The Last Supper (21 page)

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.

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
too 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
C
s. 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.”