The Last Supper (47 page)

Far down the block, Stephanie had stopped. She was running in place, to keep her muscles loose. She looked back anxiously at Christopher and Graham.

“I understand now that you and Wolkowicz are old friends. That was news to me,” Graham said. “I knew about Tom Webster’s background, I knew that you and Dave Patchen were
roommates at Harvard. I know now that you’ve been seeing these people—walking across the Georgetown campus with Dave. But I didn’t know about Barney.”

Christopher had never heard anyone call Patchen “Dave.” Graham seemed to use nicknames as talismans, as if they gave him some intimate connection with the people he was talking
about.

“The thing is, Paul,” he said, “I want to be fair. I’m working on a major piece on your old Outfit. Barney is the figure I’m focusing on. I never dreamed
you’d come into it. But now you have. There are so many connections. I think you’ve earned peace and quiet; no reporter in this town would have bothered you after all you’ve been
through. But now you’ve stumbled into my story. I can’t ignore that. But I’m not out to embarrass you in any way. Obviously, you’re a victim, capital
V
.”

Stephanie was coming back, running very slowly. Her dark eyes under her white sweatband glittered with emotion.

“After all you’ve been through, nobody wants to dump on you,” Graham said. “What I want to suggest, Paul, is that you come over to the studio and talk to me in front of
the cameras.”

“Why would I want to do that?” Christopher asked.

“In the interests of truth. I’d like to talk about Wolkowicz a little. You can talk about anything you want to get off your chest—China, your feelings about what’s
happened to you.”

Graham examined Christopher’s face. “It’s disconcerting,” he said, “talking to someone who doesn’t bother to respond. You do understand the options
here?”

“Options?” .

“This is a story that could run wild. Look at it from the viewer’s standpoint. You’re in a Chinese prison, convicted of espionage, for more than ten years. You come back in
secret, you’re seen with nobody but Outfit people. You refuse to be interviewed. It’s hard to understand.”

Stephanie arrived, sweat shining on her face. She had an early suntan. Under the tan, her cheeks were flushed, two angry spots of red. Graham ignored her, as if she were a stranger.

“They’ve sent Barney to Berlin, you know,” he said. “You can tell Patchen it won’t work. I’m going after him.”

“I’ll be late to work if we don’t get moving,” Stephanie said to Christopher.

She didn’t look at Graham. She turned and broke into a run. Christopher followed her. Stephanie moved slowly until, hearing Christopher’s footfall, she looked over her shoulder and
saw him. Then she began to pick up the pace.

Graham called to Christopher in his powerful trained voice.

“Paul,” he shouted. “Why? What do you owe those creeps?”

— 4 —

As the fall television season began, “The Patrick Graham Show” devoted a half-hour segment to the death of Hubbard Christopher, which had taken place nearly thirty
years before.

In film shot in Berlin, Graham reenacted the murder, returning on the same sort of pallid August morning, at the exact hour of the crime, to the exact scene in the Wilmersdorf Wood. Actors
played the roles of Hubbard, Wolkowicz, and Horst Bülow. Once again Bülow got off the streetcar, once again Hubbard started across the street, once again the death car headed straight for
him, once again Wolkowicz slew Hubbard’s murderer and Bülow ran away through the woods.

In a veterans’ hospital in Massachusetts, Graham had found Jimmy Jo Mitchell, the army sergeant who had driven Hubbard’s car. He had flown Mitchell to Berlin and interviewed him at
the scene of the crime. The sergeant was an old man now, ravaged by drink. When he described Hubbard Christopher, his voice broke.

“Colonel Christopher was one hell of a man,” he said; “he gave his life for his country. Those were rough days in Berlin. It was a war, it was fought in secret, but it was a
war, all right.”

“What was Hubbard Christopher doing out here that morning?” Graham intoned. “Why did he come to this lonely place in the Wilmersdorf Wood?”

This repetition of names—names of dead men, names of foreign places—achieved a dramatic effect. Graham could do a lot with tones of voice, gestures, the merest tug of a facial
expression.

Mitchell said, “He came here to meet that agent. They all had code names. I know he was a Kraut. He came over from the Russian Zone. He had something Colonel Christopher wanted.”

“What was that?”

“I don’t know. It had to be important or the colonel wouldn’t have come himself. He was the C.O.”

“The agent, a German, nameless, was bringing something out of the Soviet Zone that was so important that Hubbard Christopher risked his life and the lives of Wolkowicz and you, his
sergeant. Was he close to Wolkowicz?”

“Nobody was close to Wolkowicz. He was a hard-nosed son of a bitch, but he was good. They worked together fine.”

“This German agent, this nameless man from the Soviet Zone, did Hubbard Christopher know him?”

“No, Wolkowicz made him for the colonel.”

“ ‘Made’ him? You mean he pointed out the German agent, identified him for Hubbard Christopher?”

“Right.”

“And, moments later, Colonel Hubbard Christopher, chief of American intelligence in Berlin, was struck by a speeding car and killed. Then Wolkowicz killed the driver of the death car, then
you shot at the fleeing German agent, the nameless agent from the Soviet Zone. Why did you do that?”

“Because he was getting away.”

Graham’s crew had chalked the outline of Hubbard’s dead body on the pavement. With the sergeant, Graham stood over this drawing.

“Then what happened?”

“Wolkowicz put the colonel and the dead Kraut—the guy who was driving the car that killed Colonel Christopher—in the staff car and drove away.”

“What did you do then?”

“I policed the area.”

“Policed the area?”

“Looked for any evidence and cleaned it up.”

“What did you find?”

“The brass—the empty shells, right?—from Wolkowicz’s P-38 and my .45. The Kraut agent dropped his briefcase. There was nothing in it but a sandwich but I took it anyway,
in case there were fingerprints. And then there was the envelope I told you about.”

Graham’s voice grew more urgent.

“There was an envelope. Let’s talk about that envelope.”

“Colonel Christopher was carrying it. It flew out of his hand when the car hit him. I found it over there, in the grass. It was busted open and the pages were blowing around. Otherwise I
would have missed it.”

“Pages? It was a file, a secret file.”

“Everything was secret in our Outfit. It was all in German.”

“You couldn’t read it?”

“Only the name on it.”

“What name was that?”

“Christopher, like the colonel. The first name was a German girl’s name, I can’t remember it. There was a photograph.”

Patrick Graham turned to the camera. “Even after thirty years, Sergeant Mitchell remembers the face in the photograph. Using a police artist, we’ve reconstructed that
face.”

Lori’s face, coarsened by its long stay in the memory of the alcoholic sergeant, flashed onto the screen and over the network.

“This woman was the wife of Hubbard Christopher, an American spy who was killed in Berlin just after the war,” Graham said to the cameras. “She was also the mother of Paul
Christopher, an American spy who has just been released after spending ten years in a Chinese prison. She herself disappeared in 1939, suspected by the Nazis of treason and espionage. What are the
connections of this family to Barney Wolkowicz? We’ll explore that subject in a future broadcast.”

— 5 —

On the day he returned from Berlin, Wolkowicz called Stephanie Webster at work and told her that he wanted to see Christopher. He gave detailed instructions as to the time and
place of the meeting.

When the two men met, in the Hirschhorn Sculpture Garden, Wolkowicz did not waste time explaining how he knew that Stephanie saw Christopher every day. This was the sort of information Wolkowicz
always possessed.

“You’re the first person I’m seeing in Washington,” Wolkowicz said. “After that TV show, I suppose you think I lied to you about your mother.”

“No, I don’t think that. But if Graham had the facts, you left something out of the story you told me.”

“That’s right. I thought the whole thing had gone far enough. Your father had this obsession that your mother was alive. Why should you inherit it?”

Wolkowicz was agitated. Words rushed out of him. He seemed eager to tell Christopher these secrets. It was a startling change. To the old Wolkowicz, even the smallest secret was something to be
jealously guarded, and never to be shared. Christopher had never before seen him in such a state.

Wolkowicz sensed his puzzlement. He put an arm around Christopher’s shoulders and walked him among the sculptures.

“This has bothered me for years,” he said. “Then to have you see it on TV. Jesus.”

“
Was
my mother alive?” Christopher asked.

“Your father hoped so. He got hold of part of her Gestapo file.”

“How?”

“It just turned up in some stuff an agent handed over. But it was just the first pages of the file. Photograph, date of birth, color of eyes, suspicious associations. I never read the
whole file.”

“What happened to it?”

“I don’t know that, either. Jimmy Jo Mitchell said on the Graham show that he picked it up. That was the first I knew about that. He must have turned it in. If he’d kept it,
Graham would have had it on TV in living color.”

They walked among the abstract sculpture, misshapen chunks of stone and metal, gouged by the chisel and burned by the torch.

“I don’t know how anyone can like this shit,” Wolkowicz said. “Look at it. Nothing’s
finished
, for Christ’s sake. What happened? Did all these
sculptors die right after they got started?”

It was early in the day and it had been raining. There were few people in the sculpture garden—a group of schoolchildren, a young woman with a sad face speaking urgently to a man who
carried a briefcase. Beneath a glistening form of stainless steel, Wolkowicz paused and looked around to be certain that he would not be overheard.

“I don’t want you to think bad things of me,” he said. “That day at the Harbor, after your father’s funeral, I couldn’t tell you all the facts. You were still
an outsider, you weren’t cleared. Then, when we got the medals, you heard what happened.”

“But not that my mother was involved.”

“Paul, listen. She was only involved in your father’s mind. His dying had nothing to do with her.”

“What
did
his dying have to do with, then?”

“The Russians. Everybody in Berlin was crazy then. They were flyswatting people right and left.”

“So they baited a trap with my mother and flyswatted my father?”

Wolkowicz’s slanted eyes, bloodshot and rheumy, examined Christopher. He blinked rapidly. He shook his head, got out his handkerchief, and blew his nose and wiped his eyes. For a long
time, he did not reply.

Then he said, “No. I was the one who gave him the file, it was my agent we were going to meet. The Russians just saw an opportunity and grabbed it. Hubbard was too good; he was hurting
them.”

“How could that happen? What about your security? How could the Russians do that, see an opportunity, know exactly where to be and when to be there?”

Wolkowicz tried to speak but couldn’t. He coughed violently and spat on the ground. Finally he was able to speak again.

“I used Ilse to set up the meeting,” he said.

Wolkowicz was hungry. They took a taxi across the river to Alexandria. Wolkowicz ordered the cab to stop at an intersection near the old part of the town. From there he and
Christopher walked for several blocks, ending at the door of a restaurant called the Thai Pagoda.

Wolkowicz pounded on the door. A young girl grinned delightedly through the glass at Wolkowicz. She let them in, twittering in Thai, and locked the door behind them. Bowing and smiling, she led
them inside. She had been setting the tables for lunch. She seated them at one of the tables and trotted to the bar.

She returned with two Rob Roys on a tray. Wolkowicz spoke to her in Thai. She left the two drinks in front of Wolkowicz and went away again. In a moment she was back with a club soda for
Christopher, then disappeared into the kitchen again. Christopher heard other female voices and smelled the aroma of cooking.

“We can talk here,” Wolkowicz said. “It’ll be a couple of hours before the lunch crowd arrives.”

But, waiting for his food, he lapsed into silence. When the meal came, a breakfast of fried eggs and rice, he broke the yolks and mixed them with the rice and condiments and ate the mixture,
sprawling over the plate and shoveling with chopsticks.

Wolkowicz had not mentioned Hubbard or Lori since he had had his fit of coughing in the sculpture garden, an hour before. But now he picked up the subject as if only seconds had passed.

“Your father was the smartest man I ever knew,” Wolkowicz said, “but on this one subject he was irrational. He must really have loved your mother.”

Christopher waited.

“It was tough, watching him,” Wolkowicz said. “He just couldn’t accept that she was dead.”

“Was that it? If he had seen proof, he would have accepted it. There was never any proof.”

“No proof?” Wolkowicz stared hard at Christopher. “
You
don’t think she was alive, do you?”

“I don’t think anyone can know. Did you know that I was alive in China?”

Wolkowicz shook his head, as if to clear it of a hallucination, and stared at Christopher.

“No,” he said. “To answer your question, no—I didn’t know for a fact that you were alive in China.” He laughed his rough barroom laugh. “You know what
they all said about you? They said, ‘Poor Christopher, he’ll come out completely changed, the Chinks will destroy his mind.’ I said, ‘Horseshit.’
Nothing
changes you. You’re just like your old man, a fucking genius. It isn’t just brains. It’s persistence. You never give up. You’re the only two I’ve ever known. It must
run in the family.”