A Despicable Profession (2 page)

Herbie didn't say anything more after that. He let The Pierre do the talking for him.

----

I woke up to sunshine through the curtains. Bright sunshine given the drawn curtains of damask or muslin or fine linen hand stitched by blind nuns in a Belgian cloister. I cleaned up quick and reported to the dining room.

It had three windows. One looked north up 5
^th
Avenue, the other two overlooked Central Park. An elderly Negro in a starched white tunic refilled my coffee cup for the second time and asked again if I wouldn't like some nice fresh strawberries with cream. I said a polite no thanks and checked his wrist. He didn't wear a wristwatch either.

The three-bedroom suite had a crystal chandelier, antiques older than Abraham and overstuffed chairs that made you dozy just to look at them. What it didn't have was a damn clock. It had to be well past nine a.m.

I was about to ask the old gent if he carried a pocket watch when the front door opened and a gaggle of Ivy Leaguers spilled in. I don't know how I knew they were Ivy Leaguers exactly, their couldn't-care-less attire maybe. Oxford cloth shirts pocked with cigarette burns, navy blazers shiny with age, club ties loosely cinched.

They introduced themselves and shook my hand. But Herbert W. Merckle was not among them when we sat down to breakfast. I got those strawberries and cream, a glass of grapefruit juice and a soft-boiled egg. Slim pickin's for a growing boy.

We seemed to be waiting for someone. Presumably the President of Hendricks and Lee Construction.

A skinny guy in tortoise shell glasses held a leather-bound legal pad upright as he read some notes. The cover was embossed in gold letters.
Global Commerce Ltd.
The room got quiet when I asked him what Global Commerce was.

“Global Commerce?”

“Yes. Global Commerce.”

“Well, it's...in point of fact I am not the person to answer that question.”

Hmm. The Office of Strategic Services had Ivy League bloodlines. Director William Donovan and right hand man Allen Dulles were Wall Street attorneys who staffed OSS headquarters with members of their exclusive law firms. We low-level slugs called them yachtsmen. They were young men very much like the one's arrayed around this dining room table, sucking down coffee and soft-boiled eggs.

I hadn't been whisked across the country and installed in this high-priced mausoleum because of my international renown. I was a hick from the sticks to these guys. A hick from the sticks who wasn't afraid of getting his hands dirty.

So. Who were we waiting for?

Could've knocked me over with a feather when he strode in a minute later, Herbert trailing along behind. I shot to my feet, drawing a jaunty smile from the blue-eyed ruddy-faced man with a shock of white hair. The legendary commander of “The Fighting 69th” in WWI and the Office of Strategic Services in WWII. Major General Wild Bill Donovan himself.

He crossed to my side of the table, shook my hand and said my name like he knew me. Then he worked the table, mauling the Ivy Leaguers with his big mitts, pounding their backs as Herbert gave me a sheepish look that was half apology, half boast. By the time my rear end found my chair I was steamed.

The OSS had been disbanded right after the war despite Wild Bill's efforts to make it a permanent agency. President Truman thought that spying was un-American and Congress went along.

Dumb. Our espionage shortened the war and saved the lives of thousands of Allied soldiers. Our counter-espionage prevented the D-day invasion from becoming the bloodiest rout in military history. But the war was over. I had done my duty to God and country. It was somebody else's turn.

Bill Donovan walked to the head of the table and leaned his weight on his hands. “Mr. Schroeder, I understand you want to know about Global Commerce Limited.” Wild Bill didn't wait for my reply. “We are an international trading company dealing
in commodities - gums, spices, oils and such. Hendricks and Lee is one of our subsidiaries.”

I just looked at him. Was I supposed to believe this? Bill Donovan, who made a handsome living as a Wall Street lawyer in between shaping world events, would waste his time trading gums and spices?

I guess I was. He hadn't winked or grinned when he said it. He did have a twinkle in his eye but he's Irish, he can't help it.

“Permission to speak freely sir.”

“Granted,” said Donovan with a wave.

Coffee cups returned to saucers, mouthfuls of strawberries were quickly swallowed, all eyes were mine. How the hell to say this? Hurry up numbskull, the Great Man is waiting.

“Sir, the OSS taught me one ironclad rule. A spy's first allegiance is not to career, colleagues, not even country. A spy's first allegiance is to the truth.”

Bill Donovan nodded approvingly. I said the truth as I saw it.

“Sir, my OSS training and experience leads me to suspect that Global Commerce is a commercial front for espionage.”

“Well, of course it is!” said Wild Bill, tripping an eruption of snooty merriment around the table.

Donovan went on to say that he was not one to pass up a punchline and that Global Commerce Limited was, of course, a viable business concern that merely employed a few former OSS operatives for their international connections and language skills and so on and so forth etcetera. He paused, then said the following:

“Mr. Schroeder is a distinguished alumnus of the Office of Strategic Services. He served with distinction behind German lines from late '43 to VE Day. Extremely dangerous duty.” The Ivy Leaguers eyed me with new respect.

“Upon returning home he joined the FBI as an undercover agent.” The Ivy Leaguers eyed me with new suspicion.

“Yes he worked for our friends at the Bureau. No shame in that. He foiled a big bank robbery as I understand it. But it was the way in which he foiled it that caught my attention.”

Wild Bill grinned and twinkled for all to see. I struggled to find my tongue but he was on to other matters.

He asked for sales reports from around the table. The Ivy Leaguers read them off. Donovan made a few comments on the reports and said a hearty farewell. Herbert escorted him out of the room.

I had a head fulla bees, I did. What the hell did Donovan mean about the way I foiled the bank robbery? He liked it that I put one over on J. Edgar Hoover? Could be, guess so, beats me. I was clear about one thing. I wasn't shipping out for another miserable Atlantic crossing without a straight answer.

I got up and chased after Herbert and Bill Donovan. I caught up to them just as Herbert W. Merckle was closing the front door and General William J. Donovan was striding down the corridor. I followed.

“Sir,” I said. “Sir!”

Donovan turned on his heel. He was not happy to see me. I approached anyway. “General, I am no longer interested in being a spy.”

Donovan gave me a blue-eyed half-second before he said, “I'm not asking you to be a spy. I have no authority to ask you to be a spy”

With that he walked to the bank of elevators and pushed the call button. I stood and watched and tried to think of something to say. The bell sounded and the operator cranked open the door. The General looked my way and said, just before he stepped into the elevator car, “I'm just asking you to keep your eyes open.”

Goddamn spooks, I'd forgotten how they were. Always the dance of the seven veils. I returned to the suite with Herbert Merckle and asked what was next. Wild Bill Donovan had piqued my interest.

The bastard.

I didn't cross the Atlantic in the hold of a troopship this time, mate. It was a luxury liner, with a stateroom and a steward I could summon at the pull of a cord. Herbert Merckle had given me a month's pay in advance - 500 bucks! - and a detailed itinerary. Arrangements had been made for me to catch a hop on a C-45 from Antwerp to Berlin.

Military aircraft. I didn't ask. I had five hundred bucks in crisp twenties and nothing at home but an empty barstool. I would give it a shot. I would keep my eyes open. What I wouldn't do was put my neck in a noose.

When the liner docked at Antwerp I was met by a driver who took me to Chievres Air Base. It was a very long drive. I showed my passport at the gate. The guard waved me through.

I went to Hangar Two. A cocky little twin-tail C-45 was waiting on the macadam, props spinning, wringing water from the heavy air. We were airborne three minutes later.

The co-pilot bent my ear when we reached altitude. He said Templehof had been the busiest airport in Europe before the war and that Lufthansa had its last commercial flight from there just ten days before the fall of Berlin. A flight to Stockholm, a dozen passengers. A dozen very happy passengers.

We came in low over the central city. It was something to see. Row upon row of busted open buildings, roofs gone, inside chambers exposed. A great gray honeycomb is what it looked like.

We landed at Templehof at 1:20 p.m. by the cockpit clock. The C-45 taxied toward the enormous arc-shaped
terminal. It had to be a mile from end to end. Hitler designed it himself, said the co-pilot. It was supposed to resemble an eagle in flight. The terminal looked to be in halfway decent shape, the runway smooth. I asked the co-pilot how that could be.

“Your tax dollars at work buddy boy.”

I thanked the pilots for the ride and offered a tip. The pilots recoiled from the twenty. Had I violated some Air Force superstition? Or was it something more? The talkative co-pilot hadn't asked me the obvious question. What are you up to in Berlin? Hadn't asked me any questions, come to think. I was, apparently, off limits. My way had been cleared from Otto Moser's to Templehof Airport. I was Wild Bill Donovan's fair haired boy.

I carried my suitcase to the terminal and looked around. Herbert said my employer would be there to greet me. He wasn't. I found a bench and watched construction workers climb the three story scaffolding like monkey bars in a schoolyard.

I waited. I got annoyed. You get used to the red carpet treatment real quick. I waited some more. I had no phone number to call, no address to go to. Somewhere along in there I noticed a pimpled dogface with pronated ears. He was studying me from a distance. I stood up as he approached.

“Are you Harold Schroeder?”

“No. I'm Dwight D. Eisenhower.”

The kid looked me over for a long moment, decided I was pulling his leg, then jeeped me downtown.

-----

‘Germania, the capital of the world' as the Nazis styled it, had seen better days. It was almost a year since
Stunde Null,
hour zero, May 8
^th
, 1945. A few streetcars were running, busses too along the main thoroughfares, flanked by ruin. I had never been to Berlin. My tour of duty was confined to southwest Germany. I told the jug-eared kid to give me the nickel tour. My employer had kept me waiting, I would return the favor. I was Bill Donovan's fair haired boy.

Hitler's steel-framed Chancellery Building on
Vossstraße
was still standing. Its courtyard, the ‘Court of Honor' where
heroes of the Reich were greeted with fanfare, was barely touched.

A few blocks north the Reichstag, site of a pitched battle with the Red Army, was a different story. The Reichstag was a magnificent wreck. Sandblasted and blowtorched, shell pocked and bomb cratered, blackened by smoke and speckled white where bullets gouged stone, the soaring glass cupola half gone, but the towers largely intact. Ditto the marble columns etched with the names of Russian soldiers.

Hitler had ballyhooed his Thousand Year Reich and if you didn't know better you might say he had made an accurate call. The Reichstag looked at least a thousand years old.

The Brandenburg Gate was next door, blackened and busted up but still on its feet. I'd seen pictures, who hadn't? It was Germany's Eiffel Tower. There'd been some famous statue of a wreathed goddess on a chariot atop the Gate that was gone now. In its place was a big red flag.

Fair enough. But where was the Stars and Stripes? The Union Jack? I had risked my neck for eighteen months behind enemy lines. I had moments when I wondered why, as the bombing runs I cleared rolled in and the civilian casualties mounted in the only war in recorded history where more civilians than soldiers died. Many, many more civilians. But the mission was clear. Destroy the enemy. So I did what I did and felt bad about it later. I felt bad about it a second time when I saw that Hammer and Sickle.

We drove on, past a large park with sawed-off stumps where trees used to be. I knew about the Reichstag and the Chancellery and the Brandenburg Gate from watching newsreels at the Bijou. But I knew nothing about this big swatch of green in the heart of the Berlin. I gave my driver a chance to show me up.

“What's that park called?”

“It's the Tiergarten, Mr. Schroeder, and I'm sorry, real sorry I picked you up late. I went to the wrong end of the terminal I guess but that's where they told me to go and then they sent me
a whole ‘nother way and then they sent me back again and, well, I hope I don't get gigged out of this and I'm sorry.
Real
sorry.”

I assured the kid he wouldn't get gigged and told him to quit his blubbering, I wasn't worth it. I could see where this fair haired boy routine might get to be a pain.

We drove a block south of the Tiergarten. Several streets came together. A sign said
Potsdamer Platz.
From its location it figured to be the heart of the central city. From its appearance it could have been the Mongolian steppes. It was covered with grass and head-high nettles, and dotted with rabbit traps.

Another block south was a
Bierstube
on a corner. The blackened building looked as if it had been blown apart and put back together, brick by brick. My driver stopped at the front door. I went inside.

I had pictured my employer at Hendricks and Lee Construction as an older version of Herbert Merckle. A big-bellied guy with a bull neck and poor taste in clothes. But he wasn't like that. He was tall and well-dressed, with a high forehead and close cropped dark hair flecked with more gray than I remembered. He was Victor Jacobson, my Case Officer from the OSS.