Christopher's Ghosts (13 page)

“I’m glad we’re alone,” Lori said. “We must get to know each other.”

Breakfast was laid out on a sideboard. Lori helped herself to butter and jam, bread, a piece of cheese, a slice of ham, a boiled egg. Clearly she meant to fill her empty stomach. Rima took bread and butter and a cup of coffee.

They sat down on opposite sides of the table, looking into each
other’s faces. Rima was surprised by Lori’s youthful appearance. Take away the bruised eyes and the shadow of misery and she might have been a girl of twenty. She ate like a teenager—silently, greedily, everything on her plate.

“Now I must interrogate you,” she said when she was finished.

Rima said nothing.

Lori said, “It’s my duty as a mother, you understand.”

“Of course.”

“You are a nurse?”

“No, a student. A former student.”

“But you are Professor Doctor Kaltenbach’s daughter?”

“Yes. Do you know him?”

Lori switched to English. “Your father is a fine person and a great surgeon,” she said. “But you know that. I knew your mother, too. She played the viola very nicely. She is getting along all right in Argentina?”

“I believe so. Her letters don’t always come through.”

“And when they do they have been opened.”

“Sometimes it seems so.”

“You’re circumspect, I see.”

“Everyone in the Reich should be circumspect.”

Lori examined her, as if answering her own question before asking it. “You are what age?”

“Sixteen.”

“You seem older.”

Rima spread her hands—whatever you say.

“At your age that’s a compliment. Seeming to be older at your age may not be a good thing in every way, but it’s an advantage. It’s difficult at sixteen to get people to take you seriously. Especially if one is as pretty as you. How did you learn English?”

“From tutors. My mother thought it would be an advantage. She always hoped to go to America.”

“And now she’s there, in Argentina.”

“Not that America. New York City is where she wanted to be, because of the gaiety and the skyscrapers. She thought that my father could work there and be as well known as he was in Berlin and we could
live in peace.”

“So she saw it coming, what we have now in Germany?”

“Maybe not the entire reality, but she guessed enough to realize what it would mean for my father.”

“And your father?”

“If you know him,” Rima said, “then you know the answer to that question.”

Lori nodded. “I’m curious about how you met Paul.”

Rima took a moment before she answered. This was not because she had to summon memories. Those were always with her—not as memories, but as the most vivid things in her mind in every moment of the present. She could not get Paul out of her head. She had never before understood the entire meaning of that cliché, but now she did. Clichés, she realized, were clichés for a reason.

“I saw him for the first time last summer, in the Tiergarten, near the Neuer See. He was just standing there in the middle of a lawn, looking at the world.”

“A figure in a landscape.”

“No, a boy in the midst of life. He was very still but entirely alive. That’s what I noticed.”

“And you decided that he was the one for you?”

“Yes. At that moment.”

“You’re very frank. I admire that. Did you approach him then?”

“No. The authorities were in the midst of ruining my father, taking everything away from him. It wasn’t possible to know where this process would end.”

Lori interrupted. “You didn’t want to involve Paul?”

Rima said, “I decided to wait and see what happened to my father.”

Lori said, “So you set your cap for him, you spied on him, you became a mystery woman in his eyes, you made him grateful to you, and at last you captured him.”

“I would not have chosen those exact words to describe what happened,” Rima said. “But yes, those are the essentials.”

Lori said, “I see. And why exactly did you come to Rügen yesterday?”

“To be with Paul.”

“You love him?”

“Of course I do.”

“He loves you?”

“He has said that he does.”

Lori paused, eyes locked with Rima’s. “And there is no other reason that you came here yesterday?”

“Yes, but I can’t answer your questions about that. I’m sorry.”

“You are not pregnant?”

“No.”

Lori coughed into her napkin—deeply, almost consumptively, as she had done the night before. Her bruised eyes watered; she dried them on the napkin. “I may understand your reasons better than you think,” she said. “I’ve seen you before, you know. You were watching me by the Tiergarten the other day. You were walking Miss Wetzel’s little white dog.”

“Yes, Mrs. Christopher, and you were getting into a black Daimler.”

“You identified everyone in the car?”

“I recognized the man, Mrs. Christopher.”

“Whom have you told?”

“Only Paul. He had seen the same thing happen on another day.”

Lori bit her lower lip, the first visible sign that her emotions were engaged by this conversation. Her pupils had grown smaller while they talked. She said, “You realize that I should hate you for all this, do you not?”

“As a woman, I understand such a feeling. But I think it is wrong.”

“You consider yourself a woman?”

“Didn’t you at my age?”

This made Lori pause, even smile briefly with her fierce eyes. “Perhaps a year or two later than sixteen,” she said. “And if as a woman you think what you think, then what is your opinion as an intelligent human being?”

“I think I should not have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I am afraid—very much afraid, Mrs. Christopher, that it’s going to cost me everything.”

Lori looked at Rima without expression, then shook her head as if
to rid it of a notion or an impulse. “Perhaps not, or at least not yet,” she said. “They saw you too, you know. They may well think that you can be useful to them.”

Rima was taken aback. What did this woman know? She said, “I am prepared for that possibility.”

“Are you indeed, Miss? Be careful. Many others have thought the same thing and most of them are dead.”

Lori folded her napkin and drew it into its silver ring, then rose from the table. She touched Rima on the shoulder. Rima looked up at her.

“You are gorgeous,” she said. “Paul is a lucky young man, but he is very young, younger than you. Take precautions when you’re with him. You know what to do?”

Rima nodded. “May I ask you a question?” she said.

“Fire away.”

“Do you hate me?”

“Of course not,” Lori said. “I’m all booked up in that department.”

 5 

Better than anyone else, Lori knew that Rima had saved the family from the embarrassment—and in the Christophers’ case, something worse than that—of letting the secret of Lori’s suicide attempt out of the house. Had they called a doctor, he would have been obliged to report his visit and the particulars of the emergency to the police. They would have investigated and passed the information on to higher authority. There would have been another detention, another interview. Heydrich himself would have interrogated Lori the next time he abducted her from the Tiergarten, drove her to his confiscated hunting lodge in a wooded section of Berlin, and entertained her at lunch with his theatrical conversation, his painful manners, his learned appreciation of her piano playing. He had perfect pitch just as Lori did or so he
claimed, he was hopelessly in love with her, the most perfect Aryan female he had ever seen.

“You are from folklore, from art!” he had told her, kissing her palm on the day that Rima saw her getting into the Daimler. “You are the eternal German beauty, do you wonder that I love you?”

He kept Paris clothes for her in a closet at the hunting lodge and required her to change into them when, as he put it, she called on him. He gave her gifts of jewelry and perfume, once a Julius Blüthner grand piano that had belonged to Franz Liszt and later to a famous Berlin pianist who—how should he put it?—no longer played in Germany, just as the former owner of his hunting lodge no longer lived in Germany. Lori could not touch the keys of this magnificent instrument without nausea, but during her hours in captivity she played it for Heydrich, who preferred the romantics and also, though he was slightly ashamed of this, the operettas of Lehár and Strauss. To Heydrich, their love, as he called it, was, as he put it, a sublime operetta, tuneful and gay and sometimes (he admitted it), marked by foolish misunderstandings.

In fact, Lori did not misunderstand her situation in the least. Her trysts with Heydrich were the price for his staying his hand against Paul, Hubbard, Paulus, Hilde and everyone else to whom she was connected by blood and friendship. The secret police knew the identities of the people she loved. None of them was safe. Heydrich really did have the power to do whatever he liked in Germany. His popular nickname was Der Henker, the hangman. In her own mind Lori called him Die Spinne, the Spider. The entire German people was caught in his web. He could, if the whim took him, sentence them all to death and in their enthusiasm for obedience they would shoot each other down to the last two men alive, who would thereupon enter into a murder-suicide pact.

When he wanted to be alone with Lori without the possibility of interruption—to spare her worry, as he put it—he would order the arrest of Hubbard, and now that Paul was home from school, of Paul, too. This was the reason for their detentions, for the endless, pointless interviews with Stutzer. Even though he knew all about them,
Heydrich never referred to the crimes of which the Christophers were undeniably guilty—the smuggling of a large number of fugitives out of the country aboard the
Mahican
. Nearly all of these people had been Jews, a few had also been Social Democrats, some really were or for fashion’s sake had pretended to be communists. Some of them even managed to take their money, or some of it, out of Germany with them. Helping such people—enemies of the state, enemies of the people, racial and political scum—to escape justice was treason. A capital crime. Heydrich knew all the names, all the dates, all the details of the Christophers’ nighttime rescues. Lori knew that he knew. On his whim she could be shot or tortured and then shot. Or beheaded or impaled on a meat hook. So could Hubbard, so could Paul because he had stowed away on a couple of their night sails to Denmark. Heydrich was capable of shooting Hubbard and Paul or tripping the guillotine himself and requiring Lori to watch. And then, sentimental fool that he said he was, not shoot her because he could not kill the thing he loved.

Lori was not glad to be alive on Midsummer Day. The lingering effect of the opiate she had taken the day before clouded her mind and still struggled with her brain for control of her body. She did not know which opiate it had been. She had thought that so-and-so many grams of the stuff would kill her, which was all that mattered. The dose she swallowed had not been enough. Her body had saved her by being stronger than the drug. Now, the morning after, she was chilled, she shuddered, her legs were weak and made small involuntary kicking movements. She had vomited the huge breakfast she had eaten almost immediately after she ate it. She tasted vomit, she smelled it for hours afterward.

She had never in her life been so angry at herself, so ashamed, so furious with her own stupidity, her own weakness. How could she have let herself be driven to this by mere humiliation? What had she been thinking? Her death would have been a death warrant for the others. Had she died, Heydrich would have avenged the insult of her escape by charging her jealous husband with murder. Everybody at Schloss Berwick this weekend would now be lying in a cellar with bullets in
their brains or their heads in baskets.

“Stupid!” she said to herself. “Stupid!” It was the worst insult she could imagine.

These thoughts passed through Lori’s mind as she sat in a strip of sunlight in Hilde’s sewing room. She had no one to whom she could speak of such matters. Nor would she ever have anybody, no matter how long she lived. Hilde stayed near, slyly watching Lori over her flying knitting needles, on the lookout for another suicide attempt. But in reality she was as disinterested in Lori as a cat in some other cat’s kitten. She had always been kind to Lori, the orphan who grew up in her house, because it was her duty to be kind to her and because Paulus, who adored his brother’s child, commanded her to be kind. But Hilde had never had feelings for Lori. By the time the child came to live with them, Hilde’s sons, every one of them, had fallen in Russia or France. Hilde had no feelings left.

A shaft of sunlight fell on Lori’s legs. Perversely, she shivered again. Hilde looked up from her knitting, alert for any sign that she could tuck another coverlet around Lori or fetch the hot-water bottle that Lori had so far refused. Lori was already wearing a sweater and a shawl and her lower body was wrapped in an afghan.

“I’m not cold,” Lori said quickly, to forestall more wrappings. “I just have the shakes.”

She gave a foolish smile as if what she suffered from was too much red wine the night before. For the first time in her life Lori, who had never believed in the supernatural, wished that she was a Catholic. She would then have someone to talk to. But would even a priest believe, let alone understand the confession that would spill from her mouth? If he told her she was forgiven, would she believe that? What right did any human being have to forgive her? One of the most evil men in the history of the world was in love with her. Her beauty, her personage, which had always given her such pleasure, had brought about this horror. She loved her husband, she had loved him from the moment she saw him walking into this very house sixteen years before. The sight of him—tall, horse-faced, absurdly sure of himself, delighted by everything, foreign in every possible way—had made her laugh so hard
within herself that the only way to conceal the joy he gave her was to be harsh with him, to be distant, to show no interest in this oversize boy who fascinated her. Now, she knew, he was upstairs at his writing table, recording everything that he had witnessed the night before. This was as necessary to him as morphine to an addict. When he was done, everything would be recorded, nothing about Lori would ever be forgotten. He left nothing out, except what he didn’t know.