The Last Supper (22 page)

“He must have run out of film. We’ll get the rest of it in the next batch.”

“When?”

“Next Thursday. We have a meeting every other Thursday.”

“It has to be sooner than that. Contact him and tell him to bring the rest tomorrow.”

Nothing about Hubbard had changed, now that he had found what he had been searching for. There was no tremor in his voice, no difference in the way he looked across the desk at Wolkowicz.

“There is no secure way to contact this agent,” Wolkowicz said.

“You don’t have a dead drop, a chalk mark on a wall, any kind of signal for him?

“No. He’s such a zero I never thought it would be necessary to see him in a hurry. I just tell him each time where and when to show up for the next meeting.”

“There must be a way.”

“It will scare the shit out of him. He’s a bundle of nerves. It would have to be a brush contact, on the street.”

“Can you do that yourself?”

“If you want me to. I’d have to catch him on the way to or from work. I’ve never gone into his neighborhood. It could blow the whole thing if I’m seen.”

“Haven’t you been seen with him at all those concerts?”

“We don’t usually sit together. I’ll do it, Hubbard, but if things go wrong, we’ll never see the rest of the file. The Russians will grab him. I know how you feel, but
it’s only a week until the next routine contact. It’s better to wait.”

Hubbard cleared his throat. “I’d rather not wait,” he said.

The two men sat in silence for long moments.

“There’s another way,” Wolkowicz said. “Ilse.”

“He knows Ilse?”

“He met her once, remember. She could find some way to talk to him—get on the same streetcar and tell him what we want.”

Wolkowicz looked at his watch.

“If I call her at the office,” he said, “she can probably catch him on his way home from work. But that means talking on the phone.”

Ilse still worked at the Zechmann Bureau. Hubbard pushed his telephone across the desk. Wolkowicz put his hand on the instrument and gave Hubbard a look in which sympathy was mixed with
anxiety.

“Are you sure you want me to do this?” he said. “It’s Zechmann’s phone at the other end.”

Hubbard nodded. Wolkowicz cleared his throat, twice. What he was about to do was such a breach of secrecy that he had to force his muscles to disobey the warning signals sent out by his brain in
order to make the various parts of his body pick up the receiver, dial the number of the Zechmann Bureau, and tell Ilse, in a tangled web of hint and innuendo that even Hubbard could not follow, to
accost Horst Bülow and tell him to come to an emergency meeting. He called Bülow the Music Man. By some miracle of quick wits, Ilse understood who he meant and what he wanted.

— 9 —

Horst Bülow chose the meeting place, a streetcar stop on a broad avenue running through the Wilmersdorf Wood, a point nearly as far from the Soviet Zone as it was possible
to get. He set the time at 4:30
A.M
., the hour of first light in Berlin in mid-August.

Hubbard and Wolkowicz, riding in the backseat of Hubbard’s car, drove past the rendezvous point at 4:20. There was no sign of the agent. The street was deserted except for an old woman in
black who came out of the forest carrying a bristling load of dead twigs slung over her back in a shawl. Hubbard’s driver, a U.S. Army sergeant in civilian clothes, yawned.

“Keep awake, Mitchell,” Wolkowicz said to the sergeant. “Drop me here and turn into the woods. I’ll make the meeting, cross the street, and walk down this way. You watch
my every move. If I lift my right arm, even if I only lift it three inches, put the car in gear and pick me up. Got it?”

The sergeant, yawning again, nodded. He smelled of schnapps. Wolkowicz got out of the car. Hubbard got out the other door.

“Are you coming too?” Wolkowicz said.

“I want to talk to him.”

Hubbard got out of the car. He carried an envelope in his hand. Wolkowicz automatically registered this detail.

Wolkowicz hesitated, then set off, walking with his oddly endearing gait, feet slamming into the ground, elbows wagging. Hubbard sauntered along behind. A yellow streetcar, squealing and hissing
sparks, stopped a couple of hundred meters up the street and a man got off. It was Bülow. He carried the inevitable briefcase in one hand and a rolled newspaper in the other. The old woman
with the load of sticks climbed laboriously onto the platform after Bülow got off; he made no move to help her.

“That’s him,” Wolkowicz said.

The agent was on the opposite side of the street, too far away for his face to be visible, but it was obvious how nervous he was; he darted glances up and down the street and finally shrank into
the fringe of the woods.

After the streetcar had passed and Wolkowicz had seen that there was no one aboard as it traveled away from the center of the city, the two Americans stepped off the curb and started to cross
the road. Hubbard saw the sun flash on glass, but paid no attention. His eyes were on the agent, who was making a signal to indicate that it was safe to approach.

At that moment, Hubbard recognized Horst Bülow. He was older and thinner, but he was the same man he had known before the war. Out of the corner of his eye, Hubbard saw the sun flash on
glass again and then he heard the shriek of tires. The car struck him.

“Jesus!” Wolkowicz said. He began to run, turning his wide face over his shoulder as if to warn Hubbard.

Hubbard saw the envelope fly out of his own hand, spinning. Then it froze in midair, stopped by some mysterious force. Hubbard felt his own body for the last time as it was lifted into the air.
The impact ruptured his aorta, and in the fraction of a second of life that remained to him, he believed that he was flying. He descended into a beech forest. There was no pain. Freed from the
lifelong weight of his long bones, he flew even more swiftly into the chalky light of the German morning.

Wolkowicz, who had leaped out of the way of the Mercedes, watched it turn around, leaning on its springs, and head back toward him. He pulled out his P-38 and, standing with one foot on either
side of Hubbard’s fallen body, methodically put all eight rounds through the windshield of the approaching car, into the face of the driver. The car crashed into a tree and began to burn.
Wolkowicz, cursing in a steady roar, pulled the dead driver out of the flaming automobile.

Horst Bülow fled through the trees. The sergeant, who had leaped out of the car, fired five shots from a .45 automatic at his darting figure, missing all five times.

Wolkowicz carried Hubbard’s body to his car and loaded it in the back, tenderly arranging the long twisted limbs on the seat.

“Aw, shit,” he sobbed, tears flowing down his face. “Aw
shit!
”

Refusing all help from the sergeant, Wolkowicz heaved the leaking corpse of the German into the trunk and drove with both dead men to American headquarters, weeping and cursing and fumbling with
loose cartridges as he attempted to reload his pistol.

— 1 —

Wolkowicz delivered Hubbard Christopher’s ashes to the Harbor on a day in late September. Among the hemlocks the leaves of the swamp maples had already turned scarlet,
and higher up the mountain some of the birches showed bright amber foliage. As the family stood in the graveyard above the house, inside the circle of headstones, there was no sound at all apart
from the low moan of the wind through the woods, and that seemed to make the hush deeper. Wolkowicz had never experienced such silence, not even in the Burmese jungle with its constant hum of birds
and insects. There were no prayers; Alice Hubbard had wanted to have the Order for the Burial of the Dead read by an Episcopal minister, but Paul and Elliott would not agree. Neither had ever heard
Hubbard mention God.

Hubbard’s friend Sebastian Laux, a small pale banker who looked like a porcelain figurine among the gigantic Hubbard men and the plump Hubbard aunts, read some of Hubbard’s verses. A
flight of crows passed overhead, cawing raucously. Turning his back to the wind, Paul opened the urn and let his father’s ashes go, a puff of gray. As they drifted away toward the blue hills
their parched scent was briefly noticeable. This only lasted a moment. There were no tears; no one comforted Paul. They all walked down the hill together through the pasture and then ate lunch in
the sunny dining room, laughing and telling anecdotes about Hubbard’s childhood. They did not seem to acknowledge that he was dead.

“The Hubbards are not natural mourners,” Alice explained. “Death, to them, is Hubbard heaven. When their hearts stop, they go to an eternal family reunion in the sky. Even on
earth, they never get bored with each other.”

She was speaking to David Patchen, Paul’s roommate at Harvard. Patchen had been surprised by the merriment. He was a gaunt young man, as tall as the Hubbards, with a vivid scar on the left
side of his face. The whole left half of his body had been damaged in the war: he had an artificial eye, his eyelid was paralyzed so that he never blinked on that side of his face, his arm was
withered, his leg was lame.

As the family rose from lunch, Alice took Patchen by the hand and led him into the library. She gave him a glass of port wine and lit a fire in the fireplace.

“Do you mind being alone?” she said. “We won’t be missed, and now and again I do like talking to a non-Hubbard.” They discussed Post-Impressionist painting; this
had been Alice’s passion at Vassar. “Elliott has custody of the Hubbard Cézannes,” Alice said. “Some old uncle bought them from the artist for pocket money. I’m
plotting to get half of them in a divorce settlement.” With the living side of his face, Patchen smiled at the joke, but it was no joke. Alice had learned, the month before, that Elliott was
sleeping with another woman. She chattered on. Patchen had never heard so many witticisms. From the next room came the plangent sound of the spinet. Wolkowicz was playing Bach again.

In his room, Paul sat by the window, reading the book of his father’s poems:

The music that had been floating through the house ceased and Paul heard someone in the hall outside his door. Wolkowicz knocked and entered, carrying an old scratched Gladstone bag that had
belonged to Hubbard.

“Your father’s things,” he said, setting the suitcase down.

Wolkowicz was ill at ease, looking around the room at the pictures. His eyes examined Zaentz’s drawing of Lori; when he saw that Paul was watching him, he looked away.

“My mother,” Paul said. He smiled. “And me.”

“You look a lot like her.”

Paul nodded. He had heard this all his life.

“Was she quiet, too?”

“Quiet? No, not at all.”

“Then you’ve got your father’s personality.”

Paul made no answer to that, but he gestured toward a chair. Wolkowicz hesitated, then sat down.

“Your friend is in pretty bad shape,” Wolkowicz said.

Paul peered at him, puzzled. He had expected him to say something about Hubbard and it took him a moment to understand. Wolkowicz touched the left side of his face, tracing the line of
Patchen’s scar with a blunt forefinger.

“Oh, you mean Patchen,” Paul said.

No one else at the Harbor had mentioned Patchen’s wounds; Paul himself ignored them. But Wolkowicz had already memorized the shape of Patchen’s scars.

“What happened to him?” Wolkowicz asked.

“Grenade. I don’t know the details.”

Wolkowicz nodded briskly. The moment Paul stopped speaking, he seemed to lose interest in this subject and be ready to go on to another. This was one of the marks of Hubbard’s behavior; it
seemed odd to Paul to see Wolkowicz, a stranger, using one of his father’s mannerisms.

“About your father,” Wolkowicz said. He had to clear his throat twice to get the sentence out. “Do you want to hear what happened?”

Paul nodded. Wolkowicz described Hubbard’s death—just the way in which the car ran him down. Wolkowicz left out the meeting with Horst Bülow, the gunshots, the dead German. All
that was secret; even Hubbard’s son had no right to know such details.

Holding Wolkowicz’s eyes, Paul listened intently to Wolkowicz’s words. Wolkowicz saw that he didn’t look exactly like his mother after all: he had his father’s
intelligence, so intense and silent that it seemed to be a danger signal.

Paul said, “You’re telling me my father’s death was a traffic accident?”

“He was hit by a car.”

“At four-thirty in the morning, in the middle of the Wilmersdorf Wood?”

Paul, still staring into Wolkowicz’s eyes, would not break off his glance. This scrutiny made Wolkowicz uncomfortable; he made no effort to conceal this. He held up his hand, as if to ward
off more questions.