Christopher's Ghosts by Charles McCarry

three centuries ago when he marched through Pomerania during the Thirty Years War,” Hubbard said. He possessed the gift of enthusiasm. Every single thing in the world interested him, and despite his agnosticism, not a few things beyond it. At this point in the journey, Hubbard always made the same remark about Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. In fact, he had a familiar saying for nearly every crossroads. Paul smiled fondly, happy to hear the well-worn words. In the backseat, Lori, her auburn head resting against the red leather upholstery, did not open her eyes. She was pale, inert. She seemed to lack the energy to smile. Hubbard had been watching her face ever since they left Berlin. Now he stole another glance at her in the rear-view mirror. Her expression had not changedall morning long, nor had she smiled or spoken a word. When they stopped by a lake to picnic, she ate little—half an apple, a bite of cheese—and said less. Hubbard was unbothered by his wife’s withdrawal. Lori was entitled to her moods.
    After lunch Hubbard let Paul drive the Horch. Paul had been driving since he was twelve, and now that he was bigger he handled the machine almost as easily as Hubbard. He kept an eye on the mirror, checking to see if they were being followed. Hubbard noticed this.
    “On the lookout for the enemies of mankind?” he asked.
    “Yes.”
    “That’s always a good idea, but they have no need to follow us. They’re everywhere. All they have to do is sit in a window and watch us drive by, then phone the guy who’s sitting in the next window a few kilometers up the road. The minute we arrive in Rügen they’ll call Stutzer in Berlin.”
    In this flat country the roads, mostly unpaved, ran straight, and there was little traffic apart from farm horses hauling wagons. These were huge chunky animals. Hubbard identified them by breed—Rhenish, Westphalian, Schleswig-Holstein. He told his son, not for the first time, that eight million horses belonging to the German army had been killed in battle in the 1914-18 war.
    “The astonishing thing,” he said, “is that two and a half million wounded horses were treated at the front in German veterinary hospitals and returned to duty.”
    Hubbard had gotten this information from Paulus, the old lancer. Today’s Wehrmacht boasted of its modernity and its mechanization, Paulus said, but if there was another war, horses would drag guns and ammunition and rations into battle just as they had always done and be blown to smithereens by enemy shells, exactly as before. They would die in even greater numbers, unimaginable as it seemed that more living things, human and animal, could be possibly killed in a new war than were slaughtered in the last one.
    A dozen or so interesting facts later, the family arrived on the island. Hubbard had grown up among mountains and he had always thought that Rügen needed a more dramatic landscape. Granted, the island itselfwas a prominence, with chalk cliffs rising hundreds of feet above the leaden Baltic. But the place needed some reworking, nothing major, but why not add a knob or two, as in a landscape by Giotto, to put it in perspective? Instead of sheltering in its beech groves, Paulus’s house, Schloss Berwick, should stand on a hill, with lines of sight from its windows taking in all the rest of the island and the panorama of the sea. True, the wind would be an inconvenience, but wouldn’t it be wonderful to hear it moaning and howling in the night and see ships and sails and whitecaps?
    Paul steered the Horch up the drive “Look, darling, it’s just the same,” said Hubbard over his shoulder. Lori gave him her first faint smile of the day. It was mid-afternoon. Among the pale gray beeches with their pale green foliage, Schloss Berwick floated in watery light, feeble sun twinkling in its window glass. “On the first day I saw this house and this grove, coming down the path from the cliffs, I thought it was the most romantic sight I had ever