The Last Supper

by Charles McCarry

  “You look well,” Patchen said at last.

  “I’ve been leading a healthy life,” Christopher said.

  The attendant brought drinks and a dish of salted nuts. Christopher ate the nuts. Patchen watched with disapproval.

  “Too much salt,” he said. “Salt is a villain to the middle-aged.”

  Christopher drank his orange juice, upending the glass as before. He put down the glass and waited for the other men to speak.

  “Did the Chinese tell you why you were released?” Patchen asked.

  “I didn’t know that I was being released until I saw Horace,” Christopher replied.

  “What did you think was going on?”

  “I didn’t know. It seemed possible that they were going to execute me. They don’t explain, they just do things.”

  Patchen’s watchful face reminded Christopher of Ze. So did his way of speaking; Christopher had often imagined Ze speaking to his children, if he had any, in the same tone he used with him.

  “You made an excellent impression on the Chinese,” Patchen said, “and you should know that it is that, and not anything the Outfit or anyone else in the U.S. government did, which led to your release. You have nothing to thank your country for. You’re under no obligation to tell us anything.”

  “I see.”

  “Good. I’m not going to let anyone from the Outfit anywhere near you. If you want to talk to me, or Horace, that’s fine. But it’s your decision.”

  Plunging into things in this way, Patchen seemed to take it for granted that Christopher was still the man he had always been. This puzzled Christopher, who did not himself know for certain if he had kept his sanity.

  “You may not have much peace and quiet,” Patchen said. “There was a lot of fuss when you turned up in China. That died away, of course, but when the media find out you’ve been released they’ll be baying at your heels.”

  “The media?” Christopher said.

  “You don’t know that word? You will. It’s what used to be called the press. It would be better to keep your homecoming quiet, but secrets have been banned in America. Patriotism is the new pornography. You’ll notice great changes in our country.”

  The attendant brought food, an American airline dinner of salad, filet steak, and buttered vegetables. The tray looked exactly as it had looked in the past, but it smelled much stronger. Christopher ate the salad, holding the bowl under his chin and using his fingers. Then he consumed the bread. The attendant poured wine into stemmed glasses. Patchen examined the label; it was a good Pomerol. He drank it as he ate. Christopher finished in a matter of seconds and sat back, watching Patchen and Horace wield their knives and forks. He drank no wine.

  Patchen ordered the table cleared.

  “There’s something else,” he said. “It’s not good news.”

  Looking into Patchen’s face, Christopher knew what had happened. Patchen told him anyway.

  “It’s a death,” he said. “Your Australian girl, Molly.”

  Christopher asked his first question: “When?”

  “The night you left Paris. She followed you to the airport. She was hit by a car. Tom Webster saw it happen.”

  Christopher unbuckled his seat belt and got up. He went into the toilet and shut the door. The fluorescent bulb came on with a sound like a trapped insect. There were no shadows at all; everything in the little cubicle was made of plastic or metal.

  Looking into the mirror for the first time since the night of Molly’s death—he remembered exactly the time and place where he had last seen himself in a glass: the men’s room at Orly, Tom Webster standing beside him—Christopher recognized himself at once.

  His hair was cropped short and it was darker than he remembered. His face, too, was darker, not in color, but in the loss of light, as if youth had been burned out of it by a disease. Still, he was the same man.

  Christopher tried to remember Molly as he had seen her so many times on the Ponte Sisto. He could imagine the bridge, imagine the roofs and the trees of the city beyond it, imagine the brown Tiber flowing beneath it—imagine, even, the jovial noise of Rome and the way the city smelled of dust and coffee. But, looking into his own eyes for the first time in all these years, he could not make Molly appear again in his memory. She was gone.

  Silently, watching himself in the mirror, he began to cry. He tried to speak. For the first time in ten years, he had no control over his actions; his body was acting on its own, tears squeezing out of his eyes, words squeezing out of his larynx. He heard a noise deep in his throat, then a whisper, and finally a shout. Each time, he repeated the same word: “Good-bye.”

  As he wept, what he remembered best was the stinging pain he had felt on the day he had seen his mother for the last time, when the policeman had struck him with his truncheon.

  Four

  — 1 —

  “Tell me about Paul Christopher,” Patrick Graham said.

  “I don’t know anything about him,” Stephanie Webster replied.

  “But you knew him. You told me that he used to come to your parents’ place in Paris.”

  “When did I tell you that?”

  “In New York.”

  “Christ. Is there anything about New York that’s slipped your mind?”

  Just after college, Patrick and Stephanie had, for part of a summer, been fellow members of a revolutionary cell in the East Village. They had plotted kidnappings and assassinations and bombings; they had had sex with each other; they had taken Arab underground names as a demonstration of their solidarity with the Third World. They had never actually committed an act of violence or subversion; in the style of their generation, it was all a game.

  In the end, most of the members of the underground cell went back to their families. Now Stephanie was a psychotherapist. Patrick Graham was a television reporter with star quality. She hadn’t seen him for at least two years.

  “Come on, Saffiyah,” said Graham, calling Stephanie by her underground name. “It’s too early in the morning to be coy.”

  It was seven-fifteen. Graham’s face, on tape, flickered on the kitchen TV; he had turned it on when he came in, and now he held up a hand for silence as he listened to his own strong voice as it described the state of his latest investigation. Graham’s speciality was the exposé.

  Stephanie Webster opened the door of her refrigerator and poured herself a glass of juice. She had gone out at six-thirty as usual for her morning run through Georgetown, and when she returned she had found Graham waiting on her doorstep. She was still damp with sweat. Stephanie drank her apple juice and shivered; her body was cooling too quickly in the air-conditioned house.

  Patrick Graham still watched himself on the tiny screen of the Sony. Stephanie did not like television; the set had been a gift from her father. She stripped off her sweatband and spoke in a piercing voice in order to be heard above the television set.

  “I’ve got to shower and go to work,” she said.

  Graham followed her out of the kitchen and up the stairs. The chic house that she lived in, a narrow brick structure in what had once been a slum, would have sold for half a million dollars on the current market. Works of art worth more than that hung on the walls. Graham recognized a Seurat, a Cassatt, a Hicks. He knew about such things. He had studied art history at Yale.

  “What the fuck are you doing in a place like this?” he said.

  “House-sitting,” Stephanie said.

  “Who for?”

  Graham never left a question unasked. Stephanie didn’t answer. The house belonged to Horace Hubbard, but this was not a name she was going to speak in Graham’s presence. She went into a bedroom and closed the door. Graham tried to follow, but Stephanie had locked the door. He put his ear to the panel and heard the shower running.

  When Stephanie came back downstairs, dressed in the jeans and blouse and tweed hacking jacket that she wore to work, she found Graham looking at the pictures. He had turned on the track lights the better to see them. On
his face, as he leaned toward the Seurat, was a look of lust.

  “It’s theft from the people, to own such paintings,” he said.

  “Unless you’re the one who owns them. Look, I’ve got to go.”

  “Do you just leave this stuff in the house?”

  “There’s an alarm system. You can’t get near them without bells going off and cops jumping out of the closets. Out, Patrick.”

  “Whose house is this?”

  “No one you know.”

  Stephanie shook her key ring at Graham and jerked her head toward the front door.

  “You haven’t told me about Christopher,” he said.

  “I was a child the last time I saw him,” Stephanie said, holding the front door open. “He was a nice man and he always seemed to have a beautiful woman with him. He used to drop in for a drink. Then the Chinese arrested him.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “Espionage, the papers said.”

  “I mean why. What was his mission in China? If he was a friend of your father’s you could have heard the real story. You used to play with your dolls and listen to spies while they talked about their dirty tricks, at least that’s what you always said in New York.”

  “I never played with dolls.”

  “Nothing changes. Even in the cell you wouldn’t tell any real secrets. It was just a lot of talk about how tough it was to be an Outfit brat. Never any details, just a bunch of Freudian junk.”

  “I don’t know any real secrets.”

  Stephanie pushed Graham out the door, turned on the alarm system, and pulled the door shut. As she turned the key in the lock, Graham asked her another question.

  “Who else from the Outfit was he close to, besides your father?”

  “For all I know, Patrick, Paul Christopher sold ballpoint pens for a living. I don’t know who he knew.”

  “Wolkowicz? Did he know Wolkowicz?”

  Stephanie blew out an exasperated breath, waggled her fingers, and got into her Volkswagen. As the engine started, Graham rapped on the window.

  “Did he know Wolkowicz?” he asked through glass. “By God, he did; I can see it in your eyes. That’s wonderful Steph.”

  — 2 —

  “In your absence, Paul,” Sebastian Laux said, “Elliott and I made a number of decisions about your property.”

  “Property?”

  Sebastian refused coffee and waited until Elliott’s servant left the room before he spoke again.

  “We thought you’d want a place of your own when you came back,” Sebastian said. “We guessed you’d prefer Washington. Your friends are there. It’s a small house, but quite nice.”

  “A house?”

  “On O Street,” Sebastian said. “There’s a small garden in the back. Horace lives in it when he’s in Washington. While he’s been in China, Tom Webster’s daughter, Stephanie, has been house-sitting, but she’s got a line on another place, so it’s yours at any time.”

  “How? I had no money.”

  “But you did have money,” Sebastian said. “Your father left an estate of $78,587.”

  “He left it to my mother, nearly thirty years ago.”

  Sebastian and Elliott exchanged smiles. They were selecting cigars and the conversation stopped while each rolled a Havana beside his ear, listening for the faint crackle of the tobacco leaf. Sebastian clipped the end off his cigar and handed the cutter to Elliott. He drew a candle toward him and began to speak again as he puffed energetically, releasing bluish smoke.

  “Twenty-nine years ago,” Sebastian said. “Precisely. You wouldn’t touch it. You said it belonged to your mother.”

  Elliott spoke. “It’s yours, Paul,” he said. “It’s always been yours. We took the liberty of making that legal, some years ago.”

  “You’ve had my mother declared legally dead?”

  “Yes. I hope that doesn’t disturb you.”

  “You found proof of her death?”

  “No,” Elliott said. “I don’t think there’ll ever be proof. But she’s been missing since 1939. Can she have survived—the camps, the war, whatever came afterward?”

  “People do survive,” Christopher said. “There’s no actual proof that she’s dead.”

  For a moment, neither Elliott nor Sebastian said anything more. Sebastian held Christopher’s eyes with his own bright gaze.

  He chose not to ask a question. Christopher was finding that no one wanted to ask him questions. His relations and friends behaved as if there were no such place as China. His imprisonment was like a disfiguring war wound, seemingly invisible to everyone but the wounded man.

  Sebastian produced a document from the inside pocket of his jacket.

  “This is your balance sheet,” he said. “There have been the inevitable taxes. But it’s not a bad picture, overall. Thirty years is a long time to let a capital sum grow undisturbed. We’ve averaged a modest ten percent, compounded.”

  The balance sheet was a heavy yellow document covered with columns of figures handwritten in black ink.

  “Just tell me, Sebastian,” Christopher said. “How much of the seventy thousand dollars is left?”

  “Seventy-eight thousand. Then there was an additional ten thousand that’s been working for only ten years.”

  “An additional ten thousand?”

  “Tom Webster found it in a bed in Paris. He said it belonged to you.”

  “In a bed?”

  “Was there a young friend of yours, an Australian girl? Tom thought she’d left it behind.”

  “Molly,” Christopher said. “It’s the money I left for her.”

  “So, you see,” said Sebastian, “it isn’t a matter of how much is left, but of how much it has grown. Not counting the house in Washington, you are worth . . .”

  Sebastian put on his glasses and peered at the balance sheet.

  “. . . One million, four hundred fifty-eight thousand, two hundred ninety-two dollars,” Sebastian said.

  Elliott burst into laughter.

  Sebastian leaned across the polished table, offering the balance sheet to Christopher. “Your family has always thought that money is comical,” he said. “This time it is a joke, in a way. I often thought of it in the past ten years, Paul, as your fortune grew. The joke is on the Red Chinese. You must have been the biggest capitalist in captivity over there.”

  — 3 —

  Christopher moved into the house in Washington at once. He still followed his prison schedule, rising at dawn, going to bed at dusk, eating little. Otherwise, he adjusted quickly to freedom: the house was full of books, his and Horace’s, and he had hung up the drawing of Lori. He had begun to write out the poem he had composed in his head in prison. He worked very early in the morning at a desk by a window that looked out onto the street.

  He was seated at his desk, copying out lines he had composed in the early days of his captivity, when he saw Barney Wolkowicz on the sidewalk in front of his house. It was just after first light, but Wolkowicz was already dressed in a suit and tie. He carried a battered pigskin attaché case. He looked into the window and grinned at Christopher with his crockery teeth.

  Inside the house, he gripped Christopher’s shoulders and shook him in his old gesture of affection, but said nothing. His eyes wandered. He went to the piano in the living room and struck a series of chords. Wolkowicz made a face; the piano was badly out of tune.

  His eye fell on Zaentz’s drawing of Lori. He ran a finger along the backs of Christopher’s books; he went to the desk and squinted at the lines of poetry Christopher had written out on sheets of foolscap.

  “Got any coffee?” he asked.

  Christopher went into the kitchen and made coffee, using the elaborate machine that had come with the house. Wolkowicz sat down in a kitchen chair. When Christopher set his coffee before him, he heaved his attaché case onto the table, worked the combination lock, and opened it. From the jumble inside he extracted a pint bottle of Scotch. He poured whisky into his coffee cup and put the bottle
back into the attaché case. There were two other pints inside. So that they would not rattle, Wolkowicz padded them with Outfit files marked Secret.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I’m still a fucking alcoholic. We all are, except Patchen. Have you seen any of the others?”

  “Patchen and Horace, on the plane.”

  “No debriefers?”

  “Patchen is protecting me from debriefers.”

  “Is he? It’s great to be all-powerful.”

  Wolkowicz heaved himself to his feet and poured a second cup of coffee. This time he drank it without whisky.

  “So,” he said, “how did the Chinks treat you?”

  “All right.”

  “They didn’t cut off your dingus or anything like that?”

  Christopher smiled. “Nope.”

  “No shit? They used to go in for that in a big way.”

  Wolkowicz blew his nose. He put his handkerchief away. “Just out of curiosity, kid,” he said, “what were you doing in China in the first place?”

  “The pilot got lost,” Christopher said.

  “Got lost? He must have been some pilot. What happened to him?”

  “After we landed, he shot at some Chinese soldiers. They shot back.”

  “That must have been exciting. Where’d you get this guy?”

  Christopher said, “It was your friend Gus.”

  A look of puzzlement flashed across Wolkowicz’s face. “Gus?” he said. “Gus? How the fuck could it have been Gus?”

  “It was Gus who answered the phone in Saigon when I called the number you gave me.”

  “I gave you his number?”

  “In Zermatt.”

  Wolkowicz frowned. “You’re right. I did.” He shook his head in wonderment. “I’ll be goddamned,” he said. “Gus. That’s unbelievable.”

  Wolkowicz poured a third cup of coffee. His hand was perfectly steady. He opened the attaché case again and mixed himself another toddy. Christopher had not smelled alcohol on another person’s breath for a long time.

  “It’s terrific the way things turn out,” Wolkowicz said. “I’m fifty-five years old. In my whole life, I’ve liked, actually liked, two people—you and your father. He was killed right in front of my eyes, and now it looks like I got you thrown into jail for what—ten years? eleven?—by recommending the wrong pilot.”