Wolkowicz, with a sudden twitch of his stout body, threw a hip into Graham. In a windmill of arms and legs, the newsman fell down the steps. Sprawled on the sidewalk, he rocked back and forth, gripping a bleeding knee with one hand and his microphone with the other.
Wolkowicz put a sweaty palm on Christopher’s chest and pushed him into the hall. The camera and the lights followed them over the threshold.
Wolkowicz slammed the door. Seizing Christopher’s arm, he hurried him down the hall. Christopher resisted.
“Come on, God damn it!” Wolkowicz said. “They saw you.”
Christopher shook his head. Wolkowicz gave him a long scowling look. He plunged out the back door and disappeared into the darkness.
“Patchen?” Christopher said.
“He left long ago,” Webster replied.
The doorbell rang insistently. Webster led Christopher up a back stairway and into a bedroom. They found Sybille there, standing in the dark, looking out the window.
Below them, on the front walk, Patrick Graham was on his feet again, gripping his microphone. A crowd of the Websters’ neighbors had gathered and they stood in a circle with drinks in their hands, watching the filming.
Graham spoke in a strong voice that seemed to bite on words as if to crack them open and reveal the lies they concealed. Christopher could not make out what he was saying. The crowd applauded. As the camera lights went out, Graham lifted his microphone above his head in a gesture of triumph.
“Do you think they got pictures of you?” Webster asked Christopher.
“It’s possible. Won’t they chase Barney home?”
“Follow Barney? Besides, he doesn’t have a home. He doesn’t believe in it.”
“He still disappears at night?”
“Vanishes. It drives Security crazy. If the Russians ever kidnap him, we won’t know until morning.”
“The Scarlet Pimpernel,” said Sybille. “Where do you think Wolkowicz sleeps, in the bus station? In parked cars? What a figure of romance he is.”
— 6 —
Tom Webster walked home with Christopher. It was now after midnight and most of the houses in this neighborhood were dark. The traffic had ceased. Christopher was astonished by the peacefulness of America. In prison, he had remembered only the noise of the world of free men. He stopped for a moment and listened as the wind rustled the leaves of the young trees that grew along the curb.
When they reached Christopher’s house, Webster lingered.
“Want to come in?” Christopher asked.
“Yes, if that’s all right.”
Inside, Webster took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes again, a new mannerism.
“There’s something I’d like to get over with,” he said.
Christopher knew what this must be. “All right,” he said.
Christopher invited Webster to sit down, but Webster, whose eyes were fixed on the carpet, did not seem to see his gesture.
“Did Patchen tell you about Molly?” Webster asked.
Christopher nodded.
“Did he give you any details?”
“He said that you saw it happen.”
“That’s why I’m here,” Webster said. “I want to explain.”
“There’s no need to explain.”
Webster shook his head impatiently and put his glasses back on. “Don’t tell me that,” he said. “It was my fault. I owe you an explanation.”
Webster’s round face was stretched tight by the strength of his feelings. He sat down on a sofa and ran his hand over the slipcover. He remained silent for several moments, chewing his lip.
“The fact is,” he said at last, “I don’t really have an explanation. All I have is details. I don’t know why it happened. She got past us, that’s all.”
Webster looked upward at Christopher, who was still standing. Christopher sat down opposite on a matching sofa.
“Why don’t you just tell me the details?” he said.
“Okay. Go back to the men’s room at Orly on the night you left Paris. You’re washing your hands. We’re talking. A Frenchman comes in. You walk out. Are you with me so far?”
“Yes. I remember all that.”
“I follow the Frenchman outside, just to make sure he isn’t following you, right? He goes straight to the taxi stand. It’s two-thirty in the morning. There are no taxis. Just then, a taxi pulls up across the street. The Frenchman’s eyes light up. A girl is getting out of the taxi. It’s Molly.”
Webster stroked the slipcover. “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” he said. “Did you know she was coming to the airport?”
“No. She was asleep when I left the safe house.”
“I was going to grab her, stuff her into the car, and send her home. She was walking across the driveway. She saw me and gave me a big smile.”
Webster caught himself stroking the slipcover and stopped doing it.
“She took maybe six steps,” he said. “And then this car, a green Peugeot, hit her. It was a professional job. It was over in less than a second, Paul. She couldn’t have felt anything.”
Webster watched Christopher’s face for a long moment. “My fault,” he said at last, “all my fault.”
Christopher said, “What happened to the Frenchman?”
Webster frowned. He didn’t understand why Christopher was asking this question. What he had feared, all these years, was that he would ask about Molly’s injuries. Webster knew he hadn’t the courage to describe the way she had looked in death.
“The Frenchman,” Christopher said, “didn’t stay after the car hit Molly?”
Webster lifted his eyes. “No,” he said. “He must have grabbed a taxi and got out of there. He was signaling for a taxi when Molly was hit.”
“Signaling? How was he signaling?”
“What do you mean, how?”
Webster snapped his right hand upward.
“Like that,” he said. “He had a newspaper in his hand—a rolled-up copy of France-Soir.”
Five
— 1 —
“I’m sure you don’t remember me,” Stephanie Webster said.
“Of course I do,” Christopher replied. “You haven’t changed so very much.”
Firmly, Stephanie shook Christopher’s hand. She was now a woman of twenty-five, but she had the same dark hair, the same wary face and watchful eyes that she had had as a child. She wore a leather headband across her wide forehead. It was very becoming. She had her mother’s straight Grecian nose, but she had not grown up to be a belle like Sybille. This seemed to be the result of an act of the will. There was a determined plainness about Stephanie. She avoided unnecessary smiles. She wore no paint or jewelry; her hair fell down her back from a straight white center part.
“The amazing thing is,” Stephanie said, “you haven’t changed very much, either.”
Christopher led her into his sitting room. In the soft spring evening, they could hear the sough of rush-hour traffic on Wisconsin Avenue. The sound came in through the open windows on a warm breeze that billowed the curtains.
A dozen pages of Christopher’s manuscript blew off the desk and fluttered down the long, narrow room. Stephanie chased them and gathered them up. For a moment, she stood where she was, reading. Then, catching herself, she brought the pages to Christopher.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m a compulsive reader. I walk down the street reading the label inside my umbrella. Those are beautiful lines.”
She read from his poem:
“It was the beloved of summer, that island,
with a little pool of winter at its heart. . . .”
Christopher put the sheets of his poem back on the desk, under a paperweight. When he turned around, he saw that Stephanie was biting her lip in embarrassment. Instantly, she turned the mannerism—he remembered it, too, from her childhood—into a smile.
“Well,” she said. “I stopped by to see if you were able to find everything. I’m sorry just to barge in like this, but you don’t seem to
have a telephone yet. I should have called and had it connected. Would you like me to do that tomorrow?”
“Thank you, no. I don’t think I’ll need a telephone.”
“No phone? What luxury. Is there anything you do need? The house is all right?”
“It’s wonderful. Thank you for looking after it so well.”
“Living with Horace’s paintings gave me fits of anxiety. I worried about them all day at the office. What if I came home and they were gone?”
Stephanie looked around the room to reassure herself that the pictures were in their places. They hung in shadow. Christopher had not yet learned to remember that he could turn on the electric light whenever he wanted it.
Stephanie realized that Christopher was studying her. When she turned her head, intercepting his stare, his glance did not waver. His eyes were as calm as a child’s. He seemed completely unselfconscious. The light was behind him as he stood by the tall windows that looked out onto O Street. He had a leathery look, as if he had been out in the weather for years. His neck and his bare arms were muscular and corded and his rough scarred hands hung inertly at his sides, as though he had forgotten how to gesture with them. His clothes, khaki pants and an old polo shirt, were faded and slightly large for him.
Suddenly Stephanie felt that she was disturbing Christopher, as one might disturb the atmosphere around a ghost.
“Well,” she said, “I’ll be going. If you need anything . . .”
Christopher lifted his hands. Stephanie saw the thick pad of yellow calluses, two rows of them on each palm. She was greatly moved; his roughened hands with their twisted fingers somehow made his suffering real to her. There was nothing more real to Stephanie than physical labor, hard labor that changed the very shape of the body, because in all her life she had never known, never been so close to, someone who had worked in this way. She had only imagined it. Christopher saw the emotion in her eyes.
“Do you have to go?” he said. “Stay. Have something to drink. I’m sorry; I was surprised to see a visitor. My manners haven’t really come back to me yet. What would you like?”
“Apple juice, unless the gallon I left in your refrigerator is all gone.”
When Christopher returned with two glasses on a tray, he found that Stephanie had switched on the track lights that illuminated the pictures.
Christopher had hung Zaentz’s drawing of Lori on the wall near his desk.
She went closer. “My God, that’s wonderful,” she said. “Do you know who the model was?”
“My mother. She was about nineteen when the original drawing was made. This is a copy.”
“That explains why Horace didn’t hang it. He was very careful of your privacy. They all were.”
Stephanie looked sidelong at Christopher. He drank his apple juice and for the first time smiled at her.
“Do you like it here?” she asked.
“Oh, yes. It’s a very good place to be for now.”
“For now? You’re not going to stay here?”
“I don’t know if that will be possible.”
“You mean Patrick Graham? He has a very short attention span.”
“You know him?”
Stephanie hesitated. “Yes. He came here looking for you, just before you moved in. I should have warned you. He’s not a danger to anyone, just an embarrassment.”
“Do you know him well?”
“As well as you can know a man who has Patrick’s problems. One summer after college, we were revolutionaries together.”
In a calm voice, keeping nothing back, she told Christopher about the cell in the East Village.
“You didn’t enjoy the experiment?” Christopher asked.
“Not much. It was so stupid, so false, renting rooms in the slums and playing Third World.”
“What about Graham?”
“Oh, Patrick. Those were the happiest days of his life. All that meaningless sex, all that synthetic fear of Big Brother. Just the environment for a paranoid with a narcissistic personality disorder.”
“Are those his problems?”
“Problems? They’re the reasons for his success. He’s a merchant of paranoia. His audience loves it.”
“You sound like Patchen.”
“Do I? Good God.”
Stephanie changed the subject.
“Did you learn Chinese?” she asked.
“A little, enough to understand what was being said.”
“Were you able to work?”
“Every day, from breakfast to supper.”
“That’s wonderful. And they let you bring it out with you?”
“Bring it out?”
Stephanie pointed to the pages of his poem on the desk. Christopher smiled for the second time.
“Writing poetry wasn’t the sort of work I did in China,” he said, “I dug up the earth with a pick and shovel.”
Stephanie closed her eyes in embarrassment. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s difficult, making small talk with a man who’s been in prison since I was fourteen years old.”
“That’s all right. The digging was very satisfying work. I miss the exercise now.”
“Maybe you’d like to run with me, then. It’s not honest labor, exactly, but it’s what Americans have as a substitute. I could stop by for you in the morning. Six-thirty. I do two miles.”
In spite of her effort to control it, emotion flickered in her face again. Christopher realized that she felt sorry for him. He did not want to embarrass her again by refusing. Besides, time hung heavy on his hands in the morning. He still rose at sunup, just as he had done in China, but now he had nothing useful to do, no reason to go outside.
“Why not?” he said.
Stephanie ran with stiff concentration, striding over the brick sidewalks of Georgetown with her head thrown back and her dark ponytail bouncing. The back of her shirt was soaked with sweat and her legs shone with perspiration. She was not a natural athlete, but it was clear that she had studied the technique of running as she might have studied a foreign language. She earnestly applied the grammar and vocabulary of the sport, wearing the proper equipment, doing stretching exercises before she set out, placing her feet in just the right way, carrying her head and arms correctly, breathing deeply. But she didn’t have the accent quite right. It was a charming weakness. She reminded Christopher of the earnest hikers in the forests of Rügen. She reminded him constantly of herself as a child. There was something endearing about her solemnity.
Christopher moved along easily behind her. He was in excellent condition, though his muscles were heavy and tense, better suited to digging than to loping. Stephanie wore a pedometer on her belt and as they approached O Street she consulted it, holding up two fingers to signify that they had covered the scheduled two miles. She had expected Christopher to be exhausted and stiff after this long a run, but he wasn’t breathing hard.
“You’re in really good shape,” she said, when they reached the door of his house. This realization pleased her, and her serious face relaxed for an instant, though still she did not smile.
“It was enjoyable,” Christopher said.
“Do you want to come with me again tomorrow? You’ve got a lot invested in the gear, after all.”
The evening before, Stephanie had driven Christopher to a shop and he had bought shorts, a sweat shirt and socks, and a pair of running shoes. Stephanie and the clerk had fussed over the shoes, which were every bit as expensive as Sybille had said they were.
“Sure,” Christopher said. “It’s nice to be outside at this time of day.”
“Good. The only thing is, you’ll have to let me shower and dress here afterward. I live over on Connecticut now and I won’t be able to run with you, then fight the traffic to my place, shower and dress, and get to work on time.”
“All right. Will you be late for work today?”
“Not if I go upstairs now and take a shower. My things are in the car.”
She opened the trunk of her Volkswagen and go
t her clothes.
When she came downstairs, dressed for the office in her jeans and blazer, she found Christopher already at his desk, writing with a fountain pen. He wrote without hesitation, never revising, effortlessly putting one word after another, black ink on heavy white paper.
Stephanie, making no effort to hide what she was doing, read the lines over his shoulder. She shook her head as if she could not quite comprehend the beauty of what she had read.
“Don’t get up,” she said. “Write.”
A luminous, womanly smile spread over her face, which was glowing from her exercise, and the child Christopher kept seeing in her disappeared.
— 2 —
The friendship between Stephanie and Christopher developed very swiftly. They ran together every morning. Soon she began stopping by in the evening and they ate together, simple plain food that she prepared. Stephanie put limits on the relationship. She would not leave clothes at the house, or even her bottle of shampoo. Except for her work, they were almost constantly together. They exchanged books and talked about them. They went to films. Stephanie searched the newspapers for quiet events: chamber music in the National Gallery, exhibitions of new pictures.
Of all the people he had seen since returning home, only Stephanie asked Christopher about his life in China. She was intensely interested in him. She watched him eat, she watched his face as he read, she listened with close attention to everything he said. In her soft, serious voice, she asked any question that came into her head. In her dogged honesty, she felt that she had to explain this.
“You’re the only person I’ve ever known personally who has suffered,” she told him.
“That can’t be true.”
“Can’t it? You should spend a day with my patients. They think they’re Third World persons, like starving Africans and tortured Iranians, because they can’t achieve orgasm. Have you thought about—really thought about—the implications of living in a society in which a million people will pay fifteen dollars for a diet book?”
The Last Supper Page 34
