The Last Supper (57 page)

“Anything?”

Wolkowicz made a gruff gesture of dismissal, as if Christopher’s question were an insect to be batted away.

“I got in touch with Chinese Gus,” Wolkowicz said, rushing on. “I told him what a red-hot agent you were. I had Pong break Gus Kimber’s neck and Chinese Gus stole his
airplane. You thought I was lying to you about the Truong toc and Kim, but I did kill the bastards to protect you; I thought the Russians might be running them somehow. Even if they weren’t,
why the fuck should they live to kill
you?
I did it all.”

Wolkowicz stopped, to give Christopher an opportunity to speak. But he said nothing.

“Let me tell you something else,” Wolkowicz said. “I’d do it again. You’re sitting here instead of lying under the ground, a fucking heap of bones.”

“Molly, too?” Christopher asked. “Would you do that again?”

Wolkowicz shook his head. For an instant, he was impatient, his old rude self. Then he seemed to realize that his answer was important to Christopher and he did the best he could. “I
should have known they’d hit her after they set up the operation. They’re stubborn bastards, the Russians,” he said. “I thought Webster was smart enough to keep Molly
inside, where they couldn’t get at her. I was wrong. It was my fault. And the answer is yes: I’d do it again if it would keep you alive.”

For once, Wolkowicz’s face showed what he felt. It glowed with affection and relief. He hugged Ilse again. Christopher had never seen Wolkowicz in such a mood, with words tumbling out of
him. He seemed sure that Christopher could understand anything, forgive anything, if he could only see him as he really was.

Wolkowicz’s confession had freed him of a terrible burden. He actually said, “I feel better.”

He slumped on the sofa, exhausted. Ilse looked from Wolkowicz to Christopher with joy in her pale eyes. She was happy. So was Wolkowicz.

Christopher asked another question. Like all the others, it wasn’t really a question. “You weren’t working for the Russians at all, were you, Barney?” he said. “You
were working for yourself.”

Wolkowicz and Ilse looked, smiling, into each other’s eyes.

“Don’t tell the Russians that,” Ilse said, “they’d be so disappointed. Do you know why
I
did it?”

“Yes. Because Barney asked you to.”

Nodding, Ilse took both of Christopher’s hands in hers. “I
love
this ape,” she said. “Isn’t that funny, a girl like me?”

Christopher looked at Wolkowicz. “You did all this,” he said, “turned yourselves into this,
to get Waddy Jessup?
”

“To get
all
the fucking Waddys,” Wolkowicz said. Abruptly, he laughed his snorting laugh which was so full of ridicule and contempt. “Jesus,” he said. “I
never realized it. It was the class struggle—me against the Fool Factory. I’m a fucking Red!”

Overcome with mirth, Wolkowicz and Ilse held hands and shared this delicious joke with Christopher.

Christopher, grieving for his dead parents and his dead Molly and his deadened life, realized that this was his true homecoming. He covered his face and made a sound deep in his throat.

Ilse flew to him and pried his fingers away from his eyes.

“I know it’s hard, Paul,” she said. “But what Barney is talking about here is operations, not feelings. We’ve always loved you. Always.”

— 2 —

The chief interrogator for the Outfit had a theory. He believed that a man like Wolkowicz, who had once held up under torture, would break if he was threatened with torture a
second time, because he would know too well what to expect. Patchen would not let him try it.

“If you make the threat, you may have to carry it out,” he said.

“That’s all right with me.”

The interrogator hated Wolkowicz, who had made it impossible, forever, for the Outfit to trust its own men and women. Outfitters had always been outcasts, but they had lived happily enough
because they trusted each other absolutely. They had believed that the Outfit could not be penetrated: its people were too patriotic, too bright, too idealistic. Now the greatest of all the Outfit
agents had turned out to be an enemy; had turned out always to have been an enemy. Why? How? The interrogator was willing to use anything to get the truth out of him: clubs, electricity, water,
surgical instruments.

“No,” Patchen said. “Leave his ego alone. Wolkowicz has always believed that we were too civilized. It will upset everything if he suspects he’s been wrong.”

Before the interrogation started, Wolkowicz asked to see Patchen. He wanted to ask him to be civilized about Pong.

“I just want you to realize that Pong is clean,” Wolkowicz said. “He was just doing favors for me, passing the stuff to Graham. He didn’t know what he was passing. Pong
is a patriotic American.”

“I know that.”

“Okay. Just don’t fuck around with him.”

He glared at Patchen as if he had the power to make him pay if he dared to harm Pong, Wolkowicz’s loyal agent. Wolkowicz had always expected to be captured in the end. His status as a
prisoner did not change his personality.

The interrogators used sleeplessness, drugs, the polygraph, and endless relays of questioners. Wolkowicz made no attempt to evade the questions they asked him. The interrogators were not always
satisfied with his answers. Wolkowicz had survived dozens of lie detector tests in the past, and still the needles traced normal lines. They only jumped when he was asked about the Christophers.
Any question about Ilse produced wildly erratic tracings.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” the polygraph operator said. “He must be a pathological liar.”

Patchen studied the tracings. “No,” he said. “He just doesn’t feel any guilt.” He ran a finger over the nervous peaks marked with Ilse’s name and
Christopher’s. “Love, yes,” Patchen said.

Once a week, Wolkowicz was shown a documentary film about a state mental institution in Arkansas. The hopelessly insane were confined there in conditions of unbelievable filth and squalor.
Wolkowicz watched them fight, copulate, defecate and smear themselves with the feces. No one was ever released from this place. He watched the film, time after time, in fearless contempt. It had no
effect on him. He supposed it was some sort of brainwashing technique devised by academics. It was not, he thought, nearly so effective as a bayonet and a block of wood.

After the first three months of interrogation, Wolkowicz asked for a piano and, on Patchen’s authorization, a spinet model was moved into his room for an hour each day. His guards, lithe
young men in blue jeans who carried their Kulsprutas carelessly, like boys walking across a campus with lacrosse sticks, were as astonished as everyone else always had been by the delicacy of his
touch on the keyboard. Each note, as it came over the earphones they used to monitor his every sound, was pure and free and separate from all the others. Sometimes, if the door was opened for a
moment while Wolkowicz happened to be playing, a few strains of Bach or Mozart would drift through the soundproofed house. The chief interrogator had objected to the piano. Hearing the piano, Ilse
would know that Wolkowicz was alive and in the house with her, and that would reduce the psychological pressure on her.

“It’s one of Wolkowicz’s tricks,” the interrogator said.

“Let him outwit us just one more time, then,” Patchen replied. “That will mean a lot to him.”

Wolkowicz himself had been surprised when they had given him his piano. He had nothing else, not even a book or newspaper, in his room. He had no blankets or sheets; the room was kept at a
temperature that made them unnecessary. He wore coveralls with the sleeves and legs cut off so that there was no piece of cloth long enough to be used as a hangman’s noose or a strangling
cord. Because he was not allowed to use a razor, his beard had grown long.

He knew that the interrogation had been completed when the guards came into his room with barbering tools. They shaved his grizzled whiskers and trimmed his hair.

That day, Patchen came to see him. It was the first time they had met since the morning Wolkowicz had been caught.

The youthful guard had brought a folding chair. He opened it and Patchen sat down. Patchen was wearing a lightweight suit. This meant that the seasons had changed. Shut away from windows, from
noises and smells, Wolkowicz had become an even more avid reader of clues. For months, he had had virtually no clues to read. He had no idea what was going to happen to him. He was sure that
Patchen had some plan for him. He waited for him to reveal it.

“Thanks for the piano,” Wolkowicz said.

In his cut-off coveralls, hairy Wolkowicz looked like an ape in rompers. Patchen had been ignoring his appearance for years. He paid no special attention to it now.

“I’m glad you’re comfortable,” Patchen said. “You seem a little thinner. It must have something to do with giving up liquor. There are a lot of calories in Rob
Roys.”

Wolkowicz scratched himself, some sort of signal that he had not changed, that he could still repay a pleasantry with an insult.

“What,” Patchen asked, “are you going to do now?”

Wolkowicz cupped a hand behind his ear, as if he hadn’t heard, but Patchen did not repeat himself. Wolkowicz did not reply, not even with a joke.

“You’ll want to see Ilse before you go,” Patchen said. “A conjugal visit.”

Another man might have smiled or betrayed something by the movement of a hand, but Patchen sat still and expressionless.

“Before I go?” Wolkowicz said. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You’re all pumped out, they say. You may as well leave.”

Patchen stood up to go.

“Just a minute,” Wolkowicz said. “What about a trial?”

“Trial? I’m afraid not, Barney. No grand finale for you. You’re not going to be exposed as a Soviet agent. It would destroy the Outfit. Sorry.”

Wolkowicz, sprawled on his cot, glowered at Patchen.

“You think that’s going to save the Outfit, not trying me?” Wolkowicz said. “If you let me go, I can go right back to Graham and blow the whole fucking story.”

Patchen shrugged. “If you think he’d believe you, go to him. What are you going to say? That
you
passed him all that stuff through Pong? That you set out to destroy yourself,
the best agent the Russians have ever had, as a way of ruining the Outfit?”

“It’s true.”

“Yes,” Patchen said. “But it’s insane.”

“You don’t think I can do it? Assholes like Graham will believe anything, as long as it’s what they want to hear. He’ll be enthralled to think that the Russians have been
running the Outfit for thirty years. It’ll explain everything. You’re an even bigger bunch of assholes than he thought.”

“You may be right, Barney.”

Wolkowicz had to lean forward and cup his ear to hear Patchen.

“One last thing,” Patchen said. “I know why you did it. But why did the Russians do it? Why you? What was there about you?”

Wolkowicz snorted. Patchen’s question broke through to him in a way that months of drugs and sleeplessness had never done.

“Who the fuck did you
think
they were going to recruit?” he said. “Waddy Jessup?” He waved a hand in dismissal.

“No, don’t stop now,” Patchen said. “I want to know your opinion.”

Thirty years of exasperation with Patchen and his kind spilled over in Wolkowicz. “Out in Burma, before he ran away from the Japs, Waddy told me that I was the son of a worker,” he
said. “That, asshole, is the key. I’m a member of the lower classes. So was Darby. We were the KGB’s aces, baby. The Russians are out to kill people like you. They’ll use
you, but you don’t count. Look at the Brits. Philby, Burgess, MacLean, Blunt—all members of the bourgeoisie. All sacrificial lambs. The Russians didn’t give a shit for them, they
didn’t give a shit for British intelligence. The Outfit was the target because the United States is the target.”

Patchen nodded. He had no more time for this interview. To the television camera in the corner of the bare, overlighted room, he said, “Come in now, please.”

The guards brought Wolkowicz his clothes—one of his checked polyester jackets, a pair of slacks, a drip-dry shirt, and a necktie, all freshly cleaned and pressed. They handed him an
envelope containing his watch and his wallet.

“Good luck,” Patchen said, ready to leave.

Automatically, Wolkowicz counted his cash, seventy-six dollars—fifteen dollars less than he had had when he was taken. Then he remembered Ilse, waving the fan of bills at him in the
bedroom: her taxi fare.

“Wait a minute,” Wolkowicz said. “What about Ilse?”

Patchen seemed surprised that he would ask.

“Oh,” he said. “She’ll stay with us. You’ll want to know she’s all right. You can write to her, she can write to you. We’ll give you a post office box
number for yourself and one for Ilse. You can make two telephone calls a year, on your birthdays. You’ll have to give her a number to call in your letters. Is that reassurance
enough?”

Wolkowicz understood Patchen’s plan.

“If you open your mouth, if one word of what you’ve been for the last thirty years appears in print, even if the Russians do it for you against your will, we’ll move
her.”

“Where to?”

“An asylum. In Arkansas, say. If she tells them the truth about herself, she’ll never get out.”

“She could live for thirty years,” Wolkowicz said.

“I don’t see why not,” Patchen replied.

He turned around and walked out of the room.