The Last Supper (43 page)

“How? I had no money.”

“But you did have money,” Sebastian said. “Your father left an estate of $78,587.”

“He left it to my mother, nearly thirty years ago.”

Sebastian and Elliott exchanged smiles. They were selecting cigars and the conversation stopped while each rolled a Havana beside his ear, listening for the faint crackle of the tobacco leaf.
Sebastian clipped the end off his cigar and handed the cutter to Elliott. He drew a candle toward him and began to speak again as he puffed energetically, releasing bluish smoke.

“Twenty-nine years ago,” Sebastian said. “Precisely. You wouldn’t touch it. You said it belonged to your mother.”

Elliott spoke. “It’s yours, Paul,” he said. “It’s always been yours. We took the liberty of making that legal, some years ago.”

“You’ve had my mother declared legally dead?”

“Yes. I hope that doesn’t disturb you.”

“You found proof of her death?”

“No,” Elliott said. “I don’t think there’ll ever be proof. But she’s been missing since 1939. Can she have survived—the camps, the war, whatever came
afterward?”

“People do survive,” Christopher said. “There’s no actual proof that she’s dead.”

For a moment, neither Elliott nor Sebastian said anything more. Sebastian held Christopher’s eyes with his own bright gaze.

He chose not to ask a question. Christopher was finding that no one wanted to ask him questions. His relations and friends behaved as if there were no such place as China. His imprisonment was
like a disfiguring war wound, seemingly invisible to everyone but the wounded man.

Sebastian produced a document from the inside pocket of his jacket.

“This is your balance sheet,” he said. “There have been the inevitable taxes. But it’s not a bad picture, overall. Thirty years is a long time to let a capital sum grow
undisturbed. We’ve averaged a modest ten percent, compounded.”

The balance sheet was a heavy yellow document covered with columns of figures handwritten in black ink.

“Just tell me, Sebastian,” Christopher said. “How much of the seventy thousand dollars is left?”

“Seventy-
eight
thousand. Then there was an additional ten thousand that’s been working for only ten years.”

“An additional ten thousand?”

“Tom Webster found it in a bed in Paris. He said it belonged to you.”

“In a bed?”

“Was there a young friend of yours, an Australian girl? Tom thought she’d left it behind.”

“Molly,” Christopher said. “It’s the money I left for her.”

“So, you see,” said Sebastian, “it isn’t a matter of how much is left, but of how much it has grown. Not counting the house in Washington, you are worth . . .”

Sebastian put on his glasses and peered at the balance sheet.

“. . . One million, four hundred fifty-eight thousand, two hundred ninety-two dollars,” Sebastian said.

Elliott burst into laughter.

Sebastian leaned across the polished table, offering the balance sheet to Christopher. “Your family has always thought that money is comical,” he said. “This time it
is
a joke, in a way. I often thought of it in the past ten years, Paul, as your fortune grew. The joke is on the Red Chinese. You must have been the biggest capitalist in captivity over
there.”

— 3 —

Christopher moved into the house in Washington at once. He still followed his prison schedule, rising at dawn, going to bed at dusk, eating little. Otherwise, he adjusted
quickly to freedom: the house was full of books, his and Horace’s, and he had hung up the drawing of Lori. He had begun to write out the poem he had composed in his head in prison. He worked
very early in the morning at a desk by a window that looked out onto the street.

He was seated at his desk, copying out lines he had composed in the early days of his captivity, when he saw Barney Wolkowicz on the sidewalk in front of his house. It was just after first
light, but Wolkowicz was already dressed in a suit and tie. He carried a battered pigskin attaché case. He looked into the window and grinned at Christopher with his crockery teeth.

Inside the house, he gripped Christopher’s shoulders and shook him in his old gesture of affection, but said nothing. His eyes wandered. He went to the piano in the living room and struck
a series of chords. Wolkowicz made a face; the piano was badly out of tune.

His eye fell on Zaentz’s drawing of Lori. He ran a finger along the backs of Christopher’s books; he went to the desk and squinted at the lines of poetry Christopher had written out
on sheets of foolscap.

“Got any coffee?” he asked.

Christopher went into the kitchen and made coffee, using the elaborate machine that had come with the house. Wolkowicz sat down in a kitchen chair. When Christopher set his coffee before him, he
heaved his attaché case onto the table, worked the combination lock, and opened it. From the jumble inside he extracted a pint bottle of Scotch. He poured whisky into his coffee cup and put
the bottle back into the attaché case. There were two other pints inside. So that they would not rattle, Wolkowicz padded them with Outfit files marked
Secret
.

“Yeah,” he said, “I’m still a fucking alcoholic. We all are, except Patchen. Have you seen any of the others?”

“Patchen and Horace, on the plane.”

“No debriefers?”

“Patchen is protecting me from debriefers.”

“Is he? It’s great to be all-powerful.”

Wolkowicz heaved himself to his feet and poured a second cup of coffee. This time he drank it without whisky.

“So,” he said, “how did the Chinks treat you?”

“All right.”

“They didn’t cut off your dingus or anything like that?”

Christopher smiled. “Nope.”

“No shit? They used to go in for that in a big way.”

Wolkowicz blew his nose. He put his handkerchief away. “Just out of curiosity, kid,” he said, “what were you doing in China in the first place?”

“The pilot got lost,” Christopher said.

“Got
lost?
He must have been some pilot. What happened to him?”

“After we landed, he shot at some Chinese soldiers. They shot back.”

“That must have been exciting. Where’d you get this guy?”

Christopher said, “It was your friend Gus.”

A look of puzzlement flashed across Wolkowicz’s face. “Gus?” he said.
“Gus?
How the fuck could it have been Gus?”

“It was Gus who answered the phone in Saigon when I called the number you gave me.”

“I gave you his number?”

“In Zermatt.”

Wolkowicz frowned. “You’re right. I did.” He shook his head in wonderment. “I’ll be goddamned,” he said.
“Gus
. That’s
unbelievable.”

Wolkowicz poured a third cup of coffee. His hand was perfectly steady. He opened the attaché case again and mixed himself another toddy. Christopher had not smelled alcohol on another
person’s breath for a long time.

“It’s terrific the way things turn out,” Wolkowicz said. “I’m fifty-five years old. In my whole life, I’ve liked, actually
liked
, two people—you
and your father. He was killed right in front of my eyes, and now it looks like I got you thrown into jail for what—ten years? eleven?—by recommending the wrong pilot.”

He swallowed his coffee, drinking the hot liquid down as if it were a glass of water.

“You must have been pissed off at me,” he said.

For the first time, he looked straight into Christopher’s eyes. Wolkowicz had always looked at others as if he were a mind reader; in a sense, because he expected so little of human
beings, and because they usually behaved as badly as he expected them to, he was.

“Why?” Christopher said. “You weren’t flying the plane.”

“No. Gus was. Were you really in solitary the whole time?”

“I was the only prisoner in a prison. I saw the guards, the interrogators. It wasn’t exactly solitary.”

“But no broads. Was that hard on you? Thinking about it, I thought that must be the worst part for you. You were a guy who loved women. Not just ass, like everybody else—you were a
sucker for women, for themselves. Isn’t that right?”

“I suppose it is. I missed Molly.”

“I can understand that,” Wolkowicz said. “Let me tell you something really funny, just to start you off in your new life. I see you’re writing a poem, so you must still
collect strange facts about the human heart.”

Christopher smiled, recognizing Wolkowicz’s old sarcastic tone. Wolkowicz was behaving as if there had been no interruption of their friendship, and so it seemed to Christopher, too.

“It’s been twenty years since Ilse went bad on me,” Wolkowicz said.

He paused to look out the window into the garden again, then leaned across the table and pointed a finger at Christopher. “In all that time,” he said, “I’ve never banged
another woman.”

“Never?” Christopher said. “Why?”

Wolkowicz waved a hand as he drank coffee. “What difference does it make?” he asked. “But it’s kind of funny—I haven’t been getting any more nookie out here
than you got in prison.”

After years of isolation, Christopher’s senses were very keen. Colors seemed brighter, voices louder, tastes stronger. Of all his senses, smell was the most powerful. For a whole decade,
he had not come into contact with men who ate meat and drank whisky.

Wolkowicz’s whisky breath, as he laughed, was overpowering, but Christopher smelled perfume on him, too, a rosy, girlish aroma. He wondered where that came from.

— 4 —

David Patchen had a new Doberman, a more playful animal than its predecessor. The dog scouted ahead of him and Christopher as they hiked across the Georgetown campus. Students,
hurrying through the twilight, nodded to him as they passed. After twenty years of evening constitutionals, he was a familiar figure. An eccentric professor, generations of students had surmised,
walking his dog before supper.

“I hope you don’t mind being left alone,” Patchen said.

“I don’t mind. I’m surprised that the Outfit hasn’t wanted to debrief me.”

“I told you on the plane: if you want to say anything about the last eleven years, you can say it to me or to Horace.” Limping along the path, Patchen coughed. “I hear
Wolkowicz dropped in on you. Did he want to debrief you?”

“He asked me what the fuck I was doing in China.”

“What did you tell him?”

“The same thing I told the Chinese, the truth. My pilot got lost.”

“We must talk about that. Meanwhile, you may want to avoid Barney.”

“Avoid him?”

“He’s being hunted by the media. Some television man is working up an exposé. If he digs very far below the surface, your name will come into it.”

“Dig below the surface? A journalist? Barney’s life has been a secret.”

Patchen laughed. “A secret?” he said. “There are no secrets. America these days runs on paranoia. It’s the psychic fuel of the nation. You could say that Barney is the
fossil from which the fuel is made. This television fellow is going to dig him up and burn him. Patrick Graham is the reporter’s name: you should know that, in case he finds you.”

Patchen, coughing again, a grating noise in the mellow spring evening, made a gesture that dismissed Wolkowicz and Patrick Graham as subjects for conversation and walked a little faster.

The Doberman twitched at its leash. Its ears went up and its muzzle pointed down the path, toward a patch of darker ground.

“He sees someone,” Patchen said.

He gave the dog a signal. It walked ahead of them, alert and menacing. Patchen stopped talking, but he took no other precautions.

A man stood on the path, facing them. The dog, making no sound, led Patchen and Christopher to within a couple of paces of the waiting figure, then stopped.

The man seized the dog by the head and gave it an affectionate shake, then pounded the animal on its ribs. The Doberman panted happily and leaned against his legs. It was Wolkowicz.

“You’ve got yourself a real killer here,” he said.

He pushed the dog away. Even in the open air, Wolkowicz smelled of whisky.

“You didn’t return my calls, Patchen,” he said.

They moved along the path into the glow of a streetlight. Wolkowicz seized Patchen’s sleeve and pulled him to a stop. Patchen’s glasses glittered. Always pale, his face seemed whiter
than usual under the sodium light. He did not answer.

Wolkowicz paid no attention. “I just don’t understand you,” he said. “Why did you can my operation?”

“Because it was illegal.”

“
Illegal?
What the fuck business do you think the Outfit is in? We exist to do illegal things.”

“Not in this country, not to American citizens.”

“Not to reporters, you mean. You’re afraid of the bastards.”

“No. I’m afraid of you, Barney. Who authorized you to bug Graham’s phone, to mike his office and his bedroom, to follow him around and plant girls on him?”

“Not you, that’s for fucking sure. You know what kind of girls he likes? Long black hair, size six. He likes to slap ’em around. You wanna see feelthy pictures?”

Patchen tried to draw away. Wolkowicz still held a fistful of Patchen’s coat. He turned his wrist, tightening the cloth. The Doberman, silent, gathered itself, waiting for another
signal.

“You’re making a big mistake, pal,” Wolkowicz said. “I’m
onto
that fucking Graham. Give me another week, one week, Patchen, that’s how close I am.
After that, you can ship me to New Zealand.”

Patchen breathed steadily through his nose, emitting little clouds of moisture into the cold air.

“Barney,” he said. “Not now.”

“Not now? Then tell me when. On the day I get my gold watch? By that time the whole thing—
everything
, Patchen—will be down the drain, and you know it.”

Wolkowicz moved a step closer to Patchen.

“Barney,” Christopher said, “the dog.”

Patchen turned his scarred face away from Wolkowicz’s breath. He handed the leash to Christopher.

“Walk him back to the house, Paul, will you?” he said.

Christopher nodded and started back the way they had come. Wolkowicz’s loud voice followed him.

“I’ve got that bastard wired,” Wolkowicz was saying to Patchen. “We’re right on top of him, Patchen. We’re going to get Graham and some fucking Russian or
some fucking Cuban on tape. We’re going to have
pictures
. And you want to tear out the wires, God damn it! Why?”