The Last Supper (27 page)

Jocelyn didn’t find it hard to please him, though it was time-consuming. Being his mistress was like rehearsing a part: she had to know her lines by heart. If she said something wrong,
Mordecai would make her say it over again until she had it exactly right. He made her read
Das Kapital
and
Ten Days That Shook the World
and
The New Masses
. They went only to
Soviet films, which always seemed to be overexposed and speeded up, so that Jocelyn formed the impression (she knew this wasn’t so) that Russia was a country bathed in blinding sunlight,
inhabited by bearded wild-eyed men who scurried around like mice, waving rifles over their heads. Mordecai and his friends talked incessantly about these few books and periodicals and films. There
was nothing worth knowing in American literature, nothing worth looking at in American art: there couldn’t be, because the United States was still a bourgeois capitalist society. It was a
terrible sin to read the books that Jocelyn’s father had always called “the dear, old books.” It was a shocking breach of manners to mention one’s family in the presence of
Mordecai’s friends: Jocelyn embarrassed him more than once with her empty-headed chatter about her parents and her sisters and her funny cousins before she learned to be more serious.

Mordecai made Jocelyn feel guilty about everything. “If you want to come into my life,” he had said, “you can’t bring any bourgeois baggage with you.” She
sacrificed her magazines, her Bette Davis movies (except for
Watch on the Rhine
, a wonderful treat on her twenty-eighth birthday), the Episcopal Church with its sweet boy sopranos singing
“Hear My Prayer,” and jokes. It made her sad to think of what she’d lost, but she knew that she could not live without Mordecai. She came to be bored by his talk, but her passion
for his body grew so strong that she thought sometimes that she was going crazy. She wondered if any woman had ever done the things she did and lusted to do again. She didn’t think it was
possible.

Jocelyn’s affair with Mordecai, which lasted for nearly twenty years, was a deep secret. In the office he treated her as he always had: with such cruel unfairness that the other girls came
to love her and hate him. She was not permitted to mention Mordecai to her parents, not even his name. Mordecai would not come to her apartment, and she never knew where he lived or even if he had
a telephone. They made love in borrowed rooms or in the car or in the lonesome Virginia woods beyond Mount Vernon. Sometimes Mordecai would call her at midnight and tell her where to meet him.
She’d drive through the deserted streets to the rendezvous and he would pull her into an alley and stand her up against the wall and have her.

She knew that she was in the grip of a sexual obsession. If it was a sickness, then there was no cure for it, because the sickness
was
the cure.

After a few years, Mordecai started to send Jocelyn on errands. She delivered messages for him to people whose names he never revealed to her: he called them “Addressees.” Sometimes
she carried an envelope to an Addressee, sometimes she had to repeat a phrase that Mordecai had made her memorize; sometimes she picked things up from one Addressee and delivered them to another.
Mostly she called on Addressees—scruffy people with contemptuous eyes and hateful masks for faces, like all of Mordecai’s friends—in Washington. But sometimes she went to New York
or Baltimore or even to Boston. She knew better than to ask questions: she just made her deliveries. Mordecai began to talk about the need for her to have a reason to call on the Addressees.
Jocelyn said she didn’t know why she needed a reason when no one even knew she was doing it, and she had no friends to tell. Mordecai was so angry that he refused to give her any relief for a
whole month. They would meet and get undressed, but he would not touch her. He would masturbate while she watched, writhing in frustration. Once she tried to do the same, thinking that perhaps that
was what he wanted.

“I don’t want
that
,” Mordecai said. “If you love me, you have to do exactly what I say, with whomever I say.”

The next time Jocelyn delivered a package to an Addressee, she slept with him, as Mordecai had instructed her.

When she staggered out of his room into the street she found Mordecai waiting for her. He made her describe every act she had performed with the Addressee, exactly as he required her to repeat
the ideas that he approved of. Afterward, he was very tender to her in the back of her car. “You must have a reason to call on the Addressees,” Mordecai said, bestowing one of his rare
smiles on her. “Being a whore explains everything.” After that, she committed some sexual act with many of the Addressees. Mordecai invariably rewarded her after a delivery of this kind
by being passionate and virile.

At the end of a wonderful hour in a hotel room—it was the eighth anniversary of their night by the Tidal Basin—Jocelyn asked, her voice quavering, if she could please stop being a
whore. She hated it; she wanted only one man, Mordecai. He pushed her away. “The others are the only thing that make it possible for me to fuck you,” he said.

— 2 —

Wolkowicz arrested Jocelyn on a Thursday in the spring, in a Peoples Drug Store. Sometimes, on her lunch hour, Jocelyn made a delivery to a man she never spoke to. This always
happened on a Thursday, the day that
Newsweek
came out. Jocelyn would go to the drugstore and look at the magazines. Her job was to leave an envelope inside the third
Newsweek
from
the top. The man would buy that particular copy and walk out with it while Jocelyn looked through other magazines, making sure the wrong person didn’t get the loaded
Newsweek
. As a
reward, she always bought herself a copy of
McCall’s
to read in the ladies’ room.

One day, as the man was paying for his
Newsweek
, two young men in dark suits and straw hats took him by the arms and seized the magazine. They found the envelope inside.

“I am an official of a foreign embassy,” the man said in a loud voice. “I have diplomatic immunity. I demand that you return my property.”

He attempted to free his arms; the young men resisted. There was a wild struggle and all three men fell to the floor, punching and cursing. Their straw hats fell off and rolled down the aisle
toward Jocelyn. She was terrified. A strong male hand seized her arm.
McCall’s
fell from Jocelyn’s hand and fluttered to the dirty floor.

A burly man with cold, cold eyes was showing her some sort of identification in a leather case. Through the thin sleeve of her blouse she could feel the sweat on his hand.

“I want you to come with me, Miss Frick,” he said in a conversational tone. “Don’t look at what’s happening up front. Just walk out of the store like you always do.
I’ll be right behind you.”

He unbuttoned his coat. She saw the butt of a gun protruding from his waistband.

It had been Jocelyn’s great fear, when she was taken into custody, that the whole story of her becoming a whore would get into the newspapers. Sitting on a straight chair
in the bare room Wolkowicz took her to, she had wide-awake dreams, a whole series of them, in which her father read the unspeakable truth in the Richmond
News Leader
and then did the only
thing he could do: Jocelyn flinched when she heard the gunshot in the library, cried out when she saw the judge’s flowing white hair stained with blood.

Wolkowicz seemed to understand her burden. For the first few hours, she would tell him nothing. He didn’t bully her at all; for a man who looked like a brute, he was remarkably kind, even
courtly. Finally Wolkowicz gave her a long look, filled with sympathy, then opened an envelope he had brought with him. It was a holey government messenger envelope, closed by a cord that wound
around two little cardboard buttons.

“Jocelyn,” Wolkowicz said, “I want you to look at some pictures.”

Then, one by one, he laid out glossy photographs of Jocelyn engaging in sexual acts with the Addressees. She stared in fascination at the shiny enlargements. Men with slack faces and rumpled
hair penetrated her, kneaded her breasts, and did worse. The pictures were bleached and jumpy, like Soviet films. She hardly recognized her own face, twisted as it was into a shame-filled mask with
wild eyes. Jocelyn had never realized how ugly copulation looked.

Wolkowicz let her cry for a long time. Then he pulled one of her hands away from her face and placed a clean handkerchief in it. Jocelyn dried her eyes and blew her nose. The first sight she
saw, when she was finally able to look at a human face, was the homely features of Wolkowicz, and there wasn’t a trace of blame or disgust or cruelty there. While she cried, he had put the
photographs away.

“Jocelyn,” he said, “I want you to look at one more picture.”

She covered her eyes again. Gently, he pulled her hands away from her face and held them. On the table, all by itself, lay a photograph of Mordecai Bashian. It was a group portrait. There was a
woman in the picture too, and three children. All had dark, sullen faces like Mordecai’s. Jocelyn tugged at her hands and Wolkowicz let them go. She picked up the photograph and a spear
pierced her heart.

“Then he was married every minute of the time I’ve known him,” Jocelyn said, dabbing her eyes with the handkerchief.

“That’s about the size of it,” Wolkowicz said sympathetically.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”
Jocelyn cried.

Wolkowicz let her go on until she was all cried out and racked by dry sobs, like a child whose heart has been broken. Then he took one of her hands in his and apologized.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We didn’t take those pictures. I’m sorry you had to see them. Mordecai Bashian had them taken; we found them hidden in his house. When
you wouldn’t talk to me, Cinders, I thought it might be because you were afraid everyone would find out what’s in the pictures—afraid that we’d use this evidence against
you, to hurt you and your family. Was I right about that?”

Jocelyn nodded. Hearing him call her Cinders perked her up somehow. She’d never dared to reveal this old pet name to Mordecai. Suddenly she was bright-eyed and deeply calm. Wolkowicz
squeezed her hand reassuringly.

“That doesn’t have to happen,” he said. “I promise you. The pictures can be destroyed. No judge would ever see them, no other human being would ever see them. Nothing
would happen to you. You’ve suffered enough. None of this was your fault. Do you believe me?”

“Yes.”

Wolkowicz smiled at her until she smiled back. Then he touched her cheek, gave it a little pat.

“Mordecai meant the world to you,” Wolkowicz said, “but I think you know what he’s done. He betrayed you, Cinders. He betrayed his country, too. He’s put the United
States in terrible danger. Will you help our country?”

Jocelyn nodded. Wolkowicz patted her cheek again.

“Good girl,” he said.

In after years, remembering that little tap upon the cheek, Jocelyn wondered what Wolkowicz’s name might have been. Though they spent days together, going over photographs and documents
and rehearsing her testimony before the Committee, he never once told her what to call him. It seemed rude to ask: she should have been able to read his name on his badge when he showed it to her
in the drugstore. It was her fault that she didn’t remember.

— 3 —

In her testimony before the House Committee, Jocelyn forgot no names, as she had forgotten Wolkowicz’s. Among her Addressees were officials of the Defense Department, the
Treasury, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and one officer of the Foreign Service. Like Mordecai Bashian, they were all medium-level civil servants who had no great power or influence.
But, as the fiery young counsel of the Committee, a man named Dennis Foley, kept on saying, they were inside the government like maggots.

The officer of the Foreign Service named by Jocelyn Frick was Wadsworth Jessup. Waddy was accused of being a Soviet agent. He denied it. But Dennis Foley insisted that Waddy had worked in subtle
ways to bring about the defeat of the French in Indochina and the establishment of a Communist regime there. Haggard and trembling, his voice breaking as he tried to answer Foley’s barrage of
accusations, Waddy was not a believable witness.

Midway through the testimony, as Waddy drew closer and closer to the edge of hysteria, Waddy’s lawyer asked for a conference with Foley and the committee chairman. Elliott Hubbard had been
engaged by the Outfit to represent its interests in the case. After all, Waddy was a former Outfitter and it was obvious that he was ready to confess to crimes he had never committed, just to put
an end to his ordeal.

“If you’ll plead him guilty,” Foley told the lawyer, “we’ll recommend a minor charge—perjury, say—to the Department of Justice. His D.S.C. will get him
a token sentence.”

“Plead him guilty?” Waddy’s lawyer said. “He’s not guilty and you know it. You have nothing to go on but innuendo and supposition.”

“Is that so?”

Foley pressed a buzzer and Wolkowicz came through the door.

“This is the man who broke the case,” Foley said. “I think you know each other.”

Elliott was astonished. No hint that Wolkowicz was involved in the Addressees Spy Ring, as the press called Mordecai Bashian’s network of shabby failures, had reached his ears. Elliott
asked to speak to Wolkowicz in private.

“How are you mixed up in this?” Elliott asked when he and Wolkowicz were alone. “This is not Outfit business, catching spies for Foley’s wienie roast.”

“It’s Outfit business if there’s a threat to the security of the Outfit,” Wolkowicz said. “The Director thought there was a threat. Waddy was mixed up with this
Mordecai Bashian, who was seeing the case officer from the Polish Embassy we picked up in the drugstore.”

“Waddy, mixed up? How?”

“Mordecai let him frig Jocelyn Frick.”

“
Waddy?
For Christ’s sake, Barney—Waddy’s a homosexual.”

“So she gave him a blow job. Maybe he closed his eyes and thought about boy scouts.”

“Barney, be honest. Do you really think Waddy’s a Soviet agent?”