The Last Supper (55 page)

“After what happened tonight, you know what Patchen is, don’t you?” he said.

Christopher didn’t respond.

“I know you don’t
want
to know,” Wolkowicz said. “But think. Who knew everything? Who knew what you found out in Vietnam? Who knew where Molly was hiding in Paris?
Who pulled me out of Saigon? Who knew what time you were arriving in Saigon and who you wanted to see? Who talked to the Chinese about you after you were taken? Who was there to hold your hand when
you got out? Webster knew some of those things. Horace knew some. I knew some. But only Patchen knew them all.”

Wolkowicz was shuddering violently now. His teeth chattered.

“You don’t believe it,” he said, hugging himself. “There’s no fucking hope. The first guy I had to deal with in this business was Waddy Jessup. The last is Patchen.
Nobody believes in Communists anymore, if you even suggest somebody might be a Communist, you’re a mental case. I’m whipped. You can’t fight the Fool Factory.”

Wolkowicz seized Christopher by the ears and kissed him on the cheek. Then, without a word of farewell, he left, as Christopher had seen him do hundreds of times before. His borrowed raincoat
was too long for him. Burly and short, plodding through the snow like a muzhik with the long skirt of Christopher’s coat flapping around his ankles, he looked, ironically, like a Russian
soldier.

It was useless to attempt to follow him. It was only through luck, or Wolkowicz’s own design, that Christopher had been able to stay with him even for a couple of blocks. At the primitive,
cunning tricks of spying, Wolkowicz remained the master.

Christopher waited until he was out of sight, then he walked up Sixteenth Street until he found a public telephone. He dialed Patchen’s number and when he heard the other man’s dry
voice at the other end of the line he said, “Are you ready?”

“Oh, yes,” Patchen said, through the blockage in his throat.

— 3 —

In his troubled sleep, Wolkowicz had thrown off the blankets. Toothless, he lay on his back, wearing raveled Jockey shorts, his broad fleecy chest rising and falling. His P-38
lay in its holster on the table by his head. His clothes were strewn over the floor, except for Christopher’s raincoat, which hung, still dripping, above the tub in the bathroom, beyond the
foot of the bed.

The phone rang. Wolkowicz’s eyes flew open and the first thing he saw in the gray light of the winter dawn was the raincoat. It moved. He sat bolt upright and put his hand on his gun
before he realized that what he saw was only an empty garment, turning in a current from the hot-air register.

The woman on the other side of the bed answered the telephone. She said, “Yes, immediately,” into the mouthpiece, then hung up.

Wolkowicz watched her get out of bed. She wore a silvery blue nightgown with lace at the neck, her best color because it matched her eyes. He reached out and slid his hand under her gown. She
was no longer young. The skin on her buttocks was thick now, pebbled like the skin of a fowl, and when she bent over, her breasts were like pears, small at the top and bell-shaped at the bottom,
but she still excited him. She paused, looking at him over her shoulder like a mare, and let him stroke her. “I’ll be back,” she whispered, running a stiffened index finger down
the bulge in his shorts and giving the head of his penis a hard pinch.

She went into the bathroom. Wolkowicz closed his eyes. His bones ached. It was not yet six o’clock; he had got into bed, after a longer run than usual to shake off surveillance, only an
hour before. He went back to sleep and slid into a complicated dream. It seemed to him that he had been asleep for hours when a sharp little sound awakened him, but in fact he had been unconscious
for less than five minutes.

The sound he had heard was the click of the clasp on the woman’s purse. She stood by the chair, dressed for the street in a trench coat, with her hand in the pocket of his trousers. She
held up a fan of paper money and smiled at him.

“Cab fare,” she said, whispering again. “They want me.”

“What the fuck for?”

The woman shrugged. She had covered her hair with a scarf. She wore no makeup. Without mascara and eye shadow, her pale eyes looked like the eyes of a blinded person, but she had a lovely
smile.

Wolkowicz rolled over and closed his eyes. He opened them again and looked at the telephone. He realized that she had spoken German to the caller. The telephone had wakened her while they were
in bed together a hundred times before, but she had never before spoken German.

Wolkowicz heaved himself out of bed and called the woman’s name, but she had gone. He looked out the window, through the slats of a venetian blind, but there was nothing to see. He had
rented this apartment because it did not have a front exposure; all the windows looked out on air shafts and blank walls.

He pulled on his trousers and tried to put on his wet shoes. The soaked leather resisted and he bent over and forced the shoes onto his thick feet. Measuring time in his head, he knew that his
struggle with the shoes had lost him the moments he needed to put on a shirt, so he snatched Christopher’s raincoat off the hanger and put that on as he ran through the apartment and out into
the hall, holding the P-38 in its holster under his armpit, beneath the coat.

The elevator carrying the woman was still in the shaft. It was slow. The whole building had been made on the cheap. Wolkowicz could heard Muzak, tinny strains of “The Merry Widow
Waltz,” as the door opened ten floors below. The service elevator was already on his floor; the woman had pushed both buttons and both cars had responded. As he went down, listening to Franz
Lehár, Wolkowicz saw himself in the convex mirror in the corner of the car and realized that he had not put in his false teeth. The snout of a television camera, part of the building’s
security system, pointed at him. He turned his back and buttoned up the raincoat.

Through the plate-glass wall that formed the front of the lobby, Wolkowicz saw that the woman had gone outside. She was looking up and down the wide thoroughfare for a cruising taxi. She spotted
one, a miracle at this hour of the day, and went up on tiptoe and waved to it. The cab stopped on the other side of the street. She was wearing a belted raincoat—a Burberry, she was as
conscious of style as Wolkowicz was oblivious to it—and from the back, as she ran into the street, she seemed as slim and as supple as a girl of twenty.

As she ran through the slush, mincingly on her high heels, a man on the other side of the street watched her. Wolkowicz had not seen him at once; he couldn’t understand how he had missed
him. Wolkowicz went outside, to get a better look at the stranger. It was six o’clock in the morning—too early for anyone to be there for an honest purpose.

Now the woman was halfway across the street. With a brisk gesture, the man raised a rolled newspaper, as if he himself were signaling for a taxi. Fifty feet down the street, a car pulled away
from the curb and accelerated through the wet snow, skidding and swerving.

“
No!
” Wolkowicz shouted, saliva flying out of his toothless mouth. “No! God damn it, no!”

He leaped down the steps, drawing his P-38. He called the woman’s name. She heard him and turned. In the same instant, she saw the car bearing down on her. She covered her eyes like a
frightened child.

Wolkowicz fell to his knees and leveled his pistol at the car. Before he could fire, the driver hit the brakes and the car skidded sideways, sending up a huge sheet of slush. The car spun
completely around and came to a stop. A man leaped out and leveled a machine pistol at Wolkowicz’s head. Wolkowicz, who automatically identified the weapon as a Kulspruta, and the man as
Horace Hubbard, laid down his P-38.

Two more cars pulled up, forming a pen around the woman, who lay on the pavement. She was unhurt, but in her fright she crawled a foot or two through the melting dingy snow, then stopped where
she was, on her hands and knees. Her eyes were fixed on the man with the newspaper, who had stepped off the curb and was walking toward her.

He dropped the newspaper and helped her to her feet. Her wonderful slow smile melted her ice-blue eyes. He had always been so good-looking, so quiet, so clever. She had always liked him, always
admired him. Though she knew he was her mortal enemy, and that a kinder man would have killed her, would have killed Wolkowicz, rather than humiliate them in this way, she was glad to see him, glad
that he had lived through everything.

“Paul!” said Ilse Wolkowicz. “It’s true what Barney told me: you haven’t changed at all. No one but you could have done this. My German boy!”

She leaned her head on Christopher’s shoulder. He breathed in the refreshing scent of her rose perfume.

— 1 —

The safe house in the Virginia woods was fitted out to resemble a gracious home: chintz slipcovers on the furniture, racing prints and watercolor landscapes on the walls. A log
fire burned cheerily in the fireplace.

Wolkowicz sat on a sofa, huddled inside Christopher’s raincoat. On a facing sofa, Patchen sat motionless, chalky with fatigue. He put his head back and closed his good eye. Wolkowicz
cleared his throat, loudly. Patchen opened his eye and looked with distaste on the steaming cup of coffee on the low table between the sofas.

“I’m overcome with curiosity,” Wolkowicz said. “How did you tail me?”

He glared at Patchen, as if he, Wolkowicz, were the captor and Patchen the prisoner, brought here for interrogation. Patchen did not respond. Ilse pointed a finger, immaculately manicured, at
Christopher. Comprehension dawned in Wolkowicz’s watchful eyes. He snapped his fingers.

“The raincoat,” he said. “It was the fucking raincoat.”

Wolkowicz leaped to his feet and took off the coat. This left him naked to the waist. There were many white hairs in the black mat on his chest and back and many puckered scars, mementos of the
wounds he had suffered in Burma, where the hair did not grow at all. He ran his hands over the material of the coat. He felt something in the hem and, with a wringing motion of his powerful hands,
ripped out the threads. A transmitter, no larger than a cuff button, fell onto the table. Wolkowicz didn’t bother to examine it: it was, to him, a familiar object.

“I’m proud of you,” he said to Christopher.

Without his teeth, Wolkowicz’s voice was different—thinner, less sure.

Patchen said, “Would you just like to tell us everything, Barney? It would save time.”

Wolkowicz put on the raincoat and buttoned it up. He ignored Patchen.

“Are you cold, darling?” Ilse asked.

“Naw—I’ve got my best friend’s coat on,” Wolkowicz replied. He grinned. His empty mouth looked like an exit wound, clotted with dried black blood. “I’ll
tell you what I’m going to tell you, Patchen,” he said. “Nothing. Not a fucking thing.”

Patchen nodded and stood up. “Then I’ll leave you to say good-bye to Paul,” he said. “Take all the time you need.”

He went out. Two men, armed with machine pistols, stood guard outside the door. It was the only exit; there were no windows. They were in a cellar.

“I wish I had my fucking teeth,” Wolkowicz said to Christopher. He drank Patchen’s coffee and stared into the bottom of the upturned cup. Christopher had never seen these
mannerisms before.

“Now,” Wolkowicz said, “besides catching me in bed with my wife, what do you and One-Eye think you’ve got on me?”

Christopher had been holding a manila envelope on his lap. He opened it, removed the photograph he had brought back from London, and handed it to Wolkowicz. Holding it at arm’s length,
Wolkowicz examined it. He snorted and shook his head.

“There we are,” he said, “the sweet girl graduates.”

He handed the photograph to Ilse.

“That’s you and Robin,” she said. “You were both so
skinny
. Was this your pagoda in Burma?”

“And some of our friends. Notice the Jap, third from the left,” Wolkowicz said in a conversational tone.

The severed head of a Japanese, driven onto a stake, stood in the second row between two grinning Chinese guerrillas. The decapitated Japanese wore round spectacles over his wide-open dead
eyes.

“That’s a flower from the bamboo Darby’s got in his hand,” Wolkowicz said. “He couldn’t believe his luck. It only blooms every forty years, and Darby, the
world’s greatest flower lover, was there when it happened.”

With a grease pencil, Christopher drew a ring around Gus’s head. Carelessly, Wolkowicz looked at it.

“Gus,” Christopher said.

The guerrilla standing to the right of the severed head was unmistakably Gus; even as a young man he had had the wrinkled wry face of second childhood.

For the space of six breaths, Wolkowicz lifted his eyes and looked straight at Christopher. Finally he said, “He hasn’t changed a hell of a lot, has he?”

“True name?”

“He never told me,” Wolkowicz said. “By 1944 he was already using a funny name. Wang is what we called him in the jungle. I don’t know what they call him in China these
days.”

“You kept in touch with him all these years?”