Free Christopher's Ghosts by Charles McCarry Page A

trees. When Paul was twelve, his great-uncle had taken him on his first boar hunt. They rode out before dawn, hoping to catch the animals unawares as they fed on the beechnuts that had fallen to the ground. They found half a dozen pigs feasting on the nuts and, onPaulus’s command, charged them at the gallop through the morning mist, smooth gray tree trunks whizzing by. A boar charged Paul’s horse as he charged it. He killed it with a lucky thrust between the shoulder blades. Paulus dismounted, bled the trophy, and smeared Paul’s cheek with the blood of his first kill.
    “Charming,” Rima said. “And this is the lucky boar?”
    She inspected everything, then wound up the gramophone, chose a record, put it on the turntable, and lifted the needle onto the spinning wax record. This time the band was not Benny Goodman’s but Tommy Dorsey’s, playing “Getting Sentimental Over You.” They danced in stocking feet so as not to make Blümchen, whose play room was directly below, start barking.
    When the song ended, Rima took the pins from her hair and shook it out, then took Paul firmly by the hand and led him to the bed. Sex was not a mystery to him. His parents had always been frank with him and he had read descriptions of the act in novels and looked at the cartoons and photographs that were passed around at school. Rima, however, had technical knowledge. She had read her father’s medical books, and of course she knew her own body as no one else, not even Paul, ever could. She was the initiator, the guide. She was nimble in bed as in everything else. She had no shyness. She asked for what she wanted. She made rapturous noises that astonished Paul as much as the pleasure of the act itself, but not as much as the way in which the passionate love he already felt for this girl expanded within him until he felt nothing else, thought of nothing else, wanted nothing else, and finally was aware of nothing else. Rima trembled, she wept, she cried out. She amazed him.
    All morning they lay in bed, whispering. They completed Rima’s daydream by dancing, but in this perfect real world with no sheet wrapped around her body. She drew Paul back to the bed. They made love. They fell asleep, awoke, they made love again. They were enclosed in an atmosphere of their own mingled scent, each other’s skin, each other’s senses.
    “Nothing like this will ever happen to us again,” Rima said.
    Had anyone but Rima uttered these words they would havesounded to Paul like a line from the movies, but he knew that what she said was true, that he would never make love again, no matter how far in the future, without remembering Rima. Whatever happened, this hour would haunt him for the rest of his life. He wept. Rima, dry-eyed now, smiled down at him. She said softly, “Oh, my love.”
    At noon precisely, Rima knocked on Miss Wetzel’s kitchen door and heard a volley of soprano barks on the other side. Miss Wetzel threw open the door. “See her little tail wag?” she said. “Blümchen is waiting for you. Already she likes you.”
    Rima followed the same route to the Tiergarten as before, and as before, Blümchen scolded every living thing she encountered. Rima did not try to stop her. She was wrapped in contentment. Her heart was peaceful, she had never been so happy, she saw no end to this overwhelming bliss as long as she and Paul could be together. To feel like this every day—imagine! She had been warned by women and by books that the first experience for a girl was painful, ugly, bloody and brutal. They had lied.
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    Just as she reached the park, at eleven minutes after noon, Rima was arrested. She was standing on the sidewalk near the bridle path, more or less on the spot where she had observed Lori getting into the gleaming Daimler earlier in the day. Blümchen attacked the Berlin policeman who took Rima into custody, yapping and nipping at his boots and wrapping her leash around his ankles. The portly cop lifted his feet as