Christopher's Ghosts (11 page)

Paul had expected it to take a couple of hours for the call to go through to Berlin. However, the Kaltenbach’s number rang almost immediately. On hearing her voice, Paul said, “Rima.”

“My love. You are safely there?”

“No broken bones. It was an easy drive. We hardly saw another car.”

After a pause—for a moment Paul thought that the connection had been broken—Rima said, “I want to come to you, Paul.”

“Here?”

“Yes, I must. Tonight. On the eleven-forty train.”

Paul didn’t hesitate. It was too late for hesitation. His curiosity was too great. Besides, he longed for her. And whoever was listening had heard enough. They should hear no more.

“Of course,” he said. “I’ll be at the station to meet you.”

“Your family will not be upset?”

“They’ll understand. Take the train. What about your father?”

“He doesn’t know. I’ll leave a note.”

It was not love but deathly fear that Paul had heard in Rima’s voice. He felt what she was feeling as if he were the one who was afraid. But he was not afraid—not for himself, anyway. He had never in his short life been afraid—not of bullies even before he learned how to fight them, not even of Stutzer. His father said that he got this from his mother and her family—look at Paulus—but Paul had never seen his
father show a sign of fear, either. Hubbard watched, he listened, he smiled. Then he wrote everything down and this act seemed to cure everything, even the instinct for self-preservation.

When Hubbard and Paulus returned from their walk, they were silent and withdrawn, rare behavior for either of them. Paul had planned to tell the family his news one at a time, Hubbard first, Lori last, so as to give them the opportunity of consulting each other and making a decision. However, Hubbard and Paulus seemed determined to remain together, and Paul needed time to stop Rima if the answer was No. In that case he would take a train to Berlin. He would go to her.

Paul told the two of them about his phone call. As usual, Paulus’s taut face showed nothing. Hubbard absorbed Paul’s words, then smiled—but faintly. Paulus let Hubbard, the father, ask the questions. There was only one.

“This is the girl who helped you in the Tiergarten?”

“Yes.”

“Then of course she can come,” Hubbard said. “Paulus, is that agreeable?”

“Certainly. Is she pretty, Paul?”

“More than that, Uncle.”

Paulus gave him a long look while his smile, beginning in his eyes, peeled off the expressionless mask that he had been wearing since his walk with Hubbard. More than pretty? More evidence that Paul, this splendid boy, was like his maternal grandfather, like Paulus himself, like all of his Prussian forebears. “Wunderbar!” Paulus said.

Hubbard had similar manly feelings. He threw a heavy arm around Paul’s shoulders and squeezed. His eyes glowed. Paul could see that his father was imagining the meeting of Paul and Rima at the station—Paul waiting on the platform, Rima alighting from the train, their proper public hello, the longing in their eyes. Hubbard was not, however, imagining the watchers in the shadows. He saw no evil unless it tapped him on the chest.

 
 
2

It was well after midnight when Rima arrived at Schloss Berwick. Hilde greeted her at the door with a heart-chilling demonstration of old-fashioned good manners. She was kind but distant, hospitable but not welcoming. She spoke all the right words without uttering a kindly one. The girl had brought her overnight things in a rucksack, as if she were on a Wandervögel hike. Her large, intelligent and beautiful brown eyes—Hilde immediately admitted these obvious qualities to herself—touched everything in the entrance hall. As if on tiptoes, Rima looked from object to object as if checking an inventory, which in fact she was doing because Paul had told her about the Arras mille-fleurs tapestry with its unicorn at the turning of the stairway, the suits of armor, the stuffed boars’ heads, the giant-size swords and spears, the huge Kilim rug that one of Paulus’s brothers had sent home from Turkey before being killed by a British shell at Gallipoli while advising the Turkish infantry.

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 the 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?”