“You had a lot of enemies out there, too. It was because you were good. Barney always said you were the best.”
“Barney said that?”
Pong tossed down his brandy. His eyes watered and a deep flush crept up under the brown skin of his unlined, youthful face.
“You know Barney. He’d never say anything like that. But he didn’t like your enemies. He took care of you.”
“Took care of me?”
“Took care of your enemies. You’d better ask Barney.” Pong laughed. “Hell of a lot of good that’ll do you. He won’t tell you what he did for you. It was a lot, though, no shit.”
Stephanie came out of the toilet. Pong stopped speaking. But instead of returning to the table, she strolled through the shadowy restaurant, looking at the decor, travel posters of Thai scenes. Pong’s daughter joined her and they chatted. Pong looked on with approval. Stephanie, with her neat body and her tawny coloring, looked something like the Thai girl. Her black hair was less beautiful.
“Your wife?” Pong asked.
“No.”
“Maybe you should marry her. At least she’s quiet. American woman talk so fucking much. They answer all the questions, they choose the food. I say to my daughters: ‘Not you, baby.’ I’d send them back to Thailand if they pull that shit. They don’t want to go, they want to be American girls—college, boyfriends, music all the time, crazy ideas. But not around me.”
Pong poured himself a third cognac, then put the cork back in the bottle, slapping it home with his horny palm. In his day, he had been a killer, skilled with his bare hands, good with weapons. In Vietnam, when he worked for Wolkowicz, he had carried a box of sand with him in the car; waiting for Barney, he would pound the edge of his hands into the sand, hundreds of blows every day. His hands had been like two stone axes. Obviously he remembered his youth with pleasure.
“You missed the worst parts in Vietnam,” he said. “There was a lot of mess to clean up. I helped, right up until I came to the States.”
“Working for Barney even after he left?”
“Sometimes, odd jobs. He always keeps in touch.”
“How about you, Pong? Do you keep in touch?”
“The guys come in here for a meal. I see some of them. I remember them all. Barney taught me how to remember faces—you divide them in three, right? I knew you right away.”
“There’s one guy from Saigon I’ve been trying to remember,” Christopher said.
“Yeah? Who’s that?”
“A pilot. His first name was Gus.”
“Gus Kimber,” Pong said without hesitation.
“Kimber? Was that his name?”
“Skinny guy, used dope, didn’t give a shit for anything. He did a lot of stuff for Barney. That was the only Gus I knew.”
“I heard he was killed.”
“Gus? Killed?” Pong chortled. “Not this Gus. He’d get himself beat up in bars, but that was it. He was in here last year, drunk as a skunk. He’s giving flying lessons out West somewhere. Shit, wait—he left a card.”
Pong snapped his fingers. His daughter brought him a cigar box. It was full of business cards. Pong put on a pair of half-moon reading glasses and went through them. He found a Polaroid snapshot of himself, standing in front of a moored cabin cruiser. In the snapshot, he wore a yachting cap.
“My boat,” he said. “Chesapeake power squadron.”
Peering over the tops of the half moons, Pong watched for Christopher’s reaction to this evidence of his affluence. Despite his gray hair, despite his history, the glasses, perched on his round face, made him look like a child playing with a grown-up’s things. At last he found Gus Kimber’s card and gave it to Christopher.
Christopher read it and handed it back.
“Blythe, California,” Pong said, peering through his lenses. “That’s in the desert, near the Arizona line, according to Gus. No trees as far as the eye can see. Gus liked that. He didn’t enjoy having the Cong shooting at his ass whenever he’d have to fly over the jungle, I remember that.”
Pong closed his cigar box and took off his glasses. He rested his hands on the lid of the box and, unable to stop himself after his long day at work, yawned.
He covered his mouth with one hand and lifted the other in apology to Christopher. On his index fingers he wore Nguyên Kim’s ruby rings.
Nine
— 1 —
“You want to see the intaglios?” the woman asked, when Christopher called Gus Kimber’s number in Blythe. She had a stripped American voice, loud and free of accent. Christopher didn’t know what the intaglios were; he didn’t ask. The woman didn’t wait for his answer.
“The best time to see them is sunup,” she said. “The charge is fifty dollars for a half-hour flight. Gus’ll meet you out at the airport at five-thirty. You’ll see the sign: Kimber Flying Service.”
Christopher flew to Phoenix and rented a car. It was after midnight. Driving westward through the desert, he realized that he was truly alone for the first time since he had left China. He stopped the car and got out. The moon had set and the black sky above this empty country was filled with stars. A gust of wind brought him the parched smell of dust, like the dust he had inhaled during the firefight after Gus’s plane had crashed in China.
He drove on. It was not yet five o’clock when Christopher arrived at the Blythe airport. In the starlight he could see small planes parked on the apron. A dog barked furiously behind a chain-link fence, then wriggled through a gap in the wire and leaped onto the hood of Christopher’s car. The animal, a mongrel with a lot of Alsatian blood, snarled at him through the windshield, scratching the paint as it scrambled for a foothold on the smooth body of the car.
Headlights approached, jouncing on the rough dirt track that led in from the highway. An old Jeep pulled in beside Christopher’s parked car and its driver, a man wearing a high-crowned Stetson, leaped out. The dog barked at him. He seized it by the collar and the tail and flung it, like a sack of garbage, into the darkness. The animal hit the ground, yelping, twenty feet away, and scuttled off.
The man in the Stetson looked through the windshield. Christopher lowered the window.
“Sorry about the dog,” the man said. “It belongs to the night watchman—he turns it loose if he sees a strange car. Hard on the paint.”
The rising sun, its disk still invisible beyond the eastern ridgeline, sent a shaft of light through a cleft in the rocks.
“Might as well crank her up,” the man said. “The sun’ll be up by the time we get up in the air. You know the price?”
Christopher got out of the car and handed him a fifty-dollar bill. There was just enough light for them to see each other. The man unsnapped the breast pocket of his western shirt and put away the money without looking at it. He wore a stainless-steel Rolex watch on his left wrist.
“Couldn’t Gus make it?” Christopher asked.
“What?”
“I was expecting Gus.”
“I’m Gus,” the man said, in a strong Texas accent.
He was lanky, an inch or two taller than Christopher, with a lean, weatherbeaten western face, unmistakably a Texan.
His aircraft was a Piper Super Cub, a slow, reliable machine. Once they were airborne, scorched air blew into the cockpit from the heater. The mountains to the east were still purple with night, but the sun made little ponds of light on the barren flanks of the hills to the west. Below them the Colorado River, shining in the morning light, wound through squares of irrigated land, green and placid as paddy in Asia.
The plane climbed, bucking a little as it crossed the water, and flew over the bleak desert. Gus banked and pointed downward. On the flat top of a high mesa, directly below, Christopher saw the outline of an enormous human figure. It was at least a hundred feet in length. Gus nudged Christopher and pointed again: the figure had large pendulous testicles. Nearby was the outline of a deer.
“Those are the Blythe intaglios,” Gus shouted. “You know the history?”
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Christopher shook his head.
“Some lost pilot found ’em in 1932,” Gus said. “Just flew over and there they were. Nobody’d ever seen ‘em before. You can’t see from the ground. Whoever made ‘em, made ‘em by turning over stones that are dark on one side and light on the other, so the light side is up.”
Gus flew to another mesa. There were more intaglios below, winged objects like flying machines, concentric circles that looked like targets, Maltese crosses, and other abstract designs.
“They’re all over the place,” Gus said. “Nobody knows who put ‘em here, or why, or what they mean.”
“Can you land on the mesa?”
“Sure, this thing’ll land anywhere. But you can’t see anything from the ground.”
Gus landed the Super Cub on a tiny patch of rough ground, littered with sharp stones, among huge rocks. The two men walked together to the intaglio. Gus crouched down, a long-shanked figure in his jeans and boots, and turned over a stone.
“See?” he said. “Black on the bottom, light on the top. This is the guy with the testicles. The Indians who made these—if it was the Indians—never did get to see ‘em. You’ve got to be at least five hundred feet above the deck.”
Gus replaced the stone carefully, in the exact spot from which he had taken it, and stood up. It was full daylight now. The wind took Gus’s hat; he caught it deftly in midair.
Christopher told him who he was.
“No shit?” Gus said. “The guy who was in China all that time?”
“Yes.”
“Glad you made it back. How long ago did they get you?”
“Ten years ago last January. You were in Saigon about that time, weren’t you?”
Gus nodded and pulled his hat down tighter on his forehead. The wind was growing stronger. Gus shot an anxious glance at his plane, which was rocking in the wind only a few feet from the edge of the mesa.
“That was a bad year for me,” he said. “It started out bad. I got the shit beat out of me in Saigon on New Year’s Eve. Busted my face, ruptured my guts, I was a mess.”
“You were in the hospital?”
“For a solid month. They had to take out my spleen and I had this fucking cast on from my neck to my knees.”
“Bad luck.”
“It was only the beginning. While I was in the hospital, some son of a bitch stole my airplane. A brand-new Piper Apache.”
“Did you get it back?”
Gus shook his head. “No, that mother was long gone. I had another plane for a while, but shit, I got tired of that scene out there and came on back after about a year.”
Gus’s eyes were on his Super Cub. Holding on to his hat, he started to walk fast over the carpet of stones in the direction of the parked machine. Christopher followed him.
“Did you see the fellows who beat you up?” Christopher asked.
“No, I don’t know who the fuck they were. I walked out of Rosie’s—that’s where it happened—turned right, and got cold-conked. D’you ever hit Rosie’s? They had a girl in there who smoked cigarettes with her pussy.”
“I was there once.”
“I imagine the Communists closed it down. I wonder what Rosie’s doing for a living.”
“Was it a fight you were in, or what?” Christopher asked.
“It wasn’t much of a fight. Some son of a bitch popped me on the back of the neck. He damn near killed me; separated vertebrae and I don’t know what all. He must have kicked the shit out of me while I was out, lying on the ground. Took everything, my watch, five hundred dollars, my stash—I used a little dope out there, like everybody. Gave it up when I got home, though: the love of a good woman.”
Gus hurried toward the plane. Light as a kite, it rocked in the wind that swept like a draft in a chimney up the sheer face of the mesa.
“Did you ever meet a Chinese pilot out there?” Christopher asked. “Little fellow, spoke with a cockney accent?”
Gus seized a strut and put his weight on it, to anchor the plane.
“A Chink pilot with a cockney accent? No. All the pilots I knew out there were cowboys. Help me turn this sucker around.”
They turned the plane into the wind. Gus started the engine and took off, flying off the edge of the mesa. The plane dropped, then soared above the intaglios.
“Christ knows there could have been a Chink like the one you’re talking about,” Gus shouted above the stammer of the engine. “They had everything in Nam.”
— 2 —
In Christopher’s absence, another episode of “The Patrick Graham Show” went on the air. This time, Graham told his audience about the Sewer.
“You and Wolkowicz were the stars again,” Patchen said to Christopher. “Deep beneath Vienna, Graham showed us the actual spot where you crouched with your machine gun, mowing down the Red dogs. He knew all about the code machines, all about Wolkowicz’s medal.”
“He seems to know everything.”
“Not quite everything. There was no mention of Darby, no mention of Ilse Wolkowicz. Graham’s source is being very selective; he’s not giving him everything. You’d think that would make Wolkowicz happy—he comes off as a hero every time. But no.”
They were walking, in a light mist, down the familiar path through the Georgetown campus. Patchen took off his glasses and wiped them: economically, one lens only. There was no need to polish the glass that covered his blind eye.
“You’ve seen Barney?” Christopher asked.
“We talked on the telephone. He won’t show himself at all. Even Graham can’t find him.”
“He’s disturbed?”
“You could say that. He wants me to turn the Outfit inside out, find Graham’s source, cut off his dingus.”
Patchen, swinging his bad leg, took a dozen steps before he spoke again.
“To be honest with you,” he said, “I’m not so sure that the Outfit is the right place to look for Graham’s man.”
Patchen’s tone was even and controlled, as if he had always been perfectly willing to talk to Christopher on this subject.
“You think an outsider could have access to this kind of information?”
“I didn’t say an outsider. For example, Darby is still alive. So far, everything Graham has learned is something Darby knew. And there’s been no mention of Darby on the air. Why?”
“Has Graham been to Moscow, to interview Darby?”
“I don’t think so, but of course we don’t have him under surveillance. Anyway, it doesn’t have to be Moscow. For that matter, it doesn’t have to be Darby. Others are also alive.”
“It could be me,” Christopher said.
Patchen stopped and his dog came bounding back to him, its wet coat opalescent under the sodium lights.
“Yes, it could be you,” Patchen said. “It could be anyone. It could be Wolkowicz, or me, or somebody with a multiple personality.”
He set off down the path, walking rapidly again. Christopher kept pace in silence.
“I don’t think Wolkowicz is pointing in the right direction,” Patchen said. “All this material of Graham’s is old. It all has something to do with you. The timing—right after the Chinese let you out. . . .” Patchen slowed down again. “You don’t think that’s strange?”
Patchen sighed, a deep, exasperated sound. The Doberman froze, confused by this unfamiliar signal from his master.
“You think you know, don’t you?” he said.
“Not all the details, not yet. I think I understand the reason.”
“Tout comprendre est tout pardonner,” Patchen said in his dreadful French. He rubbed his face, as if after all these years he could wake up the feeling in it. “Or is it?” he said.
He spun around and set off in the opposite direction, leaving Christopher alone on the path.
— 3 —
“Patchen wants to believe it’s an outsider?” Wolkowicz said. “Sure he does. They always want to believe that. The Outfit has never been penetrated, right? It’s fucking unthin
kable. They all went to the Fool Factory together and sang ‘The Whiffenpoof Song.’ They wouldn’t let themselves be recruited by some peasant of a Russian in a J. C. Penney suit.”
“That’s not really what I wanted to talk to you about,” Christopher said.
A cold wind filled with rain whipped down the low canyon formed by the buildings in the zoo. They hurried around the elephant house to the entrance; it was too wintry for the animals to be outside. Wolkowicz wore no topcoat, not even an undershirt; the curly black hair on his chest was visible beneath the transparent fabric of his soaked drip-dry shirt. Inside, he didn’t bother to wipe the water from his hair and face. The keepers were cleaning the cages. The atmosphere smelled strongly of ammonia. Wolkowicz inhaled. His mind leaped to another subject.
“When I was a little kid in Youngstown, Ohio,” he said, “my father always used to get me out of bed in the middle of the night to see the circus load and unload. He was a circus freak. One night, about two o’clock in the morning, as I’m sitting up on my old man’s shoulders, watching them put the animals on board, along comes this Barnum & Bailey midget. The midget is drunk. He’s all dressed up in a suit with a checked vest and a watch chain and he’s wearing a derby hat. He’s with his buddy, the Strong Man, also drunk; they’re singing dirty songs. There’s a cop on duty and he walks up to the midget, swinging his nightstick, and gives him a dirty look. ‘Better get on the train, pal,’ the cop says. ‘We don’t want no drunk midgets in Youngstown, Ohio.’ The crowd is with the cop, local pride is aroused. ‘Yeah,’ says the crowd, ‘yeah.’ ‘Hold my hat,’ says the midget to the Strong Man, handing him his derby. The midget walks up to the cop. ‘There are those among us,’ says the midget to the cop, ‘that have rubbed the likes of you plumb into the elephant shit.’ ”
Wolkowicz got out his peanuts and fed the elephants. His voice reverberated against the bare walls of the concrete building. He didn’t seem to care if the keepers heard what he had to say next.
“If fucking Patchen had left me alone,” he said, “Graham would be rubbed into the elephant shit by now. I’d have it on film, I’d have it on tape, there’d be no mystery. Just remember that. You were there when he pulled me off Graham. You saw him, kissing the fucking Constitution.”
The Last Supper Page 39