The Last Supper

by Charles McCarry

  Wolkowicz looked Waddy up and down. “I’ll bet you did, you little cocksucker,” he said.

  Waddy tilted his head in puzzlement, as if Wolkowicz had cracked a joke that he didn’t quite understand. There was a knock at the door. A Ceylonese servant, all in white, scuttled in, balancing a huge silver tray on his head.

  “Ah, breakfast,” Waddy said. “Sit ye down, Barney, sit ye down. They do a much better breakfast here than what we used to get in Burma.”

  They were in a hotel in Nuwara Eliya, the highest and most beautiful place in Ceylon. Before the war, the British had used it as a hill station, a place to go in the hot season. Now it was headquarters for the Outfit, and for British special operations, in the China-Burma-India Theater.

  The servant plucked silver domes off plates of food and poured steaming coffee into china cups. He stood back, one bare foot on top of the other, in case he was needed.

  “That’s all right,” Waddy said. “You can go away now.”

  The servant left. Wolkowicz, wearing nothing but his wrinkled khaki drawers, got out of bed and sat down at the table. Waddy was energetically spreading marmalade onto a piece of toast.

  “Cream? Sugar?” Waddy asked. “Is this room all right?”

  Wolkowicz, arriving in the dark the night before, after a flight from the battlefield, had not appreciated the splendor of the Grand Hotel. He looked out the window again. He could see crimson rhododendron bushes, hundreds of them, all in bloom. A silvery lake lay in the middle distance, the reflection of cypresses and pines shimmering on its placid surface. Wolkowicz drank an entire cup of coffee in three swallows. Waddy poured him another cup, then watched in satisfaction as Wolkowicz demolished the rest of the breakfast, porridge and eggs and sausage and bacon and a grilled tomato. As Wolkowicz mopped up the yolk with bread, Waddy urged more of everything on him: he hadn’t touched his own food.

  While Wolkowicz ate, Waddy told him the story of his own miraculous escape from Burma, eyes dancing as if no one on earth besides the two of them could understand what a delicious joke their firefight with the Japanese had been. The bolting elephant had carried Waddy straight to the nearest trail, and there he had encountered what was left of Force Jessup. The Kachins had whisked him back to their base, fighting their way through Japanese positions. Waddy had been delirious as a result of his wounds and unable to fight himself. He had just managed to get the radio working in order to call headquarters and report Wolkowicz’s death and his own disabling wounds. The Kachins had cleared a runway in the jungle, a DC-3 had made a daring landing, and Waddy had been flown out to Ceylon.

  Wolkowicz eyed Waddy’s ribbons.

  “Is that what you got the D.S.C. for?” he asked.

  “I myself think it’s excessive,” Waddy said. “But they insisted. They’ve made me acting C.O., too, so the world’s your oyster in Nuwara Eliya, my dear Barnabas. Golly, it’s good to see you back from the dead!” He filled their coffee cups again. “Now, tell me your story.”

  Waddy sat back expectantly and lit a British cigarette with a Dunhill lighter. Wolkowicz remained silent. Waddy peered across the table at him. “Is it true you hitched up with the Brits?” he asked. “There’re rumors that you had amnesia and still killed half the Jap Army.”

  Wolkowicz had been staring fixedly at Waddy the whole time he ate the two complete breakfasts, his greenish eyes dull with contempt, but he had not uttered a sound except for the peculiar sucking noises that resulted from the techniques he had invented in order to eat without teeth: he soaked his toast in coffee, mashed his sausage with his fork, swallowed his fried eggs as if they were oysters. Finally, wiping his greasy lips with an egg-stained napkin, he spoke. “I’m not going to tell you a fucking thing,” he said.

  “You’re not?”

  Waddy held the cigarette in the center of his mouth, puffing rapidly as he continued to give Wolkowicz a look filled with cheery comradeship. His voice trembled slightly and he kept his hands out of sight beneath the table; Wolkowicz supposed that they were trembling, too.

  “Look,” Waddy said in a bluff tone of voice, his cigarette bobbing up and down as he spoke, “you know I don’t care what you’ve been up to. But you’ve been missing for six months, Barnabas. Headquarters wonders where you’ve been. They want to hang a medal on you. You and I have to put something on paper, send in a report.”

  Wolkowicz stood up, hairy and broad, and opened his toothless mouth in a black grin. “Waddy,’ he said, “just get the fuck out of here. I’m going to turn in a report, all right. But it won’t be to you.”

  Boyish animation, Waddy’s habitual expression, drained out of his face. He blushed under his tan, and then he looked deep into Wolkowicz’s eyes, like a schoolboy trying to conceal his sullen resentment of punishment from a headmaster who had seen through his lies.

  “Out,” Wolkowicz repeated.

  Waddy put on his sunglasses. Wolkowicz reached across the table, removed the cigarette from Waddy’s lips, seized him by the hair, and ground out the burning end on the lens. Sparks fell on Waddy’s perfectly laundered shirt, burning little holes in it.

  — 7 —

  At midnight, carrying a sheaf of papers in his hand, Wolkowicz stalked through the long corridors of the vast old Victorian hotel to Waddy Jessup’s room. The door was unlocked. Wolkowicz opened it and stepped inside.

  Waddy, dressed in a fitted silk dressing gown, stood by the window with a glass in his hand. He was all alone. A half-empty bottle of Glenlivet Scotch stood on a baize table. The Baby Nambu pistol lay on the green cloth beside the bottle. Waddy did not greet Wolkowicz, but turned and walked back to the table and poured him a drink. Waddy’s hand was still unsteady. He spilled whisky on the tabletop, creating a spreading dark stain in the felt. The whisky was colorless in the glass. Waddy drank it off.

  “I’ve brought you a couple of things to read,” Wolkowicz said. “Are you up to it?”

  “Of course.”

  Waddy put down his empty glass with a thump and accepted a handwritten document from Wolkowicz. It was a detailed description, ten pages long, of the action in the jungle. Slumped in a chair, turning the pages, Waddy struggled to understand what he was reading. The style was dry and factual. Wolkowicz’s handwriting was strange: line after line of perfect Palmer Method penmanship.

  Waddy paused to pour himself another drink. His hands quivered. Scotch splashed over the rim of the glass. Wolkowicz reached across the table and gently removed the tumbler from Waddy’s fingers. When he had finished reading, Waddy picked up his glass again and drained it. His hand was quite steady now.

  “Is that what you think happened?” Waddy said. His look of friendliness had given way to an expression of sullen resentment.

  “There was a witness.”

  “A witness?”

  Wolkowicz handed Waddy the other paper. It was written in a flowing British hand, as handsome in its way as Wolkowicz’s. Within the sentences, words were joined together like a parade of elephants by a sweeping stroke of the pen that tied the last letter of one word to the first letter of the next. Each letter was perfectly formed: the ys were particularly fine. Waddy, though he realized that he was reading his death warrant, giggled. It was uncanny that any two grown men should write in this inhumanly perfect way. And it appeared that they had met in the Burmese jungle. What were the odds on that!

  Waddy, intending to laugh aloud at this absurdity, instead uttered a sob. The paper he held in his hands was a narrative account of Wolkowicz’s workmanlike bravery, and of Waddy’s shameful cowardice, during the attack by the Japanese. It was signed by some British captain: Wolkowicz’s “witness.” Neither of these champion penmen had an ounce of pity for Waddy; neither had room in their dry sentences to mention the simple truth that Waddy had been driven mad by the Japanese, by the jungle, by the war, by the strain of living through what he had thought was the hour of his own death. His insanity was temporary. It was understandable. There was no guilt involved. It had happened to oth
ers; Waddy wasn’t the only one.

  “This Brit is willing to say that he watched the whole thing from hiding?” Waddy said in an unsteady voice.

  “Why not? It’s the truth.”

  “Why didn’t he attack, then? Why didn’t he come to our aid?”

  “You can ask him that at your court-martial, Waddy.”

  Waddy fell silent. His breathing was very loud, almost a snore, as a result of the alcohol he had drunk. He worked his tongue as if it were coated with some ill-tasting substance. He was unable to talk. His eyes, red-rimmed and watery, stared with a faraway expression at the Baby Nambu.

  “Just leave me alone with that,” Waddy said dolefully, nodding at the pistol. “Is that what you want?”

  Wolkowicz picked up the ridiculous little weapon, removed the clip, and ejected the round from the chamber. He then slid it into his trousers pocket. Waddy, spilling Scotch down the front of his iridescent blue robe, struggled to speak. At last, sound issued from his mouth.

  “. . . Sorry,” he said.

  Tears slid down Waddy’s smooth-shaven cheeks. Wolkowicz picked him up, surprised again by how little his angular body weighed, and threw him onto his bed.

  At eleven the following morning, Wolkowicz found Waddy on the practice green, putting, his narrow body hunched over the club, his face frozen in concentration.

  There was no sign, in the bright early sunlight, that Wadsworth Jessup had ever had a drink. Attired in faultless starched khakis, decorations glowing on his breast, he flashed his eager smile and clapped Wolkowicz on the shoulder.

  “Great news, Barnabas,” Waddy said. “We’ve won in Burma.”

  He beamed at his subordinate, a confident man certain of admiration. He was behaving as if he had never read the reports Wolkowicz had given him the night before.

  “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.”

  Two

  — 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:

  What beast slouched here in our sleep,

  crunching the brittle bones of our illusions

  in its jaws? Only our old affectionate

  pet: he grew hungry in the dark house.

  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 we
re 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.