The Last Supper (24 page)

“Even if you weren’t your father’s son and Elliott’s nephew, we’d want you,” the Director said. “You understand the Germans and the French, you speak
their languages. That’s pure gold to us. Besides, I’ve been reading your poems.”

During the war, and afterward at Harvard, Paul had written enough poems to be collected into a book, and his father’s publisher had printed them. He thought that the mild publicity his
book received—a few brief reviews in newspapers and magazines—might disturb the Outfit.

“No, no, it’s wonderful cover,” said the Director.

“Cover?”

“Yes. You’re a genuine poet, a hell of an advantage. You can live anywhere, see anybody. You don’t have to explain yourself. You have a reason to live in the real world. Damn
few spies do.”

Christopher had been concerned about Patchen’s future. He decided to put in a word for him. The Director listened with twinkling eyes.

“David Patchen is already with us,” he said. “Fine boy. He was with us in the war. We dropped him into a hornet’s nest on Okinawa, you know—that’s where he
got his wounds, going in ahead of the invasion. He radioed the information in spite of his wounds. David is remembered. He’ll always have a home with the Outfit.”

Paul accepted the Director’s offer. In later years he would try to remember his feelings at this moment, when he stepped out of the real world and into the secret world. Had he thought
about his father? Had he remembered the hidden Jews aboard
Mahican,
the Dandy, the Gestapo men who had beaten his father and arrested his mother? Had he been motivated by love of America, by
the idea of freedom? He didn’t know. What he remembered was a great feeling of relief: the Director had offered him privacy, a world in which honors were locked in a safe, a world in which
everything could be known and nothing revealed, a world in which there could be no inexplicable disappearances.

— 6 —

Because he could speak French, the Outfit sent Christopher to Indochina, where the French were fighting a war against Communist guerrillas. Wolkowicz seemed to know of this
assignment even before Christopher did. On the day his orders were issued, Wolkowicz invited him to lunch.

Christopher was surprised to hear Wolkowicz’s voice on the telephone. In the six months he had been working for the Outfit, he had seen nothing of Wolkowicz. There was nothing unusual in
that: the Outfit had no central headquarters; its staff was scattered around Washington in temporary buildings, in odd corners of other departments of the government, in private office buildings
and safe houses. There was no telephone directory. Wolkowicz knew Christopher’s number in the way that he seemed to know everything else, by that superdeveloped instinct for learning secrets
that Hubbard had noted in him.

“Do you like oysters?” Wolkowicz asked on the phone. “Good. Meet me at twelve in the aquarium.”

Wolkowicz was watching the tropical fish when Christopher arrived. He opened a grease-stained paper sack and handed Christopher his lunch—a hamburger bun with a deep-fried Chesapeake
oyster the size of a flattened tennis ball inside it.

“I put ketchup on it,” Wolkowicz said. “I hope that’s okay.” He bit into his own sandwich. “Best oyster sandwich in town,” he said. “I get them
from this takeout place down by the river.”

The aquarium was crowded during the lunch hour with other government workers. Wolkowicz, wolfing his sandwich as he went, led Christopher outside. They walked in silence across Constitution
Avenue to the mall. Wolkowicz sat down on a park bench.

“I think we’ll be all right here,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you about what you’re going to run into in Hanoi.”

“Have you been there?”

“Not to Hanoi, but I spent part of the war with the guy who’s going to be your case officer out there. Waddy Jessup.”

“You spent the war with Waddy?”

“We were together in Burma. He’s a touchhole cousin of yours, I hear.”

Wolkowicz curled his upper lip and tapped his false teeth with the nail of his index finger. “Burma,” he said. “Jesus.” He seemed to be speaking to himself. Then his eyes
came back into focus and he spoke to Christopher.

“Look,” he said, “I’ve got a strange feeling about you, like you’re my responsibility. It’s because of your father, but not all because of him. You seemed
like a good guy the first time I met you, at that Christmas party. Then at your father’s funeral I felt like a shit. What happened in Berlin shouldn’t have happened. Not to
him.”

“I agree, but nobody thinks it was your fault.”

“Fuck what anybody thinks. I was there.”

Wolkowicz shook his head, a bearish movement. His muscles seemed to work involuntarily, like an animal’s: one moment he was at rest, utterly motionless, and the next he was moving at full
speed.

“What you want to do when you get to Hanoi,” Wolkowicz said, “is watch it with Waddy Jessup. He’s dangerous.”

“Dangerous?”

“Dangerous.” Wolkowicz dug a finger into Christopher’s thigh to emphasize the word. “Waddy used to wear a Yale track shirt out in the jungle. They fried his brains at
Yale. They do that to everybody—the Outfit is full of the cocksuckers, they hire each other—but Waddy is something special. He’s not only a fool, he’s yellow, and if you
don’t watch him he’ll get you killed.”

Christopher could think of no reply. Wolkowicz peered into his face.

“I take a short lunch hour,” Wolkowicz said. “You’re leaving. It would have been better to lead up to what I’m telling you instead of just hitting you with it, but
we haven’t got the time. If I’d known what was going on I would have found a way to keep you out of Indochina as long as Waddy is there. I
didn’t
know. So I’m telling
you now: watch out for Waddy. And for Christ’s sake, don’t go out on any ops with him, especially not in the jungle.”

“I’ll remember what you’ve said,” Christopher said.

He got to his feet. Wolkowicz, still seated on the bench, looked up at him. While he spoke about Waddy Jessup, his broad face had been twisted in disgust. Now his expression changed and once
again he looked sad—close to tears, even, as he had looked at the Harbor when speaking of Hubbard.

“I hope so,” Wolkowicz said. “Waddy’s done enough damage.” He cleared his throat and spat, another automatic response, like a dog biting at a wound on its own body.
“So have I,” he said.

— 7 —

A month before Christopher’s arrival in Hanoi, Waddy Jessup smuggled fifty copies of his book of poems into Vietnam by diplomatic pouch. Waddy’s agents then
distributed these volumes surreptitiously on the shelves of bookstores, returning every other day for two weeks to see if they had been sold. Fifteen of them were sold. Waddy bribed a local
journalist to write a favorable review of Christopher’s book.

Waddy was convinced that his book-smuggling operation had eased Christopher’s passage into the heart of the local avant-garde when, only days after reaching Indochina, Christopher met a
fellow poet, a Tonkinese who had studied at the Sorbonne, who introduced him to the local café intelligentsia, a mixed group of European and Vietnamese Communists and fellow travelers. The
fact that the Tonkinese poet was a female who fell in love with Christopher did not seem important to Waddy.

“She read your poems,” Waddy said to Christopher; “that was the key—your aura as an
artiste
. I fixed you up with the aura. All you have to do now is
glow.”

Waddy and Christopher met once a week, in the cool of the early morning, to play tennis on a court owned by a French colon. The tennis gave them a reason to see each other; even to the Tonkinese
girl, it seemed natural that a man with Christopher’s athletic body might want to play a bourgeois game once a week. Between sets, Waddy outlined Christopher’s mission in Indochina.

“The job of an intelligence service,” Waddy said, “is to stay in with the outs. Just now the Vietminh are the outs, but not for long. The French are going to lose this colony,
thank God, and when they do the United States must have friends among the new people. That’s where you come in.”

“Why do you say
thank God,
Waddy?”

“Because Vietnam belongs to the Vietnamese, because colonialism has had its day, because the white man must lay down his burden. You and I are going to help the white man do
that.”

“The French are our allies.”

“Of course they are. That’s why you don’t have to waste time making friends with them. Your job is to make friends with their enemies; love their enemies,
Paul—that’s your credo.”

“The French won’t love me for that.”

‘Well, I ask you: who
do
the French love? Do you want to be the first American they’ve ever admired? The worst they can do is throw you out of Indochina, but before they do,
the Vietminh will love you. You’re already sleeping with one of them. By the time the French have you out, the country will be teeming with little brown friends of yours.”

Christopher’s Tonkinese girl taught him Vietnamese. He learned languages easily and within a few months he was able to converse with fair fluency. Her poems were too
angry to be published in an occupied country, but they were distributed by an underground press: Waddy provided money for the purchase of a printing press, and this was set up in a house in the
native quarter. Christopher’s girl worked as a printer and she would come home late at night with the smell of ink on her golden skin. So long as the sun was out or a lamp was lit, she talked
politics, but in bed she never spoke; she would fall asleep lying on top of Christopher and in the night he would lift her feathery body with its fragile bones and place it on the mat beside him.
She was called Lê, a common Vietnamese name that means “tears.”

Christopher had a commission from an American magazine that had printed some of his poems to write about Indochina. The American press was filled with stories written from the French point of
view: American correspondents in Indochina drank in French clubs, ate in French restaurants, went to briefings by the French military. They went out with French troops and watched as the
rebels—fragile, fleet young people in black pajamas—were hunted and shot like deer as they sped through the trees or went to the river at dusk.

Christopher, who on Waddy’s instructions had not met a single French person in Hanoi, proposed to write about the other side. By now the Vietminh trusted him. One night, guided by a friend
of Lê’s, he got onto a boat in the Red River, and a few hours later was put ashore. There he was met by a Vietminh patrol. In their company, he walked a hundred miles through the jungle
to an underground encampment, a whole town hidden beneath the earth. As his guide led him through miles of tunnels, running beneath the forest, Christopher asked what had happened to the dirt; not
a single shovelful could be seen aboveground. “It was carried away in cloths, a shovelful in each cloth, and put somewhere else,” the guide said. Christopher realized that Waddy Jessup
was right: the French had lost this colony. There was no possibility of defeating an enemy who would carry away a thousand tons of dirt in handkerchiefs.

Christopher spent a month with the Vietminh, lying hidden during the day, moving and attacking by night. While Christopher accompanied them, the Vietminh were ruthless and destructive, but they
fought with scrupulous honor, never harming a civilian. Their targets were exclusively French: patrols of French soldiers, outlying French plantations. They fought the French in the way the
Japanese had fought Christopher and the U.S. Marines in the Pacific jungles: with animal stealth and fearless skill.

Then one morning the patrol walked into a quiet village. There was no sign of life. While the guerrillas waited, weapons at the ready in case this should be a French ambush, their leader went
into the headman’s hut. Christopher heard voices inside and the sudden piercing cry of a child. Before the Vietminh could stop him, he ducked into another hut. A woman crouched on the dirt
floor, clutching two children, a boy of five or six and a girl of three. Both children had chopsticks driven into their ears. Evidently this had been done to them during the night, because the
blood on their cheeks was still wet: the girl was unconscious and Christopher touched her face with his forefinger. The mother spoke to him in broken French; she did not seem to be afraid of him,
but when two Vietminh soldiers came into the hut, she gasped and stopped speaking. The Vietminh herded everyone outside. Every child in the village had chopsticks driven into its ears.

At the edge of the village, lying in an uncovered grave, were the bodies of a dozen men and women; their right hands and their heads had been cut off. Among them was a Catholic priest, a
Frenchman who had had a bald head and a peevish sharp face; even in death he seemed sure of his opinions. He reminded Christopher of one of the masters at his school in Switzerland. The guerrilla
leader found Christopher at the edge of the open pit. Lifting his voice above the sound of the droning flies, the Vietminh officer said, “This is what the French do to our people.” Then
he saw the priest’s body in its cassock and the priest’s severed head, and he called for a working party of villagers to fill the grave.

Christopher wandered away. He asked no questions of the villagers, but he listened to what they were saying to one another. A Vietminh educational squad had done all this as a lesson to the
village. It was a Catholic village; they had heard that the priest had come to live there because he believed that his presence, as a Frenchman and as a priest, could protect the villagers.

It was important to the Vietminh to prove him wrong. First the educational squad had cut off the right hands of every Catholic in the village (because those hands had been used to make the sign
of the cross), then they had beheaded them, then they had held a lesson in revolutionary doctrine, then they had sung patriotic songs. And then they had driven the chopsticks into the
children’s ears.

“What’s the point of writing about the
chopsticks?
” Waddy Jessup asked, back in Hanoi. “It’s an isolated incident, not at all typical of the Vietminh. It
could have been a French trick, they could have sent out some of the thugs posing as Vietminh.”