The Last Supper (18 page)

“I don’t know what’s next for types like us,” Waddy said. “Anyway, everybody who’s been in Burma will be coming out.” He grinned again. “I have
more good news. To begin with, I’ve confirmed your battlefield commission as a second lieutenant and recommended that you be promoted to first lieutenant.”

“What battlefield commission?”

“The one I gave you under fire in Burma.”

Waddy reached into his shirt pocket and produced a pair of gold second lieutenant’s bars. He pressed them into Wolkowicz’s hand.

“That’s not all,” Waddy said, “I’ve put you in for the D.S.C. If your Brit will back up what I say, you ought to get it. Even without his corroboration you’ll
get the Silver Star.”

Wolkowicz stared steadily into Waddy’s eyes. In the look that Waddy returned, there was no trace of embarrassment or shame or fear.

“The great thing, as our gallant British allies would say, is to avoid a bad show,” Waddy said. “Barnabas, what’s past is past. Neither one of us can go back to that day
in the jungle and change what happened. I don’t remember events quite the way you do; maybe I was affected by my wounds. But after all, Barney, only you and I were there
and”—Waddy was grinning again—“only the elephant will never forget.”

“Meaning?”

Waddy went on smiling, less buoyantly. “Meaning that you have me in your power,” he said. “What else do you want?”

“It’s as simple as that?”

“When it comes down to it, Barnabas, things are always simple. What else do you want? Just tell me.”

“Europe.”

Waddy frowned, a mere flash of expression, before he understood that Wolkowicz was not making a joke. “Europe?”

“By the time I get new teeth and take leave in the States,” Wolkowicz said, “the war in Europe will be over. I want to go to Germany for a while, just to see what it’s
like.”

“Why Germany, for heaven’s sake? The Air Force has blown it to smithereens.”

“I want to stay in the Outfit and go to Germany as a civilian. Can you arrange it?”

“What is the quid pro quo?”

“Only the elephant will remember.”

“And your Burmese Brit, of course.”

“You’ll never hear from him.”

Waddy studied Wolkowicz’s contemptuous eyes, his sunken mouth, his blunt peasant hands. “I’ll see what can be done,” he said. “Hubbard Christopher—you
remember, the Christmas party again—has been appointed to run the Outfit’s postwar operation in Berlin. He’s in Washington now. I’ll give you a letter of
introduction.”

“That’s all that’s necessary?”

“Well, yes,” Waddy said. “We’re cousins by marriage. Anyway, Hubbard’ll want you. You’re a Russian-speaking Deadeye Dick with the heart of a lion. I only wish
I could keep you on my team.”

— 1 —

When Hubbard Christopher returned to Berlin was chief of U.S. intelligence in the summer of 1945, the city, once so beautiful and green, had vanished. In its place was a vast
smoking plain covered by heaps of rubble. From 1940 to 1945 the RAF and the U.S. Air Force dropped 76,652 tons of bombs on the city, and in the last ten days of April 1945, during the final battle
for the city, the Red Army directed more than 40,000 tons of artillery shells on Berlin. In 1945 there were 1,153,040 fewer persons living in Berlin than there had been in 1939. Not all of those
missing had been killed, but in the last year of the war the death rate was 55.5 persons per thousand, for a total of approximately 200,000 dead in that year alone. By way of comparison, total
American dead in all theaters of operation in all of World War II amounted to 292,100.

Many of Berlin’s dead still lay buried under the smashed masonry. An army of women in black dresses, gathering up the smashed city stone by stone, uncovered the corpses as they worked and
laid them out on the rubble—old people, women, children. A few walls, ripped out of dead buildings like flesh torn from a carcass by the teeth of a predator, still stood, and here and there a
blinded stone face, the fragment of one of the ornamental cornices, could be seen. The Tiergarten had been cut down for firewood. Berlin, which had been a great metropolis only five years before,
now looked like a lost city that had been dug out of the earth centuries after its fall by some colossal archaeological expedition. Hubbard wrote:

These were the first lines Hubbard had put on paper since 1939. He had never really broken the silence he had fallen into after the Gestapo took Lori from him. It was necessary for him to speak
to people in the course of his work, he had to get food and answer the telephone, but he never talked for pleasure again.

In carrying Lori away, danger had done everything to him it was possible to do; he cared nothing about it after that. By the end of the war he was a legendary operative. As a novelist, he had a
trained imagination; as the man who loved Lori, he had the ruthless will to do whatever was necessary to find her and to stay alive long enough to be reunited with her. Not many men possessed such
a combination of talent and motive. Following his recruitment by British intelligence, Hubbard Christopher had spent a year in Germany, pretending to be his cousin Elliott. The work the British
asked him to do—recruiting Germans, the most obedient people in Europe, to betray their country—seemed to Hubbard so absurd as to be insane.

Sir Richard Shaw-Condon had been surprised that Hubbard had missed the point. “The point is, we
must
have networks,” Sir Richard had said. “Naturally you’ll have a
high percentage of duds. That doesn’t matter. Once you’ve turned a chap into a spy and made him realize that he’s a traitor who will be killed by his own tribe, the silly bastard
is yours for life. You must know masses of Hun idealists—Social Democrats, crypto-Communists, cabaret politicians, that lot. Sign
them
up.”

“I’d be sending them to their deaths.”

“Bad luck. We
must
have networks.”

Hubbard understood that Sir Richard and his masters were not really interested in results. They were interested only in the style of the thing; spending the war in secret work was just another
of the things fashionable people did to make themselves envied. The world of espionage was a region of the mad, in which men who could not write or paint or sculpt created distorted works out of
the flesh of living persons and said—
believed
—that the result was art. It was like watching the inmates of an asylum daub an army of stick figures onto an enormous canvas, using
buckets of blood for paint.

Hubbard did his secret work with painful care. All of his agents lived to the end of the war, and one of them became the most valuable spy the Western Allies had inside the German Army. His name
was Friedrich Zechmann. When Hubbard first met him, at one of Otto Rothchild’s dinners in 1935, he had been a young major on the general staff. Zechmann, who had the sly blank face of a
cabaret comedian, had poked fun at the Nazis, who were then still a novelty, by pretending to admire everything they did.

“The concentration camps in Thuringia!” he would say, fingering the stem of a wineglass. “The Communists and the Social Democrats are benefiting greatly from the program of
healthful outdoor exercise at Buchenwald. Pallid intellectuals are now as ruddy as their politics; sunken chests have been replaced by manly bosoms.”

“Disgusting,” Lori had said.

“Exactly. A Communist ought to
look
like a Communist, not like an example of healthy German manhood. It may be necessary to kill all the Communists in order to avoid confusion. The
party admits its mistakes and corrects them.”

A few months after his return to Berlin in 1940, Hubbard, disguised as Elliott, had been strolling in the Tiergarten when Zechmann greeted him.

“Christopher!”

“Good afternoon, Colonel. But you’ve mistaken me for my cousin. My name is Elliott Hubbard.”

Hubbard now spoke German with a broad American accent. As he could not prevent himself from speaking the language grammatically, he spoke slowly, to give the impression that he was groping
painfully for the right place in the sentence to put a verb he could not quite remember. Zechmann quizzically examined Hubbard’s dyed hair and eyebrows.

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Hubbard. The resemblance is startling. Even the name is reminiscent. What brings you to Germany?”

“My cousin’s wife is missing. I’m trying to find her.”

“Have the authorities been able to help?”

“She doesn’t exist in their files.”

The British had not, of course, been able to give Hubbard any direct help in locating Lori. They had never intended to help him—of what use was a female prisoner of the Gestapo to them?
Hubbard had always understood that there would be no help.

Zechmann slapped the palm of his open hand with his folded gloves. “That’s very distressing,” he said. “I knew her father. I served in the last war with her
uncle.”

Zechmann stood for a moment on the gravel path, eyes averted from the soldiers who strolled by, hugging their girls. He was deep in thought. Hubbard knew that Zechmann was not fooled by his
alias. At last Zechmann made a decision.

“I’m on my way home,” he said. “Follow me.” He strode off in his burnished boots.

In his apartment, a tiny unheated place in the Englische strasse, a five-minute walk from the edge of the Tiergarten, Zechmann poured Hubbard a glass of beer.

Hubbard, still in his role as Elliott, described what had happened to Lori and Hubbard at the frontier. Zechmann, never questioning Hubbard’s disguise, listened to the end. He asked no
questions; there was no need.

“I’ll do what I can to help you,” Zechmann said brusquely. “But do not permit yourself to hope. In the end, we may only know how much she suffered.”

Zechmann had been on Paulus’s staff during the Russian campaign in the First World War. Because of this experience, and because Paulus had insisted that he learn Russian, he was now in
charge of the section of military intelligence that dealt with the East. He met every month with his counterparts in the SS. He brought Hubbard dozens of photographs taken in the camps, with the
blurred faces of women who might be Lori encircled with black crayon. Hubbard never saw a face he knew to be Lori’s.

Soon Zechmann saw through Hubbard’s second disguise and realized that he was a British agent. He began to give him other information, always delivered verbally, always perfectly accurate.
He never explained why he was doing this.

Zechmann and Hubbard met, during the spring and summer of 1940, at Paulus’s apartment in Berlin, during the coffee hour. After the United States entered the war, they met in northern
Italy, Hubbard crossing over from Switzerland on a Swiss passport. In 1944, Zechmann told Hubbard that Paulus, recalled to active service as a Russian expert, had been killed in the Urals. Until
the end, Zechmann brought Hubbard the photographs of women in the camps, though Zechmann had never believed that Lori was among them. By prearrangement, Zechmann and Hubbard met in a meadow in
Bavaria a week before the Russians entered Berlin. Zechmann had surrendered, to Hubbard personally, with all his files and all his officers and agents. His section of German intelligence was
reconstituted intact as the Zechmann Bureau, an arm of the Outfit.

— 2 —

Barney Wolkowicz had no high regard for the Zechmann Bureau. In Berlin, in 1946, he explained why to his silent chief, Hubbard Christopher.

“Every time we try to run an agent who doesn’t come from the Zechmann Bureau,” Wolkowicz said, “he gets flyswatted. You
have
noticed the pattern?”

Two of Wolkowicz’s agents had been killed in a week, both of them smashed against one of Berlin’s sawtooth rubble walls by a speeding car. This method of assassination was called
flyswatting because the victim was crushed against the masonry, leaving a mark (blood and flesh and the tattered black cloth that all the defeated Germans seemed to wear) which resembled the
remains of a fly that had been smashed on a windowpane.

“It’s the fucking Russians,” Wolkowicz said. “They’ve penetrated the Zechmann Bureau.”

Hubbard looked calmly across the desk at Wolkowicz. This suspicion, voiced by any other man, would have been regarded as the first sign of a nervous breakdown. The Zechmann Bureau
was
American espionage in Berlin. But Wolkowicz was the best man Hubbard had. All the others, more than twenty intelligent, brave young men, did not together produce the results that Wolkowicz produced
by himself.

This astonished his colleagues. When he arrived from Burma, still suffering from the effects of malaria and dengue fever, wearing his new false teeth, speaking no German, not much had been
expected from him. It was thought that Waddy Jessup, who had sent him to Hubbard, was doing this crude, foulmouthed man a kindness—letting him see Berlin before he was sent back to Ohio, or
wherever it was he had come from. Sniffing this atmosphere, Wolkowicz insisted on working alone; he radiated class hostility. Soon this created difficulties.