by John Knoerle
I stood up and swabbed my mug with a handkerchief. Well done, Schroeder. Well done and executed. Could be the Colonel’s right. You are a rube.
Chapter Twenty-two
I walked down the pathway west of the chalet, toward the two-story brothel in the back. I heard the one-winged piano player pounding out a percussive tune, I heard bawdy laughter, I heard loud grunts of exertion and a low groan of pain. I broke into a run, sober in a second, knowing what I would find and finding it. Ambrose duking it out on the front lawn.
The dumbshit had bit off a big chaw, two foes, one twice his size. British soldiers by their uniforms, drunken sots by their halting steps and wild swings. Ambrose was holding his own, darting in with quick combinations, dancing back, ducking, circling, boxing not brawling. I was suitably impressed.
Then the big man got tired of getting popped and lurched forward, arms wide. Ambrose jumped back but the big man fell and snagged his ankle. His pal bull rushed Ambrose to the ground. Shellacking commenced.
I let them get in a few well-earned licks before I waded in. I jammed a thumb deep under the smaller man’s jaw and held it there. He went limp.
The big man rolled over to see what was what. I planted my heel on his testicles and said, “Fun’s over. Go home.”
Ambrose slithered out of his grasp and clambered to his feet. The big man had reached the fourth stage of drunkenness, the stage of not recognizing that your opponent has his foot on your nuts. He tried to get up and have at me. I bent down and gave him a quick piston shot, the heel of my palm right between his eyes. His head bounced off the grass. He groaned, and started back up.
I was beginning to get annoyed with this strapping Brit. A full-standing knee drop to the family jewels would serve him right. Ambrose intervened.
“Back off. I can handle this feckin’ Limey.”
“You weren’t doing so hot a second ago.”
“Just keep his pal busy.”
“Won’t be necessary. His pal is dead.”
That took the starch right out of him. Ambrose looked over in horror at the facedown figure. The big man crawled over to inspect his fallen comrade. I hauled Ambrose away by the shirt collar.
“He’s dead? You kilt him?”
“He had it coming, now pick up the pace.”
We quick stepped around to the back of the building and ducked behind the stand of poplars. I chanced a glimpse around the corner. The big one had the smaller one’s arm around his neck. They were making half circles in the dewy grass, lowing like cows.
“He’s walking good for a dead guy,” said Ambrose at my back.
“Yes he is. What the hell happened?”
“Nothing. I was at the bar, waiting my turn, mouth shut, head down. And this crumped-out yob starts in about Brunehilde with the big titties, what he’s gonna do to her and...”
“Ambrose. He’s a drunk. In a whorehouse.”
“I know, but...”
“You took it outside?”
“Sure.”
“The bouncer didn’t toss you?”
“No. Not really.”
I shoved the keys at him. “I need to see Eva. You go to the truck, pray your rosary, stay put!”
“Yeah, okay,” said Ambrose, miserably. He dug in his pocket and handed me a stick of gum. “You smell of puke.”
“Thank you, Ambrose. That’s very considerate.” I unpeeled the gum and bounced the wrapper off his mush. “Now go.”
He went, walking backwards, spilling blarney. “She won’t like you Schroeder. She only likes the wild ones.”
I tossed a dirt clod at him and missed. Ambrose lit out down the pathway. She only likes the wild ones. I was a twenty-five year old off-the-books secret agent in the world capital of intrigue. Why wasn’t I a wild one?
I walked around to the side entrance, knocked and waited. The bruiser who answered the door didn’t like the look of me.
“I’m Hal Schroeder,” I said with a smile. “Of the Gates Mills’ Schroeder’s.”
The bruiser didn’t like me any better after that. Did he think I was Ambrose? There was a superficial resemblance, that inscrutable thing that distinguishes Americans from Europeans, softer features maybe, from all the interbreeding that led Hitler to call us as ‘a race of mongrels’.
“It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” I said, extending my hand. The bruiser palmed the fin and held the door open.
The joint was a lot livelier this time. Fewer well-dressed older gents in the plush booths but a bar crammed with uniforms waiting their turn to climb the stairs. The one-armed piano player plunked out a tune that was either “Stardust” or “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Ballads weren’t his strong suit.
I looked around for Eva. No joy. She must be upstairs in the trenches.
“Mr. Hal the salesman.”
I turned around. “Sophie.”
She was gussied up this evening. Low cut velvet dress, flower in her upswept hair, wearing enough makeup to paint a steam yacht. She frowned her forehead. “Where is your bowtie?”
“In my wallet.”
I took a step forward. Sophie took a step back, looked around for the bouncer. I was angry all of a sudden, disgusted with the shit I was wading through, swimming in, in a town where starved kids shivered in lean-to’s on Heidelberg Platz.
I held out a ten dollar bill. “Tell me I am next in line to see Eva.”
Sophie filled her enormous lungs, ready to put the upstart Yankee in his place and then some. I returned her look, and then some.
She tucked the bill into her brassiere. “In ten minutes. Room 4. Use the back stairs.”
I nodded. She left.
The back stairs were outside, on the west side of the building. I climbed them, entered a narrow hall that smelled of spilt beer and jism. I killed time listening to soldiers relieve themselves. That’s what the place reminded me of in my foul mood. A latrine.
The door to room 4 was closed. Had it been ten minutes? I stood there like a stooge. I listened at the door. A GI came bounding up the stairs and looked at me funny. I knocked on the door.
“It’s Hal.”
“Come in please.”
I entered a small room with a big bed and a dirty window. Eva lay on the bed, scrubbing herself with a wet wash cloth under her unbuttoned cotton nightgown, rubbing her white skin pink.
“I am not here for sex, Eva.”
“No?” she said, putting her wash cloth in a basin on the nightstand.
“No. I want you to do us a service. Ambrose and me.”
Eva dragged a brush through her honeyed hair, winced at a snag. “He is good boy, Ambrose. I like him very much.” She set down the brush. “But he is just a boy.”
Eva put a dab of perfume behind each ear, drizzled more on her fingertip and ran that fingertip between her breasts. That she did this matter-of-factly didn’t lessen its impact. She shook out her hair and leaned back on pillows and crossed her dainty ankles.
“I am ready now for you.”
“Eva, I can’t...”
“You can’t?”
“No, no. I can, it’s just that...”
“You want me for a service.”
“Yes. It’s very important. It concerns...”
“But I have already done...how you say?...a service for your working.”
“Herr Hilde. Yes, great. Very valuable.”
“And you want more now at this time?” she said, rising up off her pillows.
“I will pay you whatever you ask.”
Eva leaned back and pouted most prettily.
I explained that I wanted her to canvas the other ladies in the brothel to determine if any of them had spent time with a drunken former Gestapo Captain who ran his mouth about a meet with Yankee gunrunners. Eva said it was against house rules to ask such questions.
“Will you ask them anyway?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you will no have sex with me.”
�
��Eva, you are...a very attractive woman. Very. But I can’t...”
“You say that you could!”
“No. Yes. lean, but I...”
Eva giggled. She was messing with me. She patted the bed. She looked up at me with those blue-green peepers, gave me both barrels. “It is how I know who you are.”
Crap on toast. It looked like I would have to take one for the team. And do it in a convincing manner.
Yeah, I know. Poor Harold, forced to frolic with Aphrodite. But it wasn’t like that. I did my patriotic duty but I didn’t enjoy it.
Not right away.
-----
I gave Eva a gold sovereign when we were done. She tucked it away with a perfunctory danke and freshened herself up for the next guy.
“Know me now, do you?” I said as I pulled on my clothes.
“Oh yes,” she said with a wink.
“Then you’ll ask the other girls about the Gestapo Captain?”
“Yes, yes. Now you go.”
I turned to her as I opened the door to the dank hall. She was scrubbing her armpits with the wash cloth. Prostitutes have a terrible job. I stepped into the hall and closed the door behind me. But being a john stinks too.
I clomped down the back stairs, a black mood in full pursuit. I had been weak, and stupid. Poozle stoopid. Ambrose would know. He would smell Eva on me. I could wash up in the washroom and he would still know. Was that why Eva had insisted? To send a message to Ambrose to back off? Or did she simply want to show the high and mighty Yank he weren’t so high and mighty.
I didn’t know. I did know that Leonid said the job description of a spy is contradictory - a person of impeccable integrity who is an accomplished liar. And I was neither.
I paused at the base of the stairs to clear my head and gulp fresh air and enjoy the simple pleasures of a Berlin spring. It was pleasantly warm, the one-armed piano player was thumping out “On the Sunny Side of the Street” and no one was getting shredded by artillery fire or pulverized by thousand pound grass cutters. I told myself to snap out of it. Everything was hunky dory.
Ambrose didn’t ask me if I had seen Eva when I climbed into the delivery truck. We drove back to the apartment in silence. When we arrived Victor Jacobson and Leonid Vitinov were waiting for us on the musty couch.
Chapter Twenty-three
“Herr Hilde has upped the ante,” said the CO when Ambrose and I had settled into chairs, facing our elders on the couch. We were young men out tomcattin’ around town if anyone asked. Anyone didn’t.
“He says there’s something big brewing. Leonid doesn’t believe him and I have my doubts.”
“What’s he say?”
“That a group of anti-Communists in town - White Russians, a few locals - have linked up. They call themselves the Committee to Free Berlin. They’re issuing leaflets and dispensing cash. Hilde says they’re a fly trap.”
“Funded by NKVD?”
“So he says.”
I had learned about false flag recruitment at spy school. It’s when you recruit a source by disguising your true identity and affiliation, raising a false flag. This would be false flag recruitment on a grand scale. Not a double agent but a doubled organization.
“So,” I said, “it’s a front the NKVD can use to compile a list of enemies.”
“And it gets worse,” said Jacobson. “According to Hilde the NKVD are secretly arming this group, planning to instigate an attack on the Soviet armory on a date certain, with the intent of liberating a cache of heavy weapons. Whereupon the Committee to Free Berlin will be annihilated.”
“Which gives the Red Army an excuse to blockade Berlin and seize the city.”
“Which prompts a military response from us. At which time, according to Hilde, Operation LUNA gets underway.”
Holy shit. Russian tanks across the Elbe. Brits and Yanks in full retreat. MANTIS, Colonel Norwood, Klaus Hilde, all singing off the same sheet. I was pondering these imponderables when Ambrose asked the obvious.
“And how did this Hilde sod come up with this blessed bullshit about this Committee, him being holed up for the last year and all?”
The CO smiled. He was warming to this scamp. “He won’t say, not till we improve his accommodations anyway. But he figured to have a good hole card.”
The well-draped Russian to Jacobson’s left cleared his throat to speak. “This is a fairy tale that the NKVD told Hilde to recite to us.”
Ambrose wanted to know why the NKVD would do that.
“Because they want to discredit this Committee, so that we do not offer them assistance.”
Made sense. And double agent Leonid Vitinov ought to know. “The NKVD told you this?”
My question made Leonid angry. I know because he spoke with even less emotion than usual.
“I am not need-to-know on this matter.”
“Then how can you be sure, Chief?” said Ambrose saucily, fist on his hip.
Leonid graced him with a thin-lipped grin. “If the plan that Herr Hilde described was legitimate I would have been need-to-know.”
Leonid paused long enough for Ambrose and me to grope around in the murk and come up empty. He continued, with great forbearance.
“If the NKVD was supporting the Committee to Free Berlin, they would have instructed me to monitor and intercept any communications that pertained to the Committee in order to determine if we suspected that the Committee was a front.” Leonid concluded with a smug tick of the eyebrow. “The NKVD has not so instructed me.”
Ambrose said what I was thinking. In a roundabout way.
“I’m just an Irish eejit, I don’t know about espionage and all that. But this, what I just heard, sounds to me like Sunday Mass. The priest always wants us to take his word for it, take things on faith, doncha know. How is this any different?”
Leonid looked droll, unoffended. “Such a mistrusting young man.”
I asked the Irishman’s favorite question. “So what do we do?”
“There is a meeting of the Committee to Free Berlin in two days time,” said Jacobson. “You’ll go as reporters for Stars’n’Stripes. If they’re a political group they will welcome you. If they have a more sinister agenda they’ll keep their distance.”
I liked it. Ambrose too from the look of him. We looked to the slight, silent Russian, waiting for his curt dismissal of this plan as a waste of time. Leonid did not oblige. I wondered why.
Came a small knock at the door.
“Don’t answer it,” said the CO. The small knocking became small thumping, heel of the hand or sole of the shoe. Jacobson drilled me with a look.
“I think it’s the boy who used to live here.”
Jacobson glowered. He had given me explicit instructions not to open the door. The thumping continued. Not loud, but it built up a great tension in the room. Jacobson seemed unsure, not wanting to break his own rule.
“Wer ist da?” I said through the door. Who is there?
“Der Junge mit dem Topf.” The boy with the pot.
“Was willst Du?” What do you want?
“Der Deckel für den Topf” The lid to the pot.
“Hold the artillery,” I said as I unlatched the door.
He was leaner and more foul-smelling than I remembered him. More dog than boy. I told Ambrose to fetch the lid to the cooking pot. He went to the kitchen and clattered through cabinets.
I crowded the little bugger but he bunged around trying to catch a glimpse of the men behind me. He saw the person to my right and bunged left. He saw the person to my left and froze. Dead. I turned to see who that person was. Leonid.
Ambrose returned with the lid to the cooking pot. I took it and turned to face the kid but he was halfway down the stairs.
-----
The CO gave me the time and place of the Committee to Free Berlin meeting. Then he and Leonid went away. Ambrose and I nipped at the brandy bottle and ate Zwieback crackers.
Ambrose kept his manner light but I could tell what was on his mind. So I ap
ologized for having sex with a prostitute.
I could’ve told Ambrose that Eva called him a boy and insisted that I jump in the rack with her but I’m not that kind of heel. I said I was weak and I said I was sorry and both were true. Ambrose growled, called me a motherhumping son of Satan, drained his brandy and said, “What’s next?”
“Eva agreed to canvas the ladies, see if anyone got an earful about Yankee gunrunners from our Gestapo Captain. If there ain’t no such lady we’ll know the Colonel got his information elsewhere.”
“Where elsewhere?”
“The Soviets. Where else?”
“How’d they know we were gonna be there at the loading dock? The Soviets.”
“From Horst Schultouer I guess.”
“The Gestapo Captain? Why he tell ‘em? Isn’t he s’posed to be a Commie hater?”
“Supposed to be. But in the spy game there’s sometimes a long stretch of road between what’s supposed to be and what is.”
Ambrose chewed, swallowed and digested this pearl of wisdom along with a Zwieback cracker. “Why did the kid run away like that?”
“He recognized Leonid, was afraid of him.”
“Why? What’s it mean?”
“I don’t know.”
Ambrose poured himself another slug of brandy. “You’re not very good at this are ya?”
I laughed. What could I say? The intemperate young son of the Old Sod was right.
“What’s on the slate if Eva finds that Horst didn’t blab to the ladies?”
I smiled, I grinned. I had a plan!
“We return to Col. Norwood’s late night salon and play a bit of nick and nack.”
Chapter Twenty-four
The hard-working Miss Eva was doing okay for herself. She had a private telephone line. Ambrose had the number. We stumbled out at something o’clock the next morning to locate a working phone box.
No such thing. So we ducked into a sweet-smelling Konditorei where all the customers spoke English and all the prices were in dollars. We borrowed their blower for a buck. Ambrose called Eva while I ogled a tray of apple Kuchen. It was a thing of beauty but not what I needed at the moment. I was overhung. I needed a big hunk of Schwarzwurstl dipped in Tabasco sauce. I settled for a cup of black coffee, straight from the jar.
