At the end of a month, she knew all the surface details of his life in China. Nothing shocked her. There was no question she was not willing to ask. She was, of course, a psychotherapist, but her way of looking at the world went beyond professional training. She hated hypocrisy. She would no more soften a question or use a weak word when a strong one would do than she would wear perfume or a silk dress. She was determined to see things as they were, to live life as it was.
One summer night, they were sitting in the garden, beside a Roman fountain that some dead Hubbard uncle, an amateur archaeologist, had excavated in Cappadocia. It was dark. Stephanie launched a new line of questioning.
“In China,” she said, “what did you do for sex?”
“Very little,” Christopher replied. Her bluntness amused him. She made him think of Rosalind Wilmot, of Molly. He had nearly forgotten how relentless young women could be when their interest was aroused.
“But what exactly?” she persisted. “Did you use other men?”
“There were no other men. I had myself, but that only lasted for the first few years.”
“Why?”
“I could no longer remember what a woman’s body looked and felt like.”
“You needed to visualize a woman’s body in order to have an orgasm?”
“Yes.”
For some reason this nonplussed Stephanie. She rose from her chair and went inside. Through the window, Christopher saw her moving about in the lighted kitchen, unloading the dishwasher and putting the plates away. He expected her to come back outside to say good night—that was her usual routine—but she switched off the kitchen light and remained in the house.
When he went inside, Christopher found her in the sitting room, reading his poem. Absorbed in her reading, she was startled when he came into the room. But she didn’t stop.
“I know I should have asked,” she said. “It was lying on the desk and my eye fell on it. I don’t think I can stop now.”
The poem had interested her from the first day. She knew that it was a record of everything that Christopher had remembered in prison. He had never invited her to read it, and it was the only thing in his life that made her shy.
“I read your other poems,” she said now. “You gave me a copy in Paris. I used to read them when you were first in China. It helped me to visualize you. They’re so full of emotion and you’re so . . .”
“Go ahead.”
“Empty, Paul. As if all the feelings have run out of you through a wound. You seemed so alive to me in Paris, when you used to come to the house with those beautiful women. Molly especially.”
When she spoke of their earlier friendship in Paris, she never said, “When I was a child.” She did not seem to want Christopher to remember that he had seen her as a child.
“Are the women from Paris in this poem?”
“Everything’s in it,” Christopher said. “You can read all of it if you like.”
“What I’ve already read is so plain and true,” she said. “You really have forgotten how to lie, haven’t you?”
Christopher didn’t know what to say to that.
Stephanie sat down at the desk. “It’s eleven o’clock already,” she said. “Go to bed. I’ll sit here and let myself out when I’m finished.”
Christopher went upstairs. In his bedroom, he took off his clothes and folded them neatly, as Cheng had taught him. Then he lay down and went immediately to sleep.
Even before he woke, Christopher knew that Stephanie was with him. When he opened his eyes he found himself looking into hers. The whites glistened against the tawny skin of her face. He started to speak. Stephanie laid a finger on his lips.
“Don’t,” she said. “Let me.”
She was expert, studied, earnest, as in her running. Finally, Christopher reached for her. When his rough coolie hands touched her own smooth skin, she shuddered and murmured.
Christopher closed his eyes and, as Molly had promised him all those years ago in the snow on the Jura, he believed for an instant that it was her joyful young body that he held in his arms. For the first time in years, his mind opened completely to let her in. While the lovemaking lasted, he saw Molly as she had been and remembered how it had felt to love her with all his heart.
When Stephanie looked at him again, Christopher’s face was wet with tears. He spoke. Stephanie didn’t hear him.
“What did you say?”
As on the airplane, he spoke without thinking.
“Love,” he said.
Stephanie bit her lip, then smiled with happiness. Christopher, who had not altogether forgotten how to lie, smiled back and kissed her with the utmost gentleness.
Six
— 1 —
Patrick Graham continued to hound Wolkowicz. On his Sunday night show, Graham ran dramatic snippets from the encounter on the Websters’ front steps. In a slow-motion montage, viewers saw Wolkowicz’s snarling face, his P-38 gripped in his hand, his attack on Graham, and Graham’s fall to the sidewalk.
“This man is the greatest secret agent in American history,” Graham told the camera. “Barney Wolkowicz, the Red-slayer. What are the secrets of his success, the secrets of his life? They are the Outfit’s most closely guarded secrets, and we hope to reveal some of them on an upcoming broadcast.”
“I’m sending Wolkowicz to Berlin,” Patchen said. “He’ll have to fly over on an air force transport. He can’t carry his P-38 on commercial flights anymore.”
Patchen and Christopher sat in the garden by the plashing fountain, the Doberman at Patchen’s feet.
“Sometimes it seems to me that I’ve spent half my life getting Barney out of the country,” Patchen said. “This won’t solve the problem, of course. Barney will be on television in the end. Graham will scour the globe for him.”
“Then why send Wolkowicz away? What’s the point?”
“I thought perhaps getting Barney out of Washington would have an effect on Graham’s . . . enthusiasm.”
“His enthusiasm?”
“His fixation, then. You saw Wolkowicz, waving his gun for the camera. That’s what Graham is after. He thinks that the Outfit is a collection of storm troopers. Barney’s such a drunk, such a thug. Everything about him confirms the delusions that Patrick Graham lives by.”
On an evening in June, with rain in the air, Patchen wore a light woolen cardigan.
“It’s all very strange,” he said. “The media seem to operate on some sort of insect intelligence. They all get the same delusion at the same time. Then they swarm out of the hive and sting something to death. I hope it’s not going to be you this time.”
“Why should it be me?”
Patchen coughed. “You may well ask. Wolkowicz thinks the answer to that is simple: it’s a Communist conspiracy. Graham is a Soviet agent. Another Soviet agent inside the Outfit is feeding him scandal.”
“You don’t think that’s the case?”
“It’s a very simple answer to the problem. Simplicity is Barney’s specialty, of course. In Graham’s case, I wish it were that simple. If he were an agent, it would be less disturbing than the truth about him and his colleagues. These people are tetched in the head.”
Patchen studied the stone of the fountain, worn by the waters of centuries. His one eye, when he turned back to Christopher, was unfocused. Christopher realized that he hadn’t really seen the fountain; Patchen had never taken much notice of beauty.
“I wish Graham hadn’t seen you and Wolkowicz together. I feared that, you’ll remember. I’d hoped you could live in peace, but that’s hard to manage nowadays.”
Patchen paused. “Barney should retire,” he said. “God knows what harm he’ll do in Berlin.”
— 2 —
Patrick Graham, who loved conspiracy, enjoyed the tradecraft that his source insisted upon. He would receive a phone call and a whispery voice that sounded like a robot from a science fiction show on black-and-white TV would give him a time and a place. He researched the voice and co
ncluded that his source was speaking through an electronic device called a voice-changer, to baffle attempts to identify him. It was a wonderful touch of cheap melodrama, and Graham had recorded the calls, for use on the air.
Graham, with his famous face, could do nothing in secret; he was recognized wherever he went. It was intelligent, then, to meet in a busy place.
He never met the source himself. The material—amazing material, marked with the red Secret stamp of the Outfit on every page—was given to him by a young girl. She had long hair, so black that it shimmered with blue lights. After passing Graham the material, she vanished. Because she was so elusive, and because Graham was an incurable romantic, he called her Rima, after the bird girl in W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions, the favorite novel of his adolescence.
Today Graham, still in his running clothes, strolled through the Georgetown Safeway. People who came to the market early in the morning were too busy comparing produce and prices to pay attention even to a famous stranger.
He looked for the girl and at first he could not find her in the crowd. He was late. Usually she wouldn’t wait if he didn’t come on time. Then he saw her. She was standing beyond the checkout with her back turned, her shawl of blue-black hair hanging down her back.
In her hand, she carried a string bag filled with oranges. She waved to him as if they were college sweethearts—she was amazingly good at all the roles—and took his arm. As they strolled away from the market, she reached into her bag and handed him an orange. Graham had learned that it was useless to ask her questions. When he tried, she looked at him as if she didn’t understand English. He had developed a fancy for her. Wolkowicz’s information was correct—Graham did have a weakness for small, slim, black-haired girls. On a whim, he kissed her, a hard kiss on the mouth. She tasted of peppermint. He had expected something more exotic.
“Good cover, right?” he said, grinning down into her face.
There was disgust in her eyes, but only Graham could see it. For the benefit of any surveillance, she smiled and walked away across the parking lot, running a little and looking at her watch, as if this sweet, hurried rendezvous had made her late for a class. She made you imagine that she had a stern father who would not approve of this lover, who so obviously came from another world.
In his car, Graham examined the orange. A neat circle of skin had been cut around the navel. Graham pried it out with the manicured nail of his index finger. A tube slid out of the orange. Inside the tube, as usual, he found a strip of film, photographs of Outfit documents.
Graham ran the film through a battery-powered viewer. When he realized what he had, he put his car in gear and drove toward Georgetown.
— 3 —
As she ran, leading the way down a quiet street, Stephanie saw something. Her pace, which had been so strong, became tentative. She slowed down and looked over her shoulder at Christopher.
“Shit,” she said.
Patrick Graham, dressed in running clothes, waited for them a few yards away, in the dappled light beneath a maple tree.
As they approached, Graham smiled warmly, a flash of white in a tanned face. Stephanie ran on. Christopher stopped.
Graham spread his arms as if he were inviting a body search. “No camera,” he said, “no recorders. I didn’t come to your house, Paul. You’ve earned a little privacy.”
Graham’s voice was the same in life as it was on television. He spoke slowly and clearly, enunciating every syllable, as if he were addressing a slow-witted child.
“I want to talk to you,” he said. “Informally. Just for a moment.”
Christopher waited. Graham examined him, a quick professional reading that missed nothing. Graham had a smooth, handsome face. But an expression of suspicion, mixed with hostility, overlay his healthy good looks like a membrane.
“You’re a fascinating character,” Graham said. “All that talent, all that misfortune. I’ve read your poetry; I used to admire your journalism when I was at Yale.”
Christopher didn’t answer. Graham smiled; his teeth were capped. He was as well tended as a millionaire’s young wife: hair, skin, teeth, nails—everything about him betrayed signs of professional attention. Christopher had never seen a male who took such care of his appearance.
“Frankly,” Graham said, his voice even more controlled, “I was a little surprised to see you at the Websters’ the other evening, especially in Barney Wolkowicz’s company.”
Far down the block, Stephanie had stopped. She was running in place, to keep her muscles loose. She looked back anxiously at Christopher and Graham.
“I understand now that you and Wolkowicz are old friends. That was news to me,” Graham said. “I knew about Tom Webster’s background, I knew that you and Dave Patchen were roommates at Harvard. I know now that you’ve been seeing these people—walking across the Georgetown campus with Dave. But I didn’t know about Barney.”
Christopher had never heard anyone call Patchen “Dave.” Graham seemed to use nicknames as talismans, as if they gave him some intimate connection with the people he was talking about.
“The thing is, Paul,” he said, “I want to be fair. I’m working on a major piece on your old Outfit. Barney is the figure I’m focusing on. I never dreamed you’d come into it. But now you have. There are so many connections. I think you’ve earned peace and quiet; no reporter in this town would have bothered you after all you’ve been through. But now you’ve stumbled into my story. I can’t ignore that. But I’m not out to embarrass you in any way. Obviously, you’re a victim, capital V.”
Stephanie was coming back, running very slowly. Her dark eyes under her white sweatband glittered with emotion.
“After all you’ve been through, nobody wants to dump on you,” Graham said. “What I want to suggest, Paul, is that you come over to the studio and talk to me in front of the cameras.”
“Why would I want to do that?” Christopher asked.
“In the interests of truth. I’d like to talk about Wolkowicz a little. You can talk about anything you want to get off your chest—China, your feelings about what’s happened to you.”
Graham examined Christopher’s face. “It’s disconcerting,” he said, “talking to someone who doesn’t bother to respond. You do understand the options here?”
“Options?” .
“This is a story that could run wild. Look at it from the viewer’s standpoint. You’re in a Chinese prison, convicted of espionage, for more than ten years. You come back in secret, you’re seen with nobody but Outfit people. You refuse to be interviewed. It’s hard to understand.”
Stephanie arrived, sweat shining on her face. She had an early suntan. Under the tan, her cheeks were flushed, two angry spots of red. Graham ignored her, as if she were a stranger.
“They’ve sent Barney to Berlin, you know,” he said. “You can tell Patchen it won’t work. I’m going after him.”
“I’ll be late to work if we don’t get moving,” Stephanie said to Christopher.
She didn’t look at Graham. She turned and broke into a run. Christopher followed her. Stephanie moved slowly until, hearing Christopher’s footfall, she looked over her shoulder and saw him. Then she began to pick up the pace.
Graham called to Christopher in his powerful trained voice.
“Paul,” he shouted. “Why? What do you owe those creeps?”
— 4 —
As the fall television season began, “The Patrick Graham Show” devoted a half-hour segment to the death of Hubbard Christopher, which had taken place nearly thirty years before.
In film shot in Berlin, Graham reenacted the murder, returning on the same sort of pallid August morning, at the exact hour of the crime, to the exact scene in the Wilmersdorf Wood. Actors played the roles of Hubbard, Wolkowicz, and Horst Bülow. Once again Bülow got off the streetcar, once again Hubbard started across the street, once again the death car headed straight for him, once again Wolkowicz slew Hubbard’s murderer and Bülow ran away through the woods.
In a veterans’ hospital in Massachusetts, Graham had found Jimmy Jo Mitchell, the army sergeant who had driven Hubbard’s car. He had flown Mitchell to Berlin and interviewed him at the scene of the crime. The sergeant was an old man now, ravaged by drink. When he described Hubbard Christopher, his voice broke.
“Colonel Christopher was one hell of a man,” he said; “he gave his life for his country. Those were rough days in Berlin. It was a war, it was fought in secret, but it was a war, all right.”
“What was Hubbard Christopher doing out here that morning?” Graham intoned. “Why did he come to this lonely place in the Wilmersdorf Wood?”
This repetition of names—names of dead men, names of foreign places—achieved a dramatic effect. Graham could do a lot with tones of voice, gestures, the merest tug of a facial expression.
Mitchell said, “He came here to meet that agent. They all had code names. I know he was a Kraut. He came over from the Russian Zone. He had something Colonel Christopher wanted.”
“What was that?”
“I don’t know. It had to be important or the colonel wouldn’t have come himself. He was the C.O.”
“The agent, a German, nameless, was bringing something out of the Soviet Zone that was so important that Hubbard Christopher risked his life and the lives of Wolkowicz and you, his sergeant. Was he close to Wolkowicz?”
“Nobody was close to Wolkowicz. He was a hard-nosed son of a bitch, but he was good. They worked together fine.”
“This German agent, this nameless man from the Soviet Zone, did Hubbard Christopher know him?”
“No, Wolkowicz made him for the colonel.”
“ ‘Made’ him? You mean he pointed out the German agent, identified him for Hubbard Christopher?”
“Right.”
“And, moments later, Colonel Hubbard Christopher, chief of American intelligence in Berlin, was struck by a speeding car and killed. Then Wolkowicz killed the driver of the death car, then you shot at the fleeing German agent, the nameless agent from the Soviet Zone. Why did you do that?”
The Last Supper Page 35
