Christopher's Ghosts (37 page)

“And do we know what is known or believed on the other side of the fence?”

“All is darkness,” Patchen said. “Even the Israelis don’t have a clue, and needless to say they’re at least as interested in Stutzer as you are. We assume that Stutzer’s absence was noted by MfS. The accepted hypothesis is that MfS people found the two of you in the nick of time and spirited Stutzer away before Wolkowicz and his goons came on the scene. Do you agree?”

“No. If that’s what happened why they didn’t spirit me away, too?”

“Everyone wonders about that, except Wolkowicz. There’s not a doubt in his mind. According to his hypothesis, they tried to kill you with an overdose of something instead.”

“That was Stutzer. Who else could it have been? He was draped across my back, he had every opportunity and every motive.”

“You didn’t search him?”

“I did, and found all kinds of weapons, but I guess I missed the syringe.”

“How?”

“I wasn’t looking for it. I thought he was trying to kill me, not keep me alive. But I should have remembered what he is—an interrogator. I had aroused his curiosity. His plan would have been to knock me out, take me to a safe house, break me. The dose was never meant to be fatal.”

“So why didn’t his men throw you in the trunk of the getaway car so he could question you?”

“Because there were no such men. His priorities changed. After I made the phone call all he wanted was to get back home. He crawled away on his own or had other help.”

“Excellent point. But then there are a lot of nice debating points in this case. Consider Wolkowicz’s hypothesis.”

“Which is?”

“That you were hallucinating. That the slug that split your scalp addled your wits. That you imagined the whole thing, and that what you think happened never actually happened. It was all a crazy dream.”

“How did he arrive at that?”

“For one thing, you told him you had Stutzer’s papers in your pocket when you passed out. But the pocket was empty.”

“True but irrelevant. Anybody could have picked my pocket. What else?”

“Barney submitted the sterilized facts—no names, no place, no time, just a hypothetical situation—to our best forensic shrink and that’s what he came up with. It made all the sense in the world to Barney. Stutzer got away from you. But nobody gets away from Wolkowicz.”

Patchen’s lip curled. His disdain for Wolkowicz was well known, especially to Christopher, to whom he spoke frankly at all times. Apparently he felt that he should say a good word for his enemy. He continued, “In justice to Wolkowicz and the shrink, you were shot in the head. And in both versions, yours and the shrink’s, everything follows from that. However, the questions remains, if there was no Stutzer, who shot you, who stuck a needle in you, and why would they bother?”

Patchen had another fit of coughing. Refusing to yield to it, he walked on, the sound of his cough echoing from the portentous architecture.

When he had recovered his breath, Christopher said, “So what do you believe?”

“Let’s just say I believe you to be perfectly capable of carrying a wounded man a couple of miles on your back while wounded yourself.”

“And O. G.?”

“It’s my job to tell him everything that’s in my mind,” Patchen said, “not to read his mind. But he is, I believe, your godfather, and he’s the one who put you into this situation, so he’s got to give you the benefit of the doubt.”

Christopher was tempted to say more, to tell Patchen what O. G. knew about Stutzer, to tell him what Stutzer had been to the Christophers in the past. He had never told anyone—not O. G., not Hubbard, not Lori, not Paulus—what had happened to Rima. None of them—and not Patchen either—had had a need to know or a right to know. That did not mean that they hadn’t guessed the truth. What mattered was that Stutzer had taken everything but Rima’s own death away from her. She had a right to keep that for herself, and keep it she had, stored in the mind of her lover.

ELEVEN

 1 

For two years there was no news of Stutzer. No one was looking for him, and thanks to the way in which O. G. had erased him from the Outfit’s archives, no one ever would except by mistake. This did not mean that there was no Stutzer still in the world, whatever his reinvented identity might be. Christopher’s life, like everyone else’s, was a map of coincidence and he believed in its power. He went from assignment to assignment, always expecting that at the next turning of a street in Cairo or Hue or Leopoldville he would glimpse the matchstick man again, just as had happened before, and that this time Stutzer would either kill Christopher by treachery or Christopher would have his revenge. But what revenge could cause the sea to give up Rima, could cut the loop of image and sound and scent that haunted him—Rima’s arms in her last moment curved above her head, the glare of the searchlights,
Mahican
aflame and running before the wind into the night, the Baltic taking the girl, the disbelief. The briefness of it. Maybe when the moment for retribution came, it would simply happen like a poem that was ready to be born running onto paper out of a pen. This frozen zygote he had been carrying within himself for half a lifetime would somehow at the last moment turn into a complete being and tell him what to do and how to do it.

After a long uninterrupted time in the field he took a month’s leave. A year or two before he had moved to Rome. One night as he waited for his supper in an open-air restaurant in Trastevere, Heidi slipped into the empty chair across the table. He had not seen her since Berlin.
She was no longer the unsmiling hotel manageress in a green apron that she had been in East Berlin. Now she wore sunglasses after dark, a jumble of cheap beads around her neck, rows of bracelets on both arms and slacks and sandals and a bright red shirt that perfectly matched her painted toenails. Her hair, formerly twisted into a bun, now hung to her shoulder blades. She shook it back so that Christopher could see her face. “Fancy meeting you here,” she said in English.

In her new costume she seemed smaller and prettier than he remembered. “This is a surprise,” he replied, also in English. “What brings you to Rome?”

“Curiosity,” Heidi said. The waiter brought pasta. “And hunger,” she said. Christopher told the waiter to divide the pasta into two portions and bring another glass. Heidi ordered the same main course as Christopher—grilled sea bass. “Everything in Italy tastes so wonderful,” she said after her first mouthful of pasta, “and olive oil is so much better for the digestion than lard.”

While they dined, two mimes in clown suits and white greasepaint performed in the street near their table. Their routine was to do everything in mirror image. They were very good. Each gesture, each expression was an exact duplicate of the other man’s. One of them was rotund, the other thin, but this difference only made the synchronization funnier. Christopher came often to this restaurant but he had never seen these performers before. Looking over Heidi’s shoulder, he studied them. Greedily, Heidi ate her tortellini con funghi and sipped Frascati and studied Christopher as if waiting for him to do some particular thing she knew he must do. Finally he recognized the mimes. When this happened Heidi must have seen some change in his eyes because she said, “You’ve identified the suspects, am I right?” Her English was American, and unlike her German, entirely free of accent.

“The bicyclists in the fur hats on Stalinallee,” Christopher said.

Heidi said, “You are good, aren’t you?”

“
They
are. Are you part of the act?”

“Sometimes, but I’m just décor. They’re the artistes.”

“This is their hobby?”

“No, no, they’ve studied with the best. It’s what they want to do when they grow up.”

“Work in the streets?”

“Not forever. World fame is their goal, Marcel and Marceau. It might happen, don’t you think?”

The mimes were passing the hat, going from table to table. Christopher gave them a thousand lira. They paid him and Heidi no particular attention.

“It’s amazing how much money they can make in an evening,” Heidi said. “Sometimes a kilo of coins. Cheapskate tourists give them foreign coins which are useless because they can’t be exchanged.”

The mimes wandered away. Heidi paid them no further attention.

Christopher said, “You’re traveling with them?”

“Always.”

“Then you are an act.”

“Sort of. Sometimes.”

Heidi changed the subject to movies. Marcello Mastroianni grew up in this neighborhood, she said, and was sometimes seen dining with friends at one of the restaurants in the piazza. “He wears sunglasses at night, just like his character in
La Dolce Vita
—just like me, when in Rome et cetera,” Heidi said. “Nobody bothers him when he materializes. He’s just Marcello from the neighborhood. He eats his pasta and talks to his friends and walks home to his mama’s house. How do the Romans do it—live so naturally?”

Heidi herself hadn’t the knack. Her conversation, her costume, her expressions were as studied as the mimes’ had been. In Berlin she had played a hotel manageress. Now she was playing an American girl in Rome. Christopher wondered if really she was an American girl, and if she was, who had set her on his trail and what she wanted. He suspected Wolkowicz.

The waiter brought the check. Heidi took it from his hand and paid for their dinner with a ten thousand lira note the size of a page ripped from a book. “Another thing I like about Italy is the money,” Heidi said. “It’s just the right size.”

They walked along the Tiber for a few blocks, stopping at a bar to
have coffee. Heidi said, “Add cappuccino to the list of things I like about Rome.” They crossed a bridge. She seemed to know where she was going. Christopher followed along, and finally she led him into a tiny street and then into a necktie shop. It was closing time and the shop seemed to be empty, but after a moment a man wearing a beautiful necktie and a suit with the jacket cut short in the Italian style bustled out of the backroom, and paying Heidi and Christopher no more attention than he would have done if they were tourists here to waste his time and buy nothing, went outside and cranked down the metal shutter that covered the door and the display window. They were locked in.

Heidi smiled a bright American smile.

The shop was separated from the back room by a bead curtain. Heidi parted it and stepped through the doorway. When Christopher did not follow she held out a hand, her body on one side of the curtain, her slender arm with its many bracelets on the other. Because there was no way out the front door it was pointless to stay where he was, so he followed her into the back room. It was as large as the shop, boxes stacked everywhere. The space was better lighted than the rooms in the Red Orchestra Inn, but dim all the same. In one corner an electric ring glowed red beneath a teakettle. A very small man, little more than five feet tall, sat in a frayed chair with his feet dangling. He was elderly and bald. Tufts of gray body hair protruded from his shirt collar. He held a glass of tea in his hand. With a gesture he offered Christopher a chair that had been drawn up to face his own. Behind him Heidi worked with swift efficiency and handed Christopher his own glass of tea. Then she sat on the floor at the old man’s feet, her legs crossed, her expression intent. Christopher sipped the oversweetened tea. He could taste the sugar on his tongue many seconds after he had swallowed it.

The little old man lifted his glass to Christopher and speaking English with a heavy accent said, “I am happy to see you again.”

Christopher had already recognized him. He was not a figure who, once encountered however briefly, was likely to be forgotten, but Christopher had other reasons besides his unforgettable appearance to know who he was.

The small man said, “Do you remember the last time we met?”

“Yes,” Christopher said, “in Rügen. We were introduced on the beach. You went sailing with my parents. I was left behind.”

“You were what in nineteen thirty-four, nine or ten?”

“About that.”

“You were tall for your age, about my size, I remember that,” said the small man. “That sailboat burned, I hear. A shame, it was so beautiful.”

Christopher was not in the least surprised that this man knew this detail. He specialized in details.

Christopher said, “Am I to understand that you’re still working, Mr. Stern?”

“From time to time, off the books, when the job is interesting. Call me Yeho. You’re old enough now.”

In his writings Hubbard had called Yeho Stern, who had been his friend, the hidden man. Yeho was hiding now. He was polite, deeply so, but it seemed to Christopher that this was an impersonation of politeness, just as Heidi’s role for tonight was an imitation of Americanness. It was Yeho who had planted in the minds of Hubbard and Lori the idea of smuggling Jews who had no other hope of getting out of the Reich. Yeho had asked them for help and they had given it. In asking for help he asked them to put their own lives on deposit as well as the lives of the people they rescued. They had paid the price. What did he want now?

Expressionless, Yeho watched Christopher as if he had no need to read his thoughts—as if he already knew them by heart, having read the same kind of thoughts in other people so many times before. He finished his tea. Heidi took the glass from his hand. Yeho never took his eyes from Christopher’s face.

Finally he said, “I have some information.” Christopher waited. Yeho said, “You’re much more like your mother than your father, did you know?” In spite of himself Christopher reacted to these words—something in his eyes, a slight movement, a half smile. Yeho said (was he making a little joke or did he think that Christopher might mistake his meaning?), “What I just said to you is not the information.” Eyes fixed on Christopher, Yeho accepted another glass of tea from Heidi.

He said, “This is the information. We have located this subject in whom you are interested, this Stutzer.”

These were startling words but once again Christopher was not surprised that Yeho should know something that almost nobody else in the world knew, or that he should share this secret with him. Yeho made no altruistic gestures. He wanted something in return. But what?