Christopher's Ghosts (27 page)

“Usually I avoid such flights of fancy about first impressions,” Yuri said. “But it was obvious that this one had not conquered his pride, whatever his act. I asked him a question. He answered in a servile tone of voice. I said, ‘Speak to me in your own voice, Number Whatever-you-are.’ He snapped to attention, even slapping his heels together in their felt boots and of course not making a sound. He stared at the bloodstain on the wall and answered my original question again. This time his voice was very loud—a Schutzstaffel bark. We were speaking Russian, but nevertheless what came out of his mouth was a sound that only a German officer could make.”

The file on Stutzer told Yuri little that was useful. He had cooperated from the first with Soviet interrogators. He understood from his own past experience that resistance was pointless. In the end, everybody broke, everybody talked, everybody begged for mercy. His captors knew that he knew this. In Yuri’s opinion Stutzer had lied to his interrogators about nearly everything, including his identity. His papers identified him as a member of the fighting SS, rather than as the secret policeman he really was. The rest of his testimony was a cover story backing up his papers. True, he commanded a kommando that hunted down Soviet partisans, but that was war. The partisans conducted the same type of operations against German forces, as his capture and the immediate summary execution of all his men demonstrated. All questions about the German order of battle he answered truthfully. He had no reason not to cooperate. The Red Army already knew what units of the Wehrmacht they were fighting, who commanded them, what their strength was. Besides, the German armies were in full retreat. Chaos was queen. Communications were disrupted. Even the German High Command did not know exactly what units were left or where exactly they were or how effective they might be. The war was lost. Everyone knew this. Stutzer had done his duty in the greatest war in history. Now
that the war was over except for the final skirmishes, his duty was to preserve himself and the wisdom he had gained to fight the next one. Of course Stutzer never said that, but Yuri knew that it was true.

Yuri said, “He said the same thing about the Soviet victory as Hitler did later on. In his first session with an interrogator Stutzer said, ‘The eastern people have shown that they were stronger than the German people, therefore they are the superior race.’ Whether he actually believed this or was just telling a stupid Russian peasant like me what he thought I wanted to hear is an open question.”

Throughout his many interviews with Yuri, Stutzer conveyed his admiration for the Red Army, for Communism. The war, he said, had taught him that the wind of history was blowing the Soviet Union toward world rule. If Germany had been overwhelmed—not merely defeated but subjected to apocalypse—what chance could the bankrupt English, the French who had been erased from history, the soft Americans possibly have? Communism, which was just another name for imperial Russia, had already prevailed in China and in half of the old Europe. The rest of mankind would soon surrender, too.

“All this was a subtle performance at first,” Yuri said, “conveyed through rueful smiles and words that seemed to escape from him rather than being spoken by a conscious effort of the will. As time went on he became more forthright. It was all lies, of course, but he was a good actor and he gave a masterly performance. In the end it was the performance that opened my eyes to the value of this fellow. After all, I wasn’t looking for an angel. I had been asked to decide if Stutzer might be useful to the Ministry of State Security of the German Democratic Republic. By every measure—Stutzer’s training, his skills, his experience, his accomplishments, his intelligence, his guile, his gifts as an impersonator, his fluency as a liar—it was obvious was that he was wonderful material. The fact that he was also a psychopath was no impediment—quite the opposite.”

Still Yuri hesitated about signing him up. With Yuri’s blessing, Stutzer was controlling the interviews, and, in his own mind at least, controlling Yuri. How could such a megalomaniac be controlled? Even the Schutzstaffel, which Stutzer had loved and still loved, had not been able to
control him. Also little by little, Yuri was drawing from somewhere inside Stutzer a truer, if not entirely true, record of his past. In every assignment he had ever been given, this monster had exceeded his orders, exceeded his mission, exceeded his authority. He had also exceeded the expectations of his superiors in nearly everything he did, and because he worked for an organization that had abolished the very idea of excess, he had been richly rewarded. Promotion, decorations, reputation, favor from on high had all come his way. Stutzer was supremely confident that this would happen again if only he could persuade Yuri—condition him—to recommend him to his superiors in the Soviet intelligence service, who were the most powerful secret policemen in the history of the world.

“All of this was mind-reading on my part,” Yuri said. “But he was too clever by half, so he was not all that hard to read.”

Rising out of his silence, Christopher said, “You liked him.”

“I couldn’t bear him,” Yuri replied. “But I thought he was qualified. My assignment was to render an opinion on his potential as a servant of the Communist Party of the German Democratic Republic. I was in a position to do great harm if I made a bad decision. I was being pressed to make up my mind on this case. I was accused of dawdling.”

“He was your only case?”

“No, there were others, but he was by far the most interesting one. Usually the answer was obvious. Maybe one in every fifty candidates got a yes. Even the yeses were almost always gumshoe material. Stutzer was different. If he was chosen, he would succeed, he would rise, sooner or later he would be trusted. Then what? That was the question.”

Yuri decided to put Stutzer through a series of practical tests. This required putting him on the street. He was outfitted with a new suit and everything that went with it. “He hadn’t been dressed like a human being for six years, but you could see the disgust in his eyes when he put on these ugly cheap clothes made in the USSR and looked at himself in the mirror. It was a two-way mirror, needless to say, and I was on the other side of it. The heavy wool suit with its elephant-ears lapels, the clumsy shoes, the hat, even the baggy socks—everything revolted him. He buttoned the coat, he tilted the hat, he turned this way and that like a girl in front of the mirror. His vanity was astonishing, especially since he was a professional
who knew all about mirrors in police stations and therefore he understood that he was almost certainly being watched by me from the other side. These clothes had been cut and sewed by chimpanzees. He preferred his gulag rags. No one could question his taste and social rank for wearing a prison uniform. Contempt was written all over his face and of course that expressed his true opinion of the Soviet Union.”

Yuri’s acuity was already well known to Christopher, but he had never before seen it on such open display. Always before the Russian had concealed a portion of his cleverness—he was too good at what he did to invite something as useless as admiration—but now he was fascinated by what was emerging from his own memory. Christopher was tempted to interrupt, to confirm Yuri’s intuition with descriptions of Stutzer the dandy, but Yuri was switched on now and Christopher knew better than to interrupt a man who was trying to tell him something that he desperately wanted to know.

Stutzer was given a number of exercises in tradecraft—follow this man, suborn his wife into informing on him, study his contacts, build up a profile, make a case, nail him even if he was innocent—as he probably was. For Stutzer this was child’s play. More complicated exercises followed. He succeeded in them all. He worked quickly, efficiently, without distraction. As his masters in the Schutzstaffel had discovered, he was endlessly resourceful, he found new ways to do things, he improved on old methods. He had forgotten nothing in the six years at hard labor he had already served. He had even learned from the experience. His captors took brutality into new dimensions. They had perfected humiliation as a form of punishment that had no ending, even for those who were eventually released from captivity. His camp in the Urals had had no barbed wire. It wasn’t even necessary to lock the cells. There was nowhere to go except into a worse emptiness. The USSR itself was a vast prison of space from which no escape was possible. Even the rags in which he was clothed had a meaning that was, for Stutzer, next door to metaphysical. Appearances were meaningless. The people he had tortured and shot in his day as a secret policeman were always properly dressed for their date with death. Even in Nazi death camps the condemned wore clothes that were in such excellent condition that
prisoners were required to take them off and fold them neatly before they were executed. The communists had eliminated such niceties from their own methods. Of course few Soviet citizens owned clothes that anyone else would wish to inherit.

“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.”