A Despicable Profession (9 page)

I didn't know. Ambrose was behind me when we climbed the back stairs. I called his name. He appeared shortly, zipping up his trow.

“Here I am.”

The Colonel filled his pipe from a leather pouch and didn't bother to turn his head. “Tell your friend to sit somewhere where I can keep an eye on him.”

“The name's Ambrose sir,” he said, perching on the arm of a wing chair that faced the couch.

I took the matching chair next to him. “And I'm Harold Schroeder.”

“So I have been informed,” said the Colonel pleasantly.

Huh? A British Colonel knew my name? And what was he a Colonel of anyway? MI6, had to be.

“Colonel, Ambrose and I would like to express our profound thanks for...”

“Hauling your chestnuts out of the fire?”

“Yes sir.”

“Happy to be of service dear boy. Happy to be of service.”

He loosened his brightly striped tie from Oxford or Cambridge or one of those. He lit his pipe with a gold Ronson and sat back and looked content. The chauffeur entered from the back door, hung his cap on a peg and lumbered off to the kitchen. It felt like a scene that had taken place a hundred times before.

“We need you cheeky Yanks, don't you see?” said the Colonel suddenly. “Britain is spent, defeated by victory, the French haven't been worth a fig since Waterloo. Only you cheeky Yanks, only you batboys can keep the Red Army from crossing the Elbe. Where
is
the bloody tea Sedgewick?”

Sedgewick let the whistling kettle answer for him. The Colonel puffed his pipe impatiently. I had heard this doomsday scenario before, from the CO. But he was a Gloomy Gus. That this jolly Brit thought likewise made it seem more real.

“I don't know much about the big picture sir, Ambrose and I are just pawns in the game...”

“Pawns in the game who would like to know, sir, how you knew to come to our rescue,” said Ambrose, brashly.

The Colonel shrugged his considerable eyebrows and sat very still. Ambrose leaned forward on his perch.

There are few tasks in life more thankless than being a referee. I learned this while mediating disputes between my strict Catholic parents and my wild kid sister Beth. This was the like. A brazen Mick versus a Limey toff. Just what I didn't need.

“I don't believe I am under any obligation to tell you,” said the Colonel.

“Of course not, sir,” I said. “It's just...”

“But what's the harm?” grinned the Colonel. He had good teeth for an Englishman. “Horst Schultouer stopped by last evening, had a bit too much refreshment and confided to one of our ladies that he was meeting with some Yankee gunrunners the following day.”

Ambrose pricked up his ears. “What ladies?”

“The ladies in the coach house,” said the Colonel, craning his neck toward the kitchen.

“This is a whorehouse?” said Ambrose. Sedgewick approached with a wheeled cart draped in linen.

“This is my private residence,” said Norwood crossly. “The building at the rear of the property is a whorehouse.”

Sedgewick poured dark aromatic tea into china cups. The act, the ritual, seemed to relax Norwood. He placed his pipe in a gnarled wood receptacle designed for the purpose and said, “Though we prefer bordello. Darjeeling anyone? It's fresh off the boat.”

Sedgewick served us steaming cups of tea, with cream. Real cream that clotted in the cup.

I took a sip and pondered. Norwood's disclosure explained how he knew of our meet with the Gestapo Captain. It didn't explain how the Soviets knew. Or how he knew they knew. I could hear Ambrose toting up the same sum. It was a question that needed asking, but not yet. I spoke up before Ambrose could queer the pitch. Or tried to.

“Colonel, you suggest that...”

“The Red Army is poised to cross the Elbe? Precisely! The Soviets are about to consolidate control of Poland and Romania and are laying the groundwork for Czechoslovakia. But Germany is the key. If they can seize the industrial heartland of the Ruhr the game is lost. Your President Truman seems not to know this. He gave a party in January to announce the formation
of the CIG. Guests were given black cloaks and paper daggers, as if this were all some silly parlor game!”

“Colonel,” I replied, preparing to reveal something I wasn't authorized to reveal but figuring if you can't trust a British colonel who had rescued you from certain death and had Churchill's cigar humidor in his cupboard who can you trust? “We are just trying to track down a fugitive.”

“You never know what great good can come from a humble act,” said Norwood. “The British SOE deposed the truckling Prince Paul of Yugoslavia in March of '41. We installed a Nazi resistance leader, Dusan Simovic, who promptly engaged the Wehrmacht. The results were murderous, 17,000 dead in Belgrade alone. But Simovic tied up Nazi air and armor for five weeks, delayed Hitler's eastern push for five precious weeks.” The Colonel looked crossly at his empty tea cup. “And you know what became of that adventure.”

Yes I did. German divisions got within ten miles of Moscow before they bogged downed under the assault of the Russian winter.

“So dear boys, pray tell me, I'm keen to know.”

“The name of the fugitive we're after is a terrible big secret,” said Ambrose. “If that's what you're askin'. And over here, on this side of the table, we might be wonderin' hows come two truckloads of Russian soldiers rolled up right after we did. Sir.”

Ambrose's reply was accurate in every detail. That Ambrose said it in an exaggerated Brit-baiting County Cork brogue may have prompted the Colonel to snatch up his pipe and bite down on the stem so hard that the bowl jumped up and made him look, for a moment, like Popeye the Sailor Man.

“Ambrose, apologize to the Colonel for your demeanor.”

“I was just...”

“Now.”

Ambrose apologized, even managed to sound like he meant it. I turned to Norwood. “We owe you our lives sir, and we are allies in a noble cause. Allies with separate interests however.”

The Colonel sat so far back on his silk-draped sofa that it teetered on its hind legs. He set his feet and leaned forward, blue eyes blazing, enjoying my performance. He extended his hand, palm up. The stage was mine.

“How did the Red Army know we were meeting Herr Schultouer?”

“I don't know.”

“No idea?”

“I always have an idea,” said the Colonel.

“And what would that be?”

“Our circle is a small one. And you had a secret rendezvous with a man who can't keep a secret.”

“So the lady who told you about Schultouer meeting Yankee gunrunners also told the Red Army?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Who did the telling then?”

“The man was drunk as a bosun's mate, he may have told any number of people, he may have been overheard.”

“And that's how you knew to come to our rescue?”

“Call it an educated guess,” said the Colonel, coldly.

Ambrose piped up. “Not to seem ungrateful Colonel, but why did you give a hang?”

“I believe I have explained this previously,” he said, leaning forward, biting off his words.

Sedgewick crossed to the back door and held it open. We stood up and made for the exit.

“Stop by some evening,” called the Colonel over his shoulder, suddenly cheery. “I set the best table in Berlin.”

Ambrose and I returned to the delivery truck and policed up the loose grenades, repacked them in the crate. I backed down the gravel drive and drove back down
Emststraße,
giving Ambrose the silent treatment. Not that he noticed.

“Helluva setup he's got there. Rolls Royce, snooty butler, and you should see the wine rack in the bedroom. Plus a bleedin' – what'd he call it? – bordello. A bleedin' bordello in the back yard! Man oh man, the feckin' Brit's got it knocked.”

“Interesting to hear you say that. Because you didn't show him much respect.”

Ambrose waved me off. “That's just part of the routine.”

I stopped at the intersection with the main north-south thoroughfare. I turned south, towards Dahlem, with no clear idea how to get from here to there. The CO would be wondering what the hell happened to us. And our cache of weapons.

“What routine?”

“The nip and nack. My brothers and me used to run it. They'd nip, I'd nack.”

“Ah. Well. Glad we cleared that up.”

“Don't be a dope, you know what I mean.”

I crawled down the thoroughfare. The sidewalk in this block was buried in rubble. We shared the road with one-legged men on crutches and old women pulling two-wheeled grocery carts. I did know what Ambrose meant. Cops and crooks do it all the time. The brash rookie grabs the suspect by the lapels, the grizzled vet calls him off. How I got stuck being the grizzled vet at the tender age of 25 I couldn't tell you.

“I wonder what those tickets were for?” said Ambrose. “The ones the Colonel gave out to the Russians.”

I jammed the brake pedal to the floor in front of a bone skinny old man who had either lost his balance or was attempting suicide. The truck smoked to a stop just a foot shy of his prostrate figure. A passerby hauled him to his feet.

I turned to Ambrose and poked my right index finger in and out of the hole in my left fist.

“You think?” said Ambrose with a grin.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think.”

Ambrose's wide-eyed leer made his words redundant. “We need to get us a couple of those tickets.”

I agreed with him. We drove south down the thoroughfare, two young men with sap in their veins and lead in their pencils, buzzed with the exhilaration that only dodging a fatal bullet can bring. I felt great for about five seconds. Then I remembered what we were hauling in the bed of the truck.

“Uncrate that Browning AR and jack in a magazine.”

Ambrose climbed into the back of the truck without comment or question. I checked the mirrors and settled in for a long nervous drive.

-----

The CO ticked off our failures on long blunt fingers. “Your cover is blown, you failed to do a deal with the Gestapo Captain, and you told the head of a rival agency that we're hunting Klaus Hilde.”

Ambrose and I were standing in front of Victor Jacobson's desk in his windowless office at the white brick mansion in Dahlem. In back of the mansion actually. The garage. The long drive south had been uneventful. The delivery truck and its load of weapons was now parked in the driveway, secured by a single chain across the entrance. Henka, the foul-tempered Polish cook, would doubtless beat back any approaching teams of Soviet sappers with her soup ladle.

“We never identified the fugitive sir.”

“Norwood will figure it out.”

“Could be, but we didn't tell him. I told the Colonel that we were pursuing a fugitive as a professional courtesy, seeing as how he risked his neck to save us.” That no one on our side was capable of doing likewise I left unsaid.

That was the crux of it. The Brits might be ‘defeated by victory' but their MI6 put our OSS and CIG to shame. Always had. We were the country cousins come to the big city to see how it's done. That the Berlin Bureau Chief of MI6 had to rescue Victor Jacobson's raggedy-ass operatives was the reason the CO was clutching a pencil so hard his fist got white.

“Klaus Hilde is still at large, intelligence from our émigré informants is next to nothing. I don't...” Jacobson stopped and pinched the bridge of his nose. The walls squeezed in. The CO heaved a sigh. “You got any ideas?”

Only one thought occurred. One the CO wouldn't much like. “Well, if Colonel Norwood knows we're chasing Herr Hilde, why not join forces with him in pursuit?”

Jacobson paused to consider, then pressed an intercom button on his desk. “My office” is what he said.

Ambrose and I stood there like schoolboys called on the carpet while Jacobson made notes on a legal pad. Leonid appeared a short minute later, magically, in a puff of smoke. He stood to the side of the CO's desk and looked, blank-faced, at a garage wall that wasn't worth looking at unless you fancied plasterboard with hairline cracks in it.

The CO told him the story of our misadventure, concluding with the possibility of joining forces with Col. Norwood and MI6 to hunt Hilde. The way he said it made it sound like his idea, not mine.

Leonid shook his pretty little head. “Too vulnerable.”

“How so?” said Jacobson.

“John Norwood is a decorated veteran of The Great War, a Cambridge graduate who speaks five languages, a casual acquaintance of Winston Churchill and is married to a noblewoman who has an estate in Norwich.”

He stopped. We waited.

“He is also a flagrant homosexual.”

No one said a word. The walls that had squeezed in seemed to back away. A homosexual. I guess I shouldn't have been slack-jawed with surprise at this revelation. But I was.

Ambrose and I unloaded the cache of weapons from the truck to the garage and drove home to our four story building near Heidelberg Platz. There were lights in the windows. Electric lights. It was a sight for sore eyes because the afternoon was gray and bleak and us with it.

The CO and Leonid had kicked around some half-hearted plans to get a line on Hilde. Send us into the DP camps, Stars and Stripes reporters doing a feature on the hard life of a displaced person. Or we could meet with our liaison to the émigré network, code named MANTIS, provided he wasn't dead. The CO finally shooed us off, saying only that he would be in touch.

We were not a group brimming with confidence and ready for action. The gung ho, Wild Bill, try anything attitude was breaking down.

Not on my watch it wasn't. I don't like queers any more than the next guy. Not sure I'd ever met one before, come to think. But it didn't matter what Col. Norwood was, MI6 trusted him. And he was playing the game at a higher level than we were.