The Last Supper

by Charles McCarry

  “Make a hard right, now,” Wolkowicz said.

  Christopher turned into a passage in the rubble. The nose of the car dipped and he found himself driving down a curving stone ramp.

  “This used to be an underground garage,” Wolkowicz said. “Now it’s an underground garage again. We run it. It’s surprising how much of a big city is underground—most of the important stuff.”

  They were in a large room, brilliantly lighted with arc lamps. Mechanics worked on several cars.

  “The garage is good cover,” Wolkowicz said. “You can drive into a garage anytime without arousing suspicion. But we have a hell of a time getting enough cars to fix; it’s always the simplest details that take up the most time.”

  Another man in a leather coat and a Tyrolean hat awaited them here.

  “Hi,” he said in a chipper American accent. “Want to go below?” He unlocked the door of a van and slid it open. Wolkowicz jumped in. Christopher followed him. The van, a boxy vehicle like an American bread truck, was parked with its rear door flush against the wall. Wolkowicz slid the door upward with a clatter and shone a flashlight against the steel plates of a door set into the stone wall of the garage. The door swung open. A second American, this one dressed in denim coveralls, stood inside, at the head of a steep flight of stairs. He wore a military-issue .45 Colt automatic in a shoulder holster and carried a submachine gun slung across his chest. The submachine gun was fitted with a thick silencer that was nearly as long as the weapon itself.

  Wolkowicz plunged down the stairs, his feet rattling the iron treads. As he got to the darkness at the bottom he handed Christopher a flashlight and led the way through a long tunnel; beyond its walls, which were encrusted with dead lichens, Christopher heard the rush of running water and detected the sweetish odor of decomposed excrement.

  “You’re in an old sewer,” Wolkowicz said. “Everybody had forgotten about it until we came along.”

  They were in a labyrinth, with smaller passages leading off the main tunnel and smaller ones yet branching off the secondary tunnels. Wolkowicz moved briskly, sure of the way. He fell to his knees and crawled into a low tunnel. A long narrow carpet of the kind usually laid in hallways had been put down on the floor. At the end, Wolkowicz pulled an army field telephone out of its box and turned the crank. He spoke a phrase Christopher could not understand into the mouthpiece, then replaced the phone.

  “We’re there,” Wolkowicz said, sitting with his back pressed against the wall.

  “What language was that you just spoke on the phone?”

  “Kachin.” Wolkowicz grinned. “Let the fucking Russians figure that out,” he said. “You’ll have to learn the daily passwords in Kachin. It’s not hard.”

  A door opened. The colors in the rug, which was at least thirty feet long, glowed in the sudden bath of stark electric light.

  Wolkowicz crawled through the door into a long room that had been created out of a section of tunnel. The walls were padded with soundproofing material. The word Silence! was painted on every wall in letters two feet high. Half a dozen men sat at a long table, each tending a bank of tape recorders.

  Wolkowicz ignored them. He led Christopher through another door. It opened into a guardroom where three men waited alertly, submachine guns at the ready. Christopher saw a detonator box wired and ready, inside the cover of an ornate birdcage. Wolkowicz followed his glance.

  “The birdcage is the Brits’ idea of a safety device,” Wolkowicz said. “They don’t want to fall on the handle when drunk and blow everybody up. Right?” The guards smiled at the tired joke.

  “Beyond this point, everything is wired. We can blow it if we have to,” Wolkowicz said. “The code word is Birdcage. The charges are a mixture of TNT and phosphorus; when they go off, this sewer becomes one big burn bag.”

  In the next room, Wolkowicz slapped the metal case of a chattering machine that looked like a very complicated teletype. It was one of five identical devices that were spewing out streamers of white paper. Wolkowicz tore one off and handed it to Christopher. It was covered with Russian text.

  “This is the operation,” Wolkowicz said. “This room is directly underneath the Imperial Hotel, which is Russian headquarters. These funny-looking typewriters are replicas of their decoding machines. We’re intercepting and decoding and reading every fucking word they send and receive. Come on. We’ll see if the genius is here.”

  Wolkowicz swung open another steel door and strode into a smaller room. The floor was covered with Persian carpets, laid edge to edge, and more carpets had been hung like paintings on the whitewashed walls. A dark-haired girl sat behind an antique desk, working on a streamer from the decoding machine. She was rolling the paper into a tube; a pyramid of similar tubes, fastened by rubber bands, stood in a basket on the floor. She, too, was equipped with a silenced submachine gun; it lay on a fragment of carpet, to protect the desk from scratching.

  “Hello, Rosie,” Wolkowicz said. “Where is he?”

  “Not far,” the girl said in a British voice. She had frank eyes, large and violet—the only violet eyes Christopher had ever seen. “You must be the new Yank,” she said to Christopher.

  “Paul Christopher.”

  “Rosalind Wilmot.”

  “Rosie works for the head Brit,” Wolkowicz said. “In actual fact, this is her show. She’s the queen of the underground.”

  “I do make tea,” Rosalind said. “Very tricky at this depth. Would you like a cup?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Very negative about tea, the Americans. Here’s Robin.”

  A man came into the room with a stack of fluttering streamers across his arm. He laid them on Rosalind Wilmot’s desk. He did not give Wolkowicz and Christopher so much as a glance.

  “We must have more Russian speakers,” the man said. His accent was the British equivalent of Wolkowicz’s: street English, with the shadow of a foreign intonation. There the resemblance ended. Where Wolkowicz was squat and muscular, Robin Darby was tall and thin; instead of a squashed Slavic face, he had a large hooked nose and a domed forehead. His eyes were bold and expressive rather than slanted and guarded. He wore a full beard, a mixture of gray and ginger hairs, an unusual adornment in the well-barbered years just after the war.

  “Do you speak Russian?” he asked Christopher.

  “No.”

  “Neither does Rosalind. How are we supposed to read all this bloody stuff?”

  “Christopher reads Russian,” Wolkowicz said. “He just doesn’t speak it.”

  “Ah, Christopher. I knew your late father. Welcome to Plato’s cave. My name is Darby.”

  “How do you do?”

  “Bloody badly. Too much of a good thing, all these ribbons of paper. You can’t visualize how boring—boring!—these cretinous Soviets are. Sit down. I’ll put you in the picture.”

  A year before, in Berlin, Robin Darby, an officer of the British intelligence service, had completed the theft of a Soviet coding machine.

  “I say completed,” Darby said, sipping tea from a mug, “because it took three perishing years to steal the thing. My man inside Soviet headquarters smuggled it out a part at a time. He was the repairman, you see. Every time a machine needed maintenance, which was often—the Russians aren’t terribly mechanical, you know—he’d winkle out some cog or gear in his toolbox. Eventually we had enough of the vital parts to deduce the rest of the machine. Then we built one of our own, hooked it up to a landline running out of the Soviet Embassy in a European capital that shall be nameless, and lo! it worked. We went into mass production.”

  “How did you recruit the repairman?”

  “Recruit him?” Darby said. “We could hardly keep him out by barring the doors. He was a German Communist who’d vanished into Russia before the war. He just popped up in Berlin after the fighting was over, looked us up, and said, ‘Look here, old chaps, how would you like a decoding machine?’ Well, of course we smelled a rat, but we led him on in our super-clever way, an
d what do you know? The bloody thing worked. The whole scenario was so implausible that London and Washington had no choice but to believe it. That’s so often the way, though, isn’t it?”

  “If he was a Communist, trusted by the Russians to repair these machines,” Christopher said, “why did he do it? How did he do it?”

  Robin Darby shrugged his sharp shoulders. “Who knows?” he said. “I suppose he was disillusioned with Soviet life. Agents are very strange, you know. We did pay him a hundred thousand pounds.”

  “Is he now spending it somewhere?”

  “No, poor chap,” Darby said. “He died of rabies just after he delivered the last bit of clockwork, though I don’t know where he found a dog to bite him in Berlin; I thought the Germans had made them all into stew. It’s a fearsome death, rabies—the spine bends, the jaws clench, the mouth foams. It was enough to make one think that God is a Red.”

  Robin Darby stretched, yawned, and departed. Rosalind lingered for a moment.

  “As you’ve just arrived, would you like to meet for dinner?” she said to Christopher. “I know Vienna intimately. There’s a marvelous place where the waiters are ex-SS troopers, dressed in cowboy suits.”

  Christopher agreed to meet her at seven. Wolkowicz waited until the door closed behind her before speaking.

  “Now you know who the world’s greatest spy is,” he said. “Darby is such a Britshit. ‘Our agent, our operation!’ The decoding machine was bought and paid for with Outfit money and this whole operation is Outfit planning. Darby was a messenger.”

  “You don’t like Darby?”

  “I can’t stand the la-de-da son of a bitch.”

  — 2 —

  Both Christopher and Rosalind Wilmot thought it strange that Wolkowicz and Darby were not compatible. They had a great deal in common. Darby was the anglicization of some long Lithuanian name: his parents, like Wolkowicz’s, were refugees from eastern Europe. Both had grown up in working-class neighborhoods, the sons of self-educated factory workers. Both had gone to universities on scholarships. To carry coincidence to unlikely extremes, both had parachuted into Burma during the war and fought with the Kachins behind the Japanese lines.

  “Good job they landed in different parts of the jungle,” Rosalind said. “They’re too much alike. Both despise the old-school-tie crowd—it’s an obsession with Robin, and with Wolkowicz, too. Then they look at each other, poor devils, and see what the truly awful alternative is—each other.”

  “Is that it?” Christopher asked.

  “Not entirely. There’s Frau Wolkowicz. Ilse rather fancies old Robin, you know. Not so much as she fancies delicious you, Christopher, but she does fancy him, rather.”

  This conversation took place in the fall, as Christopher and Rosalind sat in his car outside her apartment building. They had come from a dinner party at the Wolkowiczes’. Throughout the evening, Robin Darby had carried on a comic flirtation with Ilse, quoting love lyrics in German and inviting her to run away to Paris. Ilse had countered Darby with a joke of her own, pretending to a passion for Christopher; she had stroked his hand, gazed at him and sighed, and finally even sat on his lap. Ilse had drunk a lot of wine.

  “Sometimes, when Ilse’s a bit tiddly,” Rosalind said, “I get the impression she even fancies me.”

  “All that’s a joke,” Christopher said.

  “Old Wolkowicz doesn’t see the joke, you know,” said Rosalind. “Tonight he kept on glowering and fingering his heater.”

  “Fingering his what?”

  “His heater. Isn’t that what you Americans call a firearm?” Rosalind put a hand on Christopher’s arm. “Really, I think Ilse is unsafe for you,” she said. “But do you think there can ever be love between the two of us?”

  Christopher smiled at her. She stroked his face.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “You have nice eyes, but you say ‘Ameddican’ and ‘heatuh.’ You don’t seem to be able to talk like a regular person.”

  “Actually there’s no hope of love for you and me, Christopher. There’s someone else in my life. It’s hopeless, but there it is.”

  “Not a married man, Rosalind?”

  “Worse than that—incest.” In the feeble roof light, Rosalind’s great limpid eyes shone with mirth. “But look here,” she continued, “we could be friends—wouldn’t that be all right?”

  “Yes. It would be torture, but it would be all right.”

  “Not torture. Bliss. We could be sexual friends.”

  “Sexual friends?”

  “You don’t believe in sexual friendship?”

  “Oh, yes. But I didn’t know that women believed in it, too.”

  “Oh, dear—you’re not telling me you’re queer?”

  Christopher laughed. “No.”

  “Well, then. Shall we try it?”

  They went upstairs together.

  Months later, Rosalind turned to Christopher in bed and seized his ears in her two hands. It was a large double bed in her overheated bourgeois flat at the top of an apartment house; from the windows they could see the roofs of the royal palace. Christopher’s pistol in its shoulder holster hung from one bedpost, Rosalind’s from the other. She kneeled astride Christopher, her black hair swinging, and laughed.

  “Pistols on the bedposts,” she said. “Really, it’s like some perverse Teutonic brothel. We owe so much to Wolkowicz and Darby.”

  “Can we change the subject?”

  “You don’t want to gossip about our masters? Such an honorable Ameddican. I thought it was all right to backbite if one was in bed.”

  Christopher looked at his watch and stirred. Rosalind pinned his shoulders to the mattress.

  “Do let me gossip,” she said. “Robin can be terribly funny. Do you know what he calls you and Wolkowicz? ‘Tall-blond-and-handsome and Short-brutish-and-ugly.’ ”

  Christopher picked Rosalind up—she was a small girl—and set her on the other side of the bed. He went to the window and looked out. Fat snowflakes drifted out of a gray sky, turning the rooftops white. Rosalind called to him; he didn’t answer. She crossed the room and climbed naked onto the windowsill.

  “Snow,” she said. “If we start now in that great beast of a car of yours, we can be in St. Anton by morning. Wouldn’t it be lovely to get out of this filthy city and up into the lovely clean mountains? Skiing, Christopher.”

  Rosalind always called her sexual partner by his last name, a reminder of the terms of their contract. Love was never mentioned between them; as Rosalind had specified, they had remained friends.

  “I’m the duty officer this weekend,” Christopher said.

  “In the absence of Robin and Short-brutish-and-ugly, you’re in charge. Call in somebody else.”

  Wolkowicz was away, meeting the Director in London. Darby had left Vienna, too. Christopher hesitated.

  “Sun, Christopher,” Rosalind said. “We’d see the sun. Remember the sun? Driving up the Vorarlberg, we’d break through the clouds into dazzling sunlight. The virgin snow would be gleaming on the mountainsides, we’d breathe the Alpine air.”

  “All right. Pack.”

  They drove all night, and as Rosalind had foreseen, they arrived in St. Anton, in brilliant sunshine, at midmorning. They skied until late afternoon and then came down to the hotel for hot chocolate. They sat on the terrace, basking in the sun; Rosalind had got a light tan and her eyes were more beautiful than ever. Suddenly they brimmed with laughter.

  “Ah,” she said.

  Rosalind was gazing over Christopher’s shoulder at a couple in ski clothes who stood on the path leading to the hotel. They were kissing passionately; the woman’s fingers clawed at the man’s back. They separated and walked on, still kissing, toward the hotel. Desire had made them unsteady and they staggered slightly as they groped their way along the snowy path, eyes shut. The woman took off her cap and shook her blond hair loose. She looked directly into Christopher’s face. It was Ilse. Robin Darby’s hand clasped her breast through the wool of h
er sweater.

  Rosalind covered her mouth and laughed.

  — 3 —

  If Wolkowicz, with his sensitivity to the moods of others, suspected his wife’s adultery, he did not betray his suspicions to Darby or to Ilse by so much as a gesture, and he never mentioned them to Christopher. But he often left the Sewer during his shift on duty, leaving Christopher in charge. The schedule was ideal from the point of view of the lovers: when Darby was off duty, Wolkowicz was on duty, fifty feet underground, sealed in a secret installation. This gave Ilse and Darby a sense of freedom: they lunched together in restaurants, went to tea dances in hotels, strolled through the Prater.

  Nevertheless, Wolkowicz, using all his professional skills, watched them, collecting evidence. One day he came to work an hour early, bringing Christopher with him. He carried a large yellow envelope, the flap secured with tape. He closed the steel door behind him and threw the envelope onto Darby’s desk.

  Darby lifted his amused eyes. “What’s this?” he asked.

  “Open it up.”

  Darby slit the seal and emptied the contents, a stack of glossy photographs bound with a rubber band, onto the polished surface of the desk. Darby removed the rubber band and began to look at the pictures. A look of mild interest spread over his face. Rosalind, standing beside him, flushed and bit her lip.

  “Christopher,” she said, “shall we go check the machines?”

  Wolkowicz stood in front of the door. “Stay put,” he said, “both of you.”

  Darby, still amused, looked from Rosalind to Wolkowicz to Christopher. He separated the photographs into two stacks and put the larger stack back into the yellow envelope. Then he held up the top photo from the smaller stack: it was a clear, perfectly exposed candid portrait of Darby and Ilse, naked together in an overstuffed chair.

  “I’ll have copies of each of this lot,” Darby said. “I don’t think the outdoor shots are up to much, do you? Too many clothes.”