She wanted to look at Canova’s nude Pauline Bonaparte and the Caravaggios before lunch. “Just those two things, Paul,” she said as she made their plans. “You needn’t look so suspicious.” Molly could spend hours looking at painting and sculpture. “There are museum guards all over Europe who think you’re in love with them, the way you hang about,” Christopher told her. “Then you know?” Molly said. “Chaps with sore feet in dusty uniforms make me go all funny.”
“Do you love me, now that you admit it, for my mind or for my body?” Molly had asked when he returned from Washington. Christopher could not separate the two. When he entered her, he felt himself grasped not so much by her flesh as by her idea of herself. Naked, she was as comic as a child; that was what had surprised him the first time he had her. He had imagined that she would be a solemn lover, but she laughed when she opened her legs, as if pleasure were a joke she played on life. They looked into each other’s face when they made love, smiling and chuckling.
Now, as she came toward him, holding her hair in the December wind, he felt a smile pulling at his face, and when they kissed, he laughed. Christopher had a strange loud laugh that he could not control; strangers turned their heads when it exploded.
“Ah,” Molly said, “I’ve just come from feeding a poor caged thing like you.”
When the museum closed at two o’clock, they walked to a restaurant, and because it was Thursday, ate gnocchi and bollito misto.
Molly ordered a spiced pear and said, “Why does food seem so romantic when one’s having a love affair? If I ate this much in a state of innocence, I’d weigh two hundred pounds.”
When she had come back from Siena, she had moved into his apartment; she bought vases and filled them with roses and carnations. She put his books in alphabetical order, novels on one set of shelves, poetry on another, general works on a third.
Molly said she had driven Cathy’s ghost out of Christopher’s bed. “Did you really not mind the way she put horns on you?” she asked.
“Yes, I minded, until I saw her reason,” Christopher said. “She knew more about my life than you do, Molly. Cathy was a gloomy woman. Maybe she wanted an existence that was as corrupt as she thought mine to be. It wasn’t love, but it was the best she could do, to go down the way she thought I was going.”
They were in bed, with Molly’s candles burning on all the tables in the room. “I know nothing about your life-are you all that bad when you’re away?” she asked.
“I never was, but when I was younger I had a tendency to melancholy,” Christopher said. “I’d return from Lagos, still seeing the lepers catching coins in their mouths like dogs because their fingers had fallen off, and I’d betray a certain sadness. Cathy thought she knew another reason for my mood.”
Molly lay still in the moving light. “Black girls?” she asked.
“That was the least of it,” Christopher replied.
“It must have been your bloody silence,” Molly said. “Have you any love for me when you’re away, or does it start when you see me and end when your plane takes off?”
Christopher took a candle off the bedside table and held it up so that both their faces were in the light. “If I love you, Molly, it’s because you’ve never been with me in all those places,” he said. “I won’t tell you, I won’t take you. That part of it isn’t life.”
A tear ran down her cheek. He had never seen her cry before.
“I never thought there was any love in you at all,” she said, “and now that you say there is, I want it all.”
He blew out the candle. Molly drew his arm around her body, put her wet face in the hollow of his neck, and went to sleep.
2
The following morning, Molly came back from the post office with Patchen’s letter. Christopher looked at the sterile envelope with his name and address typed on it and knew the sender: the characters that fell on the left side of the typewriter keyboard were fainter than the others. Once, as a joke, he had advised Patchen to get an electric machine to conceal these traces that his letters were typed by a man with one arm weaker than the other. He sent Molly out of the room and opened the envelope. On a sheet of cheap paper were typed two lines from one of Christopher’s old poems.
Death fell breathless behind us in our war-struck youth, and winning that race, we lost our chance at truth.
Below this, Patchen had typed: “PSRunner/22XI63/UBS (G).”
The note was unsigned. Christopher put it in his pocket, lifted the phone, and made a reservation on the noon plane to Geneva.
Christopher was not known at the Union de Banques Suisses in Geneva, but they were used to strangers there. He told a clerk that he wished to discuss a numbered account, and he was taken into an office where a bald Swiss sat behind a bare desk. Swiss banks have a churchly atmosphere; Christopher judged from the furnishings in the bald man’s office that he was the equivalent of a bishop. The man rose from a chair with a high carved back and shook hands, but did not smile.
“There is a numbered account here for me, recently opened, I believe,” Christopher said.
“Will you state the number and the name, please?”
“It is 22X163,” Christopher said, “and the name is P. S. Runner.”
“One moment.” The bald man unlocked a file and extracted a large card; he centered it on the polished surface of the desk before him and looked expectantly at Christopher.
“Do you require a signature?” Christopher asked.
“No, monsieur. Our instructions are to pay on demand, but you must furnish the second of two lines of verse.”
Christopher quoted the line from Patchen’s letter.
“It’s in order,” the bald banker said. “Do you wish to make a withdrawal?”
“What is the current balance?”
“A deposit of $100,000 has been made-that is, Swiss francs 432,512.65. You may have any amount, in either currency.”
“Please give me twenty-five thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills, and five thousand Swiss francs in hundred-franc notes.”
The banker wrote on a form and pressed a bell. In a moment, a messenger returned with two long buff envelopes. The banker counted the money rapidly, sealed the envelopes, and handed them to Christopher. “Your balance is now $73,865.74,” he said. “When you call for more funds, you may come directly to this office without asking the huissier. It’s more discreet.”
Christopher nodded and put the envelopes in his breast pocket. Outside in the rue du Rhone he saw a man in a tweed Brooks Brothers overcoat limping through the crowd and thought for an instant that it might be Patchen. His letter bore a Swiss postmark, so he might have carried the cash to Geneva himself. Christopher followed the limping man for a block or two before he got a clear glimpse of his face, which was whole and handsome.
At a garage near the railroad station, Christopher rented a car with French license plates. There were no identity controls at the French frontier for motor traffic. The weather in northern Europe was already turning bad, and he drove over the Jura through fog and sleet. He did not want to leave any traces of himself on paper in France, so he did not stop at a hotel. He drove all night and arrived in Paris before the morning traffic had begun to move. He parked the car behind the horse barns at Longchamps and slept for three hours in the back seat. When he awoke, he touched the envelopes with Patchen’s money in them.
3
It took Christopher half the day to learn the telephone number of Nguyen Kim.