The Last Supper (53 page)

Christopher looked around the dining room. This was a club for men who had fought behind enemy lines in the Second World War. Half a dozen members, most of them older than Sir Richard, ate alone
at small tables. The club offered only a cold lunch: with his noble Rhine wine, Sir Richard, after finishing his salmon, ate a Scotch egg, pale pink ham-and-chicken pie with a soggy crust, and a
mound of cold sliced beets. His glance followed Christopher’s.

“This place had its great days, but I’m afraid they’re past,” he said. “Everyone’s dying off. Their war dies with them, you know. Sad, really.”

On the walls, smudged by forty years of tobacco smoke, hung group photographs of underground fighters—Frenchmen and Belgians in berets, Greeks in tassels, Yugoslavians in peasant boots,
Burmese in sarongs. At the center of each group, in thick woolen battle dress or in khaki shorts and rolled-up sleeves according to the climate, stood a young British officer, the team leader.

“Strange, isn’t it, to think of old parties like these leaping out of Mosquitoes and Dakotas by the light of the moon?” Sir Richard said. “Still, they had a good
war.”

Sir Richard took the dripping bottle out of its ice bucket. Christopher’s wine was untouched. He filled his own glass.

“You asked about Rosalind Wilmot,” he said. “She’s round and about. I’m sure I have a number for her in my book.”

“Maybe you can give it to me. I’d like to see her.”

Sir Richard got out his address book and read off Rosalind’s telephone number.

“You two were great friends in Vienna days, I know,” he said, going back to his Scotch egg. “Marvelous woman, Rosalind. I always thought she’d make a useful
wife—mine, by preference. But it just wasn’t on. She’s awfully attached to that young brother of hers, Clive. He got his leg blown off in Ulster.”

“What news is there of Robin Darby?” Christopher asked, abruptly.

Sir Richard looked up from his food. A quick smile twitched at his lips: so
that
was what Christopher was up to!

“Very little, you know,” Sir Richard said. “The Russians gave Darby the Order of Lenin and a sumptuous flat in Moscow and I suppose he’s advising or translating or doing
whatever it is that heroes of the Soviet Union do after they get caught.”

“He’s still living?”

“Rotting away, you mean. We don’t inquire, really. Have you come to London to reopen the Darby case?”

“Nothing so dramatic as that.”

“Good. I should have thought you chaps would have drama enough at home these days, starring on television. Amazing, the things your press is permitted to do, amazing. Do taste that
hock.”

Christopher tried the Riesling. Because of his ancestry, strangers had always assumed that he liked German wines but, in fact, he had always found them too sweet. Christopher put down the glass
and nodded in appreciation.

“What I would like to do, if you’d introduce me to the right man,” he said, “is look through the club’s collection of photographs.”

“Photographs?”

“Of the special operations teams from World War II. They still maintain the archives?”

“I believe so,” Sir Richard said. “But you won’t find any pictures of your father, you know. One didn’t pose with one’s agents in Hitler’s
Germany.”

“It’s not my father I’m looking for. There’s a face I can’t place.”

“Whose face is that?”

Christopher smiled. “That’s what I hope to discover. In prison, I tried to sort out the names and faces of everyone I ever knew. . . .”

“Whatever for?”

“To pass the time. I got them all but one. There’s one face I can’t put a name to.”

“British?”

“I think he must have worked with you during the war, in the East.”

Sir Richard gave Christopher a keen glance from under his theatrical eyebrows. They were so symmetrical that Christopher realized that Sir Richard must have them trimmed, like his mustache.

“It must have been hell,” Sir Richard said, “lying in a cell, not able to place the chap.”

“Exactly.”

“Worth a trip to London, I should think.”

“Yes.”

“Your father was like that, you know,” Sir Richard said. “A bear for detail. Nothing escaped him, nothing. Of course you may look at the family albums. I’ll fix you up
after lunch.”

The aged waiter took away their plates and came back with two squares of pastry, glazed with some sort of syrup.

“Treacle tart,” Sir Richard said. “You hardly ever see it in England nowadays, thank heaven.”

Christopher spent the afternoon in the club library, studying yellowing photographs. Using a large magnifying glass provided by the club secretary, he examined each likely
face.

Finally, in a photograph made in 1944, he found the face he was looking for, in the second row of a group of half-naked young Asians, posed before a pagoda in the jungle. They were armed to the
teeth with rifles and pistols, knives and swords and grenades. The team leader, a tall bearded youngster with knobby knees and a face full of intelligence, was seated in an armchair. He wore a
sarong and a British officer’s cap and held a blossoming frond of some kind in his hand instead of a weapon. What a joke, he seemed to be saying with his drooping flower, what a
prank
it all is: the war, death, the jungle, these earnest brown and yellow killers having their picture taken.

Receiving this droll message across the decades, Christopher smiled.

According to the indexing information, the officer’s name was Captain R. Dirzinskaite, D.S.O., M.C.: a strange name for an Englishman.

— 2 —

“A
very
strange name,” Rosalind Wilmot said. “That’s why Robin changed it to Darby after the war; Lithuanians always seem to call themselves after
horse races when they decide to anglicize.”

Rosalind and Christopher had her flat in Onslow Gardens to themselves. She had sent her brother out for the evening. Clive Wilmot’s artificial leg hung by its straps from a coat rack in
the front hall.

“Someone gave Clive a peg leg, he prefers that,” Rosalind explained. “It’s a pity you missed him. He was dressed as a Tsarist dragoon. He and Charlotte Grestain—you
remember her, she drinks Scotch and milk and looks like a cheetah—are going to a costume party.”

But Rosalind was worried about her brother. Rain sluiced down the windowpanes and from time to time she looked anxiously into the street, thinking about Clive skittering over the slippery
pavement on his peg leg. Framed photographs of the two of them, smiling into the camera in front of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, before the Pyramid of Cheops, on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice,
stood on tables all around the room. Clive was younger than Rosalind, and even prettier. The photographs formed a strangely sentimental motif in a room decorated by the Rosalind whom Christopher
had known in Vienna.

“I don’t often think about Vienna,” Rosalind said, “but when I do, I think of that fight in the snow, and all that blood. Wolkowicz was such a primitive. Robin thought it
was so dreadfully funny. I always wondered why.”

“Darby—Dirzinskaite, should I say?”

“Should you? Your Lithuanian seems a bit rusty. What about him?”

“He had a very active sense of humor. When Wolkowicz called on him in prison, to gloat, he even made a joke of that. He gave Barney one of his Persian carpets.”

“I suppose he knew he was going to get away and couldn’t take it with him. Robin was a great one for having the last laugh. It was dreadful, the way he taunted Wolkowicz when he was
having Ilse.”

“Taunted him?”

“Robin knew that Wolkowicz was following the two of them. He’d kiss Ilse on the street and fondle her while the jealous husband was secretly watching—you remember how
pneumatic, how like a fragrant rose she was,” Rosalind said. “Barney simply writhed. The odd thing is, I think Darby and Wolkowicz liked each other, at heart.”

“I never saw much evidence of that.”

“All the same, they were fellow proles, you know. They made a joke of that. They talked Russian to each other at first.”

“Talked Russian?”

“The passwords were in Russian at first, before they changed to Kachin. They were tickled pink with themselves.”

“Why did they stop?”

“I don’t know. It may have been your presence. You were so tremendously not a prole. Ilse always went on about how your mother had been a baroness. ‘A
Prussian
baroness,’ she would chortle, with Hun superiority.”

Although Rosalind’s black hair was long, like a young girl’s, it was streaked with gray. She wore ribbed woolen stockings and a pleated skirt and blazer, like a school uniform. But
when she held out her ringless hands to the electric fire, the blue veins of middle age showed on the backs. There was a little less light than formerly in her clear violet eyes.

“Well,” she said, “Vienna brought none of us happiness, did it? You slew all those Russians, Wolkowicz slew his wife, Robin slew himself. The hell with Vienna. Tell me about
China.”

Christopher told her. Like Stephanie, she was interested and listened in silence, her eyes wide open and fixed on his.

“Surely,” she said, “it
couldn’t
have just been an accident? You weren’t sentenced to death for pilot error? How could you bear the thought?”

“What difference did it make?”

“To die for stupidity? A great deal of difference, I should have thought. To you especially. You were quite eerie, you know, the way you never did a stupid thing. Not even on the female
body. That’s awfully rare in a member of your sex, to know where everything is.”

Rosalind warmed her hands again. She hadn’t intended to speak about their life in bed; there had never been anything between them but sex and jokes. But as Christopher described his years
in prison, alone and silent, she had had a sudden sharp sensation that it had somehow been her own body that had lain on his pallet in China. She shook her head in annoyance at this romantic
fantasy. Christopher was watching her. She supposed he could read signs as well as ever and knew that she had been thinking of the past.

“Did Robin ever talk about the past?” Christopher asked.

Rosalind was startled, but she was glad of another subject. She surprised herself with the length of her answer. “Robin? Not much. If you asked, he’d just recite his
curriculum
vitae
. His parents hiked out of Lithuania before he was born, ‘with little packs on their backs,’ he always said. They went first to South Africa. They were heroes to Robin, heroes.
I don’t know if they walked all the way, over the water I mean, but Robin made it sound as if they had. Then they came to London, just at the end of the First World War; Mrs. D. was pregnant
with Robin and they wanted him to be born in England. He went to grammar school in London, Highgate, I believe, and won all the prizes and a scholarship in oriental studies at London University. He
got a commission in the Special Forces on the strength of his languages—Chinese, Japanese, strange Burmese dialects. And Russian, of course.”

“Did he ever talk about Burma?”

“No, never. Of course everyone knew that he was practically the T. E. Lawrence of the jungle. He was such a god to the headhunters that they had to give him the D.S.O. even though he had
crawled out from under a rock somewhere south of the Thames and was called Dirzinskaite. Even after he came over onto the permanent strength of the service, he insisted on talking like a fish
porter, cocking a snook at the old Etonians. They detested him, they always kept him in the field, but they couldn’t do without him.”

“Do the files on his Burma days still exist?”

Rosalind displayed no surprise at this improper question, no caution. “I suppose they must,” she said.

“I’d like to know something about his team out there.”

Rosalind listened to Christopher’s list of requirements. It was short: a picture, a name, a certain dispatch.

“Am I to understand,” Rosalind said, “that you want me to steal this information out of our Registry, for old times’ sake?”

“Yes.”

“Very well,” she said.

Christopher handed her a theater ticket, for a performance of
King Lear
. Rosalind put on her glasses and examined the ticket.

“Tomorrow night?” she said. “Very impetuous, you Ameddicans.”

Rosalind arrived late at the play, just as the third act was beginning. When the lights went down, she pressed a hat-check token into Christopher’s hand. She had left the
things he wanted in an envelope in the cloakroom of the theater.

“It’s all there, just as you guessed,” she whispered, as Lear’s voice and the noise of a wind machine filled the theater. “What sly dogs they were. Poor Paul, to
know it all along, and be locked up in China.”

— 1 —

On the eleventh anniversary of his capture, Christopher called on Pong’s daughter, the medical student, and asked her to deliver a message for him.

She shook her shining cape of black hair, a gesture of disgust. “I don’t know about going to his office, he’s always coming on to me,” she said. “All the other
meetings were outdoors.”

“This would be the last time you’d have to see him.”