The Last Supper

by Charles McCarry

  The Dandy poured cream into his cup, put down the pitcher, and lifted the coffee to his lips in a gloved hand. Heinz darted to the Dandy’s table, seized the tiny pitcher, and tossed off the cream. The Dandy watched him drink. Then, holding his cup in one hand and the saucer in the other, he stood up in his Gestapo costume and swung back his right leg in its polished boot. As he took a sip of coffee, he drove the toe of his boot into Heinz’s head. It made a sound like two blocks of wood being struck together.

  The whole café had been watching this comedy. The sound of the Dandy’s boot striking Heinz’s skull extinguished every smile. As if on a signal, everyone except Lori and Paul stared into space, as if neither the Gestapo man nor his victim existed.

  Lori put down her own coffee cup, rose to her feet, and strode to the fallen drunk. Blood ran from Heinz’s nose and mouth. Lori knelt beside him and felt for his pulse.

  “Napkin,” she said.

  The waiter, standing behind Lori, put a napkin into her hand. Lori wiped Heinz’s face and turned him on his side so that he would not strangle on the blood that was filling his mouth. Paul took off his jacket and covered him.

  The Dandy took a new document out of his briefcase and read from it, absorbed, as he sipped his coffee.

  Lori moved Heinz’s slack jaw. “Fractured,” she said. “Perhaps the skull also. Put him in the back of the car.”

  Paul and the waiter carried Heinz to the car. Blood dripped from Heinz’s mouth, leaving a spotty trail on the cobbles. The Dandy took no interest in these activities. He went on reading his documents and sipping coffee.

  “Stutzer,” Lori said.

  The Dandy lifted his eyes momentarily at the sound of his name, but did not respond. He turned a page, lifted a gloved finger, and with eyes fixed to the next page, took another sip of coffee.

  “Stand up,” Lori said, in her clear voice.

  The Dandy stood up. He was perhaps twenty-five, a sallow man with soft pink lips and a triangular face. He put a hand, the hand of an equal, on Lori’s sleeve. He began to smile. After all, what had he done to Heinz that any German officer would not have done to a commoner who had insulted him and his class?

  Lori did not bother to remove the Dandy’s hand from her sleeve. She raised her own gloved hand and struck the Gestapo chief of Rügen on the face, a tremendous blow with the back of her fist, like a saber cut. The Dandy’s black fedora flew off his head and scaled across the room, spilling a cup of coffee on another table.

  Lori turned on her heel, got into the car, and took the wheel. “Sit in back with that man, Paul,” she said. “Hold his head in your lap. Mind he doesn’t choke.”

  As Lori turned the car around, reversing in one precise arc, changing gears and going forward in another, the Dandy, still hatless, was standing where she had left him. The wind lifted a lock of his brilliantined hair so that it stood up like a feather.

  Twenty people sat in the café, but Paul’s eyes were the only ones looking at Stutzer the Dandy.

  Thereafter, nobody on the island of Rügen would look Lori or any of her family in the face. The waiters at the café would bring coffee, the butcher would cut meat, the baker would deliver bread, they would all say thank you and run to open the door of their shops, but they did all this with averted eyes.

  According to the doctor who treated him, Heinz, the drunk, recovered. But it was decided by the medical authorities that he required institutional care. He disappeared.

  — 4 —

  This happened in 1936, the summer that Paul was twelve. One night, toward the end of the summer, Paul, unable to sleep, looked out his window and saw a boat standing offshore. She was signaling with a light. Then she sailed around the point. Paul put on his clothes and went outside, thinking that he could run through the beech forest and see the boat again. It would be something to tell his parents the next day.

  It was a moonless night and the wood was very dark, but Paul knew the way perfectly. In part, he was guided by a sense of smell: approaching the Borg, he could scent the cold mist rising from its dark surface.

  Then, to his surprise, he heard a man and a woman speaking in low tones. They were standing among the stones of the old temple. Drawing closer, Paul recognized his mother’s voice. He expected to hear Hubbard’s voice next, as his parents were always together, but the man with Lori spoke in a tenor, not in Hubbard’s deep baritone, and he had white hair, visible as a patch of movement in the darkness. Paul realized that the man with Lori was Zaentz, the artist who had made the nude drawing of Lori that hung in their sitting room in Berlin. Paul wondered what he was doing in Rügen: the Christophers’ Berlin friends never came to the island.

  “We must climb down the cliff in the dark,” Lori’s voice said. “It’s not difficult. The cliff is white, so you’ll be able to see, and there are plenty of places to hold on.”

  As Paul had seen her do dozens of times before, Lori led the way to the cliff, swung over, and clambered to the bottom. Zaentz, after giving a short, nervous laugh, went over the edge, too. Paul followed them down. Below him, he could hear the brisk sound of his mother’s boots, kicking into the brittle face of the cliff, and Zaentz’s heavy breathing. From time to time, Lori spoke to Zaentz, telling him where to put his feet.

  The grown-ups did not hear or see Paul; he had learned about stealth from Hubbard’s tales of Mahican woodcraft. On the beach, Lori and Zaentz took off their clothes and hid them in a crevice in the chalk. They were wearing bathing suits. From the boat that Paul had seen from his window, a light flashed once, from a point about a half-mile off the headland. Paul realized that the boat was Mahican.

  As soon as she saw the light, Lori plunged into the sea and started to swim with her strong crawl toward the light, which blinked regularly on a count of ten. Zaentz, swimming less well, followed her, his white hair gleaming.

  Paul took off his clothes and hid them in the crevice with the others’. Then he, too, began to swim for the boat, lifting his head every twenty strokes to locate the light. A strong tide was running out, and he moved swiftly with the frigid water. As he got farther from shore, the swell grew higher, so that sometimes he had to wait to be carried to a crest before he could see the light flashing from Mahican; rolling onto his back to rest, he could see the chalk cliffs, phosphorescent in the black night, far behind him.

  Mahican’s white hull was only ten feet away when Paul saw it at last. He gripped the rudder and, hidden in the darkness, looked upward at his father, who was holding Lori’s hand as she climbed up the ladder. She was shuddering with cold. Hubbard threw a blanket around her and wrapped her in his long arms.

  Zaentz, water pouring from his stout body, heaved himself aboard. Hubbard reached out and shook hands with him. Lori’s head was pillowed against her husband’s chest. Paul swam silently to the ladder and, still undetected, climbed aboard too. For a long moment, he stood close to his parents, naked, wet, and shivering.

  Suddenly, as if she felt his presence, Lori’s eyes opened. She wore an expression that Paul had never before seen on her face: for the first time in his life, his mother was not glad to see him. There was fear in her eyes. It lasted only a moment. Then, as if he were standing by her bedside and she had just awakened, Lori smiled and said, “Paul. I didn’t know you were joining us.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “For a sail with Zaentz,” Lori said. She felt his skin. “You’re freezing. Go below and get dry. Put on warm clothes from the locker.”

  When Paul came on deck again, Mahican was running on the tide without lights, sailing due west. Paul knew then that their destination was Falster. He joined his parents in the cockpit. Hubbard gave him the tiller. There was very little wind. In the still night their woolen clothes smelled of lanolin. Lori opened the wicker picnic basket and poured a hot drink from a thermos. It was coffee instead of the usual chocolate, as Paul had not been expected. When Paul had finished his drink, Lori sent him below with food and a hot drink for Zaentz. He sat on a bunk, a
blanket wrapped around his bare torso. The hair on his chest and shoulders was white, too, and as thick as his spade beard.

  “You’re quite a swimmer,” Zaentz said, sipping coffee and eating bread and sausage. “Weren’t you afraid, swimming out to the boat?”

  The question surprised Paul. He had known that he could swim to the boat. He had also known that, if he missed the boat, he would never be found. “Control, control,” Paulus was always saying. “Do only what you know you can do. When you’re afraid, it’s because you have gone beyond your capabilities.” Swimming to the boat, Paul had had the flashing light and the cliffs to guide him, and he swam as naturally as he walked. Even at the age of twelve, Paul knew that it was useless to explain oneself. He had never been afraid. He smiled at Zaentz. The artist, who had always liked him, pulled off Paul’s knitted cap and ruffled his hair.

  Mahican dropped anchor off Falster just as dawn was beginning to show. Zaentz came on deck for the first time since they had sailed from Rügen.

  “I heard the anchor go down,” he said. “Is this Denmark?”

  “It is,” Lori said.

  Zaentz had always been full of jokes. But now he was weeping behind the tinted lenses of his round steel spectacles.

  Just before the Christophers had left Berlin for Rügen that summer, Zaentz had come to the apartment in Charlottenburg, bringing all his pictures with him. When Paul woke in the morning, Zaentz’s pictures, dozens of them, were strewn around the apartment, propped up on the furniture, leaning against the walls. Except for the drawing of Lori during her pregnancy, the pictures were brutal caricatures of German faces twisted by greed or lust or hatred.

  “Why is the one of Mutti so much like her?” Paul had asked.

  “The others are like themselves also,” Zaentz replied. “I draw what I see.”

  Aboard Mahican, he hugged Lori long and hard and kissed her repeatedly.

  “I’ll never forget,” he said.

  Lori patted his bearded face. “It will be over soon,” she said.

  Zaentz shook his head. The gesture was like a shudder.

  Hubbard brought the dinghy alongside and Zaentz climbed in. Hubbard pulled the cord on the dinghy’s motor and headed for shore. It was low tide, and Paul watched through the boat’s binoculars as Zaentz walked over the wet sandy beach, strewn with kelp, and then climbed the dunes and disappeared. He was wearing a rucksack. At the crest of the dunes, he turned and waved, first at Hubbard, who waited in the bobbing dinghy just offshore, and then to Lori and Paul aboard Mahican.

  Lori, standing behind Paul, wrapped her arms around him. The morning star was bright above the sun.

  “Put down the glasses,” she said. “Look at the morning star.”

  The east grew brighter. Lori put her cheek next to Paul’s. “Paul,” she said, “you know that Zaentz is a secret, don’t you?”

  Paul nodded. He looked toward shore again; the footprints Zaentz had left as he walked over the wet beach were clearly visible.

  “Good,” Lori said. She kissed his ear and turned his face toward the rising sun; she hadn’t done such a thing since he was a small child.

  The first crescent of the sun was pushing above the tundra. The morning star grew dimmer. Then it vanished. Lori tightened her embrace.

  “An angel has died,” she said. “That’s what my mother used to tell me when the morning star went out.”

  When they returned to Berwick, Paulus was waiting for them.

  “The Dandy has been here,” he said. “He brought these.”

  The clothes Lori and Zaentz and Paul had left on the beach, hidden in the crevice in the cliff, lay on a table in the hall.

  “I told him you often swam from the cliffs,” Paulus said. “He asked if you swam with a friend. These clothes obviously don’t belong to Hubbard.”

  Paulus held up the shirt Zaentz had been wearing. It was an old shirt, one he had worn while working in his studio, and it was smeared with paint.

  “The Dandy held this shirt up to his nose,” Paulus said. “ ‘Do you know,’ he said to me, ‘that Jews smear themselves with goose grease at the beginning of winter, and then their women sew them up in their underwear, not removing it until spring? Even turpentine won’t kill that smell,’ the Dandy said; ‘it penetrates the skin and squeezes out through the sweat glands.’ ”

  — 5 —

  Paul spent the following summer in the Berkshires. His American godfather, Elliott Hubbard, met him in New York and drove him in a yellow Chrysler convertible to the Harbor, 150 miles to the north. Elliott never drove at less than sixty miles an hour, leaving a huge plume of dust behind as they roared over the dirt roads that led to the Berkshires.

  They arrived at midnight. In the morning, Paul asked Alice Hubbard, Elliott’s new wife, to show him Indian Joe’s grave. They climbed together through the pasture above the Harbor to the Hubbard burial ground, a mossy plot surrounded by a tumbling stone wall. Five generations of the family were buried in a circle, feet pointing inward.

  “When the Hubbards arise at the Last Trump, they’ll be facing one another,” Alice Hubbard said. “Opening their eyes upon the elect of God, they’ll see nothing but Hubbards. No boring outsiders. That’s called the Hubbard heaven.”

  “What about Indian Joe?”

  “Here he is.”

  Paul found the granite boulder, marked with the words the second Aaron had chiseled into it.

  “Very advanced about Mahican Indians, the Hubbards were,” Alice said. “It must have been guilt; they never got over the shame of stealing their land from the poor savages. They name everything for them. Is your father that way, too?”

  “Our boat is named Mahican.”

  “Of course it is. Imagine! Indian Joe’s ghost, sailing around in the Baltic.”

  Alice thought that her husband’s family, so close-knit and so proud of its history, was comical.

  “What you really must understand, in order to understand the Hubbards, is the Hubbard brides,” she said. “They’re all here.”

  Moving from one tilted headstone to the other, Alice read off their ages. “You see?” she said. “All the Hubbard women die young, right down to the last generation. They were buried every one before they were forty—here’s your grandmother, snuffed out at thirty-four, and Elliott’s mother, dead at twenty-five. What a tragic history, what a mystery, or so I thought until Elliott shanghaied me into this summer in the country among his pals. Now I understand: all these women died of boredom.”

  As she spoke, the pure silence of the country morning was shattered. One of Elliott Hubbard’s houseguests, an Italian tenor, had come onto the lawn of the Harbor to sing his morning scales. Alice and Paul could see him, far below them, his portly body wrapped in a white bathrobe, as he projected his voice against the stony mountainside. The Harbor, a sprawling white clapboard structure with innumerable ells and wings, stood on the banks of a brook in a mowing between two mountains. The brook was cold and as gray as a trout’s back; the mowing, planted in timothy and redtop, was silvery green; the mountains were blue. Before the tenor began to sing, it had been possible to hear the sound of the brook. Now, as he sang the first few bars of “Una furtiva lagrima,” a whitetail deer that had been grazing among a herd of Jersey cows lifted its head. Its horns were in velvet.

  Elliott Hubbard was a collector of houseguests. Everyone was interesting to him, and he invited everyone who interested him to stay at his country house. In the room next to Paul’s, a playwright composed dialogue, reading his lines aloud far into the night and crumpling up sheet after sheet of paper as he failed to achieve the effect he wanted. In the barn, a retired professional lightweight named Battling Jim Cerruti gave Paul boxing lessons. At the end of the summer, he made his report to Elliott: “The kid’s fast and he’s not afraid of getting hurt; he won’t back off. He’s going to get his bell rung a lot as he goes through life.”

  Alice said, “Elliott is like the college boy who sent his mother a telegram from New Haven
: Bringing 16 for Easter. She had beds made up for sixteen guests. Her son got off the train on Good Friday accompanied by the entire Yale Class of 1916. Is your father like that, Paul?”

  “He brings a lot of people home.”

  “What sort of people?”

  “All sorts. Painters, writers, actors . . .”

  “No actresses?”

  “No.”

  “Elliott doesn’t bring them home, either. Who else? Any bank robbers? Elliott brings clients home; we had a man who dressed up to rob banks. He’d be a monk, then an admiral, then a nun. Mostly it was ecclesiastical. He said he liked the costuming; he wasn’t in it for the money. Elliott thought he was fascinating. He got him off with only a year in jail. You’ll probably be just like them when you grow up. It’s the Hubbard enthusiasm.”

  In the evening, when Elliott’s guests came down to dinner, the conversation ran on until well after midnight. Usually Alice was the only female present. Whatever she may have said in the graveyard, she never seemed to be bored, but she did like to go to bed with her husband at a reasonable hour. When she wanted to end the jovial male conversation she would cry, “Bones!” and Elliott’s Yale friends would get up and leave the room, as members of Skull and Bones, the university’s secret society, were obliged to do on hearing that word spoken aloud. The others, respecting a mysterious ritual they did not understand, would follow.

  — 6 —

  “This is not the time to educate a boy in Germany,” Paulus said.

  Lori agreed, but she could not send Paul as far away as America again. When he returned to Europe at the end of the summer, he went to school in Switzerland. The school, a former monastery standing among vineyards on a knoll above Lake Geneva, was the coldest place in which Paul had ever been. From October to April, the sun disappeared, a bitter wind scoured the playing fields, and the lake was hidden behind a perpetual cloud bank. The school was as much like a prison as it was possible to make it. In the vaulted dining room, the boys ate thin soup, root vegetables, pasta, and salt fish, never meat, while in a loud voice a prefect read elevating passages from French literature. There were two huge paintings in this room, portraits of Saint Joan and St. Cyr, darkened by candle smoke, and these were the only pools of color in the whole gray place.