The Last Supper

by Charles McCarry

“The Manchurian Candidate,” Darby read. “Is that a thriller? I’ve never actually read a thriller.”

  “I think you’ll enjoy this one,” Wolkowicz said.

  “Very thoughtful.” Darby tossed the pulp book with its garish orange cover onto the cot with his first editions.

  “I must give you something,” Darby said. Stooping in the confined space, he rolled up one of the carpets and handed it to Wolkowicz. “It’s an Isfahan, rather a good one, really,” he said.

  Wolkowicz made no move to accept the rug. Darby picked up the other man’s arm by the elbow and thrust the cylinder of carpet beneath it. “Do take it,” he said; “think of me when you tread on it.”

  That night, Darby killed two of his jailers and escaped. Autopsies established that he had used a needle to inject a deadly poison into his victims; it was a poison, derived from the bean of the castor plant, that was used only by the Soviet secret service.

  Darby left a message for Wolkowicz, written in ornamental Cyrillic script on the flyleaf of The Manchurian Candidate.

  When translated, it read: Ilse was quite innocent. But she did like to lie face down on the Isfahan while one smelled the roses. Think of me.

  Christopher

  One

  — 1 —

  A week before the death of Molly Benson, she and Christopher went skiing in the early morning on the slopes above Zermatt. It was the day after New Year’s, their last day in the mountains. By nine o’clock, when they came down to their hotel, the tables on the outdoor terrace were crowded for breakfast. A fierce white sun lit up the snowfields on the wall of the Matterhorn.

  “Oh,” Molly said, “but I’ve loved it here.”

  They had spent the holidays here after Christopher returned from America. Before that he had been in Vietnam. In Saigon, he had made enemies, and this had put both their lives in danger. Friends of Christopher’s in Paris had hidden her while he was gone. Hidden her. Molly thought it was too farcical, it was like a film, being in love with a man who knew a dangerous secret, being in this glorious place with him, eating delicious food, drinking strange liqueurs, making love while the Alpine moon came in the window, being hunted by secret agents.

  As Molly and Christopher came onto the hotel terrace with their skis, he studied each face at each table, as if her murderer might be sitting there in ski clothes, awaiting his opportunity while the butter softened in the winter sun. She smiled at a middle-aged Frenchwoman who sat alone at one of the tables, feeding eggs off a fork to a toy dachshund. The Frenchwoman and the dog wore matching sweaters from Hermès; Molly had seen them in the window of the shop while she was hiding out in Paris.

  The Frenchwoman did not smile back at Molly. This was, Molly knew, a reproach for her lack of chic. She was dressed in a loose blue Guernsey sweater that was meant to be worn with rubber boots during long tramps over the English moors. She had bought her faded ski pants five years before during a school trip to Gstaad. Molly never looked at other women, never noticed what clothes they wore. She had no idea of fashion. Her transparent skin glowed, tanned after a week on the slopes. Her full lips needed no paint; she had green eyes with large brilliant whites and her thick hair had never been curled. When fashionable women looked at Molly, that was what they saw. Coldly, the Frenchwoman looked away, as if she hadn’t seen Molly at all, as if she expected to see someone who was truly beautiful elsewhere in the crowd.

  The waiter brought coffee and Molly poured from the silver pot for herself and for Christopher. She cut a brittle roll in half lengthwise, scattering flakes of crust on the tablecloth, and buttered it. She examined the little transparent packets of jam.

  “Do you prefer grape jam or grape jam?” Molly asked. She spread jam on the bread and gave half to Christopher. Molly did many things for him that he preferred to do for himself. He opened the copy of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung that the waiter had brought with breakfast. He looked through the paper, sipping coffee, but left his bread untouched on the plate.

  “Don’t you like lovely bread and jam?” Molly asked, chewing.

  With her shining hair falling down the back of her warm, sensible Guernsey sweater, she drank the last of her coffee and ate Christopher’s share of the bread and jam.

  Molly licked the jam from her fingers. Christopher had stopped examining faces; something in the newspaper interested him. Molly saw a chance to show that she had learned something about the spy’s life.

  “Do you know that man, the one in the trilby hat?” she asked.

  Christopher looked over his newspaper at a squat, unshaven man who stood on the steps at the entrance to the terrace. The newcomer, coatless in the snow, was dressed in a safari suit. His short-sleeved jacket was open at the throat, revealing a mat of thick black chest hair. He wore a brand-new Tyrolean hat with a large feather stuck into a silver ornament. Molly’s Frenchwoman stared at this newcomer in utter disbelief and gave her dachshund a reassuring kiss.

  “Yes,” Christopher said, “I know him.”

  Barney Wolkowicz doffed his Tyrolean hat to Christopher and Molly and started toward their table. As he crossed the lumber floor of the terrace the leather soles of his shoes slipped on the caked snow. He floundered and grasped the backs of chairs to keep his balance. Molly smiled at him and Wolkowicz grinned back with his false teeth.

  Sitting down at their table, Wolkowicz took off his hat again and wiped the sweatband with Christopher’s napkin. “How do you like my new hat?” he asked. “Fifty francs, Swiss. Pretty good, I thought, considering the size of the feather.”

  “I wish my chap had one just like it,” Molly said. “I’m Molly Benson.”

  Wolkowicz didn’t tell her his name. Molly asked no questions. She was still learning the manners of the profession. Though she and Christopher had been lovers—not just lovers, but in love every minute, absorbed in each other’s bodies and minds—for two years, she had known for less than a month that Christopher was a spy. When he told her, she had laughed; it had been such a breathtaking surprise, as if he had invented some merry new way to make love. She believed him at once, it explained so much about him—his absences, the things he said in his sleep in foreign languages, his caution. She even believed, because he told her so, that men were trying to kill them. All the same, it seemed comical to her. Suppose they were killed, murdered by some seedy little man who was paid a thousand dollars for the job. Even death would be a joke.

  As she watched Wolkowicz her eyes brimmed with merriment. From beneath the fuzzy brim of his trilby hat, he was examining the faces at the surrounding tables.

  “Paul’s already done that,” Molly said.

  “Done what?”

  “Memorized all the faces. I should think you’d want some breakfast.”

  Christopher called the waiter and ordered coffee and rolls for Wolkowicz.

  Christopher said, “You’re a long way from home, Barney.”

  They had last seen each other in Saigon, a month before. Wolkowicz was the chief of station in Vietnam.

  “Well, yeah,” Wolkowicz said. “I’m on my way to the States and I thought I’d look you up and say hello.”

  “Isn’t Zermatt a little out of your way?”

  “Anything for an old friend. Anything: I’ve never liked Zermatt. There’s no way to get off this frigging mountain except on that dinky train and every time you try to walk down the street you fall down in the snow. They ought to spread sand or ashes.”

  Wolkowicz shuddered violently.

  “You don’t have a coat?” Molly said, concerned. “I’ll fetch Paul’s for you. Unless you want to go inside.”

  “No. You’ve paid for the sunshine. Let’s sit in it.”

  “Then I’ll get the coat,” Molly said.

  Wolkowicz watched her walk into the hotel.

  “She doesn’t sound like an Australian,” he said.

  “She went to school in England.”

  “Where?” It was a silly detail, but Wolkowicz was still storing up details about Christ
opher as if he were a younger brother who needed to be protected from his own lack of experience. Wolkowicz resented any secret, however small, that Christopher kept from him.

  “She went to Roedean,” Christopher said. “Then Cambridge, Girton College.”

  “Isn’t there a song about Roedean? Darby used to sing it: ‘We are the girls from Roe-dean. . . .’ ”

  “I remember. It’s not one of Molly’s songs.”

  The waiter brought Wolkowicz’s tea and started to pour it. “Go away,” Wolkowicz said, taking the pot out of his hand. He cut a piece of Gruyère, crushed it on his plate, and ate the yellow crumbs with a spoon. He was shivering again. His cup rattled in the saucer when he put it down.

  Christopher said, “We can go inside.”

  “No, we’d better talk outside for now. Before your girl comes back I want to tell you why I came all this way to see you.”

  Christopher waited for Wolkowicz to continue. Wolkowicz watched the people at the next table gather up their jackets and hats and mittens. When they had left, he spoke again, in his normal grating voice.

  “I’m all through in Saigon,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “New assignment in Washington. I’m en route.”

  Christopher didn’t ask what the assignment was; Wolkowicz wouldn’t have told him.

  “Your buddy Patchen was in Saigon a week or so ago,” Wolkowicz said. “He said nobody is supposed to go near you. There are people in Washington who think you should be locked up in a mental institution. What did you tell them, for Christ’s sake?”

  “That the President was killed in revenge for the assassination of the President of Vietnam.”

  “Is that all? You are crazy.”

  “What if it happens to be the truth?”

  Wolkowicz exhaled through his teeth. “The truth. The trouble with you is that you think that the truth and reality are the same thing. In this world, lies are the reality. People can’t live without them.”

  Wolkowicz, shuddering with cold, lifted the cup to his lips with both hands and drank.

  “I know you’ve resigned from the Outfit,” he said. “I know you’re not going to start babbling about your wacky theory to any outsiders, but your pal the Truong toc doesn’t know that. You’ve covered his family with shit. He wants your ass.”

  Molly came out of the hotel, carrying Christopher’s sheepskin coat. Wolkowicz spoke quickly, so as to get the words out before Molly came close enough to hear.

  But Molly did overhear.

  “What is a Truong toc?” she asked.

  Wolkowicz grinned at her. She held the coat open for him and he got up and slid his arms into the sleeves. As he did so, his unbuttoned safari jacket parted and Christopher glimpsed the butt of his P-38.

  “If it wants Paul’s ass,” Molly said, “I really must know what it is.”

  “In Vietnam, the Truong toc is head of the family—he represents all the dead members of the family, all the ones who are now living, and all the ones who are yet to be born.”

  “Represents them?”

  “Kills people who insult the family honor,” Wolkowicz said. “People like your boyfriend, here.”

  “Is it the Truong toc who’s after us, then?” Molly said.

  Wolkowicz sat down and huddled inside Christopher’s sheepskin coat. He took Molly’s hand.

  “The warmth is back in my bones,” he said. “You saved my life, sweetie pie. I’m never going to forget that.”

  “What about the Truong toc?”

  Wolkowicz seemed to notice Molly’s beauty for the first time. “He’s not going to forget about you, either,” he said.

  To the waiter, who had trailed along after Molly, gazing worshipfully at her body, Wolkowicz said in German, “Bring me some eggs and fried potatoes, quick.”

  — 2 —

  From the window of their room, Molly and Christopher looked down on the terrace. Wolkowicz, as shapeless as a bear in Christopher’s heavy coat, crouched over a plate of ham and eggs, a fork in his fist.

  “What a thug!” Molly said. “Just what I imagined a spy would be like. You’re a great disappointment to me in that regard, Paul. You wear such humdrum hats.”

  Down below, Wolkowicz tore the soft center out of a piece of bread and mopped his plate. “He’s wonderful,” Molly said. “Look! He has the table manners of a Russian prisoner of war.”

  It was taking Molly a long time to pack. Christopher folded her sweaters and put them, one after the other, into the bottom of her suitcase. She turned around and saw what he was doing. “No, that’s wrong,” she said. She spoke in a fluting headmistress’s voice: “ ‘What is the cardinal rule of packing, girls? Boots, books, and bottles in the bottom of the box.’ ” She removed the sweaters and began to repack.

  “He is a spy,” she said. “Don’t deny it. I saw his gun.”

  “Don’t be fooled by his act,” Christopher said. “He may talk like a gangster and fake his table manners, but he’s an intelligent man.”

  “He fakes those table manners?”

  “If you don’t pack your box, we’re going to miss the train.”

  “Each of your friends is more wonderful than the last,” Molly said. “I had no idea Americans were so interesting.”

  They were not alone in the little cog train as it traveled down the mountainside. Three men in drab Swiss business suits, gray with dull orange stripes, sat at the far end of the car. Wolkowicz’s eyes, glittering under his Tyrolean hat, never left them. Wolkowicz had drunk schnapps with his morning eggs, and his breath smelled of raw alcohol.

  Molly held Christopher’s hand, stroking the skin. Wolkowicz watched with a mocking smile on his stubbled lips. Molly intercepted his look.

  “It’s the full moon,” she said. “At this altitude, the lunar influence is very strong. It causes tides in the human body.”

  Wolkowicz paid no attention to her. The train stopped at one of the way stations and the Swiss businessmen alighted, leaving them alone.

  “Excuse us for a minute,” Wolkowicz said to Molly.

  He marched Christopher to a seat at the end of the car. They sat facing each other. Wolkowicz leaned forward and pitched his voice so that it could just be heard above the rattle of the train.

  “I’m going to peel off when we get to the valley and leave you and your girl on your own,” Wolkowicz said, “but first I want you to have some information.”

  The train passed through a tunnel. Wolkowicz stopped speaking until it emerged into the light again. Molly was still sitting where they had left her, gazing out the window at the windblown snow.

  “We’ve penetrated the Truong toc’s establishment since the last time you were in Saigon,” Wolkowicz said. “Horace got a girl inside who services the old man.”

  Horace Hubbard had become Wolkowicz’s deputy in Saigon.

  “Horace,” Wolkowicz said, “gave his little girl a Minox, so she could take pictures of things.”

  Wolkowicz unbuttoned the breast pocket of his safari jacket and produced an envelope. He handed it to Christopher. The flap was sealed with Scotch tape. Christopher opened the envelope. Inside he found a picture of a Western woman, obviously a photograph of a photograph. It had been made in bad light by an amateur. It was grainy and blurred. But Christopher recognized it. The face in the picture was Molly’s.

  “Horace’s agent said they put money on the table to pay for an assassination,” Wolkowicz said. “And lying on the table, all mixed up with the blood money, was this picture.”

  Christopher lifted his eyes. Molly was still looking out the window of the train. After a moment, she felt Christopher’s eyes on her and smiled. Wolkowicz turned in the wooden seat and followed Christopher’s gaze. He winked at Molly, then looked at her for a long moment longer, a thoughtful expression on his face.

  “They want to make you suffer,” Wolkowicz said, looking at Christopher again. “I know you’re not going to let them close to this girl. So what do you want to do, go back
to Vietnam?”

  “What else is there to do?”

  “I thought so,” Wolkowicz said. “Fucking Jack Armstrong. Can I talk you out of it?”

  “No.”

  “Where are you going to store her while you’re out there getting yourself killed?”

  “In Paris, maybe.”

  “With Tom Webster?”

  Christopher nodded.

  “That should be all right,” Wolkowicz said. “Have you got enough money?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Patchen gave me some back pay.”

  Wolkowicz snorted, as if Patchen’s motives were laughably apparent. “It’s nice to have friends,” he said. “I’d take all the money I had with me. When you get to Saigon, Horace will do what he can to help you, even though nobody is supposed to help you; those are Patchen’s orders. You’ve scared the Outfit shitless with your crazy ideas.”

  “Then why are you helping?”

  “Fuck Patchen. Fuck the Outfit. What do they know? One thing you should know. The Truong toc has left Saigon.”

  “Where has he gone?”

  “Up north somewhere. Check with Horace. You’ll have to fly up there. Don’t, for Christ’s sake, trust anybody who isn’t related to you. But here.”

  Wolkowicz pressed a slip of paper, about the size of a commemorative postage stamp, into Christopher’s palm. A phone number and the name Gus were typed on the paper.

  “If you need a pilot, Gus is all right,” Wolkowicz said. “He’s got a nice little airplane and he’ll fly anywhere, anytime. Expensive, but he remembers who paid him.”

  Wolkowicz heard Molly’s footsteps approaching and stopped talking. She had changed into a skirt. Wolkowicz admired her as she walked by, making no effort to hide his interest from Christopher. Since the loss of Ilse, he treated all women with contempt.

  “Beautiful legs,” he said of Molly. “Is she as intelligent as she sounds?”

  Christopher nodded.

  “Bad combination,” Wolkowicz said.

  Molly overheard and turned around. Wolkowicz looked into her face again, as if in deep study. He waggled his fingers at her and she continued on her way.