The Last Supper (41 page)

In the early days, Ze had been only one of a dozen men who had interrogated Christopher. The Chinese had crowded around him, shouting accusations and demanding his confession. For months,
Christopher had worn manacles and leg irons connected by a heavy chain two meters long. He had been obliged to carry the chain looped in his arms at all times; it was forbidden to let it touch the
floor. These sessions, called the Struggle, had lasted for hours at a time. Their purpose had been to exhaust the prisoner, to break down his resistance, to make him accept confession as a virtuous
action.

All agents of the Outfit were under instructions to confess everything they knew if they fell into the hands of a hostile power. Though he was no longer an agent of the Outfit, Christopher had
told the Chinese, in as much detail as they asked, everything that they seemed to want to know. It was useless to submit to torture; no human being could stand up under it. The Chinese had never
tortured Christopher, unless standing in chains for ten hours at a time in a room full of screaming secret policemen can be called torture.

But he had never confessed to spying against the People’s Republic of China. This refusal to submit to revolutionary justice and ask for mercy was the reason why Christopher was treated
with exceptional harshness. Every week for ten years, Ze had reminded Christopher that his stubborn refusal to acknowledge his crime was a matter of the utmost seriousness. Now he reminded him
again. The sessions with Ze always began with the same words.

“You have been given a great opportunity,” Ze said. “Failure to confess, failure to make a clean breast of everything, can only mean that you remain in your heart a remorseless
counterrevolutionary.”

Ze wore a look of real sadness. Christopher felt a pang of sympathy. Ze had been severely tested by the years he had spent as Christopher’s interrogator. He truly wished to save
Christopher from execution at the end of his allotted twenty years, but Christopher would not help him. This was a great failure for Ze; had the interrogator been a Jesuit instead of a Communist he
might have suspected that his own faith was not strong enough to be of real service to God. Perhaps he did suspect something of the kind. He had been given time to save Christopher’s
political soul, and it was slipping through his fingers. To be executed without having confessed was to Ze what dying without the last rites of the Church would have been to the Jesuit.

The conversations with Ze were held in a square, whitewashed room, very brightly lighted. There was a red star on the wall and a portrait of Mao. Ze wore the dark blue flannel uniform of a
Communist Party functionary.

The two men always spoke in English. Ze’s command of the language had improved markedly over the years; it was he who had given Christopher his dictionary; he kept the mate to it on his
table and sometimes consulted it in the course of the interrogation.

“You understand,” Ze said on this Wednesday morning, for the five hundredth time, “that the only chance of mitigating your sentence lies in your admitting your
guilt?”

“I understand. But I did not commit the crime of espionage against the People’s Republic of China.”

“We know that you are guilty of that very crime. Why do you deny it?”

“Because to confess would be to lie. I cannot lie to you and live as I must live.”

“Do you wish to die?”

“No.”

“How old were you when you entered the People’s Republic for criminal purposes?”

“I was thirty-nine years old when the pilot of my plane became lost and landed in this country by mistake.”

“You are prepared to die in less than ten years’ time, at the age of fifty-nine?”

“I am not prepared to make a false confession.”

“I remind you,” Ze said, “that the sentence can be executed sooner if the prisoner is deemed to be beyond rehabilitation. You could be executed at any time.”

Ze had never before made this threat. He paused and gazed for a long moment at Christopher. He did not expect to see fear, but he had expected that his words, delivered in a harsh voice, would
startle Christopher. However, the American wore his usual expression of mild good humor. He was seated on a low stool. A piece of chalk lay on the floor in front of him, between his bare feet.

“Pick up the chalk,” Ze said.

Christopher did so.

“Write the word
espionage.”

Christopher wrote the English word across the scrubbed tiles of the floor.

“Write the definition of
espionage,”
Ze said.

This was part of the ritual of interrogation. In the early days, Christopher had sometimes written for hours on this floor, wearing the chalk down to a brittle nub that could barely be gripped
between the thumb and the fingers, and then starting again with a new stick. Christopher was surprised that Ze was asking him to write this particular word and definition; it had been a long time
since he had asked him to do so. Ze was especially solemn today.

Christopher, who had long ago memorized the words, wrote:
The practice or employment of spies
. It was one of the briefest definitions in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary.

“Read aloud,” Ze said.

Christopher did so. Ze searched Christopher’s face with great thoroughness, as if there was something still hidden in it after all these years—or as if he did not expect to see it
again. Christopher had never seen Ze behave in this way.

“You are not guilty of espionage?” Ze asked.

“Yes, a hundred times over,” Christopher replied. “Against the Soviets, against the Vietnamese, against the Poles and the Czechs and the Germans and many others. But never
against the People’s Republic of China.”

Ze sat bolt upright as usual on his own stool, behind his table. A very long silence developed. This had never happened before. Ze stared at his folded hands, a look of bleak disappointment on
his face. Had he, after all these years, lost heart?

Under the rules of interrogation, Christopher could not speak except to answer a question. To do so was a sign of bad attitude and could lead to a loss of privileges: in Christopher’s
case, this usually meant being deprived of books for a month or longer. So he waited, quiet and immobile.

Finally Ze spoke. “You must make a choice today,” he said. “You will not be given another opportunity to confess and reform.”

Christopher remained as he was.

“For the last time, then,” Ze said, and paused.

He looked down on Christopher, kneeling on the floor. Over the years, Ze had learned to read expression in his prisoner’s strange gray eyes. He saw nothing there now except intelligence
and calm curiosity—the same things he always saw. He repeated his words, which ought to have struck terror in his prisoner.

“For the last time,” Ze said, “bearing in mind that your sentence can be carried out at any moment, bearing in mind that you can die today, will you admit that you are guilty
of the crime of espionage against the People’s Republic of China?”

“No,” Christopher said.

He waited. Ze let several moments pass. The two men looked at each other; Ze realized that he knew Christopher’s face better than any other—so well that it had long ago ceased to
look blotched and coarse and un-Chinese.

Ze said, “Very well. I believe you.”

He walked around the table and thrust out his hand. It took Christopher several seconds to realize that Ze was offering to shake hands. Christopher stood up and enclosed the soft fingers of the
party functionary in his own curled, horny paw. He had not touched another human being in more than ten years.

— 4 —

In the morning, at the hour at which the reveille whistle ought to have blown, Christopher heard a strange noise. It was a knock on the door of his cell. The door opened and
Cheng came in as usual. He carried a satchel. Christopher recognized it at once: it was the leather overnight bag he had carried aboard Gus’s plane; he hadn’t seen it since he left
Saigon. Cheng handed it to him. The leather, once wonderfully supple, was now dry and a bit stiff.

Cheng picked up Christopher’s padded uniform, which was folded as required on its shelf, then gathered up his bedding, his toilet articles, and all his other belongings.

“You will wear those clothes,” Cheng said in Chinese, indicating the satchel. “Do you want to defecate?”

“Yes,” Christopher said.

Cheng hesitated, then handed back the padded uniform and boots. Christopher put them on and walked as usual to the latrine. When he returned to his cell, he took off the uniform, folded it, and
handed it back to Cheng. Cheng went out and the steel door rang behind him. Inside the leather satchel he found, freshly laundered and pressed, the change of clothes he had packed in Saigon for the
trip to Hue. These consisted of a cord blazer, a pair of cotton trousers, a faded navy-blue polo shirt, socks, drawers, and shoes. He dressed. The clothes were large for him and they felt thin and
insubstantial; when he pulled the nylon socks over his feet, they snagged on the roughened skin of his soles. The leather shoes seemed very heavy after sneakers and the quilted boots he had worn in
winter.

He reached into the bag and brought out two Penguin novels and a copy of the airmail edition of
Newsweek
over ten years old. In a blue cloth bag, closed with a drawstring, he found his
toilet articles: a Schick Injector razor with blades, nail scissors, a toothbrush and comb, tubes of shaving cream and toothpaste with Italian labels. He examined these, turning them over and
reading the inscriptions; they looked and felt strange, yet they were familiar, as if they were artifacts he had seen many times in pictures and now actually held in his hands.

The door of the cell opened and a Chinese Christopher had never before seen came in. This man spoke to Christopher in Mandarin, the first time anyone in China, apart from Cheng, had addressed
him in this language.

“Please follow me,” the man said.

Christopher, who had been sitting cross-legged in the approved position on the floor, obediently got up and walked to the door of the cell. The corridor was empty; Cheng was nowhere about.
Christopher stayed by the door. The Chinese came out with Christopher’s leather satchel in his hand. He spread open its mouth and held it up to the light to show that Christopher’s
belongings were inside.

The Chinese handed Christopher the bag and walked briskly down the corridor. Christopher followed. At the end, the Chinese opened the door and they went outside, walking together across the
deserted courtyard. A helicopter stood in an open space. The Chinese led Christopher under the drooping rotors and gestured him inside the cockpit.

The pilot started the engines and with a deafening stutter the machine rose into the air. Frightened by the noise, birds poured out of the eaves of the monastery, silvery in the morning sunlight
like water spilling over a stone. Below him, his ditch, which had seemed so long and deep to him for so many years, grew smaller and thinner and then seemed to close like the lips of a healed cut.

The helicopter, with the rising sun on the left, crossed the Great Wall, and then the sulfurous cloud of pollution that hangs over Peking came into sight. According to the clock on the instrument
panel, the machine had been airborne for an hour and forty minutes. Christopher knew at last approximately where he had spent one-fifth of his life: at a place in Mongolia less than two hundred
miles northwest of Peking. The helicopter landed. Christopher’s Chinese companion, again opening doors for him, ushered him into a windowless van. He closed the doors and they were in the
dark. The van drove, very fast, across a smooth surface, then stopped with a screech of brakes.

The doors opened. The Chinese got out and gestured for Christopher to follow him. Outside, Christopher found himself at the base of a stairway. The steps led to the open door of an airplane. The
plane was painted dull gray. It carried no markings.

As Christopher approached the airplane, its engines started with a whine. The Chinese handed Christopher a wrapped package, indicated the door of the plane with an outflung hand, and got back
into the van.

The unmarked plane was parked at the far end of a runway. Apart from the van as it sped away, the airport was deserted; nothing moved. Smoke belched from the chimneys of Peking to join the deck
of smog above the city; the smell of burning fuel was very strong.

Christopher walked up the stairway, ducked his head, and entered the plane. A young Chinese in Western clothes gestured him aboard, indicating without speaking that he should turn to the right
and walk through a curtain into the fuselage.

Christopher drew the curtain aside and looked into the passenger compartment. It was laid out like a sitting room, with easy chairs and tables and a television screen.

Horace Hubbard, enormously tall, stood in the middle of the cabin, his long face with its bushy eyebrows illuminated by a joyful smile.

“Paul,” he said.

“Hello, Horace,” Christopher replied.

The door of the plane slammed shut and it began to taxi. The cousins sat down, side by side, as the jet made its takeoff run and climbed above the sun-drenched clouds. Christopher looked out the
window.

The attendant brought orange juice. Christopher, who automatically consumed any food that was set before him, drank it off. Then, undoing the knots in the string with great patience, he opened
the packet the Chinese had given him at the foot of the stairs to the aircraft. It contained his watch, his passport, the keys to his apartment in Rome and to his car, the money he had had in his
pockets, and a letter from Molly. Christopher supposed that she had hidden it somewhere in his leather bag so that he would find it when he had reached his destination, and was alone. He had not
known of its existence until now.

He opened and read it. He had always been able to hear Molly’s voice when he read her handwriting. He heard it now, and smiled at secret jokes that were more than ten years old. She would
be thirty-four years old, he realized, still young enough to bear a child.