The Last Supper (23 page)

“That’s all I have to tell you,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Wolkowicz got to his feet. “I have to be going,” he said. “There’s a train to New York at four o’clock.”

“Are you going back to Berlin?”

“No, I’m through in Berlin.” Wolkowicz did not offer to explain further.

“Wait,” Paul said. He heaved his father’s heavy bag onto the bed and opened it. It contained no clothes, just Hubbard’s reading glasses and wallet and his steel watch and
wedding ring, and a thick package. Hoping that the package contained a manuscript, his father’s last work, Paul ripped it open. There was no manuscript inside. The package was full of blurry
photographs of concentration camp prisoners.

In each picture, a ring was drawn around the unrecognizable head of a woman. All the women were fair and small. Paul spread the photographs out on the bed. He gave Wolkowicz a puzzled look.
Wolkowicz looked uncomfortable again, and once more he had to clear his throat before he could speak.

“He kept hoping he’d find your mother,” Wolkowicz said. “He studied pictures from the camps and sometimes he’d find a woman who might be her. The same physical
type, about the same size and age. People changed a lot in the camps. Still, he thought he might recognize her.”

“But he never did?”

“No.”

“He never found any trace of her at all—no file that mentioned her, no witness?”

“Your father never talked to you about this?”

“No, not about this part of it. He believed that my mother was alive. Did he find any trace, anything at all?”

“No,” Wolkowicz said. “A lot of pictures, but no proof.”

Wolkowicz said nothing about the file Hubbard had seen on the last day of his life. For all practical purposes, there was no file; it couldn’t be completed. Horst Bülow, living in
terror in East Berlin, would never obtain the missing pages, if missing pages had survived.

Paul studied him with Hubbard’s calm, intelligent gaze.

“It wasn’t a reasonable thing, Paul,” Wolkowicz said, “to think there might be hope. It was sad, being with your father when he wouldn’t give up hope. I’m
sorry.”

Wolkowicz gripped Paul’s hand, a painful pressure. “I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know,” he said, “but your father was a great man.
I’ll never owe any man more than I owe him. If I can ever do anything for you, and I mean anything, just tell me. Elliott will know how to find me.”

There were tears in Wolkowicz’s eyes, the only tears that anyone had shed for Hubbard that day.

— 2 —

Before he returned to college, Paul went to New York. He found Zaentz in Greenwich Village and gave him the photographs Hubbard had collected. Opening the package, Zaentz
recoiled.

“What are these, for God’s sake?”

Paul explained.

“Why bring them to me?”

“You knew my mother’s face better than anyone.”

“I?”

“You drew her from memory after fifteen years. If anyone can recognize her face, if it’s in those photographs, you can.”

Zaentz spent the afternoon by the high window of his studio, an aging man with gleaming white hair, looking at the photographs again and again. Finally he stacked them together neatly and took
off his steel-rimmed spectacles, unhooking the wire bows from his ears. He spoke to Paul in a low voice, in English.

“No,” Zaentz said. “These women are not your mother. Your father is dead, Paul. You should let this obsession about your mother die too.”

— 3 —

A week after Hubbard’s funeral, Sebastian Laux came to Boston to see Paul. Paul thought that Sebastian wanted to discuss his father’s will with him. He had been the
family’s banker and now, as trustee under the will, he had custody of Hubbard’s estate.

In his suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Sebastian looked out the window onto the English Gardens.

“This is only the second time I’ve been to this city,” he said. “It’s just as I remembered it—a nice little park, lots of brick, and absolutely no sign of
life. You must be very glad this is your last semester at . . . college.” Sebastian, a Yale man, did not like to speak the word Harvard.

A waiter brought hot water and Sebastian made green tea, stirring it energetically with a bamboo whisk. As a young man, before the war, Sebastian had spent a year in Japan and ever since he had
carried Japanese tea and Japanese tea bowls with him wherever he traveled. According to Elliott, Sebastian had brewed green tea for them behind the German lines in France, where they had been
together, fighting with the Maquis.

He watched Paul drink the bitter tea. “Maybe you’d prefer something else?” he said.

“No, this is fine,” Paul said.

Holding his bowl in both his tiny hands, Sebastian sipped his tea, inhaling a big gulp of air to cool each mouthful of liquid. During Paul’s boyhood visits to the Harbor, Sebastian had
explained that this vulgar noise was considered good manners in Japan. Paul had not seen him since those days, though Sebastian’s bank, D. & D. Laux & Co., had paid his tuition bills
and sent him his allowance when he was at school.

Sebastian had already told Paul that his father had left his entire estate to Lori. Paul would inherit if he petitioned the courts to declare his mother dead. This Paul had refused to do.

Sebastian finished his tea. “I suppose you still want to leave things as they are with your father’s will,” he said.

“Yes.”

“The cash value of the estate, as of today, is $78,587.56,” Sebastian said. “That may be a smaller sum than you imagined. Your father and mother gave a lot of money away before
the war, almost their entire capital.”

“They gave it away? How much?”

“Just over a quarter of a million dollars. I was always sending drafts to people with odd names in Copenhagen. I suppose they were the ones you and your parents smuggled out of Germany on
that sailboat.”

Paul, hiding a smile, looked into his tea bowl. He seemed pleased at the thought of Hubbard and Lori squandering his inheritance. This didn’t surprise Sebastian. He had been handling the
family’s financial affairs for a quarter of a century and he didn’t think it was possible to explain the way money worked to anyone who had a drop of Hubbard blood in his veins. Both
Elliott Hubbard and Hubbard Christopher had always taken pleasure in giving money away—Elliott to his legion of girls and friends, Hubbard to terrified refugees. The cousins were not
spendthrifts. They just seemed to find money slightly comical, like sex—one of the things in life it was impossible to understand and useless to resist.

“It isn’t a bad idea to leave the money where it is,” Sebastian said. “You ought to be able to earn your own living, and in time the balance will grow.”

“Is there enough for my Aunt Hilde to live on?”

Paul’s question was the first real sign of interest he had shown in this subject.

“Your father was quite specific about Aunt Hilde,” Sebastian said. “We’ve been making quarterly transfers to Berlin from the interest. Their banks are operating again;
things are getting back to normal with the Germans.”

Paul nodded and looked around the room. He seemed ready to change the subject. So was Sebastian: he had not come to Boston to talk about money to Paul Christopher. Yet he didn’t quite know
how to start the conversation he wanted to have with him.

Gathering his thoughts, Sebastian went to the window and looked down again on the English Gardens. In the deepening twilight, crowds of people were streaming through the gates of the park.
Sebastian had keen eyesight, and even from this distance he noticed that there was something odd about the Bostonians. With a small thrill of satisfaction, he realized what it was—they looked
alike; most of them had Irish faces.

“Did you know, Paul,” Sebastian asked, “exactly what it was your father was doing in Berlin?”

“What he did, Sebastian? Of course.”

“He told you? I don’t mean his writing.”

“He was a spy. He didn’t tell me. He didn’t need to. It was obvious.”

Sebastian lifted his eyebrows, then chuckled. “I suppose it was. Nevertheless, your father was extremely good at the work. When he died, he was chief of American intelligence in
Berlin.” Sebastian paused. “I used the word
died,
” he said. “But you do realize that he was murdered?”

Hearing this, Paul did not move or speak; he simply continued to listen, waiting for Sebastian to go on. Sebastian searched Paul’s face for some sign of surprise, for some flash of anger
or hatred. Like Wolkowicz before him, he saw only the calm, sad intelligence he had witnessed so often in Hubbard’s face. Finally, Paul asked a question.

“Why are you the one to tell me this, Sebastian?”

“Elliott couldn’t bring himself to do it. I’m . . .
trusted
by the men your father worked with. I knew them in the war.”

“Do they know who did it?”

“In a general way,” Sebastian said. “It was the opposition.”

“The Russians? Why would they do it?”

“One never knows the answer to that question, not the exact answer. I gather they had a lot of respect for him; he was too good at his work. They feared him.”

“Was it really as simple as that? As stupid as that?”

Sebastian thought the question over carefully. “Yes,” he replied. “Very probably.”

— 4 —

The next day, Sebastian and Paul went down to Washington together. The Outfit was giving Hubbard a posthumous medal; that was why Sebastian had been sent to tell him that his
father had been murdered. Hubbard’s colleagues wanted Paul to accept his father’s decoration. On the train, Sebastian gave Paul a slip of paper to sign. It was a promise never to reveal
what Sebastian had told him; it asked him to promise, too, never to reveal that he had attended the ceremony.

“It may seem strange to you, to decorate a man in secret, after he’s dead, but those are the rules,” Sebastian said.

Paul signed the secrecy agreement.

In Washington, Sebastian led him down a dim corridor past rows of tall polished doors. Sebastian opened one of them and they walked across an empty anteroom into a paneled conference room.
Prints of square-rigged sailing ships decorated the walls. A little group of men stood by the window, talking. Among them was Elliott Hubbard, who hurried across the room to greet Paul. Behind him,
at the edge of the group, stood Wolkowicz. At his side was a remarkably pretty blond girl. She smiled brilliantly at Paul, as if he were an old friend for whom she had been waiting.

Elliott led Paul to the window and introduced them to the other men. Wolkowicz waited, hanging back, until this was over. Then, in his clumsy way, he stepped forward and shook hands.

“My wife, Ilse,” Wolkowicz said.

Ilse shook hands and repeated her smile. She wore white gloves. Paul was astonished that Wolkowicz should have married a girl who looked like this. Ilse read the surprise on his face but made
not the slightest acknowledgment.

“I knew your father very well, so I know what you have lost,” she said in German, squeezing his hand. “You have my sympathy.”

Elliott touched Paul’s arm. “I think they want to begin,” he said. He and Paul joined the others. Except for Wolkowicz, who wore a brown gabardine suit, all the men were
dressed alike, in well-pressed dark suits with vests and striped ties. Their shirts were very fresh, as if they had changed them specially for the ceremony.

The ceremony was brief. Wolkowicz and Paul Christopher stood shoulder to shoulder, facing the Director, while an aide read a citation. It was a description of Wolkowicz’s actions on the
morning of Hubbard Christopher’s death. In this way, standing at attention in a room full of strangers, Paul learned the full, bloody circumstances of his father’s death.

The Director hung a medal around Wolkowicz’s neck and gave him a sympathetic look, as if he, rather than Paul, were the bereaved son. “It wasn’t your fault we lost him,
lad,” he said.

The aide read Hubbard’s citation and the Director gave Paul his father’s medal in its open case.

Champagne was served. It was nine o’clock in the morning.

“From now on I think we’ll have these things a little later in the day,” the Director said. “This is the first time we’ve done it, so whoever is responsible for the
champagne must be interested in establishing a tradition. Do you think your father would have minded the festive atmosphere?”

“No. He liked champagne.”

“I admired Hubbard,” the Director said. “Everyone did. No one will ever know the great things he did. I suppose he would have preferred it that way, but to me it’s sad.
He did so much for his country and nobody will know it.”

“Perhaps nobody wants to know,” Ilse said. The waiter passed by and she held out her glass for more champagne.

“Who do you mean?” the Director said, smiling. Ilse was so pretty, so fragrant in her spotless linen suit and her white gloves. She smelled of her rose perfume.

“Those outside. They prefer to think that men like Hubbard, men like my husband, do not exist—that they are not necessary. Protect me and say nothing! That is what they
want.”

The Director was taken aback. “Do you really think so?” he said politely.

“Our German poet Schiller wrote, ‘Against stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain,’ ” Ilse said. She repeated the words in German, looking directly into
Paul’s face. Wolkowicz, his medal dangling from his neck, stood with them, unsmiling.

“Ah, yes,” the Director said. “Schiller.”

The aide approached, holding the box for Wolkowicz’s medal in his hands.

“Time to give that back,” he said. Wolkowicz took off his decoration and handed it over. The aide held out his hand for Hubbard’s medal. Paul gave it to him; the aide snapped
the leather boxes shut.

“I’m afraid this is the last you’ll ever see of these,” he said. “We lock them in the Director’s safe. “It would be quite a coup to the opposition to
know who we’re decorating. You’ll know the medal’s there; that’s supposed to be enough.”

— 5 —

In the spring, the Director, finding himself in Boston, invited Paul and David Patchen to supper at Locke-Ober’s restaurant. While Patchen was out of the room, he asked
Paul to join the Outfit.