Patchen’s men let Wolkowicz out of the car at Fourteenth Street and Constitution Avenue. Without looking back, he walked purposefully up the street, past the gray government buildings that had always reminded him of a city of the dead. Hurrying up the hill past the National Press Club, Wolkowicz puffed a little. He was out of shape after his months of confinement. He sweated. It was spring—people were eating sandwiches in the parks among beds of jonquils and tulips. Wolkowicz looked automatically into the windows of the shops in order to see the reflections of the people behind him. The street teemed with the lunch-hour crowd; they had let him out into it deliberately, he knew, to make it harder for him to spot his surveillance.
At a cash machine, he used his bank card to withdraw money. He went into a cheap clothing store on F Street and bought a pair of pants with the bottoms already cuffed, a jacket, a shirt, a tie, underwear, shoes, and socks. He left the clothes the Outfit had given him, along with any transmitters that might have been sewn into the seams, in the dressing room and went out into the street again. He walked north, stopping at a public phone. He dialed a number and got a stranger. He said, “This is the Same-Day Shirt Laundry. If you don’t pick up your shirts before the end of business today we’ll have to give them to the Goodwill.” The astonished person at the other end of the line said, “What?”
Wolkowicz hung up. A man in a seersucker jacket and a rep tie hurried closer, so that he could hear what Wolkowicz said if he made another phone call. At another telephone, a block or two farther on, Wolkowicz dialed another number at random and said the same thing, word for word, to a second stranger.
Now Wolkowicz could see all the men behind him—six of them, two teams on foot. There were no crowds here to hide them. He had walked his pursuers into a stretch of Fourteenth Street that belonged to drug pushers, muggers, and prostitutes. Rioters had burned this part of town once, and some of the stores were still boarded up. The girls and men who loitered in front of the massage parlors and the porno shops and the bars paid little attention to Wolkowicz. Fat middle-aged men in cheap clothes were their clientele. But they turned wary faces down the street, like animals sniffing the wind, as they spotted the men who were following Wolkowicz. They didn’t belong here. They were too young, too good-looking. They all wore the same clothes.
In a shop, Wolkowicz bought a cheap switchblade knife. Back on the sidewalk, he looked into the faces of the whores until he saw what he was looking for. The girl he chose was young, no more than sixteen. Her skin was dull, as if it were in the process of changing, a shade each day, to the color of ashes. Her eyes were dreamy with the deep amusement of the perpetually drugged. She pulled Wolkowicz into a doorway and told him a schoolyard joke. Wolkowicz laughed.
“I want to play a joke on a buddy,” he said. “You see that guy looking in the window behind me, the one that looks like he don’t know whether to shit or wind his watch?”
The girl’s dreamy gaze fastened on the man in a seersucker jacket.
“That one?”
Wolkowicz nodded. He told her what he wanted her to do.
“Shit, man,” the girl said. “You’re crazy.”
Wolkowicz gave her a fifty-dollar bill.
“You’re still crazy.”
He gave her another fifty.
“You girls do it all the time,” he said. “The cops aren’t going to bother about it.”
He gave her the switchblade knife, wrapped in a hundred-dollar bill. “I’ll be right behind you,” he said. “You’d better hurry.”
The girl rolled her two hundred dollars into a cylinder, like a cigarette, and tucked it underneath her platinum wig. The man in the seersucker jacket had been replaced on the point by another man who had crossed the street to take his place, and now he waited obediently at a crosswalk for a Don’t Walk signal to change so that he could take up his station on the opposite sidewalk.
The girl spoke to him. She was wearing gold hip boots, a garter belt, and a miniskirt. She lifted the skirt to show him the heart on her bikini panties. The man in the seersucker jacket smiled at her and shook his head. He stepped off the curb, anxious for the light to change, then stepped back on. Some of the other members of the surveillance team smiled in amusement. Had they been Wolkowicz’s men he would have fired them for revealing themselves. He started back the way he came. The driver of a car waiting at the light looked around frantically to see if he was able to make a U-turn.
The girl persisted, whispering into the ear of the man in the seersucker jacket. He tried to move away. She fondled the front of his trousers. Shocked, he pushed her away. She reached under her wig for Wolkowicz’s switchblade knife and, with a dreamy smile, stabbed him in the thigh. Then she ran, leaving the knife in the wound.
Wolkowicz jumped into a taxi that had stopped for the light and as it pulled away he saw the girl running across the street against the light. Nobody was following her.
For the next two minutes, nobody would be following Wolkowicz. That was all the time he needed.
— 2 —
Walking down to the waterfront across the spongy lawn of Pong’s summer cottage on Chesapeake Bay, Wolkowicz smelled forsythia and magnolia. In the light of the full moon, he could make out the pale colors of the flowering trees—like damsels in ball gowns, out for a stroll in the garden, as Jocelyn Frick might have said. A whippoorwill sang down from a willow tree and the dappled waters of the bay lapped against the shore.
Wolkowicz was oblivious to the beauty of the night; he looked for Patchen’s men behind the drooping trees. He knew the snows of Russia and the heat of Burma, and he regarded nature as a mindless, implacable enemy. He had never, from choice, walked in the country, he had never been on a picnic, he did not know the name of a single songbird or wildflower, he had never been to the beach for pleasure.
The Outfit had taught him to swim. Waddy Jessup had been his instructor. “Doucement, Barnabas, easy does it,” Waddy had advised, as young WOJG Wolkowicz thrashed in the pool, pitting his strength against the water. “Remember the teaching of Lao-tzu,” Waddy had said; “weakness will always overcome strength.” Waddy turned on his face and, with effortless strokes, slid away through the quivering green light beneath the surface.
At the dock, Pong’s cabin cruiser gleamed in the moonlight, all teak and chrome, flying the Thai ensign. Wolkowicz went aboard. The keys were hidden in a little magnetic box at the stern. He found them and opened the cabin hatch. Inside, in its hiding place under the deck, Wolkowicz found Pong’s loaded pistol, well greased and sealed inside six layers of plastic bags. It was a four-barreled .357 magnum derringer called a COP—an executioner’s weapon, powerful enough to blow off the top of a skull, but inaccurate beyond the width of a rug. There was a “survival knife”—a killing knife, really, razor sharp—in the hiding place too; it had a bright orange cork handle so that it would float if it fell in the water. Wolkowicz tucked both weapons into his waistband, then started the engine and cast off.
The boat moved out into the bay, leaving a bubbly phosphorescent wake. There were no other craft in sight, but along both shores Wolkowicz could see the clustered yellow lights of sleeping towns. He headed south until he could see no more lights. The bay was broader here, and the path of light thrown down by the moon seemed wider, too.
Wolkowicz hardly noticed these things. They were irrelevant; but that was not the only reason he ignored them. Wolkowicz was remembering scenes from his childhood.
This surprised him. Since the interrogation in Virginia, his memory had been none too good. All the details of his life, or nearly all, had been dragged up to the surface. The act of recalling everything had, in an odd way, caused him to forget everything. He could not remember the names of people he had known all his life, he could not recall the minutiae of operations. More and more, as if he had become a very old man, he found himself remembering things from the deep past that he had thought forgotten. Now, as he sailed down Chesapeake Bay at the end of a spring night, his memory was filled w
ith his long childhood walk across Asia on his father’s shoulders. Oddly, what he remembered about this was sleeping—sleeping deliciously with his head against the rough wool of his father’s coat, and in his sleep hearing the scuffling sound of his father’s felt boots mile after endless mile, hearing the barking of dogs far away, hearing the beating of wings as a flight of ducks rose from a pond, hearing voices shouting in Russian in a wood. All his life, Wolkowicz realized, he had heard these sounds in his sleep. He had smelled snow and barnyards and food in his sleep. Even now, when he dreamed, he dreamed the aroma of moldy black bread or the scent of a turnip pulled from the chilly wet earth of Siberia. He remembered, also, everything that had happened in the jungle with Waddy. These were the things he hadn’t talked about under interrogation. Everything else, every detail, he had willingly confessed. He had been glad to get rid of it.
Wolkowicz turned off the motor and the running lights. Pong’s boat drifted on the dazzling surface of the bay. Wolkowicz climbed onto the roof of the cabin and looked, first with the naked eye, then with binoculars, at all 360 degrees of the horizon, to be sure that he was absolutely alone. Nothing moved. Onshore, a navigational strobe light blinked on a hillside and he could hear cars on a highway, farther inland.
Working methodically, he got a rubber raft out of its locker and inflated it. He put it overboard and secured it to the boat with a line. Then he dragged the anchor, which was attached to a heavy chain, across the deck and loaded it—first the anchor, then the chain, a bit at a time, into the raft. The raft buckled under the weight.
Wolkowicz started the engines again and drove the boat toward the head of the bay, dead slow. He lashed the wheel and went astern, pulling the raft alongside. Holding on to the line, which was doubled around a stanchion but untied, he got into the raft. It nearly capsized under the extra burden of his two hundred pounds, but then it floated, its bottom slapping heavily on the wash from the boat. Wolkowicz let go of the line and the boat, lights burning and engines gurgling, cruised away toward the shore.
Wolkowicz wrapped the anchor chain around his body, standing up in the bobbing raft in order to pass it over his shoulders and around his waist. When it was secured, he sat down again and got out the survival knife and the blunt executioner’s pistol. He fired the pistol once into the air, a test shot. It kicked hard against his palm, bruising the fleshy base of his thumb. He cocked the gun and clasped it under his left armpit.
Wolkowicz took the knife out of its sheath and threw the sheath overboard. It drifted away in the strong current. Then, working clumsily because he was wrapped in the anchor chain, he slashed the raft, one air chamber after the other, with rapid, sure strokes. As the air hissed out, he heard Waddy Jessup say, “Is your father a worker, Barnabas? Then we’re dying for him.”
“Fuck it,” Wolkowicz said.
The raft was already sinking. He only had a moment to act. He threw the knife into the water, seized the gun, and placed his thumb on the trigger. With a last smile for this final act of cunning, Wolkowicz reached behind him, pressed the muzzle of the derringer against the back of his skull, and pulled the trigger.
The recoil tore the pistol out of his dead hand and it splashed into the sea. The raft capsized and floated away after the bobbing orange handle of the survival knife. Together, Wolkowicz and the pistol fluttered downward. The gun sank into the silt. The anchor bit into the bottom and held.
The chain was not heavy enough to overcome the buoyancy of Wolkowicz’s stout body. The current took him to the end of the anchor chain, and there he floated, arms outstretched, a nimbus of blood and brains around his shattered skull, in the splinters of moonlight that penetrated the surface of the water.
EPILOGUE
Lori
Pulling the Flexible Flyer behind him, Christopher climbed the mountain above the Harbor. David Patchen, higher on the path, paused at the Hubbard graveyard. It had been a hard, early winter, and deep drifts lay among the headstones.
Patchen went inside, walking on the places that had been swept bare by the wind so as not to leave footprints, and read the inscriptions on the markers. Wolkowicz had been dead for five years.
“Odd about Wolkowicz,” he said. “Ilse wanted to cremate him. She had some Teutonic idea of scattering his ashes over Berlin, the birthplace of their love. But we didn’t dare destroy the body. It would have created another conspiracy theory.”
As Wolkowicz had foreseen, the discovery of his body had given birth to a storm of investigations and publicity. It was a classic spy-thriller homicide. Patrick Graham was eager to believe that the Outfit had silenced its most heroic agent with a bullet. Who knew what foul secrets it wished to protect?
Wolkowicz had been buried in Arlington National Cemetery, with a flag on his coffin and all his medals pinned to his corpse. After all, Patchen said, he had been an authentic American hero. The funeral had been covered by all the networks, but to the end it was Patrick Graham’s story.
“This is Barney Wolkowicz’s last secret,” Graham had intoned in his on-camera voice, as Taps and the clash of rifle fire resounded in the background. “He is being buried with full military honors, and we can only wonder if his mourners are, perhaps, also his murderers. Barney Wolkowicz, you may be sure, would not want us to know the truth. He kept his oath of secrecy until the end.”
Patchen brushed off Indian Joe’s stone, then blew away the powdery snow that stuck in the grooves of the letters that the second Aaron had chiseled into the granite.
“Have you told her about Indian Joe?” he asked.
Christopher looked down at the small child who sat on the sled. “Not yet,” he said.
The little girl rolled off the Flexible Flyer and, tugging it along behind her by its rope, started up the path by herself. She trudged along with a determined stride, taking deep breaths, pausing now and again in childish curiosity to study some object along the way—a rock covered with icicles, a flight of crows. Christopher followed, and Patchen, floundering through billowing snowdrifts, joined him again on the path. He did not hurry; he was content to walk behind the child. He seemed to take pleasure in watching her.
“To the extent that it can ever be over,” Patchen said, “the Wolkowicz affair is over. How he’d bitch if he could hear me calling it ‘the Wolkowicz affair,’ as if it were . . . a fucking love story. But that’s what it was. Did you believe him when he said he had you kidnapped into China in order to save your life?”
“Yes. Of course. Everything he did, he did for personal reasons.”
“He was never anybody’s agent. How could we, how could the Russians have spent so many years thinking that he’d work for us? It wasn’t in his nature.”
It was Christmas Eve. Patchen paused and looked over the valley. The wind lifted a puff of snow; it hung for an instant against the hemlock-blue mountaintop, then vanished.
Like Hubbard’s ashes.
Patchen looked at Christopher, to see if once again they were having the same thought. Christopher smiled. They both smiled. They had known each other for such a long time; they had known the real truth about so many things. Yet they knew almost nothing. That was what made them smile.
The child had reached the top of the hill. She turned the sled around and got on. Christopher called out a warning. She was too small to go down alone. Patchen called out, too. There was terrible danger here. Without a moment’s hesitation, the child pushed off and started down the mountainside. The sled dipped and gathered speed.
“Watch out!” Patchen said.
Runners singing, the sled hurtled down the steep path, plunging among the rocks and the stone walls, flying (as Christopher knew it seemed to the little girl) down into the bare branches of the trees below. The two men were unable to stop it as it went by.
They ran down the mountainside after it, Christopher covering the slippery ground in long thumping strides, Patchen slithering and falling on his bad leg. At the bottom, the sled ran into a snowdrift and turned over. The child was thro
wn clear. Stephanie, her mother, had been watching from the window. She ran out of the house, black hair flying, and floundered into the snowdrift.
The child was unhurt. Christopher took her out of Stephanie’s arms. His daughter looked at him out of enormous, clear gray eyes. She was just beginning to speak in sentences.
“I wasn’t afraid,” she said.
“Yes, Lori, I know,” Christopher replied, his heart overflowing with love, his voice trembling with fear.
Author’s Note
The characters and events in this book are wholly imaginary and are not intended to resemble anyone who ever lived or anything that ever happened. For details of life inside a Chinese prison during the regime of Mao Zedong I consulted the excellent Prisoner of Mao, by Bao Ruo-Wang (Jean Pasqualini) and Rudolph Chelminski (Penguin Books, 1976), and other sources, but Christopher’s experiences are invented. In an earlier novel, Christopher was said to have an older brother, his parents’ favorite child. Readers of The Last Supper will recognize that this was unfounded gossip.
C. McC.
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