The Last Supper

by Charles McCarry

“You got onto kind of a painful subject for old Ilse,” Wolkowicz said. “I should have explained it all to you before this. Her father was an officer in the Waffen SS, on the Russian front. About three months before the war ended, he got in touch and said he wanted to see his wife and daughter. They left Switzerland and came to Berlin to wait for him—bombs and shells falling day and night, the Russians getting closer every day. It’s hard to imagine anyone being that stupid. He never showed up. Ilse’s mother was killed by a Russian shell. The kid was left all alone, with no relatives and very little money. The Russians got to Berlin before Ilse could get out.”

  Wolkowicz paused, embarrassed. Hubbard realized that Wolkowicz was angry at Ilse’s dead mother for leaving her daughter in a burning city that was about to be pillaged by an enemy army. Wolkowicz made himself another Rob Roy. He had an astonishing capacity for liquor, frequently drinking a whole bottle of whisky, mixed with sweet vermouth, in the course of an evening. He never showed the slightest effect.

  “Ilse seems attached to you,” Hubbard said.

  He did not think that Wolkowicz would go on without encouragement, and it was evident that he hadn’t come to the end of the story. Hubbard was sure that Ilse was listening through the door.

  “Yeah. Well, there’s a reason for that,” Wolkowicz said. “Let me tell you how I met her. Right after I got here, I was driving by some woods and I saw this fucking Mongolian coming out of the bushes, grinning and buttoning up his fly. Russian soldiers were trotting into the trees, stumbling over their hard-ons. It was obvious they were having one of their gang rapes. So I parked the car and went into the woods myself. Another Mongolian was just rolling off this German girl. She was lying on the ground on her face. They had pulled her dress up over her head. Two of these Mongolians had hold of her legs, pulling them apart, and two more were sitting on her head. I know the Russians do this all the time. I know I should have left quietly. But instead I kicked the guy who was humping her on his bare ass and pulled out my gun.”

  “How many of them were there?”

  “A dozen or so. Maybe twenty had already passed through the line.”

  “They left her alone when you arrived?”

  “Well, I speak Russian. I explained things to them. I may have fired a couple of shots. I took Ilse to a doctor and then took her home.”

  “The doctor said she was all right?”

  “Physically, yes. It wasn’t as bad as I thought when I saw them coming at her from the rear. That’s just the way they do it. They think they’re horses.

  “She’s okay now. But when you add what happened to her to the fact that her father was probably killed by the Red Army, you can understand why she isn’t crazy about the Russians.”

  Ilse came back into the room. She had been crying. A look came and went in Wolkowicz’s face. Rapid though its passage had been, Hubbard saw it for what it was: love.

  — 5 —

  Friedrich Zechmann had taken Ilse home from Hilde’s. On the way, driving down a ravine between snowy heaps of rubble, the headlights picked up two figures in the shadows. An American soldier, his cap on the back of his head, leaned against a ruined wall, gripping the head of a woman who kneeled in front of him. The woman was trying to break away. After a little struggle, the soldier let her go and slumped against the wall, depleted. The woman scrambled to her feet and turned her haggard face toward the car.

  “Dear God,” Zechmann said. “Margarete.”

  The woman spat and retched and, as the headlights continued to shine in her eyes, covered her face.

  “Who?” Ilse asked.

  “The widow of a brother officer,” Zechmann said, driving on.

  In the days that followed, Zechmann sent his driver to Ilse’s apartment with invitations to concerts, to the theater, to dinner. She accepted one invitation in three. Zechmann offered her food, clothes, coffee, cigarettes; she would accept nothing. Far from going to bed with Zechmann, Ilse would not even kiss him. Her virtue, in a city of rubble in which countesses would fellate American corporals in return for a handful of cigarettes, inflamed Zechmann.

  “Are you a virgin?” he asked Ilse in his mocking way.

  “Of course,” she replied.

  Zechmann went absolutely still. The look of mocking flirtation he had been wearing disappeared from his face and was replaced by an expression of longing. He looked for an instant as if he might weep with joy. He drew air in through his nostrils and when he spoke there was a tremor in his voice.

  “If that’s true, it’s a great triumph in these times,” Zechmann said. “How have you stayed alive in Berlin?”

  “People will always pay to see a curiosity,” Ilse said.

  “This idea that I am a virgin seems to have panicked him sexually,” she told Wolkowicz. “Really, it’s quite pornographic.”

  Zechmann did not lose his head altogether. As Wolkowicz had expected, he investigated the possibility that Ilse was an opposition agent. Zechmann assigned a team to watch her, to search her room. The team found correspondence from the Union Bank of Switzerland in Geneva. The letters from the bank explained how Ilse had managed to preserve her virginity: she had been living on withdrawals from a small account; the money was almost exhausted. Zechmann knew that his moment would come. Very soon, when her Swiss money ran out, Ilse would become a black-market commodity like most of the other women in Berlin.

  Six weeks after Zechmann had met Ilse, she withdrew the last hundred francs from her Geneva account. Zechmann gave her ten days in which to spend the money, and then he asked her to marry him.

  “No,” Ilse said.

  “Why not? Am I really so repulsive?”

  “Not at all, Friedrich. But I want to marry for love, not for self-preservation.”

  “God in heaven, Ilse, don’t you realize that ideas like that are buried under this rubble forever? Do you think that Berlin is a city of romance?”

  “Not buried forever,” Ilse said. “Not for me.”

  They were sitting in Zechmann’s car, a nondescript gray Opel. All around them the smashed stones of Berlin were heaped into hillocks. A few walls still stood, fragments of masonry punctuated by rows of empty windows. It was raining. Under the air raids, Berlin had burned for five years and the last flames had been extinguished only a year before. The fiery smell of the blackened stones, washed up by the rain, filled their nostrils. It was a nauseating odor, like the stench of a burnt carcass.

  Ilse still smelled of roses. Breathing her fragrance, Zechmann imagined a garden filled with delicate pink blossoms, petals velvety to the touch. He seized Ilse and kissed her.

  “No,” she said, twisting her face away.

  Zechmann paid no attention to her protests. Holding her down, squeezing both her biceps with paralyzing strength, throwing a leg across her thrashing ankles, he covered her face with kisses. They were tender kisses, chaste as the kisses of a schoolboy. He wore a long leather coat; it squeaked as he wrestled with Ilse, and she could smell the leather. She stopped struggling and let him kiss her. He went on with it, eyes tightly shut, trembling, as if he were tasting her heart. He stroked her hair, touched her cheeks, traced the line of her jaw with a fingertip. Ilse expected him to fondle her breasts, to force a hand between her legs, but he used only his mouth, and his mouth never left her face. Finally Zechmann released her and stared through the windshield at the black glistening dunes of brick and stone.

  “This has gone out of control,” he said.

  Ilse sat quietly, her hands folded in her lap. At dinner, Zechmann had noticed that her knuckles were a bit chapped; the sight of her reddened flesh had sent a pang through his heart.

  “This is not what I had hoped for, that’s certain,” Ilse said. There was a note of despair in her voice.

  “What had you hoped for?”

  “I’m all out of money. I’d hoped that you’d help me to find work.”

  “Work? What sort of work do you want to do?”

  “Whatever will get the bastards who did
this to Germany,” Ilse said, staring with hate-filled eyes at the rubble.

  “That will take a long time.”

  “I don’t mind. Let me work with you.”

  “I have no work for virgins.”

  Ilse’s face glowed with its angelic smile. She put her hands, small and warm, on either side of Zechmann’s face. He moved his head impatiently. Looking into his eyes, she shook her head. “Be still,” she said. She began to kiss his face in the way in which he had kissed hers. He submitted.

  “Why did you do that?” he asked when she was done.

  Ilse paused. “I felt your love just now,” she said. “Thank you. Good-bye.”

  She opened the car door.

  “Wait,” Zechmann said.

  Ilse strode toward the path in the rubble that led to her room. Zechmann, heels ringing on the cobbles, hurried after her, calling her name, but she closed the door in his face.

  Wolkowicz was waiting for her when she went inside. While they talked in the dark, Ilse stroked the coarse springy hair that grew on his broad chest. She told him what Zechmann had done in the car.

  “Maybe he’s a eunuch,” Wolkowicz said.

  “No,” Ilse said. “He’s a romantic. All cynics are romantics.”

  “Save the epigrams for Zechmann.”

  The next week, Ilse went to work for the Zechmann Bureau as an interpreter. In addition to her fluent French, she spoke fair English and even a little Russian.

  — 6 —

  While Ilse overpowered Zechmann, Wolkowicz recruited an agent from East Berlin, a former captain of the Abwehr who had a minor sidewalk job in the Soviet security apparatus. The agent had no great value, but Wolkowicz developed him with scrupulous care. He had met him at a performance of Die Meistersinger.

  “Thank God for tobacco,” Wolkowicz said to Hubbard afterward. “At the intermission I went outside for a smoke, and in the shadows I spotted these two hungry eyes. ‘Cigarette?’ I said. ‘Jawohl!’ he said.”

  Wolkowicz spoke all foreign languages with a Russian accent; even his English was tinted by his father’s way of speaking the language; he jammed gross English words into the Russian alphabet like a foot into an elegant slipper that was too small for it. Horst Bülow, on hearing Wolkowicz’s accent in German, changed to Russian. He spoke it well, but with the upper-class intonation that the Soviets hated.

  Wolkowicz invited Bülow to join him for supper after the opera. Bülow devoured his steak and fried potatoes and drank Steinhaeger and beer like a man who had just been released from prison. He wore a threadbare suit cut from his Wehrmacht uniform, the cloth dyed black, with bilious green lights in it. Bülow liked to talk; he liked to play the man of culture to an unlettered American.

  “Even in the ruins we Germans have great music played by great musicians,” he said. “Perhaps you should get some ruins in America so that you can have music, too.”

  Wolkowicz invited Bülow to a Mozart recital the following week. After that concert he gave him a ticket for The Magic Flute the following week; Bülow, sitting next to Wolkowicz with a whole carton of cigarettes on his lap, laughed like a giddy girl at the antics of Papageno.

  “I am a student of conspiracy,” said Bülow over dinner, discussing the Masonic rituals in the libretto. “To be successful over the long term, a cabal must have a religious basis—Mithraism, the Jesuit Order, Freemasonry.”

  “Communism?”

  “Of course. There is great religiosity in all political movements, especially revolutionary political movements.”

  “That was true of the Nazis too, would you say?”

  Bülow looked about him with quick birdlike turns of the head. It was a small restaurant that Wolkowicz had taken him to, another cave in the ruins, with only five or six tables. The owner had recognized Bülow when he came in, Bülow had seen it in his eyes; the man had worked before the war at the Jockey Club, one of Bülow’s favorite places. It was gone now, of course.

  “Excuse me, please,” Bülow said. “I will talk about anything but the Nazis.”

  “All right. What’s it like, working for the Russians?”

  “Maddening. They are not a nation of watchmakers, the Russians. They do everything with a sledgehammer.”

  Without preamble, in a loud voice, Wolkowicz asked Bülow to bring him a document in Russian. Bülow’s eyes flickered over the room again, looking for signs that Wolkowicz’s grating voice had been overheard.

  “I can’t possibly do that,” Bülow said in a startled whisper.

  “I don’t mean a secret document,” Wolkowicz bellowed. “It can be anything—rip a notice off the bulletin board.”

  “Why would you want such a thing?”

  Wolkowicz put a forkful of food into his mouth and talked as he chewed. “Humor me,” he said. He wanted it for the simplest of reasons: if Bülow would steal even the smallest thing from his masters, on Wolkowicz’s orders, and accept money for it, then Wolkowicz would be his new master. It was the first step. Bülow knew it was the fatal step. He drank his Steinhaeger and his eyes watered.

  After the next concert, Bülow gave him a paper typewritten in Russian. It was an exhortation to the workers of liberated Germany to fulfill their work norms for the last quarter of 1946. Wolkowicz chuckled as he read it.

  “Great stuff,” he said. “Let me pay you for your trouble.”

  Bülow waved away the fifty-mark note, two weeks’ salary for him.

  “No, no—take it,” Wolkowicz said.

  Bülow put the money in his pocket and excused himself. He was urinating into the foul toilet, in the open air behind the restaurant, when Wolkowicz came up behind him.

  “While you’re doing that,” Wolkowicz said, “sign this.”

  Reaching around Bülow, he handed him a slip of paper and a pen. The paper was a receipt for fifty marks. Bülow hesitated, then signed the paper.

  “Write For Information above your signature,” Wolkowicz said.

  Bülow, his flaccid penis hanging out of his unbuttoned fly, felt embarrassed and vulnerable. It seemed more important to cover his flesh than to resist Wolkowicz’s outrageous command. He signed.

  “Now,” said Wolkowicz, “one more thing. Just ink your thumb on this stamp pad and put your thumbprint on the receipt.”

  Again Bülow did as he was told, then scrubbed his inky thumb against his trousers.

  Wolkowicz patted him on the shoulder. “Here’s a ticket for the Haydn concert on the twelfth,” he said. “Bring the telephone directory for your section with you.”

  “The telephone directory! That’s very dangerous. They regard telephone directories as state secrets. It’s impossible, what you ask.”

  “Nothing is impossible, Horst,” Wolkowicz said. “I want you to remember that.”

  — 7 —

  Wolkowicz had identified two men inside the Zechmann Bureau who were possible Soviet agents. Ilse had no trouble making friends with either of them. Her beauty would have been enough by itself to attract them. But, as Wolkowicz told Hubbard, she had something more.

  “When you add to her looks the fact that Zechmann is crazy about her,” Wolkowicz said to Hubbard, “you’ve got a great aphrodisiac working for you. Everyone wants to be pals with the boss’s girl friend.”

  Ilse made no secret of her friendship with Hubbard. She even made a gentle joke of Wolkowicz, saying that he had begun to court her. Explaining that they were presents from Wolkowicz, Ilse brought nylon stockings, candy bars, round tins of American coffee into the office and distributed them to the other girls.

  “This American leaves treasure on my doorstep while I’m out,” Ilse explained. “He’s such a clumsy bear! He wants me to go to a Haydn concert with him. He plays the piano—Chopin, everything, to entertain me when I visit Christopher. I think I’ll go.”

  “Go? With an Ami?” one girl said. “With that Ami?”

  “He’s really rather sweet.”

  “Beauty and beast.”

  Horst Bülow came to the
concert, too. Wolkowicz pretended to have got the dates mixed up. He introduced his agent to Ilse, using a false name for her but identifying Bülow, who twitched in fear at the sound of it, by his true name. Bülow left the concert hall midway through the last selection. On his empty seat, after the lights came up, Wolkowicz found a thin mimeographed telephone directory, wrapped in a sheet of grease-stained paper.

  Next day, at morning coffee, Ilse shared a chocolate bar with the first of the two possible Soviet agents inside the Zechmann Bureau. Giggling, Ilse described Horst Bülow and the package he had left on his theater seat.

  “Evidently Wolkowicz meets this amazing spy at the concert every other Thursday,” Ilse said, making a gay joke.

  This information planted, Wolkowicz waited to see if Bülow would be flyswatted. Two concerts went by. Bülow arrived in safety and left in peace. Each time, trembling, he signed a receipt for the trifling sums that Wolkowicz paid him in return for the useless routine material that he had copied from the files.

  “There’s not even any surveillance on him,” Wolkowicz told Hubbard. “The first guy must be clean. It’s time for Ilse to tell the other guy.”

  “How are you going to prevent these people from killing your agent?” Hubbard asked.

  “Prevent them? I don’t want to prevent them. He’s not an agent; he’s bait. If I can shove him out of the way of the death car, I will. But the whole idea is that they will kill him. Then we’ll know who to kill.”

  Ilse confided her knowledge about Horst Bülow to the second suspect in the Zechmann Bureau. The results were the same. No attempt was made on Bülow’s life.

  “That doesn’t mean that the Zechmann Bureau isn’t penetrated,” Wolkowicz said. “I know fucking well it is, Hubbard. All it means is that we’ve got the wrong suspects.”

  Hubbard was not so sure. As the operation had unfolded, Hubbard had grown more skeptical of it. There had never been a shred of evidence that anyone in the Zechmann Bureau had betrayed Wolkowicz’s murdered agents. Their deaths might even have been bona fide traffic accidents, unlikely as that seemed. In espionage there wasn’t usually any evidence of anything. Those who committed crimes in this world were not criminals, they were government servants. In the real world, a murderer will leave clues because his mind is clouded by passion or fear, because he lacks the money to obtain suitable weapons, because there is no place to hide. Usually he is alone—nobody has taught him the proper way to murder a man, nobody has gone over his plan for the crime, pointing out flaws, suggesting a better technique; he feels remorse, guilt, shame, self-disgust: he is an outcast; imprisonment is a relief. The man who kills at the orders of an intelligence service has none of these practical or psychological problems: in committing a murder that in other circumstances would be regarded as the work of a psychopath, he has done his country a service and his country pays him, gets rid of the murder weapon, and folds him in its maternal embrace.