The Last Supper (51 page)

Patchen examined his still life again. It was unlike him, this wandering gaze.

“Do you have a theory?” he asked. “Do you know what it all means?”

“Were you listening to Waddy? He called the Addressees Spy Ring a diversion. Maybe everything, all along, was diversion—just one diversion after another.”

Patchen sipped some port. He was having trouble with his voice. He had become less and less audible, and now spoke in a croaking whisper.

“It’s as good a theory as any,” he said. “If dead women can float up from Stephanie Webster’s mind wearing garter belts, why should anything be
impossible?”

Patchen cleared his throat repeatedly. He couldn’t speak. Christopher handed Patchen his own port and the other man drank it. It opened his throat and he came back to the original
subject.

“Are you going to show this to Wolkowicz?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Should I?”

“Do as you like. Do you have some way of finding him? I don’t. As far as I know, Barney sleeps under bridges. His apartment is never used. Where does he go at night? It’s a
mystery.”

Patchen smiled his agonized smile, as if even he, at times, was amused by Wolkowicz’s unrelenting suspicion of everyone and everything.

— 4 —

To Christopher’s surprise, Stephanie liked the food at the Thai Pagoda.

“It’s my radical principles,” she said, eating highly seasoned pork and canned pineapple off a skewer. “If it comes from the Third World, it has to be good for
you.”

Christopher wrote something on a scrap of paper and gave it to the waitress as she cleared away the plates. It was late; Stephanie and Christopher were the last customers. The lights dimmed.

“I think they want us to leave,” Stephanie said.

“Not yet,” Christopher replied.

Firm footsteps crossed the empty room. The proprietor, his muscular torso stretching the thin material of a white silk shirt, stood beside their table.

“Hello, Pong,” Christopher said. “How have you been?”

“Alive and well,” Pong said. “I thought it was you when you came in the other day with our friend, but it’s been a long time.”

Pong shook hands, first with Stephanie, who flinched at his strength, then with Christopher. His English had improved since his days in Saigon as Wolkowicz’s driver, and he had a new ease
of manner. He wore designer clothes and jeweled rings on his powerful hands. He drew up a chair and sat down.

He snapped his fingers, a detonating sound in the empty restaurant, and the pretty little waitress brought three extra desserts and a bottle of cognac. She bowed to Pong and went away. Pong
poured the liqueur himself.

“Is that your daughter, the waitress?” Stephanie asked.

“Right,” Pong said. “She’s in medical school, Georgetown. Off duty, she’s a real American girl. The whole family are citizens. We had a special bill in
Congress.”

“How did you manage that?” Stephanie asked.

“Friends,” he said. He lifted his glass to Christopher.

Christopher wet his lips with the cognac. Pong drained his glass, then folded his hands in his lap, out of sight.

In Vietnamese, Christopher said, “Is Barney a partner, or did he just help you out when you started this place?”

“Barney never wants anything for himself,” Pong said in the same language. He jerked his head toward Stephanie. “She doesn’t understand?”

Christopher shook his head. Stephanie got up and went to the ladies’ room.

“English is better,” Pong said. “I never liked Vietnamese. Now, less. You want to contact Barney?”

“Yes, but it’s not urgent. Do you know where he is?”

“I can take a message. Maybe Barney told you I still do him some favors.”

Pong and Christopher smiled at one another, two old friends of Wolkowicz’s who understood what friendship with him entailed.

“I’m always glad to help Barney out,” Pong said. “It really has been a long time. You retired now? Everybody’s retiring.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t miss the life,” Pong said.

But he did. He poured himself another brandy, rings flashing, and offered more to Christopher. Like other old agents Christopher had known, Pong enjoyed a good gossip. He mentioned two or three
other names, Outfit people from his days in Vietnam.

“Everybody on the Vietnamese side was mixed up with the Cong —
everybody
. Barney knew that,” Pong said. “Nobody else would believe it. Not even you, my friend.
There were Vietnamese you actually loved. Remember?”

“I remember.”

“You had a lot of enemies out there, too. It was because you were good. Barney always said you were the best.”

“Barney said that?”

Pong tossed down his brandy. His eyes watered and a deep flush crept up under the brown skin of his unlined, youthful face.

“You know Barney. He’d never
say
anything like that. But he didn’t like your enemies. He took care of you.”

“Took care of me?”

“Took care of your enemies. You’d better ask Barney.” Pong laughed. “Hell of a lot of good that’ll do you.
He
won’t tell you what he did for you. It
was a lot, though, no shit.”

Stephanie came out of the toilet. Pong stopped speaking. But instead of returning to the table, she strolled through the shadowy restaurant, looking at the decor, travel posters of Thai scenes.
Pong’s daughter joined her and they chatted. Pong looked on with approval. Stephanie, with her neat body and her tawny coloring, looked something like the Thai girl. Her black hair was less
beautiful.

“Your wife?” Pong asked.

“No.”

“Maybe you should marry her. At least she’s quiet. American woman talk so fucking much.
They
answer all the questions,
they
choose the food. I say to my daughters:
‘Not you, baby.’ I’d send them back to Thailand if they pull that shit. They don’t want to go, they want to be American girls—college, boyfriends, music all the time,
crazy ideas. But not around me.”

Pong poured himself a third cognac, then put the cork back in the bottle, slapping it home with his horny palm. In his day, he had been a killer, skilled with his bare hands, good with weapons.
In Vietnam, when he worked for Wolkowicz, he had carried a box of sand with him in the car; waiting for Barney, he would pound the edge of his hands into the sand, hundreds of blows every day. His
hands had been like two stone axes. Obviously he remembered his youth with pleasure.

“You missed the worst parts in Vietnam,” he said. “There was a lot of mess to clean up. I helped, right up until I came to the States.”

“Working for Barney even after he left?”

“Sometimes, odd jobs. He always keeps in touch.”

“How about you, Pong? Do you keep in touch?”

“The guys come in here for a meal. I see some of them. I remember them all. Barney taught me how to remember faces—you divide them in three, right? I knew you right away.”

“There’s one guy from Saigon
I’ve
been trying to remember,” Christopher said.

“Yeah? Who’s that?”

“A pilot. His first name was Gus.”

“Gus Kimber,” Pong said without hesitation.

“Kimber? Was that his name?”

“Skinny guy, used dope, didn’t give a shit for anything. He did a lot of stuff for Barney. That was the only Gus I knew.”

“I heard he was killed.”

“Gus? Killed?” Pong chortled. “Not this Gus. He’d get himself beat up in bars, but that was it. He was in here last year, drunk as a skunk. He’s giving flying
lessons out West somewhere. Shit, wait—he left a card.”

Pong snapped his fingers. His daughter brought him a cigar box. It was full of business cards. Pong put on a pair of half-moon reading glasses and went through them. He found a Polaroid snapshot
of himself, standing in front of a moored cabin cruiser. In the snapshot, he wore a yachting cap.

“My boat,” he said. “Chesapeake power squadron.”

Peering over the tops of the half moons, Pong watched for Christopher’s reaction to this evidence of his affluence. Despite his gray hair, despite his history, the glasses, perched on his
round face, made him look like a child playing with a grown-up’s things. At last he found Gus Kimber’s card and gave it to Christopher.

Christopher read it and handed it back.

“Blythe, California,” Pong said, peering through his lenses. “That’s in the desert, near the Arizona line, according to Gus. No trees as far as the eye can see. Gus liked
that. He didn’t enjoy having the Cong shooting at his ass whenever he’d have to fly over the jungle, I remember that.”

Pong closed his cigar box and took off his glasses. He rested his hands on the lid of the box and, unable to stop himself after his long day at work, yawned.

He covered his mouth with one hand and lifted the other in apology to Christopher. On his index fingers he wore Nguyên Kim’s ruby rings.

— 1 —

“You want to see the intaglios?” the woman asked, when Christopher called Gus Kimber’s number in Blythe. She had a stripped American voice, loud and free of
accent. Christopher didn’t know what the intaglios were; he didn’t ask. The woman didn’t wait for his answer.

“The best time to see them is sunup,” she said. “The charge is fifty dollars for a half-hour flight. Gus’ll meet you out at the airport at five-thirty. You’ll see
the sign:
Kimber Flying Service
.”

Christopher flew to Phoenix and rented a car. It was after midnight. Driving westward through the desert, he realized that he was truly alone for the first time since he had left China. He
stopped the car and got out. The moon had set and the black sky above this empty country was filled with stars. A gust of wind brought him the parched smell of dust, like the dust he had inhaled
during the firefight after Gus’s plane had crashed in China.

He drove on. It was not yet five o’clock when Christopher arrived at the Blythe airport. In the starlight he could see small planes parked on the apron. A dog barked furiously behind a
chain-link fence, then wriggled through a gap in the wire and leaped onto the hood of Christopher’s car. The animal, a mongrel with a lot of Alsatian blood, snarled at him through the
windshield, scratching the paint as it scrambled for a foothold on the smooth body of the car.

Headlights approached, jouncing on the rough dirt track that led in from the highway. An old Jeep pulled in beside Christopher’s parked car and its driver, a man wearing a high-crowned
Stetson, leaped out. The dog barked at him. He seized it by the collar and the tail and flung it, like a sack of garbage, into the darkness. The animal hit the ground, yelping, twenty feet away,
and scuttled off.

The man in the Stetson looked through the windshield. Christopher lowered the window.

“Sorry about the dog,” the man said. “It belongs to the night watchman—he turns it loose if he sees a strange car. Hard on the paint.”

The rising sun, its disk still invisible beyond the eastern ridgeline, sent a shaft of light through a cleft in the rocks.

“Might as well crank her up,” the man said. “The sun’ll be up by the time we get up in the air. You know the price?”

Christopher got out of the car and handed him a fifty-dollar bill. There was just enough light for them to see each other. The man unsnapped the breast pocket of his western shirt and put away
the money without looking at it. He wore a stainless-steel Rolex watch on his left wrist.

“Couldn’t Gus make it?” Christopher asked.

“What?”

“I was expecting Gus.”

“I’m Gus,” the man said, in a strong Texas accent.

He was lanky, an inch or two taller than Christopher, with a lean, weatherbeaten western face, unmistakably a Texan.

His aircraft was a Piper Super Cub, a slow, reliable machine. Once they were airborne, scorched air blew into the cockpit from the heater. The mountains to the east were still purple with night,
but the sun made little ponds of light on the barren flanks of the hills to the west. Below them the Colorado River, shining in the morning light, wound through squares of irrigated land, green and
placid as paddy in Asia.

The plane climbed, bucking a little as it crossed the water, and flew over the bleak desert. Gus banked and pointed downward. On the flat top of a high mesa, directly below, Christopher saw the
outline of an enormous human figure. It was at least a hundred feet in length. Gus nudged Christopher and pointed again: the figure had large pendulous testicles. Nearby was the outline of a
deer.

“Those are the Blythe intaglios,” Gus shouted. “You know the history?”

Christopher shook his head.

“Some lost pilot found ’em in 1932,” Gus said. “Just flew over and there they were. Nobody’d ever seen ‘em before. You can’t see from the ground.
Whoever made ‘em, made ‘em by turning over stones that are dark on one side and light on the other, so the light side is up.”

Gus flew to another mesa. There were more intaglios below, winged objects like flying machines, concentric circles that looked like targets, Maltese crosses, and other abstract designs.

“They’re all over the place,” Gus said. “Nobody knows who put ‘em here, or why, or what they mean.”

“Can you land on the mesa?”