Free The Last Supper by Charles McCarry

basket and poured a hot drink from a thermos. It
was coffee instead of the usual chocolate, as Paul had not been expected. When Paul had finished his drink, Lori sent him below with food and a hot drink for Zaentz. He sat on a bunk, a blanket
wrapped around his bare torso. The hair on his chest and shoulders was white, too, and as thick as his spade beard.
    “You’re quite a swimmer,” Zaentz said, sipping coffee and eating bread and sausage. “Weren’t you afraid, swimming out to the boat?”
    The question surprised Paul. He had known that he could swim to the boat. He had also known that, if he missed the boat, he would never be found. “Control, control,” Paulus was
always saying. “Do only what you know you can do. When you’re afraid, it’s because you have gone beyond your capabilities.” Swimming to the boat, Paul had had the
flashing light and the cliffs to guide him, and he swam as naturally as he walked. Even at the age of twelve, Paul knew that it was useless to explain oneself. He had never been afraid. He smiled
at Zaentz. The artist, who had always liked him, pulled off Paul’s knitted cap and ruffled his hair.
    Mahican dropped anchor off Falster just as dawn was beginning to show. Zaentz came on deck for the first time since they had sailed from Rügen.
    “I heard the anchor go down,” he said. “Is this Denmark?”
    “It is,” Lori said.
    Zaentz had always been full of jokes. But now he was weeping behind the tinted lenses of his round steel spectacles.
    Just before the Christophers had left Berlin for Rügen that summer, Zaentz had come to the apartment in Charlottenburg, bringing all his pictures with him. When Paul woke in the morning,
Zaentz’s pictures, dozens of them, were strewn around the apartment, propped up on the furniture, leaning against the walls. Except for the drawing of Lori during her pregnancy, the pictures
were brutal caricatures of German faces twisted by greed or lust or hatred.
    “Why is the one of Mutti so much like her?” Paul had asked.
    “The others are like themselves also,” Zaentz replied. “I draw what I see.”
    Aboard Mahican , he hugged Lori long and hard and kissed her repeatedly.
    “I’ll never forget,” he said.
    Lori patted his bearded face. “It will be over soon,” she said.
    Zaentz shook his head. The gesture was like a shudder.
    Hubbard brought the dinghy alongside and Zaentz climbed in. Hubbard pulled the cord on the dinghy’s motor and headed for shore. It was low tide, and Paul watched through the boat’s
binoculars as Zaentz walked over the wet sandy beach, strewn with kelp, and then climbed the dunes and disappeared. He was wearing a rucksack. At the crest of the dunes, he turned and waved, first
at Hubbard, who waited in the bobbing dinghy just offshore, and then to Lori and Paul aboard Mahican .
    Lori, standing behind Paul, wrapped her arms around him. The morning star was bright above the sun.
    “Put down the glasses,” she said. “Look at the morning star.”
    The east grew brighter. Lori put her cheek next to Paul’s. “Paul,” she said, “you know that Zaentz is a secret, don’t you?”
    Paul nodded. He looked toward shore again; the footprints Zaentz had left as he walked over the wet beach were clearly visible.
    “Good,” Lori said. She kissed his ear and turned his face toward the rising sun; she hadn’t done such a thing since he was a small child.
    The first crescent of the sun was pushing above the tundra. The morning star grew dimmer. Then it vanished. Lori tightened her embrace.
    “An angel has died,” she said. “That’s what my mother used to tell me when the morning star went out.”
    When they returned to Berwick, Paulus was waiting for them.
    “The Dandy has been here,” he said. “He brought these.”
    The clothes Lori and Zaentz and Paul had left on the beach, hidden in the crevice in the cliff, lay on a table in the hall.
    “I told him you often swam from the cliffs,” Paulus said.