The Last Supper

by Charles McCarry

  Turning his back to the prison so that his moving lips could not be seen, Cheng began to talk to Christopher in Chinese. Christopher, hidden from surveillance in his ditch, replied. This was forbidden, but the two men had been together in the outdoors all day, every day, for more than ten years. Cheng had begun to speak to Christopher, even though he did not understand, merely to pass the time. Christopher replied, repeating words and phrases. Now he hardly sounded like a foreigner; when he spoke Mandarin, he sounded like someone who came from a remote part of China, there was the shadow of another dialect in his speech, but nothing that could be called an accent.

  “Go on with the story of the old miser,” Cheng said.

  Patiently, grunting with each blow of the mattock, Christopher told the Chinese the story about Eleazer Stickles and his bride, Melody.

  Cheng had never heard such stories as Christopher told him. He admired this American. He was an excellent worker. He was forty-nine years old. He had no gray hair. His face was weather-burned. He weighed 165 pounds. His broken bones had long since mended. He was in perfect health. If he felt the fear of death, Cheng had never seen any sign of it.

  Christopher finished the story and began to sing in English. This was not permitted, but Cheng did not order him to stop; the two men, guard and prisoner, were used to each other.

  That night, before he slept, Christopher, lying in the dark, worked on his poem. He wrote the 3,570th word. Once again, he glimpsed Molly on the Ponte Sisto; he always saw her there and she always made the same gesture, touching her heart with her fingertips. She was always twenty-four years old. He never remembered her unclothed, never (now that he had ceased to dream) saw her as she had looked in any of the hundreds of moments in which they had made love.

  — 3 —

  In the morning, after breakfast, Christopher had his weekly meeting with Ze, his interrogator. Every Wednesday, for ten years, Ze had spent the day with Christopher, who looked forward keenly to these encounters.

  In the early days, Ze had been only one of a dozen men who had interrogated Christopher. The Chinese had crowded around him, shouting accusations and demanding his confession. For months, Christopher had worn manacles and leg irons connected by a heavy chain two meters long. He had been obliged to carry the chain looped in his arms at all times; it was forbidden to let it touch the floor. These sessions, called the Struggle, had lasted for hours at a time. Their purpose had been to exhaust the prisoner, to break down his resistance, to make him accept confession as a virtuous action.

  All agents of the Outfit were under instructions to confess everything they knew if they fell into the hands of a hostile power. Though he was no longer an agent of the Outfit, Christopher had told the Chinese, in as much detail as they asked, everything that they seemed to want to know. It was useless to submit to torture; no human being could stand up under it. The Chinese had never tortured Christopher, unless standing in chains for ten hours at a time in a room full of screaming secret policemen can be called torture.

  But he had never confessed to spying against the People’s Republic of China. This refusal to submit to revolutionary justice and ask for mercy was the reason why Christopher was treated with exceptional harshness. Every week for ten years, Ze had reminded Christopher that his stubborn refusal to acknowledge his crime was a matter of the utmost seriousness. Now he reminded him again. The sessions with Ze always began with the same words.

  “You have been given a great opportunity,” Ze said. “Failure to confess, failure to make a clean breast of everything, can only mean that you remain in your heart a remorseless counterrevolutionary.”

  Ze wore a look of real sadness. Christopher felt a pang of sympathy. Ze had been severely tested by the years he had spent as Christopher’s interrogator. He truly wished to save Christopher from execution at the end of his allotted twenty years, but Christopher would not help him. This was a great failure for Ze; had the interrogator been a Jesuit instead of a Communist he might have suspected that his own faith was not strong enough to be of real service to God. Perhaps he did suspect something of the kind. He had been given time to save Christopher’s political soul, and it was slipping through his fingers. To be executed without having confessed was to Ze what dying without the last rites of the Church would have been to the Jesuit.

  The conversations with Ze were held in a square, whitewashed room, very brightly lighted. There was a red star on the wall and a portrait of Mao. Ze wore the dark blue flannel uniform of a Communist Party functionary.

  The two men always spoke in English. Ze’s command of the language had improved markedly over the years; it was he who had given Christopher his dictionary; he kept the mate to it on his table and sometimes consulted it in the course of the interrogation.

  “You understand,” Ze said on this Wednesday morning, for the five hundredth time, “that the only chance of mitigating your sentence lies in your admitting your guilt?”

  “I understand. But I did not commit the crime of espionage against the People’s Republic of China.”

  “We know that you are guilty of that very crime. Why do you deny it?”

  “Because to confess would be to lie. I cannot lie to you and live as I must live.”

  “Do you wish to die?”

  “No.”

  “How old were you when you entered the People’s Republic for criminal purposes?”

  “I was thirty-nine years old when the pilot of my plane became lost and landed in this country by mistake.”

  “You are prepared to die in less than ten years’ time, at the age of fifty-nine?”

  “I am not prepared to make a false confession.”

  “I remind you,” Ze said, “that the sentence can be executed sooner if the prisoner is deemed to be beyond rehabilitation. You could be executed at any time.”

  Ze had never before made this threat. He paused and gazed for a long moment at Christopher. He did not expect to see fear, but he had expected that his words, delivered in a harsh voice, would startle Christopher. However, the American wore his usual expression of mild good humor. He was seated on a low stool. A piece of chalk lay on the floor in front of him, between his bare feet.

  “Pick up the chalk,” Ze said.

  Christopher did so.

  “Write the word espionage.”

  Christopher wrote the English word across the scrubbed tiles of the floor.

  “Write the definition of espionage,” Ze said.

  This was part of the ritual of interrogation. In the early days, Christopher had sometimes written for hours on this floor, wearing the chalk down to a brittle nub that could barely be gripped between the thumb and the fingers, and then starting again with a new stick. Christopher was surprised that Ze was asking him to write this particular word and definition; it had been a long time since he had asked him to do so. Ze was especially solemn today.

  Christopher, who had long ago memorized the words, wrote: The practice or employment of spies. It was one of the briefest definitions in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary.

  “Read aloud,” Ze said.

  Christopher did so. Ze searched Christopher’s face with great thoroughness, as if there was something still hidden in it after all these years—or as if he did not expect to see it again. Christopher had never seen Ze behave in this way.

  “You are not guilty of espionage?” Ze asked.

  “Yes, a hundred times over,” Christopher replied. “Against the Soviets, against the Vietnamese, against the Poles and the Czechs and the Germans and many others. But never against the People’s Republic of China.”

  Ze sat bolt upright as usual on his own stool, behind his table. A very long silence developed. This had never happened before. Ze stared at his folded hands, a look of bleak disappointment on his face. Had he, after all these years, lost heart?

  Under the rules of interrogation, Christopher could not speak except to answer a question. To do so was a sign of bad attitude and could lead to a loss of privileges: in Christ
opher’s case, this usually meant being deprived of books for a month or longer. So he waited, quiet and immobile.

  Finally Ze spoke. “You must make a choice today,” he said. “You will not be given another opportunity to confess and reform.”

  Christopher remained as he was.

  “For the last time, then,” Ze said, and paused.

  He looked down on Christopher, kneeling on the floor. Over the years, Ze had learned to read expression in his prisoner’s strange gray eyes. He saw nothing there now except intelligence and calm curiosity—the same things he always saw. He repeated his words, which ought to have struck terror in his prisoner.

  “For the last time,” Ze said, “bearing in mind that your sentence can be carried out at any moment, bearing in mind that you can die today, will you admit that you are guilty of the crime of espionage against the People’s Republic of China?”

  “No,” Christopher said.

  He waited. Ze let several moments pass. The two men looked at each other; Ze realized that he knew Christopher’s face better than any other—so well that it had long ago ceased to look blotched and coarse and un-Chinese.

  Ze said, “Very well. I believe you.”

  He walked around the table and thrust out his hand. It took Christopher several seconds to realize that Ze was offering to shake hands. Christopher stood up and enclosed the soft fingers of the party functionary in his own curled, horny paw. He had not touched another human being in more than ten years.

  — 4 —

  In the morning, at the hour at which the reveille whistle ought to have blown, Christopher heard a strange noise. It was a knock on the door of his cell. The door opened and Cheng came in as usual. He carried a satchel. Christopher recognized it at once: it was the leather overnight bag he had carried aboard Gus’s plane; he hadn’t seen it since he left Saigon. Cheng handed it to him. The leather, once wonderfully supple, was now dry and a bit stiff.

  Cheng picked up Christopher’s padded uniform, which was folded as required on its shelf, then gathered up his bedding, his toilet articles, and all his other belongings.

  “You will wear those clothes,” Cheng said in Chinese, indicating the satchel. “Do you want to defecate?”

  “Yes,” Christopher said.

  Cheng hesitated, then handed back the padded uniform and boots. Christopher put them on and walked as usual to the latrine. When he returned to his cell, he took off the uniform, folded it, and handed it back to Cheng. Cheng went out and the steel door rang behind him. Inside the leather satchel he found, freshly laundered and pressed, the change of clothes he had packed in Saigon for the trip to Hue. These consisted of a cord blazer, a pair of cotton trousers, a faded navy-blue polo shirt, socks, drawers, and shoes. He dressed. The clothes were large for him and they felt thin and insubstantial; when he pulled the nylon socks over his feet, they snagged on the roughened skin of his soles. The leather shoes seemed very heavy after sneakers and the quilted boots he had worn in winter.

  He reached into the bag and brought out two Penguin novels and a copy of the airmail edition of Newsweek over ten years old. In a blue cloth bag, closed with a drawstring, he found his toilet articles: a Schick Injector razor with blades, nail scissors, a toothbrush and comb, tubes of shaving cream and toothpaste with Italian labels. He examined these, turning them over and reading the inscriptions; they looked and felt strange, yet they were familiar, as if they were artifacts he had seen many times in pictures and now actually held in his hands.

  The door of the cell opened and a Chinese Christopher had never before seen came in. This man spoke to Christopher in Mandarin, the first time anyone in China, apart from Cheng, had addressed him in this language.

  “Please follow me,” the man said.

  Christopher, who had been sitting cross-legged in the approved position on the floor, obediently got up and walked to the door of the cell. The corridor was empty; Cheng was nowhere about. Christopher stayed by the door. The Chinese came out with Christopher’s leather satchel in his hand. He spread open its mouth and held it up to the light to show that Christopher’s belongings were inside.

  The Chinese handed Christopher the bag and walked briskly down the corridor. Christopher followed. At the end, the Chinese opened the door and they went outside, walking together across the deserted courtyard. A helicopter stood in an open space. The Chinese led Christopher under the drooping rotors and gestured him inside the cockpit.

  The pilot started the engines and with a deafening stutter the machine rose into the air. Frightened by the noise, birds poured out of the eaves of the monastery, silvery in the morning sunlight like water spilling over a stone. Below him, his ditch, which had seemed so long and deep to him for so many years, grew smaller and thinner and then seemed to close like the lips of a healed cut.

  The helicopter, with the rising sun on the left, crossed the Great Wall, and then the sulfurous cloud of pollution that hangs over Peking came into sight. According to the clock on the instrument panel, the machine had been airborne for an hour and forty minutes. Christopher knew at last approximately where he had spent one-fifth of his life: at a place in Mongolia less than two hundred miles northwest of Peking. The helicopter landed. Christopher’s Chinese companion, again opening doors for him, ushered him into a windowless van. He closed the doors and they were in the dark. The van drove, very fast, across a smooth surface, then stopped with a screech of brakes.

  The doors opened. The Chinese got out and gestured for Christopher to follow him. Outside, Christopher found himself at the base of a stairway. The steps led to the open door of an airplane. The plane was painted dull gray. It carried no markings.

  As Christopher approached the airplane, its engines started with a whine. The Chinese handed Christopher a wrapped package, indicated the door of the plane with an outflung hand, and got back into the van.

  The unmarked plane was parked at the far end of a runway. Apart from the van as it sped away, the airport was deserted; nothing moved. Smoke belched from the chimneys of Peking to join the deck of smog above the city; the smell of burning fuel was very strong.

  Christopher walked up the stairway, ducked his head, and entered the plane. A young Chinese in Western clothes gestured him aboard, indicating without speaking that he should turn to the right and walk through a curtain into the fuselage.

  Christopher drew the curtain aside and looked into the passenger compartment. It was laid out like a sitting room, with easy chairs and tables and a television screen.

  Horace Hubbard, enormously tall, stood in the middle of the cabin, his long face with its bushy eyebrows illuminated by a joyful smile.

  “Paul,” he said.

  “Hello, Horace,” Christopher replied.

  The door of the plane slammed shut and it began to taxi. The cousins sat down, side by side, as the jet made its takeoff run and climbed above the sun-drenched clouds. Christopher looked out the window.

  The attendant brought orange juice. Christopher, who automatically consumed any food that was set before him, drank it off. Then, undoing the knots in the string with great patience, he opened the packet the Chinese had given him at the foot of the stairs to the aircraft. It contained his watch, his passport, the keys to his apartment in Rome and to his car, the money he had had in his pockets, and a letter from Molly. Christopher supposed that she had hidden it somewhere in his leather bag so that he would find it when he had reached his destination, and was alone. He had not known of its existence until now.

  He opened and read it. He had always been able to hear Molly’s voice when he read her handwriting. He heard it now, and smiled at secret jokes that were more than ten years old. She would be thirty-four years old, he realized, still young enough to bear a child.

  Christopher shook the watch, a self-winding Rolex. It began to run again.

  — 5 —

  Christopher had lost what little tendency he had ever had to ask questions. On the plane, he listened politely while Horace Hubbard told him
the news of America: Elliott Hubbard was still alive; David Patchen was now Director of the Outfit. Horace himself had been in China for eighteen months, as chief of the Outfit’s station in Peking. America and China were friends again. Especially, their intelligence services were friends.

  “In a way, I owe my high post to you,” Horace said. “Patchen was determined to get you out. I guess he thought the Chinese would listen more sympathetically to your cousin than to a stranger.”

  After several hours of flight, the plane landed at an American naval base in the Aleutian Islands. The aircraft remained sealed, doors shut and shades drawn over the windows, during the refueling. After the trucks had pulled away, the door opened and the cabin was flooded with arctic air. Horace had gone forward, beyond the curtain, and Christopher heard the murmur of voices as the engines began to whine.

  When Horace returned, crouching slightly so that his head would not brush the overhead, he was followed by David Patchen.

  Patchen wore his usual dark suit. His hair, which was now snow-white, had been feathered by the wind. He moved with even greater difficulty than Christopher remembered, but the scars on his face had faded as his skin had aged and lost pigment.

  Patchen saw Christopher and paused. He seemed uncomfortable, as if he had walked into a house without knocking. Christopher’s good manners came back after their long sleep and he stood up and smiled.

  “My friend,” Patchen said in his cracked voice.

  Christopher smiled at Patchen’s emotion. Coming from him, these two dry words were a passionate declaration of brotherly love. The two men shook hands. The plane began to taxi and Patchen lost his balance. Christopher seized him by the arms to prevent his falling. Then Patchen sat down, reaching across his body to support his bad leg with his good hand, and fastened his seat belt. The engines howled; it was useless to speak. As the plane rolled faster down the runway and then began its steep climb, Patchen cleared his throat repeatedly. The jet leveled off and flew more quietly.