Ginger gains a secret contact channel at Pablo’s funeral

At Pablo Jackson’s January 11 memorial service in Boston, Massachusetts, Ginger Weiss secures a cautious line of communication with Alexander Christophson, the former intelligence chief who had warned Pablo about the danger of helping her. Their conversation clarifies why Pablo accepted that danger and turns Ginger’s grief into a guarded means of continuing alone: Christophson will not investigate, but he gives her a way to call on his experience without contacting him directly.

The Funeral and Ginger’s Purpose

The memorial service began at eleven o’clock in a nondenominational chapel on the cemetery grounds, five days after Pablo’s murder. The coroner and police pathologists had not finished with his body until Thursday, delaying the funeral. After the final eulogy, mourners gathered at the grave, where snow had been cleared around the plot but the prepared space could not hold everyone. Three hundred people came to pay their respects, among them the rich and poor, the famous and unknown, Boston socialites, and magicians. Some stood in snow deeper than their boots; others watched from the memorial park’s paths.

Ginger stood in the first circle with Rita Hannaby. Since Monday, she had eaten little and slept poorly, and she arrived pale, nervous, and exhausted. Rita and George Hannaby had argued against her attending because they feared the emotional strain might trigger one of her fugue episodes. The police, by contrast, encouraged her to come in the hope that she might recognize Pablo’s killer. Ginger knew the killer was not an ordinary burglar and would not risk appearing at the cemetery. To protect the truth about her situation, she had allowed the police to believe that she had walked in on a conventional burglary; she did not expect them to identify the person who had killed Pablo.

She wept during the eulogies but kept control of herself. Her determination not to turn the solemn service into a spectacle was practical as well as personal: she had come with a second purpose that required her to remain composed. She expected Alexander Christophson, Pablo’s old friend, to attend. On Christmas Day, Pablo had turned to him for advice about Ginger’s problems, and Christophson had told Pablo about the Azrael Block. Ginger wanted to ask what Christophson understood about the danger surrounding that attempt to recover her memories.

The Warning Pablo Had Kept Secret

Ginger recognized Christophson in the chapel from his years in public life. Tall, thin, white-haired, and unmistakable, he stood on the opposite side of Pablo’s draped casket. After the prayer, mourners broke into small groups, while Christophson moved away through the headstones toward the parking lot. Ginger told Rita she had to speak with him and caught up with him beneath a large oak whose branches cast jagged shadows across the snow.

When Ginger identified herself, Christophson’s piercing gray eyes widened. He initially tried to end the conversation, saying he could not help her. Ginger asked him to wait and raised the possibility that he blamed her for Pablo’s death. Christophson answered that Pablo had known the risks and had chosen to accept them. Ginger’s question was more specific: had Pablo understood those risks? Christophson said that he had warned him himself.

The warning concerned the effort to tamper with Ginger’s memory. Christophson did not know who had done it or what lay behind it, but he believed that the scale of the memory alteration meant Ginger must have seen something of tremendous importance. He had warned Pablo that the people who brainwashed her were no amateurs and might target not only Ginger but Pablo if they discovered that the two were trying to penetrate the Azrael Block. Pablo had told Ginger about their conversation but not about this warning. Her discovery changes the meaning of his help: he had not acted in ignorance of the danger, and his silence had kept its cost from her.

Christophson reassured Ginger that she was not responsible for what happened. He explained that Pablo had accepted the risk as captain of his own fate, then told her that he was beginning to understand why Pablo had taken those risks for her. Ginger accepted his reassurance but still blamed herself. As Christophson comforted her, she began to feel that her guilt might eventually recede even if her grief remained. She also remembered her father Jacob’s belief that giving and receiving mercy creates an unbreakable bond. Their exchange shifts from his absolving her to her understanding his reluctance to help; the funeral conversation becomes a mutual effort to relieve blame rather than a simple request for intelligence.

Christophson’s Limits and the Secret Channel

Christophson said he had been out of the intelligence business for almost a decade and no longer had contacts. He could not identify who was behind Ginger’s memory block or explain why it had been imposed. He suggested going to the police, but Ginger refused. She did not trust authorities and thought the police too slow for a problem she considered urgent. The tapes Pablo had made during their sessions were missing when she returned to his apartment with the police, and she had concealed both the tapes and the truth about her fugue episodes from them. She had presented herself as Pablo’s friend who had stopped for lunch and encountered a burglar. Nor would she seek another hypnotist: she did not want further innocent people endangered.

At first Christophson offered no alternative. Then he explained why he was unwilling to take a direct role. He was seventy-six, had Parkinson’s disease, a bad heart, and high blood pressure, and feared leaving his wife alone. His former service in war, diplomacy, the CIA, and the Senate had involved decisions that put him in danger, but he felt that age had changed his relation to risk. He admitted that his hesitation was not simply a matter of valuing life: he was increasingly afraid of death. He also wondered whether his past actions would have consequences after death, having once lacked belief in God or an afterlife. These personal disclosures made his caution more than a professional calculation; he was confronting both the danger Ginger faced and the limits imposed by his own vulnerability.

Christophson then wrote on a notepad and passed Ginger the slip. He had turned his back to the remaining mourners before taking out the paper, so no one could see what he was doing. The number belonged to an antique store in Greenwich, Connecticut, owned by his younger brother, Philip. Ginger could not call Christophson directly because the wrong people might have seen them speaking and his telephone might be tapped. He would not publicly associate himself with her or pursue an investigation, but his years of experience might help if she encountered a situation she could not understand or manage.

The procedure was deliberately indirect. Ginger was to call Philip and leave her number. Philip would call Christophson at home and use a prearranged codeword; Christophson would then go to a pay phone, return Philip’s call, obtain Ginger’s number, and contact her as quickly as possible. He described what he was willing to provide as experience, specifically the kind accumulated in his former work. Ginger told him that this was more than enough. He wished her luck and walked away across the frozen snow.

Consequences and Significance

The contact arrangement does not give Ginger an investigator, an official channel, or an immediate answer about the people who altered her memory. It gives her a carefully bounded source of advice while preserving Christophson’s distance from her case. The antique-store number, the codeword, and the pay-phone return call translate his willingness to help into a covert procedure designed around surveillance and mistrust.

The exchange also establishes what Pablo’s risk meant to the people he left behind. Christophson’s warning confirms that Pablo knew the attempt to break through the Azrael Block could bring danger to both of them, while his reassurance gives Ginger a way to understand that choice without treating Pablo’s death as her fault. She leaves the graveside with grief still present, no confidence in the police, and no direct route to solve her memory loss—but with a private channel through which Christophson’s experience may still reach her.