The Last Supper (34 page)

“A traitor?” Darby, who usually spoke in a cockney accent that was so heavy that it seemed affected, reproduced the upper-class diction of the prosecutor. “A
traitor?
To
the likes of you? You must be joking,” he said, laughing outright.

— 8 —

Robin Darby was convicted of espionage and sentenced to life imprisonment. During his trial, he had been held in a special cell on an army base. On the night before he was to be
moved to his permanent place of imprisonment, Wolkowicz and Christopher visited him.

The jailer led them to Darby’s cell and slid open the peephole, inviting the Americans to look at the prisoner before they entered. In this place, Darby had been permitted some comforts.
The interior was brightly lit, as the Sewer had been, and as in the Sewer, the floor was covered with a Persian carpet. Darby sat with his narrow back to the door, reading a large illustrated
book.

When the door opened, he turned around. Christopher did not recognize him at once: he had shaved off his beard. The absence of hair made his large nose seem even larger, and his crooked yellow
teeth, which had formerly been hidden behind a fringe of mustache, glinted in a lantern jaw.

“Amazing transformation, isn’t it?” Darby said. “No beards allowed at the Scrubs, I’m told.”

“What about rugs?” Wolkowicz asked.

“I’m afraid not. It’s Spartan rules for traitors. I’m just packing up my books. I don’t know what I’ll be allowed.”

A couple of dozen heavy volumes were strewn on the narrow bed. Christopher examined them. Printed in most of the half-dozen languages that Darby was able to read, they all dealt with the same
subject.

“Botany?” Christopher said.

Darby stroked his denuded chin. “My vice,” he said, “but then, this is the hour at which all secrets of the heart stand revealed. Would you like one as a keepsake?” He
handed Christopher a leather-bound volume on the flowers of the Andes, in Spanish. “It’s a first edition,” he said. “Do have it.” He turned, with the same affable
smile, to Wolkowicz. “Barney?” he said. “Something in Russian?”

“No thanks,” Wolkowicz said. “I just came to say good-bye.”

“Decent of you. Congratulations, by the way. You’ve done it again.”

“Just lucky,” Wolkowicz said.

Darby interrupted him. “No need to apologize,” he said. “All in a day’s work.”

“No shit?” Wolkowicz said.

“You mean it
isn’t
all in a day’s work? You can’t be upset still over that business with your wife in Vienna?”

Wolkowicz expelled an harsh, exasperated breath. “Not anymore,” he said. “That’s over, finally.”

Darby studied Wolkowicz’s glowering face for a moment. He never lost his own smile. “ ‘That’s over, finally,’” he repeated. “Ah! Now I remember.
‘This isn’t over yet,’ that’s what you said, Barney, that day in the snow. But now finally it is? That’s what you’ve come to tell me?”

Wolkowicz held Darby’s eyes, and now he smiled.

Darby laughed one of his artificial party laughs, a wild whinny. He caught Christopher’s eyes and held them and when he spoke, he spoke to Christopher, as if Wolkowicz, who had just put
him into prison for life, could not be expected to understand what he was about to say.

“What an ending,” he said. “The revolution destroyed by a wronged husband. How can such a thing be believed?”

Wolkowicz seemed not to hear Darby’s words. He drew a paperback book from his overcoat pocket.

“Okay?” he said to the jailer.

The jailer glanced at the book, then nodded. “I don’t know if he’ll be allowed to have it when he moves.”

“He can read it tonight,” Wolkowicz said. He handed the book to Darby, who examined the cover.

“The Manchurian Candidate,”
Darby read. “Is that a thriller? I’ve never actually read a thriller.”

“I think you’ll enjoy this one,” Wolkowicz said.

“Very thoughtful.” Darby tossed the pulp book with its garish orange cover onto the cot with his first editions.

“I must give
you
something,” Darby said. Stooping in the confined space, he rolled up one of the carpets and handed it to Wolkowicz. “It’s an Isfahan, rather a
good one, really,” he said.

Wolkowicz made no move to accept the rug. Darby picked up the other man’s arm by the elbow and thrust the cylinder of carpet beneath it. “Do take it,” he said; “think of
me when you tread on it.”

That night, Darby killed two of his jailers and escaped. Autopsies established that he had used a needle to inject a deadly poison into his victims; it was a poison, derived from the bean of the
castor plant, that was used only by the Soviet secret service.

Darby left a message for Wolkowicz, written in ornamental Cyrillic script on the flyleaf of
The Manchurian Candidate.

When translated, it read:
Ilse was quite innocent. But she did like to lie face down on the Isfahan while one smelled the roses. Think of me.

Christopher

— 1 —

A week before the death of Molly Benson, she and Christopher went skiing in the early morning on the slopes above Zermatt. It was the day after New Year’s, their last day
in the mountains. By nine o’clock, when they came down to their hotel, the tables on the outdoor terrace were crowded for breakfast. A fierce white sun lit up the snowfields on the wall of
the Matterhorn.

“Oh,” Molly said, “but I’ve loved it here.”

They had spent the holidays here after Christopher returned from America. Before that he had been in Vietnam. In Saigon, he had made enemies, and this had put both their lives in danger. Friends
of Christopher’s in Paris had hidden her while he was gone.
Hidden
her. Molly thought it was too farcical, it was like a film, being in love with a man who knew a dangerous secret,
being in this glorious place with him, eating delicious food, drinking strange liqueurs, making love while the Alpine moon came in the window, being hunted by secret agents.

As Molly and Christopher came onto the hotel terrace with their skis, he studied each face at each table, as if her murderer might be sitting there in ski clothes, awaiting his opportunity while
the butter softened in the winter sun. She smiled at a middle-aged Frenchwoman who sat alone at one of the tables, feeding eggs off a fork to a toy dachshund. The Frenchwoman and the dog wore
matching sweaters from Hermès; Molly had seen them in the window of the shop while she was hiding out in Paris.

The Frenchwoman did not smile back at Molly. This was, Molly knew, a reproach for her lack of chic. She was dressed in a loose blue Guernsey sweater that was meant to be worn with rubber boots
during long tramps over the English moors. She had bought her faded ski pants five years before during a school trip to Gstaad. Molly never looked at other women, never noticed what clothes they
wore. She had no idea of fashion. Her transparent skin glowed, tanned after a week on the slopes. Her full lips needed no paint; she had green eyes with large brilliant whites and her thick hair
had never been curled. When fashionable women looked at Molly, that was what they saw. Coldly, the Frenchwoman looked away, as if she hadn’t seen Molly at all, as if she expected to see
someone who was truly beautiful elsewhere in the crowd.

The waiter brought coffee and Molly poured from the silver pot for herself and for Christopher. She cut a brittle roll in half lengthwise, scattering flakes of crust on the tablecloth, and
buttered it. She examined the little transparent packets of jam.

“Do you prefer grape jam or grape jam?” Molly asked. She spread jam on the bread and gave half to Christopher. Molly did many things for him that he preferred to do for himself. He
opened the copy of the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
that the waiter had brought with breakfast. He looked through the paper, sipping coffee, but left his bread untouched on the plate.

“Don’t you like lovely bread and jam?” Molly asked, chewing.

With her shining hair falling down the back of her warm, sensible Guernsey sweater, she drank the last of her coffee and ate Christopher’s share of the bread and jam.

Molly licked the jam from her fingers. Christopher had stopped examining faces; something in the newspaper interested him. Molly saw a chance to show that she had learned something about the
spy’s life.

“Do you know that man, the one in the trilby hat?” she asked.

Christopher looked over his newspaper at a squat, unshaven man who stood on the steps at the entrance to the terrace. The newcomer, coatless in the snow, was dressed in a safari suit. His
short-sleeved jacket was open at the throat, revealing a mat of thick black chest hair. He wore a brand-new Tyrolean hat with a large feather stuck into a silver ornament. Molly’s Frenchwoman
stared at this newcomer in utter disbelief and gave her dachshund a reassuring kiss.

“Yes,” Christopher said, “I know him.”

Barney Wolkowicz doffed his Tyrolean hat to Christopher and Molly and started toward their table. As he crossed the lumber floor of the terrace the leather soles of his shoes slipped on the
caked snow. He floundered and grasped the backs of chairs to keep his balance. Molly smiled at him and Wolkowicz grinned back with his false teeth.

Sitting down at their table, Wolkowicz took off his hat again and wiped the sweatband with Christopher’s napkin. “How do you like my new hat?” he asked. “Fifty francs,
Swiss. Pretty good, I thought, considering the size of the feather.”

“I wish my chap had one just like it,” Molly said. “I’m Molly Benson.”

Wolkowicz didn’t tell her his name. Molly asked no questions. She was still learning the manners of the profession. Though she and Christopher had been lovers—not just lovers, but in
love every minute, absorbed in each other’s bodies and minds—for two years, she had known for less than a month that Christopher was a spy. When he told her, she had laughed; it had
been such a breathtaking surprise, as if he had invented some merry new way to make love. She believed him at once, it explained so much about him—his absences, the things he said in his
sleep in foreign languages, his caution. She even believed, because he told her so, that men were trying to kill them. All the same, it seemed comical to her. Suppose they
were
killed,
murdered by some seedy little man who was paid a thousand dollars for the job. Even death would be a joke.

As she watched Wolkowicz her eyes brimmed with merriment. From beneath the fuzzy brim of his trilby hat, he was examining the faces at the surrounding tables.

“Paul’s already done that,” Molly said.

“Done what?”

“Memorized all the faces. I should think you’d want some breakfast.”

Christopher called the waiter and ordered coffee and rolls for Wolkowicz.

Christopher said, “You’re a long way from home, Barney.”

They had last seen each other in Saigon, a month before. Wolkowicz was the chief of station in Vietnam.

“Well, yeah,” Wolkowicz said. “I’m on my way to the States and I thought I’d look you up and say hello.”

“Isn’t Zermatt a little out of your way?”

“Anything for an old friend.
Anything:
I’ve never liked Zermatt. There’s no way to get off this frigging mountain except on that dinky train and every time you try to
walk down the street you fall down in the snow. They ought to spread sand or ashes.”

Wolkowicz shuddered violently.

“You don’t have a coat?” Molly said, concerned. “I’ll fetch Paul’s for you. Unless you want to go inside.”

“No. You’ve paid for the sunshine. Let’s sit in it.”

“Then I’ll get the coat,” Molly said.

Wolkowicz watched her walk into the hotel.

“She doesn’t sound like an Australian,” he said.

“She went to school in England.”

“Where?” It was a silly detail, but Wolkowicz was still storing up details about Christopher as if he were a younger brother who needed to be protected from his own lack of
experience. Wolkowicz resented any secret, however small, that Christopher kept from him.

“She went to Roedean,” Christopher said. “Then Cambridge, Girton College.”

“Isn’t there a song about Roedean? Darby used to sing it: ‘We are the girls from
Roe-dean. . . .’ ”