Christopher's Ghosts by Charles McCarry Page A

seen,” said Hubbard. He reached behind him with his long arm and took Lori by the hand. “And then, Paul, I saw your mother and knew what romance really was,” he said. Lori lifted Hubbard’s large hairy hand to her lips and kissed it. Watching in the mirror, Paul remembered her own gloved hand being lifted and kissed by a different man in the back seat of a Daimler.
    Paulus and Hilde came out of the house. Hilde carried a bouquet she had picked from her garden for their arrival.
    “So, Paul,” said Paulus, eyeing the boy’s half-healed injuries. “You’ve been wounded. Did you make the rascal pay?”
    Paul knew that no reply was needed. He leaped from the car, shook his great uncle’s hand and bowed like a Prussian, a silent click of the heels, a snap of the head. No hugging for Paulus.
    “You should see the other fellows—seven of them, no less,” Hubbard said. He offered no details, Paulus asked for none.
    “Favorable odds,” Paulus said. “Strike first, strike hard. That’s something to write on your shield, as long as the enemy understands it’s a warning, not friendly advice.”
    It was four in the afternoon. The sky was bright and at this latitude would remain so well into the evening. Lori went immediately to herbedroom and shut the door. Hubbard and Paulus went for a walk along the cliffs. Paul was not invited, so he supposed they were going to decide his fate between them. He carried the bags upstairs, then drank the cup of chocolate and ate the cakes that Hilde offered him. From the kitchen window he saw suits and overcoats and Turkish carpets airing in the backyard on taut wire clotheslines. Like the Christophers, Hilde and Paulus had no live-in servants, but two ruddy sisters with Popeye arms came once a week to clean the house. This was their day and Paul could hear them upstairs, shouting to each other in the hard-edged local dialect he had learned from them. Paul had known these women, Lena and Philippina, all his life. They had cared for him when he was an infant. Their cousin had been the midwife who delivered him. Their chief interest in life was village gossip, not national politics. However, this was the new Germany and he wondered what gossip about the family they passed on to the police when their day’s work was done.
    Certainly they would be expected to report. “Oh, Paul, I forgot,” Hilde said. “There was a phone call for you.” She pinched his cheek. “So grown up now, receiving phone calls from young ladies. Bold young ladies. From Berlin!” Hilde had to search for the slip of paper on which she had scribbled the number. She found it at last in her sewing basket, pinned to a scrap of cloth. “She gave no name,” Hilde said. “She spoke proper German, which was a surprise considering that she seems to have had no upbringing. Did you give her this number?”
    “I gave it to no one, Aunt Hilde.”
    “Then I wonder how she got it. Our last names are not the same. How could she know whose number to ask for?”
    Paul said he could not imagine. But he could, and the sour taste of suspicion rose in his throat. Paul asked permission to use the telephone. Hilde granted it, but by the look on her face it was plain that she did not approve of this business of young girls calling her great-nephew, and cared even less for what such a breach of modesty implied. Hilde did not like supernumerary females. Paulus had always had girls hanging on him, so had his brothers, especially Lori’s father. So had Hilde’s sons, all of them so good-looking but all of them dead now. Was Paul going to be another one?
    Even though the doctor was a Jew, the Kaltenbachs still had a telephone. It was not for personal use. The authorities had made that clear. It was for use in connection with Dr. Kaltenbach’s medical practice, and only that. If all of his patients were Jews, did this mean he could not speak to Aryans on the telephone? Dr. Kaltenbach did not know; this had not been explained to him.