The Last Supper (20 page)

“Ilse seems attached to you,” Hubbard said.

He did not think that Wolkowicz would go on without encouragement, and it was evident that he hadn’t come to the end of the story. Hubbard was sure that Ilse was listening through the
door.

“Yeah. Well, there’s a reason for that,” Wolkowicz said. “Let me tell you how I met her. Right after I got here, I was driving by some woods and I saw this fucking
Mongolian coming out of the bushes, grinning and buttoning up his fly. Russian soldiers were trotting into the trees, stumbling over their hard-ons. It was obvious they were having one of their
gang rapes. So I parked the car and went into the woods myself. Another Mongolian was just rolling off this German girl. She was lying on the ground
on her face
. They had pulled her dress up
over her head. Two of these Mongolians had hold of her legs, pulling them apart, and two more were sitting on her head. I know the Russians do this all the time. I know I should have left quietly.
But instead I kicked the guy who was humping her on his bare ass and pulled out my gun.”

“How many of them were there?”

“A dozen or so. Maybe twenty had already passed through the line.”

“They left her alone when you arrived?”

“Well, I speak Russian. I explained things to them. I may have fired a couple of shots. I took Ilse to a doctor and then took her home.”

“The doctor said she was all right?”

“Physically, yes. It wasn’t as bad as I thought when I saw them coming at her from the rear. That’s just the way they do it. They think they’re horses.

“She’s okay now. But when you add what happened to her to the fact that her father was probably killed by the Red Army, you can understand why she isn’t crazy about the
Russians.”

Ilse came back into the room. She had been crying. A look came and went in Wolkowicz’s face. Rapid though its passage had been, Hubbard saw it for what it was: love.

— 5 —

Friedrich Zechmann had taken Ilse home from Hilde’s. On the way, driving down a ravine between snowy heaps of rubble, the headlights picked up two figures in the shadows.
An American soldier, his cap on the back of his head, leaned against a ruined wall, gripping the head of a woman who kneeled in front of him. The woman was trying to break away. After a little
struggle, the soldier let her go and slumped against the wall, depleted. The woman scrambled to her feet and turned her haggard face toward the car.

“Dear God,” Zechmann said. “Margarete.”

The woman spat and retched and, as the headlights continued to shine in her eyes, covered her face.

“Who?” Ilse asked.

“The widow of a brother officer,” Zechmann said, driving on.

In the days that followed, Zechmann sent his driver to Ilse’s apartment with invitations to concerts, to the theater, to dinner. She accepted one invitation in three. Zechmann offered her
food, clothes, coffee, cigarettes; she would accept nothing. Far from going to bed with Zechmann, Ilse would not even kiss him. Her virtue, in a city of rubble in which countesses would fellate
American corporals in return for a handful of cigarettes, inflamed Zechmann.

“Are you a virgin?” he asked Ilse in his mocking way.

“Of course,” she replied.

Zechmann went absolutely still. The look of mocking flirtation he had been wearing disappeared from his face and was replaced by an expression of longing. He looked for an instant as if he might
weep with joy. He drew air in through his nostrils and when he spoke there was a tremor in his voice.

“If that’s true, it’s a great triumph in these times,” Zechmann said. “How have you stayed alive in Berlin?”

“People will always pay to see a curiosity,” Ilse said.

“This idea that I am a virgin seems to have panicked him sexually,” she told Wolkowicz. “Really, it’s quite pornographic.”

Zechmann did not lose his head altogether. As Wolkowicz had expected, he investigated the possibility that Ilse was an opposition agent. Zechmann assigned a team to watch her, to search her
room. The team found correspondence from the Union Bank of Switzerland in Geneva. The letters from the bank explained how Ilse had managed to preserve her virginity: she had been living on
withdrawals from a small account; the money was almost exhausted. Zechmann knew that his moment would come. Very soon, when her Swiss money ran out, Ilse would become a black-market commodity like
most of the other women in Berlin.

Six weeks after Zechmann had met Ilse, she withdrew the last hundred francs from her Geneva account. Zechmann gave her ten days in which to spend the money, and then he asked her to marry
him.

“No,” Ilse said.

“Why not? Am I really so repulsive?”

“Not at all, Friedrich. But I want to marry for love, not for self-preservation.”

“God in heaven, Ilse, don’t you realize that ideas like that are buried under this rubble forever? Do you think that Berlin is a city of romance?”

“Not buried forever,” Ilse said. “Not for me.”

They were sitting in Zechmann’s car, a nondescript gray Opel. All around them the smashed stones of Berlin were heaped into hillocks. A few walls still stood, fragments of masonry
punctuated by rows of empty windows. It was raining. Under the air raids, Berlin had burned for five years and the last flames had been extinguished only a year before. The fiery smell of the
blackened stones, washed up by the rain, filled their nostrils. It was a nauseating odor, like the stench of a burnt carcass.

Ilse still smelled of roses. Breathing her fragrance, Zechmann imagined a garden filled with delicate pink blossoms, petals velvety to the touch. He seized Ilse and kissed her.

“No,” she said, twisting her face away.

Zechmann paid no attention to her protests. Holding her down, squeezing both her biceps with paralyzing strength, throwing a leg across her thrashing ankles, he covered her face with kisses.
They were tender kisses, chaste as the kisses of a schoolboy. He wore a long leather coat; it squeaked as he wrestled with Ilse, and she could smell the leather. She stopped struggling and let him
kiss her. He went on with it, eyes tightly shut, trembling, as if he were tasting her heart. He stroked her hair, touched her cheeks, traced the line of her jaw with a fingertip. Ilse expected him
to fondle her breasts, to force a hand between her legs, but he used only his mouth, and his mouth never left her face. Finally Zechmann released her and stared through the windshield at the black
glistening dunes of brick and stone.

“This has gone out of control,” he said.

Ilse sat quietly, her hands folded in her lap. At dinner, Zechmann had noticed that her knuckles were a bit chapped; the sight of her reddened flesh had sent a pang through his heart.

“This is not what I had hoped for, that’s certain,” Ilse said. There was a note of despair in her voice.

“What had you hoped for?”

“I’m all out of money. I’d hoped that you’d help me to find work.”

“Work? What sort of work do you want to do?”

“Whatever will get the bastards who did this to Germany,” Ilse said, staring with hate-filled eyes at the rubble.

“That will take a long time.”

“I don’t mind. Let me work with you.”

“I have no work for virgins.”

Ilse’s face glowed with its angelic smile. She put her hands, small and warm, on either side of Zechmann’s face. He moved his head impatiently. Looking into his eyes, she shook her
head. “Be still,” she said. She began to kiss his face in the way in which he had kissed hers. He submitted.

“Why did you do that?” he asked when she was done.

Ilse paused. “I felt your love just now,” she said. “Thank you. Good-bye.”

She opened the car door.

“Wait,” Zechmann said.

Ilse strode toward the path in the rubble that led to her room. Zechmann, heels ringing on the cobbles, hurried after her, calling her name, but she closed the door in his face.

Wolkowicz was waiting for her when she went inside. While they talked in the dark, Ilse stroked the coarse springy hair that grew on his broad chest. She told him what Zechmann
had done in the car.

“Maybe he’s a eunuch,” Wolkowicz said.

“No,” Ilse said. “He’s a romantic. All cynics are romantics.”

“Save the epigrams for Zechmann.”

The next week, Ilse went to work for the Zechmann Bureau as an interpreter. In addition to her fluent French, she spoke fair English and even a little Russian.

— 6 —

While Ilse overpowered Zechmann, Wolkowicz recruited an agent from East Berlin, a former captain of the Abwehr who had a minor sidewalk job in the Soviet security apparatus. The
agent had no great value, but Wolkowicz developed him with scrupulous care. He had met him at a performance of
Die Meistersinger
.

“Thank God for tobacco,” Wolkowicz said to Hubbard afterward. “At the intermission I went outside for a smoke, and in the shadows I spotted these two hungry eyes.
‘Cigarette?’ I said.
‘Jawohl!’
he said.”

Wolkowicz spoke all foreign languages with a Russian accent; even his English was tinted by his father’s way of speaking the language; he jammed gross English words into the Russian
alphabet like a foot into an elegant slipper that was too small for it. Horst Bülow, on hearing Wolkowicz’s accent in German, changed to Russian. He spoke it well, but with the
upper-class intonation that the Soviets hated.

Wolkowicz invited Bülow to join him for supper after the opera. Bülow devoured his steak and fried potatoes and drank Steinhaeger and beer like a man who had just been released from
prison. He wore a threadbare suit cut from his Wehrmacht uniform, the cloth dyed black, with bilious green lights in it. Bülow liked to talk; he liked to play the man of culture to an
unlettered American.

“Even in the ruins we Germans have great music played by great musicians,” he said. “Perhaps you should get some ruins in America so that you can have music, too.”

Wolkowicz invited Bülow to a Mozart recital the following week. After that concert he gave him a ticket for
The Magic Flute
the following week; Bülow, sitting next to Wolkowicz
with a whole carton of cigarettes on his lap, laughed like a giddy girl at the antics of Papageno.

“I am a student of conspiracy,” said Bülow over dinner, discussing the Masonic rituals in the libretto. “To be successful over the long term, a cabal must have a religious
basis—Mithraism, the Jesuit Order, Freemasonry.”

“Communism?”

“Of course. There is great religiosity in all political movements, especially revolutionary political movements.”

“That was true of the Nazis too, would you say?”

Bülow looked about him with quick birdlike turns of the head. It was a small restaurant that Wolkowicz had taken him to, another cave in the ruins, with only five or six tables. The owner
had recognized Bülow when he came in, Bülow had seen it in his eyes; the man had worked before the war at the Jockey Club, one of Bülow’s favorite places. It was gone now, of
course.

“Excuse me, please,” Bülow said. “I will talk about anything but the Nazis.”

“All right. What’s it like, working for the Russians?”

“Maddening. They are not a nation of watchmakers, the Russians. They do everything with a sledgehammer.”

Without preamble, in a loud voice, Wolkowicz asked Bülow to bring him a document in Russian. Bülow’s eyes flickered over the room again, looking for signs that Wolkowicz’s
grating voice had been overheard.

“I can’t possibly do that,” Bülow said in a startled whisper.

“I don’t mean a
secret
document,” Wolkowicz bellowed. “It can be anything—rip a notice off the bulletin board.”

“Why would you want such a thing?”

Wolkowicz put a forkful of food into his mouth and talked as he chewed. “Humor me,” he said. He wanted it for the simplest of reasons: if Bülow would steal even the smallest
thing from his masters, on Wolkowicz’s orders, and accept money for it, then Wolkowicz would be his new master. It was the first step. Bülow knew it was the fatal step. He drank his
Steinhaeger and his eyes watered.

After the next concert, Bülow gave him a paper typewritten in Russian. It was an exhortation to the workers of liberated Germany to fulfill their work norms for the last quarter of 1946.
Wolkowicz chuckled as he read it.

“Great stuff,” he said. “Let me pay you for your trouble.”

Bülow waved away the fifty-mark note, two weeks’ salary for him.

“No, no—take it,” Wolkowicz said.

Bülow put the money in his pocket and excused himself. He was urinating into the foul toilet, in the open air behind the restaurant, when Wolkowicz came up behind him.

“While you’re doing that,” Wolkowicz said, “sign this.”

Reaching around Bülow, he handed him a slip of paper and a pen. The paper was a receipt for fifty marks. Bülow hesitated, then signed the paper.

“Write
For Information
above your signature,” Wolkowicz said.

Bülow, his flaccid penis hanging out of his unbuttoned fly, felt embarrassed and vulnerable. It seemed more important to cover his flesh than to resist Wolkowicz’s outrageous command.
He signed.

“Now,” said Wolkowicz, “one more thing. Just ink your thumb on this stamp pad and put your thumbprint on the receipt.”

Again Bülow did as he was told, then scrubbed his inky thumb against his trousers.

Wolkowicz patted him on the shoulder. “Here’s a ticket for the Haydn concert on the twelfth,” he said. “Bring the telephone directory for your section with
you.”

“The telephone directory! That’s very dangerous. They regard telephone directories as state secrets. It’s impossible, what you ask.”

“Nothing is impossible, Horst,” Wolkowicz said. “I want you to remember that.”

— 7 —

Wolkowicz had identified two men inside the Zechmann Bureau who were possible Soviet agents. Ilse had no trouble making friends with either of them. Her beauty would have been
enough by itself to attract them. But, as Wolkowicz told Hubbard, she had something more.

“When you add to her looks the fact that Zechmann is crazy about her,” Wolkowicz said to Hubbard, “you’ve got a great aphrodisiac working for you. Everyone wants to be
pals with the boss’s girl friend.”