That was why Wolkowicz had no hard evidence that two of his agents had been flyswatted by the Soviets. He had to rely on intuition, suspicion, patterns of events that were slightly askew. That was sufficient. Often enough in Berlin in 1946, suspicion was reality. Faceless men were trying to kill you. It was prudent to look into every petty detail, to spend the enormous amounts in time and money that it took to live like a paranoiac who had the inexhaustible means to check out all of his delusions.
It was especially wise to suspect the people you had the greatest reason to trust. Hubbard had compelling reasons to trust Friedrich Zechmann. Therefore he had to force himself to be suspicious of him.
Because of his own friendship with Zechmann, Hubbard had let Wolkowicz run this operation without interference; he had not even asked to know Horst Bülow’s true name. To Hubbard, Bülow was Bowstring, an alias buried in the text of a report in Wolkowicz’s safe. Had he heard the true name, he would, of course, have recognized it. Hubbard had not forgotten that Bülow was the Abwehr officer who had warned Otto Rothchild in 1939 to get out of Germany; and Rothchild had got out, aboard Mahican.
“I think you ought to drop this operation,” Hubbard said to Wolkowicz.
“Drop it? Why?”
“Because it’s leading nowhere. Because it’s reckless. There’s too much to lose. We haven’t just penetrated the Zechmann Bureau, we’ve humiliated Zechmann. I thought he’d try to seduce Ilse; in fact, I assumed he’d succeed, he’s always been such a sexual buccaneer.”
Hubbard’s words, delivered in his steady voice, were a blow to Wolkowicz; he was sure his plan would work. But instead of protesting, he made a joke.
“A sexual buccaneer?” Wolkowicz said. “Jesus, Hubbard, now that was a touchdown for Yale. I wish I could talk like that. But I don’t get the part about how we humiliated Zechmann. How did we do that?”
“He fell in love with Ilse.”
“That wasn’t part of the plan.”
“Exactly. His emotions are involved. If he finds out that she’s been using him, that she—or rather, you—have been running him like some little sex-starved clerk, all hell will break loose.”
“He’s not going to find out.”
“Then you’d better stop sleeping with Ilse.”
Wolkowicz had remarkably steady eyes. Now, for the first time in the years that Hubbard had known him, his gaze wavered for a moment. He hadn’t realized that Hubbard knew this secret.
“Zechmann is capable of killing you both,” Hubbard said. “That is the lesser danger. He’s also capable of taking the Zechmann Bureau, intact, over to the other side.”
Wolkowicz raised his hand, like a hardworking boy in a classroom. “You think he hasn’t already done that?” he asked. “Hubbard, think about it. It would be the greatest penetration in history. We think Zechmann’s working for us. We think he’s so great we don’t even bother to do any work on our own. Zechmann becomes U.S. espionage in Berlin. But all the time he’s working for the other side.”
Hubbard closed his eyes for a moment. Wolkowicz saw, in that instant, how tired this man was, how old he was becoming, how little interest he had in this work. All that kept Hubbard Christopher upright was his mad belief that his wife, who had been arrested by the Gestapo more than six years before, was somehow still alive, though ten million other prisoners had been murdered during those years by the Nazis. Briefly, Wolkowicz felt sadness for his chief. Then he felt very uncomfortable. Hubbard had opened his eyes, and there was an expression on his face—not anger, not contempt, not surprise—that Wolkowicz could not read.
“If that sounded crazy I’m sorry,” Wolkowicz said. “You always told me I had freedom of speech.”
Hubbard’s face cleared; he smiled. “You do,” he said. “Zechmann may be a Soviet agent. Anyone may be a Soviet agent. Even you.”
Hubbard smiled deep in his eyes. It was a joke. Wolkowicz knew that; Hubbard found his suspiciousness amusing. It made him uncomfortable just the same. He plunged on, keeping to the subject.
“Then you think I may be onto something?”
“It’s not an untenable theory,” Hubbard said. “I think you’re onto a Soviet operation, all right. I think the Soviets did flyswat your agents. But not for the reasons you stated. I think they want us to think that the Zechmann Bureau is penetrated. I think they hope that we’ll even suspect that Zechmann is their agent and that we’ll stop trusting him, that we’ll get rid of him. They want us to think the Zechmann Bureau is a Soviet operation.”
“Why?” Wolkowicz asked. But he already knew why. He already knew that Hubbard had seen the true pattern of the Soviet operation against the Zechmann Bureau.
“Because Zechmann is hurting them,” Hubbard said. “They couldn’t get control of the Zechmann Bureau, so they want to neutralize it. Think about it. All the raw material for a delusion of treachery is present: Zechmann betrayed his own country during the war by working with me, so why wouldn’t he betray me? We don’t even have the reassurance that Zechmann and his men are Nazis and therefore hostile to communism: Friedrich Zechmann would never have a Nazi in his section, only Wehrmacht staff officers who weren’t interested in politics. If Zechmann looks so innocent, he must be guilty. Therefore we’ll kill off our own best asset. It’s very elegant.”
“You think the Russians are that smart?”
Hubbard looked at Wolkowicz for a long moment. He liked this ugly, brilliant, brave man so much.
“Yes, I do,” he said. “The operation against the Zechmann Bureau is terminated.”
“Today?”
“This moment.”
“You don’t want Ilse to tell Zechmann himself about Bowstring, as long as we’ve gone to all this trouble?”
“No.”
“I think that’s a mistake.”
Hubbard, after his burst of speech, had retreated into his silence again. He picked up his reading glasses and opened a file. He was already thinking about something else; all the interest had drained out of his face.
Wolkowicz rose to his feet and silently left the room. He was overwhelmed by admiration. Of course Hubbard was right—but what a leap of instinct, what effortless powers of the mind had landed him on the answer. Not one man in ten thousand would have been able to see what the Russians were really up to—or, seeing it, have had the courage to risk everything by betting on his own instincts. If Hubbard was wrong, he had just wrecked the American intelligence service in Germany for at least a generation. But Wolkowicz, who had a mind to match Hubbard’s, knew that he was not wrong.
It was amazing how well Hubbard did his job without really being interested in it. He did it with 10 percent of his intelligence. What did he do with the other nine-tenths: write books? dream about his wife? Wolkowicz used every atom of his own ability in everything that he did, every day. He shook his head and laughed, then turned on his heel and went back into Hubbard’s office.
“Sir?”
“Yes, Barney?”
Hubbard wore a look of mild puzzlement: Wolkowicz had never before called him “sir.”
“If we’re through with Ilse, I think I’ll marry her,” Wolkowicz said. “Will you be best man?”
“Of course,” Hubbard replied, pushing back his chair and rising to his enormous height to congratulate his protégé. “Of course.”
Wolkowicz beamed in pleasure.
— 8 —
A month after he returned from the honeymoon in Paris, Wolkowicz burst into Hubbard’s office, still wearing a rain-soaked hat and the British trench coat Ilse had made him buy in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. He was clutching a large stack of eight-by-ten photographs. He clicked his false teeth and gave a mocking smile, a mannerism of his when he was ill at ease.
“Got a minute?” he asked.
“Draw up a pew.”
Hubbard stood up and held out his hand for Wolkowicz’s raincoat. Struggling out of the garment, Wolkowicz passed the photographs from one hand to another as if they were too valuable, or to
o sensitive, to leave unguarded even for an instant. When he sat down again, he held the photographs on his lap.
“Even though we’ve closed down the Zechmann op,” Wolkowicz said, “I kept running Bowstring. The stuff he brings in is mostly garbage, but then it turns out that he has access to captured SS and Gestapo documents—mostly files on dead Germans who were suspected of being politically unsympathetic.”
Wolkowicz had given Horst Bülow a miniature camera and instructed him to photograph the files and deliver the film to him.
“It scared the guy shitless to do this, photographing one file at a time, working his way through the alphabet, but he’s doing it,” Wolkowicz said. “To me, it was just a way to break him in. Last week he got up to the Cs. I gave the film to the lab, but even if you kick their asses it takes them days to develop anything, so I just ten minutes ago picked this up.”
Wolkowicz leaned forward and put the stack of photographs on the edge of Hubbard’s desk. Hubbard had been sitting with his big shoes on the desk. Now, without moving his feet, he leaned across the desk and picked up the photos; they were still a little sticky from the developing bath and he had to peel each successive print away from the one below it. The first sheet was the standard cover page with its secret stamp and file number. Hubbard peeled it away.
The second page read: CHRISTOPHER, Hannelore, born Buecheler.
Above the name was a police photograph of Lori. The quality of the print was not good, but it appeared that Lori had been wearing a striped prison uniform when the picture was made. Her eyes, wide and clear, staring straight into the camera, pierced the fuzzy surface of this blurred photograph.
“Would you like me to leave for a while?” Wolkowicz asked.
“No,” Hubbard said in a calm voice. “Stay.”
He put his feet on the floor and hunched over the file, concentrating deeply. Each page was filled from top to bottom with neat typewritten sentences. Hubbard read each page twice. Finally he lifted his face.
“Did you read this?” he asked in his even tone.
“Just the first couple of pages. When I saw what it was I brought it right in to you.”
“It’s not complete. Part of the file is missing—everything after 1939. This only goes up to her arrest.”
“He must have run out of film. We’ll get the rest of it in the next batch.”
“When?”
“Next Thursday. We have a meeting every other Thursday.”
“It has to be sooner than that. Contact him and tell him to bring the rest tomorrow.”
Nothing about Hubbard had changed, now that he had found what he had been searching for. There was no tremor in his voice, no difference in the way he looked across the desk at Wolkowicz.
“There is no secure way to contact this agent,” Wolkowicz said.
“You don’t have a dead drop, a chalk mark on a wall, any kind of signal for him?
“No. He’s such a zero I never thought it would be necessary to see him in a hurry. I just tell him each time where and when to show up for the next meeting.”
“There must be a way.”
“It will scare the shit out of him. He’s a bundle of nerves. It would have to be a brush contact, on the street.”
“Can you do that yourself?”
“If you want me to. I’d have to catch him on the way to or from work. I’ve never gone into his neighborhood. It could blow the whole thing if I’m seen.”
“Haven’t you been seen with him at all those concerts?”
“We don’t usually sit together. I’ll do it, Hubbard, but if things go wrong, we’ll never see the rest of the file. The Russians will grab him. I know how you feel, but it’s only a week until the next routine contact. It’s better to wait.”
Hubbard cleared his throat. “I’d rather not wait,” he said.
The two men sat in silence for long moments.
“There’s another way,” Wolkowicz said. “Ilse.”
“He knows Ilse?”
“He met her once, remember. She could find some way to talk to him—get on the same streetcar and tell him what we want.”
Wolkowicz looked at his watch.
“If I call her at the office,” he said, “she can probably catch him on his way home from work. But that means talking on the phone.”
Ilse still worked at the Zechmann Bureau. Hubbard pushed his telephone across the desk. Wolkowicz put his hand on the instrument and gave Hubbard a look in which sympathy was mixed with anxiety.
“Are you sure you want me to do this?” he said. “It’s Zechmann’s phone at the other end.”
Hubbard nodded. Wolkowicz cleared his throat, twice. What he was about to do was such a breach of secrecy that he had to force his muscles to disobey the warning signals sent out by his brain in order to make the various parts of his body pick up the receiver, dial the number of the Zechmann Bureau, and tell Ilse, in a tangled web of hint and innuendo that even Hubbard could not follow, to accost Horst Bülow and tell him to come to an emergency meeting. He called Bülow the Music Man. By some miracle of quick wits, Ilse understood who he meant and what he wanted.
— 9 —
Horst Bülow chose the meeting place, a streetcar stop on a broad avenue running through the Wilmersdorf Wood, a point nearly as far from the Soviet Zone as it was possible to get. He set the time at 4:30 A.M., the hour of first light in Berlin in mid-August.
Hubbard and Wolkowicz, riding in the backseat of Hubbard’s car, drove past the rendezvous point at 4:20. There was no sign of the agent. The street was deserted except for an old woman in black who came out of the forest carrying a bristling load of dead twigs slung over her back in a shawl. Hubbard’s driver, a U.S. Army sergeant in civilian clothes, yawned.
“Keep awake, Mitchell,” Wolkowicz said to the sergeant. “Drop me here and turn into the woods. I’ll make the meeting, cross the street, and walk down this way. You watch my every move. If I lift my right arm, even if I only lift it three inches, put the car in gear and pick me up. Got it?”
The sergeant, yawning again, nodded. He smelled of schnapps. Wolkowicz got out of the car. Hubbard got out the other door.
“Are you coming too?” Wolkowicz said.
“I want to talk to him.”
Hubbard got out of the car. He carried an envelope in his hand. Wolkowicz automatically registered this detail.
Wolkowicz hesitated, then set off, walking with his oddly endearing gait, feet slamming into the ground, elbows wagging. Hubbard sauntered along behind. A yellow streetcar, squealing and hissing sparks, stopped a couple of hundred meters up the street and a man got off. It was Bülow. He carried the inevitable briefcase in one hand and a rolled newspaper in the other. The old woman with the load of sticks climbed laboriously onto the platform after Bülow got off; he made no move to help her.
“That’s him,” Wolkowicz said.
The agent was on the opposite side of the street, too far away for his face to be visible, but it was obvious how nervous he was; he darted glances up and down the street and finally shrank into the fringe of the woods.
After the streetcar had passed and Wolkowicz had seen that there was no one aboard as it traveled away from the center of the city, the two Americans stepped off the curb and started to cross the road. Hubbard saw the sun flash on glass, but paid no attention. His eyes were on the agent, who was making a signal to indicate that it was safe to approach.
At that moment, Hubbard recognized Horst Bülow. He was older and thinner, but he was the same man he had known before the war. Out of the corner of his eye, Hubbard saw the sun flash on glass again and then he heard the shriek of tires. The car struck him.
“Jesus!” Wolkowicz said. He began to run, turning his wide face over his shoulder as if to warn Hubbard.
Hubbard saw the envelope fly out of his own hand, spinning. Then it froze in midair, stopped by some mysterious force. Hubbard felt his own body for the last time as it was lifted into the air. The impact ruptured his aorta, an
d in the fraction of a second of life that remained to him, he believed that he was flying. He descended into a beech forest. There was no pain. Freed from the lifelong weight of his long bones, he flew even more swiftly into the chalky light of the German morning.
Wolkowicz, who had leaped out of the way of the Mercedes, watched it turn around, leaning on its springs, and head back toward him. He pulled out his P-38 and, standing with one foot on either side of Hubbard’s fallen body, methodically put all eight rounds through the windshield of the approaching car, into the face of the driver. The car crashed into a tree and began to burn. Wolkowicz, cursing in a steady roar, pulled the dead driver out of the flaming automobile.
Horst Bülow fled through the trees. The sergeant, who had leaped out of the car, fired five shots from a .45 automatic at his darting figure, missing all five times.
Wolkowicz carried Hubbard’s body to his car and loaded it in the back, tenderly arranging the long twisted limbs on the seat.
“Aw, shit,” he sobbed, tears flowing down his face. “Aw shit!”
Refusing all help from the sergeant, Wolkowicz heaved the leaking corpse of the German into the trunk and drove with both dead men to American headquarters, weeping and cursing and fumbling with loose cartridges as he attempted to reload his pistol.
The Last Supper Page 16