The Last Supper (59 page)

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 thrown 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.

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.