“Because he was getting away.”
Graham’s crew had chalked the outline of Hubbard’s dead body on the pavement. With the sergeant, Graham stood over this drawing.
“Then what happened?”
“Wolkowicz put the colonel and the dead Kraut—the guy who was driving the car that killed Colonel Christopher—in the staff car and drove away.”
“What did you do then?”
“I policed the area.”
“Policed the area?”
“Looked for any evidence and cleaned it up.”
“What did you find?”
“The brass—the empty shells, right?—from Wolkowicz’s P-38 and my .45. The Kraut agent dropped his briefcase. There was nothing in it but a sandwich but I took it anyway, in case there were fingerprints. And then there was the envelope I told you about.”
Graham’s voice grew more urgent.
“There was an envelope. Let’s talk about that envelope.”
“Colonel Christopher was carrying it. It flew out of his hand when the car hit him. I found it over there, in the grass. It was busted open and the pages were blowing around. Otherwise I would have missed it.”
“Pages? It was a file, a secret file.”
“Everything was secret in our Outfit. It was all in German.”
“You couldn’t read it?”
“Only the name on it.”
“What name was that?”
“Christopher, like the colonel. The first name was a German girl’s name, I can’t remember it. There was a photograph.”
Patrick Graham turned to the camera. “Even after thirty years, Sergeant Mitchell remembers the face in the photograph. Using a police artist, we’ve reconstructed that face.”
Lori’s face, coarsened by its long stay in the memory of the alcoholic sergeant, flashed onto the screen and over the network.
“This woman was the wife of Hubbard Christopher, an American spy who was killed in Berlin just after the war,” Graham said to the cameras. “She was also the mother of Paul Christopher, an American spy who has just been released after spending ten years in a Chinese prison. She herself disappeared in 1939, suspected by the Nazis of treason and espionage. What are the connections of this family to Barney Wolkowicz? We’ll explore that subject in a future broadcast.”
— 5 —
On the day he returned from Berlin, Wolkowicz called Stephanie Webster at work and told her that he wanted to see Christopher. He gave detailed instructions as to the time and place of the meeting.
When the two men met, in the Hirschhorn Sculpture Garden, Wolkowicz did not waste time explaining how he knew that Stephanie saw Christopher every day. This was the sort of information Wolkowicz always possessed.
“You’re the first person I’m seeing in Washington,” Wolkowicz said. “After that TV show, I suppose you think I lied to you about your mother.”
“No, I don’t think that. But if Graham had the facts, you left something out of the story you told me.”
“That’s right. I thought the whole thing had gone far enough. Your father had this obsession that your mother was alive. Why should you inherit it?”
Wolkowicz was agitated. Words rushed out of him. He seemed eager to tell Christopher these secrets. It was a startling change. To the old Wolkowicz, even the smallest secret was something to be jealously guarded, and never to be shared. Christopher had never before seen him in such a state.
Wolkowicz sensed his puzzlement. He put an arm around Christopher’s shoulders and walked him among the sculptures.
“This has bothered me for years,” he said. “Then to have you see it on TV. Jesus.”
“Was my mother alive?” Christopher asked.
“Your father hoped so. He got hold of part of her Gestapo file.”
“How?”
“It just turned up in some stuff an agent handed over. But it was just the first pages of the file. Photograph, date of birth, color of eyes, suspicious associations. I never read the whole file.”
“What happened to it?”
“I don’t know that, either. Jimmy Jo Mitchell said on the Graham show that he picked it up. That was the first I knew about that. He must have turned it in. If he’d kept it, Graham would have had it on TV in living color.”
They walked among the abstract sculpture, misshapen chunks of stone and metal, gouged by the chisel and burned by the torch.
“I don’t know how anyone can like this shit,” Wolkowicz said. “Look at it. Nothing’s finished, for Christ’s sake. What happened? Did all these sculptors die right after they got started?”
It was early in the day and it had been raining. There were few people in the sculpture garden—a group of schoolchildren, a young woman with a sad face speaking urgently to a man who carried a briefcase. Beneath a glistening form of stainless steel, Wolkowicz paused and looked around to be certain that he would not be overheard.
“I don’t want you to think bad things of me,” he said. “That day at the Harbor, after your father’s funeral, I couldn’t tell you all the facts. You were still an outsider, you weren’t cleared. Then, when we got the medals, you heard what happened.”
“But not that my mother was involved.”
“Paul, listen. She was only involved in your father’s mind. His dying had nothing to do with her.”
“What did his dying have to do with, then?”
“The Russians. Everybody in Berlin was crazy then. They were flyswatting people right and left.”
“So they baited a trap with my mother and flyswatted my father?”
Wolkowicz’s slanted eyes, bloodshot and rheumy, examined Christopher. He blinked rapidly. He shook his head, got out his handkerchief, and blew his nose and wiped his eyes. For a long time, he did not reply.
Then he said, “No. I was the one who gave him the file, it was my agent we were going to meet. The Russians just saw an opportunity and grabbed it. Hubbard was too good; he was hurting them.”
“How could that happen? What about your security? How could the Russians do that, see an opportunity, know exactly where to be and when to be there?”
Wolkowicz tried to speak but couldn’t. He coughed violently and spat on the ground. Finally he was able to speak again.
“I used Ilse to set up the meeting,” he said.
Wolkowicz was hungry. They took a taxi across the river to Alexandria. Wolkowicz ordered the cab to stop at an intersection near the old part of the town. From there he and Christopher walked for several blocks, ending at the door of a restaurant called the Thai Pagoda.
Wolkowicz pounded on the door. A young girl grinned delightedly through the glass at Wolkowicz. She let them in, twittering in Thai, and locked the door behind them. Bowing and smiling, she led them inside. She had been setting the tables for lunch. She seated them at one of the tables and trotted to the bar.
She returned with two Rob Roys on a tray. Wolkowicz spoke to her in Thai. She left the two drinks in front of Wolkowicz and went away again. In a moment she was back with a club soda for Christopher, then disappeared into the kitchen again. Christopher heard other female voices and smelled the aroma of cooking.
“We can talk here,” Wolkowicz said. “It’ll be a couple of hours before the lunch crowd arrives.”
But, waiting for his food, he lapsed into silence. When the meal came, a breakfast of fried eggs and rice, he broke the yolks and mixed them with the rice and condiments and ate the mixture, sprawling over the plate and shoveling with chopsticks.
Wolkowicz had not mentioned Hubbard or Lori since he had had his fit of coughing in the sculpture garden, an hour before. But now he picked up the subject as if only seconds had passed.
“Your father was the smartest man I ever knew,” Wolkowicz said, “but on this one subject he was irrational. He must really have loved your mother.”
Christopher waited.
“It was tough, watching him,” Wolkowicz said. “He just couldn’t accept that she was dead.”
“Was that it? If he had seen proof, he would have accepted it. There was never any proof.”
“No proof?” Wolkowicz stared hard at Christopher. “You don’t think she was alive, do you?”
“I don’t think anyone can know. Did you know that I was alive in China?”
Wolkowicz shook his head, as if to clear it of a hallucination, and stared at Christopher.
“No,” he said. “To answer your question, no—I didn’t know for a fact that you were alive in China.” He laughed his rough barroom laugh. “You know what they all said about you? They said, ‘Poor Christopher, he’ll come out completely changed, the Chinks will destroy his mind.’ I said, ‘Horseshit.’ Nothing changes you. You’re just like your old man, a fucking genius. It isn’t just brains. It’s persistence. You never give up. You’re the only two I’ve ever known. It must run in the family.”
Wolkowicz looked at his watch.
“Gotta go,” he said.
He left no money on the table and when the Thai girl let them out, no bill was offered. The girl twittered again and laughed at Wolkowicz’s jokes. She went outside and looked up and down the street, shaking her apron to cover the activity, before smiling at Wolkowicz to signal that the street was clear.
“Old friends run this place,” Wolkowicz said. “It’s a good place to leave messages for me. Sterile paper, sign it Max if it’s urgent and I’ll meet you the next morning at ten and every third hour after that on the hour, in the zoo, by the elephant cage. You remember how to do it.”
“What about your house? I don’t have the address.”
“I’m never home,” Wolkowicz said brusquely.
He led the way outside to a bus stop.
“We’re going different ways,” Wolkowicz said. “I’m sorry all this shit is coming out. There’ll be more, you know. We were in on a lot of things together, you and I. The Sewer, Darby, all that crazy shit in Vietnam. Nothing’s sacred. Fucking Graham’s got a direct line into the Outfit.”
“I don’t understand it.”
“Neither do I. Maybe Patchen does. Ask him, the next time you’re out walking the dog together.”
Wolkowicz’s bus pulled up to the opposite curb. Without another gesture, he dashed across the street, puffing and holding on to his gun through the wrinkled cloth of his checked polyester jacket.
He leaped aboard his bus at the last moment. As it pulled away, Christopher saw Wolkowicz in the bluish brightness of its interior, glaring suspiciously at his fellow passengers, one after the other.
— 6 —
“Does my mother’s file exist?” Christopher asked. “Have you been able to find it?”
They were walking in the cool of the evening. Patchen, less eager to blurt the truth than Wolkowicz, did not answer Christopher’s question at once.
“I’d like to see the file,” Christopher said.
Patchen paused on the path. The Doberman stopped too. They were under the same streetlight where, in the early summer, they had encountered Wolkowicz.
With a sudden movement, strange for Patchen, who was never spontaneous, he gripped Christopher’s shoulder with his good hand. The pressure was painful: Patchen was tremendously strong in the unwounded parts of his body.
“The answer is no,” he said. “You’re out. Stay out.”
“We’re not talking about the Outfit, David. Graham has found a trace of my mother.”
“He’s found no such thing. There is no trace.”
“Then what is there?”
“Paul, I know how your father felt, I may even know how you feel. But thirty years have passed.”
“And somebody named Patrick Graham knows more about what happened to my mother than I do, than my father did? If he knows, David, it’s because the Outfit has always known.”
Patchen turned a haggard face to his friend.
“How could I have forgotten how you are?” he said. “You’re a Jeremiah, you always have been. Everything you’ve ever touched, every mystery you’ve ever solved, has caused unbelievable trouble. You’re a truth junkie. Leave it alone, Paul. Go running with Stephanie. Write poetry. But don’t look for answers. There are no answers.”
For Patchen, this was a very long speech. Disturbed by his loss of self-control, he turned his back on Christopher and looked up at the streetlamp. Its saffron glow deepened the scars on his face and brightened the color of his white hair.
Christopher realized that he had, once before, seen Patchen give way to emotion. When they were still in the Marine Corps, recovering from their wounds in a naval hospital, Christopher had pushed his friend in his wheelchair to a ceremony. An admiral had awarded Patchen the Silver Star—a very high decoration for a marine in the Second World War—and the Purple Heart for his wounds. His scars were fresh then; his ruined eye was covered by a patch; he expected to lose the sight in his other eye, the doctors had told him that it would go blind in sympathy.
On the way back to his bed, Patchen ripped the medals off his bathrobe and threw them into the shrubbery, as if they were insulting small coins that had been left as a tip.
There had been emotion on his face then. Patchen had hated his life, hated his country, hated Christopher, whose own wounds, a bullet through the leg, were so clean, so trivial. In years to come, women would touch Christopher’s wounds in bed, neatly healed punctures on an otherwise perfect body, and murmur in admiration. No female would ever caress Patchen’s scars.
Beneath the streetlight in Georgetown, Patchen’s emotion passed.
“I’m sorry, Paul,” he said. “You reminded me of the past. Too much has happened to you. No matter how much I tell myself it was all your own fault, I feel responsible. Stay out, just this once. Give me a little time and I’ll tell you anything. But not now.”
“Sorry,” Christopher said. “I’ve waited long enough.”
Seven
— 1 —
When Christopher told Stephanie that he was going to Massachusetts, she rescheduled her Monday appointments so that they could spend a long weekend together. She had a secret present for him.
After the long drive in Friday night traffic, they arrived at the Harbor in the dark and slept in the narrow bed in Christopher’s old room. Stephanie woke first. When Christopher opened his eyes, he found her sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed, watching him like a cat.
She gave him a package. Inside, bound in leather and printed in handset type on heavy rag paper, was his prison poem.
“There are only two copies,” Stephanie said.
Christopher smiled. “Who’s the other copy for?” he asked.
“Not who you think.”
She lay down beside him and kissed him in her measured way, as if each caress were a means of gathering a small new fact about her lover. Usually Stephanie recovered almost at once from sex, but on this morning, lying in Christopher’s room—a boy’s room with the photographs of his family all around—she seemed reluctant to let it end.
“I’ve wanted to give you something from the start,” she said.
“The book’s a wonderful present.”
She shook her head and sat up so that she could look into his face.
“Not just the book,” she said. “Something more. The other book is for your child, when it’s grown.”
“My child?”
“That’s what I want to give you.”
“Stephanie, I’m old enough—”
“Don’t. I know our ages. I’m not speaking of marriage. If you want a child, we can start one. I’m saying that.”
She looked around at the pictures.
“It’s a way for all these people to live a little longer,” she said. “It’s wrong to let what you love die out, Paul, if you can keep it alive. You owe something to the future.”
Stephanie nodded briskly. The question was settled. Smiling in satisfaction, she turned her head to one side and began to braid her hair for their morning run.
— 2 —
It wasn’t a long drive to the v
eterans’ hospital, about an hour over back roads through the hills that Christopher remembered from his boyhood.
He found Sergeant Jimmy Jo Mitchell sitting on a log bench in a grove of pine trees on the hospital grounds. He wore a baseball cap with the logo of Patrick Graham’s television network stitched on the front. Candy wrappers and empty whisky bottles lay among the unpruned canes of dead rose bushes.
“I wished I could’ve got in touch with you,” Mitchell said, “but I figured somebody had probably done that or they wouldn’t have let me go on the air. I didn’t want to do a thing to hurt anybody belonging to Colonel Christopher.”
“You haven’t hurt anyone.”
“That’s good, but I knew it was okay,” Mitchell said. “When the TV got in touch with me and started asking about Berlin, I said I’d have to check it out. So I called the Outfit and told ’em what I was being asked.”
“What did the Outfit say?”
“They said sure, go ahead.”
“Who said that?”
“The guy who called me back. When I called, I left a message. It had to go up through channels. It took a couple of days for them to get back in touch.”
“What was his name?”
“He didn’t give a name, just said it was the Outfit calling.”
“You remember his voice?”
“Very hoarse. What’s the matter, you think he was a phony?”
“No.”
“Good, because there’s no way he could have been a phony. He called me Dogpatch over the phone. That’s my old code name from Berlin. Nobody but the Outfit could know that.”
Christopher asked about Lori’s file. Mitchell had turned it in to the duty officer at headquarters. He’d never seen it again.
“It wasn’t the originals, not the typed pages, you know? It was photographs, enlargements.”
“You could see the face of the woman, even though it was a photograph of a photograph?”
“It was blurred, but I could see it.” He laughed. “I guess I could see it. At first I couldn’t. I drew a blank, nothing. But then they hypnotized me.”
The Last Supper Page 36