Christopher's Ghosts

by Charles McCarry

  For dessert they had the chocolate cake—in Yuri’s case, two pieces. Yuri said he had never in his life eaten so many sweets as he had done since coming to this house. “I have tremendous energy,” he said. “Of course you get the same amount of sugar from vodka, but vodka makes you unconscious. It is quite clear to me now. History will be decided by this struggle between vodka and chocolate cake.”

  Both men knew that every room in the house was wired. Microphones were hidden in the table, in the orange tree, in the fichus in the far corner. Yuri may well have assumed that one was hidden under Christopher’s clothes.

  Christopher said, “Is it possible to go for a walk?”

  “We’ll see. Usually there’s no objection, but usually I have no one from outside to talk to like today. The men in brown are all over the place with their shotguns, and everyone knows I certainly have no wish to escape this paradise, so let’s go. Do you want to empty your bladder first?” Christopher shook his head.

  The day was bright, the sky cloudless. A sharp wind blew, rearranging the thin snow that lay on the ground. For his outings Yuri had been provided by his hosts with a bright-red woolen deer hunter’s coat and cap. “From Abercrombie and Fitch,” he told Christopher. “The wool is very fine.” Now that the sun was warmer, horses, some of them mares with colts, had been let out of the barns. Yuri said, “Many, many horses were killed in the war. We ate them, ours and the Germans’. So did the enemy. A dead horse is sadder than a dead soldier. Can you make a poem out of that line, my friend?”

  Christopher thought of his father, driving across Pomerania in the Horch and telling the woeful tale of fallen German war horses. Had Hubbard been present, he would have told them the precise nutritional value of horse meat. Yuri’s reference to writing poetry caught Christopher’s ear. In theory Yuri did not know Christopher’s true name, let alone that he had published poetry. But there was no guessing what he might really know.

  “This was in the Ukraine?” Christopher asked.

  “What?”

  “Eating the dead horses.”

  “We preferred wounded horses—fewer worms. The Ukraine, yes. But everywhere was the same,” Yuri said. “Your army had no horses?”

  “Only for parades,” Christopher said. “Did you ride horses like the partisans in books?”

  “Sometimes, but in the end we always had to eat them. We foraged for our food in a country where everything, every kernel of grain, every turnip, all animals wild and domestic had already been eaten, raw sometimes, even the dogs and cats and the rats and mice. The American army would have sent a hundred airplanes and parachuted hot dogs and chocolate cake to the boys. But we were on our own.”

  They sauntered along a forest path. A hunter walked a few yards ahead of them, out of earshot, and another followed them at the same discreet distance. A couple of others drifted through the woods on either flank. Yuri said, “The others, up at the house, call these guys Daniel Boones. Did you know that?”

  Christopher shook his head no. “If you were that short of food, what did you do with prisoners?” he asked.

  Yuri said, “We conversed with them, then we shot them. We seldom ate them.”

  “You always shot them?”

  “We couldn’t feed them.”

  “Shooting them was the rule, even when you captured a German officer who might have important information?”

  “Such prisoners were rare, no pun intended.”

  “But not unknown.”

  “No. My friend, come to the point, please.”

  Yuri paused and lit a Russian cigarette with a Zippo. He did not offer a cigarette to Christopher, who, as he knew, did not smoke. The Zippo’s large smelly flame flared in the fresh breeze. “A deer or a peasant could smell this thing on the wind a kilometer away,” Yuri said, having an anti-American moment. “It is also very hot in your pocket.”

  Christopher said, “I’m interested in a particular officer of the Schutzstaffel, a colonel, who was captured by partisans in the Ukraine in 1944.”

  “An SS Standartenführer? He probably was shot in both knees and the testicles and left to die.”

  “This man lived.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “I saw him in the flesh quite recently.”

  “Name?”

  “Stutzer, Franz. A thin man, about your height. Very well dressed.”

  “That certainly would have made him stand out in the Ukraine in 1944.”

  Christopher produced a photograph of Stutzer as he had been in Berlin. Yuri studied it for a moment, then handed it back with no show of interest.

  “Why are you interested in this man?” he asked. “The war is over, the Germans are your friends, he is nothing today.”

  Christopher said, “I think you know him.”

  “Do I? Tell me why you are interested.”

  “This is personal, nothing to do with your situation or your debriefing by the people up at the house.”

  Yuri inhaled smoke, drawing so hard on his cigarette that the burning of paper and tobacco was audible. His eyes bored into Christopher’s. This was no prisoner, but a man who was as used to being in absolute control as Stutzer once had been. In his brand-new Abercrombie & Fitch coat and hat he even looked faintly dandyish.

  “Personal in what way exactly?” he asked.

  Christopher told him as much as he needed to know. He left his parents out of the story and said nothing about his round-trip to New York and he gave Rima another name, but he related the facts of their encounter with the S-boat and her death.

  Yuri said, “I can understand why you might want to find this person. You’re right, I know him a little. What I know I will tell you. For your ears only. An extra, just for you. Agreed?”

  Christopher nodded. Yuri pinched out the coal of his cigarette and put the butt into his pocket, a prisoner’s economy. He said, “You’ll owe me a favor for this, you know.” Christopher nodded.

  They walked on. The hunters fell in step.

  5

  Just after the war Yuri was posted to Berlin as a Russian midwife to the East German intelligence service. The Nazis had killed so many German communists before the war that there was a shortage of qualified operatives to man the embryonic Ministry of State Security. “The Americans were having success in West Germany with former Abwehr types and worse,” Yuri said, “so Moscow decided we should rehabilitate some Nazis of our own.”

  Yuri fell silent for perhaps a hundred steps as he and Christopher continued along the forest path. Christopher did not ask for a reason. He had learned when he was still very young that if he kept quiet, the other person would fill the silence. It began to snow. Plump snowflakes clung to Yuri’s scarlet costume and lodged in his beard and mustache and his thick black eyebrows.

  “This was in the early nineteen-fifties,” Yuri continued. “The war had just ended. I still hated the Nazis. I had many reservations about this policy of inviting them inside to work with us side by side. These people remained what they had been. There is no such thing as an ex-monster. However, Moscow had made up its mind to find them useful. It was pointless to raise issues that had already been resolved.”

  Another hundred-step silence followed this brief speech. Clearly Yuri was having difficulty with the subject at hand. He stopped for a moment and looked back at their footprints on the snow-dusted path. The air was still, the light milky. Snowflakes were falling faster now. “The answer to your unspoken question is that I never knew Stutzer in Ukraine,” Yuri said. “Somebody else captured him. However, I did hear something at the time about a big Schutzstaffel fish being taken, then shipped east for processing. It was remarkable how much gossip floated around in that no man’s land. I assumed that this criminal would be wrung out by our interrogators, then shot.”

  Nevertheless, as the years went by Yuri kept this particular prisoner of war in mind. Who had he been? What had he known? Why had he been shipped to a camp instead of being shot in the back of the neck? As Christopher
already knew, Yuri forgot nothing. Finally, sometime in 1950, Yuri was introduced to an emaciated German who was being held in a jail in East Berlin. “It was the man in the photograph you just showed me,” Yuri said. “Until today I never knew his true name. He was captured under a false name. Even that was taken from him by the routine. He became a number. Today I will call him Stutzer for your sake.”

  Yuri and Stutzer met in an interrogation room. “On the wall of this room, which was used by the Gestapo before we took it over, was an old bloodstain left by somebody who had been shot through the head, judging by its height on the wall,” Yuri said. “The stain looked like an upside-down map of Italy. It had been left where it was to encourage prisoners to cooperate. They were made to stand on a mark on the floor so that they were looking directly at the bloodstain and the bits of brain and skull that were stuck in it.”

  This prisoner was not fazed by the bloodstain. He stared at it calmly, in the detached way in which a connoisseur will examine the work of an unknown artist. Yuri wondered if the man was trying to date and classify the bloodstain. German or Russian? Jew or counterrevolutionary?

  Yuri’s task was to evaluate the prisoner. Was he or was he not a candidate for recruitment? What Yuri saw before him was what he had seen many times before—a half-starved, half-mad zik dressed in the layers of rags that were the uniform of the gulag. This man had lost everything but his physical existence and he held on to that by a thread. All ziks had once been more than they were now, but this one managed to convey that he was still a somebody. Though he attempted to conceal it, he had a certain force of personality. He had perfected the role he was expected to play—submissive body language, eyes downcast in the presence of his betters rather than staring into empty air like a soldier’s or meeting another’s eyes like a man. But this was a role he had chosen to play, nothing more. Within himself he still believed, even after six years in the worst kind of captivity, that he was born to dominate. What he had been suffering since 1944 was a mere interruption in his destiny to rule over lesser mortals. He looked like a broken man, he acted like a broken man, but in Yuri’s judgment, formed in a matter of seconds, he was not a broken man.

  “Usually I avoid such flights of fancy about first impressions,” Yuri said. “But it was obvious that this one had not conquered his pride, whatever his act. I asked him a question. He answered in a servile tone of voice. I said, ‘Speak to me in your own voice, Number Whatever-you-are.’ He snapped to attention, even slapping his heels together in their felt boots and of course not making a sound. He stared at the bloodstain on the wall and answered my original question again. This time his voice was very loud—a Schutzstaffel bark. We were speaking Russian, but nevertheless what came out of his mouth was a sound that only a German officer could make.”

  The file on Stutzer told Yuri little that was useful. He had cooperated from the first with Soviet interrogators. He understood from his own past experience that resistance was pointless. In the end, everybody broke, everybody talked, everybody begged for mercy. His captors knew that he knew this. In Yuri’s opinion Stutzer had lied to his interrogators about nearly everything, including his identity. His papers identified him as a member of the fighting SS, rather than as the secret policeman he really was. The rest of his testimony was a cover story backing up his papers. True, he commanded a kommando that hunted down Soviet partisans, but that was war. The partisans conducted the same type of operations against German forces, as his capture and the immediate summary execution of all his men demonstrated. All questions about the German order of battle he answered truthfully. He had no reason not to cooperate. The Red Army already knew what units of the Wehrmacht they were fighting, who commanded them, what their strength was. Besides, the German armies were in full retreat. Chaos was queen. Communications were disrupted. Even the German High Command did not know exactly what units were left or where exactly they were or how effective they might be. The war was lost. Everyone knew this. Stutzer had done his duty in the greatest war in history. Now that the war was over except for the final skirmishes, his duty was to preserve himself and the wisdom he had gained to fight the next one. Of course Stutzer never said that, but Yuri knew that it was true.

  Yuri said, “He said the same thing about the Soviet victory as Hitler did later on. In his first session with an interrogator Stutzer said, ‘The eastern people have shown that they were stronger than the German people, therefore they are the superior race.’ Whether he actually believed this or was just telling a stupid Russian peasant like me what he thought I wanted to hear is an open question.”

  Throughout his many interviews with Yuri, Stutzer conveyed his admiration for the Red Army, for Communism. The war, he said, had taught him that the wind of history was blowing the Soviet Union toward world rule. If Germany had been overwhelmed—not merely defeated but subjected to apocalypse—what chance could the bankrupt English, the French who had been erased from history, the soft Americans possibly have? Communism, which was just another name for imperial Russia, had already prevailed in China and in half of the old Europe. The rest of mankind would soon surrender, too.

  “All this was a subtle performance at first,” Yuri said, “conveyed through rueful smiles and words that seemed to escape from him rather than being spoken by a conscious effort of the will. As time went on he became more forthright. It was all lies, of course, but he was a good actor and he gave a masterly performance. In the end it was the performance that opened my eyes to the value of this fellow. After all, I wasn’t looking for an angel. I had been asked to decide if Stutzer might be useful to the Ministry of State Security of the German Democratic Republic. By every measure—Stutzer’s training, his skills, his experience, his accomplishments, his intelligence, his guile, his gifts as an impersonator, his fluency as a liar—it was obvious was that he was wonderful material. The fact that he was also a psychopath was no impediment—quite the opposite.”

  Still Yuri hesitated about signing him up. With Yuri’s blessing, Stutzer was controlling the interviews, and, in his own mind at least, controlling Yuri. How could such a megalomaniac be controlled? Even the Schutzstaffel, which Stutzer had loved and still loved, had not been able to control him. Also little by little, Yuri was drawing from somewhere inside Stutzer a truer, if not entirely true, record of his past. In every assignment he had ever been given, this monster had exceeded his orders, exceeded his mission, exceeded his authority. He had also exceeded the expectations of his superiors in nearly everything he did, and because he worked for an organization that had abolished the very idea of excess, he had been richly rewarded. Promotion, decorations, reputation, favor from on high had all come his way. Stutzer was supremely confident that this would happen again if only he could persuade Yuri—condition him—to recommend him to his superiors in the Soviet intelligence service, who were the most powerful secret policemen in the history of the world.

  “All of this was mind-reading on my part,” Yuri said. “But he was too clever by half, so he was not all that hard to read.”

  Rising out of his silence, Christopher said, “You liked him.”

  “I couldn’t bear him,” Yuri replied. “But I thought he was qualified. My assignment was to render an opinion on his potential as a servant of the Communist Party of the German Democratic Republic. I was in a position to do great harm if I made a bad decision. I was being pressed to make up my mind on this case. I was accused of dawdling.”

  “He was your only case?”

  “No, there were others, but he was by far the most interesting one. Usually the answer was obvious. Maybe one in every fifty candidates got a yes. Even the yeses were almost always gumshoe material. Stutzer was different. If he was chosen, he would succeed, he would rise, sooner or later he would be trusted. Then what? That was the question.”

  Yuri decided to put Stutzer through a series of practical tests. This required putting him on the street. He was outfitted with a new suit and everything that went with it. “He hadn’t been
dressed like a human being for six years, but you could see the disgust in his eyes when he put on these ugly cheap clothes made in the USSR and looked at himself in the mirror. It was a two-way mirror, needless to say, and I was on the other side of it. The heavy wool suit with its elephant-ears lapels, the clumsy shoes, the hat, even the baggy socks—everything revolted him. He buttoned the coat, he tilted the hat, he turned this way and that like a girl in front of the mirror. His vanity was astonishing, especially since he was a professional who knew all about mirrors in police stations and therefore he understood that he was almost certainly being watched by me from the other side. These clothes had been cut and sewed by chimpanzees. He preferred his gulag rags. No one could question his taste and social rank for wearing a prison uniform. Contempt was written all over his face and of course that expressed his true opinion of the Soviet Union.”

  Yuri’s acuity was already well known to Christopher, but he had never before seen it on such open display. Always before the Russian had concealed a portion of his cleverness—he was too good at what he did to invite something as useless as admiration—but now he was fascinated by what was emerging from his own memory. Christopher was tempted to interrupt, to confirm Yuri’s intuition with descriptions of Stutzer the dandy, but Yuri was switched on now and Christopher knew better than to interrupt a man who was trying to tell him something that he desperately wanted to know.

  Stutzer was given a number of exercises in tradecraft—follow this man, suborn his wife into informing on him, study his contacts, build up a profile, make a case, nail him even if he was innocent—as he probably was. For Stutzer this was child’s play. More complicated exercises followed. He succeeded in them all. He worked quickly, efficiently, without distraction. As his masters in the Schutzstaffel had discovered, he was endlessly resourceful, he found new ways to do things, he improved on old methods. He had forgotten nothing in the six years at hard labor he had already served. He had even learned from the experience. His captors took brutality into new dimensions. They had perfected humiliation as a form of punishment that had no ending, even for those who were eventually released from captivity. His camp in the Urals had had no barbed wire. It wasn’t even necessary to lock the cells. There was nowhere to go except into a worse emptiness. The USSR itself was a vast prison of space from which no escape was possible. Even the rags in which he was clothed had a meaning that was, for Stutzer, next door to metaphysical. Appearances were meaningless. The people he had tortured and shot in his day as a secret policeman were always properly dressed for their date with death. Even in Nazi death camps the condemned wore clothes that were in such excellent condition that prisoners were required to take them off and fold them neatly before they were executed. The communists had eliminated such niceties from their own methods. Of course few Soviet citizens owned clothes that anyone else would wish to inherit.