The Last Supper (2 page)

“Your plane leaves in three hours,” Molly said. “I don’t want to send you off in a sad mood, but really, Paul, I’m filled with dread.”

She was very pale. The lamplight shone directly on her face. Christopher had lived with Molly for nearly two years but he had never until this moment seen the faint constellation of freckles on
her cheekbones; always before, the surrounding skin had had enough color to conceal them.

“It isn’t just being left alone,” Molly said. “I’m used to that, you’re always going up in smoke right in the middle of things, I
hate
it.” Molly
shuddered and pulled the quilt around her body. “
Why
does it always have to be so cold in France, so damp?” she asked. “Why is there never any light? It’s like a
tomb.”

She heard herself speaking and for a moment the light of amusement came back into her face. She hated melancholia.

“It’s not France, it’s not being left alone,” she explained. “I’ll tell you what it is, Paul. I’m eaten up by suspicion. I suspect
you
of
something.”

Christopher sat up and began to speak.

“Don’t say anything,” Molly said. “Let me finish. I’m going to make a charge against you. If what I suspect is true, I want you to admit it to me. It’s the
least you can do.”

Molly cried easily, but usually from happiness. Her eyes were dry now.

“What I suspect is this,” she said. “I think you’re going to go out and get on an airplane in three hours’ time and fly out to bloody Saigon and I’ll never
see you again. You have no notion of coming back. You’re going to let them kill you so that they won’t kill me.”

Molly examined Christopher’s face. He would not look into her eyes, so she gazed at him in the mirror.

“All right,” she said. “Don’t answer; I knew you wouldn’t. But if you leave me in that way, with such cruelty, I’ll never forgive you. I won’t, Paul,
not even in death.”

She turned off the lamp and drew close to him. In the darkness he could smell her skin, soap and the forest odor of lovemaking. They had just come back from the mountains and the scent of
woodsmoke lingered in her hair; there had been a fireplace in their room; Molly loved all sorts of friendly flames: candles, burning logs.

“It isn’t true,” Christopher said, now that it was dark.

“Then don’t leave without saying good-bye,” Molly said. “Don’t
do
that again. Paul, don’t vanish. I mean it. Really I mean it.”

She turned on the lamp again so that he could see how serious she was. Christopher kissed her eyes; she was crying now. Molly lifted his arm and wrapped it around her body. Her muscles were
tense. He knew that she meant to stay awake until it was time for him to go. But soon the warmth,of the bed relaxed her and she fell asleep.

At midnight, Christopher slipped out of bed and put on his clothes. There was very little light in the room, just the reflection of a streetlamp, but he had been lying awake in the dark and his
eyes had adjusted. He could see Molly quite plainly. Her face was buried in the pillow. She was dreaming. She pushed a long bare leg out of the bed, muttered a few words, and resumed her soft
breathing. Her left hand turned on the sheet; she was wearing all the rings Christopher had ever given her: emerald, topaz, scarab, opal, one on each finger. He always brought her a ring when he
came home from a journey; she never took them off.

Molly spoke again in her sleep. Christopher could not make out the words. He knelt beside the bed and slipped his hand beneath the covers, but he could not bring himself to wake her. He stood
up. Molly had left her purse on the dressing table. He took an envelope out of his coat pocket and crossed the room, walking softly over the thick white carpet. Molly moved in the bed. In the
mirror, Christopher could see her sleeping face. He opened her purse and placed the envelope inside. He paused in the doorway and looked once more at Molly’s sleeping faces, dozens of them,
reflected in the mirrors.

Then he went into the living room. A fur coat lay in a heap by the door where Molly had left it. He picked it up and draped it over a chair. Then, just as Molly had feared, he left without
saying good-bye, locking the door behind him.

The sound of the key in the lock woke Molly. Naked, she ran into the living room. The elevator whined in its shaft. She tried to open the door, but the complicated locks defeated her; she broke
a nail, twisting the bolt. Sucking the wound, she went to the window. In the street below, Christopher was talking to the man in the Citroën. He had got out of the car and the two of them
stood in the rain, chatting. They looked up at Molly’s window, but it was at the top of the house and they didn’t see her, a pale stripe of flesh against the darkness of the room.

Christopher finished talking and walked away. He had an American walk; he did not hold himself in any particular way as Europeans did, he simply walked as if it didn’t matter to him what
class strangers thought he belonged to.

“Damn you,” Molly said, watching him.

Her eye fell on the fur coat. She put it on, meaning to follow Christopher into the street, and struggled with the locks again. She could not get them open.

Molly ran back to the window. Christopher had vanished, but the man in the Citroën was still out in the open. He looked upward at the window. Molly stepped back into the dark. The man
searched in his pocket for something, found it, looked up and down the street, then hurried away.

Molly knew what he had had in his pocket: a telephone token. He was going to use the public telephone at the Métro station, around the corner on the Boulevard Beauséjour, to report
Christopher’s departure. He would be out of sight for ten minutes: Molly had timed him earlier in the day, when he had made another phone call.

“Damn you,” Molly said again, speaking to Christopher.

She turned and walked rapidly out of the room, dropping the fur coat to the floor. It wasn’t hers; it was a borrowed coat—rabbit pelts, she thought, dyed to resemble some more
elegant dead animal. In the bedroom, she put on a skirt and sweater, ran a comb through her hair, and pulled on a pair of boots. She opened her purse, looking for French money for a taxi, and found
the envelope Christopher had left.

She tore it open. There was no note inside, just a thick sheaf of hundred-dollar bills, thousands of dollars in American currency. Molly looked helplessly at the money; it seemed insane to carry
such a sum into the street. She dropped the envelope onto the unmade bed and pulled the sheet over it.

Struggling with the locks again, Molly turned the knobs the other way. The bolts slid open at last.

At the airport, Christopher presented his ticket at the baggage room and claimed his battered leather suitcase, then carried it through the deserted terminal and into the
men’s toilet. In a cubicle, he opened the bag. It was exactly as he had left it: two tropical suits, a set of rough clothes with boots, shirts, toilet articles. The lining was undisturbed. He
closed the brass locks, flushed the toilet, and opened the door of the cubicle.

Tom Webster stood at the sink, combing his cropped hair. In the mirror, Webster turned his earnest, bespectacled face toward Christopher. “I thought I’d see you off,” he said.
He held up a soothing hand, as if he expected Christopher to be angry or frightened by his presence. “It’s all right,” he said. “I checked all the crappers. We’re
alone in here.”

Christopher put his suitcase on the floor and leaned against the tiled wall, watching the entrance.

Webster spoke in a husky whisper. “It’s not too late to change your mind,” he said.

The loudspeaker system chimed and Christopher’s flight was called in French and Vietnamese.

“I checked the passenger list. Kim is on the plane with you,” Webster said. “They’re waiting for you out there. You can still turn around.”

Christopher shook his head and picked up his suitcase.

“I’ll help you, we’ll all help you, fuck Headquarters,” Webster said. “Take Molly and get lost. Enough is enough.”

Christopher started to speak to his friend. At that moment, a man carrying a rolled newspaper came into the brightly lighted room. He gave the two Americans an incurious glance, then went to the
urinal. Christopher walked swiftly out the door. They were calling his flight again.

Webster remained at the sink, washing his hands, until the man with the newspaper finished at the urinal. Then, wiping his wet hands on his raincoat, Webster followed him.

Still clutching his newspaper, the man hurried out the doors leading to the roadway in front of the terminal.

Webster followed him outside. The man was behaving exactly like the French businessman he appeared to be, brusque and self-important. But Webster was curious about him. At two o’clock in
the morning, his suit was perfectly pressed; had he been returning from one of the long flights from Africa and Asia that arrived in Paris at this time of night, his clothes would have been
rumpled. He would have had a growth of beard, but he was clean-shaven.

When the man with the newspaper got outside, he didn’t hail a taxi. He stood patiently on the curb, holding his newspaper like a baton, waiting.

A taxi stopped on the wrong side of the roadway. The passenger was a girl. She paid the driver and didn’t wait for her change. The taxi door on the traffic side was flung open and she got
out, her skirt riding up as she slid across the seat. Her legs were long and extremely beautiful. When he saw them, the man with the newspaper pushed out his lips in a little pouting kiss of
lust.

Now the girl was walking rapidly across the roadway, the heels of her boots clattering on the pavement, her bright heavy hair moving around her face. Webster, who had begun to watch her because
of her legs, saw that the girl was Molly. He lifted a hand. Molly saw him and her mouth opened in its frank smile. Her eyes were sleepy and her face was still a little puffy from bed.

Webster stepped off the curb, holding out his hand to Molly. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the Frenchman raise his rolled newspaper, as if to signal a taxi. A car that had been parked
across the roadway sped away from the curb, tires shrieking and gears changing. Its lights were off. It was a dark green Peugeot. Webster saw all that, and saw the man drop his newspaper and walk
rapidly away.

When the Peugeot hit her, Molly was still smiling. Her eyes were looking directly into Webster’s. Her hair opened as if she had fallen into deep water and like a swimmer she floated for a
long moment in the air, her back deeply arched, before she struck the pavement.

As the Peugeot sped away, fragments of smashed chrome fell off it and rang on the concrete. A policeman blew his whistle. Down the roadway more whistles sounded, shrill and thin. Overhead,
Christopher’s jet climbed steeply, losing the lights of Paris as it passed through a layer of clouds.

When Webster, running clumsily, reached Molly, he saw that she had lost her boots; a porter, standing thirty feet away, picked one up, as if to return it to her.

A shaft of white bone, jagged at the end, had punctured the skin of Molly’s thigh. She lay on her face, her hair thrown forward, her neck bare. The blood ran out of her body in a long
thick ribbon, meandering among the cobbles of the gutter and collecting in a pool against the curb.

She wore a ring on every finger of her outflung hand, Christopher’s gifts.

Hubbard

— 1 —

The first link in the chain of events that led to the murder of Molly Benson, an innocent young woman who happened to love Paul Christopher, was forged on an August afternoon
in 1923, on the island of Rügen, before either of the lovers was born. On that day, a young American named Hubbard Christopher, Paul’s father, walked up a steep path toward Berwick, the
home of a Prussian family called Buecheler. Hubbard Christopher, then twenty-one years old, intended to pay a courtesy call on Colonel Baron Paulus von Buecheler, the current occupant of Berwick.
Forty years before, Buecheler had been at school in Bonn with Hubbard Christopher’s father, and the two men, both soldiers, had kept up a lifelong friendship.