The Last Supper - Hardcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Charles McCarry is the author, most recently, of the acclaimed thriller Old Boys. He established an international reputation as a novelist with the publication of his worlwide bestseller The tears of Autumn in 1975 and is the author of nine other critically acclaimed novels, including The Miernik Dossier.

Aus dem Klappentext

On a rainy night in Paris, Paul Christopher's lover Molly Benson falls victim to a vehicular homicide minutes after Christopher boards a jet bound for Vietnam. To explain this seemingly senseless murder, The Last Supper takes its readers back not only to the earliest days of Christopher's life, but also the origins of the CIA in the clandestine operations of the OSS during World War II. Moving seemlessly from tales of refugee smuggling in Nazi Germany, to OSS-coordinated guerilla warfare against the Japanese in Burma, to the confused violence of the Vietnam War, McCarry creates an intimate history of the shadow-world of deceit and betrayal that penetrates the psyches of the men and women who live within it.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

ALSO BY CHARLES MCCARRY

Old Boys

The Tears of Autumn

The Miernik Dossier

The Secret Lovers

The Better Angels

The Bride of the Wilderness

Second Sight

Shelley’s Heart

Lucky Bastard

Copyright

To Rod MacLeish

Molly

In his dream, Paul Christopher, thirteen years old, wore a thick woolen sweater with three bone buttons on the left shoulder. His father’s yawl Mahican was sailing before the wind, her port rail awash in the swelling waters of the Baltic Sea. The weak northern sun was just rising astern, behind the mist that hid the coast of Germany: not the mainland, but the island of Rügen, whose white chalk cliffs rise four hundred feet above the sea. Aboard the yawl, the man the Christophers called the Dandy scampered, quick as a rat, down the ladder into the cabin. Paul’s mother was alarmed. “Our guest is hiding in the picnic basket,” she said. “Ssshhh, every time a secret is told, an angel falls.”

Paul went below and opened the wicker picnic basket. The Dandy crouched inside among the fitted plates and food boxes and thermos bottles. He was striking their guest on the kidneys with a rubber baton and forcing him to eat the buttons from Paul’s sweater. The Dandy wore a Gestapo badge. The guest was dressed as a rabbi; he smelled of the dust of books and of strange food. The Dandy made a sympathetic face to show Paul that he too was disgusted by this alien stench. Then he fed the rabbi another button.

A storm came up. Paul’s father shouted, “Paul, take the helm!” The jib broke loose and they struggled with it; the canvas billowed and snapped in the howling wind. Paul’s mother fell overboard. He dove after her. In the pewter light at the bottom of the shallow sea, among rocks bearded with seaweed, he found his mother’s body with buttons sewn to its eyes.

In a chilly room in Paris, Paul Christopher’s lover, a girl named Molly, kissed his fluttering eyelids. He woke from his dream. Molly sat up in bed. She had beautiful breasts, with large aureoles that were the same color as her unpainted lips. Though it was January and the window was open, she sat for a long moment in the cold draft, looking into Christopher’s eyes, before she pulled the quilt to her chin.

“You spoke in your sleep, in German,” Molly said. “What did you dream? You have such amazing dreams.”

“I was sailing with my parents.”

“Sailing? In Germany?”

“In the Baltic. My mother was drowning.”

“Oh, dear. Did you save her?”

Beneath the covers, Molly shivered. Her skin was cold to the touch. Christopher got out of bed and closed the window. It had begun to rain, the gray cold rain of northern Europe wetting the gray stones of the city.

Molly wrapped herself in the quilt and came to the window. She put her chin on Christopher’s shoulder and spoke into his ear. She was an Australian who had been taught in an English boarding school to speak like an Englishwoman; when she was sleepy, as she was now, her native accent was just discernible, like a thready scar concealed in a wrinkle by a plastic surgeon.

“Did you save her?” Molly asked.

Christopher nodded.

“Good. I was worried that I’d waked you at the wrong moment.”

“At the wrong moment?” Christopher smiled at Molly’s reflection in the windowpane. She dug the point of her chin into the muscle of his shoulder.

“You don’t know that dreams go on after we wake up?” Molly said. “Why should they stop just because they’re interrupted? We can only see the people in our dreams when we’re asleep, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t always there. Perhaps they can see us when we’re awake.”

Molly saw that Christopher wasn’t listening to what she said. He was staring into the street below. Molly followed his gaze. There was little to see: the rain falling through the dim streetlight onto the shiny cobbles, the stubby branches of a plane tree pruned for the winter. The brake lights blinked on a parked Citroen.

“Is that Tom Webster’s man in that car?” Molly asked.

“Yes.”

“Is he really going to guard me all the time you’re gone?”

“It won’t always be the same car or the same man, but the car will always be in that parking place. They’ll blink the brake lights on the hour and the half hour to let you know they’re there.”

“Wonderful Tom. That will buck me up tremendously.”

Molly opened the quilt and put her arms around Christopher from behind, enclosing him in the folds of the coverlet. Her skin was warm now. She stroked his naked back with the length of her own body.

“You have such a sweet body,” she said.

Christopher turned inside the quilt and put his arms around her.

Later, in bed, Molly got to her knees and turned on the lamp. The Japanese, when they paint on silk, sometimes mix pulverized gold into the pigment, so that the depths of the painting will gather light and magnify it. Molly’s auburn hair had this quality. Christopher touched her and smiled. Seeing the male pleasure in his eyes, she shook her head, impatient with her own beauty.

“No,” she said. “Just this once, don’t look at me. Listen.”

“It’s difficult,” Christopher said. The bedroom walls were mirrored and everywhere he looked he saw the reflection of Molly. The whole apartment, borrowed as a hiding place, was mirrored. It was furnished with glass tables and cubical black leather chairs. The vast bed in which Molly and Christopher now lay was circular, like a bed in a movie about a movie star, and the quilt Molly had wrapped around their bodies was a reproduction of a playing card, the jack of hearts. All these images, and especially Molly’s nudity, were reflected from mirror to mirror.

“Your plane leaves in three hours,” Molly said. “I don’t want to send you off in a sad mood, but really, Paul, I’m filled with dread.”

She was very pale. The lamplight shone directly on her face. Christopher had lived with Molly for nearly two years but he had never until this moment seen the faint constellation of freckles on her cheekbones; always before, the surrounding skin had had enough color to conceal them.

“It isn’t just being left alone,” Molly said. “I’m used to that, you’re always going up in smoke right in the middle of things, I hate it.” Molly shuddered and pulled the quilt around her body. “Why does it always have to be so cold in France, so damp?” she asked. “Why is there never any light? It’s like a tomb.”

She heard herself speaking and for a moment the light of amusement came back into her face. She hated melancholia.

“It’s not France, it’s not being left alone,” she explained. “I’ll tell you what it is, Paul. I’m eaten up by suspicion. I suspect you of something.”

Christopher sat up and began to speak.

“Don’t say anything,” Molly said. “Let me finish. I’m going to make a charge against you. If what I suspect is true, I want you to admit it to me. It’s the least you can do.”

Molly cried easily, but usually from happiness. Her eyes were dry now.

“What I suspect is this,” she said. “I think you’re going to go out and get on an airplane in three hours’ time and fly out to bloody...