Christopher's Ghosts by Charles McCarry Read Free Book Online

and Rima depicted Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem on a donkey. Its rich colors glowed in the bright light of the sinking sun. An old bald vestryman lighted candles. Worshippers began to arrive, grandmothers mostly. Some of them prayed while they waited for the service to begin. The church bell rang. The organ played soft music. Though he was not especially musical, Paul recognized many of the pieces. He had heard his mother play them all his life. The effect was peaceful, affirmative, a tidy little compliment to the Almighty. It made Paul feel at one with the strangers around him. The throaty emotion he experienced was not so very different from the one that Rima evoked in him.
    Rima was whispering now, directly into his ear. She held his hand in her own hands. Paul found the warmth of her breath on his skin and the heat of her hands on his flesh almost unbearably arousing. Having such feelings in church made the experience more intense. Rima’s scent changed, too, as she whispered. They were in the last pew. No one could see them except the vestryman, who gave them a long look, then disappeared, carrying the staff with which he had lighted the candles. The organist changed composers. Paul recognized the melody, unmistakable even to a heathen, of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”
    “Paul,” Rima whispered through the music, “I know they are going to kill me. They’ll invade another country soon and close the Reich to foreigners and do whatever they like. That’s the intention. It cannot be otherwise. And I can’t bear the thought of dying before I have known love—everything about it. Everything .”
    Paul did not know what to say.
    Rima did. She said, “Will you please be my love before it’s too late? Please.”
    Paul replied, “I already am.”

TWO
     1 
    Paul and Rima could promise each other love, but the practicalities were another matter. Where would they meet? How would they communicate? How would they find privacy? How could they keep their secret? These are questions for all clandestine lovers. For Paul and Rima, they were questions of life and death. Everyone in Berlin was an informer—housewives in an ice cream parlor, the street car conductor, someone you passed on a stairway, your closest friend, your teacher. Their love was a danger to Rima’s father, to Paul’s parents, to themselves. By falling in love, these children had become fugitives. There was no safety for them. Rima knew in her bones—she had just said so—that she would be lucky to be alive at age eighteen, and Paul knew that she was right. The machine—she imagined the secret police apparatus as an enormous clanking tank that obliterated everything in its path—could take her long before that. Her father could disappear at any moment. If that happened, she would become a ward of the government and would herself vanish. No one would ask where she had gone or what had happened to her. She would cease to exist in the mind of any living person.
    The same could happen to Paul, no matter what kind of passport he carried. The United States of America was not going to declare war on Germany over a missing boy. So far the secret police had taken no official notice of his scuffle with the Youth, but by defending himself from the power of the dictatorship he had committed a serious crime.Stutzer knew every detail. Paul had given him what he needed to blackmail his parents, to make them confess to their all-too-real crimes against the Reich. The secret police knew all about the Mahican and its nighttime sails. The Christophers knew that they knew. The secret police were attacking Paul’s mother because they thought the woman was the weak link. They wanted something from her. They thought that Lori would break, that she would do anything to save her son. Even though she was the strongest of the three of them, Paul knew that they were right.
    At supper that evening, the menu was normal—an omelet with mushrooms, ham, bread, cheese, apples,