The Last Supper

by Charles McCarry

  The aide read Hubbard’s citation and the Director gave Paul his father’s medal in its open case.

  Champagne was served. It was nine o’clock in the morning.

  “From now on I think we’ll have these things a little later in the day,” the Director said. “This is the first time we’ve done it, so whoever is responsible for the champagne must be interested in establishing a tradition. Do you think your father would have minded the festive atmosphere?”

  “No. He liked champagne.”

  “I admired Hubbard,” the Director said. “Everyone did. No one will ever know the great things he did. I suppose he would have preferred it that way, but to me it’s sad. He did so much for his country and nobody will know it.”

  “Perhaps nobody wants to know,” Ilse said. The waiter passed by and she held out her glass for more champagne.

  “Who do you mean?” the Director said, smiling. Ilse was so pretty, so fragrant in her spotless linen suit and her white gloves. She smelled of her rose perfume.

  “Those outside. They prefer to think that men like Hubbard, men like my husband, do not exist—that they are not necessary. Protect me and say nothing! That is what they want.”

  The Director was taken aback. “Do you really think so?” he said politely.

  “Our German poet Schiller wrote, ‘Against stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain,’ ” Ilse said. She repeated the words in German, looking directly into Paul’s face. Wolkowicz, his medal dangling from his neck, stood with them, unsmiling.

  “Ah, yes,” the Director said. “Schiller.”

  The aide approached, holding the box for Wolkowicz’s medal in his hands.

  “Time to give that back,” he said. Wolkowicz took off his decoration and handed it over. The aide held out his hand for Hubbard’s medal. Paul gave it to him; the aide snapped the leather boxes shut.

  “I’m afraid this is the last you’ll ever see of these,” he said. “We lock them in the Director’s safe. “It would be quite a coup to the opposition to know who we’re decorating. You’ll know the medal’s there; that’s supposed to be enough.”

  — 5 —

  In the spring, the Director, finding himself in Boston, invited Paul and David Patchen to supper at Locke-Ober’s restaurant. While Patchen was out of the room, he asked Paul to join the Outfit.

  “Even if you weren’t your father’s son and Elliott’s nephew, we’d want you,” the Director said. “You understand the Germans and the French, you speak their languages. That’s pure gold to us. Besides, I’ve been reading your poems.”

  During the war, and afterward at Harvard, Paul had written enough poems to be collected into a book, and his father’s publisher had printed them. He thought that the mild publicity his book received—a few brief reviews in newspapers and magazines—might disturb the Outfit.

  “No, no, it’s wonderful cover,” said the Director.

  “Cover?”

  “Yes. You’re a genuine poet, a hell of an advantage. You can live anywhere, see anybody. You don’t have to explain yourself. You have a reason to live in the real world. Damn few spies do.”

  Christopher had been concerned about Patchen’s future. He decided to put in a word for him. The Director listened with twinkling eyes.

  “David Patchen is already with us,” he said. “Fine boy. He was with us in the war. We dropped him into a hornet’s nest on Okinawa, you know—that’s where he got his wounds, going in ahead of the invasion. He radioed the information in spite of his wounds. David is remembered. He’ll always have a home with the Outfit.”

  Paul accepted the Director’s offer. In later years he would try to remember his feelings at this moment, when he stepped out of the real world and into the secret world. Had he thought about his father? Had he remembered the hidden Jews aboard Mahican, the Dandy, the Gestapo men who had beaten his father and arrested his mother? Had he been motivated by love of America, by the idea of freedom? He didn’t know. What he remembered was a great feeling of relief: the Director had offered him privacy, a world in which honors were locked in a safe, a world in which everything could be known and nothing revealed, a world in which there could be no inexplicable disappearances.

  — 6 —

  Because he could speak French, the Outfit sent Christopher to Indochina, where the French were fighting a war against Communist guerrillas. Wolkowicz seemed to know of this assignment even before Christopher did. On the day his orders were issued, Wolkowicz invited him to lunch.

  Christopher was surprised to hear Wolkowicz’s voice on the telephone. In the six months he had been working for the Outfit, he had seen nothing of Wolkowicz. There was nothing unusual in that: the Outfit had no central headquarters; its staff was scattered around Washington in temporary buildings, in odd corners of other departments of the government, in private office buildings and safe houses. There was no telephone directory. Wolkowicz knew Christopher’s number in the way that he seemed to know everything else, by that superdeveloped instinct for learning secrets that Hubbard had noted in him.

  “Do you like oysters?” Wolkowicz asked on the phone. “Good. Meet me at twelve in the aquarium.”

  Wolkowicz was watching the tropical fish when Christopher arrived. He opened a grease-stained paper sack and handed Christopher his lunch—a hamburger bun with a deep-fried Chesapeake oyster the size of a flattened tennis ball inside it.

  “I put ketchup on it,” Wolkowicz said. “I hope that’s okay.” He bit into his own sandwich. “Best oyster sandwich in town,” he said. “I get them from this takeout place down by the river.”

  The aquarium was crowded during the lunch hour with other government workers. Wolkowicz, wolfing his sandwich as he went, led Christopher outside. They walked in silence across Constitution Avenue to the mall. Wolkowicz sat down on a park bench.

  “I think we’ll be all right here,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you about what you’re going to run into in Hanoi.”

  “Have you been there?”

  “Not to Hanoi, but I spent part of the war with the guy who’s going to be your case officer out there. Waddy Jessup.”

  “You spent the war with Waddy?”

  “We were together in Burma. He’s a touchhole cousin of yours, I hear.”

  Wolkowicz curled his upper lip and tapped his false teeth with the nail of his index finger. “Burma,” he said. “Jesus.” He seemed to be speaking to himself. Then his eyes came back into focus and he spoke to Christopher.

  “Look,” he said, “I’ve got a strange feeling about you, like you’re my responsibility. It’s because of your father, but not all because of him. You seemed like a good guy the first time I met you, at that Christmas party. Then at your father’s funeral I felt like a shit. What happened in Berlin shouldn’t have happened. Not to him.”

  “I agree, but nobody thinks it was your fault.”

  “Fuck what anybody thinks. I was there.”

  Wolkowicz shook his head, a bearish movement. His muscles seemed to work involuntarily, like an animal’s: one moment he was at rest, utterly motionless, and the next he was moving at full speed.

  “What you want to do when you get to Hanoi,” Wolkowicz said, “is watch it with Waddy Jessup. He’s dangerous.”

  “Dangerous?”

  “Dangerous.” Wolkowicz dug a finger into Christopher’s thigh to emphasize the word. “Waddy used to wear a Yale track shirt out in the jungle. They fried his brains at Yale. They do that to everybody—the Outfit is full of the cocksuckers, they hire each other—but Waddy is something special. He’s not only a fool, he’s yellow, and if you don’t watch him he’ll get you killed.”

  Christopher could think of no reply. Wolkowicz peered into his face.

  “I take a short lunch hour,” Wolkowicz said. “You’re leaving. It would have been better to lead up to what I’m telling you instead of just hitting you with it, but we haven’t got the time. If I’d known what was going on I would have found a way to keep you out of Indochi
na as long as Waddy is there. I didn’t know. So I’m telling you now: watch out for Waddy. And for Christ’s sake, don’t go out on any ops with him, especially not in the jungle.”

  “I’ll remember what you’ve said,” Christopher said.

  He got to his feet. Wolkowicz, still seated on the bench, looked up at him. While he spoke about Waddy Jessup, his broad face had been twisted in disgust. Now his expression changed and once again he looked sad—close to tears, even, as he had looked at the Harbor when speaking of Hubbard.

  “I hope so,” Wolkowicz said. “Waddy’s done enough damage.” He cleared his throat and spat, another automatic response, like a dog biting at a wound on its own body. “So have I,” he said.

  — 7 —

  A month before Christopher’s arrival in Hanoi, Waddy Jessup smuggled fifty copies of his book of poems into Vietnam by diplomatic pouch. Waddy’s agents then distributed these volumes surreptitiously on the shelves of bookstores, returning every other day for two weeks to see if they had been sold. Fifteen of them were sold. Waddy bribed a local journalist to write a favorable review of Christopher’s book.

  Waddy was convinced that his book-smuggling operation had eased Christopher’s passage into the heart of the local avant-garde when, only days after reaching Indochina, Christopher met a fellow poet, a Tonkinese who had studied at the Sorbonne, who introduced him to the local café intelligentsia, a mixed group of European and Vietnamese Communists and fellow travelers. The fact that the Tonkinese poet was a female who fell in love with Christopher did not seem important to Waddy.

  “She read your poems,” Waddy said to Christopher; “that was the key—your aura as an artiste. I fixed you up with the aura. All you have to do now is glow.”

  Waddy and Christopher met once a week, in the cool of the early morning, to play tennis on a court owned by a French colon. The tennis gave them a reason to see each other; even to the Tonkinese girl, it seemed natural that a man with Christopher’s athletic body might want to play a bourgeois game once a week. Between sets, Waddy outlined Christopher’s mission in Indochina.

  “The job of an intelligence service,” Waddy said, “is to stay in with the outs. Just now the Vietminh are the outs, but not for long. The French are going to lose this colony, thank God, and when they do the United States must have friends among the new people. That’s where you come in.”

  “Why do you say thank God, Waddy?”

  “Because Vietnam belongs to the Vietnamese, because colonialism has had its day, because the white man must lay down his burden. You and I are going to help the white man do that.”

  “The French are our allies.”

  “Of course they are. That’s why you don’t have to waste time making friends with them. Your job is to make friends with their enemies; love their enemies, Paul—that’s your credo.”

  “The French won’t love me for that.”

  ‘Well, I ask you: who do the French love? Do you want to be the first American they’ve ever admired? The worst they can do is throw you out of Indochina, but before they do, the Vietminh will love you. You’re already sleeping with one of them. By the time the French have you out, the country will be teeming with little brown friends of yours.”

  Christopher’s Tonkinese girl taught him Vietnamese. He learned languages easily and within a few months he was able to converse with fair fluency. Her poems were too angry to be published in an occupied country, but they were distributed by an underground press: Waddy provided money for the purchase of a printing press, and this was set up in a house in the native quarter. Christopher’s girl worked as a printer and she would come home late at night with the smell of ink on her golden skin. So long as the sun was out or a lamp was lit, she talked politics, but in bed she never spoke; she would fall asleep lying on top of Christopher and in the night he would lift her feathery body with its fragile bones and place it on the mat beside him. She was called Lê, a common Vietnamese name that means “tears.”

  Christopher had a commission from an American magazine that had printed some of his poems to write about Indochina. The American press was filled with stories written from the French point of view: American correspondents in Indochina drank in French clubs, ate in French restaurants, went to briefings by the French military. They went out with French troops and watched as the rebels—fragile, fleet young people in black pajamas—were hunted and shot like deer as they sped through the trees or went to the river at dusk.

  Christopher, who on Waddy’s instructions had not met a single French person in Hanoi, proposed to write about the other side. By now the Vietminh trusted him. One night, guided by a friend of Lê’s, he got onto a boat in the Red River, and a few hours later was put ashore. There he was met by a Vietminh patrol. In their company, he walked a hundred miles through the jungle to an underground encampment, a whole town hidden beneath the earth. As his guide led him through miles of tunnels, running beneath the forest, Christopher asked what had happened to the dirt; not a single shovelful could be seen aboveground. “It was carried away in cloths, a shovelful in each cloth, and put somewhere else,” the guide said. Christopher realized that Waddy Jessup was right: the French had lost this colony. There was no possibility of defeating an enemy who would carry away a thousand tons of dirt in handkerchiefs.

  Christopher spent a month with the Vietminh, lying hidden during the day, moving and attacking by night. While Christopher accompanied them, the Vietminh were ruthless and destructive, but they fought with scrupulous honor, never harming a civilian. Their targets were exclusively French: patrols of French soldiers, outlying French plantations. They fought the French in the way the Japanese had fought Christopher and the U.S. Marines in the Pacific jungles: with animal stealth and fearless skill.

  Then one morning the patrol walked into a quiet village. There was no sign of life. While the guerrillas waited, weapons at the ready in case this should be a French ambush, their leader went into the headman’s hut. Christopher heard voices inside and the sudden piercing cry of a child. Before the Vietminh could stop him, he ducked into another hut. A woman crouched on the dirt floor, clutching two children, a boy of five or six and a girl of three. Both children had chopsticks driven into their ears. Evidently this had been done to them during the night, because the blood on their cheeks was still wet: the girl was unconscious and Christopher touched her face with his forefinger. The mother spoke to him in broken French; she did not seem to be afraid of him, but when two Vietminh soldiers came into the hut, she gasped and stopped speaking. The Vietminh herded everyone outside. Every child in the village had chopsticks driven into its ears.

  At the edge of the village, lying in an uncovered grave, were the bodies of a dozen men and women; their right hands and their heads had been cut off. Among them was a Catholic priest, a Frenchman who had had a bald head and a peevish sharp face; even in death he seemed sure of his opinions. He reminded Christopher of one of the masters at his school in Switzerland. The guerrilla leader found Christopher at the edge of the open pit. Lifting his voice above the sound of the droning flies, the Vietminh officer said, “This is what the French do to our people.” Then he saw the priest’s body in its cassock and the priest’s severed head, and he called for a working party of villagers to fill the grave.

  Christopher wandered away. He asked no questions of the villagers, but he listened to what they were saying to one another. A Vietminh educational squad had done all this as a lesson to the village. It was a Catholic village; they had heard that the priest had come to live there because he believed that his presence, as a Frenchman and as a priest, could protect the villagers.

  It was important to the Vietminh to prove him wrong. First the educational squad had cut off the right hands of every Catholic in the village (because those hands had been used to make the sign of the cross), then they had beheaded them, then they had held a lesson in revolutionary doctrine, then they had sung patriotic songs. And then they had driven the chopsticks into the children’s ears.r />
  “What’s the point of writing about the chopsticks?” Waddy Jessup asked, back in Hanoi. “It’s an isolated incident, not at all typical of the Vietminh. It could have been a French trick, they could have sent out some of the thugs posing as Vietminh.”

  “The French beheaded a French priest? Do you really believe that, Waddy?”

  Waddy toweled his sweaty hair; they had just finished their tennis. “You’re new to this work, Paul,” he said. “Trust me. If what you’ve written appears in print, you’ll throw away everything you’ve worked for here. You’ll lose that delicious Tonkinese girl, you’ll lose all your friends.”

  Christopher sent off his story as he had written it. Waddy needn’t have worried: the editors of the magazine removed the description of the chopsticks. When he returned to New York, Christopher asked why.

  “Didn’t you think it was just a little racist?” asked the editor who had handled the story. “I mean, really, Paul—fiendish Asians pounding things into the ears of babies. It’s like eight-millimeter pornography run backward. The stuff about the patrol and the city of tunnels was great, though.”

  By that time, Waddy Jessup had already been back in America for nearly a year. Christopher had received news of his departure from Hanoi from David Patchen. One morning, when he arrived for his regular tennis game with Waddy, David Patchen awaited him. He had come out from Washington to introduce him to his new case officer.

  “Waddy was called home pretty suddenly,” Patchen said. “You were upcountry, he said—upcountry was Waddy’s word—so he couldn’t say good-bye.”

  “Will he be back?”

  “No,” Patchen said. He was wearing his summer clothes, a wrinkled seersucker suit and a black knitted tie. The new man, dressed in tennis whites, volleyed off the board fence of the court. Patchen shot him a look, to be certain he wasn’t within earshot.

  “It was the polygraph,” Patchen said.