The Last Supper (56 page)

“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 accent. 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
marriage 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.”

“You gave him the poison to kill his guards?”

Wolkowicz hesitated, then shrugged. What did it matter?

“You were there when I did it,” he said.

“It was concealed in the book?”

“
The Manchurian Candidate
. Two needles, in the binding. The Russians are big on poison and books that shoot people and all that crap. It made Darby laugh, but it got him out of
jail.”

“You liked Darby?”

Wolkowicz was genuinely astonished by the question. “
Liked
him?” he said. “Yeah, I liked him. Darby and your father and you—those are the people I’ve liked
in my life. Until today, Darby was the only one who knew me. That was a problem for me. Stop talking, Paul. You don’t need to know anything else about my career. I want to explain two things,
then we’d better call Patchen.”

Ilse looked anxiously into Wolkowicz’s face and took his hand again, massaging the hairy back, the swollen knuckles.

“I set up your father,” Wolkowicz said. “You know that. You knew it as soon as Graham put that shit about the way he died on the air. The file on your mother was a fake. The
Russians put it together. It was the one sure way to hook Hubbard. He was so goddamned smart it was almost impossible to neutralize him. There was only one subject on which he was not
intelligent—your mother. He wouldn’t believe that she was dead. I’m sorry, Paul, but that’s the way it was. I planted the file on him, I set up the meeting with Bülow;
he was supposed to bring the rest of the Gestapo file on your mother. We said the file had turned up in stuff the Russians had captured. That was the bait.”

Wolkowicz talked in a steady, clear voice, without hesitation. He was reciting facts, setting the case in order.

“I didn’t know they were going to kill him,” Wolkowicz said. “I thought it was going to be a snatch, that he’d spend a few years in Russia and then they’d
swap him for somebody. When I said I didn’t kill your father, that was a lot of shit. You can bet your ass I killed him. I killed him by being too dumb to see what was coming. I never made
that mistake again.”

Wolkowicz was suffering. Suddenly he couldn’t bear to be touched and, after another little tug-of-war, he made Ilse let go of his hand. There were tears in her eyes. She kissed Wolkowicz
on the face. He did not resist or respond or even move.

“Now, about you,” Wolkowicz said, forcing himself onward. “At first, in Vienna and then on the Darby case, I wanted you around because of what I’d done to Hubbard. I
figured I could make it up, protect you. Then I saw you were just like him, a fucking genius. You and Hubbard and Darby are the only geniuses I’ve ever met. Do you know what makes a man a
genius? The ability to see the obvious. Practically nobody can do that. Your father could, most of the time. Darby could, some of the time. I think you do it all the time. I don’t know how
you’ve stayed alive.”

Wolkowicz’s throat was dry. He coughed harshly into his fist, then wiped his palm on the sofa. To the empty air he said, “We could use some water in here.” He knew that the
room was equipped with hidden television cameras and microphones, and that somewhere Patchen was watching and listening.

“As soon as I realized what kind of a mind you had,” Wolkowicz said to Christopher, “I wanted you inside on my ops so I could control the information that got to you. If
you’d been outside, Christ knows what you would have found out. I was so right. You got away from me and look what happened. You started sniffing around the fucking assassination, you got the
Vietnamese all stirred up, you scared the Russians shitless. Just before you went to China, you were close to something that
terrified
them.”

“What was I close to?”

“I don’t know. Whatever it was, the Russians didn’t want to be blamed for it. Maybe they knocked off the President, maybe not. I don’t know. I didn’t give a shit.
They wanted to kill you. I couldn’t let that happen again. China was the only place on earth where nobody—not even the Russians—could get at you. Anything is better than dying,
Paul.”