Christopher's Ghosts

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Authors: Charles McCarry
Tags: Suspense, Mystery, FIC006000, FIC031000, FIC037000
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two of you. Today might have been a rehearsal. It certainly was a message. Your son, alone in their hands—imagine. They’d really be in the driver’s seat.”
    Paul said, “Excuse me, but do I have anything to say about this?”
    “Of course you do, Paul,” O. G. said.
    “I won’t go anywhere without my mother and father.”
    “Then you should discuss the matter with them,” O. G. said. “You have until the fourth of July to talk it over, assuming the secret police don’t move sooner. Nobody’s going to abandon your parents. I couldn’t let that happen. I’ve made promises to the gods that I’d never let it happen. The idea is to get each of you out by the best available means. Then you can all get together at the Harbor and let the rest of the world go by.”
    “How will you get them out after I’m gone if you’re in America, too?”
    “The embassy won’t be closed while I’m away,” O. G. said. “Others can execute the plan. The plan is, first you, then them. Those fellows on Prinz-Albrechtstrasse will be looking for a party of three, so with any luck they’ll be looking the other way at the vital moment.”
    “We hope,” said Hubbard.
    “Can’t travel far in this world without hope,” O. G. said.
    Or with it , Paul thought. He looked into his mother’s eyes and saw that she agreed.
     4 
    Lori went riding in the Tiergarten almost every day. She came back, most days, in time for lunch. Rima saw their opportunity when Paul told her about his family’s morning routine—Lori absent, Hubbard present in physical form but so completely elsewhere mentally that he might as well have been underwater. After their moments in thedarkness of the park they were desperate to be together. But they had no privacy and none seemed possible. They met as if by accident in shops and museums, but never in a place where they could touch.
    Finally they tried the obvious—a cinema. But when they kissed, a watchful customer reported them to the management. They were ejected. The head usher—he wore a badge of office on his uniform—demanded their names and addresses so that their misconduct could be reported to the authorities. They told him nothing, but learned a lesson. Even if the secret police had not been watching Paul, even if Rima had not been the daughter of a Jew who had no rights, it would have been next to impossible for them to be together. The entire adult world was a vast secret police force charged with keeping an eye on young people. They met sometimes at night when walking the dogs, but this was furtive. It made them feel guilty. It was dangerous for Rima to be alone in a park, alone on darkened streets.
    On the streetcar, Rima said, “Then you’re alone in the morning?”
    “My father is home.”
    “But oblivious. Do you have a back door?”
    Paul said, “Yes. In the kitchen.”
    “This door locks with a key?”
    “With a bolt on the inside.”
    “There’s a back stairway? You take the dog for its walks by the stairway?”
    Paul nodded.
    “So if someone forgot to bolt this bolt, on a typical morning a burglar could come up the stairs, sneak inside and tiptoe through the house and no one would be the wiser?”
    Rima explained the plan. She too was free and unobserved in the early morning. Her father slept until noon—in fact he slept beyond noon. He slept whenever he was alone. This would have been an unimaginable weakness had he still been a German. But he was not. The theft of her father’s identity and property and career, the shock of suddenly ceasing to be the man he had striven all his life to be, had driven him into a stupor.
    “It’s as if he’s already in the afterworld,” Rima said. “The world ofthe living is still visible to him. He looks out the window and sees people going about their business. Every now and then he sees someone he knows on the street, but they don’t see him or hear him. If they do, if they used to be his friends, they don’t know him. He’s a

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