A Despicable Profession (10 page)

During the war Allen Dulles, Bill Donovan's right hand man, had turned Bern Station into what the hoity toites call a salon. Though I spent some r&r time in Switzerland during my OSS service I was not invited to his posh digs staffed with servants and a Parisian chef. Plus a wine cellar that rivaled the Vatican's. I was low scrotum on the totem, what they call an ‘observer agent.' Dulles wasn't interested in me. He was busy courting ‘agents in place,' German officials and the like.

Word was Dulles did some good in his Bern salon. Looked like Col. Norwood had a poorer, craftier version here. The bordello in back was a stroke of genius.

I reported to Jacobson but I served at the pleasure of Wild Bill, who was six thousand miles away and busier than a one-armed paperhanger. It was a dumbass way to run an organization but it had its advantages. So long as I got results I could do as I damn well pleased. We were going to pay another visit to Col. Norwoood.

“Don't answer that,” said Ambrose.

“Huh?”

“The knock at the door. Don't answer it.”

I got up anyway. We were shivering on the musty couch in the parlor. The room had a radiator that clanked out heat at regular intervals – once every 24 hours. I intended to answer the door. If you don't answer a door how do you know what's on the other side of it? But I'm not a complete idiot. I said, “Who's there?” in a loud voice and put my hand in my gun pocket.

No answer. The knocking resumed. Pecking really. Tap tap tap tap tap. I fisted my Walther and yanked open the warped door with an angry “What?!”

A bald ten-year-old boy looked up at me with big brown eyes. I checked the hall behind him and put up my gun. Ambrose ankled over to see what was what. The kid stood there and looked grimy, looked familiar.

I took a buck from my billfold and told him to scram. He took it and didn't.

“Unser Topf. Der gross eine”

He wanted his family's cooking pot. The big one. He was the son in the left-behind family photo that hung in the kitchen. I left Ambrose to watch him at the door and fetched the pot. The kid asked for the lid also. Ambrose chased him down the hall. When he returned Ambrose wagged a finger at me. “He'll be back.”

“Why did they shave his skull?”

“You don't know much about bein' poor, do ya?”

I grew up in a row house in Youngstown, Ohio. Mom and Pop and Beth and me. One bathroom, two bedrooms, a kitchen and a parlor. My old man ran a corner candy store six days a week. But we had a two-door Ford, a big Philco radio and food on the table every night so, no, I didn't know much about being poor.

“Head lice,” said Ambrose. “We planning on doin' anything anytime soon?”

“Yes we are.”

“You gonna tell me or do I hafta beg?”

“Nothing wrong with begging, Ambrose. Many of the holiest saints in heaven...”

“Spill it, Schroeder, or I'll wipe the floor with ya.”

“You and what army?”

We eyed one another. Was a time I could have put the headstrong Mick's nose in the dirt in five seconds flat. It would be a much longer fight now. I grinned, glad he was on my team.

“I propose that we return to Colonel Norwood's compound. This very evening. I suggest that you...”

But Ambrose was already in the bathroom, washing up.

-----

The chalet on
Ernststraße
was necklaced with red and yellow Chinese lanterns, expensive automobiles were parked in the driveway and along the curb. We had to park the delivery truck a block away and walk back in a drizzling rain, slipping on wet bricks and gathering our courage to crash the party. Mine anyway. Ambrose was fully gathered.

“Seems an odd way to go but maybe it makes sense,” he said. “He can stand back from it all. Like a priest tellin' married folks how to get along.”

“What in the name of God are you talking about?”

“A fairy put in charge of a whorehouse.”

I laughed. “You're just jealous.”

“You're right. We got a plan?”

“I brought a photo of Klaus Hilde. When the time's right I'll show it to Norwood and say here's our fugitive.”

“And if Norwood says ‘That's Hilde' we know he's already on the case.”

“Something like that.”

We stopped at the foot of the driveway and looked at the Chinese lanterns and listened to the muffled music and bawdy laughter spilling from the second floor.

“Shouldda brought a bottle of something,” said Ambrose. “If you don't bring a gift to a poof party the Colonel might figure you're it.”

“Figure I'm what?”

“The gift,” said Ambrose. “Me, I'm making a beeline for the back building, with your say so. I won't be any help up there.”

He was right. Ambrose would clock the first guy who got close, queer or no. I told him to go to the brothel before he blew a gasket and I'd catch up later. I watched him hurry off, enviously. Being a responsible duty-bound adult ain't no way to live.

I walked to the front door of the chalet and pulled the bell knocker. The first floor windows were dark. I heard heavy footsteps on a creaky staircase as I shivered in my sports coat. If I didn't get a new topcoat soon I would croak from pneumonia. The front door opened in a blast of heat, noise and light. Sedgewick, in a black suit, boiled shirt and bowtie, eyed me without apparent recognition.

“Hal Schroeder here to see Colonel Norwood.”

Sedgewick nodded and started to climb the steep staircase. I stayed put, wishing I had a snazzy card with my name on it. That's the way they did it in those drawing room movies. The butler answers the door and you put your card on his silver tray.

Sedgewick stopped halfway up the stairs, turned and beckoned with his arm.

“Please. The Colonel is expecting you.”

“Come in dear boy, I was hoping you'd stop by,” said Col. Norwood as I made my way across his crowded parlor. He wore a Hawaiian shirt, white duck trousers and canvas deck shoes and held a drink with a little umbrella in it. “We chanced upon a pineapple so we thought we'd go tiki this evening. Mai tai?”

“Sure.”

The Colonel instructed Sedgewick to fetch me a drink, smiled broadly and lowered his voice. “What name, what job?”

“Hal is fine. Reporter for Stars and Stripes.” Norwood shook his head. I saw why. One of the newshounds we hosted in Dahlem was stuffing his face at the banquet table. “Just say I'm a salesman.”

The Colonel took me by the arm and introduced me around the room. There looked to be four distinct groups. Handsome lads in sweaters and saddle shoes, fierce bespectacled men with food in their beards, quiet thin-lipped men in cheap suits and loud men wearing gold tie bars, matching cufflinks and spit-shined brogans. Homosexuals, academics, government functionaries and black market profiteers'd be my guess. There wasn't a female to be seen.

Col. Norwood dragged me into a circle of the bearded gents, who were busy spewing spittle at one another. He listened a moment and said, to the accompaniment of Hawaiian guitar music on the Victrola, “I disagree. What we are trying to do here has never been done in human history. Not even Paris, 1814, was a successful joint operation by a coalition of victors.”

I wasn't sure what happened in Paris in 1814 but I put in my two cents. “And from what I hear, we're unprepared. Just like December 6 of ‘41.”

“Act-tu-ally,” said the Colonel through a cloud of pipe smoke, “it's more like June, 1919. Germany lays in tatters, the Big Four dither at Versailles and the Bolsheviki swarm at the castle gates!”

This remark stirred fierce debate amongst the group of bearded men. Col. Norwood dragged me along to the next circle of conversation. I told him we needed to talk but he seemed not to hear. Cripes. If I was going to be the his prom date the least he could do was get me a corsage.

The animated conversation of the group of handsome lads subsided as the Colonel and I approached. I felt myself appraised from head to toe. The nods and elbow pokes said I passed muster. I took a certain satisfaction. How sick is that?

The Colonel surveyed their appetizer plates. “Three chunks of pineapple? Wesley, you glutton.”

Laughs all around.

“We were reminiscing about the bad old days,” said a young man who wasn't Wesley. “1937. Jurgen Fehling's famous production of Richard III.”

“Ah yes, I have heard tell. The empty, cavernous stage mirroring Speer's anti-humanist architecture, the crippled Goebbels come to life as Richard of Gloucester, hobbling across the stage.”

Norwood hunched over and stumped up and back, arms flailing.

“Why I, in this weak piping time of peace

Have no delight to pass away the time

Unless to spy my shadow in the sun

And descant on mine own deformity!”

The handsome lads found this terribly amusing. My timing was poor. The Colonel was already looking around for a new circle to conquer. I wasn't going to get him alone to display my Hilde photo. Not now.

I considered taking my fat billfold and my Hilde photo to the bordello in back. Who knows more about the netherworld than ladies of the night?

I know what you're thinking. Not true. I wasn't really envious of Ambrose. I'd had my fill of ladies of negotiable virtue. The big-eyed gals who'd approached me at Otto Moser's after I got my mug on the front page weren't much different than the working girls in the doorways of wartime Antwerp and Zurich and Mannheim. Worse in a way. They weren't starving.

When the Colonel went off to fill his pipe I slipped out the door to the back stairs.

The two-story building in back was sheltered by a stand of poplars. It faced the street north of
Ernststraße
and was well lit behind lacy curtains. A canopy-covered side door looked to be the main entrance. I put four crisp tens in my pants pocket, made the acquaintance of the door and invited myself in.

I entered a big wide open room supported by 4×4's where the walls had been removed. An empty bar to the left and table booths along the wall. Seated in the booths were older men in horsehair suits and silk cravats nuzzling florid buxom women who laughed, tittered and giggled on cue.

There was a staircase in the middle of the room and cocktail tables and a piano to the right.

Well, there's something you don't see every day. The piano player had only one hand. I watched his right mitt fly across the high keys and his feet pump the pedals as he bent down low to let his elbow stump pound out bass beats on the lower 88's. Man oh man!

“Who are you?” demanded a short stout woman in a low cut dress. She had an enormous bosom that defied gravity with the help of an undergarment that could only have been designed by the Army Corps of Engineers.

“I'm Hal. I'm a salesman.”

She looked me over and sniffed. A sniff that said we are an exclusive establishment and you are tieless. I wasn't sure how
snooty a whorehouse with a one-armed piano player could be but a thought occurred. A trick I learned in grammar school. It worked with construction paper, why not snaps?

I retrieved a crisp sawbuck from my pocket. The woman gave me a look indicating that if I attempted to insert the bill into her ample cleavage she would slap my face off. I retrieved another ten and folded it lengthways, and again. Then I took the narrower bill and knotted it around the middle of the wider bill. I tucked the thing inside my shirt collar.

“There. Any better?”

My twenty dollar bowtie did the trick. Madam bouncer giggled and took my hand. “I am Sofie. Sad to say all the girls are busy for the moment.”

“That's oke by me. You're the one I want to talk to.”

“To sell me what, Mister Hal the salesman?”

“I'm not selling tonight, Sofie my sweet, I'm buying.”

“You are funny person.”

“No argument there.”

I handed her my bowtie and asked for a moment of her time, in private. She grabbed a bottle and two glasses off the bar and led me to a booth in the far left corner. I took the glass of Drambuie she passed me and took a sniff. It smelled like lighter fluid. Sofie downed hers like a dose of ipecac. I dug out the photo of Klaus Hilde and handed it over.

“I do not know this man.”

“I gave you twenty dollars Sophie. Look again.”

Sophie held up the photograph, closed one eye. “I do not know him,” she said at last. “You must be talking to Eva. She knows everyone.”

“Where do I find her?”

“She is upstairs. She is upstairs with your Yankee friend.”

Sophie got up to answer the doorbell. How she knew Ambrose was my friend she didn't say. Funny she had pegged him for American despite his Irish brogue. What was it about us Yanks?

Two loud burly men stumbled in the front door, shaking snowflakes from their overcoats. Snow. In mid-May.

I bit my drink and winced. Lighter fluid, with sugar added. I thought about Col. Norwood. There had been rumors about queers in the OSS. It made sense when you thought about it. Who's better at leading a double life than a homosexual?

Which led me to a dark thought. Jimmy Streets, The Schooler's resident armbreaker, had baited an assault on me by the Mooney brothers. Jimmy's staged rescue was meant to win my undying trust and gratitude. Col. Norwood's rescue smelled likewise. Why else would two truckloads of Red Army troops turn tail for a bunch of tickets to a whorehouse? All right, the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae would have dropped their spears at the same offer. But why would the Soviet
Commander
agree to release two American gunrunners unless he had an arrangement with Col. Norwood?

Come to that how did the Soviet Commander know we were going to be at that loading dock at 10 a.m.? Col. Norwood said that Horst Schultouer's lubricated tongue meant anyone might have known. True enough. Anyone might. And most anyone wouldn't care. Our set up and rescue was an inside job engineered by Col. Norwood to win our undying loyalty and gratitude.