The Last Supper (31 page)

“They were Russians?”

“Certainly they were Russians. In overcoats made by chimpanzees. You know.”

— 5 —

“Oh, you bloody man,” Robin Darby said. “You bloody, bloody man.”

“This is a security matter,” Wolkowicz said. “Whatever Ilse may have told Christopher, I did not contact the Russians. I didn’t know about her father.”

Teams flew in from Washington and London to investigate. Wolkowicz submitted to a lie detector test and passed.

“It’s a fucking mess,” Wolkowicz said. “She knows all about the Sewer, all about the decoder.”

“If Barney didn’t tell the Russians,” Rosalind said, “who did?”

Darby ran his fingertips over his bandaged face. “I think Barney knows,” he said.

They were all together in the Sewer, discussing the problem. Only Darby was angry. Wolkowicz seemed to feel no sense of loss, no remorse: Ilse might as well have been any other German—a
defeated enemy, an agent, lost in an operation that went wrong.

“Ilse told them—who do you
think
told them?” Wolkowicz said. “She belongs to the opposition. She belongs to the fucking Russians. She always has.”

Rosalind didn’t believe this. “Why would she go back to them? Why would they stage this silly kidnapping? She was far more valuable to them in place, where she was.”

“Because I caught her with Darby. Catch them in one lie and all the other lies run out of the hole like mice. She lost her head.”

As Wolkowicz described the consequences of his wife’s adultery, impatient with Rosalind’s stupidity, they listened to the rustling rodent noise of the decoding machines.

“Maybe you’re wrong,” Christopher said.

“I’m not wrong now,” Wolkowicz said. “I was wrong before. I trusted her. I made an exception.”

“Bad luck,” Darby said. He had regained some of his good humor. “I take it we agree that something must be done? Shall I deal with that?”

Wolkowicz nodded; Christopher and Rosalind watched their chiefs in silence as they agreed, without exchanging a word, to kill the woman who had made them hate each other.

But Ilse had vanished. Darby’s hunters could not find her. In the Sewer, the decoding machines continued to spew out their ribbons of secrets; new teams of experts were
brought in from Washington and London to see if there was any change in the character of the Soviet transmissions. Had Ilse alerted the Russians? Were they now mixing disinformation into the flow
of coded transmissions? The experts said that there had been no change; the same information, reams of it, was still coming over the wires faster than it could be translated.

“You know,” Rosalind said to Christopher, “I wonder. It’s all very odd, the way things just go on as if nothing has happened. Do you think Ilse was
not
a Soviet
agent? Did the Russians simply ship her off to the labor camps without questioning her at all, without ever dreaming that she knows what she knows?”

“Why would she keep quiet?”

“Why did she keep quiet about her father?”

“But the Russians know what Barney is.”

“They knew what her father was, too. For someone who smells like a rose, old Ilse has a marvelous combination of men in her life, hasn’t she?” said Rosalind, and went to
sleep.

— 6 —

But Wolkowicz was sure that Ilse would betray them. He expected the Russians to attack the Sewer. He sent teams deeper into the warren of abandoned tunnels to plant listening
devices and explosive charges.

“If the fuckers come,” he said, “I want to hear them.”

Wolkowicz was right, as usual. Just before dawn, on a night in spring three months after Ilse’s disappearance, one of the listeners pushed the alarm system. Red lights flashed up and down
the Sewer. Wolkowicz ran to the listening post.

“What do you hear?” he asked the listener.

“Footsteps, running. A lot of men.”

Wolkowicz pulled the headset off the listener’s head and clapped it to his own ears. Even as he heard the scuffle of boots running toward them through the sewers beyond the wall, he gave
the order to evacuate. Rosalind rolled up two of Darby’s Persian carpets and stood waiting with them clasped in her arms. The silenced submachine pistol was slung over her back.

“Christopher, come on,” she said. “Bring that Qum—the silk one on the wall.”

Wolkowicz shoved her roughly through the door. “Get out of here with your fucking rugs,” he said. “Call Darby. Go.”

Rosalind unslung her weapon and handed it to Christopher. The Sewer emptied. Only Christopher and Wolkowicz remained. Wolkowicz drew his P-38 and took the birdcage off the detonator box. He
jerked his head toward the exit. “Time to go,” he said.

“I’ll stay,” Christopher said.

“Like hell you will—”

Wolkowicz did not have time to finish. The wall of the inner office blew in with a tremendous noise. The blast lifted the nearest steel door, which had been fifty feet from the explosion, off
its hinges; it sailed toward Christopher and Wolkowicz, lazily, like a bit of foil in a gust of city wind. Wolkowicz did not move; he seemed to be hypnotized. Christopher threw him to the floor.
The door rang against the stone wall, then fell onto Wolkowicz, pinning his lower body to the floor.

Wolkowicz’s face was contorted with pain. He was bleeding from his nose and ears. “Birdcage!” he said in a loud voice. “I can’t move.
Blow
the fucking
thing.”

Wolkowicz jerked his head again, toward the detonator box. The handle had not been twisted. Christopher realized that the attackers had blown out a wall in order to get inside the Sewer.

A Russian soldier emerged from the haze of dust. He fired a burst from a Kalashnikov submachine gun into the room. Christopher saw the flame and heard the rapid reports. He killed the Russian
with the silenced machine pistol Rosalind had given him. Two more Russians rushed into the room, firing. The rounds from their weapons passed over the heads of the two Americans who lay prone in
the dust. Christopher shot both of the Russians.

Christopher pulled the steel door off Wolkowicz’s legs, seized him by the shoulders, and dragged him through the rest of the Sewer, into the low tunnel. Wolkowicz’s bulky body slid
easily over the carpet, cloth whistling against cloth.

“Birdcage! Birdcage!” Wolkowicz shouted. “God damn it, Paul,
blow
it.”

Christopher, stooping low, ran back into the debris and got the detonator box. Paying out wire from the spool, he scuttled backward into the tunnel and sprawled beside Wolkowicz. It was dead
quiet. Christopher could see through the open doors the length of three rooms.

Christopher saw figures running among the decoders, firing as they came. Rounds slammed into the stones and sang as they ricocheted around the arched walls. Christopher twisted the handle on the
detonator box. The decoding machines exploded one after another like a string of firecrackers. Then the main charges went off and the running men vanished in a flash of blinding white light, as if
the film had broken in a movie house.

— 7 —

In Washington, as winter ended, Christopher walked with David Patchen across the Georgetown campus. A cold rain pattered on the umbrella they were sharing. Patchen, who felt the
chill more than other men, was bundled up in a duffel coat, a long school scarf wound around his neck, a knitted cap pulled down over his ears.

“I remember saying I thought working with Wolkowicz would be interesting,” Patchen said, “but I had no idea
how
interesting. What is your dominant impression of your
year abroad?”

“It was a fiasco.”

“Don’t say that to anyone else. The Sewer—capital
S
, in Headquarters usage—is regarded as the greatest coup in the history of espionage.”

“It is? But if Ilse
was
a Soviet agent, then the Russians knew about the whole thing from the start.”

Patchen’s Doberman saw a stranger approaching and stopped frisking, his whole attention focused on this possible threat to his master. Patchen, too, stopped talking until the outsider, a
student who gave them a cheery hello, passed by.

“That argument has been discredited,” Patchen said. “The official view is that Ilse was not a Soviet agent until she started sleeping with Darby. The Soviets found out about
her adultery and blackmailed her.”

“That’s an ingenious theory.”

“It’s Wolkowicz’s theory. There’s a will to believe the wronged husband. If you accept the other explanation—
your
cynical explanation, Paul—then you
have to accept that the Outfit, not to mention the Brits, not to mention the invincible Wolkowicz, were all hoodwinked, used, and humiliated by the Soviets. And that simply cannot be.”

“Do they think that way at Headquarters? It’s crazy.”

“Not in their eyes. They believe they’re
avoiding
paranoia by refusing to suspect the enemy of being smarter than they are. That’s the real madness, to choose madness as
a way of remaining sane. Do you follow me?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Think about it. Then again, maybe you shouldn’t think about it. Maybe you’ve been thinking too much. You seem awfully sad, for a hero.”

Christopher had been decorated that day, along with Wolkowicz, in one of the secret ceremonies in the Director’s office. As Patchen spoke, they were passing under a lamppost. By its weak
light, Patchen searched Christopher’s face.

“They think you should go outside, under deep cover,” Patchen said.

“What deep cover?”

“Your book of poems again. Maybe you could write for that magazine.”

“What would I do under this impenetrable deep cover?”

“You’d be a singleton. You’d work alone. You could go anywhere, do anything, become a legend in your own time.
If
you can escape from Wolkowicz. He doesn’t want to
give you up.”

Christopher had lost none of his affection for Wolkowicz, but he could not work with him again. He knew too much about him.

“Who would I be working for, under deep cover?” he asked.

“You’d report to me,” Patchen replied. “But as I said, you’d be working alone.”

“All right,” Christopher said.

“Good.” Patchen coughed, then petted his Doberman when it bounded back to him in sympathy. “I think working alone will suit your temperament better,” he said.

— 1 —

Years afterward, in an expensive Washington restaurant, Rosalind Wilmot put the last forkful of food into her mouth, chewed, and swallowed. She drank some wine and touched her
lips with a napkin.

“I think it’s marvelous, the way one can now just ask for a bottle of wine in America and have actual Algerian Beaujolais brought to one’s table,” she said. “The
last time I was in Washington my brother took me to a little place that had been recommended by someone in your State Department. ‘Wine list?’ Clive said. ‘I’ll ask the
bartender,’ said the waitress. She came back with two great mugs of something Americans call Muscatel. We drank it down. Clive thought that it tasted like Algerian mead. He called for more.
‘This is absolutely delicious!’ he said. ‘Do you make it right here in America from the fermented honey of American bees?’ The waitress said, ‘I’ll ask the
bartender.’ ”

Rosalind smiled across the table at Christopher.

“You don’t look so very much older,” she said. “But then, you haven’t been working with Wolkowicz, have you?”

“No.”

“Lucky chap. For me, there’s been no escape from Robin. You know, of course, that he’s in Washington?”

Darby was now the head of British intelligence in the United States.

“I’d heard that,” Christopher said.

“What else had you heard about Robin?” Rosalind asked.

“Nothing much.”

Rosalind gave Christopher a measured look. “That hardly seems possible,” she said. “Robin is the talk of the town. He drinks like a fish and makes the most awful
scenes.”

“
Darby
drinks and makes scenes?”

“You find that odd, do you? Robin is taking this posting badly. His duties consist of going to lunch with someone from the Outfit a couple of times a week. He’s expected also to be
charming at parties. He’s not very charming, I’m afraid.”

“I thought there was more to his job than that.”

“Ordinarily there is. But Robin’s been shut off by the Americans. They refuse to put him in the picture. On important things, they deal direct with London through your chief of
station there. Robin thinks there’s a plot against him.”

“If he’s behaving as you say, maybe they just think he’s a drunk.”

“If drunks were mistrusted by either side there’d be jolly little Anglo-American collaboration,” Rosalind said. “No, he thinks it’s Wolkowicz.”

“Really?”

“Really. Wolkowicz is a vengeful bastard, isn’t he? And now he’s such a figure of mystery and power.”

It was true that Wolkowicz had come up in the world. Dennis Foley, Wolkowicz’s old friend from the congressional investigations committee, had become the President’s assistant for
intelligence matters. Foley had borrowed Wolkowicz from the Outfit for special duties. No one knew the exact nature of these duties.

“Is Barney a figure of mystery and power?” Christopher asked.