Christopher's Ghosts (31 page)

The door opened. No light shone outward. In German a man said, “You are exactly on time. Good.”

The door clicked shut. A key turned in an oiled lock. Christopher looked at his watch. It was thirteen minutes past three. The voice he had just heard was a bit thinner, a trifle higher than before, but the tone, the placement of words, the undertone of regal aggrievement as if like Louis XIV he had only just escaped waiting—all those were the same as they had been the last time he heard this man speak.

Climbing down a mountain is more difficult than climbing up it.
Even the cats sent bits of masonry bouncing when they leaped by squads and platoons across the rubble. Christopher swung over the edge of the roof, and pressing his body against the damp wall which was slimy with mildew, found a foothold, then a handhold, then another foothold. He missed the next foothold and fell half a meter or so before grabbing a windowsill, swinging for a moment on his painfully stretched arms, and finally continuing the descent. He put his ear to the door. He could hear men speaking inside the mosque, but so faintly that he could not make out words.

He walked away from the Mosque and at a curve in the street half a block away, pressed his back against a saw tooth of wall that was still standing, and waited.

The Arabs left the Mosque at four-thirty, while it was still dark. They walked away in the same leisurely way in which they had arrived, talking animatedly to each other. Christopher caught no words—the men were too far away—but from their hoarse laughter he imagined that they had resumed their conversation about the sexual behavior of German women. One of the men walked with a slight limp. The other, who swung an umbrella, did not hurry him. From the relaxed way in which they moved, the unguarded way in which they talked in half shouts about things that could do no harm even if overheard, Christopher decided that they were probably not so young as he had earlier supposed. These were men on the brink of middle age, old enough to become the leaders in whom their handlers would naturally be interested. On behalf of their masters the Russians, the East Germans were building a network, designing an instrument. The reckless youths, the ones who were willing to die, would come later. The limping man and his friend with the umbrella were being trained to find them, to recruit them, to set them in motion.

Half an hour later a woman departed, letting the door of the Mosque slam behind her as if she wished to make a point to whoever remained inside. If she was the typist he had heard, she walked as rapidly as she typed and as confidently as though she were moving from streetlight to streetlight instead of plunging ahead into pitch darkness. She was out of sight in moments, heels clattering on the pavement,
a sturdy figure in an ankle-length raincoat, carrying a man’s furled umbrella at shoulder arms.

Still Christopher waited. He was not being patient in any conscious sense. He was not aware of being wet and miserable. He did not feel his wounds, as he usually did in weather like this. Concentration had put him into a kind of trance. The same thing happened to him when he was writing poetry. In a sense he was enjoying himself. He had seldom in his life been so interested in what he was doing as he was now. All five of his senses were working. Cat stink and the acid smell of long-dead fires lingered in his nostrils. He heard tiny noises in the rubble—the cats again and the rodents. In the velvety darkness he apprehended movement, shapes, the first signs of first light. He tasted and felt a fragment of sausage lodged between two of his teeth. He felt the rough ground beneath his feet. His head itched.

His eyes were fixed on the door of the Mosque. Little by little the light increased as the rays of the rising sun grew stronger on the other side of the thick clouds that sealed off the city. The dimly perceived hillocks of brick and stone, the shells of buildings changed gradually into silhouettes, then into visible objects. Christopher waited to see what he expected to see, the matchstick man he had pursued through the rain. He knew Stutzer was inside because he had heard his voice. This was his place of business. Was he waiting for the light because he did not want to go out into darkness in which an enemy might be hiding? Sooner or later he would have to come out, unless he never came outside, or came and went by some other route.

Christopher had focused so hard on the door of the Mosque that he had shut down all but the particle of intelligence that was needed to imagine a thin man with a large head, the last man from Mars, opening a door and walking through it. He had seen the whole picture, detail after detail, in the developing fluid of his imagination. All that was needed was for Stutzer, who had already stepped out of the past, to step out of the real world into the one in which Christopher was waiting for him. Now he heard a dog bark, heard a sharp human voice speak a single word to the animal. The sounds were distant, distorted. He realized that dog and man were in another valley of rubble on a
street parallel to this one. Suddenly Christopher understood the reason for the padlocked doors on the vacant caves. Stutzer wanted no neighbors. The one room in these smashed buildings that would still be intact would be the cellar. A man who wanted to come and go in secrecy would find a way through this labyrinth of cellar rooms, old sewers, and who knew what hidden passages. There might be a dozen exits. The ones to look for would be those that were not padlocked from the outside.

Christopher set off at a run in the direction of the sounds. He felt his cold muscles, his aching bones, the scrapes and scratches he had gotten while climbing the mosque. Would the new Stutzer, a eunuch who dressed in rags and believed in the puritan virtues of socialism, be met by a polished black car at the end of his daily labor as in the old days or would he take a streetcar? Christopher ran harder, and finally, rounding a corner, he glimpsed far ahead of him a man with grasshopper limbs who was being pulled along by an Alsatian dog. A large black car followed them at walking speed. It was not so big or so shiny as the Daimlers of a different time in Germany, but its symbolism was the same. Christopher’s heart raced, he panted, he trembled and perspired. All this, he realized, was Pavlovian. He smelled the diesel fumes of the S-boat, saw
Mahican
afire and sailing into the blackness. He had not expected this. Even on the night he had pursued Stutzer through the rain, he had remained in the present. More than he wanted to kill him, irresistible though that urge was, Christopher wanted to talk to him, to make him confess, to see if he even remembered what he had done. That was his objective, to make the monster explain.

Christopher watched Stutzer and his dog out of sight, then turned back and began the search for a way into his lair.

 5 

In West Berlin, Christopher recovered his suitcase from the left luggage at the railroad station and in the men’s room changed back into his usual clothes. He rolled up the damp, made-in-the-Eastern-bloc
garments he had worn the night before and packed them in a canvas satchel that he carried in the suitcase. The ill-made, ill-fitting shoes stank of cat droppings. He cleaned them, wrapped them in newspaper, and put them into the canvas bag with the clothes.

When he emerged from the booth, Wolkowicz said, “Nice cologne.”

He stood at a urinal. Christopher was not surprised to see him. He had detected no surveillance after he passed through the checkpoint. Wolkowicz must have posted a lookout at the checkpoint, then deduced where Christopher was headed. The two men had met in this facility before. Wolkowicz favored public toilets as rendezvous points. True, the police kept an eye on men’s rooms but, knowing this, Wolkowicz’s contacts were uncomfortable and anxious to escape and would usually tell him what he wanted to know in the fewest possible words.

For the moment he and Christopher were alone. Wolkowicz said, “Last night you broke that guy’s foot, you know. Shattered—
shattered
I say—the metatarsal and mangled a couple of other bones. He barely made it back across the line. He had to answer a lot of Vopo questions about his brand-new limp. He’s in a cast. Gumshoeing is all he knows. How’s the poor chump supposed to make a living? He gets paid by the hour. He’s got a family. How come you’ve got no pity for the great unwashed?”

Christopher held an electric razor in his hand. He plugged it in and shaved by the faint natural light that was the only illumination in the big room. His beard was light, the stubble almost invisible. Moving closer and peering at Christopher’s chin, Wolkowicz said, “That’s a full day’s growth?” Christopher nodded. Wolkowicz said, “Jeez. Some people are farther up the evolutionary tree than others, I guess.” His own face, shaved only a couple of hours earlier, was blue with stubble. Christopher put his razor away.

Wolkowicz said, “So where did you go last night after you shook the surveillance?”

“I visited a neighborhood I knew when I was a kid,” Christopher said.

“Which neighborhood?”

Christopher told him.

“That’s where MfS is, on Frankfurter-Allee.” Wolkowicz used the German acronym for the Ministry of State Security. “What was your plan, to climb the wall like a human fly and break in and photograph everything?”

Christopher noted the reference to a human fly and wondered if one of his lookouts had watched him climb the Mosque. Not much was accidental where Wolkowicz was concerned. He said, “My father taught me to swim at the public pool next door to the velodrome.”

“So you got dolled up like a member of the proletariat and danced all night in cat poop just for old times’ sake?”

Christopher knew that this conversation would not be over until Wolkowicz knew more about Christopher’s mission—however much he might know already. He said, “Why do you care?”

“This is my town. I’m the mayor. You’re my responsibility.”

“I am? How did that happen?”

“Everybody is my responsibility when they’re on my turf—even the ones who went to Hahvud. I’ve got a need to know.” He poked Christopher’s biceps with a stiff forefinger. “Confusion kills, pal.”

They heard a train arriving. Christopher moved away from Wolkowicz. In moments the room filled with passengers. Wolkowicz, pretending to wash his hands, recognized one of the newcomers in the mirror and abruptly departed. His toes pointed outward when he walked and he held his arms stiffly at his sides. He swayed. From the rear in his tight coat he resembled a penguin in a travelogue. He frequently looked like something he was not.

After checking the canvas satchel back into left luggage Christopher took a taxi to the Kempinski hotel and checked in. He ordered breakfast from room service and after eating all of it—canned fruit, cheese, ham, bread and butter, jam, coffee—showered and went to bed. Now that he was safe and relaxed he felt his weariness keenly, but he could not sleep. At last he drifted off and began to dream. In his sleep Hubbard and Lori danced in the ballroom of the old Kempinski, Paul stalked imaginary Indians through the beech groves of Rügen, Lori galloped a horse, not her Lipizzaner, across a pasture with snowy peaks in the background.

The phone rang. Even while rising from his shallow sleep Christopher knew it could be no one but Wolkowicz on the line. He did not answer. The phone continued to ring insistently. Christopher picked up the receiver and replaced it, breaking the connection. The phone rang again and went on ringing. The Kempinski operator, he knew, would never ring more than a half dozen times unless the caller insisted and had some sort of authority. Christopher got out of bed, dropped to his knees, and unplugged the phone. Next would come knocks on the door, Christopher knew, and after that, if Wolkowicz asked his friend the chief of police to make a call to the manager, an expression of regret from the hotel management that his room was no longer available. Sleep was now impossible. Christopher, nauseated by fatigue, got up and put on his clothes. His idea was to get out of the room before the hammering on the door began. It was raining hard and the rain was mixed with hail. The soaking cold of the north European winter radiated into the overheated room through the window glass.

It was too early in Berlin to do anything interesting, and in any case too wet and cold to go outside. The lobby was crowded with the hotel’s clientele, mostly American businessmen in expensive suits and the neckties of British regiments. Christopher waited until one of them departed, then sat down in his warm chair and read the Paris edition of the
Herald-Tribune
.

The chair beside Christopher became empty. Wolkowicz sat down in it. “I’ve been thinking about what you said about the Indians,” he said.

“What was that exactly?”

“That they were all spies.”

“Which Indians?”

“The Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Mohawks.”

Christopher, who also forgot little or nothing, recalled this conversation about Indians, but it had taken place years before in Vienna.

Wolkowicz said, “Your theory was that they had a culture of espionage. Always sneaking around but leaving no tracks, eavesdropping, assassinating people, stealing the other tribes’ horses and women instead of secret documents.”

Christopher said, “Was that the way I put it?”

“Maybe I missed the subtleties,” Wolkowicz said. “So tell me what makes you so interested in Arabs all of a sudden?”

Wolkowicz’s shrewd small eyes bored into Christopher’s. He was looking for a spark of surprise, a hint of annoyance, any all-but-undetectable sign that he had hit the mark. He saw none of these things. Christopher, silent, waited for Wolkowicz to make the next move. If he was true to form he would offer a morsel of information and hope to get better information in return. He worked like a smart lawyer, leading the witness, playing dumb, pouncing at the right moment.

“I did some checking,” Wolkowicz said. “A couple of weeks ago we got a cable from One-Eye asking for everything we knew about a certain officer of MfS, and then we got another cable asking for information about MfS contacts with bad-guy Mohammedans, and what d’you know, there was a connection. And then all of a sudden O. G.’s fair-haired godson pops in to say hello but won’t say anything more than that. If you were me, pal, what would you think?”