The Last Supper (10 page)

“I was in Spain for the war.”

“Naturally you were.”

It exasperated Lori that Otto Rothchild always did the fashionable thing at the fashionable moment. When Bolsheviks were in style, he had collected Bolsheviks. Now he had Nazi friends: not louts
who were real believers, but acceptable people who were willing to trade a little decency for an appointment or a uniform or the opportunity to know influential people and make money. Hubbard was
intrigued by Rothchild’s lack of scruples. He enjoyed his gossip: the Russian was the best talker Hubbard had ever known: informed, witty, and malicious. Lori never stayed at the table to
listen to him.

Rothchild brought adventurers by to meet Hubbard, young men and women. They were invariably beautiful. To a dinner party for Zaentz, just before Zaentz escaped, Rothchild had brought a young
lieutenant of army intelligence.

“His name is Bülow,” Rothchild had said. “He’s not one of the real Bülows, but he’s perfect for his new career. He speaks Russian—I taught him
myself, he has a lovely accent, like an intelligent serf who’s played with his owner’s son—and he’s willing to betray absolutely anyone. Except, of course, the nobility, so
you
are immune, Baronesse.”

Perhaps in retaliation for being called Hubbard’s Russian, Rothchild called Lori Baronesse, the title used by the unmarried daughter of a baron, as if marriage to an American changed
nothing for a member of her class.

“Otto is a rat,” Lori said to Hubbard. “The rat population always exactly equals the human population. For every human being, living out in the open, there is one rat, hiding
between the walls, existing on the garbage of his human host. Otto is your rat, Hubbard. In the days of the valuta it was your dollars. Now it’s your respectability. He gets fat, gnawing away
under your table.”

“Nonsense. Otto knows everyone in Berlin.”

“Thanks to good old lovable Hubbard. If he rides around in your pocket, peeping out and sniffing and wiggling his whiskers, then people stop noticing how disgusting he is. You’ve
made him into a pet rat.”

“Probably he’s a spy,” Paulus said. “Russians are famous for it.”

Whatever he was, Otto Rothchild prospered. Reading Pushkin in the beech forest by the Borg, he seemed not to have a care in the world.

“It’s marvelously peaceful here,” he said. He sniffed, gazing fixedly at Paul. “What’s in the package?” he asked.

Paul carried their lunch, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. “Bread and cheese,” he said.

“I thought I smelled sausage. One gets very little sausage in Spain. It’s spoiled fish, mostly, and gummy rice.”

“There is sausage,” Lori said. “If you’re hungry, by all means have it.”

Rothchild untied the package. He ate greedily, poking one piece of cheese or sausage into his mouth with another and chewing very thoroughly. He wiped the sausage fat from his fingers and lips
with bread, and ate that too. Then he stretched out on his stomach beside the lake and drank like an animal at a water hole. Lori watched every move. Rothchild caught her glance.

“Skills from an earlier existence,” he said. “Paul, would it be a great deal of trouble to bring your father here?”

Lori was glad of a chance to escape. “I’ll fetch him,” she said. “You remain with our guest, Paul.”

Lori tramped away toward Berwick. Paul offered Rothchild the apple he carried in his pocket. Rothchild bit into the apple, removing large circles of white flesh. He chewed noisily and, when he
was finished, dropped the core onto the floor of the forest. Paul had never seen such a hungry grown-up. Now that they were alone, Rothchild made no effort to talk to Paul; he was not the sort of
man to spend the coins of charm on adolescent boys. He sat down on the stone and went back to reading Pushkin.

It was some time before Hubbard arrived. When he came into the glade, Rothchild made a sweeping gesture of welcome, as if he owned the forest, inviting him to sit down on one of the broken
temple stones.

“Have you heard the radio?” Rothchild asked.

Hubbard shook his head.

“Yesterday Germany and Soviet Russia signed a treaty of friendship and military alliance.”

“Nazis and Communists in an alliance?” Hubbard said. “The lunatic Right and the demented Left in bed together? How can they do that?”

“They can do whatever they like,” Rothchild said.

He was never long without a gesture. To punctuate the sentence he had just spoken, he ground the core of the apple into the powdery dirt of the forest floor with the heel of his suede shoe.

“I caused the Bolsheviks some inconvenience in Spain,” Rothchild said. “Now that they are Germany’s allies, things are going to be inconvenient for me,
Hubbard.”

“Inconvenient for you, Otto? In what way?”

“In the way things were inconvenient for Zaentz,” Rothchild said. “In the way they were inconvenient for Blau, Schwarz, Eisner, Gerstein, and all your other . . . passengers.
Shall I go on? It’s a long list. Everyone knows what you and Lori have been doing with your sailboat.”

“Oh? What do they know, Otto?”

“That the Christophers are angels of mercy. Even the Gestapo knows. In other circumstances I’d advise you to stop your humanitarian work.”

“But not before we smuggle you out of Germany?”

“Exactly. Unless you only help Jews.” Rothchild drew on his Russian cigarette. “I do have a Jewish name—false, but Jewish,” he said.

“And if we don’t?”

“What does that mean, Hubbard—‘
And if we don’t?
’ If you don’t, you don’t, and that’s the end of it. Did you think I’d denounce you?
Do you really imagine that I’m a danger to you?”

“Why not? You know half the Nazi Party.”

“Lucky for me that I do. Horst Bülow told me that my name was on a list handed to the Germans after the pact was signed in Moscow.”

As he spoke, Rothchild tied and untied a knot in the string that had held Lori’s lunch package together. Hubbard took the string and paper out of his hand and stuffed it into the pocket of
his jacket.

“What happens,” Hubbard asked, “to those whose names are on the list?”

“They vanish, handed over to the Bolsheviks. They think they can find their way to many others through me.”

“Can they? Are you a Bolshevik?”

“Of course not. Are you? But how many do we know between us? Nobody ever stands up under questioning, Hubbard. You only hold out long enough to lull your conscience for betraying your
friends. They wouldn’t kill me, you know; or you, or Lori. Or your child. It would be the camps. Slave labor.”

“All right,” Hubbard said.

“Friendship,” Rothchild said, “is the exile’s only capital.”

— 9 —

It was Paul who led Rothchild down the cliff at midnight and swam with him to
Mahican
. They sailed without lights, setting a westward course for Falster. Aboard the boat,
with Paul at the helm, nobody spoke except Lori.

“Where do you plan to go?” she asked Rothchild. “What will you do?”

“To Paris. I’ll do what I’ve always done.”

“Make friends and use them, you mean.”

Rothchild smiled at her: his charming smile, perfect teeth and liquid eyes.

At this moment, the jib broke loose and whipped wildly around the mast.
Mahican
had been sailing close-hauled before the wind, her rail awash in a four-foot sea. Hubbard hurried forward
and began to struggle with the sail.

Lori leaped out of the cockpit to help him. Hubbard’s big feet slipped on the scrubbed oak planking as he tried to gather the sail into his long arms. He had captured most of it, but when
he slipped he lost his grip on the stiff wet canvas and the wind took it, unfurling it like a flag. Hubbard grinned at Lori. She lunged for the sail and went overboard. Hubbard reached for her and
missed and then the sail came back and wrapped itself around his head.

Paul dove into the sea after his mother. Though it had been pitch-black aboard
Mahican
, there seemed to be a little light below the surface. Paul struggled to swim downward. His chest
hurt already. He hadn’t got much air in his lungs before he went into the sea. He had seen the place where Lori went under, and his mind had been entirely concentrated on following her into
this seam in the heaving water. Ten feet below his outstretched hands, he could see his mother. He couldn’t reach her; she didn’t seem to be swimming, but sank with terrifying
swiftness, as if she were holding on to a weight.

Paul pressed his arms against his sides and kicked. The water wasn’t deep here, no more than twenty feet, and there were rocks, bearded with weed, on the bottom. Lori settled between two
rocks, one arm uplifted, her hair floating away from her face. Paul seized her hair, put his feet on the rock, and pushed off as hard as he could, kicking for the surface. He wanted desperately to
take a breath; he did not know how much longer he could keep from opening his mouth. He clenched his teeth and let the water take him up, but he did not move. He kicked, but still his body did not
rise. He seemed to have no buoyancy at all.

It did not seem to matter. It occurred to him that his mother might be dead; perhaps she had struck her head when she went overboard. Perhaps it would be best to remain here, to give up the
struggle. He knew that he must fill his lungs with water in a matter of seconds; he could not control the instinct to breathe for very much longer. It was very calm down here out of the wind. Paul
and Lori were part of the sea, a particle of the deep, moving with it.

Then he saw why they could not float upward toward the surface: Lori was wearing Paulus’s old sheepskin jerkin and the weight of it, soaked with seawater, was drowning them. Paul wrenched
his mother’s arms and pulled her out of the sheepskin. Lori began to rise toward the surface. Clutching her hand, Paul kicked against the water, grinding his teeth together to keep from
opening his mouth.

Their heads broke the surface and Paul saw the hull of
Mahican
less than a hundred feet away, mainsail shuddering as her boom swung and she came about. Paul filled his lungs with air and
looked into his mother’s face. Her hair was plastered tight against her skull. Her huge gray eyes were the color of the sea. Treading water, she kissed her son. Hubbard, shouting with joy,
splashed into the sea beside them, carrying a line.

When they put Otto Rothchild ashore on Falster at dawn, Lori stayed below, so as not to have to say good-bye to him.

— 10 —

As
Mahican
’s sail entered the harbor at Rügen next day, the Gestapo launch put out from the quay to meet her and Stutzer the Dandy came aboard.

Once on deck, the Dandy did not look at the Christophers’ faces; he held out his hand for the boat’s papers and examined them. With a stiff forefinger, encased in its snug kid glove,
he turned each page of Hubbard’s passport, each page of Lori’s, each page of Paul’s. He never lifted his eyes from the documents.

“You are married to this American?” he said to Lori at last. When she didn’t answer, he raised his triangular face an inch and his eyes peered out at her from beneath the shiny
beak of his cap.

“Yes,” Lori replied.

“Your husband and child have American passports; yours is German. Why?”

“They are Americans. I am a German.”

“You don’t hold an American passport as well as a German passport?”

“No.”

“You consider, nevertheless, that your son is an American, not a German?”

“My son will make his own decision on that matter when he comes of age.”

Belowdecks, a heavy object fell with a crash. Two other policemen, the Dandy’s assistants, were searching the cabin. The Dandy, unruffled by the noise, went through the passports
again.

“Paul Christopher,” he said, “born in Rügen, fourteenth June 1924. Why do you travel so much to Switzerland, Christopher?”

Paul said, “I go to school there.”

“What school?”

Paul named it.

“A French school?”

“Yes.”

The Dandy closed the passports. He then examined Hubbard, Lori, and Paul, moving his eyes from their hats to their shoes as if he were still reading the stamped pages of their passports. His
eyes flicked upward and caught the expression on Lori’s face; it was very like the expression he had seen on her face three years before, in the café. The Dandy’s pink lips
pressed together.

“What is the purpose of this examination of our boat and ourselves?” Hubbard asked.

“You are enthusiastic sailors.”

“We come to Rügen every summer for the sailing.”

“For the sailing. You leave in the dark always.”

Hubbard looked at the sky, flooded with the thin light of midday. “We try to catch the tides,” he said.

“How many persons were aboard this vessel when you sailed?”

“My wife, my son, myself.”

“Not more? You’ve been at sea for twenty-nine hours. Where did you go?”

“To Falster.”

“In Denmark. Your passports and the boat’s papers show no entry stamps, no exit stamps.”

“We didn’t go through formalities at Falster. We went ashore in the dinghy, had a picnic on the beach.”

The Dandy opened the wicker picnic hamper. He examined the knives and forks and plates strapped to the lid of the basket. He unbuckled the straps and examined each utensil and dish.

“Four dirty forks, four knives, four spoons,” he said. “Also four dirty plates. If there are only three of you, why are there unwashed forks and plates for four
persons?”

Lori gazed steadily into his eyes. “We invited a guest for dinner in Falster.”

The Dandy pointed a finger at his assistant, who got out a notebook and pencil. When he was ready to write, pencil poised above the blank page, the Dandy asked his next question.

“Name of the guest?”

“We never asked. Informality is one of the joys of sailing.”

The assistant wrote rapidly. When the Dandy held up a finger, he stopped.

“This man whom you invited to dinner was a Dane?”

“Probably. We didn’t ask. We spoke English together.”

“And you left him in Falster, on the beach?”

“Yes.”