Wolkowicz turned his back on the elephants and grinned as their trunks searched for the fresh bag of peanuts in his pocket. He had heard what Christopher had said to him five minutes before. Now he was willing to acknowledge that fact.
“You said you wanted to ask me something,” he said. “What?”
“I wanted to ask you about Gus Kimber. I went out to see him in California.”
“You still think it was him who flew you into China?”
“No, but it may have been his plane. He says it was stolen.”
Wolkowicz frowned in concentration. It took him only seconds to remember.
“That’s right,” he said. “Gus got busted up in a fight, too. I had to sneak him into the army hospital under fake ID; he was just a contract type, like all the fliers. The Outfit would never give those guys medical benefits; they were too low-class.”
“Was the stolen plane ever found?”
“Are you kidding? It’s probably hauling opium out of Laos right now. If Gus wasn’t your pilot, who was?”
“Whoever stole his plane. When I went into China, did anybody run a check on the pilots in Saigon?”
Wolkowicz watched the keepers for a moment. Their shovels rang against the concrete floor.
He said, “Patchen polygraphed them all.”
“Himself?”
“I don’t know. It happened after I left Saigon.”
“What were his conclusions?”
Wolkowicz let another moment pass before he answered. “Patchen wouldn’t say,” he said. “He wouldn’t let anybody near your case.”
“Not even you?”
“Especially not me. I thought we should go in after you. We had all those helicopters. We could have got you if we’d have gone right in, while you were still on Hainan Island.”
“Is that where I was?”
“Two hours from Da Nang, right? Where did you think you were? Patchen thought my plan was incautious. He always thinks I’m incautious. He handled every little thing, right from the start. I imagine he was very cautious. He went out himself to talk to the Chinks after you were sentenced. He went out to get you on the airplane when you got out.”
Wolkowicz bared his false teeth.
“Just a perfect friendship,” he said.
Ten
— 1—
In his London club, Sir Richard Shaw-Condon smiled in genuine pleasure.
“It’s marvelous to meet you at last, my dear fellow,” he said. “I can’t think why it’s taken so long. I knew your father well, you know. And we have masses of friends in common. Of course, you’ve been away, haven’t you?”
Christopher smiled in return. Sir Richard sipped Riesling from a green-stemmed glass.
“You ought to have some of this hock,” he said. “We’re rather proud of it. It’s a ’71, best year of the century, they say; tastes of hyacinths and honey. That’s from your father’s poem about German wine. Do you know if your father actually ate hyacinths, ha-ha?”
Sir Richard had been delighted to hear from Christopher; he had fond memories of Hubbard.
“At my age,” he had shouted into the phone when Christopher called him from America the day before, “one lives rather in the past. Very glad to see ghosts—even the sons of ghosts, ha-ha.”
Across the table from Christopher, Sir Richard ate smoked salmon, using two forks; he had been raised to believe that it was a sign of low birth to cut fish with a knife. Sir Richard, now retired, had never quite reached the top in his intelligence service, but he had become very senior. Every day of his life, he had taken two hot baths and at the age of seventy he had the pink soft skin of an infant. He still had his mirthful schoolboy face. His flaxen eyebrows and mustache had turned snow-white. Beneath his coat he wore his school cricket sweater, with the rampant lion of Worksop College stitched in blue on the breast.
Christopher looked around the dining room. This was a club for men who had fought behind enemy lines in the Second World War. Half a dozen members, most of them older than Sir Richard, ate alone at small tables. The club offered only a cold lunch: with his noble Rhine wine, Sir Richard, after finishing his salmon, ate a Scotch egg, pale pink ham-and-chicken pie with a soggy crust, and a mound of cold sliced beets. His glance followed Christopher’s.
“This place had its great days, but I’m afraid they’re past,” he said. “Everyone’s dying off. Their war dies with them, you know. Sad, really.”
On the walls, smudged by forty years of tobacco smoke, hung group photographs of underground fighters—Frenchmen and Belgians in berets, Greeks in tassels, Yugoslavians in peasant boots, Burmese in sarongs. At the center of each group, in thick woolen battle dress or in khaki shorts and rolled-up sleeves according to the climate, stood a young British officer, the team leader.
“Strange, isn’t it, to think of old parties like these leaping out of Mosquitoes and Dakotas by the light of the moon?” Sir Richard said. “Still, they had a good war.”
Sir Richard took the dripping bottle out of its ice bucket. Christopher’s wine was untouched. He filled his own glass.
“You asked about Rosalind Wilmot,” he said. “She’s round and about. I’m sure I have a number for her in my book.”
“Maybe you can give it to me. I’d like to see her.”
Sir Richard got out his address book and read off Rosalind’s telephone number.
“You two were great friends in Vienna days, I know,” he said, going back to his Scotch egg. “Marvelous woman, Rosalind. I always thought she’d make a useful wife—mine, by preference. But it just wasn’t on. She’s awfully attached to that young brother of hers, Clive. He got his leg blown off in Ulster.”
“What news is there of Robin Darby?” Christopher asked, abruptly.
Sir Richard looked up from his food. A quick smile twitched at his lips: so that was what Christopher was up to!
“Very little, you know,” Sir Richard said. “The Russians gave Darby the Order of Lenin and a sumptuous flat in Moscow and I suppose he’s advising or translating or doing whatever it is that heroes of the Soviet Union do after they get caught.”
“He’s still living?”
“Rotting away, you mean. We don’t inquire, really. Have you come to London to reopen the Darby case?”
“Nothing so dramatic as that.”
“Good. I should have thought you chaps would have drama enough at home these days, starring on television. Amazing, the things your press is permitted to do, amazing. Do taste that hock.”
Christopher tried the Riesling. Because of his ancestry, strangers had always assumed that he liked German wines but, in fact, he had always found them too sweet. Christopher put down the glass and nodded in appreciation.
“What I would like to do, if you’d introduce me to the right man,” he said, “is look through the club’s collection of photographs.”
“Photographs?”
“Of the special operations teams from World War II. They still maintain the archives?”
“I believe so,” Sir Richard said. “But you won’t find any pictures of your father, you know. One didn’t pose with one’s agents in Hitler’s Germany.”
“It’s not my father I’m looking for. There’s a face I can’t place.”
“Whose face is that?”
Christopher smiled. “That’s what I hope to discover. In prison, I tried to sort out the names and faces of everyone I ever knew. . . .”
“Whatever for?”
“To pass the time. I got them all but one. There’s one face I can’t put a name to.”
“British?”
“I think he must have worked with you during the war, in the East.”
Sir Richard gave Christopher a keen glance from under his theatrical eyebrows. They were so symmetrical that Christopher realized that Sir Richard must have them trimmed, like his mustache.
“It must have been hell,” Sir Richard said, “lying in a cell, not able to place the chap.”
“Exactly.”
“Yes.”
“Your father was like that, you know,” Sir Richard said. “A bear for detail. Nothing escaped him, nothing. Of course you may look at the family albums. I’ll fix you up after lunch.”
The aged waiter took away their plates and came back with two squares of pastry, glazed with some sort of syrup.
“Treacle tart,” Sir Richard said. “You hardly ever see it in England nowadays, thank heaven.”
Christopher spent the afternoon in the club library, studying yellowing photographs. Using a large magnifying glass provided by the club secretary, he examined each likely face.
Finally, in a photograph made in 1944, he found the face he was looking for, in the second row of a group of half-naked young Asians, posed before a pagoda in the jungle. They were armed to the teeth with rifles and pistols, knives and swords and grenades. The team leader, a tall bearded youngster with knobby knees and a face full of intelligence, was seated in an armchair. He wore a sarong and a British officer’s cap and held a blossoming frond of some kind in his hand instead of a weapon. What a joke, he seemed to be saying with his drooping flower, what a prank it all is: the war, death, the jungle, these earnest brown and yellow killers having their picture taken.
Receiving this droll message across the decades, Christopher smiled.
According to the indexing information, the officer’s name was Captain R. Dirzinskaite, D.S.O., M.C.: a strange name for an Englishman.
— 2 —
“A very strange name,” Rosalind Wilmot said. “That’s why Robin changed it to Darby after the war; Lithuanians always seem to call themselves after horse races when they decide to anglicize.”
Rosalind and Christopher had her flat in Onslow Gardens to themselves. She had sent her brother out for the evening. Clive Wilmot’s artificial leg hung by its straps from a coat rack in the front hall.
“Someone gave Clive a peg leg, he prefers that,” Rosalind explained. “It’s a pity you missed him. He was dressed as a Tsarist dragoon. He and Charlotte Grestain—you remember her, she drinks Scotch and milk and looks like a cheetah—are going to a costume party.”
But Rosalind was worried about her brother. Rain sluiced down the windowpanes and from time to time she looked anxiously into the street, thinking about Clive skittering over the slippery pavement on his peg leg. Framed photographs of the two of them, smiling into the camera in front of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, before the Pyramid of Cheops, on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, stood on tables all around the room. Clive was younger than Rosalind, and even prettier. The photographs formed a strangely sentimental motif in a room decorated by the Rosalind whom Christopher had known in Vienna.
“I don’t often think about Vienna,” Rosalind said, “but when I do, I think of that fight in the snow, and all that blood. Wolkowicz was such a primitive. Robin thought it was so dreadfully funny. I always wondered why.”
“Darby—Dirzinskaite, should I say?”
“Should you? Your Lithuanian seems a bit rusty. What about him?”
“He had a very active sense of humor. When Wolkowicz called on him in prison, to gloat, he even made a joke of that. He gave Barney one of his Persian carpets.”
“I suppose he knew he was going to get away and couldn’t take it with him. Robin was a great one for having the last laugh. It was dreadful, the way he taunted Wolkowicz when he was having Ilse.”
“Taunted him?”
“Robin knew that Wolkowicz was following the two of them. He’d kiss Ilse on the street and fondle her while the jealous husband was secretly watching—you remember how pneumatic, how like a fragrant rose she was,” Rosalind said. “Barney simply writhed. The odd thing is, I think Darby and Wolkowicz liked each other, at heart.”
“I never saw much evidence of that.”
“All the same, they were fellow proles, you know. They made a joke of that. They talked Russian to each other at first.”
“Talked Russian?”
“The passwords were in Russian at first, before they changed to Kachin. They were tickled pink with themselves.”
“Why did they stop?”
“I don’t know. It may have been your presence. You were so tremendously not a prole. Ilse always went on about how your mother had been a baroness. ‘A Prussian baroness,’ she would chortle, with Hun superiority.”
Although Rosalind’s black hair was long, like a young girl’s, it was streaked with gray. She wore ribbed woolen stockings and a pleated skirt and blazer, like a school uniform. But when she held out her ringless hands to the electric fire, the blue veins of middle age showed on the backs. There was a little less light than formerly in her clear violet eyes.
“Well,” she said, “Vienna brought none of us happiness, did it? You slew all those Russians, Wolkowicz slew his wife, Robin slew himself. The hell with Vienna. Tell me about China.”
Christopher told her. Like Stephanie, she was interested and listened in silence, her eyes wide open and fixed on his.
“Surely,” she said, “it couldn’t have just been an accident? You weren’t sentenced to death for pilot error? How could you bear the thought?”
“What difference did it make?”
“To die for stupidity? A great deal of difference, I should have thought. To you especially. You were quite eerie, you know, the way you never did a stupid thing. Not even on the female body. That’s awfully rare in a member of your sex, to know where everything is.”
Rosalind warmed her hands again. She hadn’t intended to speak about their life in bed; there had never been anything between them but sex and jokes. But as Christopher described his years in prison, alone and silent, she had had a sudden sharp sensation that it had somehow been her own body that had lain on his pallet in China. She shook her head in annoyance at this romantic fantasy. Christopher was watching her. She supposed he could read signs as well as ever and knew that she had been thinking of the past.
“Did Robin ever talk about the past?” Christopher asked.
Rosalind was startled, but she was glad of another subject. She surprised herself with the length of her answer. “Robin? Not much. If you asked, he’d just recite his curriculum vitae. His parents hiked out of Lithuania before he was born, ‘with little packs on their backs,’ he always said. They went first to South Africa. They were heroes to Robin, heroes. I don’t know if they walked all the way, over the water I mean, but Robin made it sound as if they had. Then they came to London, just at the end of the First World War; Mrs. D. was pregnant with Robin and they wanted him to be born in England. He went to grammar school in London, Highgate, I believe, and won all the prizes and a scholarship in oriental studies at London University. He got a commission in the Special Forces on the strength of his languages—Chinese, Japanese, strange Burmese dialects. And Russian, of course.”
“Did he ever talk about Burma?”
“No, never. Of course everyone knew that he was practically the T. E. Lawrence of the jungle. He was such a god to the headhunters that they had to give him the D.S.O. even though he had crawled out from under a rock somewhere south of the Thames and was called Dirzinskaite. Even after he came over onto the permanent strength of the service, he insisted on talking like a fish porter, cocking a snook at the old Etonians. They detested him, they always kept him in the field, but they couldn’t do without him.”
“Do the files on his Burma days still exist?”
Rosalind displayed no surprise at this improper question, no caution. “I suppose they must,” she said.
“I’d like to know something about his team out there.”
Rosalind listened to Christopher’s list of requirements. It was short: a picture, a name, a certain dispatch.
“Am I to understand,” Rosalind said, “that you want me to steal this information out of our Registry, for old times’ sake?”
“Yes.”
“Very well,” she said.
Christopher handed he
r a theater ticket, for a performance of King Lear. Rosalind put on her glasses and examined the ticket.
“Tomorrow night?” she said. “Very impetuous, you Ameddicans.”
Rosalind arrived late at the play, just as the third act was beginning. When the lights went down, she pressed a hat-check token into Christopher’s hand. She had left the things he wanted in an envelope in the cloakroom of the theater.
“It’s all there, just as you guessed,” she whispered, as Lear’s voice and the noise of a wind machine filled the theater. “What sly dogs they were. Poor Paul, to know it all along, and be locked up in China.”
Eleven
— 1 —
On the eleventh anniversary of his capture, Christopher called on Pong’s daughter, the medical student, and asked her to deliver a message for him.
She shook her shining cape of black hair, a gesture of disgust. “I don’t know about going to his office, he’s always coming on to me,” she said. “All the other meetings were outdoors.”
“This would be the last time you’d have to see him.”
“You say that. What will Barney say?”
“He’ll agree.”
“All right, but if there’s trouble, you’ll have to explain to my father.”
“I’ll explain,” Christopher said. “To Barney, too. I’ll be seeing him tonight.”
That night, Christopher’s friends gave him supper at the club. Horace Hubbard had come home from China for the holidays. He told Christopher about the annual suppers attended by Patchen, Webster, Wolkowicz, and himself.
“You mean the four of you met every January for this ritual?”
“The five of us. Everybody except Wolkowicz believed that you were there in spirit, at your empty place at the table. We ate soup and roast beef, drank sentimental toasts, and exchanged information about you. Only there was never any information. The Chinese just wouldn’t talk about you. Even after we opened a station in Peking and Patchen sent me to China, there was no information.”
The Last Supper Page 40