The Last Supper (42 page)

Christopher shook the watch, a self-winding Rolex. It began to run again.

— 5 —

Christopher had lost what little tendency he had ever had to ask questions. On the plane, he listened politely while Horace Hubbard told him the news of America: Elliott Hubbard
was still alive; David Patchen was now Director of the Outfit. Horace himself had been in China for eighteen months, as chief of the Outfit’s station in Peking. America and China were friends
again. Especially, their intelligence services were friends.

“In a way, I owe my high post to you,” Horace said. “Patchen was determined to get you out. I guess he thought the Chinese would listen more sympathetically to your cousin than
to a stranger.”

After several hours of flight, the plane landed at an American naval base in the Aleutian Islands. The aircraft remained sealed, doors shut and shades drawn over the windows, during the
refueling. After the trucks had pulled away, the door opened and the cabin was flooded with arctic air. Horace had gone forward, beyond the curtain, and Christopher heard the murmur of voices as
the engines began to whine.

When Horace returned, crouching slightly so that his head would not brush the overhead, he was followed by David Patchen.

Patchen wore his usual dark suit. His hair, which was now snow-white, had been feathered by the wind. He moved with even greater difficulty than Christopher remembered, but the scars on his face
had faded as his skin had aged and lost pigment.

Patchen saw Christopher and paused. He seemed uncomfortable, as if he had walked into a house without knocking. Christopher’s good manners came back after their long sleep and he stood up
and smiled.

“My friend,” Patchen said in his cracked voice.

Christopher smiled at Patchen’s emotion. Coming from him, these two dry words were a passionate declaration of brotherly love. The two men shook hands. The plane began to taxi and Patchen
lost his balance. Christopher seized him by the arms to prevent his falling. Then Patchen sat down, reaching across his body to support his bad leg with his good hand, and fastened his seat belt.
The engines howled; it was useless to speak. As the plane rolled faster down the runway and then began its steep climb, Patchen cleared his throat repeatedly. The jet leveled off and flew more
quietly.

“You look well,” Patchen said at last.

“I’ve been leading a healthy life,” Christopher said.

The attendant brought drinks and a dish of salted nuts. Christopher ate the nuts. Patchen watched with disapproval.

“Too much salt,” he said. “Salt is a villain to the middle-aged.”

Christopher drank his orange juice, upending the glass as before. He put down the glass and waited for the other men to speak.

“Did the Chinese tell you why you were released?” Patchen asked.

“I didn’t know that I was being released until I saw Horace,” Christopher replied.

“What did you think was going on?”

“I didn’t know. It seemed possible that they were going to execute me. They don’t explain, they just do things.”

Patchen’s watchful face reminded Christopher of Ze. So did his way of speaking; Christopher had often imagined Ze speaking to his children, if he had any, in the same tone he used with
him.

“You made an excellent impression on the Chinese,” Patchen said, “and you should know that it is that, and not anything the Outfit or anyone else in the U.S. government did,
which led to your release. You have nothing to thank your country for. You’re under no obligation to tell us anything.”

“I see.”

“Good. I’m not going to let anyone from the Outfit anywhere near you. If you want to talk to me, or Horace, that’s fine. But it’s your decision.”

Plunging into things in this way, Patchen seemed to take it for granted that Christopher was still the man he had always been. This puzzled Christopher, who did not himself know for certain if
he had kept his sanity.

“You may not have much peace and quiet,” Patchen said. “There was a lot of fuss when you turned up in China. That died away, of course, but when the media find out you’ve
been released they’ll be baying at your heels.”

“The media?” Christopher said.

“You don’t know that word? You will. It’s what used to be called the press. It would be better to keep your homecoming quiet, but secrets have been banned in America.
Patriotism is the new pornography. You’ll notice great changes in our country.”

The attendant brought food, an American airline dinner of salad, filet steak, and buttered vegetables. The tray looked exactly as it had looked in the past, but it smelled much stronger.
Christopher ate the salad, holding the bowl under his chin and using his fingers. Then he consumed the bread. The attendant poured wine into stemmed glasses. Patchen examined the label; it was a
good Pomerol. He drank it as he ate. Christopher finished in a matter of seconds and sat back, watching Patchen and Horace wield their knives and forks. He drank no wine.

Patchen ordered the table cleared.

“There’s something else,” he said. “It’s not good news.”

Looking into Patchen’s face, Christopher knew what had happened. Patchen told him anyway.

“It’s a death,” he said. “Your Australian girl, Molly.”

Christopher asked his first question: “When?”

“The night you left Paris. She followed you to the airport. She was hit by a car. Tom Webster saw it happen.”

Christopher unbuckled his seat belt and got up. He went into the toilet and shut the door. The fluorescent bulb came on with a sound like a trapped insect. There were no shadows at all;
everything in the little cubicle was made of plastic or metal.

Looking into the mirror for the first time since the night of Molly’s death—he remembered exactly the time and place where he had last seen himself in a glass: the men’s room
at Orly, Tom Webster standing beside him—Christopher recognized himself at once.

His hair was cropped short and it was darker than he remembered. His face, too, was darker, not in color, but in the loss of light, as if youth had been burned out of it by a disease. Still, he
was the same man.

Christopher tried to remember Molly as he had seen her so many times on the Ponte Sisto. He could imagine the bridge, imagine the roofs and the trees of the city beyond it, imagine the brown
Tiber flowing beneath it—imagine, even, the jovial noise of Rome and the way the city smelled of dust and coffee. But, looking into his own eyes for the first time in all these years, he
could not make Molly appear again in his memory. She was gone.

Silently, watching himself in the mirror, he began to cry. He tried to speak. For the first time in ten years, he had no control over his actions; his body was acting on its own, tears squeezing
out of his eyes, words squeezing out of his larynx. He heard a noise deep in his throat, then a whisper, and finally a shout. Each time, he repeated the same word: “Good-bye.”

As he wept, what he remembered best was the stinging pain he had felt on the day he had seen his mother for the last time, when the policeman had struck him with his truncheon.

— 1 —

“Tell me about Paul Christopher,” Patrick Graham said.

“I don’t know anything about him,” Stephanie Webster replied.

“But you
knew
him. You told me that he used to come to your parents’ place in Paris.”

“When did I tell you that?”

“In New York.”

“Christ. Is there
anything
about New York that’s slipped your mind?”

Just after college, Patrick and Stephanie had, for part of a summer, been fellow members of a revolutionary cell in the East Village. They had plotted kidnappings and assassinations and
bombings; they had had sex with each other; they had taken Arab underground names as a demonstration of their solidarity with the Third World. They had never actually committed an act of violence
or subversion; in the style of their generation, it was all a game.

In the end, most of the members of the underground cell went back to their families. Now Stephanie was a psychotherapist. Patrick Graham was a television reporter with star quality. She
hadn’t seen him for at least two years.

“Come on, Saffiyah,” said Graham, calling Stephanie by her underground name. “It’s too early in the morning to be coy.”

It was seven-fifteen. Graham’s face, on tape, flickered on the kitchen TV; he had turned it on when he came in, and now he held up a hand for silence as he listened to his own strong voice
as it described the state of his latest investigation. Graham’s speciality was the exposé.

Stephanie Webster opened the door of her refrigerator and poured herself a glass of juice. She had gone out at six-thirty as usual for her morning run through Georgetown, and when she returned
she had found Graham waiting on her doorstep. She was still damp with sweat. Stephanie drank her apple juice and shivered; her body was cooling too quickly in the air-conditioned house.

Patrick Graham still watched himself on the tiny screen of the Sony. Stephanie did not like television; the set had been a gift from her father. She stripped off her sweatband and spoke in a
piercing voice in order to be heard above the television set.

“I’ve got to shower and go to work,” she said.

Graham followed her out of the kitchen and up the stairs. The chic house that she lived in, a narrow brick structure in what had once been a slum, would have sold for half a million dollars on
the current market. Works of art worth more than that hung on the walls. Graham recognized a Seurat, a Cassatt, a Hicks. He knew about such things. He had studied art history at Yale.

“What the fuck are you doing in a place like this?” he said.

“House-sitting,” Stephanie said.

“Who for?”

Graham never left a question unasked. Stephanie didn’t answer. The house belonged to Horace Hubbard, but this was not a name she was going to speak in Graham’s presence. She went
into a bedroom and closed the door. Graham tried to follow, but Stephanie had locked the door. He put his ear to the panel and heard the shower running.

When Stephanie came back downstairs, dressed in the jeans and blouse and tweed hacking jacket that she wore to work, she found Graham looking at the pictures. He had turned on the track lights
the better to see them. On his face, as he leaned toward the Seurat, was a look of lust.

“It’s theft from the people, to own such paintings,” he said.

“Unless you’re the one who owns them. Look, I’ve got to go.”

“Do you just leave this stuff in the house?”

“There’s an alarm system. You can’t get near them without bells going off and cops jumping out of the closets. Out, Patrick.”

“Whose house is this?”

“No one you know.”

Stephanie shook her key ring at Graham and jerked her head toward the front door.

“You haven’t told me about Christopher,” he said.

“I was a child the last time I saw him,” Stephanie said, holding the front door open. “He was a nice man and he always seemed to have a beautiful woman with him. He used to
drop in for a drink. Then the Chinese arrested him.”

“Do you know why?”

“Espionage, the papers said.”

“I mean
why
. What was his mission in China? If he was a friend of your father’s you could have heard the real story. You used to play with your dolls and listen to spies while
they talked about their dirty tricks, at least that’s what you always said in New York.”

“I never played with dolls.”

“Nothing changes. Even in the cell you wouldn’t tell any real secrets. It was just a lot of talk about how tough it was to be an Outfit brat. Never any details, just a bunch of
Freudian junk.”

“I don’t know any real secrets.”

Stephanie pushed Graham out the door, turned on the alarm system, and pulled the door shut. As she turned the key in the lock, Graham asked her another question.

“Who else from the Outfit was he close to, besides your father?”

“For all I know, Patrick, Paul Christopher sold ballpoint pens for a living. I don’t know who he knew.”

“Wolkowicz? Did he know Wolkowicz?”

Stephanie blew out an exasperated breath, waggled her fingers, and got into her Volkswagen. As the engine started, Graham rapped on the window.

“
Did
he know Wolkowicz?” he asked through glass. “By God, he did; I can see it in your eyes. That’s
wonderful
Steph.”

— 2 —

“In your absence, Paul,” Sebastian Laux said, “Elliott and I made a number of decisions about your property.”

“Property?”

Sebastian refused coffee and waited until Elliott’s servant left the room before he spoke again.

“We thought you’d want a place of your own when you came back,” Sebastian said. “We guessed you’d prefer Washington. Your friends are there. It’s a small
house, but quite nice.”

“A house?”

“On O Street,” Sebastian said. “There’s a small garden in the back. Horace lives in it when he’s in Washington. While he’s been in China, Tom Webster’s
daughter, Stephanie, has been house-sitting, but she’s got a line on another place, so it’s yours at any time.”