“None at all?”
“Every January, Patchen would report that you were still alive. He had some means of knowing that.”
The cousins were walking together down H Street in the direction of the club. A light snow, the first of the year, had dusted the sidewalks, and Horace looked over his shoulder at their footprints. He threw his long arm around Christopher’s shoulders and gave him an impulsive hug.
“Snow,” he said. “I was thinking of those sled rides at the Harbor.”
Tom Webster had arrived at the club before them. They found him upstairs in the private dining room, drinking Scotch. In his emotion, he breathed audibly through his nose.
“I gave up on this,” he said, grasping Christopher’s hand. “I never thought it would happen, that you’d walk in here. I really thought you were gone.” He blinked. “Ten years of these suppers.”
Webster was on the point of tears. When the door opened, it was too late to hide his feelings. Wolkowicz looked him up and down and snorted.
“I hope this is the last crying jag I have to be in on because of you, kid,” he said to Christopher. “Webster usually gives us the holy water a little later, after the wine.”
Wolkowicz punched Webster on the arm, a hard jab that shifted the other man’s weight.
“This is the last supper, buddy,” he said. “Cheer up. He is risen.”
Guffawing, Wolkowicz put an arm around Christopher and gave him an affectionate shake. In the overheated room, Wolkowicz’s frayed tweed jacket smelled of wet wool; evidently he had walked some distance in the falling snow without a topcoat. The thick rubber soles of his soaked shoes left a pattern on the hardwood floor, like the mark of a soccer shoe on skinned turf.
The waiter brought a tray. Wolkowicz lifted his Rob Roy into the air.
“Absent friends,” he said, with a flash of teeth. “That’s the toast of Patchen’s Merry Men. I’m glad we got one back, at least.”
Webster drank, but turned away afterward. Patchen came late. He made no apologies. Other waiters put the soup tureen on the table.
Wolkowicz ladled his bowl full, broke a piece of bread in half, and put his face into the dish. As he spooned pea soup with his right hand and dipped bread with his left, his eyes were fixed on Patchen. Midway through the soup, a double Rob Roy, his third, was brought to him in a water tumbler.
While the food was consumed, there was no conversation. Patchen finished eating his tiny portions very quickly.
“Somehow,” he said, “I’d imagined that this would be a happier occasion.”
These were his first words. In the black suit he wore in winter, he looked paler and lamer than usual. Wolkowicz, on the other hand, was pink-faced after his walk in the open air and jovial, in his brutal way, after the Rob Roys he had drunk. He splashed wine into his glass, filling it to the rim.
“We’re happy,” he said. “No shit. Christopher especially. What’s ten years? Look at him, surrounded by the friends who never forgot him. He’s rich, he’s a TV star. He’s even tight with Webster’s daughter.” He pinched Webster’s cheek. “Isn’t that right, buddy?”
Wolkowicz was not interested in Webster’s reply. He raised his wineglass. “All’s well that ends well, kid,” he said to Christopher. “Everybody says so.” Wolkowicz snapped his fingers for another Rob Roy.
Like Christopher, like Hubbard before him, Horace was amused by Wolkowicz. He smiled fondly at him, but Wolkowicz didn’t see this; he had gone back to his food. Patchen laid his knife and fork across his plate, saying nothing, looking at no one. He, too, wore a faint smile, as if everything was happening just as he had expected.
When the table was cleared, a decanter of port and nuts in a battered, paper-thin silver bowl were brought. When the decanter reached Wolkowicz, he slid it along to Horace without pouring any for himself. In a moment, the waiter brought him his fifth double Rob Roy.
“One more,” Wolkowicz rasped as the servant shuffled away. He drank from the tumbler just as thirstily as he had done at the beginning of the evening.
“Let me have your attention,” Patchen said, rapping on the tabletop with a walnut. “There’s something I want to say. I’m sorry, Paul, that this hasn’t been a jollier evening, but these suppers don’t have a jolly history. There’s been very little to talk about. We had no facts. We knew that you were in prison, under sentence of death. We didn’t know if we’d see you again. Some of us may have thought that you were gone forever. We didn’t know what had happened to you, or why it happened.”
Patchen’s throat went dry. He paused for a sip of port. Wolkowicz, sprawled in his pushed-back chair with one bulging leg crossed over the other, sipped at his drink. His eyes were closed. As Patchen’s silence persisted, he opened his eyes.
“What a crock of shit,” Wolkowicz said.
Patchen cleared his throat. “A crock of shit, Barney?”
“ ‘We didn’t know what happened to Paul, or why it happened.’ Who didn’t know? He went off to get himself killed because the fucking Outfit had hung him out to dry, and he didn’t succeed. That’s what happened, and why.”
Wolkowicz reached across the table into the silver bowl and found another walnut. He held it, grasped delicately in the tips of his meaty fingers, beneath Patchen’s nose, as if Patchen had never before seen a walnut. Patchen took the nut. Wolkowicz turned to Christopher.
“Tell ’em, kid,” he said. “Your roomie here is so fucking sensitive he can’t bear to ask.”
Christopher smiled at his old friend and protector. “You tell them, Barney,” he said.
Patchen seemed to be looking for the nutcracker. There was none. Wolkowicz took the walnut out of his hand, laid it on the table, and slammed it with the edge of his hand, crushing the shell. Then he spoke to Christopher again.
“You thought they were going to kill your girl, kid, and it was all your fault? Isn’t that right?”
Wolkowicz waited for Christopher’s answer, his palm upturned in encouragement. Christopher merely waited for him to go on.
“He won’t answer,” Wolkowicz said. “He’d never answer a simple question. Why should he? But that’s what he thought—that’s what we all thought. They didn’t give a shit about the girl. They just wanted to hurt Christopher because he’d hurt them. So he decided to go out to Vietnam and let them kill him. He was going to die for love—I saw it in his fucking eyes when I said good-bye to him in Zermatt. Tell me that isn’t right, Paul.”
Wolkowicz had almost never called Christopher by his Christian name. Now he underwent another change. The tone of his voice changed. He stopped cursing. He leaned forward and looked at each of the others in turn, as if to make sure that they saw the transformation he had undergone.
“What happened is that we all let Christopher down,” Wolkowicz said in a voice that was hardly louder than a whisper. “He was cut off, he was out of the Outfit, none of us was supposed to help him or even go near him. But we were his friends. Never mind the Outfit, we said to each other, never mind the risks, we’re going to help him. So we helped him. Patchen helped him get out of Washington after he came back here and told the folks who really killed Cock Robin. I helped him to get back to Vietnam. Webster guarded his girl in Paris. Patchen got money out of the safe in Washington and gave it to him, so he could afford to travel. Otherwise, how was he going to find the people who wanted to kill him? Horace was supposed to watch his back in Saigon, but he lost him—let him get away. We made it all possible.”
Wolkowicz paused. Patchen, watching intently, picked the walnut meat out of the litter of shell before him and ate it. Wolkowicz waited until he was done. Then, with a sigh, he gripped Christopher’s forearm where it lay on the table.
“You didn’t have to do it, kid,” he said. “It was all wasted.”
“Didn’t have to do it?” Christopher said.
“You didn’t have to save your lady love, you didn’t have to be the sacrificial lamb.”
Wolkowicz seemed unable to go on.
It was almost impossible for him to reveal a secret. He uttered a grunt, as if he were trying to force words out of his head or force memories back inside. Abruptly, he reverted to his old self. He grinned contemptuously at Patchen and smashed another walnut on the table.
“Have another walnut,” he said. “I’m going to give you a treat, Patchen. I’m going to confirm something for you. I’m going to put myself in your power. This shit has gone on long enough.”
Wolkowicz gave Christopher’s forearm a little shake; his elbow thumped on the table. “You were supposed to hear about it when you got to Saigon,” he said. “Horace was supposed to tell you. Horace, tell him now.”
Horace was puzzled. “Tell him what?”
“Tell him who died the night he flew into China.”
“Molly,” Webster said.
“Tom, shut up,” Wolkowicz said.
“Not only Molly,” Horace said. “The Truong toc. Nguyên Kim.”
“Christopher’s enemies,” Wolkowicz said. “The guys who wanted to kill Molly. Kill the girl with the beautiful legs first, so you’d suffer for a while, then you, kid. That was the plan. I changed their horoscopes before I left Saigon.”
“You killed them?” Christopher said. There was a smile in his eyes. Wolkowicz thought it was gratitude and the old amused affection.
“Let’s just say I told my man Pong where he could get a couple of ruby rings real cheap.” Wolkowicz pointed a warning finger at Patchen. “Remember, Horace never knew this,” he said, protecting his former subordinate. “It was me, on my own.”
“On your own?” Horace was truly horrified—not because of the murders, but because Wolkowicz had killed for personal reasons. “Why?”
Wolkowicz touched the silver bowl, saw that he had left a fingerprint, and automatically smudged it. He drank the rest of his Rob Roy.
“What do you mean, why? I’m the guy who saw his father die, right in front of my eyes. I’m the guy Christopher dragged out of that fucking Sewer when Russians were coming through the wall like rats.”
Webster closed his hand on his glass and snapped the stem.
“Then why did they kill Molly?” he said.
“Because you let her get by you, you asshole,” Wolkowicz said. “And because maybe I wasted the wrong people.”
Wolkowicz, who never did anything unplanned, turned his head and vomited, a yellow jet that smelled to him like C rations and the fecaloid rot of the rain forest.
— 2 —
When they came out the door of the club, all five of them together, Patrick Graham was waiting with a camera crew. A female assistant held an umbrella over Graham’s head so that he would not be wetted by the falling snow. As he advanced on Wolkowicz with his microphone, the girl lowered the umbrella and Graham assumed his on-camera expression, a mixture of charm and skepticism.
In brilliant white light that turned his ruddy skin blue, Wolkowicz snarled and backed away. He whirled, looking for someone behind him. There was no one there except Christopher. The other three men had darted back inside.
“Patchen!” he shouted. “You—”
Beyond the glass doors, Patchen hurried away into the cavernous old building that housed the club. A porter locked the door, stranding Wolkowicz and Christopher outside. The camera was very close to Wolkowicz. Patrick Graham was speaking to him in his powerful voice. Wolkowicz walked away. Graham followed. The cameraman scuttled along backward, keeping the camera focused on Wolkowicz’s face.
Wolkowicz broke into a run and moved away with remarkable speed. Christopher turned and ran, too, his eyes fixed on Wolkowicz’s squat figure. Far ahead, bent over, knees pumping, running like a fullback, Wolkowicz turned and crossed the street against the light.
For a few steps, Graham ran along beside Christopher, trying to talk but gasping for breath. “All I want is the truth,” he said. At the end of the block, he fell against the stones of a building, chest heaving, hair disheveled.
Lafayette Park lay ahead. Christopher had lost sight of Wolkowicz. Near Steuben’s statue at the corner of the park, he saw the hobnail print of Wolkowicz’s peculiar shoe in a patch of undisturbed snow. Farther on, he saw another print, then part of another. Christopher, traveling at a lope, followed them. In the center of the park, he found him. Wolkowicz was breathing deeply; his clothes were twisted. For once, he didn’t touch Christopher. Instead, he sank to the ground, picked up a handful of snow, and washed his face with it.
Wolkowicz held out his hand, cold and wet from the snow, and Christopher pulled him to his feet. Police cars, blue lights flashing and sirens hooting, sped west on Pennsylvania Avenue. Wolkowicz paid no attention to them.
Wolkowicz shivered. In the club, after he was sick, he had been covered with sweat. Now he was soaked and chilled. Christopher took off his raincoat and held it out to him. There had been a time when Wolkowicz would have refused such a gesture of human sympathy. Tonight, he did not argue or resist; he put his arms in the sleeves of his friend’s coat and buttoned it up. For a moment, he gazed at the floodlit White House, a few hundred feet away beyond the edge of the park.
“After what happened tonight, you know what Patchen is, don’t you?” he said.
Christopher didn’t respond.
“I know you don’t want to know,” Wolkowicz said. “But think. Who knew everything? Who knew what you found out in Vietnam? Who knew where Molly was hiding in Paris? Who pulled me out of Saigon? Who knew what time you were arriving in Saigon and who you wanted to see? Who talked to the Chinese about you after you were taken? Who was there to hold your hand when you got out? Webster knew some of those things. Horace knew some. I knew some. But only Patchen knew them all.”
Wolkowicz was shuddering violently now. His teeth chattered.
“You don’t believe it,” he said, hugging himself. “There’s no fucking hope. The first guy I had to deal with in this business was Waddy Jessup. The last is Patchen. Nobody believes in Communists anymore, if you even suggest somebody might be a Communist, you’re a mental case. I’m whipped. You can’t fight the Fool Factory.”
Wolkowicz seized Christopher by the ears and kissed him on the cheek. Then, without a word of farewell, he left, as Christopher had seen him do hundreds of times before. His borrowed raincoat was too long for him. Burly and short, plodding through the snow like a muzhik with the long skirt of Christopher’s coat flapping around his ankles, he looked, ironically, like a Russian soldier.
It was useless to attempt to follow him. It was only through luck, or Wolkowicz’s own design, that Christopher had been able to stay with him even for a couple of blocks. At the primitive, cunning tricks of spying, Wolkowicz remained the master.
Christopher waited until he was out of sight, then he walked up Sixteenth Street until he found a public telephone. He dialed Patchen’s number and when he heard the other man’s dry voice at the other end of the line he said, “Are you ready?”
“Oh, yes,” Patchen said, through the blockage in his throat.
— 3 —
In his troubled sleep, Wolkowicz had thrown off the blankets. Toothless, he lay on his back, wearing raveled Jockey shorts, his broad fleecy chest rising and falling. His P-38 lay in its holster on the table by his head. His clothes were strewn over the floor, except for Christopher’s raincoat, which hung, still dripping, above the tub in the bathroom, beyond the foot of the bed.
The phone rang. Wolkowicz’s eyes flew open and the first thing he saw in the gray light of the winter dawn was the raincoat. It moved. He sat bolt upright and put his hand on his gun before he realized that what he saw was only an empty garment, turning in a current from the hot-air register.
The woman on the other side of the bed answered the telephone. She said, “Yes, immediately,” into the mouthpiece, then hung up.
Wolkowicz watched her get out of bed. She wore a silvery blue nightgown with lace at the neck, her best color because it matched her eyes. He reached out and slid his hand under her gown. She was no longer young. The
skin on her buttocks was thick now, pebbled like the skin of a fowl, and when she bent over, her breasts were like pears, small at the top and bell-shaped at the bottom, but she still excited him. She paused, looking at him over her shoulder like a mare, and let him stroke her. “I’ll be back,” she whispered, running a stiffened index finger down the bulge in his shorts and giving the head of his penis a hard pinch.
She went into the bathroom. Wolkowicz closed his eyes. His bones ached. It was not yet six o’clock; he had got into bed, after a longer run than usual to shake off surveillance, only an hour before. He went back to sleep and slid into a complicated dream. It seemed to him that he had been asleep for hours when a sharp little sound awakened him, but in fact he had been unconscious for less than five minutes.
The sound he had heard was the click of the clasp on the woman’s purse. She stood by the chair, dressed for the street in a trench coat, with her hand in the pocket of his trousers. She held up a fan of paper money and smiled at him.
“Cab fare,” she said, whispering again. “They want me.”
“What the fuck for?”
The woman shrugged. She had covered her hair with a scarf. She wore no makeup. Without mascara and eye shadow, her pale eyes looked like the eyes of a blinded person, but she had a lovely smile.
Wolkowicz rolled over and closed his eyes. He opened them again and looked at the telephone. He realized that she had spoken German to the caller. The telephone had wakened her while they were in bed together a hundred times before, but she had never before spoken German.
Wolkowicz heaved himself out of bed and called the woman’s name, but she had gone. He looked out the window, through the slats of a venetian blind, but there was nothing to see. He had rented this apartment because it did not have a front exposure; all the windows looked out on air shafts and blank walls.
He pulled on his trousers and tried to put on his wet shoes. The soaked leather resisted and he bent over and forced the shoes onto his thick feet. Measuring time in his head, he knew that his struggle with the shoes had lost him the moments he needed to put on a shirt, so he snatched Christopher’s raincoat off the hanger and put that on as he ran through the apartment and out into the hall, holding the P-38 in its holster under his armpit, beneath the coat.
The Last Supper Page 41