Christopher's Ghosts (29 page)

“Really? Why?”

“It’s Stutzer.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Yes. O. G. may even be trying to help you out in some godfatherly way, though I’m not sure of that. But watch yourself.”

 2 

Whenever he could, Christopher traveled by train. He liked the solitude of a sleeping-car compartment, the chance to read while the countryside flashed by, the mechanical sounds and the sheer inertia of the experience. In Paris, after his flight from New York, he booked a place on the night train to Berlin. At dinner he was seated by the head-waiter with a young woman who was also dining alone. Her eyes were
fixed on the menu. She wore a wedding ring. The choices were mushroom soup or grapefruit, roast chicken or “sole” (meaning flounder), salad, and caramel custard or cheese.

The woman put her hands in her lap and studied the menu card. “Chicken or fish, how dreary,” she said in French. “What do you think?”

“The flounder,” Christopher replied.

She had not yet looked at him. Now she lifted her eyes, which were large and brown, and examined him without smiling. The waiter arrived with his pad. She put her hands back on the table. Her wedding ring had vanished.

“The soup, the fish,” she said. “A small carafe of Muscadet. Cheese.”

She looked something like a photograph of Virginia Woolf. She had a long aristocratic face, one of the least symmetrical of the seven or eight faces allotted by evolution to the French. But she had vitality. Her eyes were intelligent, with thick lashes. It was impossible to judge her hair because it had been combed and sprayed into one of the large stiff helmets that were in style. She had good teeth and a quick smile. She dressed modishly, a jacket over a blouse with a many-stranded necklace of beads at her throat. She was tall for a Frenchwoman, slim, well-kept. Christopher did not take this inventory. With little gestures she presented it to him item by item. She was an amusing talker. She spoke French with a faint Niçois accent, lifting her voice at the ends of words and adding a final Italianate vowel that was not present in the written word.

They talked about the Côte d’Azur. She recommended restaurants in Nice and Cannes and their surrounding villages. She recommended Provençal dishes as if he had never heard of them, especially sea bass with fennel and bouillabaisse. She liked swimming, sailing, and in the winter, skiing in the Maritime Alps and sometimes in Cortina and Megève.

“Do you sail?” she asked.

“Not as much as in the past. I don’t live close to water.”

“You live in Paris?”

“For the moment.”

“But you ski, surely.”

“Why surely?”

“You look like a skier.”

Christopher talked with her about skiing in Switzerland and Austria as he finished his food and arranged his knife and fork on the empty plate. She asked about movies. What did he like? Mostly American movies, he said. Why American films, of all things?

“Because the girl never takes off her clothes and dies in the end.”

“Which part of that French cliché do you object to?”

Christopher smiled and drank the rest of his Evian water. Hubbard and O. G. had taught him when he was young to drink good wine or no wine at all. He understood that this was a rule for snobs, but he didn’t like bad wine. On a train, which was a giant overheated cocktail shaker, there was no such thing as good wine no matter what the label read. The Muscadet had brought a flush to the woman’s cheeks. She was talking more rapidly.

“Me, I prefer French films,” she said. “Sometimes Italian, if they’re funny. I adore Gérard Philipe—
Fanfan la Tulipe, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
, everything.”

“Not Fred Astaire?”

“Tippety-tap. ‘Isn’t it romantic?’ I don’t know what Ginger sees in Fred.”

The dinner, rapidly served, was not bad. They ate their cheese. The waiter asked if they wanted coffee. The woman said yes, Christopher declined.

“It keeps you awake?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Me, too,” she said, drinking. “Sometimes all night.” Her eyes were wider now and shining.

Christopher had brought a book to the dining car. It lay face-down on the table, dust jacket removed. “What are you reading?” the woman asked. Christopher showed her. It was a novel in English. She turned the pages until she came to the one she was looking for. She rummaged in her purse and found a pencil. With it she drew a circle around the page number, closed the book and handed it back.

“Hide and seek,” she said, and rising to her feet she walked down the aisle, swaying with the train and the wine. Her legs were slender like the rest of her—a cyclist’s legs, with visible muscles. At the door she looked over her shoulder, a glance full of meaning.

It was bad form for an agent of the Outfit to permit himself to be picked up by a stranger on a train. Even if this had not been the case, Christopher did not sleep with married women. He went back to his own compartment, undressed, and started to read his novel—Joyce Cary’s
The Horse’s Mouth
. Soon he came to the page whose number the woman had circled in pencil. It was, he knew, the number of her compartment. He put the book down for a moment and remembered Lori’s hand without her ring. The Daimler, the Tiergarten, a different train. No. 8 Prinz-Albrechtstrasse. He did not attempt to erase the penciled circle. He read on, but there was no place he wished to go tonight with the mad painter Gully Jimson, and at last he turned off the light and lay in the dark, listening to the train.

 3 

Christopher met Barney Wolkowicz in a safe house near the Olympic stadium, in the far west end of Berlin. The apartment, small and cramped and dark, was on the top floor of a prewar building that had somehow escaped bomb damage. Nearly every other building Christopher had known as a boy, including the one in which the Christophers had lived in Gutenbergstrasse, had been obliterated by allied bombs. Walking past a certain address he would remember people who had lived behind brick walls and stone façades that were now heaps of fire-blackened rubble. Some of them—Miss Wetzel, perhaps—must be buried under the debris. He did not mention this, or anything else that did not have to do with the business at hand, to Barney Wolkowicz.

He and Wolkowicz had known each other for a long time but even though they liked each other, neither would have described the other as an old friend. Wolkowicz was that rarity in the Outfit, a birthright
member of the working class. His father, born in Russia like Wolkowicz himself, was a steelworker. His ancestors were serfs. Wolkowicz was a thick-bodied man with a squashed Slavic face and small eyes that never wavered—liar’s eyes, said Patchen, who had Wolkowicz for an enemy. Wolkowicz looked older, but he and Christopher were both in their thirties and not far apart in years. They had a history. During the war Wolkowicz served in the OSS in Burma under one of Christopher’s cousins by marriage. Later he worked for Hubbard Christopher, who became head of OSS operations in Berlin after the war. Wolkowicz had been present when Hubbard was run down and killed in the Grunewald by a speeding car. It was murder. The murderers, presumably Russians or Germans controlled by the Russians, were never identified. Before being posted to Geneva, Christopher had worked for Wolkowicz in Vienna. Their operation, located in an abandoned sewer beneath the Russians’ communications center, had been discovered and invaded by Russian shock troops. Christopher had pulled a wounded Wolkowicz to safety, shooting down commandoes as he withdrew, then blown up the sewer. Wolkowicz’s German wife had had an affair with a British agent who was part of the team. Wolkowicz nearly killed the man, then nailed him for treason. Wherever he went, things happened—bad things as often as good. But his operations usually succeeded, gunfire and moments of rage notwithstanding. He was brave. No man in the Outfit had been so often decorated. Few were closer to O. G.’s heart. Only Dickens could have invented such a wondrous character, said O. G., who was in fact the man who invented him. The Moloch—that should be Wolkowicz’s funny name, said Patchen. Wolkowicz, who hated most people, had loved Hubbard. Because he had not prevented Hubbard’s murder, he felt responsible for his son. Because of the episode in the Vienna tunnel, he felt that he owed his life to Christopher.

Climbing the steep staircase, Christopher heard a piano. The door to the safe house—apartment, really—was unlocked. Christopher let himself in. Wolkowicz was playing an old upright that must have survived the air raids, too, but was nevertheless in tune. Christopher wondered if Wolkowicz had smuggled a piano tuner into the safe house,
and if so, what had happened to the piano tuner afterward. The music was Bach, who was Wolkowicz’s favorite composer—because of the math, he said, not the melodies. He had gone to college in Ohio on a mathematics scholarship but had minored in music. Hunched over the instrument with his hat jammed on his large head, blunt hairy fingers moving over the keyboard, he looked like an ape in a secondhand suit, but his touch was exquisite. He played as well as any amateur Christopher had ever heard, including his mother. Wolkowicz’s musicianship was only one of many unlikely things about him. He spoke half a dozen languages, English and Russian like the native that he was, and had often demonstrated that he could learn any other tongue in a matter of weeks whenever the need arose. He was intensely romantic. In Viennese restaurants on scraps of paper he had written love poems in German for his German wife—very good ones, Christopher thought. In Christopher’s opinion he was probably the smartest officer in the Outfit and certainly the most ruthless. He was the rudest person Christopher had ever known. He talked like a thug and pretended to be one and sometimes behaved like one. He went nowhere without a loaded pistol and a blackjack on his person. Because of the cowardice of Christopher’s cousin, who had run away from a firefight in Burma and left Wolkowicz alone to be captured by the enemy, all of his teeth had been pried from his jaw by a torturer equipped with a bayonet. He hated the Yale men with whom the Outfit abounded because Christopher’s cousin was a member of Skull and Bones and because, in his opinion, all Yale alumni thought that they had done everything that could ever be expected of them in life simply by being admitted to Yale. He felt the same, with less facial expression, about the rest of the Ivy League. His own alma mater was Kent State College.

Christopher made almost no sound opening the door of the garret apartment but Wolkowicz’s hearing was keen and so were his other senses. He knew that someone was standing behind him. He knew—did not guess, knew—that the newcomer was Christopher. He finished the piece he was playing, spun around on the piano stool, and said, “For sixty-four dollars, kid, name that tune.”

Christopher was surprised that Wolkowicz did not have a pistol in
his hand. He liked practical jokes that involved firearms. “One of Bach’s fugues for harpsichord,” he said.

“A genius. Here’s the jackpot question. If Johann Sebastian Bach had been a junior what would his middle name have been?”

“I don’t know,” Christopher said.

“Ambrosius. What did they teach you at those fancy schools?”

Christopher smiled. He could not help himself. Wolkowicz was a man he did not like unless he was in his presence. When he was, amusement wiped out all the bad moments that Wolkowicz had brought down on him and his family.

“So why are we here?” asked Wolkowicz.

He wasn’t playing innocent. He had been told that Christopher would be in Berlin on a certain date and that he was acting under the director’s orders as usual. No one had told him that Christopher would want to see him because Christopher had not mentioned this to Patchen, the only man to whom he had spoken at headquarters. Wolkowicz being Wolkowicz, he might have sniffed out something more, or guessed something, or collected fragments of information from some of his many sources. But the three people who knew what Christopher’s assignment actually was—O. G., Patchen, Christopher himself—certainly had told him nothing. Even they did not know the whole scenario, and even Christopher would not know until it was over. In operations as in war, plans had a short existence. The future did not issue warnings to the present.

“I’ve been asked to look into something that interests O. G.,” Christopher said.

“What would that be, exactly? Everything interests him.”

“Whatever it is, it should have no effect on your interests.”

“Right. You’re always such a soothing presence. Give me a hint.”

“I’m just letting you know as a matter of courtesy that I’m going to be around for a while. I can’t go beyond that.”

“Why not? You’re on my turf. That makes me responsible for you.”

Christopher did not say, You know the rules. Wolkowicz cared nothing for the rules. His only rule was to know everything. He demanded to be trusted absolutely. He browbeat anyone who
denied him information or trust until he got what he wanted. He was never going to be left behind again. No more jungle dentistry was Wolkowicz’s motto.

To Christopher he said, “You’re here to tell me I’ve got no need to know what you’re up to, and I’m supposed to swallow that and say, Okay, kid, go right ahead and burn the Reichstag, I just love fires. Is that it?”

Christopher knew that there was no point in answering Wolkowicz’s question. It wasn’t a question. It was a provocation. Force a man to justify himself, make him argue, just get him to speak, and you’re halfway home.

Christopher understood Wolkowicz’s technique. He broke in to his line of questions and said, “How did you get the piano up here, Barney?”

Wolkowicz glowered. “Stick to the point.”

“No, seriously. The windows are too small. The last flight of stairs looks too narrow.”

“It was here already. Maybe the Krauts took it apart before the war, carried it up the stairs, and put it back together.”

“It sounds like it’s in perfect tune.”

“To you, maybe.”

Wolkowicz emptied his lungs with a mock sigh of impatience. “Cut the crap,” he said. “Why are you here?”

Christopher said, “Would it be okay if I stayed in this place until dark? I’d like to do some thinking and take a nap and I don’t want to check into a hotel just yet.”