Senator Brooks was entranced by his wife’s beauty. His face, when he looked at her, wore an expression of helpless adoration. He filled her glass, took away her plate. He asked her if she would like strawberries.
“Do you think they’re real strawberries?” she asked in her soft southern accent. “I can’t bear those hothouse berries that taste like wadded-up pages torn out of the telephone book.”
“I’ll find out if they’re fresh,” Senator Brooks said.
While he was gone, his wife sat quietly, turning a sapphire ring on her finger, her eyes fixed on the floor. As soon as her husband was out of eyeshot, her face lost its smiling charm. No one was watching her except Darby. Under his intense stare, her lips parted and she started to smile again. Senator Brooks returned with a dish of strawberries and a glass of champagne and she gained control of herself and gave him her brilliant smile.
The strawberries were heaped with whipped cream. She lifted some on her finger and licked it off. She had a quick, pink tongue. She giggled, dipped her finger in the whipped cream again, and thrust it into her mouth.
Darby laughed. It was a raucous, mocking laugh, different from all the others he had been using. Rosalind, who up to now had taken no interest in Darby’s game, leaned forward and spoke to him. Darby lifted his forearm and shook it, as if he were flinging off an unwanted hand.
“I say, Senator,” Darby said loudly. “Your wife is awfully good at that.”
Senator Brooks turned his smooth face toward Darby and gave him a cordial politician’s smile. “Good at what?” he asked.
“Getting her teeth out of the way.”
Brooks lost his smile. His wife took her finger out of her mouth.
“I mean to say it’s awfully good for the hair, or so I’ve heard,” Darby said.
“Good for the hair?”
“Yes, the hair. You have a magnificent thatch of it, if I may say so, no sign of gray, unusual in a man of your years. Earlier, as I was admiring Mrs. Brooks’s teeth, I wondered how that could possibly be, but now of course it’s quite obvious.”
Brooks had begun to smile again. This was going to be another strange transatlantic joke. Mrs. Brooks, holding her dish of strawberries in her smooth lap, sat quite still.
“The secret of eternal youth, at least so far as the hair is concerned, was told to me years ago in London, by the wife of an aging but vigorous poet. She got a bit tiddly at a party, did the poet’s wife. Most of the people there were younger than her husband, but some of them already had gray hair. She looked round at the company and said, ‘There seems to be a lot of gray hair here for such a young crowd.’ I agreed. ‘I give my husband three blow jobs a week and he doesn’t have a gray hair in his head,’ she said.”
The party had gone silent. Darby raised his voice and addressed the rigid guests.
“I had no idea that sort of cure was possible in America, your women have such bloody great strong teeth,” he said. “But the senator here is living proof, isn’t he?”
Senator Brooks, moving with great deliberation, lifted the dish of strawberries from his wife’s hand and led her from the room.
Darby watched them go, then shook hands with the hostess. “Lovely party, my dear Vera,” he said, and left.
“Dear God,” Rosalind said. “He is over the edge.”
— 5 —
“Over the edge my ass,” Wolkowicz said. “It’s all part of the act. He’s getting ready to disappear.”
Wolkowicz believed that Darby’s public misbehavior was an act, part of an elaborate scheme to make it seem that he was a lunatic rather than a criminal. On the table before Wolkowicz were the fragments of evidence that had led him to the conclusion that Robin Darby was a Soviet agent. The photographs, the dry typed reports of movements and contacts, the critiques of operations that had seemed at the time to be such triumphs for British intelligence—all added up, for Wolkowicz, to the sum of Darby’s guilt. Darby’s drunken outburst at the party was just another digit to add to the column.
“We’re going to have to move,” Wolkowicz said, “or we’ll lose the cocksucker.”
Wolkowicz closed the file. “Let’s get Horace in here,” he said. Christopher was surprised that Wolkowicz was willing to let the discussion of Darby’s behavior at the party drop with so little discussion; usually he worried every bit of evidence for hours, sniffing it and turning it in the cunning paws of his suspicion.
When Horace Hubbard came into the room, Wolkowicz ignored him. His reading glasses sliding down his pug nose, he continued to read in silence. Horace, tall and gangling, waited patiently. He had graduated from Yale the year before and immediately joined the Outfit. This was his first assignment; Wolkowicz had chosen him because he was so clean. Horace had not had time to form friendships, much less loyalties, inside the Outfit. Besides, Christopher was his hero.
“Get me some coffee,” Wolkowicz said at last.
“Something came in from the truck,” Horace said.
“Coffee,” Wolkowicz said. He went back to his reading.
Horace poured coffee from a Silex that bubbled on a hot plate within reach of Wolkowicz’s hand. Wolkowicz sipped coffee and made a face.
“Okay,” Wolkowicz said. “Now, what about the truck?”
The truck was a van—or, rather, several vans and limousines that were changed every day to divert suspicion—from which electronics technicians monitored the listening devices that had been placed in Robin Darby’s apartment, car, and office.
“The listeners picked up the Russian accent again,” Horace said. “The same voice, the same telephone code. The caller said, ‘The washing is ready, when can we deliver?’ Darby said, ‘After five is the best time.’ The caller said, ‘To your office or your home?’ Darby replied, ‘Not the office, if you don’t mind.’”
Wolkowicz took the slip of paper from which Horace had been reading this dialogue, and studied it in silence for long seconds.
“It’s a meeting,” he said. “But where?”
Horace scratched his lower lip. He looked something like his father, but he had his mother’s gift for mockery; when he spoke to Wolkowicz, he looked like Wolkowicz, adopting his facial expressions and sometimes reproducing his voice, like a ventriloquist. Wolkowicz seemed not to notice.
“This may not thrill you,” Horace said, speaking this phrase in Wolkowicz’s raspy voice before switching over to his natural way of speaking. “But I think I may know where the meeting is going to take place.”
“Why the hell wouldn’t it thrill me?” Wolkowicz demanded.
“Yesterday I was coming out of the Mayflower at about three in the afternoon—”
“What were you doing in the Mayflower?”
“I’d had a long lunch with a friend. As I came out the back door onto Seventeenth Street, I saw Darby. He was going into the National Geographic Building, trotting up the steps. I decided to see what he was up to.”
“You followed him?” Wolkowicz said. “What the fuck’s the matter with you, kid?”
“I told you you wouldn’t be thrilled,” Horace said.
There was no surveillance on Darby: Wolkowicz assumed that he would spot it immediately, scare, and ruin any chance Wolkowicz had of catching him. Not until the moment of the kill did Wolkowicz want Darby to see the men who were hunting him.
Horace waited, his brows lifted in his alert, attentive way, to see if Wolkowicz was all through rebuking him. Wolkowicz gestured that he should go on.
“It took me a moment to find him when I got inside,” Horace said. “They have a replica of the Sistine Chapel on display. Darby was inside the display, admiring the ceiling—it’s made up of backlit color transparencies. Very nice. Darby walked out, went back to the entrance, then seemed to change his mind, looked at his watch, and walked very briskly to the Sistine Chapel again and went inside it again. Then he walked right on out the back door into the parking lot. He looked at his watch again as he opened the door to go out. He was timing the whole thing
.”
“He was casing the place for a meeting,” Wolkowicz said.
“That’s what I thought.”
“Did he see you?”
“Maybe. But he doesn’t know me.”
“He’ll know you next time,” Wolkowicz said. “If he’s using the same tradecraft he’s always used, the meeting will be today. If he said five o’clock, he means four. Let’s haul ass.”
— 6 —
That afternoon at precisely four o’clock, Robin Darby, walking with the springy step that Christopher remembered from the Englishman’s triumphant days in Vienna, strode into the National Geographic Building and proceeded briskly to the Sistine Chapel display. Inside the display, he bumped into a man who was looking with rapt attention at the ceiling. There was a brief, embarrassed scuffle. Then both men made their excuses and Darby went on his way. It looked like the most natural behavior in the world.
As Darby emerged from the display, he saw Horace Hubbard. Just for an instant, recognition flickered in his eyes. He changed direction abruptly, walked to the bank of elevators, and stepped aboard a waiting car. Before the dull bronze doors could close, a uniformed guard stepped onto the elevator and confronted Darby.
“May I help you, sir?”
“No,” Darby said. “I don’t require any help.”
“Do you have an appointment with someone?”
“Of course I have an appointment.”
“Who with, sir?”
Darby looked over the guard’s shoulder and saw Paul Christopher standing in the foyer.
“Hello, my friend,” Christopher said. “You’re lost. Here I am.”
“My dear fellow,” Darby said, “I think I may be under arrest.”
The guard, unsmiling, stepped aside and let Darby go. He watched him shake hands with Christopher, then watched Christopher guide him toward the exit. As they went through the door, Christopher reached under Darby’s coattail and grasped his belt. The guard thought that was queer. But he saw a lot of queer things in his job.
Christopher ran Darby down the short flight of marble steps. Darby had never realized how strong this American was. He did not attempt to resist; there was no point in it. He saw at least five Outfit toughs stationed in the parking lot. There were as many more in M Street: one loitering by an abandoned brick school, another in the doorway of a variety store, another no more than ten feet away.
This nearest tough held a rolled newspaper in his hand. He lifted it and a taxi sped toward him. Darby’s contact, the man he had bumped into inside the Sistine Chapel, was walking along the sidewalk. The taxi rolled past him and stopped.
The tall youth Darby had seen inside—the same boy he had seen the day before when he cased the place—was walking after Darby’s contact with long, rapid strides. The door of a waiting taxi opened just before the contact reached it. He saw the men in the street for the first time and tried to run.
Horace Hubbard seized him by the scruff of the neck and the seat of the pants and rushed him toward the open door of the taxi. A man inside the taxi reached out, grasped the contact by the lapels, and pulled him inside. The tall youth jumped in after him and the taxi drove away with its back door flapping.
“Here comes our car,” Christopher said. A black limousine with smoked windows drifted to the curb and the door opened. Darby folded his skinny body and got inside. Christopher got in after him. Wolkowicz was already in the limousine, seated on the jump seat so that he faced Darby when the latter sat down.
“Hello, Limey,” Wolkowicz said.
Darby pulled up his right pants leg, revealing a small automatic pistol in a leg holster. To Christopher, this seemed a gesture of surrender. But Wolkowicz seized Darby by the hair and beard and slammed his face against the glass partition that separated the backseat from the front. Blood spurted from Darby’s nose.
The Englishman gave Christopher a look of appeal and pointed at the gun; Christopher took it. Wolkowicz seized Darby’s lower lip between his thumb and forefinger and twisted. Darby, helpless in the pain of the grip, lay still.
“Whatever the Russian gave you, I want,” Wolkowicz said.
Darby reached into the inside pocket of his coat and handed Wolkowicz an envelope. Wolkowicz ripped it open. It contained a Canadian passport bearing Darby’s photograph and a false name, a driver’s license and credit cards in the same fictitious name, and twenty brand-new one-hundred-dollar bills.
“Fucking amateurs,” Wolkowicz said.
Darby straightened up and sat quietly between the two Americans. His nose was still bleeding. Christopher handed him a handkerchief. Darby took it and smiled, but he did not attempt to stop the blood that was flowing over his beard. His whiskers were quite gray now, with little trace of the ginger color they had had years before in Vienna.
Darby closed his eyes and put his head back against the puffy upholstery. Though he had spent his life in observing small details, he seemed now to take no interest at all in the route that the purring Cadillac followed as it carried him out of the city.
— 7 —
At his trial, held in secret in London, Robin Darby freely admitted to having spied for the Soviet Union. The man he had met in the Sistine Chapel had been an officer of the KGB, his case officer. He gave full particulars on this man.
During the brief brush contact inside the Sistine Chapel, the Russian had given Darby the money and false documents that had been found on him. Had the arrest been delayed by so much as a day, Darby would have vanished from the United States and from the West.
“You planned to escape to the Soviet Union?” the prosecutor asked Darby.
“Yes.”
“You anticipated that you would be arrested for espionage?”
“It was obvious that something was on. My flat was bugged. I was not being followed, which meant that they didn’t want to flush me. I knew that Wolkowicz was engaged in a highly sensitive counterintelligence operation.”
“How did you know that?”
“Rumor. The members of the Outfit are a confiding lot. I assumed that I was the target.”
“Will you tell this court why you became a traitor?” the prosecutor asked.
“A traitor?” Darby, who usually spoke in a cockney accent that was so heavy that it seemed affected, reproduced the upper-class diction of the prosecutor. “A traitor? To the likes of you? You must be joking,” he said, laughing outright.
— 8 —
Robin Darby was convicted of espionage and sentenced to life imprisonment. During his trial, he had been held in a special cell on an army base. On the night before he was to be moved to his permanent place of imprisonment, Wolkowicz and Christopher visited him.
The jailer led them to Darby’s cell and slid open the peephole, inviting the Americans to look at the prisoner before they entered. In this place, Darby had been permitted some comforts. The interior was brightly lit, as the Sewer had been, and as in the Sewer, the floor was covered with a Persian carpet. Darby sat with his narrow back to the door, reading a large illustrated book.
When the door opened, he turned around. Christopher did not recognize him at once: he had shaved off his beard. The absence of hair made his large nose seem even larger, and his crooked yellow teeth, which had formerly been hidden behind a fringe of mustache, glinted in a lantern jaw.
“Amazing transformation, isn’t it?” Darby said. “No beards allowed at the Scrubs, I’m told.”
“What about rugs?” Wolkowicz asked.
“I’m afraid not. It’s Spartan rules for traitors. I’m just packing up my books. I don’t know what I’ll be allowed.”
A couple of dozen heavy volumes were strewn on the narrow bed. Christopher examined them. Printed in most of the half-dozen languages that Darby was able to read, they all dealt with the same subject.
“Botany?” Christopher said.
Darby stroked his denuded chin. “My vice,” he said, “but then, this is the hour at which all secrets of the heart stand revealed. Would you like o
ne as a keepsake?” He handed Christopher a leather-bound volume on the flowers of the Andes, in Spanish. “It’s a first edition,” he said. “Do have it.” He turned, with the same affable smile, to Wolkowicz. “Barney?” he said. “Something in Russian?”
“No thanks,” Wolkowicz said. “I just came to say good-bye.”
“Decent of you. Congratulations, by the way. You’ve done it again.”
“Just lucky,” Wolkowicz said.
Darby interrupted him. “No need to apologize,” he said. “All in a day’s work.”
“No shit?” Wolkowicz said.
“You mean it isn’t all in a day’s work? You can’t be upset still over that business with your wife in Vienna?”
Wolkowicz expelled an harsh, exasperated breath. “Not anymore,” he said. “That’s over, finally.”
Darby studied Wolkowicz’s glowering face for a moment. He never lost his own smile. “ ‘That’s over, finally,’” he repeated. “Ah! Now I remember. ‘This isn’t over yet,’ that’s what you said, Barney, that day in the snow. But now finally it is? That’s what you’ve come to tell me?”
Wolkowicz held Darby’s eyes, and now he smiled.
Darby laughed one of his artificial party laughs, a wild whinny. He caught Christopher’s eyes and held them and when he spoke, he spoke to Christopher, as if Wolkowicz, who had just put him into prison for life, could not be expected to understand what he was about to say.
“What an ending,” he said. “The revolution destroyed by a wronged husband. How can such a thing be believed?”
Wolkowicz seemed not to hear Darby’s words. He drew a paperback book from his overcoat pocket.
“Okay?” he said to the jailer.
The jailer glanced at the book, then nodded. “I don’t know if he’ll be allowed to have it when he moves.”
“He can read it tonight,” Wolkowicz said. He handed the book to Darby, who examined the cover.
The Last Supper Page 25
