A Despicable Profession (19 page)

Yes he did.

I made a pious face and thanked him for his kind solicitude. I was over. He thought me stupid. And in the spy game being thought stupid is a wonderful thing.

Leonid promised to check with his NKVD handlers to see if Ambrose had been swept up ‘by mistake.' The CO pledged to alert the proper authorities, whoever they might be. This was all gas and no flame of course. I would have to locate, and rescue, Ambrose by myself.

Leonid left the room. The CO slumped in an upholstered chair. “He better not be shacked up with some
Fräulein.”

“He's not.”

“You know the Committee to Free Berlin meeting is tonight. Twenty hundred hours,
der Admiralspalast,
Soviet Sector.”

“But isn't that where...”

“That's where it is Schroeder.”

“Then I'll be there. With bells on.”

“Good. Because we still have Hilde, upstairs.”

“I understand.”

“Your report will go a long way toward determining his future.”

I snapped a snappy salute. “I'm on it sir.”

Jacobson chuckled. “Get the hell out of here.” I marched myself toward the front door.

“Not that way.” The CO pointed his chin toward the kitchen. I stopped. I sniffed. “Yes sir!”

I climbed into the delivery truck and cranked the ignition. The engine coughed and sputtered. I feathered the accelerator until it settled into a happy thrum. They say an army marches on its stomach and now that I had a belly full of liver dumplings I was ready to engage the enemy. The question was how.

Why not measure for measure? Swap Leonid for Ambrose.

Not bloody likely. The NKVD would wash their hands of the little man once they knew his cover was blown. It would have to be personal. I would have to kidnap Anna.

I'd do it in a blink to save Ambrose. But Leonid wouldn't care. Not enough to compromise his precious all-important principles. True believers don't compromise. Ask the murdered children of Joseph and Magda Goebbels. Ask Leonid's parents, come to that. Denouncing a family member was a sure way to curry favor with the Party. It would explain why Leonid's father was dead and his mother in custody. And why Lavrenty Beria trusted a White Russian. There was no way short of death to defeat a true believer.

Unless I could turn Leonid's handlers, turn the Communist Party, against him. Leonid's mission was to disinform the US about Soviet plans and capabilities, not difficult since the US didn't know squat. But Herr Hilde, he knew plenty.

The NKVD was counting on Leonid to discredit Hilde. The Soviets installed Hilde in the American Sector with two stumblebum guards. They
wanted
us to capture Hilde after they'd finished their purge of the freedom fighters, so he could take the blame and deflect suspicion from Leonid. More than that. The Blue Caps knew Hilde had reached out to us, that he would tell us secrets he would keep from them.

God, it was brilliant. The NKVD wanted
us
to conduct the interrogation of Brigadeführer Hilde for them, with Leonid acting as their stenographer.

Hilde couldn't have known the precise whereabouts of our émigré informers. But Leonid could have. As our CI officer he would have had reason to meet with them in order to determine their credibility. And as a fellow White Russian he would have won their confidence. Which meant, it seemed to me, that Leonid was the Judas, not Hilde. Leonid was the one who targeted our freedom fighters for death.

I glanced down at the fuel gauge. It was just above
L
which is Kraut for empty.
Leer.
I pulled away from the curb and thought deep thoughts as I drove the rumbling delivery truck north towards downtown.

If Leonid could not discredit Hilde, if the
Amerikanskis
were to begin to act upon Hilde's intelligence, or give that appearance anyway, Leonid might become expendable to the NKVD. Which might make our True Believer into a Doubting Thomas. At which time he might agree to divulge Ambrose's location.

Christ Almighty, it was a
long
way from here to there. What I really wanted was to grab the dapper little shit by the scruff of the neck and snap his digits one by one till he came clean. It's what I would have done in 1944. But things were more complicated in 1946.

It sounds like treason to say it now but most fighting men in the European Theater weren't big fans of Ike and Monty, the four-star heavyweights of the Allied Supreme Command. We considered them back-and-fillers, politicians almost. Our boy was George S. Patton, the human half-track with no reverse gear. He was one hellacious good General. In wartime.

I had a new appreciation of Ike and Monty now, understood that sometimes you've got to put it in neutral, wait and watch and pick your spot. Ambrose wasn't on the Lubyanka Express, not yet.

Leonid said his Berlin Bureau Chief was a rival to Beria. The Bureau Chief would want to keep Ambrose in his vest pocket as long as possible. But every day that passed increased the odds that the headstrong Mick would do something stupid and get himself killed.

I stopped at a corner in Wilmersdorf to fill the tank from a young street vendor with a hundred liter drum of black market petrol and a rubber hose. He employed the suction method we teenage hot-rodders used to use to steal gas. He was good at it. I paid him ten cigarettes and drove on, picturing the young man lighting up a Lucky and exhaling a ten foot flame.

The sidewalks were crowded with ragtag locals out to enjoy the late-arriving spring. Most wore kerchiefs across their mouths. I'd been foolish to grouse about the constant rain. A spike of wind sprayed brick dust across the windshield. I rolled up the windows.

The Committee to Free Berlin meeting was fast approaching. Time for a mirror read. The CO said, in Leonid's presence, that the Committee would keep their distance from a newcomer if they were plotting violence. Which meant I would be welcomed by a friendly Blue Cap in order to demonstrate that the Committee had nothing to hide. If all went according to plan I could sabotage Leonid with his handlers tonight.

Then what? Wait for him to repent the error of his ways? I would need more and better leverage on the little man. I didn't know where to find this better leverage but I knew where I wanted to start.

I hadn't thought much about Anna since our meeting in her apartment. I had tried not to think about her anyway. Mostly because I had sweet talked her into opening the door when her husband was elsewhere. She would have suffered the consequences. I had to see her again. To apologize. And to tease out some kernel of incriminating evidence I could take to the CO, thereby putting Anna in further jeopardy.

What can I tell you, it's a despicable profession.

I drove north toward the pearl gray apartment building on
Spirchenstraße,
pondering just how despicable I was willing to be. I would do whatever it took to break Leonid and rescue Ambrose. But I didn't have to destroy Anna in the process. I was a well-heeled Yank with friends in high places. If Anna played ball I would give her a way to flee Leonid and the NKVD.

Unless Anna was a co-conspirator. Unless Hal Schroeder had gone poozle stoopid. She
had
let me in to the apartment. And somewhere along in there, while we were sipping tea, Soviet goons grabbed Ambrose.

I thought about it long and hard but it didn't click. Anna seemed as transparent as her blue-veined skin. Horns honked behind me. I geared up and drove on.

I would need a different way in. If the apartment building on
Spirchenstraße
wasn't under constant surveillance before it was now. The front door was out. Ditto the rear fire door. But there had to be a coal chute. It would be on the alley to the north of the building. I could slide in that way in the dead of night, bide my time and knock on Anna's door the following morning, looking like Al Jolson in
The Jazz Singer.

I racked my noggin for another way to go. No joy. It was a miserable night in a coal bin for old Hal.

I drove north, across the
Kurfürstendamm,
the hoity toite shopping district before the war, bullet-riddled signs and busted-out plate glass now. The Red Army would have taken particular pleasure looting decadent bourgeois Kraut clothiers. I pictured weather-beaten Ivans parading down the Ku-damm in vicuna topcoats and double breasted blazers, the more acutely inebriated sporting ladies' hats and feather boas. Must have been a hell of a party.

Shoppers buzzed in and out of a ten story building topped by blackened steel girders. A department store, just like Higbee's in Cleveland. Except this one was missing the top two floors. I
parked the truck and went inside. I needed an overcoat and a hat that didn't make me look like a goatherd.

I returned to the truck with a black wool topcoat and matching fedora and renewed respect for the almighty dollar. I had gotten change back from a ten.

I drove east on
Bismarckstraße,
through the treeless Tiergarten, past the sidewalk vendors and head-high nettles and a clump of refugees clustered around a fire pit where something meaty crackled on a spit. A rabbit by the long ears. Or a dachshund.

I passed through the Brandenburg Gate, the hammer and sickle snapping in the wind high above. I turned left on
Friedrichstraße
and hunted
der Admiralspalast.
I found it just north of the train station.

It was a big old thing. Half a block long with a peaked roof, four Doric columns embedded in the marble façade. It had suffered some surface damage but looked to be in one piece. I'd thought the CO was mistaken when he told me this was the site of the meeting of the Committee to Free Berlin. Seeing this grandiose old
Grande Dame
of a theater up close didn't change my opinion.

der Admiralspalast
was in the Soviet Sector for starters. And it had been, just last month, the site of a big deal meeting of Germany's two new political parties. The democratic socialist SPD and the Communist KPD. A confab where the two parties had agreed to merge. The English language newspaper suggested it was a shotgun wedding, with Papa Joe holding the twelve gauge.

Why in the world would anti-Commie freedom fighters choose to meet here?

I drove on, looking to park the delivery truck out of sight of the building. I found a spot three blocks north, on a street that hugged the twisty banks of the Spree. I parked behind a donkey cart piled high with combustible material, splintered joists, torn-out paneling, chunks of asphalt. The cart driver had gone off
somewhere. I killed the engine and watched and waited. Nothing happened.

The Commies were doing something right, here in the Soviet Sector. Two miles to the west displaced persons would have stripped this unattended cart clean by now. And dug a fire pit to barbecue the donkey.

The meeting of the Committee to Free Berlin was scheduled for eight p.m. My internal astrolabe calculated the angle of the fading sunlight against the vertical polarity of true north and told me, with admirable precision, that it was somewhere between late dusk and early evening. I climbed out of the truck and set off to find a clock. Preferably one behind a bar.

I found a corner tavern a block away. The old fashioned kind with stand up tables and no barstools. The cuckoo clock said seven-twenty. I ordered a stein and nursed it and asked myself a question.

Herr Hilde said the Committee was a Communist front, a fly trap set up to snare unsuspecting freedom fighters. Leonid said that was pure Commie propaganda meant to keep the US from offering assistance to the fledgling group. I preferred the Herr Hilde version. But why would the secret backers of the ruse, the NKVD, permit the meeting to be held in a gaudy showplace in the Soviet Sector?

I sipped some suds.

The NKVD were smart, that's why. They could rally the rank and file with ‘Let's march into the Soviet Sector and dare the bastards to shut us down', knowing the Soviet authorities would keep clear. And they could silence any skeptics with ‘If we were a Communist front why would we advertise the fact by holding a meeting in
der Admiralspalast
?' They had it covered coming and going.

I drained the last of my stein. I didn't need another as the cuckoo clock reminded me, eight times. But a shot of schnapps to smooth out the wrinkles wouldn't kill me. I asked the
barkeep. Peppermint was all he had. I declined. Nobody needs a drink that bad.

I paid up and ankled out, took my time strolling down
Friedrichstraße.
I wanted the crowd settled in.

The lobby of the theater was a neck-craning sweep of sleek Art Deco curves, adjoining an empty cloakroom big as a roller rink. The place was clean but smelled bad, smelled of soot and burnt cork. Conventional bombs leave a cordite smell.
der Admiralspalast
had been hit by incendiaries.

The doors to the auditorium were closed. I could hear a loud voice declaiming inside. The curtain was up, the production underway. I got my reporter's notebook in hand and barged in.

The auditorium was immense. About a thousand floor seats, a big mezzanine above and two balconies above that. Ritzy too. Crushed velvet seats and gilded loges that towered above the stage. The Committee to Free Berlin - the charter members sitting behind a long table on the stage, maybe forty supporters in the audience - looked dwarfed, silly, out of place. The stage was lit, the house lights dim. The man who had been declaiming in a loud voice shut his yap as I came into view. Everyone turned to follow his look. I doffed my fedora in greeting.

“Bitte nehmen Sie Platz,”
said the man on stage. Please take a seat.

“Danke, aber ich habe bereits eins
!” Thanks, but I already have one!

All right, it was a lame joke. But even Groucho would have been hard pressed to tease a smile from this school of trout.

I sat down, in an aisle seat. I sat and listened to a series of speeches by the charter members. They hit the high notes, called for democratic self-determinism and such but nobody in the gallery said boo. The meeting had all the rough and tumble of a show trial.