Christopher's Ghosts (25 page)

They talked baseball. Christopher had in fact taken O. G.’s advice and played the game for his American school, but neither O. G. nor Christopher mentioned the many times O. G. had counseled the young Paul to take up ball and bat. Hubbard’s name was not mentioned. Neither was Lori’s or Rima’s. O. G.’s duty as a Christian gentleman and honorary godfather placed him in
loco parentis
now that Hubbard was dead and Lori had disappeared and was presumed by everybody but her son to be dead, too. O. G.’s gaze was gentle when he looked at Christopher, but it was just as sympathetic when pigeons on the windowsill caught his eye. Christopher suspected that the old gentleman
was happy enough to have, as an agent, a fellow who was reckless enough to get back on the
Bremen
in time of war and sail to the Reich. But maybe he was less enthusiastic about having him as a godson.

Christopher said, “I wonder if I could have your thoughts on a personal matter.” He handed O. G. a single sheet of paper, half covered with typing.

O. G. raised his eyebrows but took the paper and read it. It was an account of Christopher’s encounter with Stutzer. O. G. read at a dyslectic’s pace, so slowly that he seemed to be willing himself to linger on every word. Then he read the half-page again. When he was finished he gazed through the window for a long moment at the floodlit Jet d’Eau, the famous Geneva fountain that spurted from the surface of the lake. Then he took off his pince-nez, bit his lower lip, and tapped his front teeth with his glasses, a sign of deep thought. O. G.’s eyes were watery, paler than Christopher remembered.

O. G. said, “There is no doubt in your mind about the, uh, moment of recognition?”

“None.”

“Who else have you told about this?”

“No one.”

It was O. G.’s turn to be chilly. “And what do you want from me, sir?”

“I just want you to know that I will be pursuing a personal matter in addition to my regular duties. Unless you object.”

“In which case?”

“I will have to make a choice.”

“You’re asking my permission?”

“Informing you.”

“You want my help?”

“No need, thank you.”

“You would refuse it if offered?”

“It would depend on what kind of help was offered. As I’ve said, this is a personal matter.”

“I see,” O. G. said.

On the bottom corner of the typed page he wrote a name, David,
and tore off what he had written. This scrap of paper was no larger than a thumbprint. Handing it to Christopher, he said, “This is the man to go to for information. He’ll be expecting your call.”

There was a little champagne left in the half-bottle. “Let’s have the dividend,” O. G. said. He poured what was left into their glasses in equal measure, drop for drop.

“You’ve read W. Somerset Maugham?” he asked.

Christopher said, “Most of him.”

“Do you remember that short story of his in which a fellow stalking a tiger in the jungle goes around in a big circle and comes upon two sets of the tiger’s tracks?”

“I do.”

“The point being?”

“The tiger was tracking the hunter.”

“Yep,” O. G. said, draining his glass. “Keep your eyes open, young man.”

 2 

“Okay, this is what we know,” David Patchen said. He spoke in complete, unadorned sentences and full paragraphs. He never said
uh
or
ah
or hesitated in any way. From time to time he took a sip of water. He recited the file on Stutzer from memory without referring to notes—date and place of birth, the same for his parents and grandparents, details of his education, excerpts from his teachers’ evaluations, his enthusiasms. “Essentially he was only interested in the party, to which he was fanatically loyal, and insects,” Patchen said. “He was—still is, we can suppose now that we have a reliable report that he’s alive—an amateur naturalist. He captured and mounted all sorts of bugs. His collection was huge, packed in special trunks with folding shelves, and he lugged it around with him wherever he was sent.”

“Girls?”

“His orderly says that the troops thought Stutzer was a homosexual, but he, the orderly, never saw anything to support that idea. He never
sexually molested the women or for that matter the men he interrogated. He would beat them up and sometimes shoot them, always with one nine-millimeter bullet through the left eye while they kneeled before him, an interesting detail. But no hanky-panky. Or so the orderly says.”

During the invasion of Poland in 1939, Patchen said, Stutzer served as commander of several death squads whose mission was to round up and execute Jews. “He was promoted to the SS equivalent of lieutenant-colonel and awarded another Iron Cross First Class for his work,” Patchen said. “According to his commendation, he was exceptionally imaginative, innovative, and enterprising. The morale of his men was high. He devised new methods that greatly increased the efficiency and productivity of his command. The methods he invented are not described. He caught the eye of Himmler, who wanted him for his own staff, but Heydrich, who had been Stutzer’s patron from the start, insisted on keeping him. He went back to Berlin as head of Section A, the enemies section, of the Gestapo. He and Heydrich worked together on the most sensitive cases. According to the orderly, Stutzer procured women for Heydrich.”

Christopher felt his face changing color. He began to remember the Daimler, and Stutzer directing the operation, but he pushed it from his mind. “Where does all this information come from?” he asked.

“From the files of the Schutzstaffel. We—that is, the U. S. Army—captured a lot of their archive in 1945.

And by the way, speaking of the SS archives, we found Stutzer’s fingerprints, taken when he joined up. If you want, we can check to see if they match the ones lifted from the gun you took away from Stutzer.”

Christopher did not respond to this offer. Patchen continued his narrative. When the Wehrmacht invaded Russia, Stutzer was right behind the infantry. He was again in charge of a formation of special groups, and this time he made an even more brilliant impression on his superiors because he found the Ukrainians even more enthusiastic than the Poles in helping him to find and liquidate Jews. He was decorated and promoted again, to full colonel or in SS parlance,
Standartenführer
, and because he had made so many valuable friends among the Ukrainians, he was placed in charge of intelligence operations and
some shock operations against the local partisan movement.

“He did his usual excellent job,” Patchen said. “He used the same tactics against the partisans as he had used against the Jews. Arrest them, order them to dig a mass grave and get into it, shoot them, cover them up.”

“And after the partisans?” Christopher asked.

“Stutzer was captured by the Red Army on date unknown, 1944, during the German retreat from the Ukraine. He disappeared into the gulag.”

Patchen pulled himself to his feet and limped to the water cooler. He drank three large paper cups of water one after the other without pause, then sat down again.

Christopher said, “Is that the end?”

“Not quite,” Patchen replied. “There are people in Z Group in Berlin. You know what that is, I believe—former German military intelligence officers, Soviet and Eastern Europe specialists, who came over to us after the war and brought their files with them. Z Group has reported some sightings.”

Patchen cleared his throat. He yawned, then yawned again. It was eleven o’clock at night. He had come in to work at seven in the morning. He had eaten a sandwich from a brown bag for lunch. He had had no supper. He never drank coffee or tea. Extra weight made his old wounds more painful.

“Give me a minute,” Patchen said. He took a bunch of keys out of his pocket and, holding it in his hand, leaned back in his swivel chair and went to sleep. An instant later the keys dropped from his hand. The noise woke him up. He had been asleep for no more than a second. It was Patchen’s theory that a single instant of total relaxation was all that was needed to restart a deeply fatigued body and brain. He picked up the keys, put them back in his pocket, and resumed the briefing.

Patchen said, “Z Group reports tend to be bare bones, but there are half a dozen mentions of our man in their product. There were other reports, scattered over years. Stutzer in Dresden in the fifties, working as a chauffeur for the Soviet consulate and running low-grade agents.
Around this time the East German secret police were being organized as part of MfS, the ministry for state security. Stutzer applied for a job, presumably on KGB instructions, and was hired. He continued to report every week to a Soviet case officer.”

“About what?” Christopher asked.

“Sorry, no information,” Patchen replied. “But there’s one more goodie. In 1950 Z Group heard from an asset of theirs, a Ukrainian, who had run into Stutzer in a special camp in the Urals for potentially useful prisoners of war.”

“What was the Ukrainian doing there?”

“He was a guard. Anyway, he reported that Stutzer was the worse for wear after his time in Siberia or wherever—malnourished, obsequious, but still canny, still the Schutzstaffel colonel. Still insufferable, in the Ukrainian’s phrase.”

“But alive.”

“He was when the Ukrainian saw him.”

 3 

Of all the facts and rumors about Stutzer that Patchen had revealed to Christopher, only one offered an immediate opportunity. Stutzer had been hunting partisans in the Ukraine at the same time that Yuri Kikorov was fighting with those same partisans. Stutzer had been captured by partisans. Why had he not been shot? Had someone with a cool head recognized his value as a source of information and saved his life? Was it possible that Yuri might remember? Christopher asked for authorization to visit Yuri.

“That’s tricky,” Patchen said. “It breaks the rules. No stranger, especially not you, who’s supposed to vanish from Yuri’s life forever, is allowed to interrupt the debriefing. They have to keep him in his own little world.”

Christopher said, “It has to do with Stutzer.”

Patchen was expressionless. “I’ll inquire. Sit for a minute.”

He limped away. Patchen had been wounded by a grenade on
Okinawa. He had lost an eye, his face had been disfigured, muscles in his arm and leg damaged. Christopher heard him talking over the secure telephone on O. G.’s desk in the adjoining room. The conversation was brief.

“O. G. is concerned about Yuri’s welfare, his state of mind,” Patchen said when he returned. “He wants to make sure that he’s okay. He’d like you to pay him a visit, see how he’s getting along, judge his mood, ask if he needs anything.”

“When? Where?” Christopher asked.

“Day after tomorrow, most likely. Drop by the outer office at eight in the morning on that day. Mrs. Kane-Poole will have a package for you that will include directions.”

“They’ll let me in?”

“Yes, you’ll have a
laisser-passer
signed by the director.” Patchen smiled his goblin smile. “Getting them to let you out may be another matter.”

Common sense dictated that defectors should be treated well—a comfortable but isolated house, good food and wine and spirits in moderation, books in Russian that were forbidden in the Socialist motherland, a hi-fi and a record collection, newspapers, magazines and a radio and television, movies at night, no visible security but plenty of it, an atmosphere of welcome and collegiality. Anything but a woman; that was too chancy in a hundred different ways. The turncoat was permitted to go for walks under discreet surveillance, to bird-watch or collect butterflies or gather wild mushrooms if that was how he chose to relax. Tennis, billiards, chess, cards were available with partners provided. Civilized treatment encouraged cooperation. A turncoat should think that he was confiding in men like himself, not confessing to an enemy. Every spy has a story that he is dying to tell. The trick is to get him to tell the first secret. After that all the others usually spill out—except, of course, those buried personal truths that most human beings never reveal to anyone.

Christopher supposed that Yuri Kikorov was installed in some pleasant old country house with a view of the Blue Ridge mountains or the Potomac River, discovering the pleasures of life in America. The chief of
counterintelligence, which was in charge of debriefing defectors, did not share O. G.’s belief in the persuasive powers of hospitality and camaraderie. In his heart he believed in shock treatment—slam the steel door on the prisoner and feed him soup and bread twice a day, watch him through the judas hole, disorient him, make him want to get out at any cost, and then connect him to a lie detector and tell him that the price of liberty was complete regurgitation of everything he knew or thought he knew. The price of silence? The silence of the grave.

As specified by the instructions in the package that O. G.’s secretary handed to him, Christopher drew a car from the Outfit’s motor pool. He was issued a red two-door Pontiac equipped with whitewall tires and Maryland license plates. The Outfit’s operational vehicles were nothing like the polished black Opels and Benzes and Daimlers of the Reich secret police. Their flashiness was their camouflage. They were meant to blend in, to suppress curiosity rather than invite recognition and inspire fear. Following directions included in the package, Christopher drove south from Washington through the Virginia countryside, then west toward the Blue Ridge mountains, then through dense woodland down narrow gravel roads marked
Dead End
, but seeing no dead ends until he came to a locked gate. A ten-foot-high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire stretched in both directions. A sign said
No Trespassing Private Property Keep Out Protected by Armed Guards Beware the Dogs
.

Christopher had been issued a walkie-talkie radio and given a call sign. The radio was identical to the ones he had used during the war except that it was painted in camouflage rather than plain green. He sent a series of dots and dashes by clicking the send button. There was no reply but after a few moments a man dressed in hunter’s clothes the color of dead leaves stepped into the road on the other side of the gate. He carried a shotgun and led an attack dog that quivered with nervous energy. Christopher glanced in the rearview mirror. Another hunter stood behind the car, twelve-gauge pump gun at port arms. A third hunter materialized from the woods beside the car.