Christopher's Ghosts (17 page)

Lori said, “If you’re as helpless as you say you are, why am I here?”

“You came for advice,” O. G. replied. “I’ve given you advice. If I didn’t think it was feasible I wouldn’t suggest it.”

“What if they won’t let him off the ship in New York?”

“A foreign ship berthed in an American port is not an embassy. American authorities can come aboard in defense of an American citizen.”

“In other words, ‘Trust me and don’t worry your pretty little head.’”

O. G. swallowed the taunt. “Yes to the trust, no to the rest,” he said. “Of course you have a right to be worried. You have a lot to be worried about, if I may say so.”

“Even if Paul gets off in New York he will be out in the open, unguarded and exposed. Heydrich has men everywhere.”

“True. But America is a big place, and when Paul arrives in New York he will be in the United States of America and under the protection of the Hubbards and their friends. He will be beyond Heydrich’s reach.”

“Nothing is beyond his reach.”

O. G. made no answer to this. What Lori said was true enough, at least in theory. Heydrich was young. He was exalted by the power that ruthlessness had brought to him. He was certainly ruthless enough to kidnap an American boy on American soil and somehow smuggle him back to Germany as a way of gluing a mistress to him. But in the United States this could not happen under cover of silence. The police would tell the press, the press would tell the world. Heydrich did have superiors even if there were only two of them, and Himmler and Hitler would not be pleased by the unfavorable publicity. It would also turn Heydrich into a laughingstock—a man who tried to make a woman love him kidnapping her son.

O. G.’s sinuous mind played for a moment with that scenario. Was it actually possible to destroy or at least diminish this fat-assed monster at the cost of sacrificing his best friend’s wife and the boy who was his godson? Could such an exchange be defined, if not defended as a moral action? O. G. liked moral conundrums; at Yale, ethics had been his favorite course. It instilled in him the habit of thinking like a spymaster long before he became, a few years hence, the most powerful one in the world.

Lori’s eyes, therefore her mind, were focused on something outside the room.

“Lori,” O. G. said, as if awakening her. He realized that was exactly what he was doing. He had to speak her name again, sharply, before she heard him and returned from wherever she had been. He decided that he must speak to her in a way that would keep her mind focused.

“We’ve got to agree on a plan,” he said.

“So you keep saying,” Lori replied. “But they can take Paul anytime. They can take any one of us, or all of us.”

“I don’t think they’ll do that,” O. G. said. “Obviously Heydrich has nothing to gain if he makes you hate him… .”

“
Hate
him? I’d assassinate him tomorrow if someone would show me how to do it.”

“Maybe someone will. Meanwhile, there is Paul to think about. Also, if I may say so, there is Hubbard to think about. Not to mention yourself.”

He looked her straight in the eye as he talked. And as he talked, she slipped away again. Her eyes dulled, the expression left her face. O. G. realized that there was no prospect of ever reviving the person she used to be. She had lost hope.

He said, “We’re going to get this done, my dear. Chin up.”

No response from Lori. He feared for Hubbard.

He said, “Lori, think about our talk. If you need to, come talk to me again. Come as often as you want, any time of the day or night. But confide in no one else. And I implore you, no confessions to Hubbard. It would be the end of him.”

He might as well have been talking to the chair Lori sat in, her lovely legs crossed at the knees.

 5 

“Can they hear whispers over their microphones?” Rima asked. “Can they hear me at certain moments? Is someone in earphones writing everything down? How do you spell… .” Much more softly than usual she uttered the howl of joy she made when having an orgasm. “Before you, I had no idea that I had such noises in me,” she said.

“What did you expect?”

“Something more ladylike,” she said.

They laughed in whispers. Even if there had been no Stutzer and no Heydrich, Paul thought, Rima would have contrived this world of whispers. She was alive when they were alone together, never otherwise, she said. Now they met every morning in Paul’s room. Rima came up the back stairs while it was still dark, even before Hubbard got up. Paul met her at the kitchen door, in case she was surprised by Lori, who roamed through the apartment most of the night. Rima brought oranges, bananas, tangerines, apricots. These were exotic items in Berlin. He had no notion where she found them. “I know where the lemon tree blooms,” Rima said. The fruit was incredibly sweet. They kissed with sugary mouths. They licked sugar and citrus off each other’s fingers. Rima took the peels with her when she left, as if Paul were a
fugitive in hiding and the peels were evidence of his existence.

“It’s amazing what the party has done in six short years,” Rima said. “They have made this Reich of theirs into a world in which there’s a reason for everything. All is explained by their theories. Soon everything any citizen of the Reich needs to know will be printed on the back of identity cards. In doubt about the Jews? Confused about Strength through Joy? Can’t remember the Leader’s immortal words about something or other? Just turn the card over and you will know what to think, what to say.”

It was reckless to meet as they did, but they agreed that if they did not take the chance they would lose the thing they could not live without. Each wasted moment was gone forever, said Rima. It continually astonished Paul, who had imagined romantic love as something on a page of its own—bittersweet moments, lovely light falling on a fully dressed woman, chaste kisses in a garden—that physical intimacy could create such wild emotion, such desperation, such fear of loss, such joy, such moments of hopelessness. Both he and Rima were sure that sooner or later someone would burst into their room and put a stop to their happiness. Even before the dictatorship this would have happened. Parents would have done it, or clergy, or servants would have informed on them—the eternal love police and their snitches. “But until it does happen,” Rima whispered, “we mustn’t waste a moment. Better to remember what we’ve done than what we were afraid to do. Oh, far better.”

Paul had no inkling that plans were still being made by those who loved him to save him by separating him from Rima forever. The fact that his parents never knocked on the door, that his mother—even Hubbard in his writing trance—could not help but hear Rima’s trills of pleasure puzzled Rima.

“Maybe they want us to be happy,” Paul said.

“Then they’re very unusual parents,” Rima said. “My father would shoot you with his Mauser army pistol if he knew what goes on in this bed.”

In the week that Paul and Rima had been back in Berlin, they had heard nothing from the secret police, nor had they seen any sign of
them. Stutzer had given Rima no further spy missions. But of course they were being watched. A hand in a leather glove could fall on his shoulder or hers at any time. They could be taken away separately or together. They might be released again, they might not be. They might be beaten. Rima’s father had been punched in the face during the first moment of his first interview with the secret police. His nose—of course his nose—was broken. It was their way of telling him that he was no longer entitled to respect and never would be again, that he had no protection, that they could kill him if they wished and throw him into the gutter to be picked up by the night sweepers. Her father had never actually told her what had happened. The shame of it was too much for him. But she saw his smashed nose and his black-and-blue face, and she knew. Anyone would have known. They were meant to know.

Rima was back on Miss Wetzel’s payroll. The coins she earned for walking Blümchen paid for the fruit she brought to Paul’s room. On the day after she returned from Rügen, Rima had called on Miss Wetzel to apologize for causing her to worry about the dog. Rima already knew that Blümchen was alive and well because she and Paul could hear the little dog barking excitedly in the apartment below. No doubt, at certain moments, it could hear them.

Miss Wetzel had been afraid that something had happened to Rima. But the policeman who brought Blümchen home had explained everything—how poor Rima had witnessed a crime and was giving evidence, how she had asked that they bring Blümchen home so that her mistress would not worry about her. Such a thoughtful young lady! Blümchen missed her so! She barked her name, listen! Would Rima be interested in walking Blümchen again? At noon and in the evening, yes, but not in the early morning, Rima answered. She was studying a new subject and her mind was at its clearest when the day was new.

And now Rima and Paul had oranges and tangerines and bananas in bed, sometimes even a mango. And each other, too. Wasn’t life wonderful? Rima whispered. Wasn’t it lovely?

 
 
6

On Saturday evening O. G. invited all three Christophers to dinner at Horcher’s, his favorite restaurant. It was also the favorite restaurant of the ruling class, and like O. G.’s dinner parties, it was thronged with women in fashionable gowns and military officers and civilian officials wearing what appeared to be the entire vast wardrobe of German uniforms. Several of the men greeted O. G. cordially. The Christophers were snubbed. Invisible.

“This place has an interesting new clientèle,” Lori said. “Are we here to be poisoned?”

O. G. ordered the prix fixe menu for all along with two bottles of wine, one German, one French. He ordered the waiter to let Paul do the tasting. O. G. watched, shrewd blue eyes behind round pince-nez, as the wines were poured and Paul tasted them, chewing a piece of bread between the white and the red. The bottles were wrapped in napkins, hiding the labels.

“What’s the verdict?” O. G. asked.

“I don’t like Gewürztraminer,” Paul said.

“Why ever not?”

“It tastes the way dried rose petals smell. But the red wine is delicious.”

“Good palate,” O. G. said. “Nuits Saint-Georges 1929. Drink only wine made from the pinot grape, my boy, and you’ll live a happy life.”

By the time the appetizer was served their table had ceased to be an object of curiosity. More important diners had more important things to think and talk about. Like all fashionable restaurants, Horcher’s had its own sound—pleased with itself rather than pleasurable—few arpeggios in the bedlam of its conversation, no diminuendos. It had made a different noise when Hubbard first knew it during the Weimar Republic. No doubt the sound changed with the regime, he remarked. What did the rest of them think?

“Oh, Hubbard,” Lori said.

“Strings in Wilhelmine days, saxophones during Weimar, drums and tubas now,” Hubbard said, undeterred.

A rotund waiter approached. Under any regime he would have been a spy. Eavesdropping was his métier, along with taking orders and carrying plates. O. G. changed the subject as he drew near.

He said, “You’re all coming to the Fourth of July party at the embassy, I take it?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Hubbard said.

“I’m the official host this year,” O. G. said. “The ambassador is on sick leave.”

He thanked the waiter, who had been fussing with the table setting and examining the Christophers, and he went away. Behind his lenses, one of O. G.’s eyes winked at Paul.

Paul said, “I wonder if I can bring a guest on the Fourth.”

“Of course you can,” O. G. said. “Everyone’s welcome on the anniversary of the greatest event in the history of civilization.”

Lori said, “Paul, whom do you have in mind?”

“Miss Alexa Kaltenbach,” Paul said, using Rima’s actual name.

“You can’t be serious,” Lori said.

“But I am,” Paul said.

He was surprised by the look of bitter disapproval on his mother’s face.

“Lovely child,” Hubbard said. “You’ll like her, O. G. Looks like Evangeline.”

“Looks like who?” said O. G.

“You know, Longfellow. ‘The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, standing like Druids of eld.’ ”

“Oh, that Evangeline,” O. G. said. “Kaltenbach? Any relation to the famous surgeon?”

“His daughter,” Paul said.

“Ah. Poor fellow. He’s had a bad time of it. Bring her along, Paul. She’ll want a new hat. We’ll be in the garden as usual, weather permitting. Hope she likes fireworks.”

“Believe me, she does,” Lori said.

O. G. called for the bill and signed it. He exchanged pleasant words with the waiter. Was his son well? Extremely well. He was in the Luftwaffe, a parachutist corporal serving in Austria. Lori listened with
a frozen expression. O. G. gave her a warning look. You never knew what she might say. The waiter noticed. He said, “A pleasure to see you, Baronesse, if I may be permitted to say so. It has been a long time since we have received you and your husband in Horcher’s.” His eyes swiveled to Hubbard, to whom he said nothing, then back to Lori as he backed away, bowing.

O. G. had picked them up in an embassy car, an enormous sixteen-cylinder Packard sedan driven by a silent chauffeur. On the ride home O. G. chatted with Paul about baseball, a game Paul hardly knew.

“You should take it up next time you’re home,” O. G. said. “It’s the most difficult of all games when it’s played the right way. In fact going out for baseball is the best reason for going to school in America. Your father was a pretty handy first baseman with those long arms and legs. Hit the ball hard and far. Struck out a lot, though.”

When the Packard pulled up at the Christophers’ building, O. G. got out and walked them to the door. The males shook hands. O. G. kissed the air near Lori’s cheeks, his hands light on her shoulders.

“Everything is falling into place,” he said into her ear. “Bring the boy’s toothbrush to the party.”

To Paul, who was bringing up the rear, Lori said, “Run upstairs, dear, and get Schatzi. Poor dog must be miserable.”

“Dear God, that’s three days from now,” Lori said, after the door closed behind Paul.