The Last Supper (19 page)

“I know he killed a battalion of Japs and got the Silver Star, and everybody knows how talented he is,” an exasperated colleague said to Hubbard, “but he’s a pain in the
ass. He thinks everybody in the Outfit except him went to Yale and had their brains fried. He calls Yale the fool factory. I didn’t go there, but Jesus!”

Hubbard grinned. “If you’d been marooned in Burma with Waddy Jessup you might be anti-Yale, too,” he said.

Hubbard had liked Wolkowicz the first time he ever saw him, at the Christmas party at the Harbor. The rudeness, the obscene speech, the coarse table manners meant nothing. In everything that
counted, Wolkowicz was a gentleman: truthful, loyal, brave, kind, generous. To women he was chivalrous, and perhaps because his ugliness made them feel more beautiful than they were, they often
succumbed to him.

Also, it was evident to Hubbard from the day Wolkowicz arrived in Berlin that he was the finest natural spy he had ever encountered. There was no easy explanation for this talent. Perhaps the
first reason for his excellence was his truculent refusal to believe in anybody’s innocence. Wolkowicz treated all men, and especially all women, as enemy agents at all times; they could be
used, paid, praised. They could even be loved. But they could never be trusted. What might seem paranoia in another man was shrewd intuition in Wolkowicz.

“You penetrated Zechmann’s operation in 1940, right?” Wolkowicz said to Hubbard, pursuing his latest suspicion.

This was, of course, a secret. It did not surprise Hubbard that Wolkowicz knew it, or suspected it. Wolkowicz seemed to absorb other people’s secrets through the pores of his skin.
Wolkowicz did not pause.

“Now the
Russians
have penetrated Zechmann,” he said. “If you could do it, they can do it; anyone can do it. You can’t expect a man like Zechmann to admit this. I
say we should penetrate him too, for his own good—find the infection, clean it out, and never say a word about it to Zechmann.”

“If your theory is correct, the Russians will know what we’re up to.”

“Good. It’ll teach them a little respect.”

Wolkowicz, in the strident voice he never lowered, outlined his plan for finding the traitors in the Zechmann Bureau. He disliked putting things on paper: the Army clerks who did the
Outfit’s typing could be assumed to be sleeping with girls who were in the pay of the opposition. Wolkowicz’s plan, like all his plans, was beautifully clear and brutally simple. He
relied entirely on low cunning—the old, old tricks that had worked for thousands of years. His approach to human nature was so primitive that more sophisticated men could scarcely understand
it.

“It’s more complicated than that,” they would say.

“Like shit it is,” Wolkowicz would reply. He was invariably right.

Wolkowicz proposed baiting the trap for Zechmann with a female. Hubbard had no trouble understanding what Wolkowicz had in mind for Friedrich Zechmann. “Why do you think this girl, Ilse
Bauer, is the key?” he asked.

“Because Zechmann’s queer for virgins.”

Another secret. Wolkowicz handed a large glossy photograph across the desk. Ilse Bauer, Wolkowicz’s agent, was a girl of twenty with spun blond hair, flawless skin, and slightly slanted
eyes set above high cheekbones. Even in a photograph, she glowed with virginal innocence.

Wolkowicz reclaimed the photograph. When he opened his coat to put it safely in an inside pocket, Hubbard saw the butt of a Walther P-38 automatic thrust into the waistband of his trousers.
Wolkowicz was never without this weapon; his attachment to it was an office joke.

“Why does it have to be the Russians?” Hubbard asked.

“If it’s not the Russians,” Wolkowicz said, “it’s got to be Zechmann.”

“You think he’s killing your agents to keep down the competition?”

“Why not?” Wolkowicz said. “I’m taking bread out of his mouth.”

Of course this was a possibility, though a more civilized man might not have realized it and certainly would not have mentioned it.

“All right,” Hubbard said. “Go ahead, slowly.”

Wolkowicz nodded firmly and smiled with his perfect white false teeth.

— 3 —

Every Thursday at five o’clock, Hubbard called on Hilde von Buecheler. This had always been Hilde’s time to have people in for coffee. She lived now in two rooms in
the basement of the house she and Paulus had inhabited in the Charlottenburger chaussee. It was a cave, really, beneath the heap of rubble that was all that remained of the house in which the
Christophers’ old apartment had been located. The Russians had confiscated Berwick as their headquarters on Rügen.

Hubbard brought Hilde a pound of Maxwell House coffee and enough canned food to last her for a week. Because she would not accept money from him, he left a carton of Camels on the hall table for
her each week. On the black market, the cigarettes were worth 2,500 marks, $625 at the prewar rate of exchange. (A common whore cost five marks or five cigarettes, a girl of good family twenty-five
or more.) “It’s just like it was when you came after the last war,” Hilde said. “American cigarettes are the new valuta.”

Somehow Hilde had preserved her photographs, and cabinet portraits of Paulus and their sons in uniform, and of Lori before her marriage, and of her great-nephew Paul Christopher were displayed
on the table. She had grown thin. She had developed a tendency to chatter.

“Is Zechmann coming?” Hilde asked.

Zechmann came every Thursday, too. As in 1940, this was a convenient way for Hubbard to see him.

Zechmann, when he came, brought chocolate for Hilde, carrying it in his briefcase. While he drank his coffee, he and Hilde repeated ten-year-old army gossip. Free at last to tell anything she
knew, Hilde provided details of old romances that sent the icy Zechmann into gales of laughter.

At six o’clock, as Wolkowicz had arranged, Ilse Bauer knocked at the door. Hilde opened it. Snow was falling and the ruins beyond Ilse in the lightless city were dusted white.

“Frau Colonel Baroness von Buecheler?” Ilse asked in a firm, middle-class voice.

“Yes.” Hilde saw that snowflakes were falling through the shaft of yellow light from the open door and that the shoulders of the girl’s thin coat were covered with snow.
“Please come in,” she said.

Ilse came into the candlelight, her face glowing from the cold, snowflakes shining on the yellow wing of hair that escaped from her kerchief. She smelted of roses, the scent of them came in with
her like an aura. Hilde hadn’t smelled such a perfume since her own girlhood. Her eyes, still animated from the gossip, shone with pleasure on seeing Ilse’s fresh beauty. Not many
German girls looked like this, so pure and untouched, in 1946.

It was an uncomfortable moment for Hubbard. Zechmann was, as Wolkowicz had predicted, entranced by Ilse’s looks. But Hubbard doubted that any cover story Wolkowicz had provided to Ilse
would fool Zechmann. What plausible reason could this girl, a total stranger, give for rapping on Hilde’s door?

“My name is Ilse Bauer,” Ilse said. “I don’t know if I’m doing you a kindness, Baroness, but I promised I would come.”

“Promised? Promised whom?”

Ilse Bauer reached down and took Hilde’s hand, a startling liberty.

“Your niece, Lori, long ago,” she said. “I have a message from her.”

Hilde smiled giddily, extended her free hand on the end of her rigid arm to Hubbard, and fell to the floor in a dead faint.

After Hilde revived, Ilse sat beside her on the sofa, holding her hand in both of hers and urging her to take a sip of coffee.

“No,” Hilde said. “The message.”

Ilse stroked her hand. “This happened a long time ago, a few days after the war started,” she said. “I lived then in Weimar, a bit outside of the town.”

“This was in 1939? You must have been very young.”

“Thirteen, Baronin. I was riding on a road. A big Mercedes, one of those dark official cars, came up behind me, going too fast, and struck my horse. I was thrown and knocked unconscious.
The horse was a Lippizaner gelding, but gray, not white as the ideal type is supposed to be. All the same, this Lippizaner was my pride and joy. I heard a shot and came to. A man from the Mercedes
held a pistol in his hand; he had shot my horse. I became hysterical. There were three men in long leather coats. They couldn’t deal with me. Finally one of them said, ‘She needs a
woman.’ There was a woman in the car. She seemed to be a prisoner. She had—forgive me—the marks of a beating on her face. She wore—forgive me—manacles on her wrists.
All the same, they treated her with respect, as if she was somebody. They let her out of the car. She comforted me, bathed my head, and got me to get into the car so they could take me to the
hospital. She hugged me, like a mother, whispering in my ear. I was still hysterical. She herself seemed to be very, very tired, but she said a wonderful thing to me. Stroking my cheek, she said,
‘Now he can run as much as he likes.’ Then she whispered to me, the name of Colonel Baron von Buecheler, Charlottenburger chaussee, Berlin. And she said, ‘Tell him Buchenwald. My
name is Lori. Tell my uncle I am alive.’ ”

Dark eyes shining in her powdered face, handkerchief balled in her fist, Hilde listened.

“That was seven years ago,” she said. “Why do you come only now?”

“I couldn’t come sooner. My mother is Swiss. She took me to Switzerland the next week. She wouldn’t let me write to you; she was afraid.”

“What did this woman you believe to be my niece look like?” Hilde said.

Ilse crossed the room and touched Lori’s photograph. “Exactly like her picture,” she said.

Zechmann had been listening from his chair in the corner, outside the glow of the candles. His voice came out of the shadows.

“What was the name of your horse?” he asked.

Ilse gave him a smile in which her sadness over the Lippizaner still lingered. “Hugo,” she said.

Hubbard said nothing at all.

— 4 —

Wolkowicz apologized to Hubbard for the cover story he had given to Ilse.

“I know it was a pretty bad thing to do, using your wife’s death—”

“Disappearance.”

“Disappearance. It must have been a hell of a shock. I couldn’t warn you. But I knew Zechmann would be watching your reaction. He had to see real feelings on your face. He knows you
too well to take a chance on your faking it. I’m sorry.”

Hubbard nodded. After years of secret life, no outrage seemed unpardonable to him. This was simply the way things were done. You learned not to be emotional about it. After a time, the ordinary
feelings of ordinary people became unbelievable, they made you uncomfortable, like amateur theatricals badly done. Hubbard did not bother to acknowledge Wolkowicz’s apology. He wanted to know
more about Ilse.

“Did Ilse actually live near Weimar in 1939?” he asked.

“Yes. Also, she spent the war in Switzerland, in Geneva. That’s why she looks so healthy—she hasn’t been living on potato soup like all the other girls. Zechmann will
find that everything about her checks out, even the horse, except that it wasn’t shot by the Gestapo. But even Zechmann can’t run down a detail like that.”

“I want to talk to her.”

“Okay,” Wolkowicz said.

He was puzzled by Hubbard’s interest. It wasn’t until much later that he realized Hubbard believed Ilse had actually seen Lori on that road outside Weimar. Even knowing that what
Ilse had told Hilde was a carefully rehearsed lie, invented by Wolkowicz, Hubbard chose to believe in the Mercedes, in the girl on horseback, in the gray Lippizaner, in the kind prisoner with
Lori’s face.

Now he can run as much as he likes
.

Hubbard could hear Lori’s voice speaking these words, so typical of her.

“But you told him it was a lie, a cover story,” Ilse said to Wolkowicz, later. “Is he crazy?”

“On this one subject, you’d have to say yes. Maybe he thinks he can keep his wife from being dead by insisting that she’s alive.”

“How can he believe such a thing?”

“I guess he loved her.”

Hubbard cultivated a friendship with Ilse, chatting with her about her girlhood, about the future she might have. Hubbard did not understand why such a girl, who even in a
destroyed capital could have had anything she wanted, was willing to do the work Wolkowicz gave her to do. One night, when Wolkowicz had brought her to Hubbard’s quarters for dinner, Hubbard
put this question to Ilse. She turned her face away.

“I’d rather not explain,” she said.

“I think you ought to tell him,” Wolkowicz said.

This was unusual. Wolkowicz seldom intervened in a conversation between Ilse and his chief. Ilse gave Wolkowicz a desolated look and went into the bathroom. She had drunk a lot of whisky that
night and she staggered slightly. She wore white knee socks. It was shocking to see her drunk, she was so luminous with youth and physical innocence.

Hubbard did not pursue the subject after Ilse left them, though it was obvious that Wolkowicz knew the answer to his question. Wolkowicz had never known such a quiet man. Hubbard’s reserve
was frustrating: you never knew whether he believed what you said to him, or if he even heard you.

“You got onto kind of a painful subject for old Ilse,” Wolkowicz said. “I should have explained it all to you before this. Her father was an officer in the Waffen SS, on the
Russian front. About three months before the war ended, he got in touch and said he wanted to see his wife and daughter. They left Switzerland and came to Berlin to wait for him—bombs and
shells falling day and night, the Russians getting closer every day. It’s hard to imagine anyone being that stupid. He never showed up. Ilse’s mother was killed by a Russian shell. The
kid was left all alone, with no relatives and very little money. The Russians got to Berlin before Ilse could get out.”

Wolkowicz paused, embarrassed. Hubbard realized that Wolkowicz was angry at Ilse’s dead mother for leaving her daughter in a burning city that was about to be pillaged by an enemy army.
Wolkowicz made himself another Rob Roy. He had an astonishing capacity for liquor, frequently drinking a whole bottle of whisky, mixed with sweet vermouth, in the course of an evening. He never
showed the slightest effect.