass. He had already decided that the same was true of the back entrance. Whatever was going to happen would happen today and it would happen somewhere else. Almost certainly it had already happened t
o Rima and to his parents. He half expected to see Stutzer himself in the street, in one of his resplendent costumes, waiting for him. As he watched, Miss Wetzel emerged from the building, Blümchen on the leash. The little dog dashed across the street, hauling a staggering Miss Wetzel helplessly behind her as if she were being dragged by a Great Dane. Blümchen barked furiously at the car. One of its windows rolled down. Paul recognized the face of the ex-cavalry trooper who had ridden Lori’s horse back to the Tiergarten stables on the day she got into the Daimler. Smiling at the dog, he spoke cordially to Miss Wetzel, who replied just as cordially. With a series of apologetic bows, she picked up the squirming animal, clutched it to her breast, and hurried away. She was dressed for the morning in violet—matching dress, hat, and shoes. Blümchen barked over her mistress’s shoulder at the intruders.

  Paul ran down the front stairs and walked briskly across the street. Paul said, “Good day. I’m looking for my parents. Have you seen them this morning?”

  The man grinned. “Have they abandoned you?”

  “My question is, Have they been arrested?”

  Another grin, showing a missing front tooth. “I have no information for you,” the man said, and rolled up the window.

  Paul gave him a curt nod, turned on his heel, and walked away. He expected to be seized from behind and taken to No. 8 Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, but no voice of authority called Halt! No hands were laid on him. He walked on. After he turned the corner, he looked behind him. The street was empty. Why weren’t they following him?

  Paul had no idea what to do next. It was possible that his parents were at liberty, but if Rima had not come to him at their usual hour, there was only one other place she was likely to be, 8 Prinz-Albrechtstrasse. Paul’s room had been their rendezvous point. There was no other. He was assailed by second thoughts. What if Rima risked coming in daylight while he was out and the watchers let her pass for reasons of their own? What if she was waiting at the back door now, what if she had just been late? Stutzer still awaited delivery of the manuscript of The Experiment. Paul could not penetrate the intentions of the secret police. No one could. They were too primitive. They had awakened in themselves something that the rest of humanity had left behind centuries ago.