Christopher's Ghosts (26 page)

“I. D., please,” this hunter said.

Christopher handed over the Maryland driver’s license he had found
in the bottomless package. The hunter examined it and handed it back. Apparently this was an all-clear signal. The hunter behind the car lowered his shotgun. The hunter inside the gate unlocked it and let it swing open. The hunter beside the car said, “Drive on, sir. It’s about fifteen minutes to your destination. Do not leave the car or drive off the gravel road. Leave your walkie-talkie on.”

After a mile or so Christopher emerged into broad fields surrounded by the whitewashed board fences of a horse farm. He saw no horses or other livestock, but it was winter and he guessed that the animals were in the white barns that he saw in the distance. Beyond the barns a large white manor house, verandah columned to the eaves Mount Vernon-style, stood on a low hilltop with the blue mountains behind it. A driveway lined with large trees led to the house. Christopher drove in, feeling on his skin the eyes that were watching him through binoculars.

The walkie-talkie squawked. A voice said, “Please drive around back and follow the signs to the garage.” Christopher did as he was told. The garage looked like a barn, and it was fitted with several oversize garage doors. As the red Pontiac approached, one of the doors pivoted open. Christopher drove through it. The door closed behind him. He rolled down his window and remained in the car. He saw no sign of life. The garage was shadowy. Light fell in strips through high, louvered windows. He saw two Jeeps, a fire truck incongruously painted army green, several cars, and a single-engine Beechcraft airplane. Except for the pings and creaks from the Pontiac’s cooling engine, the silence was complete.

A voice beside him said, “You can get out of the car now, sir.”

Christopher did as suggested. Two more hunters confronted him. One asked for his ID. Again he produced the Maryland driver’s license. The man looked at the license and spoke a recognition phrase: “See any deer on the way in?” Christopher supplied the correct answer: “Only one. A six-point buck.” The second hunter patted him down to see if he was carrying a weapon. He was not.

“Follow me, sir,” the first man said.

 
 
4

Yuri Kikorov seemed to be alone in the house. This was not actually the case. His minders from counterintelligence were just keeping themselves out of the way. They did not want Christopher to see their faces or hear the fictitious names they were using on this job. He had no need to know what they looked like or who they were or what they were doing. They were the most secret of the secret and wanted the world to know it.

Yuri, dressed as an American in a plaid shirt and corduroy trousers and hunter’s boots, met Christopher at the front door. He had grown the beginnings of what promised to become a luxuriant black mustache and beard. He was very much at home. He led his guest to a greenhouse room in which a small orange tree and several large tropical plants grew in pots. A small round table was laid with a teapot under a cozy and sandwiches and a large chocolate cake.

Yuri said, “We have Russian tea and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Are you hungry? The sandwiches are excellent.”

As they ate, Yuri described his outings. He had been to the movies,
The Far Country
with James Stewart,
East of Eden
with James Dean. He preferred Stewart, a serious actor. Dean should be punished for his mumbling, his twitches. He had dined in restaurants, always ordering southern fried chicken and mashed potatoes, followed by apple pie à la mode. He had gone to a basketball game. He had asked to be taken to a dance hall, but his minders told him that there were none closer than Richmond. They gave him instead a copy of Playboy. A Civil War battle had been fought nearby and he had visited the battlefield and studied the historical accounts. “Lee should have been a general in the Russian army,” he said. “He loved frontal assaults. Thousands died to entertain him. Charge the cannon, make corpses.” In the Great Patriotic War, at least in sectors where Yuri had fought, the Red Army had driven crowds of prisoners from the gulag ahead of itself into the German machine guns on the theory that the enemy would run out of ammunition before the real armed Russian troops charged. Sometimes the victims were equipped with pitchforks or scythes to encourage the
Germans to take them seriously. “The slaughter was amazing,” he said. “But the enemy always had more bullets than we had ziks.”

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.