Christopher's Ghosts (36 page)

A half glass of water with a bent straw in it stood on the bedside table. Christopher picked it up and sucked water through the straw, then put it down. Almost immediately he fell asleep again and dreamed that he was at a picnic with a lot of people he didn’t know and their children. A large poisonous snake slithered into the dream. Christopher killed it with a rock, beating its head to a pulp. The other guests watched in silence, glasses at their lips but not drinking. No one spoke to Christopher or even seemed to notice him until a self-righteous little girl said, “Everyone hates you!” Christopher asked why. “Because you killed that snake,” the child replied.

The dream woke him. Dusk filled the room. A nurse entered and
switched on the lights. Christopher was dazzled by their brightness and was now certain that he was in the hands of Americans. “Ah, we’re awake,” said the nurse. She moved his hand back to his side and checked to make sure that his IVs were still stuck firmly in his forearms, then took his pulse, temperature and blood pressure and noted these on the chart at the foot of the bed. She wore captain’s bars on her collar. Her name tag, half hidden beneath the stethoscope draped around her neck, told him that her first name was Krista and her last name began with a K. From her accent he guessed that she was from the Midwest. She said, “Do you know where you are, Colonel?”

Colonel? Christopher wondered what name had been manufactured to go with this manufactured rank. He said, “No.”

“You’re in the U. S. Army Hospital in Frankfurt, Germany,” the captain said. “Until midnight I’m your nurse.”

“What time is it now, Captain?”

“Twenty after five. Do you know what day it is?”

“No.”

“It’s Thursday. You’re going to be fine. Your injuries are not, repeat not, life-threatening. Major Sadlowski, the physician on duty, will tell you the details. I’ll notify him that you’re awake.”

She filled his water glass and held it while he drank through the straw. By her manner, professional but aloof, she created a distance between them. She was a fine-looking woman, slender but buxom. Oddly for an American girl she had not smiled once. She studied his face but avoided his eyes. She made no small talk, not even the standard where-are-you-from. She had made up her mind about him. Clearly she thought that he was not a real colonel, perhaps not even a real American. She would have been far more friendly to a genuine superior officer. A good many Outfit people had passed through this hospital and no doubt she had learned to recognize the type. Christopher wore no dog tags. Almost certainly he had arrived naked, with no personal effects. He wore no wristband with name, rank and serial number. He was an exotic, an impostor, a mystery.

Major Sadlowski was as distant in manner as the nurse had been. He was an enormously tall rawboned man, taller even than Hubbard had
been, who had to bend double over the bed in order to use his stethoscope and carry out the rest of his examination. His questions were brief and to the point. He called Christopher sir, not Colonel. He did not call him by name. At the end of his examination he stood upright and looked down from his great height on the supine Christopher and asked if he had any questions. Christopher asked about the vertigo attacks. He did not call it that because he did not yet know what it was, but described the symptoms.

“Vertigo, probably,” Major Sadlowski said. “Have you ever had these symptoms before?”

“No. They began the night I was shot.”

“What makes you think you were shot?”

“Because someone was shooting at me. Am I wrong?”

“No, sir. How’s your hearing?”

“A bit muffled, as if I had cotton in my ears. It comes and goes.”

“That’s interesting. I’ll ask an ENT man to have a look at you. The inner ear, which controls balance, can be affected by a blow to the head. Or the vertigo could be the onset of Ménières syndrome, which sometimes results in hearing loss. Try to lie still, flat on your back, with your head slightly elevated. Don’t look down or you’ll feel like you fell down a mineshaft. The nurse will bring you extra pillows.”

“What about the wound?”

“It’s a gunshot wound, all right. Did it knock you unconscious?”

“No. Just a headache and a lot of blood. And the dizziness and nausea.”

Major Sadlowski nodded as though this information was deeply interesting to him. He said, “You went on functioning normally?”

“I could walk and talk. I was somewhat disoriented. How deep is the wound?”

“Superficial. It dug a furrow in your scalp and blew away some bone fragments but it didn’t penetrate the skull. We cleaned it up and sewed it up. You have a concussion, which is never a good thing, but the pictures show no other damage. Had the bullet struck at a slightly different angle or a millimeter lower, you’d have been in trouble. You also had symptoms of exposure. It took us a long time to get your temperature up to normal, but that’s over now. Apart from the wound and the
vertigo you’re okay, but we were told that you inhaled some vomit and could have died if the person who found you hadn’t stuck his finger down your windpipe and whacked you on the sternum.”

“Do you happen to know who that person was?”

“No, sir, but whoever he was, he was a quick thinker,” Major Sadlowski said, “All I know for sure is what I see.”

What he really meant, Christopher thought, was, What I see is all I want to know. Major Sadlowski busied himself with the chart, frowning and scribbling.

“If this is Wednesday, I’ve been unconscious for more than twenty-four hours,” Christopher said. “Why?”

“Not exactly unconscious,” Major Sadlowski said, without looking up. “Asleep. You were given a heavy sedative before you got here.”

“What sedative?”

“We don’t know for certain. One of the opiates, probably. Morphine, maybe heroin. Maybe a combination of drugs.”

“But whatever it was put me to sleep for twenty-four hours?”

“Longer than that,” Major Sadlowski said. “It was an overdose. There were people around here, sir, who wondered if you’d ever wake up.”

 3 

Instead of simply telling Christopher what time it was, Wolkowicz unbuckled his wristwatch—cheap, black, and Japanese—and tossed it onto the bed. Christopher reached for it, feeling a touch of vertigo as he bent forward. It was 4:24 A. M. He offered to give the watch back.

“Keep it,” Wolkowicz said. “I’ve got more.”

Using operational funds, Wolkowicz bought digital watches and ballpoint pens and cheap cameras in job lots. Such items were scarce in peoples’ democracies and like a trader in Indian country, Barney handed them out as a way of making friends and influencing people behind the Iron Curtain.

He had shown up unannounced in Christopher’s room. “We should
talk,” he said. “Patchen is on his way to spirit you away, so this is a preemptive strike.”

Sarcasm was Wolkowicz’s way of disabusing Christopher of any idea that he was capable of a corporal act of charity like visiting the sick. Christopher smiled.

Wolkowicz said, “Let’s make this simple. Tell me what you thought you were up to in Berlin and I’ll answer a question from you. Any question. There must be something you’re dying to know.”

“How did I get here?” Christopher asked.

“That’s your one big question?”

“No.”

“Let me know when we get to it. You remember making a phone call?”

“Yes. To your home number.”

“Correct,” Wolkowicz said. “We sprang right into action, and here you are.”

“Who’s we?”

“Me and some of the guys.”

“What guys?”

“The ones who were on call that night. You were lying on Bülowstrasse in a pool of vomit, covered in blood and not breathing. Somebody cleaned out your windpipe and gave you the kiss of life. Puke and all. Imagine. Most people would have held their nose or given you a tracheotomy with a Swiss army knife. Not this guy. He must really love his fellow man.”

“He must have got there pretty quick,” Christopher said. “Usually people who breathe in their own vomit die in no time.”

“Not you, apparently.”

“So why am I here?”

“Well, for one thing you were full of dope and we couldn’t wake you up, so our doctor in Berlin thought you should be in an American hospital. For another thing headquarters thought you should get out of Berlin. I agreed.”

“How did I get full of dope?”

“Search me. And that’s your last irrelevant question. I’ve got a few of my own.”

“You think this is the best place to talk?” Christopher said.

“If it’s not, then it’s too late to start worrying,” Wolkowicz replied. “But everything’s fine. This room is like a medical safe house. It belongs to the Outfit. We own all the equipment. We use the room when we need it and the army keeps it under lock and key the rest of the time. It was swept last night before you woke up. It’s clean as a whistle. The door is bazooka-proof. The window is bulletproof. There’re guards outside the door. It’s like we’re in Action Comics.”

This may or may not have been the truth. It was standard reassurance, page one of the agent-handler’s manual. The case officer always told the agent that everything was fine, that he was safe and protected by an omniscient employer who loved him, that nothing could possibly go wrong.

Wolkowicz said, “Sadlowski—our guy, by the way—tells me you remember everything up to the time you passed out. I know from Heidi that you can do the tango like Valentino and that you took a lot of crazy chances with Stutzer and the Stasi, like riding by him on a bicycle and letting him see your face. I know that you slipped out of Heidi’s hotel in the wee hours of the morning in question. I know you’d be dead if it wasn’t for my timely arrival.”

“Now you’re boasting.”

“I’m not a WASP, I’m allowed. Tell me the rest.”

Christopher gave him a step-by-step report of everything he had done in East Berlin. Wolkowicz listened intently. He took no notes. A stranger to his ways might have supposed that he was relying on hidden microphones and a tape recorder, but Christopher knew that Wolkowicz would remember every word he was hearing, probably for the rest of his life.

When Christopher finished his narrative, Wolkowicz closed his eyes for a long moment and whistled a tune through his teeth. Then he said, “So after you were shot in the head and while you were bleeding like a stuck pig, you bashed Stutzer with a rock and carried him across the line, across the Potsdamer Bridge, and down Potsdamerstrasse into the heart of West Berlin?”

Christopher did not reply. Wolkowicz had heard what he said. There was no need to tell him again.

“And nobody followed you?”

“I saw nobody behind me.”

“Were there any witnesses?”

“Yes. I talked to some of them.” Christopher described the encounter with the Christian and the others.

“Okay. So tell me what happened when you found the telephone.”

“I put Stutzer on the ground and called you.”

“And then?”

“And then I passed out.”

“All of a sudden you conk out, after this superhuman fireman’s carry through the ruins. Why?”

Christopher said, “I couldn’t stay conscious. I thought I was going into shock. The world spun around. Everything went black.”

“Where was Stutzer while all this was going on?”

“Lying on the pavement, propped up against the phone booth.”

“In other words, he was right where you dropped him. Was he conscious or unconscious?”

“Immobilized. He couldn’t talk or walk. He made a noise. His jaw was broken. I think I tore up his knees when I clipped him.”

“But his face was the last thing you saw before you went under?”

“Yes.”

“And he was alive.”

“No question.”

Wolkowicz inhaled, bit his lower lip with his impossibly perfect false teeth. He covered the teeth with his upper lip and again whistled the same unrecognizable tune. “That’s amazing,” he said. “Because your call came in at one minute after five and my first man, who just happened to be in the neighborhood, was on the scene at five-oh-four, and when he got there, there was no Stutzer. Just you, out like a light and choking to death.”

No Stutzer? Christopher was so startled by this information that he moved suddenly—plunged toward Wolkowicz, who stood at the foot of the bed. This triggered a vertigo attack. Nausea rose into his throat, his mouth, his nostrils. The hospital bed turned upside down and he seized the rails to keep himself from falling out.

He put his head back onto the pillows. The attack passed. He said, “You didn’t find Stutzer’s Stasi ID in my inside pocket?”

“No. No sign of him whatsoever.”

Another man, hearing what Wolkowicz had just told him, might have said, “That’s impossible.” But Christopher knew that in his vertiginous world and Stutzer’s and Wolkowicz’s, the possibilities were unlimited, so he held his peace.

 4 

Christopher was slow to recover from vertigo and even slower to reconcile himself to the reality that he had had Stutzer in his grasp and then lost him or had him stolen from him. The episode in East Berlin faded in everyone else’s memory, if not in his own. On O. G.’s orders the capture of Stutzer was never put into writing. No one outside the original circle of knowledge was ever briefed. Nothing about it was recorded, nothing remembered. No one but Patchen ever discussed the episode with Christopher, and Patchen himself spoke about it only once. This conversation took place as the two friends walked once again across the campus of Georgetown University. They had dined on limp pasta in a bad Sicilian restaurant that Patchen liked because it was always nearly empty. The night was damp, mist rising from the Potomac. Patchen was recovering, as he often was, from a lung infection. Every few steps he coughed, one sharp dry bark after another, and the paroxysm stopped him in his tracks. The Doberman sniffed his coat sympathetically and licked his hand.

“O. G. ordered me to make no file and to keep knowledge of the operation strictly quarantined—his word,” Patchen said to Christopher. “On our side of the fence, only he and you and Wolkowicz and I know what happened and only you know everything—except of course for the most intriguing things, namely what happened while you were unconscious and what happened to Stutzer. Apparently O. G. wants to preserve the ambiguity.”