Christopher's Ghosts (21 page)

Paul knocked on the bathroom door. When no one answered, he opened the door and pulled the light chain. The room leapt into view—white porcelain sink and tub and bidet in deep shadows, the glittering oval mirror over the sink in which Paul had seen himself thousands of times. Three toothbrushes stood in a glass, his father’s shaving brush was in its mug, his ivory-handled razor lay on the shelf, its strop dangled from the sink. Paul went back into the hallway and knocked on his parents’ bedroom door. Again no one answered. He opened the door. The room was empty. The bed was made. In the wardrobes, his parents’ clothes hung in neat rows. They were tidy people. They lived ashore as they lived aboard their boat, everything shipshape, with nothing more than they needed. Paul found no note
addressed to himself, no explanation of any kind. He looked in all the other rooms. There was nothing there, either, except that the package that Lori had given him the night before had been moved from the sofa to a table in the sewing room. He looked inside the package. Everything was still there.

Standing back from the windows so that he could not be seen from the outside, Paul looked down into the street. It was beginning to awaken. Gutenbergstrasse was a quiet, very short dead-end street, perhaps three hundred meters in length. It had practically no traffic. It was rare to see a stranger there or an unknown car, so the apprentices’ black Opel sedan was recognized for what it was by all who saw it. Nobody looked directly at the car. They passed it by with averted eyes as if it did not exist.

Paul knew that he himself could not get past the car unless the men inside had orders to let him pass. He had already decided that the same was true of the back entrance. Whatever was going to happen would happen today and it would happen somewhere else. Almost certainly it had already happened to Rima and to his parents. He half expected to see Stutzer himself in the street, in one of his resplendent costumes, waiting for him. As he watched, Miss Wetzel emerged from the building, Blümchen on the leash. The little dog dashed across the street, hauling a staggering Miss Wetzel helplessly behind her as if she were being dragged by a Great Dane. Blümchen barked furiously at the car. One of its windows rolled down. Paul recognized the face of the ex-cavalry trooper who had ridden Lori’s horse back to the Tiergarten stables on the day she got into the Daimler. Smiling at the dog, he spoke cordially to Miss Wetzel, who replied just as cordially. With a series of apologetic bows, she picked up the squirming animal, clutched it to her breast, and hurried away. She was dressed for the morning in violet—matching dress, hat, and shoes. Blümchen barked over her mistress’s shoulder at the intruders.

Paul ran down the front stairs and walked briskly across the street. Paul said, “Good day. I’m looking for my parents. Have you seen them this morning?”

The man grinned. “Have they abandoned you?”

“My question is, Have they been arrested?”

Another grin, showing a missing front tooth. “I have no information for you,” the man said, and rolled up the window.

Paul gave him a curt nod, turned on his heel, and walked away. He expected to be seized from behind and taken to No. 8 Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, but no voice of authority called Halt! No hands were laid on him. He walked on. After he turned the corner, he looked behind him. The street was empty. Why weren’t they following him?

Paul had no idea what to do next. It was possible that his parents were at liberty, but if Rima had not come to him at their usual hour, there was only one other place she was likely to be, 8 Prinz-Albrechtstrasse. Paul’s room had been their rendezvous point. There was no other. He was assailed by second thoughts. What if Rima risked coming in daylight while he was out and the watchers let her pass for reasons of their own? What if she was waiting at the back door now, what if she had just been late? Stutzer still awaited delivery of the manuscript of The Experiment. Paul could not penetrate the intentions of the secret police. No one could. They were too primitive. They had awakened in themselves something that the rest of humanity had left behind centuries ago.

Paul reached the western gate of the Tiergarten. He was not far from the lawns where he had caught his first glimpses of Rima only weeks before. He sat down on a bench and tried to think systematically. There was no possibility of his finding either Rima or his parents by wandering the streets. But they might find him in the place where he was likeliest to be, the apartment. He got to his feet and walked home. The black car was gone. He half expected to find that the apartment had been searched and turned upside down in his absence, but everything was just as he had left it. “Ode to Joy” was still on the turntable of the silent Victrola. His father’s manuscripts, a long row of them, were in their usual places on the shelf in rosewood boxes that looked like leather-bound books with titles and the year of writing stamped in gold on the spines. There was no sign of Rima inside the apartment. He examined his room for evidence that she had been there while he was gone, but there was none. He searched the back
staircase for her, looking in all the places where she might have left a note. He went outside into the courtyard and searched there. He found nothing.

Back inside, the telephone rang, a rare event because there was hardly anyone left in Berlin who dared to call the Christophers. Paul picked up the instrument and said hello. The caller hung up without speaking a word. Paul dialed Dr. Kaltenbach’s number. If Rima were there she would answer. If she was not, no one would answer. The Kaltenbach’s number rang ten times before Paul broke the connection. He was thirsty. He had drunk nothing since the night before. He drank nothing now. If he was arrested with full bladder and bowels, he would give his captors an advantage. The silence in the apartment was so deep that it made a sound like the sea in a conch shell. He sat down in a chair in the music room, where he could see his mother’s piano and the photographs on the table beside it. He thought of nothing. For the first time he realized that Schatzi was gone, too. He remembered the car and ran down the back stairs and looked inside the former stable where the Horch was kept. It, too, was gone.

In another time, in a different country, he would have thought nothing of these missing persons and objects. He would have read a book while he waited for his parents to come back with the car and the dog. In the here and now it was impossible to know what these signs meant. Maybe Hubbard and Lori had left him to make up his own mind about getting aboard the
Bremen
. If so, it was the first act of cruelty they had ever visited upon him. He knew that there were other, likelier explanations for his parents’ absence, for Rima’s disappearance. He knew that what was happening was almost surely not their fault. That did not change the fact that he had no one to say goodbye to, no one to say goodbye to him. Alone in the hushed apartment, surrounded by objects he had known by sight and touch and smell since infancy, he felt loneliness as he had never felt it before and would not feel it again in his lifetime, not even in prison.

At ten o’clock Paul took the night train to Bremerhaven. The apprentices, spruced up for the journey and smelling of tooth powder and cologne, were already in his compartment when he got aboard.
When they saw his haggard face they smiled knowingly at each other but said nothing to Paul. Nor did he speak to them.

 4 

The voyage to New York lasted four days. Hubbard’s cousin Elliott met Paul outside customs. To be met by Elliott Hubbard was like being met by Hubbard Christopher on a day when he happened to be wearing a wig and false eyebrows. Hubbard and Elliott not only looked like twins, one blond and the other dark, they had the same gestures, the same neighing laugh, the same deep voice—and because they had gone to the same schools and been raised by fathers who had done the same, identical Yankee twangs.

“How was the voyage?” Elliott asked.

“Not bad,” Paul said.

“Cabin all right? Didn’t put you in with a snorer, I hope?”

“No, I was alone.”

“What luck! Or was it the pariah treatment?”

As if he were still in the Reich, Paul felt the sting of suspicion. What did this person know? How did he know it? Whom would he tell? He did not answer the question.

Elliott had a chauffeur standing by to deal with the luggage—he was a lawyer in a prosperous firm and the Great Depression was still on—but Paul had brought only one small bag.

In the car, a red Packard like O. G.’s, Elliott said, “O. G. hurried by while I was waiting for you. He said he hadn’t seen you on board.”

“No.”

“Were you avoiding each other?”

“I was in second class. He was upstairs in first.”

“Then you had more interesting company than he did. I invited O. G. to dinner tonight. He thinks you may be mad at him. Are you?”

“No.”

“Good. He’s your friend, believe me.” Elliott smiled Hubbard’s toothy smile. He had been watching Paul intently. Now he handed him
an unopened telegram and said, “This came for you yesterday.” It was from his parents.

“SORRY NO GOODBYES. NOT OUR PLAN OR FAULT. PLEASE FORGIVE. MISS YOU TERRIBLY. SO DOES DEAR IRMA. LOVE LOVE LOVE.”

He handed the telegram to Elliott. He scanned it and handed it back.

“This sounds like they’re all right,” Elliott said. “O. G. is bearing messages, too, he said. He wants to pass these on before dinner.”

“I’d like to reply.”

“You can phone it to the cable company from the house. But talk to O. G. first.”

Elliott did not ask who Irma was. No doubt O. G. had already told him.

Paul said, “Have you and my father ever impersonated each other?”

“Not for years,” Elliott replied. “But maybe there are possibilities for the future. Now come and meet your new second cousin.”

Elliott’s wife Alice had presented him with a son. The child was now about a year old, and there would never be any doubt about his paternity. His name was Horace, after his mother’s father. Sitting in his high chair, being fed liquefied vegetables, Horace was the small triplet of Hubbard and Elliott. He had their horse face, their all-encompassing grin, their interested eyes. Among friends and family, Alice was noted for her wit. “I never expected to produce a child who resembles Seabiscuit so closely,” she said. “But I had got so used to looking at Elliott that he had begun to seem quite handsome. Long engagements dull the senses.”

“Horace looks fine to me,” Paul said.

The child took a liking to Paul. With a glad cry he made a grab for him with spinach-smeared hands, leaving a stripe of green on his sleeve.

“The mark of Horace,” Alice Hubbard said.

In his bedroom Paul read his parents’ cable again and again. He understood everything that was written between the lines. They had been taken into custody on the day he departed, and so had Rima, so that
nothing would interfere with Paul’s departure from Germany. In some part of his mind, Paul had known this before he left Berlin. He had left Berlin because he knew it and understood it. Even if he remained—especially if he remained—he would not see them again. This situation made no sense. It was designed to make no sense. Senselessness was the point. Here in his cousin’s house three thousand miles away, sirens shrieked outside the windows as if America was the police state, Paul lay down on his bed and forced his brain to stop its inquiries. His brain answered this command by producing images of Rima that were as elusive as her reality was becoming.

Elliott pounded on the door of Paul’s room, awakening him from a deep sleep. “Awake or starve!” Elliott shouted in his courtroom baritone.

In the library Elliott and O. G. were drinking fifteen-year-old single-malt scotch whisky. O. G. was a connoisseur of scotch. As Paul entered the room, he was telling Elliott that another war in Europe was inevitable. The German army would be in France before the harvest was in.

“The experts say the Maginot Line will stop them,” Elliott said.

“Generals are always preparing for the last war,” O. G. said in French. “The Hun will go around those pillboxes with their Panzers and Stukas and take Paris in a matter of days.” He caught sight of Paul. “What do you think, Paul? You know both countries.”

“The French say that they’ll win because they are stronger than the Germans.”

“They do, do they? Sit ye down, son.” O. G. had fresh news from Berlin, courtesy of a courier from the State Department who had crossed the Atlantic in a Pan-Am Clipper. “Message from your parents,” he said. “They’re unhappy that they weren’t able to say goodbye to you. They were in custody.”

Paul waited to hear more.

O. G. said, “The secret police came around midnight, or so I’m told, after you’d gone to bed. Apparently they weren’t questioned, just held till the following evening, then let go. They’re perfectly all right.”

“Were they together all that time?”

O. G. paused before answering. “They were separated, I believe. Isn’t that standard procedure?”

“Not always,” Paul said. “What time did they let them go?”

“Soon after the
Bremen
sailed, apparently.”

“They were released together, at the same time?”

Another tiny hesitation—this time, Paul thought, intended as a reproof. “So it seems.” O. G. replied. His tone was neutral, his eyes vague. Hardly ever did he make an unqualified statement. Paul suspected that O. G. knew as well as he did what had really happened. Heydrich had abducted Lori for the night and locked up her husband to keep him out of the way. He had done this often enough in the past.

Paul said, “So now they’re back at Gutenbergstrasse?”

O. G. cleared his throat. “At last report, yes. There’s a footnote. Your young friend was also taken into custody, but they let her go.”

Paul had only one young friend in Berlin. He said, “Alexa Kaltenbach?”

“Yes. Your mother saw her leaving Prinz-Albrechtstrasse at about the same time that she and your father were released.”

“Did they speak?”

“I don’t know. In the circumstances they might have thought it unwise,” O. G. said, “I’m sorry to bring you such news, though on the whole it’s good news. All hands appear to be all right.”