The Last Supper

by Charles McCarry

  As Waddy spoke, he watched Christopher. He saw that he wanted to ask a question, and he paused.

  “He hated you?” Christopher said. “What happened in Burma?”

  “We got separated during a firelight. I got away on an elephant.”

  “On an elephant?”

  “You must know the story about Waddy’s magic elephant,” Alice said.

  “It’s a boring story,” Waddy said. “Paul doesn’t want to hear it. The long and short of it is, I escaped and Wolkowicz didn’t and the Japs gouged out his teeth with a bayonet. Naturally he was upset, anyone would be. But it was the fortunes of war. Back to the spy ring. After all, the Outfit knew I was queer—I was thrown out after I failed the lie detector test. I passed the questions about being a Russian spy. Those questions didn’t bother me; I was innocent. It was Have you ever had a blow job from a queer? that did me in.”

  Patchen, very still and upright in his chair, asked a question: “Do you still think it was a personal vendetta?”

  “God, no. Wolkowicz is too efficient for that. The truth dawned on me when I was still in prison. If I had been an FBI spy, I would have been invaluable to the capitalists. I won the confidence of all the members of Mordecai Bashian’s spy ring. We talked about our cases. Every one of them told me the same thing: they knew Jocelyn all right; they had all enjoyed her favors; Mordecai Bashian had been her pimp and they knew Mordecai as a friend and a progressive. Furthermore, they were all Party members or fellow travelers and they all were working for communism in any way they could. They were very keen politically. All that was true, nobody denied it. But this is the vital point, David: Every single one of them was accused and convicted of the wrong crime. They had entirely different assignments, entirely different targets, entirely different superiors from the ones they were convicted of having. The Addressees Spy Ring didn’t exist, it was a figment of the imagination.”

  Alice whooped. “Waddy, why haven’t you ever told before?”

  “I was waiting for the right audience.”

  “What did Mordecai Bashian say about all this?”

  “Well, of course he acted out the part of spy master. What would you expect him to do? It was his hour of glory.”

  “Mordecai claimed that the ring was real?”

  “To me, yes. I told you, he thought I was an FBI spy. He thought I’d fricked poor Jocelyn, penetrated his operation. ‘Stupid bourgeois cow!’ he’d say. But back to the point. It was all for the best. There was a purpose.”

  Waddy looked alertly at Patchen, fondly at Christopher, triumphantly at Alice. He had surprised his sister into real laughter; she wiped the tears from her eyes.

  “Look how wonderfully it turned out for everyone,” said Waddy. “Wolkowicz got decorated again, the congressional committee was happy, the press was ecstatic. Happiest of all was the international Communist conspiracy, me included. Think about it. All Wolkowicz and the committee got were little fish, me and that ass Mordecai Bashian. The really big fish got away and went right on being Russian spies. David knows who they were, I’ll bet. They wouldn’t believe the names, would they, David? What a diversion!”

  Waddy reached across the table and gripped Christopher’s hand. “You never know,” he said. “That’s the message, that’s the meaning. I thought my life meant nothing, for years the truth was hidden from me, Paul. But if I’m right—and I think I’m right, don’t you?—then I’ve been pretty useful in my way. That’s the test of belief, the test of commitment—to submit when you don’t understand, to let yourself be used.”

  “Like Jocelyn Frick,” Alice said.

  — 2 —

  Stephanie remembered her meeting with Waddy aboard the France. On the second night out, someone had organized a passageway party. The doors of all the first-class staterooms had been thrown open, everyone had put out bottles and canapés, and passengers in evening dress had wandered from cabin to cabin, chattering and drinking.

  “I had just turned fourteen then,” Stephanie said, “a skinny little kid. Pants suits had just come in in Paris, they’d hardly been seen in public. Mommy had bought me one: it was velvet, dark blue, it came with a ruffled shirt. My hair was cut very short then, I’d had it chopped off. Daddy called me Steve, for a joke.”

  “I remember,” Christopher said.

  By now, Stephanie was not surprised by Christopher’s memory.

  “I wore my velvet pants suit to the party,” she continued. “It stormed all the way across the Atlantic on that trip. The ship was heaving, things were falling off the tables. Half the people there got sick and rushed into the bathrooms, so there were a lot of stray husbands and wives all mixed up together. The air was thick with adultery.”

  “You observed all this at the age of fourteen?”

  “I was a spy, Mommy always said so. Anyway, I wandered off by myself and was sitting in a strange cabin when Waddy came in. I had a vague idea of who he was. He’d been talking to my parents and I knew he and his sister were some sort of ex-relatives of yours. He was wearing a velvet dinner jacket like mine.

  ” ‘We match,’ he said. ‘Bored by the party?’

  “I said I was very bored.

  ” ‘Me, too. My name is Waddy. What’s yours?’

  “I said, I don’t know why, ‘Steve.’

  “Waddy offered me a cigarette out of a gold case, as though I’d been smoking for years. This won my confidence completely. I remember giggling a lot as I puffed away. Waddy was a terrific gossip. He’d noticed the ridiculous thing—a mannerism, a nose, a voice, clothes, whatever—about every single person at the party. He was like a child, very observant, funny-malicious. He never once asked me where I went to school or any of the other stupid questions adults usually lay on kids. He gave me sips of his champagne: he’d brought a bottle with him.

  “He asked me if I liked velvet. I said sure. He said his sister couldn’t stand it, couldn’t touch it without shuddering. He stroked my jacket, just the sleeve, and invited me to stroke his. ‘Imagine shuddering! Women are strange,’ he said. He closed the door, turned around, and started stroking me, as if it were a game. I knew it was no game. I wasn’t at all shocked or frightened—a little scared of getting caught, of course, but not afraid of him.”

  Stephanie laughed. In the last light of evening, they were sitting in the garden behind the house on O Street.

  “I haven’t thought about this for years,” she said. “I’ve never told anyone except my therapist about it. The fact is, I do think about it. It was my first real sexual arousal. Waddy was really quite sweet. He was holding me on his lap. Waddy was panting a bit and that tickled me, it made him seem vulnerable. All of a sudden, to my amazement, Waddy put his hand between my legs.”

  Stephanie giggled. “He leaped as if he’d been shot.

  “ ‘You’re a bloody girl!’ Waddy cried.

  “My hair was cut like a boy’s, I was wearing what could have been boy’s clothes, I had given him a boy’s name. Naturally he’d thought I was a boy.

  “At this moment, the door opened and in came the owner of the cabin in a cloud of perfume. She was a German. I remember that this woman was wearing a silver evening gown. Waddy’s face was still distorted by surprise and, I suppose, disgust. He looked at the woman. She looked at Waddy, who in his shock had not removed his right hand from its resting place.

  “ ‘Vot are you doing in my cabin?’the woman said. She had a German accent—her English was perfect, but she said v for w and expectorated her consonants.

  “ ‘Just chatting,’ Waddy replied.

  ” ‘Chatting? Chatting? You call this chatting? I’m going to call for the captain and have you put in the brrrrig!’ the woman said.

  “She was outraged. She made a hell of a scene. It made a much greater impression on me than Waddy’s stroking. She was a Valkyrie, this woman, busty and fierce. She sent for Waddy’s sister and threatened them both with the brig. The sister was tougher than Waddy. She not only saved him from the brig by calming the
woman down, but also got me to say that it was all a mistake.”

  Stephanie laughed again. “Of course it was all a mistake. Poor Waddy. It was years before I understood what had happened.”

  “Is that all that happened?” Christopher asked.

  “All?” Stephanie’s good humor was still bright in her face. “There are people who’d pay a shrink twenty thousand dollars to dig out a story like that.”

  Stephanie took Christopher’s glass out of his hand and stood up. “It’s getting too cold to sit out here,” she said.

  “What happened?” Christopher asked. “Did they tell your parents, was there trouble between Waddy and your father?”

  Stephanie bit her lip. “No, thank God. I was in trouble enough with my conscience for being a spy.”

  “For being a spy?”

  Stephanie bit her lip, deep in a thought of the past.

  “That’s interesting,” she said. “It must have been the perfume and the German accent that triggered that. I haven’t thought about the Baroness for years.”

  “The Baroness?”

  “That’s just what I called her. I used to tail her around Paris. She was a woman of mystery. I’d see her in the Parc Monceau, always by herself. She came to watch the children. She had this terrifically melancholy look. So I tailed her.”

  “You followed her?”

  “All over Paris, for weeks. It was what I did after school. Then one day I caught up to her, in Aux Trois Quartiers. She was trying on dresses. I hid behind a rack, observing her. She grabbed me.”

  “Grabbed you?”

  Stephanie nodded. “She pulled me into a changing booth. She was in her underwear—no slip, just pants and bra and a garter belt. It was terrifying. ‘Vhy are you following me?’she hissed. She shook me like a Raggedy Ann. I thought I was a goner. I’ve been frightened of garter belts ever since.”

  Stephanie started to leave. Christopher took her hand. His palm, months after his release, was still unyielding and rough, like a slab of raw lumber.

  “Finish the story.”

  “I was rescued. Wolkowicz rescued me.”

  “Wolkowicz?”

  “He burst into the changing cubicle and grabbed me away from the murderess. Barney was in Paris for some reason; he’d been to the house a lot. He must have been tailing somebody himself. He just happened to be there.”

  “What about the woman?”

  “She smelled of perfume, clouds of it. That’s why I’ve never been able to wear it, I guess. Ah, analysis!”

  “But what happened to her?”

  “I don’t know; I never saw her in the Parc Monceau again. Wolkowicz hurried me out of there and took me home. He got the whole story out of me. ‘You need your little ass paddled,’ Barney said. But he never told on me. Mommy would have done worse than paddle.”

  “Do you remember what the woman looked like?”

  “Just the underwear. It was that sleazy pink stuff, with lace.”

  Christopher asked Stephanie if she objected to being hypnotized.

  “Hypnotized?” Stephanie said. “Whatever for?”

  He told her about Sergeant Jimmy Jo Mitchell.

  “I’m not sure I want to see the Baroness again,” Stephanie said.

  “But I do,” Christopher said. “I want to be sure she wasn’t somebody I knew.”

  Christopher had never before asked Stephanie to do anything that was not absolutely sane. She didn’t know how to refuse to do this for him.

  “All right,” she said lightly. “If I can choose the hypnotist.”

  — 3 —

  “It looks like her,” Patchen said. “Anything is possible.”

  He slid the drawing back into its envelope and handed it to Christopher.

  “And what if it is her, after all these years?” he said. “What would that tell us?”

  “That she’s alive, that she’s in the West.”

  “I guess that’s interesting. Obviously it’s interesting to you.” Patchen looked at a still life on the wall of his living room, as if it contained a more tantalizing face than the one Christopher had just shown him. “Tell me,” he said, “how do you find a hypnotist? Do you look in the Yellow Pages?”

  Patchen, who had no small talk, seemed ready to drift away into chitchat. As he spoke, he was busy at a side table. He took the stopper out of a decanter of port, poured two glasses of wine, replaced the stopper, put the glasses on a tray, offered the tray to Christopher. Because he had to do everything one-handed, this took a long time.

  Christopher took the port even though he did not want it and held it in his hand. Patchen, who had such an orderly mind, could not seem to remember that Christopher did not drink wine. He offered him nuts from a bowl. Christopher took a walnut and cracked it in his bare hands.

  “You seem to be on a trail,” Patchen said. “Alcoholic sergeants, Waddy Jessup, hypnotists. What are you trying to find?”

  “Explanations.”

  Patchen shrugged, the most passionate gesture in his repertoire.

  “So many people are dead,” he said. “Mordecai Bashian and that woman, Jocelyn Frick, are dead. Your father, all those people in Vietnam. Did you know about them? Nguyên Kim, the Truong toc—murdered about the time you were captured. A car bomb for the Truong toc; Kim was strangled. There were those who thought you’d killed them. Clearly that was impossible. Not you. In any case, everyone is dead. But then, interviewing the dead was always one of your specialties, wasn’t it?”

  Patchen examined his still life again. It was unlike him, this wandering gaze.

  “Do you have a theory?” he asked. “Do you know what it all means?”

  “Were you listening to Waddy? He called the Addressees Spy Ring a diversion. Maybe everything, all along, was diversion—just one diversion after another.”

  Patchen sipped some port. He was having trouble with his voice. He had become less and less audible, and now spoke in a croaking whisper.

  “It’s as good a theory as any,” he said. “If dead women can float up from Stephanie Webster’s mind wearing garter belts, why should anything be impossible?”

  Patchen cleared his throat repeatedly. He couldn’t speak. Christopher handed Patchen his own port and the other man drank it. It opened his throat and he came back to the original subject.

  “Are you going to show this to Wolkowicz?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Should I?”

  “Do as you like. Do you have some way of finding him? I don’t. As far as I know, Barney sleeps under bridges. His apartment is never used. Where does he go at night? It’s a mystery.”

  Patchen smiled his agonized smile, as if even he, at times, was amused by Wolkowicz’s unrelenting suspicion of everyone and everything.

  — 4 —

  To Christopher’s surprise, Stephanie liked the food at the Thai Pagoda.

  “It’s my radical principles,” she said, eating highly seasoned pork and canned pineapple off a skewer. “If it comes from the Third World, it has to be good for you.”

  Christopher wrote something on a scrap of paper and gave it to the waitress as she cleared away the plates. It was late; Stephanie and Christopher were the last customers. The lights dimmed.

  “I think they want us to leave,” Stephanie said.

  “Not yet,” Christopher replied.

  Firm footsteps crossed the empty room. The proprietor, his muscular torso stretching the thin material of a white silk shirt, stood beside their table.

  “Hello, Pong,” Christopher said. “How have you been?”

  “Alive and well,” Pong said. “I thought it was you when you came in the other day with our friend, but it’s been a long time.”

  Pong shook hands, first with Stephanie, who flinched at his strength, then with Christopher. His English had improved since his days in Saigon as Wolkowicz’s driver, and he had a new ease of manner. He wore designer clothes and jeweled rings on his powerful hands. He drew up a chair and sat down.

  He snappe
d his fingers, a detonating sound in the empty restaurant, and the pretty little waitress brought three extra desserts and a bottle of cognac. She bowed to Pong and went away. Pong poured the liqueur himself.

  “Is that your daughter, the waitress?” Stephanie asked.

  “Right,” Pong said. “She’s in medical school, Georgetown. Off duty, she’s a real American girl. The whole family are citizens. We had a special bill in Congress.”

  “How did you manage that?” Stephanie asked.

  “Friends,” he said. He lifted his glass to Christopher.

  Christopher wet his lips with the cognac. Pong drained his glass, then folded his hands in his lap, out of sight.

  In Vietnamese, Christopher said, “Is Barney a partner, or did he just help you out when you started this place?”

  “Barney never wants anything for himself,” Pong said in the same language. He jerked his head toward Stephanie. “She doesn’t understand?”

  Christopher shook his head. Stephanie got up and went to the ladies’ room.

  “English is better,” Pong said. “I never liked Vietnamese. Now, less. You want to contact Barney?”

  “Yes, but it’s not urgent. Do you know where he is?”

  “I can take a message. Maybe Barney told you I still do him some favors.”

  Pong and Christopher smiled at one another, two old friends of Wolkowicz’s who understood what friendship with him entailed.

  “I’m always glad to help Barney out,” Pong said. “It really has been a long time. You retired now? Everybody’s retiring.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t miss the life,” Pong said.

  But he did. He poured himself another brandy, rings flashing, and offered more to Christopher. Like other old agents Christopher had known, Pong enjoyed a good gossip. He mentioned two or three other names, Outfit people from his days in Vietnam.

  “Everybody on the Vietnamese side was mixed up with the Cong —everybody. Barney knew that,” Pong said. “Nobody else would believe it. Not even you, my friend. There were Vietnamese you actually loved. Remember?”

  “I remember.”