The Last Supper (48 page)

Wolkowicz looked at his watch.

“Gotta go,” he said.

He left no money on the table and when the Thai girl let them out, no bill was offered. The girl twittered again and laughed at Wolkowicz’s jokes. She went outside and looked up and down
the street, shaking her apron to cover the activity, before smiling at Wolkowicz to signal that the street was clear.

“Old friends run this place,” Wolkowicz said. “It’s a good place to leave messages for me. Sterile paper, sign it
Max
if it’s urgent and I’ll meet you
the next morning at ten and every third hour after that on the hour, in the zoo, by the elephant cage. You remember how to do it.”

“What about your house? I don’t have the address.”

“I’m never home,” Wolkowicz said brusquely.

He led the way outside to a bus stop.

“We’re going different ways,” Wolkowicz said. “I’m sorry all this shit is coming out. There’ll be more, you know. We were in on a lot of things together, you
and I. The Sewer, Darby, all that crazy shit in Vietnam. Nothing’s sacred. Fucking Graham’s got a direct line into the Outfit.”

“I don’t understand it.”

“Neither do I. Maybe Patchen does. Ask him, the next time you’re out walking the dog together.”

Wolkowicz’s bus pulled up to the opposite curb. Without another gesture, he dashed across the street, puffing and holding on to his gun through the wrinkled cloth of his checked polyester
jacket.

He leaped aboard his bus at the last moment. As it pulled away, Christopher saw Wolkowicz in the bluish brightness of its interior, glaring suspiciously at his fellow passengers, one after the
other.

— 6 —

“Does my mother’s file exist?” Christopher asked. “Have you been able to find it?”

They were walking in the cool of the evening. Patchen, less eager to blurt the truth than Wolkowicz, did not answer Christopher’s question at once.

“I’d like to see the file,” Christopher said.

Patchen paused on the path. The Doberman stopped too. They were under the same streetlight where, in the early summer, they had encountered Wolkowicz.

With a sudden movement, strange for Patchen, who was never spontaneous, he gripped Christopher’s shoulder with his good hand. The pressure was painful: Patchen was tremendously strong in
the unwounded parts of his body.

“The answer is no,” he said. “You’re out. Stay out.”

“We’re not talking about the Outfit, David. Graham has found a trace of my mother.”

“He’s found no such thing. There is no trace.”

“Then what is there?”

“Paul, I know how your father felt, I may even know how you feel. But thirty years have passed.”

“And somebody named Patrick Graham knows more about what happened to my mother than I do, than my father did? If he knows, David, it’s because the Outfit has always known.”

Patchen turned a haggard face to his friend.

“How could I have forgotten how you are?” he said. “You’re a Jeremiah, you always have been. Everything you’ve ever touched, every mystery you’ve ever solved,
has caused unbelievable trouble. You’re a truth junkie. Leave it alone, Paul. Go running with Stephanie. Write poetry. But don’t look for answers. There are no answers.”

For Patchen, this was a very long speech. Disturbed by his loss of self-control, he turned his back on Christopher and looked up at the streetlamp. Its saffron glow deepened the scars on his
face and brightened the color of his white hair.

Christopher realized that he had, once before, seen Patchen give way to emotion. When they were still in the Marine Corps, recovering from their wounds in a naval hospital, Christopher had
pushed his friend in his wheelchair to a ceremony. An admiral had awarded Patchen the Silver Star—a very high decoration for a marine in the Second World War—and the Purple Heart for
his wounds. His scars were fresh then; his ruined eye was covered by a patch; he expected to lose the sight in his other eye, the doctors had told him that it would go blind in sympathy.

On the way back to his bed, Patchen ripped the medals off his bathrobe and threw them into the shrubbery, as if they were insulting small coins that had been left as a tip.

There had been emotion on his face then. Patchen had hated his life, hated his country, hated Christopher, whose own wounds, a bullet through the leg, were so clean, so trivial. In years to
come, women would touch Christopher’s wounds in bed, neatly healed punctures on an otherwise perfect body, and murmur in admiration. No female would ever caress Patchen’s scars.

Beneath the streetlight in Georgetown, Patchen’s emotion passed.

“I’m sorry, Paul,” he said. “You reminded me of the past. Too much has happened to you. No matter how much I tell myself it was all your own fault, I feel responsible.
Stay out, just this once. Give me a little time and I’ll tell you anything. But not now.”

“Sorry,” Christopher said. “I’ve waited long enough.”

— 1 —

When Christopher told Stephanie that he was going to Massachusetts, she rescheduled her Monday appointments so that they could spend a long weekend together. She had a secret
present for him.

After the long drive in Friday night traffic, they arrived at the Harbor in the dark and slept in the narrow bed in Christopher’s old room. Stephanie woke first. When Christopher opened
his eyes, he found her sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed, watching him like a cat.

She gave him a package. Inside, bound in leather and printed in handset type on heavy rag paper, was his prison poem.

“There are only two copies,” Stephanie said.

Christopher smiled. “Who’s the other copy for?” he asked.

“Not who you think.”

She lay down beside him and kissed him in her measured way, as if each caress were a means of gathering a small new fact about her lover. Usually Stephanie recovered almost at once from sex, but
on this morning, lying in Christopher’s room—a boy’s room with the photographs of his family all around—she seemed reluctant to let it end.

“I’ve wanted to give you something from the start,” she said.

“The book’s a wonderful present.”

She shook her head and sat up so that she could look into his face.

“Not just the book,” she said. “Something more. The other book is for your child, when it’s grown.”

“My child?”

“That’s what I want to give you.”

“Stephanie, I’m old enough—”

“Don’t. I know our ages. I’m not speaking of marriage. If you want a child, we can start one. I’m saying that.”

She looked around at the pictures.

“It’s a way for all these people to live a little longer,” she said. “It’s wrong to let what you love die out, Paul, if you can keep it alive. You owe something to
the future.”

Stephanie nodded briskly. The question was settled. Smiling in satisfaction, she turned her head to one side and began to braid her hair for their morning run.

— 2 —

It wasn’t a long drive to the veterans’ hospital, about an hour over back roads through the hills that Christopher remembered from his boyhood.

He found Sergeant Jimmy Jo Mitchell sitting on a log bench in a grove of pine trees on the hospital grounds. He wore a baseball cap with the logo of Patrick Graham’s television network
stitched on the front. Candy wrappers and empty whisky bottles lay among the unpruned canes of dead rose bushes.

“I wished I could’ve got in touch with you,” Mitchell said, “but I figured somebody had probably done that or they wouldn’t have let me go on the air. I
didn’t want to do a thing to hurt anybody belonging to Colonel Christopher.”

“You haven’t hurt anyone.”

“That’s good, but I knew it was okay,” Mitchell said. “When the TV got in touch with me and started asking about Berlin, I said I’d have to check it out. So I
called the Outfit and told ’em what I was being asked.”

“What did the Outfit say?”

“They said sure, go ahead.”

“Who said that?”

“The guy who called me back. When I called, I left a message. It had to go up through channels. It took a couple of days for them to get back in touch.”

“What was his name?”

“He didn’t give a name, just said it was the Outfit calling.”

“You remember his voice?”

“Very hoarse. What’s the matter, you think he was a phony?”

“No.”

“Good, because there’s no way he could have been a phony. He called me Dogpatch over the phone. That’s my old code name from Berlin. Nobody but the Outfit could know
that.”

Christopher asked about Lori’s file. Mitchell had turned it in to the duty officer at headquarters. He’d never seen it again.

“It wasn’t the originals, not the typed pages, you know? It was photographs, enlargements.”

“You could see the face of the woman, even though it was a photograph of a photograph?”

“It was blurred, but I could see it.” He laughed. “I
guess
I could see it. At first I couldn’t. I drew a blank, nothing. But then they hypnotized me.”

“Hypnotized you?”

“The TV people came up with the idea. It’s a new technique, even the cops are using it. Everything registers on the subconscious, see, but you gotta bring it up to the surface.
That’s where the hypnotism works. I remembered the face under hypnotism and that’s when they drew the sketch. The artist talked to me while I was under. When I woke up, there was the
face. I remembered it then, clear as a bell.”

“What else did you remember?”

“A lot of stuff, it surprised even me. They let me listen to the tape after I came to, and then later on I remembered more stuff, after I came back here. It just popped into my
head.”

“Things that happened that day in Berlin just popped into your head after thirty years?”

“Right. Little details, like I was watching the Kraut agent, and I remembered why I shot at him. On the show I couldn’t answer that question. I was going to say Wolkowicz was
shooting the shit out of the car, why not me? But that wasn’t it. It was what the Kraut did.”

“What did he do?”

“The son of a bitch signaled the driver of the hit car. I didn’t even realize it at the time, it was only just now, after the hypnotism, that I knew what he was doing.”

“What did he do, exactly?”

“He had this rolled-up newspaper, see?”

Mitchell got to his feet and demonstrated, gesturing.

“This is the newspaper, see? He signaled, jerked up his arm like he was calling a cab.
That’s
when the hit car headed straight for your father. The newspaper was the signal to
kill him.”

— 3 —

When Christopher turned around and she saw his ravaged face, Stephanie said, “Good God, Paul, what is it?”

He hadn’t come into the house on his return to the Harbor. Working by the window in the kitchen, Stephanie had heard the car door slam, and then, through the open sash, she had seen
Christopher climbing through the steep pasture. When he hadn’t answered her call, she had followed him up the hillside. There had been something odd, even frightening, about the way he
plunged up the mountain, as if he had lost his sight and his hearing.

Stephanie found him in the Hubbard graveyard, staring down at an adder that was sunning itself on Indian Joe’s boulder headstone.

“Why did you come here?” she asked.

“To think,” Christopher said.

Stephanie teased him. “About what? The child? We could conceive it here. The time is right.”

She put a hand against his chest as she spoke to him. His body was rigid and cold. Empty-eyed, he stared at the torpid snake. She realized that he hadn’t heard what she had said to
him.

“Paul, what is it?”

“I know what happened,” Christopher said.

“What happened? To you? You mean in China?”

“To me, to my father, to Molly. All of it. I understand it. Jimmy Jo Mitchell lifted his hand, like this, and I understood it.”

Stephanie let her own hand fall. Christopher began to tremble. He closed his eyes and clenched his fists, trying to control the shaking, but he could not make his body obey his will.

Stephanie seized his face with both her hands. She had to reach high to do this and her body pressed against his.

“Paul, don’t try to control it,” she said. “Don’t.”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, Steph. Oh, Jesus. I loved them so.”

He began to sob, but no tears came.

“Paul, open your eyes,” Stephanie said.

He obeyed. She had never seen so much intelligence, or so much pain, in anyone’s eyes.

“Now your fists,” she said. “Open your hands.”

Stephanie rubbed her body against his. With her thumbs, she pressed his cheekbones, as if to force the tears to flow. Christopher was still trembling violently.

“
How
did you know?” Stephanie asked.

“I just saw the connections, the whole thing.”

“What are you feeling, Paul? Tell me.”

He shook his head.

“
Tell
me.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes you can. Everyone you love is dead. Are you telling me you know who killed them?”

“Yes.”

“Go on. Tell me more.
Who
killed them?”

“Fools. They were murdered by fools.”