Authors: Charles McCarry
The Dandy handed Hubbard the passports, slapping them into his palm. “Do not travel abroad again without reporting first to the police, and without passing through formalities at your
destination,” he said. “Failure to do so is a serious breach of German law.”
Hubbard put a warning hand on Lori’s rigid back. The Dandy made a gesture and his men scrambled into the launch, holding it against the fenders while he climbed down the ladder. Holding on
to the ladder with his kid gloves, he stared, expressionless, at Lori’s breasts. Triumph, a pinprick of expression, came and went in his pale eyes. He knew all the Christophers’
secrets, he seemed to be saying, even the look of Lori’s flesh under her clothes; and he wanted them to know that he knew everything. At last, the Dandy smiled.
— 11 —
In the library at Berwick, Paulus listened to Lori’s account of the Gestapo search of
Mahican
.
“The time has come to give up these night sails,” he said.
“Suppose the Dandy had caught us with
Rothchild
hidden below,” Lori said. “What a joke—to be tried for treason or whatever they try you for because you smuggled
something like Rothchild out of Germany.”
“Next time you will be caught. They know what you’re doing. If you go on, Lori, you’ll only lead the Gestapo to the people you want to save. They’ll disappear one
night.”
“They’re going to disappear in any case.”
“You’ll disappear with them. Paul is an accomplice. You’d better realize that no one has immunity from these people.”
“No immunity from the Dandy?”
“No,” Paulus said, holding Lori’s eyes. “No immunity. You’re behaving very stupidly. Like your father.”
“Like my father?” Lori cried. “Stupid? Explain, Paulus.”
“He too laughed at the wrong people, at the wrong moment. Because the people who killed him were not soldiers, he thought they weren’t dangerous. Because this man you call the Dandy
isn’t the sort you’re used to seeing in a uniform, you think
he’s
not dangerous. He’ll kill you for the same reason the mob killed your father, because you look as
you do and because your voice sounds as it does. If you don’t realize that, then you are very stupid indeed. You’re unfit for politics, Lori. Everyone in this family has always been
unfit for politics.”
Lori turned away and walked to the window.
“Politics? I don’t care what they believe in,” she said. “It’s the stupidity I hate. It
must
be opposed, Paulus. My son won’t grow up in a country of
the stupid, hearing people say that Jews smear themselves with goose grease and sew themselves up in their underwear for the winter. I won’t have it.”
They left Rügen that night and, after two hours of packing in Berlin, boarded the Paris express with two bags apiece. Hubbard rolled Zaentz’s drawing of Lori into a
tube and carried it in his hand. It was important not to look overburdened, like refugees.
After that, everything happened very quickly. At the frontier, an officer of the Gestapo entered their compartment. Like the Dandy, he was absorbed in the stamps in the Christophers’
passports. He read out their names.
“Two American citizens, one German citizen, father, mother, and son,” he said.
“That is correct.”
“You will come with me.”
As they followed, the man from the Gestapo strode over the station platform, the mills of the Saarland filled the evening sky with flame and smoke. The night air smelled like scorched wool.
“They have lower standards of dress down here,’ Lori said, nodding at the wrinkles in the back of the Gestapo man’s ill-fitting jacket.
There was only one chair in the policeman’s office. He sat in it and studied the passports for several moments.
“You’re going into France. Why?” he asked at last.
“For a holiday.”
“What sort of holiday? You will walk, swim, what?”
“Some of everything, no doubt.”
Hubbard did the talking. He held Lori’s arm firmly, to keep her quiet.
“Also sailing?”
The Gestapo man’s head snapped back as he spoke these words, as if he expected to detect a look of guilt on Hubbard’s face. Hubbard gave him his genial smile.
An assistant came in, carrying the tube containing Zaentz’s drawing of Lori. The Gestapo man opened it.
“That is personal property,” Lori said.
“Yes?”
With great sarcasm, the Gestapo man tapped the end of the tube on the desk and removed the drawing. He unrolled it and held it at arm’s length.
“Why are you attempting to smuggle this out of Germany?” he asked.
“One does not smuggle a work of art,” Lori said.
“A work of
art?
”
His contemptuous eyes ran up and down Lori’s body, comparing her to the pregnant smiling girl in the drawing.
He opened the two American passports and stamped them; then he wrote at length on the stamped pages, signed with a flourish, and placed another, smaller stamp beneath his signature. He handed
the two American passports to Hubbard.
“Kindly read the entries I have made.”
Hubbard found the pages and read what the Gestapo man had written there.
“This says that my son and I are expelled from Germany. For what reason?”
“It is not necessary to state the reason.”
Lori stirred. Hubbard could feel the anger in her. Paulus was right—she was stupid about danger. There was great danger here. He tightened his grip on her arm.
“When may we reenter Germany?”
The Gestapo man did not respond; his business with Hubbard was over. He must have rung a concealed bell. Four uniformed men, ordinary frontier police, had already come into the room. It was a
hot night; the odor of sweat-stained wool was very strong.
“You will leave now,” the Gestapo man said. “These men will escort you to the train.”
Lori held out her hand. “My passport, please.”
The Gestapo man did not look at Lori. Her passport lay on the desk, between his hands.
“This woman will remain in Germany,” he said. “You have one minute to make your good-byes.”
“What do you mean,
remain in Germany?
” Hubbard said.
“You’re wasting your one minute,” the Gestapo man said.
“Go, Hubbard,” Lori said.
“I demand to speak to the American consul,” Hubbard said.
“The American authorities will be informed of your expulsion. Now you must leave Germany.”
“Without my wife?”
“Your wife is a German citizen. She may not leave Germany at this time.”
“Go,” Lori said.
“No,” Hubbard said in English. “Paul, kiss your mother. Get on the train. As soon as you cross the frontier, send telegrams to the American consuls in Saarbrücken and
Berlin, to Paulus, and to Elliott. Here.”
Hubbard handed Paul his wallet, full of Reichsmarks worth four to the dollar. In Germany, the currency was normal again.
Lori kissed Paul. “Remember everything,” she said. “Go.”
Paul hesitated. In English his mother said, “Don’t say good-bye. Don’t obey them in anything.”
“Now,” Hubbard said to the Gestapo man, “I demand to see your superior officer.”
The Gestapo man’s hands were flat on the desk. He lifted his right index finger, the smallest possible gesture. One of the policemen hit Hubbard on the right kidney with his baton. Another
looped a chain around Hubbard’s thumb and twisted. A third seized him by the arm and twisted it to his shoulder blades. The last policeman stood, legs spread, baton held across his thighs,
and nodded to Paul.
Lori’s eyes were on him. She spoke English again. “Control your face,” she said. “They mustn’t make you feel anything.”
The policemen walked Hubbard, doubled over in pain, and Paul, who stood upright, out of the room.
Paul turned, to look for a last time at Lori. Nothing showed on her face, not even love for him and Hubbard. She shook her head, forbidding him again to say good-bye, forbidding him to let these
thugs see that they had touched his emotions.
“Mutti,” he said, unable to help himself.
“No good-byes,” Lori said. But at the last second she, too, weakened, and spoke his name.
The fourth policeman struck Paul on the elbow with his baton. When he neither moved nor flinched, he hit him on the other elbow, and because he was blinded by pain, Paul did not see his mother
again.
In later years, when he tried to remember every detail of this moment, he was always surprised that everything had been so ordinary. Apart from the blows, there was practically nothing to
remember except that his mother, knowing that she would never see him again, knowing that she was almost surely going to her death, had not been afraid. She had never been afraid.
— 12 —
On Friday, September 1, 1939, the day that Paul and Hubbard Christopher left Germany, the Wehrmacht invaded Poland. Two days later, France declared war on Germany.
Communications between the two countries ceased.
They went to Strasbourg, because there was an American consulate there. There were troops everywhere, dark-jawed, unkempt, unsmiling. Unlike the pink-faced German soldiery, who never seemed
happier than when they were in ranks, the French did not sing as they marched. Nothing Paul had heard at school about French military glory, or at Berwick on the same subject, had prepared him for
these files of sallow, resentful men tramping through the streets of Strasbourg toward the Rhine.
Fourteen days passed before a message arrived from Paulus. In all that time, Hubbard did not speak a word except during his daily visits to the post office and the consulate. At last the consul
handed Hubbard Paulus’s telegram, transmitted from the American embassy in Berlin:
No word from Lori since your departure. Am making inquiries through army channels
,
unfruitfully so
far. Imprisonment possible. Under no circumstances enter Germany yourself. Remaining in France will intensify suspicion. Strongly advise return to the United States in neutral ship. All messages
hereafter will be sent in care of your cousin.
A regiment of infantry marched past the consulate as Hubbard read Paulus’s message, and the sound of thudding feet came through the open window.
“This whole episode may not last very long,” the consul said. “France
is
stronger than Germany. Remember the Maginot Line. They have the Jerries outnumbered five to one
on the western front, and of course Britain is in it too.” He smiled at Hubbard. “The Polish Army is supposed to be very brave,” he said.
But the French, with more than one hundred divisions facing only twenty-three German divisions in the west, did not attack. Warsaw fell on September 28.
The next day, Paulus sent another message through the American consul:
No word. No trace. Your presence in an enemy country is a danger to your wife and child. Go to America at once
.
— 13 —
On the voyage across the Atlantic, Hubbard stopped speaking even to Paul. Paul sat in silence with him in the cabin and walked silently by his side as he circled the deck,
making as many as a hundred circuits in the early morning before the other passengers were up. He had the eerie thought that, huge as Hubbard was, some even larger being, insane with anger, was
struggling to burst through his skin in a shower of blood.
Paul was absolutely certain that his mother was dead, perfectly sure that she had been tortured before she died. He remembered the look in the Dandy’s eyes as he stared at her breasts as
he climbed down
Mahican
’s ladder. The Gestapo man at the frontier, looking at Zaentz’s drawing, had had the same look. All his life, Paul had heard about his mother’s
beauty; he knew what beauty meant to men like the Dandy. For the first time in his life, he hid his feelings from Hubbard. He realized that he was, in some way that he could not control, obeying
his mother’s orders not to let others see his emotions. He dreamed about Lori constantly. In his dreams she drowned, she fell from great heights, she sailed like a kite among clouds. Each
time she died, he tried to say good-bye, and each time, she laid a finger on his lips. He woke up sobbing. Hubbard, who never slept, heard him, but he never spoke to him across the dark cabin.
In New York, Elliott Hubbard met them on the pier.
“What word from Paulus?” Hubbard asked, his first spoken words in more than a week.
“Nothing,” Elliott said. “I would have cabled the ship if he had sent any word at all. Wouldn’t Lori have gone straight to Paulus?”
“Yes,” Hubbard said.
Elliott took them to the house on Ninety-third Street that he had bought on his marriage. Alice had given birth to a son called Horace. “No surprises,” she said, dismissing the
experience. “He’s all Hubbard. How did
you
escape, Paul? Your mother must have amazing genes.” This was her only reference to Lori.
Alice chattered incessantly, describing the strange friends Elliott had brought to the Harbor that summer. “This was our summer for bizarre Englishmen,” she said. “They were
all rabidly anti-German. Good thing
you
weren’t there, Paul, as you’re half German; they would have run you through.” Hubbard listened to her, unsmiling, unspeaking.
In the library after dinner, Elliott poured brandy from a decanter and handed a glass to Hubbard. Hubbard took the glass, then put it down, untouched.
“Hubbard,” Elliott said, “what are you going to do?”
Hubbard responded in a strong voice, as if the answer to Elliott’s question was so obvious that it hadn’t needed asking.
“I’m going to find my wife,” Hubbard said.
“Where do you think she is?”
“In prison.”
“You think it’s possible to find her?”
“I don’t know.”
“And if you find her, do you think it’s possible to get her out of a country at war—especially if that country is Germany?”
“It’ll be very difficult.”
Hubbard was speaking in a toneless voice. There was no more expression on his face than in his voice.
Elliott picked up Hubbard’s brandy glass and gave it to him again. “Drink that,” he said. Obediently, Hubbard did so. Elliott took the glass out of his hand. “Now,”
Elliott said, “how do you plan to get into Germany?”