Christopher's Ghosts

by Charles McCarry

  “Stutzer won top marks in everything he was instructed to do,” Yuri said. “He would turn what was supposed to be a mere exercise into a real case. Two of his subjects—the man he followed and his treacherous wife—went to prison and another man was actually shot due to his work. He discovered and was able to prove—at least to the satisfaction of my superiors—that this second subject, a former Nazi, was working with the French. In those days it was possible to cross over quite freely from one part of Berlin to the other. Stutzer followed the subject and photographed his meetings with a Frenchman we knew to be a member of the Service des Renseignements. It was Stutzer who broke this man, who extracted his confession.”

  Yuri broke off and walked on in silence. The snow was ankle-deep now and his cap, his coat, his beard and eyebrows were white. It did not give him a Santa Claus look. His small brown eyes, set deep and wide apart, burned. He stopped and stared at Christopher. He said, “The snow is getting worse.” He seemed to expect a question.

  Christopher said, “He interrogated this man?”

  “Yes,” Yuri replied. “It was his final test. I watched through the two-way mirror. Some of my superiors were there, too, because Stutzer had aroused their curiosity. They were already impressed by his feats, and the way in which he conducted the interrogation impressed them beyond their dreams. He was a master, one minute a kindly uncle, the next a madman, quick as a weasel, smart as a whip. The subject had no chance even though he had been in the Gestapo himself and was now a member of the police—an underling, yes, but nonetheless somebody who knew what to expect. It did him no good. Stutzer made him stand for an hour with his arms above his head, he made him drink liters of water. The man wet himself. After that Stutzer really went to work on him. In less than an hour he was signing a confession to crimes he had never committed. Never have I seen a man so much in his element as Herr Stutzer. That was what my colonel called him when they were introduced, Herr Stutzer. My chief was so pleased that I thought he might let him shoot the prisoner himself. But he didn’t.”

  Yuri had not looked at Christopher as he talked, but walked along with his hands clasped behind his back, his eyes fixed on the Daniel Boone who was in the lead. Now Yuri turned around and headed back toward the house. “Without our guides we would be lost,” he said. “Tell me, did Stutzer ever interrogate you?”

  “Yes,” Christopher said.

  “How was he dressed?”

  “Sometimes in his uniform, sometimes in a civilian suit. He was very well dressed. A dandy.”

  Yuri said, “On the day he broke the man who wet himself, Stutzer wore his zik rags. He insisted on it. It was very impressive, that, to dress as a prisoner and yet in a matter of minutes establish absolute authority over a policeman.”

  After this virtuoso performance, there was no real question about Stutzer’s future. He would be offered a position in the secret police. He would be given work—lots of work. His talent was needed. The German Democratic Republic swarmed with counterrevolutionaries, with enemies of the people, with former Nazis, with men and women who had treason in their hearts—though like the policeman Stutzer broke they might not know this about themselves until they had spent an hour alone with Stutzer.

  “Stutzer knew, of course, that he had made a fine impression, but he was not a man to leave any stone unturned,” Yuri said. “In our final interview, the one that would determine my recommendation to my superiors—who had of course already made up their minds—he took me into his confidence on an important matter. I had given him a cigarette, the first one I had ever offered to him, and his eyes watered when he inhaled the first drag. Clearly he had not smoked for some time, if ever. Was he a smoker when you knew him?”

  “I never saw him smoke, but yes,” Christopher replied.

  “Then how did you know?”

  “I smelled it on him, and sometimes he left a pack of Dunhill cigarettes on his desk.”

  Yuri nodded, as if he were the investigator instead of Christopher and he had just gained an important piece of information that he could file away for future reference. He seemed to be following a new line of thought.

  Christopher said, “You were saying something about the last interview.”

  “Yes. He told me he was a communist.” Yuri waited for Christopher’s reaction to this revelation. Was it staggering, comical, or what? Christopher did not react. Yuri said, “I asked myself, How can a Nazi, a Schutzstaffel officer, a man who swore a personal oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, be a communist? I asked him this same question. Naturally he had the answer on the tip of his tongue. He had converted in the camp. One day the scales fell from his eyes and he realized that the ideals of the revolution were the ones he had always believed in his heart. He was the child and grandchild of workers, all his ancestors had been miserable peasants. ‘Workers of the world unite’ was just another way of saying ‘Tomorrow the world.’”

  “He said that?”

  “Of course not. He wasn’t a fool. But that was what I thought as I listened to his first confession. He became the earnest novice. I was the wise old Jesuit.”

  “You didn’t believe him.”

  “No, my friend, I didn’t. But his audacity made an impression. Anyway, by now the decision had been made. He was in. All that remained was to put it in writing, as my colonel expected me to do. I wanted to ask Stutzer how many Jewish Lutherans and Catholics he had handled in his former life, and how many of these converts he had considered to be genuine. But the question was pointless. Stutzer was an opportunist because he was a survivor, and vice-versa. Now he had decided to become an upside-down Maranno, a hidden Nazi instead of a hidden Jew, lighting candles on the Sabbath in a secret room in his house. In its way this was hilarious. He was so sly, and this made him so predictable.”

  Through the falling snow Christopher saw the windows of the house, filled with yellow light, as if to guide Yuri home. They trudged on, Daniel Boones on the alert all around them, their boots crunching in the snow. Christopher’s socks were soaking wet. Yuri’s feet in his Abercrombie & Fitch boots must have been as warm as toast. Now the house loomed, its roofline visible, its bulk still obscured by the snow but just discernible. Hubbard, had he been present, might have said that if Turner’s palette had been smeared with the colors of ice instead of the colors of fire, this scene would have resembled a Turner painting.

  Yuri and Christopher were now too close to the house to finish their conversation before reaching it. Christopher stopped in his tracks. Yuri paused too. Christopher said, “So what was the outcome?”

  “I recommended recruitment with permanent precaution.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Castration,” Yuri said. “It gave us some small hope that we could control him.”

  Christopher stared. “Your recommendation was accepted?”

  “He met the surgeon soon afterward.” Smiling through the snow, Yuri said, “It’s an ancient precaution in the orient. We Russians are an oriental people. We learned from the Tatars that taking a man’s testicles makes him dependent on those who have done this to him—grateful, even. He becomes a pet—loyal, affectionate. This is a great paradox, of course—you’d expect undying hatred—but thousands of years of experience with eunuchs have proved that it’s true. Stutzer was no exception. The fact that he is a madman may even have heightened the effect.”

  “He didn’t protest?”

  “He wasn’t told until he woke up from the anesthetic. But why should he protest even if he knew what was in store? Sex meant nothing to him. His vocation was everything. He was born to be a secret policeman. He had little to lose and everything he ever wanted to regain.”

  Yuri nodded brusquely, as if he had now explained everything, not only about Stutzer but about the whole human race.. He walked on to the house. He stamped his feet on the veranda to knock the snow from his boots. Christopher remained where he was. Through the window he could see a wood fire burning on a hearth. Surely Turner would have made that the he
art of his painting.

  EIGHT

  1

  A month or so after Christopher’s talk with Yuri, he and Patchen and Patchen’s Doberman Pinscher, Rudi, were walking down the Mall in Washington. “Amazing!” Patchen said. He was enthralled by the city at night. The illuminated buildings—Capitol at one end, Lincoln Memorial at the other, and all the others in between—took his breath away. The classical architecture suggested to him the timelessness of power and civic virtue. New as it was to history, America was the consequence of Athens, the reflection of Rome, the future of the world just as those bygone empires were its past. Like Christopher, his best friend and Harvard roommate, he had been wounded on Okinawa. His injuries were far more serious—he had lost an eye and most of the use of one arm and leg. He loved the country he had bled for. So did Christopher, but because America was something new in the world, he thought that Washington’s public architecture should be new, also—less imitative. It should gleam. It should consist of skyscrapers and towers instead of temples and obelisks. He disliked imitations.

  However, he did not argue the point. Patchen was almost as silent by nature as Christopher was, so they talked very little about anything but business. They threaded their way through a shantytown of ugly temporary buildings that had been erected on the Mall during the First World War to house an overflow of bureaucrats, and then expanded for the same purpose during World War II. Many of these leaky structures—unpainted, warped and askew—were now occupied by various operational branches of the Outfit, which had no central headquarters. O. G. believed deeply that it should never have one, that being scattered all over Washington under a hundred fictitious names and titles kept it from becoming a hive. He wanted it to be anti-bureaucratic and therefore creative, energetic, realistic. Its people, by golly, ought to use their imaginations and do useful things instead of killing time in pointless meetings and otherwise running around in circles, impressing each other. Like Christopher, with whom he had never discussed the matter, he thought that Greek temples bred pride and folly and a sense of inheritance, the seeds of disaster. The greater the privilege, the humbler the home. That was his maxim, or one of them.

  Patchen unlocked the door to one of the shanties, identified on its weather-beaten sign as the Center for Language Studies, and turned on the light. They were in a small windowless foyer furnished with a desk and chair and several chairs for visitors. There was no guard, no alarm system, no security at all except for two ordinary Yale locks, one on the outer door and one on the massively thick inner door that Patchen now opened. It led to what appeared to be a radio studio, soundproofed and thickly insulated, but otherwise unfurnished except for a battered oak library table and half a dozen chairs.

  Christopher said, “No microphones?”

  “Not even in the walls, which is the point,” Patchen replied. “You can say anything you like in here and nobody can overhear, unless of course, the Russkies are lurking in the sewer that runs underneath this shack.”

  “And if they are?”

  “That’s Rudi’s job. He’s checking right now.”

  Patchen released the Doberman from its leash. It trotted around the room, ears up, sniffing the carpet. Then the animal sat down in front of Patchen, awaiting orders. Patchen gave the dog a treat that he took from his pocket and said, “Take a nap.” Rudi gulped the treat, lay down with his muzzle between his paws, and closed his eyes.

  The two men sat down at the table that was the only furniture in the room. With a sigh Patchen pulled his pistol from its shoulder holster and laid it on the table. It was heavy. He disliked carrying it. Notwithstanding his time as a U. S. Marine, he had been raised as a Quaker and disliked guns as a matter of principle. Also, its weight was painful because it hung from his wounded right shoulder, which had never healed entirely and never would. But the weapon was an excellent instrument of self-defense. It was so powerful that just one of its soft-nose bullets would paralyze an enemy no matter where it hit him. A man shot in the big toe by a .45 slug was just as helpless as if mortally wounded.

  Apart from his chats with Patchen and Yuri, Christopher had been idle since the operation in Geneva. Before that, Christopher had been working eighteen hours a day, weekends included, for more than a year. Like a major league manager, O. G. was giving his star a few days off to heal the invisible injuries that the game inflicted. Christopher was just back from a vacation. Because he had lived abroad most of his life, he wanted to see the America he had only read about. He took the train to Utah, bought a horse to ride and a pack mule, and went camping alone for a month in the mile-high desert of southern Utah. After three weeks of solitude he sold the horses, bought a rubber boat and paddled alone under a chalky daytime moon down the tequila-colored San Juan River. The stream raced through the goosenecks of its narrow canyons. For a week, soaking wet the whole time, Christopher saw only brown water, brown rocks, and a thread of china-blue sky hundreds of feet above him.

  “Do you feel rested?” Patchen asked.

  “Reborn.”

  “Good, because I’ve been asked to pass along one of O. G.’s suggestions.”

  O. G. never gave orders. He floated ideas, he found gold dust in the opinions of his subordinates, he made what he called suggestions. Sometimes these instructions baffled, sometimes they took the breath away. In O. G.’s mind nothing was impossible. He was loved for this. After all, to be told you were capable of doing the impossible was a rare kind of flattery. Christopher waited to hear what was coming. He had to wait. Patchen rose to his feet, turned his back, gripped the back of the chair with whitened knuckles, and faced the blank wall. For a long moment he seemed to be gazing through a non-existent window. He was subject to sudden attacks of excruciating pain—the nerves down the right side of his body had been damaged by the grenade that almost killed him—and Christopher realized that he was having a seizure now. Patchen was hiding his face. Rudi lifted his head and watched his master. Then the dog, the blackest, sleekest, most muscular animal Christopher had ever seen, fixed his attention on Christopher. He made no threatening movements, but the message was clear: Do not move until Patchen does.

  As white-faced as if his skin had been bleached, Patchen sat down again. He said, “O. G. wants you to go to East Germany.”

  Christopher accepted this information without comment. He knew from experience that this might be the entire instruction. A year or so before he had been given an airline bag full of hundred-dollar bills and told to go to Africa. The colonial powers of Europe were bankrupting themselves supporting their colonies, and it was obvious, at least to O. G., that Britain and France and Belgium would soon be forced to grant these primitive countries independence. The United States was pressuring them to do so. They were looking for a way to lay down the burden of governance without losing the revenues that had been the reason for stealing these godforsaken lands and inventing names for them in the first place. American intelligence, and therefore the rest of the U. S. government, knew very little about what were soon to be called the emerging countries of Africa, and next to nothing about the politicians who were soon going to take over the reins of government. Christopher had deduced that his assignment in Africa was to meet, evaluate, and by doing the favors that his satchel of money made possible, make friends with as many of these future leaders as possible. That is what he did, entirely alone and on his own. O. G. was delighted with these results. “We can be a presence in Africa now, by golly,” he exclaimed. “All these benighted colonies are going to be full-fledged members of the United Nations in less time than it took Stanley to find Livingston!”

  Now Patchen said, “Your mind is elsewhere.”

  “Sorry, yes.”

  “Would you like to know more, or do you plan to make up the German Democratic Republic as you go along, like you did in Africa?”

  “I’m all ears.”

  Patchen said, “Berlin has picked up some interesting stuff on KGB plans for certain Arab countries, or at least certain Arabs.”
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  “Such as?”

  “Such as support and training for guerrilla movements.”

  “The Berlin base picked this stuff up on their own, or their Germans picked it up?”

  “Mostly Z Group. Wolkowicz, is following up.”

  Barney Wolkowicz was the current chief of the Berlin base. Christopher said, “Tell me the interesting stuff.”

  “At first it was vague, a report from a minor source, possibly reliable, that the Russians had decided to make use of East German expertise in paramilitary operations in Arab countries.”