The Last Supper (46 page)

Of all the people he had seen since returning home, only Stephanie asked Christopher about his life in China. She was intensely interested in him. She watched him eat, she watched his face as he
read, she listened with close attention to everything he said. In her soft, serious voice, she asked any question that came into her head. In her dogged honesty, she felt that she had to explain
this.

“You’re the only person I’ve ever known personally who has suffered,” she told him.

“That can’t be true.”

“Can’t it? You should spend a day with my patients. They think they’re Third World persons, like starving Africans and tortured Iranians, because they can’t achieve
orgasm. Have you thought about—really thought about—the implications of living in a society in which a million people will pay fifteen dollars for a
diet
book?”

At the end of a month, she knew all the surface details of his life in China. Nothing shocked her. There was no question she was not willing to ask. She was, of course, a psychotherapist, but
her way of looking at the world went beyond professional training. She hated hypocrisy. She would no more soften a question or use a weak word when a strong one would do than she would wear perfume
or a silk dress. She was determined to see things as they were, to live life as it was.

One summer night, they were sitting in the garden, beside a Roman fountain that some dead Hubbard uncle, an amateur archaeologist, had excavated in Cappadocia. It was dark. Stephanie launched a
new line of questioning.

“In China,” she said, “what did you do for sex?”

“Very little,” Christopher replied. Her bluntness amused him. She made him think of Rosalind Wilmot, of Molly. He had nearly forgotten how relentless young women could be when their
interest was aroused.

“But what exactly?” she persisted. “Did you use other men?”

“There were no other men. I had myself, but that only lasted for the first few years.”

“Why?”

“I could no longer remember what a woman’s body looked and felt like.”

“You needed to visualize a woman’s body in order to have an orgasm?”

“Yes.”

For some reason this nonplussed Stephanie. She rose from her chair and went inside. Through the window, Christopher saw her moving about in the lighted kitchen, unloading the dishwasher and
putting the plates away. He expected her to come back outside to say good night—that was her usual routine—but she switched off the kitchen light and remained in the house.

When he went inside, Christopher found her in the sitting room, reading his poem. Absorbed in her reading, she was startled when he came into the room. But she didn’t stop.

“I know I should have asked,” she said. “It was lying on the desk and my eye fell on it. I don’t think I can stop now.”

The poem had interested her from the first day. She knew that it was a record of everything that Christopher had remembered in prison. He had never invited her to read it, and it was the only
thing in his life that made her shy.

“I read your other poems,” she said now. “You gave me a copy in Paris. I used to read them when you were first in China. It helped me to visualize you. They’re so full of
emotion and you’re so . . .”

“Go ahead.”

“Empty, Paul. As if all the feelings have run out of you through a wound. You seemed so alive to me in Paris, when you used to come to the house with those beautiful women. Molly
especially.”

When she spoke of their earlier friendship in Paris, she never said, “When I was a child.” She did not seem to want Christopher to remember that he had seen her as a child.

“Are the women from Paris in this poem?”

“Everything’s in it,” Christopher said. “You can read all of it if you like.”

“What I’ve already read is so plain and true,” she said. “You really have forgotten how to lie, haven’t you?”

Christopher didn’t know what to say to that.

Stephanie sat down at the desk. “It’s eleven o’clock already,” she said. “Go to bed. I’ll sit here and let myself out when I’m finished.”

Christopher went upstairs. In his bedroom, he took off his clothes and folded them neatly, as Cheng had taught him. Then he lay down and went immediately to sleep.

Even before he woke, Christopher knew that Stephanie was with him. When he opened his eyes he found himself looking into hers. The whites glistened against the tawny skin of
her face. He started to speak. Stephanie laid a finger on his lips.

“Don’t,” she said. “Let me.”

She was expert, studied, earnest, as in her running. Finally, Christopher reached for her. When his rough coolie hands touched her own smooth skin, she shuddered and murmured.

Christopher closed his eyes and, as Molly had promised him all those years ago in the snow on the Jura, he believed for an instant that it was her joyful young body that he held in his arms. For
the first time in years, his mind opened completely to let her in. While the lovemaking lasted, he saw Molly as she had been and remembered how it had felt to love her with all his heart.

When Stephanie looked at him again, Christopher’s face was wet with tears. He spoke. Stephanie didn’t hear him.

“What did you say?”

As on the airplane, he spoke without thinking.

“Love,” he said.

Stephanie bit her lip, then smiled with happiness. Christopher, who had not altogether forgotten how to lie, smiled back and kissed her with the utmost gentleness.

— 1 —

Patrick Graham continued to hound Wolkowicz. On his Sunday night show, Graham ran dramatic snippets from the encounter on the Websters’ front steps. In a slow-motion
montage, viewers saw Wolkowicz’s snarling face, his P-38 gripped in his hand, his attack on Graham, and Graham’s fall to the sidewalk.

“This man is the greatest secret agent in American history,” Graham told the camera. “Barney Wolkowicz, the Red-slayer. What are the secrets of his success, the secrets of his
life? They are the Outfit’s most closely guarded secrets, and we hope to reveal some of them on an upcoming broadcast.”

“I’m sending Wolkowicz to Berlin,” Patchen said. “He’ll have to fly over on an air force transport. He can’t carry his P-38 on commercial
flights anymore.”

Patchen and Christopher sat in the garden by the plashing fountain, the Doberman at Patchen’s feet.

“Sometimes it seems to me that I’ve spent half my life getting Barney out of the country,” Patchen said. “This won’t solve the problem, of course. Barney will be on
television in the end. Graham will scour the globe for him.”

“Then why send Wolkowicz away? What’s the point?”

“I thought perhaps getting Barney out of Washington would have an effect on Graham’s . . . enthusiasm.”

“His enthusiasm?”

“His fixation, then. You saw Wolkowicz, waving his gun for the camera.
That’s
what Graham is after. He thinks that the Outfit is a collection of storm troopers. Barney’s
such a drunk, such a thug. Everything about him confirms the delusions that Patrick Graham lives by.”

On an evening in June, with rain in the air, Patchen wore a light woolen cardigan.

“It’s all very strange,” he said. “The media seem to operate on some sort of insect intelligence. They all get the same delusion at the same time. Then they swarm out of
the hive and sting something to death. I hope it’s not going to be you this time.”

“Why should it be me?”

Patchen coughed. “You may well ask. Wolkowicz thinks the answer to that is simple: it’s a Communist conspiracy. Graham is a Soviet agent. Another Soviet agent inside the Outfit is
feeding him scandal.”

“You don’t think that’s the case?”

“It’s a very simple answer to the problem. Simplicity is Barney’s specialty, of course. In Graham’s case, I wish it
were
that simple. If he were an agent, it would
be less disturbing than the truth about him and his colleagues. These people are tetched in the head.”

Patchen studied the stone of the fountain, worn by the waters of centuries. His one eye, when he turned back to Christopher, was unfocused. Christopher realized that he hadn’t really seen
the fountain; Patchen had never taken much notice of beauty.

“I wish Graham hadn’t seen you and Wolkowicz together. I feared that, you’ll remember. I’d hoped you could live in peace, but that’s hard to manage
nowadays.”

Patchen paused. “Barney should retire,” he said. “God knows what harm he’ll do in Berlin.”

— 2 —

Patrick Graham, who loved conspiracy, enjoyed the tradecraft that his source insisted upon. He would receive a phone call and a whispery voice that sounded like a robot from a
science fiction show on black-and-white TV would give him a time and a place. He researched the voice and concluded that his source was speaking through an electronic device called a voice-changer,
to baffle attempts to identify him. It was a wonderful touch of cheap melodrama, and Graham had recorded the calls, for use on the air.

Graham, with his famous face, could do nothing in secret; he was recognized wherever he went. It was intelligent, then, to meet in a busy place.

He never met the source himself. The material—amazing material, marked with the red
Secret
stamp of the Outfit on every page—was given to him by a young girl. She had long
hair, so black that it shimmered with blue lights. After passing Graham the material, she vanished. Because she was so elusive, and because Graham was an incurable romantic, he called her Rima,
after the bird girl in W. H. Hudson’s
Green Mansions
, the favorite novel of his adolescence.

Today Graham, still in his running clothes, strolled through the Georgetown Safeway. People who came to the market early in the morning were too busy comparing produce and prices to pay
attention even to a famous stranger.

He looked for the girl and at first he could not find her in the crowd. He was late. Usually she wouldn’t wait if he didn’t come on time. Then he saw her. She was standing beyond the
checkout with her back turned, her shawl of blue-black hair hanging down her back.

In her hand, she carried a string bag filled with oranges. She waved to him as if they were college sweethearts—she was amazingly good at all the roles—and took his arm. As they
strolled away from the market, she reached into her bag and handed him an orange. Graham had learned that it was useless to ask her questions. When he tried, she looked at him as if she
didn’t understand English. He had developed a fancy for her. Wolkowicz’s information was correct—Graham did have a weakness for small, slim, black-haired girls. On a whim, he
kissed her, a hard kiss on the mouth. She tasted of peppermint. He had expected something more exotic.

“Good cover, right?” he said, grinning down into her face.

There was disgust in her eyes, but only Graham could see it. For the benefit of any surveillance, she smiled and walked away across the parking lot, running a little and looking at her watch, as
if this sweet, hurried rendezvous had made her late for a class. She made you imagine that she had a stern father who would not approve of this lover, who so obviously came from another world.

In his car, Graham examined the orange. A neat circle of skin had been cut around the navel. Graham pried it out with the manicured nail of his index finger. A tube slid out of the orange.
Inside the tube, as usual, he found a strip of film, photographs of Outfit documents.

Graham ran the film through a battery-powered viewer. When he realized what he had, he put his car in gear and drove toward Georgetown.

— 3 —

As she ran, leading the way down a quiet street, Stephanie saw something. Her pace, which had been so strong, became tentative. She slowed down and looked over her shoulder at
Christopher.

“Shit,” she said.

Patrick Graham, dressed in running clothes, waited for them a few yards away, in the dappled light beneath a maple tree.

As they approached, Graham smiled warmly, a flash of white in a tanned face. Stephanie ran on. Christopher stopped.

Graham spread his arms as if he were inviting a body search. “No camera,” he said, “no recorders. I didn’t come to your house, Paul. You’ve earned a little
privacy.”

Graham’s voice was the same in life as it was on television. He spoke slowly and clearly, enunciating every syllable, as if he were addressing a slow-witted child.

“I want to talk to you,” he said. “Informally. Just for a moment.”

Christopher waited. Graham examined him, a quick professional reading that missed nothing. Graham had a smooth, handsome face. But an expression of suspicion, mixed with hostility, overlay his
healthy good looks like a membrane.

“You’re a fascinating character,” Graham said. “All that talent, all that misfortune. I’ve read your poetry; I used to admire your journalism when I was at
Yale.”

Christopher didn’t answer. Graham smiled; his teeth were capped. He was as well tended as a millionaire’s young wife: hair, skin, teeth, nails—everything about him betrayed
signs of professional attention. Christopher had never seen a male who took such care of his appearance.

“Frankly,” Graham said, his voice even more controlled, “I was a little surprised to see you at the Websters’ the other evening, especially in Barney Wolkowicz’s
company.”