Christopher's Ghosts (39 page)

“Do this quietly, on tiptoes,” Yeho said. “Stutzer’s friends should wake up in the morning and ask each other, Where is he? Not wake up in the night and reach for their guns. Silence, prudence, speed—those are the words.”

“And if we’re discovered?” Christopher said.

“Don’t be. But if you are, nothing changes. Do what’s necessary. Grab Stutzer, come home.”

Christopher looked at him. Yeho read the question in his eyes. He said, “You make me say it out loud? Okay. No rescue if you get in trouble.”

 4 

On time to the minute and moving dead slow, the
Olaster
arrived off Rügen. Even by full moonlight the island was not visible except for the pulse of its lighthouses reflecting from low clouds. Christopher knew that this meant that they were miles offshore. Yeho told Christopher—he addressed all his remarks to him, presumably because the others already knew the facts—that they were in international waters. This meant a long run back to the ship from the shore, and an almost impossible one if the East Germans had patrol boats in the
water, as they almost certainly did given what was going on in Berlin. Yeho, who had no taste for the obvious, did not mention this hazard.

Heidi and the mimes stood somewhat apart. Christopher studied them closely so as to be able later on to recognize their silhouettes in moonlight. Like him, they wore watch caps and turtlenecks and dark baggy trousers. Their faces and hands were blacked. He did not like this last bit of theatricality, and if he had been in command he would have ordered them to clean up. The ship’s crew worked wordlessly and within seconds had lowered the Zodiac into the water. The team rappelled down to it, mimes first, then Christopher, then Heidi, who bounced elastically from point to point on the ship’s side as if trying out a new thrill in an amusement park. The last man, the boat driver and lookout, was lowered in a bosun’s chair. It was Yeho. The mimes had already started the outboards—there were two of these, enormous Evinrudes—and Yeho opened the throttles and headed for shore. The flat bottom of the Zodiac slammed the water. According to its speedometer the boat was traveling at forty miles per hour. This was faster than Christopher had expected. The
Olaster
, showing running lights, moved slowly eastward.

As the Zodiac drew closer and the island came up out of the sea, it snapped into place in Christopher’s memory. Yeho beckoned Christopher to sit beside him. He piloted the boat to shore not far from
Mahican
’s old mooring. Christopher knew the cliffs and the other landmarks by heart and he was sure, within a meter or two, where the Zodiac ran aground. The team went ashore, leaping from the bow of the boat to the sand to keep their shoes dry.

Christopher led them to the cliffs, which were more than one hundred feet high at this point, and immediately started climbing, using the cavities in the chalk as foot- and handholds. The smell of chalk and the gritty way it felt on his hands, the stink of guano and rotting nests reawakened his memory of this place just as its silhouette, seen from miles away, had done. In moments he reached the top of the cliff. Heidi and the mimes were right behind him. He led them into the beech grove. A deep cushion of rotted leaves lay underfoot, moonlight dappled the ground.

Christopher walked upright through the grove at a normal pace. A
man moving swiftly at night was easier to see. The others kept pace, spread out like an infantry patrol in diamond formation. They seemed to trust him. He wondered if they really did. How could they? They had no idea what he might do, what he might lead them into. Nor did he have any idea what their intentions were toward him.

The schloss was bathed in moonlight, tall windows on the west side aglow with it. The roof was crowded with antennas of all shapes and sizes. To Christopher’s eye this spoiled the comeliness of the house. Instead of the tender nostalgia he had expected in himself and guarded against, he felt annoyance at this vandalism and wondered if the ghost of Paulus was beside him, hoping that he had come to blow the place up. The grounds were patrolled, as he had been sure they would be. A guard with a submachine gun slung across his chest sauntered across the open ground between the trees and the house. After four minutes a second man slouched by in the opposite direction. They were so unmilitary in their baggy Russian-style uniforms that Paulus would not have believed that they could be Germans. As soon as the guard turned a corner and disappeared behind the schloss Heidi gave a hand signal. She and the mimes dashed across the open ground and faded into the shadows next to the house. Christopher waited till the next guard passed by and then walked across.

What, he wondered, did Heidi and the mimes plan on doing next? His question was answered when they drifted around the corner, following the guard. A third man was posted at the front door. His back was turned. Heidi made another hand signal. Without hesitation, moving swiftly and silently, the slender mime moved toward him and struck him on the head with a blackjack, then rolled him into the shrubbery. The chubby mime took off in pursuit of the guard who had just passed. The other mime went in the opposite direction, on the hunt for the second remaining guard. Heidi tried the great front door, found it locked, took tools from her pocket, and efficiently picked the lock. The mimes returned. Heidi donned her night-vision goggles and went inside. In a moment her hand and forearm appeared, signaling the others to come inside, just as she had beckoned Christopher into the necktie shop.

Christopher was the last to enter. Enough moonlight filtered into the hall to reveal its familiar features—the double stairway, the great stone fireplace, the empty spaces where the pictures had hung and where the suits of armor with their peculiar pewterlike sheen of old German steel had stood. Heidi made a deferential gesture to Christopher to lead on. She seemed to assume that because he knew the house he would know where Stutzer could be found. Christopher made an assumption of his own and led the others toward Paulus’s old room. It was the baronial chamber, three times as large as any other bedroom in the house, with frescoes of nymphs and knights on the ceiling and pillars surrounding the elevated platform on which the bedstead stood. Surely this was the room that Stutzer, as man in charge, would commandeer for his own use. The door was locked. Heidi knelt and swiftly picked the lock. The tiny noises she made were enough to alert a husky young sentry on duty inside. He flung open the door. He did not immediately see Heidi kneeling before him, and he may never have seen her before she pressed a stun gun against the front of his trousers and released 600,000 volts of electricity into his private parts. He froze, then dropped to the floor unconscious.

Christopher stepped over him. The mimes followed, he could feel them behind him. A man sat up in Paulus’s and Hilde’s old bed with its tall carved headboard and fringed canopy. Hilde hissed, the signal for danger, and Christopher guessed that the man was armed. He took another long step, meaning to attack, but the sturdy mime, who was surprisingly quick on his feet, had already reached the bed. He punched the man hard in the stomach. The man gasped and bent over double. Something dropped to the floor. Christopher picked it up—a cocked pistol. He lowered the hammer and put the weapon on what used to be the commode in which Paulus’s wash basin and chamber pot were stored.

Heidi handed Christopher her night-vision goggles. He realized that she wanted him to verify the identity of the prisoner. He put them on and in the green night-vision field saw Stutzer in striped old-fashioned pajamas, clutching his stomach, mouth agape, his emaciated body bent at queer angles.

Christopher said, “It’s him.”

The slender mime, who had been waiting with a syringe in his hand for Christopher’s answer, immediately gave Stutzer an injection. He twitched, opened his eyes wide in what seemed to be terror, then went limp. For an instant Christopher thought that an execution had just taken place but then Stutzer moaned and moved and he knew that the plan really was to take him alive.

The mime removed a hank of climbing rope from the other’s day pack. Heidi pulled back the curtains and opened a window. The mimes bent the rope around a pillar, then threw one end out of it the window. While the mimes held the belay, Heidi went out the window and rappelled down the wall of the schloss. The heavier mime followed her, with Christopher helping the other one to bear his weight. As soon as his strain was off the rope the slender mime tied a bowline on a bight at one end, leaving a long tail which he attached to the other half of the rope with a taut-line hitch. This permitted a slow descent by controlling the flow of the rope through the taut-line hitch.

Christopher and the mime slipped the two loops of the bowline over Stutzer’s legs. The mime secured him to the rope with two slipknots. They sat Stutzer on the windowsill, legs dangling outside, then threw the long end down to the others, who were waiting below the window. By the light of the sinking moon Christopher watched as the mime told him in dumb show that he would take Stutzer down and Christopher would follow and pull the rope down after him. His message could not have been plainer if he had written it in block letters on a placard.

They carried Stutzer to the chalk cliff in relays, then swung him down on the rope, snubbing it around a beech tree. While he waited for the team’s return Yeho had taken the Zodiac out to sea. Heidi signaled him with her flashlight. Christopher read the dots and dashes. The message was
OK
, simplicity itself, just like the rest of this operation. He looked at his watch. The entire raid had taken twenty-three minutes.

Yeho brought the boat in more quietly this time, at low revolutions, but the wind had risen at his back and as he approached they could hear the whine of the outboards.

Yeho expressed no surprise or pleasure at the sight of Stutzer’s unconscious person. The team had done what it was supposed to do, so who was he to offer congratulations? “We’ve got a little time to kill,” he said. “You’re early.”

With the unconscious Stutzer in his twisted flannel pajamas stretched out in the bottom of the boat, they motored out to sea at nowake speed. Gradually, light by light, Rügen sank beneath the horizon. When they got to the rendezvous, the
Olaster
waited for them, lights lit for all the world to see.

TWELVE

 1 

Yeho was in a chatty after-picnic mood all the way from shore, reminiscing light-heartedly with Christopher about his long-ago visit to Rügen and Schloss Berwick and his sail to Demark aboard
Mahican
. Now, as they waited for lines to be lowered, he said, “My brother-in-law from Berlin arranged that meeting with your parents. He was a man, a Social Democrat, a friend of Friedrich Ebert all his life, close to him even when Ebert was president of the Weimar Republic. From the start he handled Berlin for us, very risky work. He and my sister and their boy Norman made it to Palestine before they got caught because Hubbard and Lori gave him a sailboat ride. Were you along on that one?”

“No,” Christopher replied. “Usually I went along only if I stowed away. But I knew Norman and his parents.”

“I’m not surprised. They and your parents were friends for years. My brother-in-law was a literary man like your father, he wrote political books, every one of them burned, no doubt. When he made the suggestion that your parents might help us I said, What? An American two meters high and a baronesse, you must be joking. But as soon as I met them I knew they were going to be all right, even though your father had this look in his eye like he was going to suggest we go into the ventriloquism business together, me in a smoking jacket sitting on his lap. I’ve got to admit it would have been good cover. We could have gone anywhere, me in a suitcase, him on a U. S. passport.”

Yeho reached up and squeezed Christopher’s shoulder, a vice-like grip despite his size and age. “I know you’ve got memories,” he said. He pointed to Stutzer’s inert form, his first acknowledgment of the prisoner’s
presence. “Thanks to him, so do a lot of people.” He heard a winch and looked upward. “Here come the ropes,” he said.

Stutzer lay at their feet, unconscious and shackled but not senseless, apparently, because he shivered in the chill night air even though the mimes had covered him with a blanket. There was no compassion in this. Stutzer was cargo to be protected. In the bow of the Zodiac, Heidi sat with her legs folded under her, looking into a hand mirror and removing the black from her face with tissues that she threw into the sea.

Except for Heidi, who was still working on her face, Christopher was the last member of the team to be lifted back aboard the
Olaster
. By the time he reached the deck the others, including Stutzer, had vanished. Simon the captain was nowhere to be seen, either, and Christopher knew it was pointless to put a question to the crew, who spoke no language other than their own, at least in his presence. The winch whined and Heidi came into view, holding onto the rope with one hand and with one foot in a loop in the rope, a star of the circus rising to the trapeze. Her face was still smudged. When she drew closer Christopher was taken unawares by a perverse little rush of sexual interest. Quick as ever, she detected this, or so he thought. Anyway something made her smile a woman’s tight, knowing smile like the one she had given him after he had followed her up the stairs in the Red Orchestra Inn.

Christopher said, “Where is he?”

“Which he?”

“Stutzer.”

“Below, I imagine. Sooner or later Yeho will want to talk to him.”

“Where below, exactly?”

She hesitated, but only for an instant. Then she turned to a man in an officer’s cap who seemed to be in charge of the crew that had lifted them aboard. She spoke to him in Hebrew. Busy with other things, he answered brusquely.

To Christopher Heidi said, “Come.”

She led him at her usual half run through an open hatch in which he supposed the Zodiac was going to be stowed. Then she scampered down a ladder into the bowels of the ship and through several cargo holds connected by open watertight doors. The holds contained crates and barrels and bales and
in one of them a small airplane with its wings removed and an oddly shaped vehicle of some kind, covered by a tarp, were lashed to the deck.