A Despicable Profession

by John Knoerle

  “Head lice,” said Ambrose. “We planning on doin’ anything anytime soon?”

  “Yes we are.”

  “You gonna tell me or do I hafta beg?”

  “Nothing wrong with begging, Ambrose. Many of the holiest saints in heaven...”

  “Spill it, Schroeder, or I’ll wipe the floor with ya.”

  “You and what army?”

  We eyed one another. Was a time I could have put the headstrong Mick’s nose in the dirt in five seconds flat. It would be a much longer fight now. I grinned, glad he was on my team.

  “I propose that we return to Colonel Norwood’s compound. This very evening. I suggest that you...”

  But Ambrose was already in the bathroom, washing up.

  -----

  The chalet on Ernststraße was necklaced with red and yellow Chinese lanterns, expensive automobiles were parked in the driveway and along the curb. We had to park the delivery truck a block away and walk back in a drizzling rain, slipping on wet bricks and gathering our courage to crash the party. Mine anyway. Ambrose was fully gathered.

  “Seems an odd way to go but maybe it makes sense,” he said. “He can stand back from it all. Like a priest tellin’ married folks how to get along.”

  “What in the name of God are you talking about?”

  “A fairy put in charge of a whorehouse.”

  I laughed. “You’re just jealous.”

  “You’re right. We got a plan?”

  “I brought a photo of Klaus Hilde. When the time’s right I’ll show it to Norwood and say here’s our fugitive.”

  “And if Norwood says ‘That’s Hilde’ we know he’s already on the case.”

  “Something like that.”

  We stopped at the foot of the driveway and looked at the Chinese lanterns and listened to the muffled music and bawdy laughter spilling from the second floor.

  “Shouldda brought a bottle of something,” said Ambrose. “If you don’t bring a gift to a poof party the Colonel might figure you’re it.”

  “Figure I’m what?”

  “The gift,” said Ambrose. “Me, I’m making a beeline for the back building, with your say so. I won’t be any help up there.”

  He was right. Ambrose would clock the first guy who got close, queer or no. I told him to go to the brothel before he blew a gasket and I’d catch up later. I watched him hurry off, enviously. Being a responsible duty-bound adult ain’t no way to live.

  I walked to the front door of the chalet and pulled the bell knocker. The first floor windows were dark. I heard heavy footsteps on a creaky staircase as I shivered in my sports coat. If I didn’t get a new topcoat soon I would croak from pneumonia. The front door opened in a blast of heat, noise and light. Sedgewick, in a black suit, boiled shirt and bowtie, eyed me without apparent recognition.

  “Hal Schroeder here to see Colonel Norwood.”

  Sedgewick nodded and started to climb the steep staircase. I stayed put, wishing I had a snazzy card with my name on it. That’s the way they did it in those drawing room movies. The butler answers the door and you put your card on his silver tray.

  Sedgewick stopped halfway up the stairs, turned and beckoned with his arm.

  “Please. The Colonel is expecting you.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Come in dear boy, I was hoping you’d stop by,” said Col. Norwood as I made my way across his crowded parlor. He wore a Hawaiian shirt, white duck trousers and canvas deck shoes and held a drink with a little umbrella in it. “We chanced upon a pineapple so we thought we’d go tiki this evening. Mai tai?”

  “Sure.”

  The Colonel instructed Sedgewick to fetch me a drink, smiled broadly and lowered his voice. “What name, what job?”

  “Hal is fine. Reporter for Stars and Stripes.” Norwood shook his head. I saw why. One of the newshounds we hosted in Dahlem was stuffing his face at the banquet table. “Just say I’m a salesman.”

  The Colonel took me by the arm and introduced me around the room. There looked to be four distinct groups. Handsome lads in sweaters and saddle shoes, fierce bespectacled men with food in their beards, quiet thin-lipped men in cheap suits and loud men wearing gold tie bars, matching cufflinks and spit-shined brogans. Homosexuals, academics, government functionaries and black market profiteers’d be my guess. There wasn’t a female to be seen.

  Col. Norwood dragged me into a circle of the bearded gents, who were busy spewing spittle at one another. He listened a moment and said, to the accompaniment of Hawaiian guitar music on the Victrola, “I disagree. What we are trying to do here has never been done in human history. Not even Paris, 1814, was a successful joint operation by a coalition of victors.”

  I wasn’t sure what happened in Paris in 1814 but I put in my two cents. “And from what I hear, we’re unprepared. Just like December 6 of ‘41.”

  “Act-tu-ally,” said the Colonel through a cloud of pipe smoke, “it’s more like June, 1919. Germany lays in tatters, the Big Four dither at Versailles and the Bolsheviki swarm at the castle gates!”

  This remark stirred fierce debate amongst the group of bearded men. Col. Norwood dragged me along to the next circle of conversation. I told him we needed to talk but he seemed not to hear. Cripes. If I was going to be the his prom date the least he could do was get me a corsage.

  The animated conversation of the group of handsome lads subsided as the Colonel and I approached. I felt myself appraised from head to toe. The nods and elbow pokes said I passed muster. I took a certain satisfaction. How sick is that?

  The Colonel surveyed their appetizer plates. “Three chunks of pineapple? Wesley, you glutton.”

  Laughs all around.

  “We were reminiscing about the bad old days,” said a young man who wasn’t Wesley. “1937. Jurgen Fehling’s famous production of Richard III.”

  “Ah yes, I have heard tell. The empty, cavernous stage mirroring Speer’s anti-humanist architecture, the crippled Goebbels come to life as Richard of Gloucester, hobbling across the stage.”

  Norwood hunched over and stumped up and back, arms flailing.

  “Why I, in this weak piping time of peace

  Have no delight to pass away the time

  Unless to spy my shadow in the sun

  And descant on mine own deformity!”

  The handsome lads found this terribly amusing. My timing was poor. The Colonel was already looking around for a new circle to conquer. I wasn’t going to get him alone to display my Hilde photo. Not now.

  I considered taking my fat billfold and my Hilde photo to the bordello in back. Who knows more about the netherworld than ladies of the night?

  I know what you’re thinking. Not true. I wasn’t really envious of Ambrose. I’d had my fill of ladies of negotiable virtue. The big-eyed gals who’d approached me at Otto Moser’s after I got my mug on the front page weren’t much different than the working girls in the doorways of wartime Antwerp and Zurich and Mannheim. Worse in a way. They weren’t starving.

  When the Colonel went off to fill his pipe I slipped out the door to the back stairs.

  The two-story building in back was sheltered by a stand of poplars. It faced the street north of Ernststraße and was well lit behind lacy curtains. A canopy-covered side door looked to be the main entrance. I put four crisp tens in my pants pocket, made the acquaintance of the door and invited myself in.

  I entered a big wide open room supported by 4×4’s where the walls had been removed. An empty bar to the left and table booths along the wall. Seated in the booths were older men in horsehair suits and silk cravats nuzzling florid buxom women who laughed, tittered and giggled on cue.

  There was a staircase in the middle of the room and cocktail tables and a piano to the right.

  Well, there’s something you don’t see every day. The piano player had only one hand. I watched his right mitt fly across the high keys and his feet pump the pedals as he bent down low to let his elbow stump pound out bass beats on the lower 88’s. Man oh man!
/>
  “Who are you?” demanded a short stout woman in a low cut dress. She had an enormous bosom that defied gravity with the help of an undergarment that could only have been designed by the Army Corps of Engineers.

  “I’m Hal. I’m a salesman.”

  She looked me over and sniffed. A sniff that said we are an exclusive establishment and you are tieless. I wasn’t sure how snooty a whorehouse with a one-armed piano player could be but a thought occurred. A trick I learned in grammar school. It worked with construction paper, why not snaps?

  I retrieved a crisp sawbuck from my pocket. The woman gave me a look indicating that if I attempted to insert the bill into her ample cleavage she would slap my face off. I retrieved another ten and folded it lengthways, and again. Then I took the narrower bill and knotted it around the middle of the wider bill. I tucked the thing inside my shirt collar.

  “There. Any better?”

  My twenty dollar bowtie did the trick. Madam bouncer giggled and took my hand. “I am Sofie. Sad to say all the girls are busy for the moment.”

  “That’s oke by me. You’re the one I want to talk to.”

  “To sell me what, Mister Hal the salesman?”

  “I’m not selling tonight, Sofie my sweet, I’m buying.”

  “You are funny person.”

  “No argument there.”

  I handed her my bowtie and asked for a moment of her time, in private. She grabbed a bottle and two glasses off the bar and led me to a booth in the far left corner. I took the glass of Drambuie she passed me and took a sniff. It smelled like lighter fluid. Sofie downed hers like a dose of ipecac. I dug out the photo of Klaus Hilde and handed it over.

  “I do not know this man.”

  “I gave you twenty dollars Sophie. Look again.”

  Sophie held up the photograph, closed one eye. “I do not know him,” she said at last. “You must be talking to Eva. She knows everyone.”

  “Where do I find her?”

  “She is upstairs. She is upstairs with your Yankee friend.”

  Sophie got up to answer the doorbell. How she knew Ambrose was my friend she didn’t say. Funny she had pegged him for American despite his Irish brogue. What was it about us Yanks?

  Two loud burly men stumbled in the front door, shaking snowflakes from their overcoats. Snow. In mid-May.

  I bit my drink and winced. Lighter fluid, with sugar added. I thought about Col. Norwood. There had been rumors about queers in the OSS. It made sense when you thought about it. Who’s better at leading a double life than a homosexual?

  Which led me to a dark thought. Jimmy Streets, The Schooler’s resident armbreaker, had baited an assault on me by the Mooney brothers. Jimmy’s staged rescue was meant to win my undying trust and gratitude. Col. Norwood’s rescue smelled likewise. Why else would two truckloads of Red Army troops turn tail for a bunch of tickets to a whorehouse? All right, the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae would have dropped their spears at the same offer. But why would the Soviet Commander agree to release two American gunrunners unless he had an arrangement with Col. Norwood?

  Come to that how did the Soviet Commander know we were going to be at that loading dock at 10 a.m.? Col. Norwood said that Horst Schultouer’s lubricated tongue meant anyone might have known. True enough. Anyone might. And most anyone wouldn’t care. Our set up and rescue was an inside job engineered by Col. Norwood to win our undying loyalty and gratitude.

  Wasn’t it? Norwood wanted a source inside Global Commerce, he wanted a conduit to Bill Donovan. And he wanted to know what fugitive we were pursuing. Yet when I returned to his salon, ready to reveal the name, the Colonel couldn’t be bothered.

  I watched Sofie charm the loud men in a language I didn’t recognize. I listened to the piano player bang out a very percussive version of “Our Love is Here to Stay.” I felt seven kinds of stupid.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I was starting to feel sorry for myself, sitting alone in a brothel with a glass of lighter fluid and a head full of huh, when Ambrose and a young lady tripped down the staircase together, looking like they just stepped out of an Andy Hardy picture. She was a pretty young thing, strawberry blond with rosy cheeks and a lush figure. Ambrose took her hand and pulled her in my direction. I stood up from my table booth.

  “This is Eva,” said Ambrose, flushed and out-of-breath. “She has something she’d like to tell you.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  Eva wasn’t quite a dewy young milkmaid on closer inspection. The rose in her cheeks was pancake rouge and she had hard-stamped wrinkles around her eyes. Ambrose nudged her forward. We made eye contact. I felt a flush of embarrassment. Her blue-green peepers seemed to look right through me.

  “I have visit your Klaus Hilde,” she said in a thick German accent. “I can take you to him when I’m done work.”

  “You’re serious?”

  Eva smiled most fetchingly. “I am very serious girl.”

  She was that. I showed her the photo of Herr Hilde.

  “That is him, yes. But he has big beard now.” Eva rubbed her cheek. “Scratchy.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t know what to say period. This was all too good to be true. A tell-the-rich-Yanks-what-they-want-to-hear con job maybe.

  “He wants to know how you’re sure Hilde is Hilde,” said Ambrose, “since he wouldn’t be using his real name.”

  Eva listened to Ambrose intently then turned to me. “I knew Herr Hilde from the wartime. When he was big man, General. He was my customer.”

  “And you recognized him after all this time?”

  Eva held up both hands. “This was wrong to do?”

  “No, no. I just wondered how you, well, no offense Eva but I imagine you’ve had a lot of customers and...”

  “I am remember because Herr Hilde did not wanting to having sex. Not at first.”

  “What did he want?”

  Eva mimed holding a baby to her breast.

  “He wanted to suckle?”

  Eva nodded. “And to sing baby songs to him.”

  “Baby songs?”

  Eva sang a little lullaby.

  “Schlaf, Kindchen, schlaf / Ich gebe Dir ein Schaf / Und es soll eine Glocke aus Gold haben / Für Dich zum Spielen und zu halten / Schlaf, Kindchen, schlaf.” Sleep, baby, sleep / I’ll give to you a sheep / And it shall have a bell of gold / For you to play with and to hold / Sleep, baby, sleep.

  Good Lord.

  Ambrose waved his hand in front of my face. “Hey Chief, this is good news. Let’s do something about it!”

  “Right you are,” I said with more enthusiasm than I felt. I gave Ambrose twenty bucks. “Go find Sofie and tell her Eva is done for the night.”

  They scampered off together. I chewed on what was eating me.

  Good news. Col. Norwood’s bordello was a bottomless font of good news. A basted Gestapo Captain runs his mouth about Yankee gunrunners, the Colonel rescues them from a fate worse than death the following morning, Ambrose Mooney visits the bordello later that day, is led upstairs and trips down an hour later with more good tidings. What luck!

  Ambrose and Eva reported back. Eva was cleared for takeoff. I got up and dropped a pack of Luckies into the one-handed piano player’s overturned hat. He grunted his thanks. The tune he was pounding out was “Too Marvelous for Words”.

  Yes it was.

  We left by the side door, walked under the poplar trees, passed beneath the windows of Col. Norwood’s noisy salon, crunched down the gravel drive and piled into the delivery truck on Ernststraße.

  I took the wheel, Eva took Ambrose’s lap, grabbing and giggling. I didn’t get it. In my experience prostitutes will do just about anything but show affection.

  “Where are we going?” I said to Eva.

  “I don’t remember street name but I know the house.”

  “What part of town?”

  “Dahlem.”

  “That’s the American Sector Eva.”

  “Yet he is there!”

/>   I hung a U in the driveway of a boarded-up bungalow and drove west down the brick street in a cloud of fat snowflakes.

  -----

  The villa was sealed off by a head-high brick wall. It was a four-chimney job with a grape arbor in front, a steep four-cornered orange tile roof snugged down like a rain hat and a small front balcony suitable for torch lit speeches. The villa wasn’t two miles from the CO’s residence, not to mention the Berlin Operating Base. Herr Hilde was hiding in plain sight.

  The upstairs was lit. We watched for signs of life.

  “Did Hilde have bodyguards when you visited?”

  “Two men I saw,” said Eva. “Very drunk.”

  “They carry guns?”

  Eva screwed up her face in concentration. “I don’t see them. Guns.”

  “What about Hilde? Did he carry a gun?”

  “No. No gun.”

  I watched the upstairs some more, saw the brief silhouette of a male figure pass by an upstairs window as Eva and Ambrose nuzzled in the seat beside me.

  “Eva when you visited Hilde here did he, uh, have a satisfactory experience?”

  She had a very expressive face, Eva. At the moment it said she had no idea what I meant. I tried again. “You said he didn’t want to have sex at first. Did you have sex later, and did he like it?”

  Eva’s face said I was a very naughty boy to ask such a question.

  “Sorry, I need to know.”

  “Y-es. I think so.”

  “Was there an intercom at the front door? A radio, so you could call inside?”

  “Radio. Yes I think so.”

  “Good.”

  “What are you cooking up over there?” said Ambrose. “Using Eva as a Trojan Horse?

  “Not to send her in. Just to get the drawbridge lowered.”

  Eva followed this exchange with narrowed eyes. “Speak English!”

  It was a funny thing to say, we should have laughed. But Ambrose was cheesed off that I was putting his lady love in harm’s way and I was cheesed off because Ambrose had broken the cardinal rule. They dress it up with fancy phrases like ‘fraternization with civilian assets’ but my instructor at spy school said it plainly. Poozle makes you stoopid.