He swallowed his coffee, drinking the hot liquid down as if it were a glass of water.
“You must have been pissed off at me,” he said.
For the first time, he looked straight into Christopher’s eyes. Wolkowicz had always looked at others as if he were a mind reader; in a sense, because he expected so little of human beings, and because they usually behaved as badly as he expected them to, he was.
“Why?” Christopher said. “You weren’t flying the plane.”
“No. Gus was. Were you really in solitary the whole time?”
“I was the only prisoner in a prison. I saw the guards, the interrogators. It wasn’t exactly solitary.”
“But no broads. Was that hard on you? Thinking about it, I thought that must be the worst part for you. You were a guy who loved women. Not just ass, like everybody else—you were a sucker for women, for themselves. Isn’t that right?”
“I suppose it is. I missed Molly.”
“I can understand that,” Wolkowicz said. “Let me tell you something really funny, just to start you off in your new life. I see you’re writing a poem, so you must still collect strange facts about the human heart.”
Christopher smiled, recognizing Wolkowicz’s old sarcastic tone. Wolkowicz was behaving as if there had been no interruption of their friendship, and so it seemed to Christopher, too.
“It’s been twenty years since Ilse went bad on me,” Wolkowicz said.
He paused to look out the window into the garden again, then leaned across the table and pointed a finger at Christopher. “In all that time,” he said, “I’ve never banged another woman.”
“Never?” Christopher said. “Why?”
Wolkowicz waved a hand as he drank coffee. “What difference does it make?” he asked. “But it’s kind of funny—I haven’t been getting any more nookie out here than you got in prison.”
After years of isolation, Christopher’s senses were very keen. Colors seemed brighter, voices louder, tastes stronger. Of all his senses, smell was the most powerful. For a whole decade, he had not come into contact with men who ate meat and drank whisky.
Wolkowicz’s whisky breath, as he laughed, was overpowering, but Christopher smelled perfume on him, too, a rosy, girlish aroma. He wondered where that came from.
— 4 —
David Patchen had a new Doberman, a more playful animal than its predecessor. The dog scouted ahead of him and Christopher as they hiked across the Georgetown campus. Students, hurrying through the twilight, nodded to him as they passed. After twenty years of evening constitutionals, he was a familiar figure. An eccentric professor, generations of students had surmised, walking his dog before supper.
“I hope you don’t mind being left alone,” Patchen said.
“I don’t mind. I’m surprised that the Outfit hasn’t wanted to debrief me.”
“I told you on the plane: if you want to say anything about the last eleven years, you can say it to me or to Horace.” Limping along the path, Patchen coughed. “I hear Wolkowicz dropped in on you. Did he want to debrief you?”
“He asked me what the fuck I was doing in China.”
“What did you tell him?”
“The same thing I told the Chinese, the truth. My pilot got lost.”
“We must talk about that. Meanwhile, you may want to avoid Barney.”
“Avoid him?”
“He’s being hunted by the media. Some television man is working up an exposé. If he digs very far below the surface, your name will come into it.”
“Dig below the surface? A journalist? Barney’s life has been a secret.”
Patchen laughed. “A secret?” he said. “There are no secrets. America these days runs on paranoia. It’s the psychic fuel of the nation. You could say that Barney is the fossil from which the fuel is made. This television fellow is going to dig him up and burn him. Patrick Graham is the reporter’s name: you should know that, in case he finds you.”
Patchen, coughing again, a grating noise in the mellow spring evening, made a gesture that dismissed Wolkowicz and Patrick Graham as subjects for conversation and walked a little faster.
The Doberman twitched at its leash. Its ears went up and its muzzle pointed down the path, toward a patch of darker ground.
“He sees someone,” Patchen said.
He gave the dog a signal. It walked ahead of them, alert and menacing. Patchen stopped talking, but he took no other precautions.
A man stood on the path, facing them. The dog, making no sound, led Patchen and Christopher to within a couple of paces of the waiting figure, then stopped.
The man seized the dog by the head and gave it an affectionate shake, then pounded the animal on its ribs. The Doberman panted happily and leaned against his legs. It was Wolkowicz.
“You’ve got yourself a real killer here,” he said.
He pushed the dog away. Even in the open air, Wolkowicz smelled of whisky.
“You didn’t return my calls, Patchen,” he said.
They moved along the path into the glow of a streetlight. Wolkowicz seized Patchen’s sleeve and pulled him to a stop. Patchen’s glasses glittered. Always pale, his face seemed whiter than usual under the sodium light. He did not answer.
Wolkowicz paid no attention. “I just don’t understand you,” he said. “Why did you can my operation?”
“Because it was illegal.”
“Illegal? What the fuck business do you think the Outfit is in? We exist to do illegal things.”
“Not in this country, not to American citizens.”
“Not to reporters, you mean. You’re afraid of the bastards.”
“No. I’m afraid of you, Barney. Who authorized you to bug Graham’s phone, to mike his office and his bedroom, to follow him around and plant girls on him?”
“Not you, that’s for fucking sure. You know what kind of girls he likes? Long black hair, size six. He likes to slap ’em around. You wanna see feelthy pictures?”
Patchen tried to draw away. Wolkowicz still held a fistful of Patchen’s coat. He turned his wrist, tightening the cloth. The Doberman, silent, gathered itself, waiting for another signal.
“You’re making a big mistake, pal,” Wolkowicz said. “I’m onto that fucking Graham. Give me another week, one week, Patchen, that’s how close I am. After that, you can ship me to New Zealand.”
Patchen breathed steadily through his nose, emitting little clouds of moisture into the cold air.
“Barney,” he said. “Not now.”
“Not now? Then tell me when. On the day I get my gold watch? By that time the whole thing—everything, Patchen—will be down the drain, and you know it.”
Wolkowicz moved a step closer to Patchen.
“Barney,” Christopher said, “the dog.”
Patchen turned his scarred face away from Wolkowicz’s breath. He handed the leash to Christopher.
“Walk him back to the house, Paul, will you?” he said.
Christopher nodded and started back the way they had come. Wolkowicz’s loud voice followed him.
“I’ve got that bastard wired,” Wolkowicz was saying to Patchen. “We’re right on top of him, Patchen. We’re going to get Graham and some fucking Russian or some fucking Cuban on tape. We’re going to have pictures. And you want to tear out the wires, God damn it! Why?”
The dog was reluctant to leave. Christopher twitched at the leash and spoke to him, but he wasn’t trained to respond to ordinary commands. Patchen was speaking now. Christopher could not make out the words, only the flat, calm tone.
In the ghastly sodium light, Wolkowicz was gesticulating. His deeper, louder voice was easy to hear.
“Horseshit, Patchen,” he bellowed. “That’s horseshit. Who the fuck repealed the law of self-preservation?”
Patchen murmured and looked up the path toward Christopher.
“You’re worried about Christopher?” Wolkowicz shouted. “He’s been locked up in China for over ten years and he’s got more sense than you. Le
t him hear the story. Let him judge. Come on, God damn it. We’ll tell him.”
He seized Patchen by the lapels, using both hands this time, and jerked. Patchen’s long, thin body leaped into the air, black cloth and pallid face.
The Doberman attacked. Christopher had been holding the leash in his left hand. The force of the dog’s charge pulled him off balance and dragged him, staggering, ten feet down the path. Regaining his balance, he seized the leash, a length of steel chain with a leather loop at the end, and set his feet. The dog, gagging and snarling, leaped against its choke collar. The chain sawed at Christopher’s tough palms and waves of shock ran up his arms.
Patchen stepped away from Wolkowicz and gave a command. The Doberman subsided but continued to watch Wolkowicz, its ruff raised. The three men stood quiet, listening to the wheezing of the dog as it tried to breathe through its bruised windpipe.
Wolkowicz tightened his lips and shook his head. He lifted a hand. The dog growled.
“Relax,” Wolkowicz said to the animal, “I’m not going to touch the crazy bastard.”
Wolkowicz covered the ground between the Doberman and himself in two rapid strides. He pushed the dog aside with his knee and seized Christopher’s shoulders. It did not occur to him that the dog, which seconds before had tried to kill him, might misunderstand his gesture and attack again. He had never believed in caution.
Wolkowicz pointed a thumb at Patchen. “Keep an eye on your roomie,” he said. “He doesn’t know which side he’s on.”
Breathing hard, he glowered at the Doberman.
“Graham’s protected by the Constitution,” he said. “He’s trying to kill us, but we haven’t got the right to bug his phone or follow him. We’ve lost the right of self-defense. That’s what you’ve come back to, kid. Patchen will fill you in. He’s our guru, where civil liberties are concerned.”
He said nothing more to Patchen, but strode away into the darkness.
— 5 —
For his homecoming supper, Christopher went to the Websters’. His friends had changed very little. They were a little fatter and a little ignore drunken. Christopher, standing in the Websters’ living room, drank Perrier.
“It costs a dollar a bottle,” Sybille said. “Who but the French would ship it across an ocean, who but us would buy it? Do they have mineral water in China?”
“Not Perrier, as far as I know,” Christopher replied.
Sybille saw Wolkowicz approaching and glided across the room to sit beside David Patchen on a sofa. Telling Patchen a story, Sybille was all animation. Patchen was as impassive as a mannequin.
Wolkowicz smiled, his old sardonic grin that narrowed his slanted eyes and lit up his shrewd muzhik face.
“Patchen is in a class by himself,” he said. “Look at the son of a bitch in his black suit, he’s a fucking undertaker. That’s appropriate. Hear that hammering outside? They’re building a coffin for the Outfit.”
Christopher was amused; Wolkowicz had always amused him. His disgust, his impatience, his profanity were like the single-minded vitality of a child, except that Wolkowicz never wore himself out and went to sleep.
“Who’s building the coffin?” Christopher asked.
“You’ll meet ’em, thanks to Patchen.”
At the drinks table, Wolkowicz mixed himself a Rob Roy in a water tumbler.
“That’s a nice house you’re living in,” he said. “Are you okay? Got everything you need?”
“Yes, everything’s fine.”
“Glad to hear it. Let me ask you something. Why did the Chinks let you out?”
“I don’t know.”
“Didn’t they tell you?”
“No. They just did it.”
“Patchen must have made a deal with them.”
“He says he didn’t.”
“That means he did,” Wolkowicz said. “Patchen and the Chinks are asshole buddies these days. He thinks they love him because they hate the Russians. I tell him a Communist is a fucking Communist—Russian, Chinese, Fool Factory, they’re all the same. He doesn’t want to hear that.”
Wolkowicz shook his head, as if to clear it, and studied Christopher. “You haven’t missed a hell of a lot, being away,” he said. “You’ll see. I’m too drunk to talk to you tonight. Have you got a phone?”
“No. It’s disconnected.”
“I’ll be around,” Wolkowicz said. “We’ll talk over old times. Does Patchen let you talk about China?”
“There’s not much to tell, Barney.”
“I want to hear it anyway. What did you do to pass the time?”
“Remembered you.”
“Remembered me?”
“You and all the others.”
“For ten years? It must have been pretty goddamned boring.”
“No. It was very interesting.”
Wolkowicz gave a contemptuous laugh. “There were a few interesting moments,” he said. “A lot of it I never could figure out. But, shit, you’re back from the dead, kid. You must know everything.”
“No,” Christopher said, “not everything. Not yet.”
Something moved in Wolkowicz’s eyes. Sybille called them to the table.
“Have you met up with Stephanie?” Sybille asked.
“Not yet.”
“I hope you will. We’re so proud of her. She’s a psychotherapist. She treats disappointed radicals; Stephanie’s practice is ideologically correct, nothing but members of the New Left. Our cultural revolution turned out badly, too, and all the hooligans are terribly sad. They have all these dunce caps and nobody wants to wear them anymore. Stephanie was living in your house on O Street, you know. Maybe she forgot something and will have to come back for it. No, not Stephanie. She has no middle-class wiles. But she does want to see you; you were always her favorite uncle when she was little.”
Sybille was the only woman at the table. She sat next to Christopher and held his hand.
“I mustn’t talk about my child,” she said. “It isn’t easy to find an interesting subject, though. Nothing has changed in your absence, nothing. Talking to David Patchen is the same delightful experience it always was. It’s like bouncing a tennis ball off the wall of the barn—you throw an idea at him, you hear the thud, you catch it, you throw it back, aiming for a slightly different spot. It’s absolutely hypnotic. I know! Stephanie can invite you to go running with her.”
“Running? Why running?”
“Don’t ask. Only a bourgeois fool doesn’t know instinctively the deep spiritual meaning of running. Stephanie’s very reverent about her running. It’s tremendously ritualistic. You put on a sweat suit and tennis shoes with funny soles that cost a hundred dollars and are all wound around with dingy adhesive tape, and you run through the public streets, dripping with sweat. It gives you shin splints and snapped Achilles tendons and wobbly knees but in compensation you build up your state of grace and these marvelous muscles. Stephanie’s whole body is like a drumskin. I know I shouldn’t talk about my daughter in this way, but I really don’t think she’ll ever get married unless I list her good points to the bachelors she meets.”
Christopher put back his head and laughed. He had not made this sound in years. His own voice escaping from his throat sounded delicious to him. Every face at the table turned toward him. They all smiled; even Patchen smiled. It seemed that they were not able to stop smiling.
Sybille lifted Christopher’s hand to her lips and kissed it. “Oh, cookie,” she said, “we’ve missed you so.”
It was after midnight when they rose from the table. The others lingered for a moment, chatting. Wolkowicz had never believed in ceremonious good-byes; at the end of an evening, he simply got up and left. Now, crumpling his napkin and draining his wineglass, he nodded brusquely to the Websters and strode out of the dining room. He beckoned Christopher to follow him.
In the hall, he seized Christopher’s arm. With all his old suspiciousness, he kept watch on the others over Christopher’s shoulder while he spoke, and finally drew
him outside onto the steps.
“You don’t know everything yet?” he said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just that I’m still thinking,” Christopher replied.
“Some guys never learn,” Wolkowicz said. “We’d better get together. Soon.”
He gave Christopher’s arm a final squeeze and hurried along the brick sidewalk—trotting almost—on his round short legs.
Car doors slammed, five or six of them one after the other. Then Christopher heard the sound of running feet scuffling on the pavement. Wolkowicz stopped where he was, beside a large tree. A blinding white light flooded his squat figure. He took a step or two backward, then turned as if to run. A second brilliant light came on. Wolkowicz leaped behind the tree. His P-38 fell out of its holster and clattered on the sidewalk. He went down on all fours to recover it. The men holding the lights began to stalk Wolkowicz, moving around the tree as he tried to escape them, trapping him in the glare.
Wolkowicz uttered a howl of rage and rushed one of the lights. He delivered a kick. The light fell to the ground with a clatter but kept on burning. Arms pumping, Wolkowicz ran back toward the Websters’ door, pursued by the other light, his P-38 in his right hand. Someone was shouting at him, calling him by name.
Pursued by the panting television crew, Wolkowicz stumbled up the steps and turned, at bay.
Christopher stayed where he was, squinting into the blue-white strobe. Patrick Graham ran his hands over his thick hair and leaped onto the step beside Wolkowicz.
“Are you going to use that gun on me, Barney Wolkowicz?” he asked.
Wolkowicz stared at the P-38 in his hand, then shoved it into its holster. He turned his back to the camera. Wolkowicz’s shirttail was out of his trousers. This made him look fat and defeated, but there was no expression at all on his face as he lunged up the steps.
Patrick Graham, excited and alert, thrust a microphone into Wolkowicz’s face. “Why are you running away?” he said. “Don’t you want to answer our questions?”
Graham spoke to the camera. “We want to ask Barney Wolkowicz, the most decorated secret agent in the history of the Outfit, why he’s been following me, why he’s been tapping my phones, what he’s afraid of. Can you shed any light on this for us, Barney Wolkowicz?”
The Last Supper Page 33
