“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?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Why do you think? So that I can help you.”
“Sail, walk, parachute,” Hubbard said. “Once I get inside the country I’ll be all right. Nobody can tell from my speech that I’m not a German.”
“You’ll have no papers. You’re six feet four inches tall. Do you think the Germans won’t know you’re there?”
Hubbard did not listen. “I must get Paul into a school, then I’ll go back,” he said.
Hubbard’s speech was brisk now. He had made a decision; he had made a plan.
“Hubbard,” Elliott said, “there’s a man I want you to meet. I’ll ask him to meet you at the club tomorrow.”
“What man?”
“An Englishman,” Elliott said. “One of the Englishmen who spent the summer at the Harbor—Alice mentioned them.”
“What kind of an Englishman?”
Elliott smiled. “A baronet,” he said. “He’s an ingenious sort of fellow.”
Sir Richard Shaw-Condon, Bart., wore a dove-gray billycock bowler hat like Winston Churchill’s, and he left it on his head while he sipped Scotch whisky in the library at the Yale Club. Sir Richard had remarkable facial hair: thick flaxen eyebrows and a matching Hitlerian mustache. In these strange American precincts, he was utterly at ease. His legs were crossed at the ankles, and his feet, encased in glossy oxfords, rested on the table. He seemed to want to look like a very young minister of the Crown, lounging on the front bench at question time in Parliament, dealing jauntily with attacks from the opposition. In the peculiar English way of breaking the ice with a stranger, he asked Hubbard a series of rude personal questions.
“Whatever made you live in Germany for all those years?”
“I had a German wife,” Hubbard said.
“A beauty, I hear. German women can be extraordinary—that perfect skin. But sixteen years, my dear fellow. Didn’t you ever long for civilization, tucked away in Berlin, munching on sausages and listening to drinking songs?”
Hubbard did not answer; he knew that this waggish interrogation must run its course.
“You write books,” Sir Richard said. “Your cousin lent me one. Difficult for an Englishman to understand all those American attitudes, of course, but I thought the writing was first-rate. Is that what you lived on, your royalties?”
“In part,” Hubbard said.
“What was the other part? Have a bit of income of your own?”
Hubbard, still silent, ordered another whisky for Sir Richard. The waiter looked the Englishman up and down; a lot of eccentrics belonged to this club, but nobody had ever before worn a hat indoors here or put his feet on the tabletop.
“What really engages my curiosity, our curiosity,” Sir Richard said, “is why you and your wife smuggled all those Jews and Bolshies out to Denmark. Was it politics, Christopher?”
“No.”
“You’re not a Bolshevik yourself?”
“No.”
“What are you, then, may one ask?”
“Those people were our friends.”
“All of them?”
“Nearly all.”
Sir Richard took off his billycock bowler and spun it on his index finger. For a long moment, he was absorbed in this trick.
“Look here, Christopher,” he said at last, placing his feet on the floor and his hat neatly upon his knees, as if this were some signal that the mood of the meeting had changed, “the fact of the matter is, we’re most awfully sympathetic about your wife. D’you reckon we might put our heads together and think of something?”
“Think of something?”
“Something to help—to find her, to bring her back. Elliott told you nothing about our work?”
“No.”
“You look remarkably like him, you know. Are you like him in other ways?”
Sir Richard had a high-pitched boyish laugh and now that he had abandoned his junior minister pose, he crackled like a schoolboy with mischief and curious intelligence. Hubbard had never seen a grown man with such a lively face. Sir Richard waited alertly for Hubbard’s next question. Knowing the right question to ask was a test of breeding; Hubbard had the impression that he would be admitted to some sort of club if he asked it. He hadn’t run into this situation since his first years at college: you were supposed to ask a man from Boston if he knew another man, and then ask if old so-and-so still rode that black gelding called Domino—all of which told your listener that you knew the names of the horses belonging to people who rode with the Myopia Hunt, and it was therefore all right to go on with the conversation.
“In point of fact,” Sir Richard said, when no question came, “we’re not supposed to talk absolutely frankly to Americans inside the borders of the United States. It’s your Neutrality Act. However, I’d like to talk frankly to you.”
“Talk frankly about what?”
“About choosing sides. Your country is neutral, but in times like these, there can be no neutral men.”
“Really? Why should I choose sides?”
“You must answer that question. You are faced with a grave personal dilemma. Perhaps we can help you to resolve it.”
“Look,” Hubbard said, “why don’t you tell me whatever it is you’re not supposed to say frankly to Americans?”
Hubbard’s bluntness startled Sir Richard. The charm vanished from his face, like a smooth blank lid closing over a sparkling eye.
“Very well,” Sir Richard said. “I hear you want to go into Germany.”
“Yes.”
“We might be prepared to help you.”
“How?”
“I’ll come to that. Are you willing to discuss the matter?”
“Why should I? You are asking me to become a British spy, aren’t you?”
“Would it be so painful to spy against the people who have arrested your wife?”
“No. But how would that help my wife?”
“It wouldn’t be all spying, you know. It’s possible that you could find your wife.”
“And rescue her?”
“You’ve rescued others from the Gestapo—all those Jews and Bolshies. Eisner, Blau, Gerstein, Zaentz. I realize that is by no means the complete list. You’re greatly admired for what you’ve done, you and your wife. I’m offering you the chance to get her out. Surely you want to do for her what you’ve done for your . . . friends.”
Hubbard lifted his glass to his mouth but could not drink; the liquor burned his lips.
“How would I enter Germany?” he asked.
“By train from Switzerland, like any other neutral.”
“You must know that I was expelled from Germany.”
“Yes. But we can get around that.”
“Get around the German police? In time of war? How?”
“You must tell me if you’re interested,” Sir Richard said.
“I’m willing to hear what you have to say.”
“It’s a rather obvious idea. For the purposes of your visit, you would become your cousin Elliott. Travel on his passport.”
“It would never work.”
“Why not? You already answer to the name Hubbard. All you’d need to do is dye your hair and remember not to speak German quite so fluently. The other things you need to know we can teach you—knives, guns, poison, invisible ink. It’s most enjoyable.”
“What about Elliott?”
“Elliott arranged our meeting.”
Hubbard heard his heart beating in his ears. Of course it was possible. It was so brilliantly simple. Why hadn’t he thought of it?
“Really,” Sir Richard said, “I think you’ll
find the whole thing is rather good fun. Leaving out your worry over your wife, of course.”
“I accept,” Hubbard said.
Sir Richard tilted his billycock bowler over his flaxen eyebrows and gave Hubbard a merry, conspiratorial smile.
Three
— 1 —
On the day before Christmas 1943, Paul Christopher took his second cousin Horace Hubbard sledding on the mountainside above the Harbor. After the long climb, the two boys paused for a moment and looked out over the valley. It was a bright day, so cold that the sunlight, reflecting from the snow and ice, seemed to be tinged with blue. The low mountains, thick with hemlocks, were a deeper blue. They could hear the wind in the trees, a constant low whistle, and dervishes of light dry snow spun across the open spaces.
Paul swung Horace onto his back, and the child wrapped his arms around Paul’s neck and his legs around his waist. Paul threw the two of them, belly down, onto the sled. Horace grunted at the impact but held on. The Flexible Flyer gathered speed, its steel runners whispering over the snow; the pitch of the land was so steep that it seemed to Paul and Horace that they were flying into the bare limbs of the hardwoods and the feathery blue-green boughs of the conifers. The sled came out of the woods into a pasture strewn with boulders and ledges. The ground grew even steeper, Paul steered to the left in order to avoid a ten-foot drop off a hidden granite ledge, and the sled passed within inches of the high wall of loose stones that surrounded the cemetery. Now they could see the Harbor, a few hundred yards below, and smell the woodsmoke rising from its chimneys.
Two people, a woman and a tall man, had come out of the house to watch the end of the sled ride. They were directly in the path of the Flexible Flyer. The sled was traveling at fifteen or twenty miles an hour. The west wind had drifted snow to the sills of the second-story windows. Paul steered for the drift. When the runners bit into the softer snow, the sled slowed and then flipped over. Horace’s small body flew through the air and plunged into the drift.
By the time Paul got to his feet, Horace had been rescued; Alice, his mother, was still floundering through the snow, holding her skirt high, but the man with her, whom Paul had mistaken for Elliott Hubbard, had hauled the child out of the drift and was brushing snow off his face. Horace was laughing: this was the way he liked the sled ride to end. His rescuer swung Horace above his head, and kissed him.
“Horace, you’ve got your father’s looks, poor fellow,” Hubbard Christopher said.
He handed Horace to Alice and turned to his own son, opening his arms.
“Hello, Paul,” he said.
Paul hugged his father and kissed him. It was the first time he had seen him in nearly four years.
Half an hour later, Hubbard and Paul were alone in one of the small sitting rooms at the front of the house. They stood side by side, holding out their hands to a fire of apple logs.
“There’s no trace of her at all, Paul,” Hubbard said. “None. There are no papers, no record of an arrest or a trial. Officially, she doesn’t exist.”
“Does that mean that she’s dead?”
“It means that she’s alive.”
“If she’s alive, where is she?”
“Hiding, possibly.”
“Do you really believe that?”
Hubbard, after a long pause, shook his head. “No,” he said. “I think she’s in a camp. I think the Germans have some reason for . . . erasing her existence.”
“Then she’ll die.”
“No,” he said, eyes glittering. “Your mother will not die. Remember what she was like. She won’t yield. She will live to the end.”
Hubbard had lost the air of hiding a joyous laugh that had made him so charming. He had become a fierce, unsmiling man. He sat down in a Shaker chair that creaked under his weight. He was as erect as Paulus. His eyes rested on Paul, who wore the uniform of a Marine Corps second lieutenant.
“Are you going to the Pacific?”
“Yes, right after this leave.”
Hubbard, in an old gesture from Paul’s childhood, laced his fingers through his son’s. “We won’t have much time together, then,” he said.
Alice had left a tray of cocoa on the table. Hubbard poured two cups and handed one to Paul. They stood side by side, backs to the spitting apple logs, and sipped the cocoa. Through the windows with their small panes of wavy glass they could see the snow blowing; the wind moaned in the eaves and howled in the stone chimneys of the old house.
A car horn sounded and a green Packard convertible coupe, the top down despite the cold, turned in from the road and was climbing toward the Harbor. Every few yards the driver pressed the horn button and the klaxon sounded its peculiar hoarse ah-OO-ga!
Alice came into the room, carrying Horace, and held him up to the window so he could watch the car as it approached.
“It’s brother Waddy,” Alice said. “He thinks Horace likes to hear him blow the horn.”
Horace grinned in delight as the horn sounded again. “I do like it,” he said.
“I’ve given birth to the Hubbard cretin,” Alice said. “Can it be a recessive gene? Will Horace grow up like his Uncle Waddy?” She peered out the window. “My God,” she said, “he’s brought a friend.”
Stamping snow from his feet in the hall, Waddy introduced his friend.
“This is Wolkowicz,” he said, “my secret weapon. Snow is nothing to Wolkowicz. As a child he walked from Kiev to Shanghai with a little pack on his back—five thousand miles over the Urals, across freezing Siberia, through the burning Gobi. It’s a proletarian epic. Wolkowicz ate raw pony meat in Mongolia.”
Barnabas Wolkowicz was a squat, muscular man with a big chin and high Slavic cheekbones. His nose had been broken and rebroken. He looked as though he had played the line in football, blocking for men like Waddy. He wore the insignia of an army warrant officer. Beside willowy, blond Waddy Jessup he looked like a Neanderthal man. He put down Waddy’s suitcase and nodded to Alice, unsure of what to do next.
Alice lifted Wolkowicz’s large hairy hand and shook it. “Did you really walk all the way across Asia?”
Wolkowicz nodded. “I don’t remember much about it. My father was with me,” he said. “We didn’t walk the whole way. There were trains.”
“All the same,” said Alice, “it sounds like a lot of effort. But what luck for Waddy. He’s always wanted to meet a real Russian. He’s the family Red.”
— 2 —
That evening, Christmas Eve, Alice insisted that all the men wear uniform to dinner. “It gives the party exactly the hectic wartime flush I want,” she said. “Who knows when there’ll be another Hubbard Christmas at the Harbor?”
Alice was speaking to Wolkowicz. Waddy Jessup joined them. His eyes were bright, his speech a little slurred. “Why shouldn’t there be any more Christmas parties?” he asked. Waddy had a weak head for liquor and he had already drunk three glasses of Scotch.
“You’re all marching off to war,” Alice said. “Elliott has been learning to parachute. I’ve never seen him so happy. You’re all happy. It’s this Outfit you all belong to. What is it?”
“You mustn’t ask.”
“Why not? Why doesn’t it have a number, like everybody else’s outfit? How can Army, Navy, and Marines be all mixed together? Why is a forty-year-old sailor like Elliott jumping out of airplanes?”
Waddy Jessup put a finger to his lips. “It’s oh, so secret,” he said.
Alice gave him a look of bitter annoyance. “God, men are clumsy,” she said. “It’s a good thing you only have secrets in time of war. Women live by secrets all the time; we have to in order to inhabit the same planet with men. You can’t be trusted with the facts.”
Waddy was not listening. His eyes were fixed on Paul, and he wore a look of amused calculation, like a rake noticing for the first time that a friend’s daughter has grown breasts.
“Handsome young man, Hubbard’s boy,” he said. “What are his interests? Give me an icebreaker.”
�
��An icebreaker? You’ve known him for years.”
“I want to know him better. What are his interests?”
“Girls; he always seems to have one. He reads German poetry for relaxation.”
“German poetry! Just my thing.”
Waddy gave Alice a bright smile and crossed the room to Paul. He put a hand at the small of Paul’s back. “ ‘Werd ich zum Augenblicke sagen,’ ” he said, “ ‘ “Verweile dock! Du bist so schön!” ’ ”
“Hello, Waddy,” Paul said.
“They say you spoke German even as a very small child,” Waddy said. “What did I just say?”
“Were you speaking German?”
“Of course I was speaking German. I was quoting Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the immortal bore. I can’t remember what it means.”
Paul translated: “ ‘If I say to the moment, “Stay now! You are so beautiful!” ’ ”
“That’s it! The immortal Goethe.” He beckoned to Wolkowicz, who left Alice and joined them. “Here’s the immortal Wolkowicz,” he said. “What’re you drinking there, a boilermaker?”
“No, sir, a Rob Roy.”
“A Rob Roy? Is it your first? Do you like it?”
“It’s very good, sir.”
“Drop the ‘sir,’ Barnabas. Call me ‘you.’ It’s Christmas. WOJG Wolkowicz hails from Youngstown, Ohio,” Waddy said to Paul. He pronounced WOJG, the abbreviation for Wolkowicz’s rank, warrant officer junior grade, as if it were a word: wojjig.
“They drink boilermakers in Youngstown, Ohio,” Waddy continued. “I knew a fellow at Yale who grew up in Youngstown, Ohio. His family owned a steel mill that made sheets and tubes. After a hard day of putting sheets and tubes into the blast furnace and taking them out when they were done, everybody would go down to the tavern and have a boilermaker. My pal didn’t say anything about Rob Roys.”
Waddy handed Wolkowicz his glass. “Why don’t you have another Rob Roy? Bring me a boilermaker,” he said. “Paul, what do you have there?” He drank from Paul’s glass. “Plain soda water!” he said. “You must have crystalline piss, like mineral water. You can write your name invisibly in new-fallen snow—in Mary Lou’s handwriting, of course.”
The Last Supper Page 9