Christopher's Ghosts (23 page)

Rima believed the opposite. Never in her lifetime would there be another Germany filled with kindly people whose stupidities were harmless.

She whispered, “Are we going to escape?”

“We’re going to try, if you want to do it. But think carefully.”

“Do you think it’s impossible?”

“I know it is not. But the odds aren’t favorable.”

Rima knew this. The S-boats were still out there. No doubt Stutzer was out there, too. The secret police would be on the watch. Paul had disappeared. By now they knew that she had disappeared also. They might have followed her to Rügen. If not, it was because Stutzer knew her destination. He would certainly have deduced where they were headed next. A nice young soldier had given Rima a ride on his motorcycle all the way from Berlin to Stralsund and had not asked for so much as a kiss in payment. Stutzer would find this soldier. Someone on the empty plain between Berlin and the Baltic would have seen them riding by and made a report. Rima said nothing to Paul about the soldier. Did he know about jealousy? Rima knew all about it. She had imagined temptresses on the
Bremen
. She had fantasized rich American girls, blond and blue-eyed like himself, making eyes at him in New York.

Paul estimated their chances at fifty-fifty. He was not, after all, a novice. For the hundredth time he reminded himself that he had been present at other escapes when his parents had been in charge, so he knew that success was possible. He told Rima nothing about these secret voyages. It was dangerous for her to know. Next time, Paul knew, Stutzer’s patience would be exhausted. He would take the information he wanted from them both, no more games, no more coaxing. If Rima knew a little and was forced to tell the little she knew, Stutzer would believe that she knew more than she had told him and his men would beat what she did not know out of her. No one could protect her.

The conditions necessary for escape were simple—a dark night, a
good wind, luck. Hubbard in his love for simplicity had never considered installing an engine in
Mahican
. She was a sailboat, the wind was her element, and in Hubbard’s mind it connected
Mahican
and everyone who sailed in her to the first human being who thought of stepping a mast in a cockleshell and hanging a piece of hide on it to catch the air. Paul and Rima had darkness and wind aplenty. A thirty-knot breeze moaned in the hollows of the chalk cliffs. The hull of
Mahican
pitched and rolled in a strong chop. The night was so black that they could not even see the schloss hovering above them. It would be next to impossible to sail into such a wind. The only feasible destination was the Danish island of Bornholm, fifty miles to the northeast of Rügen. They could run before the wind and be ashore on free territory in four hours or less.

“Unless?” Rima said.

“Unless we capsize or an S-boat finds us,” Paul said.

“What are our chances?”

“Of capsizing, small if we sail by the rules, but in this weather that will be a problem. I don’t know about the S-boat. It depends on where they’re patrolling tonight, but they know as well as we do which way the wind is blowing.”

“But how can they see us in this weather?”

“Our sails are white. They have lookouts with good glasses. There’s no such thing as invisibility at sea unless there’s thick fog. No chance of that tonight.”

“So everything depends on their not seeing us.”

Paul and Rima could not even see each other’s faces. She took his face between her hands—as he already knew, her palms were slightly rough—and placed her forehead against his. “Then let’s go now before they find us here,” she said.

Rima remembered from their last outing how to rig the boat. She worked efficiently in the dark with Paul to fit the centerboard and the rudder and cast off. He raised the mizzen sail and the jib and as the wind pushed them out to sea, Rima could see the white triangles of canvas. The fabric glowed in the pitch dark like the phosphorescent combers into which they were now sailing. The pale cliffs of Rügen
glowed also. She realized that
Mahican
would be visible as a silhouette against the cliffs. Her throat tightened with fear.

Rügen remained visible for a long time as a smudge on the horizon, and when at last the boat passed over the horizon and the island was lost to sight, Rima feared that they must be even more visible to those who were hunting them.
Mahican
, heeled over, seemed to be flying now. The mainsail ballooned. When touched it felt as tight as a drumhead. When the boat yawed and the canvas snapped, it seemed that the sound must be audible miles away. Rima had never been so frightened in her life—not by the boat or the wind, which were the angels of this experience, but by whatever else might intrude. By the searchlight that might suddenly blind them, by the smell of burnt diesel that might suddenly fill the nostrils, by the bow of the S-boat or who knew what else suddenly looming in the darkness, suddenly visible, but only for the moment that it took to ram
Mahican
into splinters.

Rima’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness, but she did not look into it. She was seated on the windward rail, lashed to a cleat on the tilted deck, her body stretched out to balance the boat. Nothing it seemed but her slight weight kept it from overturning. She looked back at Paul at the tiller. His eyes were on the compass, then on the sails, then on her. He smiled. His teeth were brilliantly white like everything else in this picture that was not darkness. She was inside the picture, therefore outside the world. So was Paul. There they would remain for the rest of their lives. For an instant she actually believed in this enchantment.

The S-boat was waiting for them about a mile outside Danish territorial waters. Its searchlights found
Mahican
instantly. Its small boat, already in the water, set off with engine hammering in pursuit of the sailboat. A parachute flare ignited, signal flags were hoisted. A signaling lamp winked the command to stop. No nautical ritual was omitted except shots across
Mahican
’s bow. There was no hope of outrunning this mechanized enemy. A moment before,
Mahican
had been running before the wind at thirty knots, a giddy speed for a small sailboat. Now she seemed to be wallowing dead-slow in a bathwater sea. Paul turned the yawl into the wind and dropped the sails.

Stutzer himself and his two apprentices were aboard the small boat. Paul saw their faces clearly by the harsh light of the flare. The sailors who were operating the craft brought it alongside
Mahican
and made it fast. The apprentices boarded immediately with pistols drawn. One of them carried a large glass jug and a flare gun. Without a word or a gesture, he opened the forward hatch and hurled the jug into the hold. The glass broke, releasing the smell of kerosene. He fired a flare into the hold. Flames and smoke belched from the hatch. Blisters popped into being all over the varnished deck.

The apprentices picked Paul up bodily and threw him into the small boat. Rima, who was still lashed to
Mahican
, struggled to loosen the bowline around her waist. Paul tried to leap back aboard
Mahican
to help her but was tripped and held fast by the apprentices.
Mahican
was an old vessel, her wooden hull and decks and masts dried by seasons in the open and covered with many coats of varnish and paint. The small boat, bobbing violently in the chop, backed away from the intense heat. Rima freed herself from the rope at last. She dove overboard and swam underwater to escape the flames. The sails caught fire, then the masts. The entire hull burst into flames.

Rima surfaced several meters from the burning yawl, but the heat was still too intense to bear and she dived again. Paul fought toward the small boat’s gunwales, meaning to go to Rima’s rescue. In response to a small gesture from Stutzer, a tiny movement of his head, one of the apprentices pulled Paul’s legs out from under him, and as he sprawled backward, the other caught him as expertly as an acrobat executing a tumbling routine. He put a forearm against Paul’s throat and tightened the choke hold. Paul felt his consciousness slipping away.

“Careful with him!” Stutzer said.

The apprentice relaxed his forearm and let Paul breathe again.

One of the S-boat’s searchlights was now focused on Rima. She was treading water on the other side of the burning
Mahican
. Completely alight now, masts and spars and hull outlined by flame, the yawl was being blown into the darkness as if under sail. The small boat came about, describing a circle with the girl at the center. She raised one hand to show them where she was. Her face was white, her movements
sluggish. Only weeks before, the water in which she swam had been frozen solid. It was still just above the freezing point. No one could live in it for long. The helmsman steered toward Rima. A sailor clambered into the bow, a coiled line attached to a life preserver in his hands.

In a loud officer’s voice, Stutzer said, “No. Leave the Jew.”

Rima heard Stutzer’s command—Paul was sure of this. She knew what it meant. Her eyes were fixed on Paul. He was sure of that, too, though he knew that she must be blinded by the searchlight. She continued to tread water, trying to see Paul through the blinding light. He was trying to break free, trying to join her, but the apprentices, under orders to do him no harm, restrained him with remarkable gentleness, canceling his physical efforts with their own strength, as if it was their duty to keep him from making a fool of himself.

Rima raised both arms above her head in the glow of the searchlight. For a long moment she held them aloft. Then, by an act of the will, she slid into the sea as if returning to it, as if it were a place where she could breathe at last.

P
ART
T
WO

1959

SIX

 1 

Twenty years later on a winter night, as he passed beneath a streetlamp in a gray European city, Paul Christopher glimpsed, just briefly, the face of a man who was walking in the opposite direction. It was raining hard. The light was feeble, but Christopher knew at once that this person, though thinner and more gray-faced than before and dressed in threadbare clothes, was Franz Stutzer. Christopher turned on his heel and followed him. The cobblestone streets were narrow and steep, with flights of granite stairs. Stutzer wore an old fedora, a short mustard-yellow raincoat with a frayed hem, and socks with holes in the heels. Little half-moons of pallid flesh appeared above the backs of his shoes at every step. He smelled of wet wool, rank sweat and cheap cologne. Through the rain Christopher saw his quarry indistinctly, as if he were on the other side of a smudged sheet of glass. Stutzer knew he was being followed. He glanced fearfully over his shoulder, he quickened his step.

Perhaps Stutzer did not, at that moment, realize who Christopher was. After all, he had been a boy the last time he saw him. But he feared strangers. He could not possibly remember all the faces he had ever seen, but there were people still alive all over the world who had reason to kill him. Why should this young man not be one of them? Besides, he saw by the way his pursuer moved how good he was at this game, how keen his senses were, and how used to winning he was. He was a savage, a hunter. Stutzer had just become his quarry. He was weaker than this stranger, older. He feared death. He feared pain, feared the
humiliation of being caught by a stronger animal. Christopher could overtake him whenever he chose, kill him with his bare hands or take away his pistol and shoot him with it—not mercifully in the heart or the head, but in the foot or knee or intestines or all three so that pain would give him a motive to talk. He would wring him out and finish the job before anyone in this cold, damp, sleeping city woke up and interrupted him.

Christopher read these thoughts as if Stutzer were speaking them aloud, smelled his panic just as he smelled his sweat beneath the cologne. The street made a sharp turn. Stutzer disappeared from view. He began to run. Christopher knew this even before he turned the corner himself because he heard him splashing through the ankle-deep torrent that rushed over the cobblestones. Christopher himself broke into a run, and athlete that he was, was moving at full speed within two or three steps. Ahead of him, Stutzer lost his footing. His mustard raincoat billowed, his hat flew off. He fell on his back with a cry of panic and skidded downhill, hands and feet flailing. Christopher stopped in his tracks and watched. Stutzer was heading toward a flight of stone stairs that had been turned by the downpour into a waterfall.

Stutzer’s momentum turned him onto his stomach. He looked at Christopher, held out a hand as if he was about to go over Victoria Falls, and shouted, “In the name of God!”

Christopher moved. He caught up with Stutzer when he was very close to the edge and seized one of his frantically waving arms. This was enough to save Stutzer, who grabbed a railing, but Christopher himself, as if on ice, slid onward toward the stairway, feet together and arms outstretched for balance. At the last moment he grasped the banister and stopped himself. Stutzer got to his feet. He stared wild-eyed at Christopher and clawed at his coat pocket. He found his pistol, but it was entangled in wet cloth and he could not draw it. He stood in front of a thick padlocked door. He kicked it, nearly knocking himself over backward, but the door did not yield. He drew his weapon at last. By now Christopher had regained his balance. He was no more than half a dozen steps away and coming fast. Stutzer fired—not at Christopher, but at the padlock. The sound was weak, not much louder and no more
identifiable than a single running footstep, not loud enough to wake even a light sleeper.

The padlock, an old iron one, shattered. Stutzer threw open the door and plunged through it. Christopher, running at full speed, launched himself into the air, and hit the door with his body before Stutzer could bolt it from inside. The door, with Christopher’s weight behind it, burst open and knocked Stutzer headfirst down a long flight of stairs. The stairs were carpeted. His soaked raincoat slowed him down, so that he came to rest gently on a landing. A tiny bulb at the top of the stairs shed a little light. Stutzer rolled over and lifted the pistol, aiming at Christopher. His hand shook violently. Christopher plunged down the stairs. Stutzer did not fire, but instead got to his feet and fled heavily down another flight of stairs, then another, with the cocked pistol held above his head. Christopher followed, moving faster than Stutzer, whose thin hair did not stir as he ran. Christopher remembered the brilliantine, the smell of it, and smelled it again. Because the stairs were carpeted, the two of them made very little noise. Now and then Stutzer took sobbing breaths. Once or twice his weapon slammed into the wall, but somehow did not go off. He nudged a round table and almost, but not quite, upset the tall rose-colored vase that sat upon it.