Free Christopher's Ghosts by Charles McCarry

the scent of sweated horses. She walked along the bridle path, Blümchen barking all the while. The dog was tremendouslyexcited. Rima wondered if it was the smell of the horses. What a treat for Blümchen’s Pomeranian senses, Rima thought. It must be the equivalent of a person, born like herself in the twentieth century, being dragged across a savannah and suddenly smelling a herd of mastodons.
    “Suppose dinosaurs were covered with feathers, like birds,” she said to Paul later on, when they were together. “Suppose they sang like birds when they woke in the morning. Imagine the sight of that, the sound.”
    In the moment itself, however, something broke this chain of thought. Standing at the curb was a woman whom she knew, though she had never met her. She knew at once that she was Paul’s mother. The woman, wearing jodhpurs and boots and a tweed hacking jacket, looked like him—the same face that Rima had thought was unlike anyone else’s, the same bottomless eyes, the same musician’s hands.
    The woman stood beside the open door of a black Daimler. An SS trooper in uniform held the door. Another sat at the wheel. A large beautiful Alsatian dog lay on the floor of the backseat at the feet of a man wearing burnished black riding boots. Blümchen barked frantically at the Alsatian. The woman, lovely but profoundly sad, looked for a brief moment into Rima’s eyes, as if she recognized her, too, and then got into the car.
    Rima was farther away from the Daimler than Paul had been when he had witnessed a similar scene a few days earlier, so she was able to see inside and recognize Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the entire secret police apparatus, as the man who lifted Lori’s hand, peeled off its glove, and kissed the palm.
     6 
    After dropping off Blümchen at Miss Wetzel’s back door and declining a cup of chocolate and a bun, Rima ran up the back stairs, pushed open the Christophers’ unlocked kitchen door, and slipped inside. Paul awaited her. They kissed. For long moments, all was silence. Then, in the middle of the kiss, Hubbard uttered a loud guffaw. Rima leaped in her skin.
    “I warned you,” Paul said. “He does that when he’s writing. But if we walked into his room he wouldn’t know we were there.”
    They were whispering as always. Paul led her through the reception rooms—strange misshapen sculptures, a grand piano with music open on the rack, bright upholstery, Persian carpets that looked very old. Expressionist paintings and drawings that looked like cartoons hung on every wall. A large studio drawing depicted a young nude, a girl not much older than Rima, who looked boldly at the artist and seemed to be in the very early stages of pregnancy. She was the woman who had gotten into Heydrich’s Daimler.
    “My mother when she was nineteen,” Paul said. “And me before I was born, I’m told. Does it shock you?”
    “No. It’s beautiful.” She went closer and read the artist’s signature. “Who is Zaentz?”
    “He was well-known in Berlin not so long ago. Most of these pictures were made by friends.”
    “But these friends no longer come here?”
    “No, they’ve all left Germany.”
    “So the Christophers are alone.”
    “Not quite,” Paul said, touching her.
    They walked down the hallway to Paul’s room. He had turned off the electric light and closed the curtains, so it was dark.
    “Can we have a lamp?” Rima asked. “I must be able to see you.”
    He switched on his reading lamp. The room, half in shadow, took form—shelves of books, stacks of magazines, record albums, photographs taken in America, in France, in the Alps, in Rügen, all showing Paul in the company of his parents and what Rima took to be other relations. The stuffed head of a wild boar hung over his desk.
    “What in the name of God is that?” she asked.
    Paul explained. Schloss Berwick, the house on the island of Rügen in which his mother’s Uncle Paulus and Aunt Hilde lived, stood in a grove of beech