Christopher's Ghosts (3 page)

Rank and lineage notwithstanding, several of Lori’s ancestors, some quite recent, had been beheaded. Until recently the guillotine had still been the punishment of choice for treason in Germany, and she knew that many people, including some no older than Paul, had lost their heads for less serious crimes than punching a Hitler Youth on the nose when he was on official Reich business. Outwardly Lori was the picture of confidence and calm. But she dreamt of the guillotine. In her heart she did not believe that any of her family, not herself, not Hubbard, not Paul, not the uncle and aunt who had raised her, were likely to live much longer. She knew as realities things that Hubbard could not imagine. Paul knew some of the same things, having learned them by accident.

But Lori did not know that he knew.

 4 

The dinner at O. G.’s house was a black-tie party, which in Berlin meant dress uniforms and medals. There were the usual army, navy, air force and SS uniforms, but also several different types of party uniforms, the SA in dromedary brown, others in coats of many colors. The foreign office had its own uniform. So did other government
departments, the government of Prussia, and many others. Hubbard was virtually the only guest in a dinner jacket.

“Dear Lord, O. G.,” Lori said, shaking her host’s hand. “Don’t you know anyone who can afford evening clothes?”

“Imagine what it was like in the kaisers’ time,” O. G. replied with his gay Rooseveltian smile. “Every regiment designing its own dress uniform. All those different kinds of swords and hats stacked up in the hall.”

It was his job to entertain the ruling class, to get to know them and their minds, to encourage them to like him, if not necessarily trust him. The men and women with whom he chatted and joked gave every sign that they did like him. As an American he was a racial grab bag, of course, and besides that a bachelor, which was an iffy state of being at a time when homosexuals were being sent to concentration camps, but he had excellent manners and he spoke German just well enough to be taken seriously rather than resented. In the reception room, Lori took a glass of sparkling wine from a waiter and gazed into the middle distance, hoping that she would be shunned, as sometimes happened to her at these affairs. However, she was soon joined by a man she knew. He was the only man in the room besides Hubbard who wore evening clothes—in his case, a tailcoat and white tie, as if he were going to play the violin after dinner. He clicked the heels of his gleaming patent leather shoes and snapped his narrow head forward, then back.

“Good evening, Baronesse!” he said. “Your husband and I seem to have the same tailor. But then we have always had similar tastes.”

He was blond, long-faced, tall, though not as tall as Hubbard, with military posture and, except for broad womanly hips, quite slim. The tailcoat drew attention to his large behind. On other occasions, so did the short skirt of his belted SS uniform jacket, the clothing in which Lori usually saw him.

“Good evening,” Lori said. She did not address him by his rank, major general. This was a grave breach of manners. He was the chief of the SS intelligence service and also the Prussian secret police, who controlled Berlin. These two offices gave him the powers of freedom or confinement and life and death over everyone in the Reich. He was thirty-five years old.

But he ignored Lori’s slight, in fact showed by subtle signs that he was amused by it. “I had not intended to come tonight,” he said with another smile—white but uneven teeth, eyes that challenged Lori’s idea of herself. “But then I read the guest list, saw your name on it, and realized that I was far too weak to stay away.”

Across the room, Hubbard was talking to the plump wife of a Wehrmacht general who was one of the few people in Berlin or anywhere else in the world who had read every one of his books. She liked his work—adored it, in fact, to the point where Hubbard feared that she would drag him to a sofa and have her way with him despite the difference in their ages. But even as she paid Hubbard fulsome compliments, holding his right hand in both of hers, her eyes worked the crowd.

“Oh my,” she said. “Your wife has bagged the star of the evening, Reinhard Heydrich himself. Why would he be here when we are all so far below him? Watch out, dear man! The major general has a terrible reputation, and Mrs. Christopher is so very attractive.”

One of O. G.’s assistants was passing by. Hubbard seized him by the arm. “Timberlake, what a coincidence,” he said. “I was just telling Mrs. Halder, here, about your wonderful poetry.”

“About my what?” said Timberlake. But it was too late for him; the lady was already asking him the first of a hundred questions.

“Ah, we have been spotted by your watchful husband,” Heydrich was saying to Lori. “He is rushing toward us, he will be here in no time, and there will go our conversation out the window. May I see you tomorrow?”

Lori gave him a cold stare.

“No response?” Heydrich said. “How delicious. I must find a way to make you be kinder to me. Otherwise I will have no tomorrow.”

“Go!” Lori said.

“She speaks!” Heydrich replied. “She fears embarrassment. The husband draws ever nearer. What will he suspect? I hold her fate in my hands.”

Hubbard was now close enough to make out their words above the babble of the party. Heydrich smiled, snapped his head forward an inch
or two, but did not offer his hand to Hubbard.

“You have interrupted us too soon, Herr Christopher,” he said. “Your wife and I have been discussing Bach. Do you not agree that the E major concerto for violin is dazzling in its key changes? Six different keys in the fifty-two opening bars! Those astonishing dissonances, those diminished sevenths!”

“My wife is the musician.”

“She plays an instrument?”

“The piano.”

“Beautifully, I’m sure. One day perhaps I will have the pleasure of hearing you play, Baronesse.”

Baronesse was the title of an unmarried daughter of a baron. The title, by which Heydrich always called her when he called her anything at all, erased her husband.

Lori said nothing.

Heydrich said, “Perhaps we could even play together sometime, though I am a mere amateur.” The whole Reich knew that Heydrich came from a musical family. It was said that he played several instruments.

Again, silence from Lori. She looked straight at Heydrich, but as if he wasn’t there.

Heydrich clicked his heels and headed straight for the front door.

“He does admire you, that dancing partner of yours,” Hubbard said. “You hurt his feelings just now, you know.” Last year she had danced with this man at a tea dance in a hotel, not knowing who he was. Heydrich had flirted with her ever since. This was permitted if a woman was married. It was regarded as gallantry, reassurance, a harmless form of flattery. No one actually believed this. It wasn’t true even in operettas. But Hubbard’s tone was light. He feared nothing from other men where Lori was concerned.

“Or do you actually like him a little?” He teased. “He makes you blush.”

“I loathe him,” Lori said.

At her elbow O. G. murmured, “Maybe you should try not to let it show quite so plainly, my dear.”

 
 
5

At dinner Lori was seated next to a one-armed Wehrmacht brigadier general who had served under her Uncle Paulus in the World War. He wore the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross at his throat and told her tales about Paulus’s feats of arms and merry pranks in the regimental mess. Like many of the soldiers Lori had known, this one was frozen in boyhood. He was too much the gentleman to frighten a lady with descriptions of the horrors of combat. “The battle line is less gory than people think,” he said. “The smoke hides those awful sights you see in Bolshevik films.”

“But when the smoke clears?”

“By that time you have advanced a kilometer or two and all you see are cows in green fields and the backs of the enemy.”

In the brigadier’s stories the war had been fun—Lori’s Uncle Paulus chasing a Russian in a horseback duel during the Battle of Tannenberg that ended with Paulus lopping off the Russian’s hand with his saber and then, noblesse oblige, dragging the vanquished enemy to a burning house and thrusting the stump into the flames to cauterize the wound. The brigadier had known Lori’s father, too—he and Paulus had been in the same regiment of lancers—and would have told her stories about him, too, if he had fallen in battle instead of being beaten to death by a gang of Bolshevik rabble. On the day of his death, her father had gone for a stroll from the hospital in Berlin where he was recovering from wounds received in the last battle on the western front. Because of his injuries he had been too weak to defend himself. No one ever spoke of his death—a German officer must always go down fighting—but Lori had often imagined it, and she imagined it again now, except that it was Paul’s death she envisioned while surrounded by the smiling people, now gorging on food and the latest gossip, who were most likely to kill him.

She was obsessed by the possibility—in her heart, the inevitability—of Paul being murdered by the politically insane. One side or the other would slaughter him, then march on, singing “The
Internationale” or “Die Wacht am Rhein.” She had felt this in her bones even before she conceived her child. She knew then that she herself was somehow going to be responsible for her son’s death. The fact that she would devote her life to trying to save him from his fate would make no difference. She listened to the brigadier, who was now talking about his schooldays with the irrepressible Uncle Paulus. If Lori’s photograph had been taken at that moment the image would have been that of a gently smiling, perfectly composed woman. What was going on in her mind was another matter.

After the sherbet she escaped, making a graceful excuse to the brigadier and the person on her right, and locked herself in the library. Two or three times someone rattled the doorknob, once or twice somebody knocked. Then she was left in peace. Conclusions had been drawn. Someone, more likely two someones, required privacy. Lori was not at the table, Heydrich was not at his place. Everyone had seen them talking, had seen Heydrich’s outrageous flirting. What could be more obvious? This man could order the immediate death of anyone in Germany and beyond. What woman could resist such power?

Lori read Dickens while waiting for the guests to leave. O. G. owned the complete works, bound in leather, so she read passages from several novels. She did not like Dickens, did not like the way he made the monstrous entertaining. She resented happy outcomes that could not possibly have arisen from the hopeless circumstances in which the author placed his characters. She disliked the palimpsest that was his style, so that all the sentiment was in the ink and all the truth was between the lines.

The last guests departed, the last peal of laughter faded. Hubbard’s frisky American knock, shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits, sounded. She turned the key and let him and O. G. in. Hubbard gave her a searching look. She was distraught, head thrown back, eyes red, throat ligaments taut. In earlier days he would have smiled at her, but he had long since learned how much she disliked this American reassurance when there was nothing to smile about, so he kept his teeth beneath his lip. O. G. locked the door, then poured scotch whisky from a
decanter, added to each drink a squirt of seltzer from a siphon, then handed the glasses around. Lori put hers down on the table beside her chair.

“Drink, my dear,” O. G. said. “You look like you need it.”

To the surprise of neither man, Lori did not obey.

To O. G. she said, “You know what happened to Paul today?”

“I’ve heard a version of it,” O. G. said. “Heydrich told me.”

“Heydrich?” Hubbard said. “He knows?”

“I’m afraid so. He takes an interest in the Christophers. Speaks of you as if you are dear friends.”

Lori’s eyes were wide, her body rigid. A quick pulse beat in her blushing chest, above her décolletage. Hubbard avoided looking at her, as if he could make things worse by noticing what was happening to her.

He said, “But why on earth should Heydrich know?”

“Because charades are his business,” O. G. said. “Also, they are his nature. He plays games.”

“He sent the Youth to attack Paul?”

“It’s not impossible. Everyone knows what he is capable of doing, but who knows for sure what he actually does or orders to be done? He’s a man of mystery. That’s why he has risen so far so fast.”

“But why Paul?” Hubbard said.

“He wants something from you.”

“What could he possibly want from me, for heaven’s sake?” Hubbard asked.

O. G. shrugged. “Does it matter? Whatever it is, he’s licensed to take it whenever he wants.”

He drank, his mild gaze fixed on Lori’s face. Hubbard drank. Lori remained as she was, staring at nothing, rigid in her chair, silent, face averted, heartbeat visible. Hubbard had never seen her so withdrawn. Her genes and her upbringing discouraged displays of emotion, but now her face was a map of her fears, whatever they were.

Suddenly Lori said, “It is not safe to discuss these matters.”

“It’s perfectly safe to talk here…” O. G. said.

“Ha!” said Lori.

“… so I will come to the point,” O. G. continued. “I think we should get Paul out of Germany as quick as we can, and then get the two of you across a frontier as soon after that as possible.”

“How?” Hubbard said.

“In two weeks’ time I sail home on the
Bremen
for consultations in Washington. Paul can go with me. He can stay with Elliott in New York.”

Lori said, “They’ll grab him at the passport control.”

“Not if he’s under my protection.”

“What protection?” Lori said. “Do you think they care about diplomatic immunity? You just got through saying there is no immunity from them.”

“They’re ruthless, but there are rules just the same,” O. G. said. “I have a plan.”

“What plan?”

“It’s better that you don’t know the details.”

“He’s our son!”

“Yes, he is,” O. G. said. “And what if the next time you are invited to the Prinz-Albrechtstrasse they decide to get rough? If they beat Paul—I’m talking about grown men, trained thugs, taking turns with fists and feet and clubs—which secrets will you decide not to tell them?”