The Last Supper

by Charles McCarry

  “It’s the ocean route for us,” Gus shouted. “Too much moon to fly over the jungle. Crawling with V.C. cockroaches with anti-aircraft guns, the jungle is.”

  Gus muttered into the radio, then twirled the dials on his radio navigation system. The plane had reached altitude. Unfolding a soiled aviation map, Gus pointed to the bulge of the Vietnamese coast.

  “What we’re going to do,” he said, “is fly northeast until we’re beyond the coast, then due north over salt water. It’s farther, but there’re no cockroaches in the South China Sea. Okay?”

  To the west, like a fringed eyelid closed in sleep, lay the dark forested coast of Vietnam. The dappled water stretched to the horizon on all other sides. Christopher saw the phosphorescent wake of an American destroyer, on station off the mouth of the Mekong.

  Gus took his hands off the controls. “George is flying the aircraft—automatic pilot,” he said. “Are you going to stay awake?”

  Christopher nodded. Gus pulled the beak of his baseball cap over his eyes. “Shake me up if you hear strange voices,” he said, and went peacefully to sleep, chin on his chest, arms folded for warmth.

  The monotonous noise of the engines rose and fell as the propellers bit into the thin air above the sea. The heater sent torrents of scorched air into the cabin. Christopher felt slightly ill, as he always did in airplanes. Gus slept for more than three hours. When he woke, he drank water from an army canteen and offered it to Christopher. Then, yawning, he crawled into the backseat and rummaged in a canvas duffel bag, placing a Kulspruta submachine gun, identical to the one Horace had offered to Christopher, on the seat while he searched in the depths of the bag. He found what he wanted and got back into the pilot’s seat, leaving the weapon in full view.

  “Breakfast?” He offered Christopher one of the two thick chocolate bars he had got out of the duffel bag. The chocolate bars had melted and solidified again, so that they were hard brown puddles in their foil wrappers.

  Gus, chewing, checked his instruments. “Coming up on the moment of truth,” he said. “We’ve flown right up the 109th meridian, and in a minute or two we’ll have to make a left turn for Da Nang, if that’s where we’re going. But that’s not where we’re going, right?”

  “We’re going to Hue.”

  Gus stopped chewing his chocolate. His face twisted in disbelief.

  “Hue? All this mystery over bloody Hue? I thought at least we’d be landing in Laos to pick up a load of opium. Hue!”

  “What’s the charge for Hue?” Christopher asked.

  “No bleeding charge for Hue. But I’ve got to have an extra two hundred to compensate for the disappointment. I had you figured for a real soldier of fortune.”

  Gus, working with his instruments, changed course. Hue, the royal capital of old Vietnam, lay about a hundred miles to the northwest of Da Nang. He sorted through the charts, then threw them in the backseat.

  “No bloody chart for bloody Hue,” Gus said. “I don’t know if I can find the airport. You should’ve told me Hue. Have you ever landed in Hue?”

  “No.”

  “It’ll be the blind leading the blind, then. Neither have I.”

  Gus completed a long turn, leveled the wings, and put the controls back on automatic pilot. He folded his arms, pulled down his cap, and went back to sleep.

  The moon, still large and bright, had moved to the western horizon. Christopher had not slept since he left Paris. He closed his eyes and dreamed of his childhood again. His mother gave him her brilliant slow smile; they were riding in the Tiergarten; she was looking down from a tall horse at Paul on his pony. She wore polished oxblood boots. She offered him chocolate. He could smell chocolate and boot polish in his dream. He realized that he was grown up and his mother had come back. Hubbard had been right: she had lived, nothing could make her die against her will. “Now it’s all right to say good-bye,” she said. “But remember, they cannot order us to say good-bye. What right do they have to look at our faces when we say good-bye?” She held up Zaentz’s drawing of the Gestapo dandy; five policemen tore it out of her hands and beat it to shreds with their truncheons. Paul picked up the Gestapo dandy’s severed hand and took Lori’s passport from its grasping fingers. “Say good-bye now,” Lori said; “I’m going straight to Paulus, don’t worry.” She galloped away. Paul could not utter the word. Molly was beside Lori on another horse. “Good-bye, good-bye,” the women cried, galloping away with their sun-shot hair flying like pennons.

  In a loud voice, Gus said, “Bloody hell!”

  Over the nose of the plane, Christopher saw a coastline. The moon had set. The first bleached hues of the Asian sunrise touched the low-sailing clouds.

  “Overbloodyslept,” Gus said. “I thought you were going to stay awake.”

  “What’s that coast?”

  “Scenic Vietnam, of course, but where?” Gus said. “Look at the time. We flew through our destination.”

  Gus turned on the power for the radio. He switched bands and listened. The blurred chatter of pilots talking in English and Vietnamese, and in a language that wasn’t Vietnamese, faded in and out behind the static. Gus switched off the automatic pilot and began a wide turn, slapping the nose trim control with his open hand to lose altitude. He craned his head, looking for landmarks.

  “I’m going to be truthful with you,” he said. “I don’t know where the bloody hell we are. But I’m making a left turn here and that ought to bring us into Hue. I’m going to descend.”

  They flew a few feet above the treetops. “This is one way to find out if you’re in cockroach country,” Gus said. “Not recommended for the faint of heart. If we were, they’d be shooting at our arses.”

  He pointed forward. A complex of runways appeared a mile or two ahead.

  “I think that’s Hue,” Gus said. “Anyway, we’ll land and empty our bladders and tell ’em we got lost.”

  Gus spoke into the radio. The tower didn’t answer. He overflew the field, still talking. There was no response to his radio call and no sign of life on the ground.

  “Maybe the cockroaches have taken over in the night,” Gus said. Into the microphone he said, “Wake up, you cockroaches.” Still there was no response. “They’re all asleep,” he said. “No bloody radio, no bloody runway lights, no bloody anything.”

  Suddenly the runway lights came on. “Hurrah, the bloody janitor’s turned on the lights,” Gus said. “Hold on.”

  He made a tight turn, lined up with the runway lights, and made a fast, hard landing.

  As the taxiing plane bumped along, propellers catching the colors of the sunrise, Gus grinned apologetically. He reached into his shirt pocket and returned Christopher’s two extra hundred-dollar bills. “No charge for getting lost,” he said.

  It was a long taxi to the terminal buildings. Gus peered into the half-light. Christopher had no idea what the airport buildings at Hue looked like. These were the standard square concrete boxes, oozing with tropical lesions.

  Men ran out of one of the buildings.

  “Bloody hell,” Gus said. He slammed on the brakes and revved the engines, racing across the tarmac.

  Some of the men had leaped into a vehicle and raced across the field with headlights blazing. The plane shuddered as Gus increased speed. Beneath the peak of his cap his narrow face was grim; as he manipulated the controls, he ground his teeth.

  Gus reached into the backseat with one hand and grabbed the submachine gun. He handed the weapon to Christopher. “If they try to get ahead of us in that truck, shoot the bastards,” Gus shouted.

  Christopher put his face against the Plexiglas window and looked back. He couldn’t see the truck. The plane rose from the ground and fell again with a jar. Gus, his neck corded, pulled back on the control column, trying to get the plane to take off.

  “Get up, you beast,” Gus said.

  The wheels hit the ground again. Then there was another, shuddering crash and the plane went over onto its nose. As it began to cartwheel, Christopher re
alized that the truck had rammed them from behind. Gus, hanging in his safety harness, frantically cut the engines and threw the switches to activate the fire extinguishers.

  The machine landed right side up. “Out, out!” Gus cried. Christopher had dropped the submachine gun. Gus snatched it from the floor and kicked open the flimsy door of the plane.

  Before Christopher could get his own door open, a rifle butt smashed through the Plexiglas; the edge of the plastic sheet opened a cut four inches long on Christopher’s forehead. He felt nothing, but was blinded by the blood running into his eyes. He was pulled roughly out of the plane by at least two men and dragged away from the wreckage.

  Christopher struggled free and wiped the blood out of his eyes. He could not see perfectly, but he could see well enough. Two young men wearing wrinkled mustard-colored uniforms threw Christopher to the ground; he got a mouthful of powdery dirt and coughed as he inhaled it into his lungs.

  Gus was running for the tree line, a hundred yards from the edge of the runway. Three men in mustard uniforms were chasing him. Gus had covered about twenty yards. His pursuers shouted at him to stop. One of them fired a burst of automatic fire into the air. Gus lost his hat and Christopher thought he had been hit, but he kept running.

  Gus whirled and fell to one knee. The muzzle of his submachine gun blinked very rapidly. Parabellum rounds ripped through the wrecked fuselage and kicked up dirt near Christopher. The men who had been holding Christopher’s arms threw their bodies over his, as if to shield him from the bullets. He was still coughing uncontrollably, trying to expel the dust from his lungs.

  Gasping, Christopher tried to raise his head. One of the men pushed his head down and lay on it. Christopher thought, I am going to choke to death in the middle of a firefight.

  He squirmed until he could see. All three men pursuing Gus began to shoot. The noise of their weapons, firing on full automatic, sounded like a saw whirling through a log. The submachine gun flew out of Gus’s hands.

  Christopher thought afterward that he had seen parts of Gus’s body torn away by the high-velocity bullets; perhaps it was the noise like a saw that made him think that. Then it was absolutely quiet except for the sound of men breathing very close at hand.

  Still Christopher could not breathe. His arms were twisted behind him. These men, who were very young, did not smell like Vietnamese: their breath was clean, with no trace of the piercing fishy odor of Vietnamese food.

  Christopher heard a sob. Thinking that one of his boyish captors had been wounded, he looked into the flat features of the soldier who was twisting his arm. Christopher realized that he was in China, and that the sobs were coming out of his own throat.

  Two

  — 1 —

  In a secret trial, Christopher was convicted of espionage against the People’s Republic of China. He was sentenced to “death with twenty years’ suspension of execution and solitary forced labor with observation of the results.”

  “What exactly does that mean?” Patchen asked the Chinese intelligence officer who brought him the news. They faced each other across a table laden with food in the dining room of the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong. Neither Patchen nor the Chinese had much appetite, but both had wanted to meet in a public place.

  “It means that he is under sentence of death but that the sentence will not be carried out for twenty years.”

  “That’s a very cruel sentence.”

  “No, it is most clement,” said the Chinese. “Many of the criminals who receive this humanitarian punishment are saved.”

  “How does that happen?”

  “Through the observation of results. If the prisoner reforms, or if there are special circumstances, he may not after all be executed.”

  “Do you foresee such a result in this case?”

  The Chinese let his eyes wander over the crowd of sleek Chinese capitalists and white tourists who were enjoying the Peninsula’s famous buffet lunch. The serving tables groaned with more than two hundred different dishes, Chinese and Western. There was enough food in this room, for this one meal, to feed twenty imprisoned Christophers for twenty years.

  Patchen repeated his question: “Do you foresee such a result in Christopher’s case?”

  The Chinese emerged from his reverie and looked into Patchen’s impassive face. “It is for the prisoner to answer that question,” he said, “the prisoner and his government. Christopher does not have a good attitude. He insists that he is not an American espionage agent.”

  “That happens to be the truth.”

  “Then why are you here, Mr. Patchen? We will make no progress if we are not honest with one another.”

  “I agree. That’s why I’m telling you the facts. He had resigned before he landed on your territory. He was not on an official mission.”

  “Is that the position of your government?”

  “It’s the truth.”

  The Chinese frowned. “Then there is little hope,” he said. “In order for the prisoner to be saved, he must admit his crime and understand it. That is the first condition. Equally important, the United States must admit officially that this man Christopher was an American spy; your government must apologize publicly to the People’s Republic of China for having sent the terrorist Christopher into our country to commit his criminal acts.”

  Patchen and the Chinese looked at one another, two men with impassive faces, shabbily dressed by the flashy standards of the place they were in.

  “How long are you prepared to wait for your apology from an American government?” Patchen asked.

  “According to the terms of the sentence, twenty years. But that is a matter for your side to decide; it need not be twenty years.”

  “What, in the meantime, will happen to Christopher?”

  “He will perform useful work.”

  “Will he be permitted to receive letters or parcels or visitors?”

  “No.”

  “Will he mingle with other prisoners?”

  “No.”

  “Then he has been condemned to twenty years of solitary confinement with the certainty of death at the end of it?”

  “He is a dangerous counterrevolutionary. Perhaps he will yet show the right spirit. Perhaps a future American government will show the right spirit. We must hope that the right results will be observed.”

  Patchen did not nod or smile or make any gesture to signify that he understood. He tucked money under his plate to pay for the lunch. Then he and the Chinese stood up and walked out of the room, leaving their laden plates on the table.

  — 2 —

  On the anniversary of Christopher’s capture, Tom Webster was the first to arrive at the club. Though he was not a member, the porters knew him, and when he came into the foyer out of the bitter January wind, they greeted him by name and asked the ritual question always put to strangers: “Would you like to use the facilities, Mr. Webster?”

  Webster declined, and they showed him up the stairs to the private dining room that Patchen had engaged for the evening. It was a windowless, somber room, paneled in walnut. Four weak bulbs, screwed into a brass chandelier, gave off the only light. A silver candelabrum, charged with five unlighted candles, stood on the round table. Its mirror image, blurred and yellow, shone in the polished mahogany. Five places had been set with the club’s worn silver.

  As he waited for a drink, Tom Webster tried to imagine Christopher in his cell in China. He could not do it; instead, he pictured him as he would look on the day of his release twenty years hence—thinner, older, broken. Although it was only seven o’clock, Webster was already drunk. The death of Molly had broken his spirit; thinking of Christopher in prison, thinking of the dead girl, he could hardly live with his conscience. In his imagination, he shook hands with this ghost of the future and said, “I was the last one to see Molly alive; what happened in Paris was my fault.” What would Christopher say?

  An elderly waiter brought Webster a glass of Scotch whisky on a tray.

  “Is
that all right, sir?”

  “Fine. Do you have a match? I want to light the candles.”

  “I can do that for you, sir.”

  “No. I’ll do it.”

  When Horace Hubbard arrived, all five candles were burning. “Patchen is downstairs,” he said, “waiting for Wolkowicz.”

  Webster nodded. “What is this all about?” he asked.

  “Patchen didn’t say exactly. It’s about Christopher.”

  Patchen and Wolkowicz arrived, followed by the old waiter.

  “Double Rob Roy,” Wolkowicz said.

  Patchen ordered a club soda, without ice, and drank it in silence. His graying hair was brushed flat on his long head. He wore spectacles with narrow black frames and small round lenses. These gave him a look of meekness. Even his enemies had always thought that he would become Director; now his chances were spoiled, some said, because he had tried to protect Christopher—and, worse, had believed his last terrible reports.

  “I think we can sit down now,” Horace said.

  Another waiter came in carrying a tureen of soup. Wolkowicz caught him by the sleeve and ordered another Rob Roy. He was the last to sit down, and as the legs of his chair squealed across the floor he looked around the table with his hard eyes.

  “Who’s the fifth man?” he asked.

  Patchen, filling the wineglasses, paused with the bottle in his hand. “The empty place is for Christopher.”

  Wolkowicz had been lifting his Rob Roy toward his lips. He paused, stared incredulously at Patchen, and then finished his gesture, drinking off half a cocktail.

  Patchen lifted his own glass.

  “Absent friends,” he said.

  Tom Webster and Horace Hubbard raised their wineglasses and drank.

  Wolkowicz drained the dregs of his Rob Roy. “Boola boola,” he said.

  Patchen ate the least and was finished first. The level of wine in his glass had fallen about an inch. As the cheese was passed around, Wolkowicz filled Webster’s wineglass to the rim and emptied the last of the Burgundy into his own.

  “Okay,” Wolkowicz said, “what’s the news?”