The Last Supper

by Charles McCarry

  The elevator carrying the woman was still in the shaft. It was slow. The whole building had been made on the cheap. Wolkowicz could heard Muzak, tinny strains of “The Merry Widow Waltz,” as the door opened ten floors below. The service elevator was already on his floor; the woman had pushed both buttons and both cars had responded. As he went down, listening to Franz Lehár, Wolkowicz saw himself in the convex mirror in the corner of the car and realized that he had not put in his false teeth. The snout of a television camera, part of the building’s security system, pointed at him. He turned his back and buttoned up the raincoat.

  Through the plate-glass wall that formed the front of the lobby, Wolkowicz saw that the woman had gone outside. She was looking up and down the wide thoroughfare for a cruising taxi. She spotted one, a miracle at this hour of the day, and went up on tiptoe and waved to it. The cab stopped on the other side of the street. She was wearing a belted raincoat—a Burberry, she was as conscious of style as Wolkowicz was oblivious to it—and from the back, as she ran into the street, she seemed as slim and as supple as a girl of twenty.

  As she ran through the slush, mincingly on her high heels, a man on the other side of the street watched her. Wolkowicz had not seen him at once; he couldn’t understand how he had missed him. Wolkowicz went outside, to get a better look at the stranger. It was six o’clock in the morning—too early for anyone to be there for an honest purpose.

  Now the woman was halfway across the street. With a brisk gesture, the man raised a rolled newspaper, as if he himself were signaling for a taxi. Fifty feet down the street, a car pulled away from the curb and accelerated through the wet snow, skidding and swerving.

  “No!” Wolkowicz shouted, saliva flying out of his toothless mouth. “No! God damn it, no!”

  He leaped down the steps, drawing his P-38. He called the woman’s name. She heard him and turned. In the same instant, she saw the car bearing down on her. She covered her eyes like a frightened child.

  Wolkowicz fell to his knees and leveled his pistol at the car. Before he could fire, the driver hit the brakes and the car skidded sideways, sending up a huge sheet of slush. The car spun completely around and came to a stop. A man leaped out and leveled a machine pistol at Wolkowicz’s head. Wolkowicz, who automatically identified the weapon as a Kulspruta, and the man as Horace Hubbard, laid down his P-38.

  Two more cars pulled up, forming a pen around the woman, who lay on the pavement. She was unhurt, but in her fright she crawled a foot or two through the melting dingy snow, then stopped where she was, on her hands and knees. Her eyes were fixed on the man with the newspaper, who had stepped off the curb and was walking toward her.

  He dropped the newspaper and helped her to her feet. Her wonderful slow smile melted her ice-blue eyes. He had always been so good-looking, so quiet, so clever. She had always liked him, always admired him. Though she knew he was her mortal enemy, and that a kinder man would have killed her, would have killed Wolkowicz, rather than humiliate them in this way, she was glad to see him, glad that he had lived through everything.

  “Paul!” said Ilse Wolkowicz. “It’s true what Barney told me: you haven’t changed at all. No one but you could have done this. My German boy!”

  She leaned her head on Christopher’s shoulder. He breathed in the refreshing scent of her rose perfume.

  Twelve

  — 1 —

  The safe house in the Virginia woods was fitted out to resemble a gracious home: chintz slipcovers on the furniture, racing prints and watercolor landscapes on the walls. A log fire burned cheerily in the fireplace.

  Wolkowicz sat on a sofa, huddled inside Christopher’s raincoat. On a facing sofa, Patchen sat motionless, chalky with fatigue. He put his head back and closed his good eye. Wolkowicz cleared his throat, loudly. Patchen opened his eye and looked with distaste on the steaming cup of coffee on the low table between the sofas.

  “I’m overcome with curiosity,” Wolkowicz said. “How did you tail me?”

  He glared at Patchen, as if he, Wolkowicz, were the captor and Patchen the prisoner, brought here for interrogation. Patchen did not respond. Ilse pointed a finger, immaculately manicured, at Christopher. Comprehension dawned in Wolkowicz’s watchful eyes. He snapped his fingers.

  “The raincoat,” he said. “It was the fucking raincoat.”

  Wolkowicz leaped to his feet and took off the coat. This left him naked to the waist. There were many white hairs in the black mat on his chest and back and many puckered scars, mementos of the wounds he had suffered in Burma, where the hair did not grow at all. He ran his hands over the material of the coat. He felt something in the hem and, with a wringing motion of his powerful hands, ripped out the threads. A transmitter, no larger than a cuff button, fell onto the table. Wolkowicz didn’t bother to examine it: it was, to him, a familiar object.

  “I’m proud of you,” he said to Christopher.

  Without his teeth, Wolkowicz’s voice was different—thinner, less sure.

  Patchen said, “Would you just like to tell us everything, Barney? It would save time.”

  Wolkowicz put on the raincoat and buttoned it up. He ignored Patchen.

  “Are you cold, darling?” Ilse asked.

  “Naw—I’ve got my best friend’s coat on,” Wolkowicz replied. He grinned. His empty mouth looked like an exit wound, clotted with dried black blood. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to tell you, Patchen,” he said. “Nothing. Not a fucking thing.”

  Patchen nodded and stood up. “Then I’ll leave you to say good-bye to Paul,” he said. “Take all the time you need.”

  He went out. Two men, armed with machine pistols, stood guard outside the door. It was the only exit; there were no windows. They were in a cellar.

  “I wish I had my fucking teeth,” Wolkowicz said to Christopher. He drank Patchen’s coffee and stared into the bottom of the upturned cup. Christopher had never seen these mannerisms before.

  “Now,” Wolkowicz said, “besides catching me in bed with my wife, what do you and One-Eye think you’ve got on me?”

  Christopher had been holding a manila envelope on his lap. He opened it, removed the photograph he had brought back from London, and handed it to Wolkowicz. Holding it at arm’s length, Wolkowicz examined it. He snorted and shook his head.

  “There we are,” he said, “the sweet girl graduates.”

  He handed the photograph to Ilse.

  “That’s you and Robin,” she said. “You were both so skinny. Was this your pagoda in Burma?”

  “And some of our friends. Notice the Jap, third from the left,” Wolkowicz said in a conversational tone.

  The severed head of a Japanese, driven onto a stake, stood in the second row between two grinning Chinese guerrillas. The decapitated Japanese wore round spectacles over his wide-open dead eyes.

  “That’s a flower from the bamboo Darby’s got in his hand,” Wolkowicz said. “He couldn’t believe his luck. It only blooms every forty years, and Darby, the world’s greatest flower lover, was there when it happened.”

  With a grease pencil, Christopher drew a ring around Gus’s head. Carelessly, Wolkowicz looked at it.

  “Gus,” Christopher said.

  The guerrilla standing to the right of the severed head was unmistakably Gus; even as a young man he had had the wrinkled wry face of second childhood.

  For the space of six breaths, Wolkowicz lifted his eyes and looked straight at Christopher. Finally he said, “He hasn’t changed a hell of a lot, has he?”

  “True name?”

  “He never told me,” Wolkowicz said. “By 1944 he was already using a funny name. Wang is what we called him in the jungle. I don’t know what they call him in China these days.”

  “You kept in touch with him all these years?”

  “We were good buddies.”

  “Darby taught him English?”

  “Darby was a great one for improving the working class. His Chinks all sounded like him, cockneys. I suppose you noticed Gus’s a
ccent. Is that what blew everything?”

  “Darby recruited you in Burma.”

  Wolkowicz waved a hand in dismissal. The answer was so obvious, he seemed to be saying, that it was a waste of time to reply. He leaped to a more interesting subject.

  “Darby’s Chinks were really something,” he said. “After we killed some Japs, they’d cut off all the heads and chop off all the balls. Then they’d slit ’em open and rip out the livers. It was like the Seven Dwarfs—‘Whistle While You Work.’ They’d put the heads on stakes, fling the bodies into the brush, light fires, and have a barbecue on Jap liver—”

  Christopher interrupted. “What was the reason, Barney?” he asked.

  “What reason?” Wolkowicz looked at him without guilt or remorse. He remembered his reason for becoming a traitor exactly, and forty years afterward it made him smile.

  “Waddy Jessup shot an elephant,” he said. “That pissed me off.”

  Even though Christopher gave no sign that he was going to speak, Wolkowicz held up a hand for silence.

  “You don’t believe a fucking thing I tell you, do you?” he asked.

  Christopher did not answer. Wolkowicz closed his eyes. Ilse, stumbling over the low table and Christopher’s feet, moved onto the sofa beside him and took his hand. She gazed anxiously into Wolkowicz’s face.

  Wolkowicz opened his eyes and stared at Christopher. Tugging hard, he took his hand away from Ilse, and when she fumbled for it, put it out of reach between his crossed thighs.

  “Okay,” he said to Christopher. “You finally know everything. You tell me.”

  “This is what I think happened,” Christopher said. “Waddy Jessup ran away in Burma and left you to the Japanese. Darby rescued you and while your wounds healed, the two of you talked. Did you speak to each other in Russian?”

  Wolkowicz snorted, pleased, as always, with Christopher’s intuition. “I couldn’t have described what happened in English,” he said.

  “You wanted to get Waddy. Darby showed you a way to do that.”

  Wolkowicz sat up and shrugged inside the raincoat. He was intensely interested. “Go on,” he said.

  “You blackmailed Waddy into recommending you for a permanent job as a civilian and he gave you a letter to my father. In Berlin, the Soviets picked you up. They fed you information, they gave you agents. They wanted to establish a reputation for you, fast. The agents were always unwitting. Horst Bülow thought that he really was working for U.S. intelligence. My father admired you, but something made him suspicious. What was it?”

  “Zechmann.”

  “Friedrich Zechmann was a German, always and only a German,” Ilse interrupted. “Hubbard didn’t mind if Friedrich worked for Germany as long as he shared with America; working for Germany frightened the Russians.”

  Wolkowicz shushed her. “The Russians wanted to make Hubbard suspicious of Zechmann. They wanted to make him think Zechmann was a Soviet asset. It was hopeless. Your father saw through it.”

  “But he trusted you.”

  Wolkowicz grunted and slumped. “You didn’t know your father. He smelled it on me right from the start.”

  “So you killed him.”

  Startled by the hatred in Christopher’s face, Ilse took Wolkowicz’s hand again. He submitted to her sympathy, but his eyes never left Christopher’s.

  “No,” he said. “It wasn’t me. But we can come back to that.”

  Christopher nodded and went on.

  “After Berlin, you asked for duty in Washington. You told the Director that you thought the Outfit might be penetrated. With the help of the Russians, you worked up the Addressees spy case. There was no espionage ring led by Mordecai Bashian, even though Bashian himself thought there was. The Russians set him up, had him circulate garbage and run fake agents. In order to do it, in order to hold up under questioning when he was caught, he had to believe that he was a master spy. Jocelyn Frick was just frosting on the cake: the usual Russian love of dirty pictures for blackmail purposes. The purpose of the operation was to throw some American romantics, Party members and fellow travelers, to the witch-hunters and let them burn in public. The smoke hid the Soviets’ real assets in the United States. Is that substantially correct?”

  Wolkowicz nodded. He was smiling in admiration.

  “Did you jail Waddy just for revenge, for what happened in Burma?” Christopher asked.

  Wolkowicz nodded pleasantly. As Christopher guessed his secrets, he felt at peace, like a man surrendering to an anesthetic. It was no surprise to him that Christopher knew so much. The facts of his betrayal had been lying around in plain sight for years. He had been living among blind men; it was a relief to be in the company of someone who could see.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “Vienna.”

  “Ah, Vienna,” Ilse said, lowering her eyes.

  “It was a disinformation operation,” Christopher said. “The Russians didn’t just know about it, they set it up. It succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They couldn’t believe that the Americans and the British could be so stupid as to believe that the Russians wouldn’t know that there were fifty people and ten code machines in an abandoned sewer, twenty-five feet below the soles of their boots. It went so well, the Outfit and the Brits fell for it so completely, that the Russians thought it was an American operation against them—that we were just pretending to believe all that crap they were feeding us.”

  Wolkowicz was enjoying himself. He looked at the ceiling for a moment, savoring a hilarious memory.

  “You’re right,” he said. “They couldn’t believe it. But that wasn’t the main reason. They couldn’t stand the expense. They had to invent a lot of lies for us to bug, and that took more and more personnel. They had half the fucking KGB in Vienna, staying up all night, writing fictitious cables for us to intercept. It busted their disinformation budget. ‘What the fuck do you guys think you’re doing with all those rubles?’ Moscow kept saying. Also, they were scared shitless, because a certain amount of the traffic had to be genuine. They were smart enough to check that in Washington—just barely. Somebody had to decide every day which real Russian secrets to send out over the bugged lines. Nothing important was ever transmitted, but you can get your goddamned head blown off in Russia twenty years after you’ve made a mistake. It gave them the shits.”

  Wolkowicz, in his contempt for bureaucrats, did not discriminate between Russians and Americans. In his experience, one was as stupid and as blind as the other.

  “The Outfit and the Brits wanted to believe the Sewer was for real. Wanted to? Shit, they had to. It made them look so fucking good they couldn’t resist it. ‘What a coup!’ That’s what they said around the Fool Factory.”

  He searched Christopher’s face for a sign that he agreed with him on this point.

  But Christopher wanted to stick to the subject. “So the Russians decided to terminate our operation and didn’t know how to do it,” he said. “They thought up the affair between Ilse and Darby.”

  Ilse blushed. “Even though it was a fake, I was scandalized,” she said. “It was such a charade. Do you remember Darby and me kissing in St. Anton where you and Rosalind could see us? So disgusting. You were so shocked, Paul! What a good friend to Barney you were. But you didn’t tell him. My God, the trouble that caused!”

  Ilse’s hands fluttered as if to cover another blush, but her face was dead white. Without her makeup, she resembled an actress who, after giving the performance of her life, takes off her greasepaint and is, at last, free to be herself.

  “It wasn’t the Russians who pulled off the fake kidnapping in Vienna,” Christopher said. “Barney wasn’t going to give them Ilse as a hostage. He used his own men. Afterward, Ilse went fictitious. The two of you lived together in secret. Ilse went everywhere, in secret, on false papers.”

  “Berlin, Saigon, Paris, always hiding, always a new place. It was so expensive, even the Russians complained. But I liked being invisible to everyone except Barney. It’s kept our mar
riage alive.”

  She gave Wolkowicz her lovely smile. With curious gentleness, he put a hand on her head and stroked her hair. It was dyed golden blond, blonder even than its color in Ilse’s youth. It was very odd to see his tenderness. It lasted only for an instant. He let go of her and crooked a finger at Christopher, beckoning the next words out of his mouth.

  “Darby,” Christopher said.

  Wolkowicz looked into the fireplace. A broad smile formed on his face.

  “Tell me what you think happened,” he said.

  Even Ilse was grinning, her mistake with Stephanie forgotten; she was happy again.

  “Darby was blown anyway, finished,” Christopher said. “The Brits were after him. Even Patchen told me at the time he knew about him. The Russians decided to let you catch a big Soviet spy. It was an operation, one more thing to build up your reputation as a Communist killer. To make you even more trustworthy.”

  Wolkowicz laughed in pure delight at the cleverness of Christopher’s mind.

  “You really did have time to think in China,” he said. “The Russians panicked again. Some defector—a real one, not one of their plants—knew about Darby. Robin was tired. He wanted to retire and work on his botany, so he said—Darby said, not the Russians—let Wolkowicz catch me. Why not turn a bad situation into a gain for our side?”

  “The Russians didn’t mind the publicity?”

  “They were going to get publicity anyway. The Brits were right behind Darby. So was Patchen. It was a hell of a job, beating them to it. Patchen didn’t want to let me do it—the Brits complained to him that I was trying to embarrass them. That’s why I had to use Foley.”

  “He didn’t know about the Brits?”

  “Foley? Who’d tell Foley anything? Everybody was happy in the end except the Brits. The Russians had outsmarted the capitalists, Foley had made political points, I got another decoration, and so did you. And Darby got to cultivate his orchids in the Crimea.”