A Pure Double Cross

by John Knoerle

  A Pure Double Cross

  Book One of the American Spy Trilogy by

  John Knoerle

  This is a work of fiction.

  Published By Blue Steel Press

  Chicago, IL

  bluesteelpress@att.net

  www.johnknoerle.com

  First edition – first printing 2008

  Copyright ©2008 by John Knoerle.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art and design by Katherine Bennett.

  ISBN 978-0-9743199-1-9

  Library of Congress 2008907387

  Printed in the United States.

  Also by John Knoerle:

  “Crystal Meth Cowboys”

  “The Violin Player”

  And soon to come:

  “A Despicable Profession”

  “The Velvet Trench”

  The author would like to thank the following for their help and support:

  Kevin O’Donnell

  Vern Morrison and the Cleveland Memory Project at the CSU Library

  Joe and Anne Schram

  Allan Guthrie and Noir Originals

  Duff Kennedy

  Mark A. Ward

  Jeanne Jenkins

  Barb Cooper

  Robert Borchardt

  Claudia Brown and the Kelleys Island Historical Assoc.

  And Kate the barmaid at Otto Moser’s

  for JJ

  “All a man can betray is his conscience.”

  -- Joseph Conrad

  They’re all lined up like little toy soldiers. Overturned shot glasses on the bar. I’m going to have to pace myself. Each overturned glass is another free drink in waiting bought and paid for by my adoring public.

  I wasn’t a hero after World War II. I am now. Here’s how it happened.

  Chapter One

  The day was Thursday, November 29th, 1945 in the best location in the nation. So said the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company billboards. T-bones were back. So were cooking oil, Friday fish fries and long Sunday drives with a full tank of gas and a dame wearing a white cotton blouse, a flared midcalf skirt and silk stockings. The war was over and Cleveland, Ohio, the smoke-belching colossus that smelted the ore and poured the heat and rolled the steel that won the peace, was feeling its oats.

  My name is Hal Schroeder and I’m twenty-three years old. I walked from Mrs. Brennan’s rooming house to the Detroit-Superior Bridge and jumped on the rattler. The bridge has two levels, cars and trucks on top, streetcars below. I wore a pea coat over my armored car uniform, an empty boodle bag stuffed in the coat pocket. I looked out the window as we crossed the Cuyahoga River to downtown.

  From a distance The Flats looked just like the Ruhr Valley after a B-24 raid, mountains of oil black smoke rent by stalks of torchy flame. I wiped fog from the streetcar window and looked again. The long gray peak-roofed buildings along the riverbank were intact, ore trains steamed up slowly to their sidings, hoppers full to bursting. The oil black smoke poured from working stacks, the torchy flames from burn-off pipes. It wasn’t oil black flesh-smelling defeat I was looking at, it was victory.

  The rattler stopped at Public Square, Superior and Ontario. I got off and craned my neck at the Terminal Tower, the tallest building west of Manhattan and impressive as hell to a kid from Youngstown. The Society for Savings was a block north. It was impressive too. One of those Greco-Roman-Gothic-Renaissance jobs with granite pillars and arches and red sandstone turrets.

  I checked my watch. Five minutes to go.

  I climbed the granite stairs to the Soldiers and Sailors Monument and hid my pea coat and my empty bag in the bronze sculpture of the Civil War cannoneers. The lake wind blew wicked cold as I crossed the street to the ten-story building in my spit-shined boots and gun belt, my cleaned and pressed uniform and my gold Brinks Armored Security badge.

  The bank interior was a showstopper. A thirty-foot ceiling with a stained glass skylight, murals of pioneers yoking oxen and raising barns, acres of white marble and miles of polished brass. It had the desired effect, I felt small and insignificant, but what else is new?

  I walked up to the banker’s gate like I had a right to be there. They didn’t buzz me in. I cleared my throat in an impatient manner. A lower down signaled for a higher up. The higher up stood on the other side of the gate and said he didn’t know me.

  “Pete’s out sick,” I said. I kept my yap shut after that and let my shiny gold badge do the talking. The higher up and the lower down had a whispered conversation. I tapped my foot and looked at my watch.

  The higher up buzzed me in. I collected two bags of banded bills in large denominations, signed a receipt for $18,758 and got escorted to the entrance by a bank guard.

  I entered the revolving door ahead of the guard, pushed through and jammed a rubber doorstop into the side of the door. The bank guard said, “Hey!”

  I ran across the street and up the granite steps. I dumped the sacks of cash into the boodle bag and pulled on my pea coat.

  The armored car pulled up to the bank right on schedule. The bank guard bellowed at them from his glass cage. I ran down the steps on the other side of the Soldiers and Sailors monument. A big black sedan was idling on Superior. I got in.

  -----

  That night I put on coat and tie and hailed a cab. The cabbie told me all about the daring daylight heist at the Society for Savings. It was the headline story in the late edition of The Cleveland Press. We drove west to Lorain and Rocky River Road. They call it Kamm’s Corners. I got out at the Green Light Tavern, paid the fare and added a dollar tip. What the hell, I was flush. The Green Light looked like your standard issue beer and a bump dive. Sawdust on the floor, a jar of pickled pig’s feet behind the bar. Only it wasn’t. I ordered a local beer from the barkeep. It tasted like tap water. Two years in Europe will do that to you. I paid the barkeep and said “Double feature.” He picked up the quarters and inclined his head.

  The steel door was down a narrow hall, past the bathrooms, past the pay phone. It was partly open, held so by a gigantic man with a neatly trimmed white beard. He was Irish, had to be. “And you are?”

  “Harold Schroeder, of the Gates Mills’ Schroeders. Here to try my hand at a game of chance.”

  The giant’s eyes narrowed.

  “Perhaps a remuneration is customary,” I said brightly, extending a sawbuck. The steel door opened wide.

  I had never been inside a gambling parlor before but I’d seen pictures. Monte Carlo it wasn’t. No icy blondes with up-swept hair, no bored silver-haired gents playing baccarat. Just a bunch of working stiffs chewing green cigars and counting their chips at the table, plus a few loudmouths throwing dice at the craps table.

  I sat in on a game of seven card stud and ordered a rye rocks from a waitress in fishnet hose. I lost two hands and ordered another round. I did it again.

  This went on for quite a while. Along about the fourth watered down drink I threw down my cards, stood up and accused the dealer of using marked cards or dealing off the bottom, I forget which. The white-bearded giant scooped me up like a rag doll and headed for the back door.

  “I’m Harold Schroeder, of the Gates Mills’ Schroeders.”

  “Yeah, you said.”

  “And you are?”

  The white-bearded giant kicked open the back door and tossed me into the alley. “Kelly,” he grunted as he pulled the door shut.

  I dusted myself off and walked around the front entrance. I parked myself at the bar once again and asked the barkeep if he had a bottle that wasn’t half Lake Erie bilge water. He had to stand on tiptoe to nab a dusty fifth of Lighthouse Whisky, aged six years. I downed a shot, tipped him a deuce and said, “Tell Kelly that Harold Schroeder is here to kick his ass.”

 
Kelly wasn’t long in coming. He looked scary as hell with his neck veins bulging and his green eyes open wide as they would go. I had a moment’s panic. But I got over it.

  “You got a private room where we can do this?” I said. “I don’t want to embarrass you in front of the patrons.”

  Kelly grabbed me by the coat collar and dragged me up a flight of stairs to an empty lounge outside a private office. I knew it was a private because it had a plaque on the door that said so. The door was closed but light shone underneath it. That was good.

  Kelly moved some tables to make room. I took some deep breaths to get my heart quiet. Kelly rubbed his hands together and smiled. I assumed the position, arms relaxed, feet at ten and two. “You sure you’re up to this gramps?”

  He was on me in two strides. I had hoped to demonstrate my expertise at the double sleeve throw, or the complex reverse elbow arm bar. But it was simpler just to dart aside and trip him with my foot.

  He was a spry old gent, give him that. He was up and turned around in a blink, his face a fiery red. “You’re not gonna have a heart attack, are you?” I said. “I wouldn’t want that.”

  Kelly flew at me, his fists high. I couldn’t leverage his arm into a deft cross arm wristlock because I couldn’t reach that high.

  So I snap kicked his knee and spun to my right. He stumbled. I could have put him down with a rabbit punch just above the occipital bulge but that wasn’t the point of this exercise. And I was starting to feel sorry for him.

  Kelly got up and gathered himself. He advanced slowly, arms outstretched, grinning like a chimp. I no longer felt sorry for him.

  There is one principle central to both espionage and ju jitsu. Avoid the head on collision of forces. My spy school ju jitsu instructor had not prepared me to counter a 280 lb. opponent willing to absorb a thumb to the eye and a knee to the groin in order to wrap me in a monstrous bear hug and squeeze my internal organs out through my windpipe.

  I backed up a step, grabbed a chair and yelled. I smashed the chair against the floor and yelled some more.

  The door to the private office opened. The man who stood in the doorway said, “What?!”

  The man was half Kelly’s size and twice as scary. Everything about him sloped downward, the shelf of brow, the beak nose, the frowning mouth and the chin like an icebreaker’s prow. He looked me up and down with his left eye. His right eye paid no attention. “What the motherhumping hell is this?”

  “My name is Hal Schroeder and it’s about a #10 envelope in my coat pocket,” I said pleasantly. “And watch your mouth, you’re in polite company.”

  The man’s expression didn’t change. It didn’t have to, guy was born scowling.

  “Throw him down the stairs,” he said to Kelly and turned back to his private office.

  I whipped out the heavy envelope from my coat pocket and threw it as hard as I could. Bob Feller would have been impressed. It hit the one-eyed thug square between the shoulder blades.

  When he turned around he had a big nasty nickel-plated .45 in his mitt. He wanted to shoot me. He wanted to shoot me so bad you can’t believe it but the contents of the envelope had spilled out onto the floor. Two stacks of crisp, bank-banded hundred dollar bills.

  “Consider that my letter of introduction.”

  “To who?”

  “The Schooler,” I said. “Yes, it’s from where you think it is and, no, it’s not a set-up.”

  The man pointed his nickel-plated in my direction. I sighed.

  “You’re not going to use that thing. Not here. Now get on the horn and arrange a meet. You can shoot me later if The Schooler doesn’t bite.”

  Slopehead trained his gat on my face and almost smiled. “Count on it.”

  -----

  My hands were bound with electrical tape. I was patted down and blindfolded and tossed into the back seat of a late model black Buick. Car doors slammed.

  We drove a long way, no one in the front seat said a word. After about twenty minutes the hum of the tires got thin and I felt a jolt of cold air. We were crossing a bridge, headed east. Downtown.

  We stopped a short time later. I was pulled from the back seat and stood up. The place smelled of creosote and old smoke. I was half-walked, half-carried for about fifty paces. The floor was slippery with oil and crunchy with metal shavings. Our footsteps echoed.

  We stopped and waited. We waited some more. We waited some more after that.

  “This must be a new form of interrogation. Third degree boredom.”

  Somebody slugged me in the stomach. I bent over and puked watered whisky all over my shiny black brogans. When I straightened up someone pulled down my blindfold and shined a flashlight in my eyes.

  “Who are you and what do you want?” His voice was soft, fatherly.

  I told him my name and said I wanted to talk to The Schooler. “Is that you?”

  “Please continue,” said the man.

  “All right, I’ll do that. Just as soon as you untape my wrists. I use a lot of gestures when I speak.”

  I braced for another haymaker but the man with the flashlight chuckled and gave the order. This was good, this was encouraging. If this guy was indeed The Schooler I might still be drawing breath after I finished saying what I had to say.

  I massaged my wrists and took my time doing it.

  “I robbed the Society for Savings this afternoon. $18,758. Not bad for a day’s work but not good enough. I’ve got completely worked out heist plans in the six figures, all right here in Cleveland. But they’re too big for one man, I’ll need a crew.”

  The echoey room got quiet. I couldn’t see diddly with that electric torch scorching my eyeballs so I shut my lids and enjoyed the silence. They were on my turf now.

  “How did you pull off that job this afternoon?” said the soft-voiced man.

  “I won’t answer that question till I can see who I’m talking to.”

  The flashlight clicked off. A portly middle-aged gent took shape once the starbursts faded. I’d seen his picture. The Schooler.

  “I didn’t do the job by myself,” I said. “I had an accomplice.”

  “Who?”

  “The Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  Chapter Two

  It was a clambake that decided me. A Saturday afternoon clambake in Frankie Lemowski’s backyard in Youngstown. All my neighborhood pals were there, back from Corregidor and Anzio and the Aleutian Islands, working at the mill or the hardware store, living in trailers and crackerbox apartments, the ink barely dry on the articles of surrender and most of them already hitched and half their wives in maternity smocks. Frankie and his wife lived in the basement of his parents’ bungalow and counted themselves lucky.

  My neighborhood pals are good guys, salt of the earth, shirt off their back. But they’d been reading too many of their own press clippings. They think they’re heroes, still wearing their dress blues and oak leaf clusters to church on Sunday. They swapped their war stories and I listened. They gave me a hard time. ‘Hal was busy sipping champagne with some Mata Hari in a French café.’ Ha ha.

  I was an undercover wireless agent parachuted behind enemy lines to provide intelligence on troop movements and potential bomb targets. I was recruited because I was the grandson of German immigrants and spoke Deutsch. That much they knew. I didn’t fill my pals in on the gory details because I am prohibited by the Office of Strategic Services from doing so.

  Cheesed me off. What I did was dangerous. So far as I know I’m the only behind-German-lines OSS agent who lived to tell about it. Only I couldn’t.

  My Case Officer would say I was alive because I shirked my duties but screw him. Had I followed his orders to the letter – fraternized with the Wehrmacht brass at the local Biergarten, infiltrated the nearby Panzer camp – my ability to dit dah valuable intel would have been severely compromised from being tied to a fencepost and used for bayonet practice.

  So I’m no hero. Truth to tell neither were my pals. The real heroes, the ones who
did what they didn’t have to do, are all dead. Like Alfred and Frieda. They weren’t awarded any medals and citations and nobody knows what they did except me. And I ain’t talking.

  The clambake got louder as night fell. Frankie sounded just like his old man when someone stole a sniff of the five-gallon pot of steaming clams, chicken, potatoes and corn on the cob. “Close the lid! Close the lid, you’ll lose the flavor!”

  Somewhere along in there I decided. I told Frankie I had taken a job in Cleveland, a job in a bank.

  “Cleveland? Didn’t Jeannie move up there?”

  Jeannie was my high school sweetheart. We were plain crazy about one another. We would have been just two more dopey newlyweds at the clambake if Jeannie hadn’t eloped while I was overseas.

  “I don’t know and I don’t care,” is what I said to Frankie.

  Chapter Three

  The FBI sent a registered letter to my address in Youngs-town. It contained a roundtrip train ticket to Cleveland and a one-paragraph letter that invited me to a meeting, 2 November, 14:00 hours sharp, to discuss ‘a matter of mutual interest.’ It was signed by Chester Halladay, Special Agent in Charge.

  It was not the sort of letter I got every day. Especially not from the FBI. The FBI and the OSS hated each other.

  J. Edgar Hoover lobbied FDR to put the Bureau in charge of overseas espionage during the war. FDR tapped William Donovan to head the Office of Strategic Services instead. And Wild Bill did a passable job, if victory counts for anything. In 1944 Donovan secretly proposed making the OSS permanent. Someone leaked the proposal to a Washington newspaper columnist who dubbed it the “Super Gestapo Agency.”

  FDR shelved the proposal. Everyone from Wild Bill Donovan on down figured J. Edgar Hoover for the leaker.

  Mind you I don’t give a rat’s patoot about the OSS. I signed on for a nine-month stint and was still humping my wireless set, dodging Yank P-51’s and Russian shock troops, two years later. Then I came home in street clothes, shambling down the gangplank at Newport News after the uniformed GI’s were greeted with popping flashbulbs and brass bands.