Wolkowicz took the photographs out of Darby’s hand. Darby offered no resistance.
“What we have here, in this sewer,” Wolkowicz said, “is a very good operation. Nothing should spoil it. So what I want is peace and brotherhood down here. But at four o’clock this afternoon, I want you to meet me, Darby, out in the woods. Christopher will bring you to the place. I’ll take Rosalind with me now.”
Darby wasn’t smiling, but no hint of guilt or embarrassment crossed his face. “Is Ros to be a hostage?” he asked.
“Just show up,” Wolkowicz said.
On the way to his rendezvous with Wolkowicz, while Christopher drove, Robin Darby chattered. “You’re remarkably like your father,” he said. “Not in looks, really—it’s the manner. You seem to have the same sort of super-absorbent mind. Rather scary, actually; your father was otherworldly. Ros loaned me the book of your poems. The poetic voice is quite similar. Is all that deliberate? Do you consciously emulate him?”
“We’re almost there,” Christopher said.
The Mercedes was rolling along a narrow road in the woods. The windshield was steamy. Christopher rolled down the window and the sound of the tires crunching on the snow came inside. The shuttered façade of a Heurigestube, closed for the winter, came into view. Wolkowicz waited in the parking lot, a squat figure in a duffel coat.
“An encounter in the woods over a lady’s virtue,” Darby said. “How very Ruritanian.”
Darby alighted. He wore a green Loden cape. Wolkowicz said nothing, but his eyes never left Darby’s smiling face. Wolkowicz took off his coat and hung it on the hood ornament of his Mercedes. He gave his P-38 to Christopher, and then drew a snub-nosed .38 caliber revolver from an ankle holster.
“Is it to be pistols, then?” Darby asked.
Wolkowicz gave the second pistol to Christopher. Then, without so much as drawing in his breath, he launched himself across the five or six feet of space that separated him from Darby and smashed his fist into the other man’s bearded face. Darby’s thin body flew backwards, cape fluttering as he fell.
Christopher had never seen anyone move so fast and so violently as Wolkowicz. Before Christopher heard the sound of Wolkowicz’s fist smashing the cartilage in Darby’s nose, the two men were on the ground, flailing each other. Neither used his voice; the only sound was the fall of fists, the impact of feet, and gasps of pain and effort. Both men were trained fighters. Wolkowicz used no judo, only his fists and feet; perhaps he was too angry. Darby, who knew that he had no chance against Wolkowicz in a fistfight, did use his training. He kicked Wolkowicz in the groin and pounded his stomach and kidneys with cleaverlike blows with the edge of his hands. The struggle might have lasted three or four minutes, a long time. Neither man won. It just ended.
Wolkowicz and Darby lay together for a moment in the trampled snow, which was pink with their blood. Then Wolkowicz, sobbing for breath as the result of a blow to the sternum, got to his feet and struggled to the car. He put his hands on the fender and fought to breathe. Darby, still lying in the tangle of his ruined cape—Wolkowicz had used it to sling him against a tree—gazed at his adversary. All the sparkling expression had been beaten out of Darby’s eyes. Blood poured from his broken nose into his beard; he reached into his mouth and brought out a broken tooth.
Wolkowicz picked up his P-38. Darby’s eyes did not change expression. Christopher moved quickly to place his body between the two enemies. But Wolkowicz had no plan to shoot Darby. Chest heaving, he tucked his holstered pistol into the waistband of his trousers and put a hand on Christopher’s shoulder, moving him to one side. He spat a globule of reddened saliva into the snow and pointed a finger at Darby. The finger was broken.
“I just want you to know,” Wolkowicz said, coughing, “that this was only round one. Nothing’s over yet. Got it, Limey?”
Darby held Wolkowicz’s enraged glance for a long moment. Then he scooped up a double handful of snow and pressed it against his ruined face.
— 4 —
Christopher was awakened the following night by a pounding on his door, hammer blows that echoed through the apartment. Rosalind was with him; she stood behind Christopher in the darkened room with a pistol in her hand while he opened the door.
Ilse Wolkowicz stood on the landing, holding the valise with which she had been battering the door panels.
“Paul, Paul,” she said. “You have to let me in. Barney is drinking, he’s gone crazy, he went out. He’s going to do something terrible.”
Christopher turned on the light. Rosalind’s nude figure, white skin and black hair, leaped into view; she was still pointing her Walther, which she held in the approved two-handed grip, at the open door. Ilse looked her up and down.
“Dear God,” she said with a shrill laugh, “what a picture.” With her eyes still on Rosalind, she seized Christopher’s arm, pinching the flesh between her nails, pulling his ear toward her mouth. He leaned over.
“The Russians,” Ilse hissed.
Rosalind, frowning at Ilse, shielded her pubis with the pistol, a perverse gesture of modesty. Abruptly, she turned and left the room.
“It’s true,” Ilse said to Christopher, whispering rapidly. “He’s going to tell them about me.”
“Tell the Russians about you? Tell them what?”
“About my father. He wasn’t in the Waffen SS, he was in the other SS. He was in charge of a camp in Poland. It’s so terrible to be a German. Our home was in the Soviet Zone; I come under their jurisdiction. They’ll kill me for what my father did.”
Images flooded into Christopher’s mind: the faces of the women in the camps, dozens of them, who had looked like Lori, each with a black circle drawn around her head. Ilse’s fingernails dug into the flesh of his arm. He pried her fingers loose and pushed her hand away.
“I can’t help you,” he said.
“For God’s sake, Paul—I was only a child! I was in Switzerland, going to school. I knew nothing. Do you think my parents told me what my father was doing in the camps?”
Christopher was wearing a dressing gown. Ilse slid her hand under the lapel, onto his bare skin. He stepped away from her.
Ilse stared at him in disbelief. “Your father wouldn’t have let this happen to me,” she said.
Christopher didn’t answer her. He went to the telephone and dialed a number. She rushed after him and snatched at the telephone.
“Not Darby,” Ilse said. “Don’t call him.” She was still talking in her urgent whisper. She hung up the phone. “I don’t want help from either of the bastards,” she said.
She seized the lapels of Christopher’s dressing gown again. He stepped back.
“Then you’d better stay here with Rosalind,” he said. “I’ll try to find Barney. He won’t go to the Russians.”
“You don’t know Barney,” Ilse said. “You don’t know what was between us.”
Rosalind came back, fully clothed, her coat over her arm. Her face was cold and composed.
“Rosalind will stay with you,” Christopher said to Ilse.
“Like hell I will,” Rosalind said. “I heard every word.” She walked out the door.
Christopher found Wolkowicz in the Sewer, sitting in the inner office at Darby’s desk, reading a streamer from one of the decoding machines. He appeared to be perfectly sober, but then he always did.
“Ilse is at my place,” Christopher said.
“Is she?”
Wolkowicz did not raise his eyes from his reading. Presently he got up and left the room. For the rest of the night he avoided Christopher. Christopher stayed in the Sewer until Darby and Rosalind came in at dawn. He took Wolkowicz home with him. Wolkowicz knew where the car was going as it passed through the streets leading to Christopher’s apartment house; he sat with the brim of his hat pulled down over his eyes, battered hands in his coat pockets, saying nothing.
In Christopher’s apartment, they found a note from Ilse; she had gone home to pack; she had decided to go to the States. Christophe
r called Wolkowicz’s number; there was no answer. He went to Wolkowicz’s apartment; the porter had not seen her come in.
Wolkowicz’s Austrian driver arrived with a message. In a destroyed street between Christopher’s apartment and her own place, Ilse had been kidnapped from her taxi. A truck had backed into the taxi and when the driver leaped out to remonstrate, two men had wrenched open the back doors and pulled Ilse into another car.
“She resisted, she was screaming for help,” the taxi driver told Christopher. “She was holding on to my taxi like this, very strong, I thought she was going to pull the door off the hinges, and when she wouldn’t let go, one of the Russians punched her in the stomach. Then she was limp, yes? So they just stuffed her into their car.”
“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.
The Last Supper Page 23
