A Despicable Profession (14 page)

“I'm from Cleveland. Ohio. Factories there're running three shifts and would be four if they could find more hours in a day. The Russians lost twenty million in the war, their cities are all blown up and yet...and yet...they're the ones on the move and we're the ones in retreat. Makes no sense when you think about it.”

“So you've said,” said Norwood, wearily.

“Point is, Hilde's a survivor, blows with the wind. And the wind...at this peculiar time...is blowing east to west!”

I sat back, grinning, sweat-drenched, waiting for the Colonel to agree with me, to say you could hardly blame Hilde for selling out, to say it was really us, the Brits and Yanks, who were screwing up. Instead he thanked me for the visit and instructed his burly manservant to show me out.

Sedgewick braced me, back and elbow, at the top of the staircase and walked me down. I let him.

The door closed behind me with a thunk. I waited for the bitter cold Berlin spring to slap me sober. It did not. Berlin weather is for the birds. Freezing when you didn't have a topcoat, balmy when you needed a bracer. I staggered to the bushes and experienced phase three of drunkenness. Repeatedly.

I stood up and swabbed my mug with a handkerchief. Well done, Schroeder. Well done and executed. Could be the Colonel's right. You are a rube.

I walked down the pathway west of the chalet, toward the two-story brothel in the back. I heard the one-winged piano player pounding out a percussive tune, I heard bawdy laughter, I heard loud grunts of exertion and a low groan of pain. I broke into a run, sober in a second, knowing what I would find and finding it. Ambrose duking it out on the front lawn.

The dumbshit had bit off a big chaw, two foes, one twice his size. British soldiers by their uniforms, drunken sots by their halting steps and wild swings. Ambrose was holding his own, darting in with quick combinations, dancing back, ducking, circling, boxing not brawling. I was suitably impressed.

Then the big man got tired of getting popped and lurched forward, arms wide. Ambrose jumped back but the big man fell and snagged his ankle. His pal bull rushed Ambrose to the ground. Shellacking commenced.

I let them get in a few well-earned licks before I waded in. I jammed a thumb deep under the smaller man's jaw and held it there. He went limp.

The big man rolled over to see what was what. I planted my heel on his testicles and said, “Fun's over. Go home.”

Ambrose slithered out of his grasp and clambered to his feet. The big man had reached the fourth stage of drunkenness, the stage of not recognizing that your opponent has his foot on your nuts. He tried to get up and have at me. I bent down and gave him a quick piston shot, the heel of my palm right between his eyes. His head bounced off the grass. He groaned, and started back up.

I was beginning to get annoyed with this strapping Brit. A full-standing knee drop to the family jewels would serve him right. Ambrose intervened.

“Back off. I can handle this feckin' Limey.”

“You weren't doing so hot a second ago.”

“Just keep his pal busy.”

“Won't be necessary. His pal is dead.”

That took the starch right out of him. Ambrose looked over in horror at the facedown figure. The big man crawled over to inspect his fallen comrade. I hauled Ambrose away by the shirt collar.

“He's dead? You kilt him?”

“He had it coming, now pick up the pace.”

We quick stepped around to the back of the building and ducked behind the stand of poplars. I chanced a glimpse around the corner. The big one had the smaller one's arm around his neck. They were making half circles in the dewy grass, lowing like cows.

“He's walking good for a dead guy,” said Ambrose at my back.

“Yes he is. What the hell happened?”

“Nothing. I was at the bar, waiting my turn, mouth shut, head down. And this crumped-out yob starts in about Brunehilde with the big titties, what he's gonna do to her and...”

“Ambrose. He's a drunk. In a whorehouse.”

“I know, but...”

“You took it outside?”

“Sure.”

“The bouncer didn't toss you?”

“No. Not really.”

I shoved the keys at him. “I need to see Eva. You go to the truck, pray your rosary, stay put!”

“Yeah, okay,” said Ambrose, miserably. He dug in his pocket and handed me a stick of gum. “You smell of puke.”

“Thank you, Ambrose. That's very considerate.” I unpeeled the gum and bounced the wrapper off his mush. “Now go.”

He went, walking backwards, spilling blarney. “She won't like you Schroeder. She only likes the wild ones.”

I tossed a dirt clod at him and missed. Ambrose lit out down the pathway. She only likes the wild ones. I was a twenty-five year old off-the-books secret agent in the world capital of intrigue. Why wasn't I a wild one?

I walked around to the side entrance, knocked and waited. The bruiser who answered the door didn't like the look of me.

“I'm Hal Schroeder,” I said with a smile. “Of the Gates Mills' Schroeder's.”

The bruiser didn't like me any better after that. Did he think I was Ambrose? There was a superficial resemblance, that inscrutable thing that distinguishes Americans from Europeans, softer features maybe, from all the interbreeding that led Hitler to call us as ‘a race of mongrels'.

“It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” I said, extending my hand. The bruiser palmed the fin and held the door open.

The joint was a lot livelier this time. Fewer well-dressed older gents in the plush booths but a bar crammed with uniforms waiting their turn to climb the stairs. The one-armed piano player plunked out a tune that was either “Stardust” or “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Ballads weren't his strong suit.

I looked around for Eva. No joy. She must be upstairs in the trenches.

“Mr. Hal the salesman.”

I turned around. “Sophie.”

She was gussied up this evening. Low cut velvet dress, flower in her upswept hair, wearing enough makeup to paint a steam yacht. She frowned her forehead. “Where is your bowtie?”

“In my wallet.”

I took a step forward. Sophie took a step back, looked around for the bouncer. I was angry all of a sudden, disgusted with the shit I was wading through, swimming in, in a town where starved kids shivered in lean-to's on Heidelberg Platz.

I held out a ten dollar bill. “Tell me I am next in line to see Eva.”

Sophie filled her enormous lungs, ready to put the upstart Yankee in his place and then some. I returned her look, and then some.

She tucked the bill into her brassiere. “In ten minutes. Room 4. Use the back stairs.”

I nodded. She left.

The back stairs were outside, on the west side of the building. I climbed them, entered a narrow hall that smelled of spilt beer and jism. I killed time listening to soldiers relieve themselves. That's what the place reminded me of in my foul mood. A latrine.

The door to room 4 was closed. Had it been ten minutes? I stood there like a stooge. I listened at the door. A GI came bounding up the stairs and looked at me funny. I knocked on the door.

“It's Hal.”

“Come in please.”

I entered a small room with a big bed and a dirty window. Eva lay on the bed, scrubbing herself with a wet wash cloth under her unbuttoned cotton nightgown, rubbing her white skin pink.

“I am not here for sex, Eva.”

“No?” she said, putting her wash cloth in a basin on the nightstand.

“No. I want you to do us a service. Ambrose and me.”

Eva dragged a brush through her honeyed hair, winced at a snag. “He is good boy, Ambrose. I like him very much.” She set down the brush. “But he is just a boy.”

Eva put a dab of perfume behind each ear, drizzled more on her fingertip and ran that fingertip between her breasts. That she did this matter-of-factly didn't lessen its impact. She shook out her hair and leaned back on pillows and crossed her dainty ankles.

“I am ready now for you.”

“Eva, I can't...”

“You can't?”

“No, no. I can, it's just that...”

“You want me for a service.”

“Yes. It's very important. It concerns...”

“But I have already done...how you say?...a service for your working.”

“Herr Hilde. Yes, great. Very valuable.”

“And you want more now at this time?” she said, rising up off her pillows.

“I will pay you whatever you ask.”

Eva leaned back and pouted most prettily.

I explained that I wanted her to canvas the other ladies in the brothel to determine if any of them had spent time with a drunken former Gestapo Captain who ran his mouth about a meet with Yankee gunrunners. Eva said it was against house rules to ask such questions.

“Will you ask them anyway?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you will no have sex with me.”

“Eva, you are...a very attractive woman. Very. But I can't...”

“You say that you could!”

“No. Yes. lean, but I...”

Eva giggled. She was messing with me. She patted the bed. She looked up at me with those blue-green peepers, gave me both barrels. “It is how I know who you are.”

Crap on toast. It looked like I would have to take one for the team. And do it in a convincing manner.

Yeah, I know. Poor Harold, forced to frolic with Aphrodite. But it wasn't like that. I did my patriotic duty but I didn't enjoy it.

Not right away.

-----

I gave Eva a gold sovereign when we were done. She tucked it away with a perfunctory
danke
and freshened herself up for the next guy.

“Know me now, do you?” I said as I pulled on my clothes.

“Oh yes,” she said with a wink.

“Then you'll ask the other girls about the Gestapo Captain?”

“Yes, yes. Now you go.”

I turned to her as I opened the door to the dank hall. She was scrubbing her armpits with the wash cloth. Prostitutes have a terrible job. I stepped into the hall and closed the door behind me. But being a john stinks too.

I clomped down the back stairs, a black mood in full pursuit. I had been weak, and stupid. Poozle stoopid. Ambrose would know. He would smell Eva on me. I could wash up in the washroom and he would still know. Was that why Eva had insisted? To send a message to Ambrose to back off? Or did she simply want to show the high and mighty Yank he weren't so high and mighty.

I didn't know. I did know that Leonid said the job description of a spy is contradictory - a person of impeccable integrity who is an accomplished liar. And I was neither.

I paused at the base of the stairs to clear my head and gulp fresh air and enjoy the simple pleasures of a Berlin spring. It was pleasantly warm, the one-armed piano player was thumping out “On the Sunny Side of the Street” and no one was getting shredded by artillery fire or pulverized by thousand pound grass cutters. I told myself to snap out of it. Everything was hunky dory.

Ambrose didn't ask me if I had seen Eva when I climbed into the delivery truck. We drove back to the apartment in silence. When we arrived Victor Jacobson and Leonid Vitinov were waiting for us on the musty couch.

“Herr Hilde has upped the ante,” said the CO when Ambrose and I had settled into chairs, facing our elders on the couch. We were young men out tomcattin' around town if anyone asked. Anyone didn't.

“He says there's something big brewing. Leonid doesn't believe him and I have my doubts.”

“What's he say?”

“That a group of anti-Communists in town - White Russians, a few locals - have linked up. They call themselves the Committee to Free Berlin. They're issuing leaflets and dispensing cash. Hilde says they're a fly trap.”

“Funded by NKVD?”

“So he says.”

I had learned about false flag recruitment at spy school. It's when you recruit a source by disguising your true identity and affiliation, raising a false flag. This would be false flag recruitment on a grand scale. Not a double agent but a doubled organization.

“So,” I said, “it's a front the NKVD can use to compile a list of enemies.”

“And it gets worse,” said Jacobson. “According to Hilde the NKVD are secretly arming this group, planning to instigate an attack on the Soviet armory on a date certain, with the intent of liberating a cache of heavy weapons. Whereupon the Committee to Free Berlin will be annihilated.”

“Which gives the Red Army an excuse to blockade Berlin and seize the city.”

“Which prompts a military response from us. At which time, according to Hilde, Operation LUNA gets underway.”

Holy shit. Russian tanks across the Elbe. Brits and Yanks in full retreat. MANTIS, Colonel Norwood, Klaus Hilde, all singing off the same sheet. I was pondering these imponderables when Ambrose asked the obvious.

“And how did this Hilde sod come up with this blessed bullshit about this Committee, him being holed up for the last year and all?”

The CO smiled. He was warming to this scamp. “He won't say, not till we improve his accommodations anyway. But he figured to have a good hole card.”

The well-draped Russian to Jacobson's left cleared his throat to speak. “This is a fairy tale that the NKVD told Hilde to recite to us.”

Ambrose wanted to know why the NKVD would do that.

“Because they want to discredit this Committee, so that we do not offer them assistance.”

Made sense. And double agent Leonid Vitinov ought to know. “The NKVD told you this?”

My question made Leonid angry. I know because he spoke with even less emotion than usual.

“I am not need-to-know on this matter.”

“Then how can you be sure, Chief?” said Ambrose saucily, fist on his hip.

Leonid graced him with a thin-lipped grin. “If the plan that Herr Hilde described was legitimate I
would
have been need-to-know.”