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Authors: Charles McCarry

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BOOK: The Last Supper
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Lovely
sight,” Rothchild said.

Lori had disappeared. Her smoked trout lay on her plate as she had left it, the first bite still impaled on the fork.

Hubbard found her in the car, her arms wound around her lifted knees, her face pressed against her skirt. He put a hand on her hair. She didn’t move.

Hubbard stroked her hair. Lori lifted her face—filled, he knew, with the memory of her father’s murder. A tear ran down her cheek.

“Those people, one side or the other, are going to kill any child I have,” Lori said. “I know it.”

— 4 —

Within a month, Lori and Hubbard were lovers. It was Lori who managed the seduction.

She began her assault in a nightclub called Kaminskys Telephonbar. Each table was equipped with a telephone, so that clients and prostitutes of both sexes could call one another up. A very tall
Negro with a painted face sang in English; he was naked except for a woman’s fur coat. When he lifted his arms at the end of a song, the coat opened and a slender erect penis emerged like an
inquisitive brown snake.

Hubbard blushed in deep embarrassment. “Look,” he said, “I think we’d better go. I didn’t know.”

But Lori was delighted by the atmosphere of clownish sexuality.

“It’s wonderful here,” she said. “Let’s dance.”

On the dance floor, Lori put both arms around Hubbard’s neck. Actual dancing was impossible. In a space not much larger than a round dinner table, twenty couples swayed to an American
song. Because Hubbard was so much taller than Lori, her body clung to his. He felt her breasts against his stomach and the warmth of her flesh through the thin cloth of her skirt. Lori knew what he
felt. Laughing as she had laughed on the train, she kissed him, a sweet virginal kiss at first, but as he drew away she pulled his head back and ran her tongue over his lips, a slow warm animal
lick that started at one corner of his mouth, ran over his upper lip, and then back across the lower. Grinning mischievously, she gave his lip a little nip with her white teeth, like a period.

They stayed until dawn, dancing and drinking sparkling Mosel. As Hubbard drove her home through the empty streets, Lori, kneeling in the passenger seat, licked his ear. Hubbard tried thinking
about football; it didn’t work. He tried to push her away, but she resisted and went on licking his ear. When he tried to slow down, she put her own foot on the accelerator. As they entered
the Potsdamer Platz at fifty miles an hour, a taxi pulled out of the rank in front of the railroad station, into the path of their car. Hubbard slammed on the brakes. The car, rocking crazily,
skidded along the streetcar tracks and spun completely around twice before Hubbard brought it under control again.

“Really, Lori,” Hubbard said, “I think you’d better sit down.”

Lori slid into the seat, put her knees primly together, looked into Hubbard’s face with her cat’s smile, and began speaking about his work again. The kiss in the nightclub, the
tongue in Hubbard’s ear, the wild ride in the open car might never have happened. She was a scholar again. She ran her hands over her hair, which had blown wildly around her face moments
before, restoring it to perfect order.

“Are you actually writing,” she asked, “or are you merely trying to make yourself interesting?”

Hubbard was stung by this accusation. “I’ve written a novel,” he said.

“Good. You must read it to me.”


Read you my manuscript?

“What else? You need an opinion, intelligent criticism. You must read your book to me tomorrow. I’ll come to your rooms.”

— 5 —

Hubbard had taken a furnished flat in Charlottenburg, on a fashionable street. The furniture, left behind by the owners, was a mixture of uncomfortable Bauhaus and tattered
Louis XV. Very good Persian carpets were spread over the floor. The walls were hung with new German painting, brutal caricatures of bourgeois life, abstractions in primary colors.

“Not a very Bohemian flat,” Lori said, “except for the pictures. Surely they didn’t come with the place? Nobody in this neighborhood knows about this sort of German
painting.”

“Otto Rothchild helped me to find them.”

“Ah, the valuta again. Do your friendships generally last?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so. Pity. I’ll never like this Russian.”

Hubbard had arranged his manuscript in a neat stack on the table and placed two chairs opposite one another. He indicated the chair in which Lori was to sit. Instead, she sat on the floor,
curling her legs beneath her.

Hubbard began to read. At seven o’clock the maid brought them a cold supper. Hubbard put down the manuscript.

“No,” Lori said. “Read on to the end. Food later.”

“But I’m hungry.”

“Later.”

“Now. I’m also thirsty. My throat is giving out.”

The maid had placed beer on the table, a brown liter bottle with a porcelain stopper on a bail. Lori scrambled to her feet. Limping a little on cramped muscles, she went to the table and poured
a full glass for Hubbard and a quarter of a glass for herself. Hubbard drank the beer.

Hubbard filled two plates with cold ham and sour potato salad and refilled the beer glasses. Lori demolished the food. She went to the table, spread two pieces of black bread with pale butter,
and put thin slices of cheese on top. Hubbard ate his with his fingers; Lori used a knife and fork.

“Is that the way Americans eat cheese?”

“Yes.”

“You must have very dirty napkins. Is that the way Americans
are
—the way you have written about them?”

“How exactly did you imagine them?”

“Not like the ones in your book,” she said. “Read.”

It was past ten o’clock when Hubbard read the last word. By then he was so tired and so hungry, and so far into the region of his own imagination, that he had half forgotten that Lori had
been listening to him. She rolled over onto her stomach, put her chin on the pillow, and stared into the ashes of the fire. She said absolutely nothing. Hubbard was puzzled by her silence, and took
it as a sign that she was trying to find a way to tell him that she did not like his work, or did not understand it, or found it too complicated—the usual complaints people made about what he
wrote.

“Who exactly are the people in the book?” she asked at last.

“They’re imaginary.”

“That evil old man with his mills is not imaginary. Neither are the Irish and German children going to work in the darkness and coming home in the darkness and dying of
tuberculosis.”

“The old man is evil? He’s like my grandfather in some ways. There are children in his mills who go to work when they are eight years old and die of tuberculosis before they’re
twenty.”

“And the boys, the inseparable brothers?”

“The good one is like a cousin of mine.”

“And the bad one is you. You’re going to publish this novel?”

“If a publisher will take it.”

“How will your family take it?”

Hubbard shrugged. “It’s all true.”

“Precisely. You don’t fear your family?”

Hubbard shook his head.

“They’re going to hate you,” Lori said.

Hubbard fetched the beer bottle, opened the top, and offered it to Lori. She was on her face again, staring into the fire.

“I hadn’t expected this,” she said. “You’re a genius.”

Hubbard, his mouth full of tepid beer, paused for a moment, then swallowed. The bitter taste of the beer ran up into his nose. Lori’s intense gray eyes looked directly into his.

“You won’t answer me? Then I will answer for you. You
are
a genius. I’ll insist on that, and not only to you. To the world.”

Lori kissed Hubbard on the mouth. She looked as if she had remembered a delicious secret. She turned down the lamps and drew him to the floor. It was utterly plain to him what she expected.

Two

— 1 —

When Lori was in the eighth month of her pregnancy, Paulus von Buecheler came to call on her in Hubbard’s flat in Charlottenburg. Hands folded on the knob of his walking
stick, Paulus sat on a chair made of steel tubes and leather straps.

“What medicinal furniture,” he said. “Even the arts and crafts of the Socialists are designed to correct the flaws in humanity. This is like sitting on an artificial
limb.”

It was eight-thirty in the morning, late in the day for Paulus, who had been reading out orders at dawn all his life, to be discussing matters of importance. He had refused a cup of coffee, a
signal of stern intentions.

“Hubbard should be back soon,” Lori said. “He’s meeting the train from Paris; his cousin is visiting us.”

Lori had not seen Paulus for six months, not since she had moved in with Hubbard. She had not mentioned her pregnancy when she left Berwick; her intention to live in concubinage had been enough
of a shock to Hilde. If Paulus was surprised by Lori’s condition, as he sat in his Bauhaus chair, he gave no sign. Lori folded her hands on her kicking baby and waited for her uncle to say
what he had come to say.

“Pregnancy seems to agree with you,” he said, by way of addressing his subject. “Your Aunt Hilde thinks you ought to be in Rügen. The sea air is full of iodine. Hilde
always went to Berwick when she was pregnant in order to breathe it in; her doctor believed that it strengthened the fetus.”

Paulus had been staring into space as he spoke. Now he turned his face to Lori, monocle glittering in one eye socket, moisture in the other.

“We are quite alone at Berwick, you know,” he said.

Paulus stopped talking and Lori said nothing to fill the silence. She knew how alone her uncle and aunt were. The first of their sons had been killed in 1914 at Tannenberg, the second had fallen
in 1916 at Verdun, and the third, a pilot, had been shot down in 1918 by an American aviator. The American, a member of a naval flight called the First Yale Unit, had written to Paulus and Hilde,
describing what he termed the “sportsmanship” of their son: evidently, Bartholomäus had saluted the American just as his ship burst into flames. It seemed queer to Paulus that his
youngest son, the most gifted of his children, should have been added to the total of 1,773,000 Germans killed in the Great War, dying at the hand of an amateur American sailor who, to judge by his
letter, looked on the war as a university prank. After Paulus, inasmuch as Lori’s father had been murdered, there were no more Buechelers in the male line.

“You do not, I suppose, have any idea of going to America to have the baby?” Paulus asked his niece.

“I doubt that I’d complete the voyage. Besides, Hubbard is not very welcome at home because of his book.”

“Oh? Has he insulted somebody?”

“Nearly everyone; it’s about his mother’s family. But it is a brilliant novel.”

“No doubt. Do you plan to marry this extraordinary novelist?”

“Yes. I didn’t suppose that you wanted an illegitimate great-nephew named after you.”

“Named after
me?

“Who else would I name him after?”

“Your father.”

“Children shouldn’t be named for the dead. I’m tired of the dead. He’ll be an American; Americans don’t seem to die young for stupid reasons, like the rest of
us.”

Paulus looked around the room at the primitive lines and the raw colors of Hubbard’s growing collection of revolutionary works of art. His eyes rested on a naturalistic drawing of Lori,
smiling her chatoyant smile, standing easily with her feet together and her hands hanging loose, nude and pregnant.

“That is quite beautiful,” he said.

“I’m glad you think so. The maid quit when I hung it.”

They heard the key in the lock and stopped speaking. Two male voices spoke English in the hall; suitcases thudded to the floor. Hubbard, enormously tall, came into the sitting room. When he saw
Paulus, his face lighted up with his guileless grin. Paulus stood up and gazed with amazement at the young man who followed Hubbard into the room.

He, too, was a gigantic, smiling American. He looked exactly like Hubbard. Lori, who had begun to rise from her chair, sank back in astonishment. Where Hubbard was fair, this fellow was dark.
Otherwise they might have been twins.

“My cousin Elliott,” Hubbard said. “Paulus, what a pleasant surprise. Colonel Baron von Buecheler, may I present my cousin, Elliott Hubbard.”

Hubbard spoke German. Elliott, who did not understand this language, said nothing, but shook hands vigorously with Paulus. Then he turned to Lori. “I’m Elliott,” he said in
English.

Lori gripped his hand. “The good brother,” she said. “This is indecent. You’re replicas. Hubbard, why did you leave this secret out of your novel?”

“It’s the only thing he did leave out,” Elliott said.

Hubbard, grinning in pleasure over the success of his surprise, explained to Paulus. “Elliott’s father and my mother were twins,” he said. “They did everything together.
It was a double wedding, and Elliott and I were born a year later, a month apart.”

“Who is older?”

“Elliott.”

“If your name is Hubbard Christopher,” Lori said, “why is his name not Christopher Hubbard?”

“Things are bad enough as they are, Lori,” Elliott said.

BOOK: The Last Supper
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