A Despicable Profession

by John Knoerle

  I went to the buzz board and pressed buttons for the second floor, got an answer from apartment H. One Frau G. Unkel.

  “Lieferung für Frau Unkel.” Delivery for Mrs. Unkel.

  She wanted to know what it was.

  “Es ist ein Paket, meine Dame.” It’s a package, ma’am.

  “Woher ist das Paket?” Where is the package from?

  How the hell did I know? Think, genius. What package would any and every woman in the Western world open the door to receive? Oh, yeah. I had dug deep one time and made a big hit with Jeannie on her birthday.

  “Von Godiva Schokoladen in Brüssel.” From Godiva Chocolates in Brussels.

  Frau Unkel buzzed me in post haste. I crossed the marble floor, passed the brass-trimmed elevator and hunted the fire stairs, saying a silent apology to Frau G. Unkel, Apt. H, 1832 Spirchenstraße. I would send her a box of Godiva chocolates when all this was done. I would!

  I found the stairwell in the back right corner of the lobby, next to the fire door. Now there’s something you don’t see every day. Carpeted fire stairs. Leonid had himself a swank scatter.

  I climbed two flights of stairs and walked down the corridor to apartment K, wondering what the hell I was doing with every step. If Anna told me to take a hike I would be in deep Dutch with Leonid. I knocked anyway.

  No answer. I knocked some more. The door opened against a chain lock. A woman said something in a soft voice, something in Russian. I looked through the crack in the door, saw no one.

  “It’s Hal Schroeder Mrs. Vitinov. We met before. I work with your husband.”

  No response. Did Anna speak English? I couldn’t remember, couldn’t recall if we had exchanged a single word. I tried Deutsch.

  No response, no face in the door crack. But the door didn’t close. I said the only word I knew that Anna would recognize.

  “Leonid.”

  A pale frowning face in the crack of the door. “No Leonid here.”

  I nodded. “I know, I understand.”

  “What is he?”

  Good question. She meant ‘where is he’ maybe. Or ‘Has something happened to him?’

  “Leonid is fine. O-kay. Fein.”

  Anna understood. Leastwise she smiled, a quick mechanical curl of the lips seen through a crack in the door. A sad smile.

  “Why here are you?”

  Another good question. Anna moved closer to the door, peered at me with one pale gray worried eye. She was a wounded bird, this one.

  “I was nearby, close by. Café Gestern.”

  The pale gray eye watched me.

  “I wanted to apologize, to say I’m sorry.” I bowed my head in penance. “When we met,” I said, pointing to her, pointing to me, “at the party, in Dahlem, I was rude to you.”

  I made a mean face. No sign of comprehension from behind the door. I droned on, with a lot of gestures.

  “We talked, we had pleasant con-ver-sa-tion. And then I turned away, walked away without saying goodbye. So long, auf Wiedersehen.”

  Anna understood the last part. I know because she said “Goodbye” and shut the door in my face.

  It was the way she said it that kept me standing there. Softly, reluctantly. And the way she closed the door. With a click, not a slam.

  Ambrose and I had a date with the Committee to Free Berlin the following evening. A date or an ambush. We would show up either way, two gobs on a job as the swabbies like to say. Would be nice, however, to know what we were in for and up against. Nice to have a chance to prepare.

  I knocked again, gentle but insistent.

  The door opened against the chain. I got both eyes this time. They were angry. I put my hand against the door jamb and met her look and smiled. Easy like, not too cocky.

  We had an odd moment just then. A back and forth with eyes and eyebrows and unsaid words. Ambrose was right. She liked me for some reason. She also feared me. How to tip the balance?

  Act human, act stupid. Speak.

  “I just had a long lunch at the Café Gestern with a friend of mine. Ambrose, you met him at the party. And we had a couple steins of Bier and now, well, I need to go to the bathroom,” I said, mincing about. “Water closet. Toilette.”

  No response, no reaction. I pulled a face and raised my hands in prayer. “Please?”

  This coaxed a tiny smile and an opened door.

  I said thanks in several languages and followed her through the parlor to the head. The apartment was spare, stark. The only touch of warmth were several framed watercolors. I closed the bathroom door and tapped a kidney.

  Anna was standing by the open front door when I returned to the parlor, ready to usher me out.

  I pretended not to notice, studied the watercolors on the walls. They were good, bright and lively. A plump cat curled up in a basket, one eye open. A bunch of dark cherries in a yellow bowl. A blazing late autumn maple missing half its leaves. The tree leaned sharply to one side and called to mind an elegant society dame at the end of a long night.

  I wondered who the artist was. Then I didn’t. The plump cat in the portrait wandered over and hissed at me. Though it pained me deeply I leaned over and petted the little bastard. I’m allergic to cats, in more ways than one.

  “Your paintings are very beautiful.” Anna lowered her eyes and flushed ever so slightly. She understood English well enough. “You must be very famous.” She squinted at my last word. “Famous, well known. Like Rembrandt.”

  Anna put a blue-veined hand to her face to cover a snort. Prettiest hand you ever saw.

  “Could we have some tea?” I mimed a sip, my pinky in the air.

  Anna fought a smile to a standstill. But she shut the door and went to the kitchen. I sat down on the only upholstery I could find, a gray couch stiff as a parson’s collar. I put my foot up on the coffee table – a large green metal ammunition box stenciled CCCP. Charming. Anna entered a short time later with a tray. I stood up to help her, a guest now, not an intruder.

  Anna perched on a wooden chair with the bow-backed grace of a ballerina. She crossed her wrists. Thin as spun sugar. The fat cat bounded up on the couch and settled in my lap. Never fails. Anna scolded the cat in Russian. The cat paid her no heed. His name was Ivan. I stifled a sneeze.

  Well. Here we all were. Hal, Anna and Ivan the Terrible.

  “I am also very talented Anna. I am, I’ll show you.”

  I know exactly one magic trick, one Uncle Jorg taught me. It’s a variation of The French Drop. You hold your right hand palm upward and place a coin between thumb and forefinger. You move to grab the coin with your left hand. Just before the left hand closes you let the coin drop to the palm of your right hand, making a big show of snatching the coin with your left hand as you palm the coin in your right.

  You then display your empty left hand to astonished gasps and find the coin in your pocket with your right hand. The Schroeder variation involves finding the coin in your nose. It’s a big hit at taverns. Anna liked it too. Ivan got bored and wandered off.

  We settled back into silence. Anna was a proper lady, she wasn’t going to respond to pointed questions about her husband. Yet her loneliness was palpable.

  I knew the feeling. It gets worse over time. The last few months of my behind-the-lines OSS service I occasionally entertained the notion of surrendering at a German checkpoint just to have someone to talk to. I’d heard tales from senior agents who had been captured and held in solitary for months. They would scream and misbehave in any way they could just to get some human contact, just to get a beating.

  So. Play the loneliness angle.

  “This is a nice apartment, nice building. You must have many visitors. Besucheinen.”

  Anna gave me a quick dismissive shake of the head.

  “What about your parents? Your Mutter und Vater? Do they come to visit?”

  Another head shake.

  “What about Leonid’s parents? His mother and father?”

  “Leonid father, no more. Tot. Leonid mother...” Anna l
owered her voice to a grim whisper. “Lubyanka.”

  “That is what Leonid told me. He told me that his mother was held by Lavrenty Beria in the Lubyanka. So that Beria would have control, complete control of Leonid. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Anna did not respond.

  “Forgive me, Anna, but I don’t see why Beria would do that. Hold Leonid’s mother in prison.”

  Anna stood up. It was time to go. I thanked her for the tea and company. She walked me to the door.

  We squared up, two inches apart. Her gray eyes had flecks of purple in them. They lit on mine and flitted away. And again. I managed to keep my hands to myself. Anna kept hers out of trouble by knotting them together at her waist. She was strangling those graceful delicately-tapered fingers purple!

  “Don’t do that,” I said and put my hands on hers. They were surprisingly soft, her skinny hands. And warm. “I would like an answer to my question.”

  Anna reclaimed her mitts and opened the door. She eased me out with a hand on my back, just above my belt. Her touch was firm, no nonsense.

  “Eine Ehefrau kann ersetzt werden, eine Mutter nicht,” she said and closed the door behind me.

  A wife is replaceable, a mother is not.

  -----

  I glided down the carpeted stairs, enjoying the springy feel of them. Or was that just me, walking on air? I hadn’t felt the like for quite a while. Not since Jeannie.

  I indulged these adolescent yearnings all the way down to the lobby then made a beeline for the front door. Progress had been made. Anna’s explanation about Leonid’s mother made some sense. Russians were famously sentimental about their mothers. Could be Leonid was on the level.

  I made it out onto Spirchenstraße without incident. Am-brose was not where he should have been, huddled in the doorway across the street. Which meant he had to see a man about a dog or he’d waylaid Leonid. Not a problem. Ambrose was nearby in either case. I positioned myself across the street and down the block. By the wreckage of the National Socialist institute of Something or Other.

  I watched and waited. And waited.

  Ambrose did not appear. I searched every Bierstube, café, Kneipe and bistro in a four block radius. Checked every barstool, toilet stall and back room, returned to the spot on Spirchenstraße and waited till night fell.

  Ambrose was nowhere to be found.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  I double timed it back to the apartment, hoping Ambrose had got bored and gone home, not believing it for a second. Ambrose hadn’t ditched a merry life of Dublin pub crawls to come to Berlin and be a punk. I bulled my way down the crowded sidewalk, scattering cripples and old ladies, wondering what I should do if he wasn’t there. Call Eva? Call the CO? Call Wild Bill Donovan?

  No. I would play it close. If Ambrose wasn’t at the apartment, if Ambrose had been snatched.

  Stupid of me not to tell him to find better cover while he kept an eye out for Leonid. Whatever side of the fence Leonid was working the Blue Caps would keep watch on his residence. I bust in, they snatch my sentry. And why do that? Make some sense, Schroeder!

  But someone had. Snatched my sentry. I climbed the three flights two stairs at a time. The apartment was empty.

  I stripped off my clothes and stood underneath the rusty shower pipe. The water pressure was good at this hour. The frigid gusher beat back the waves of guilt welling up inside me. Why hadn’t they bagged my sorry ass? I had signed up for this. I had something to gain. Ambrose didn’t know a Communist from a Rotarian. It wasn’t goddamn fair is what it wasn’t.

  I climbed out and sat on the toilet and shivered. I left the mangy gray towels where they were. I think better when I’m cold.

  The NKVD wouldn’t risk snatching a low value target like Ambrose. Not now. They had the USA right where they wanted us, fast asleep. But Leonid wouldn’t have been able to snatch Ambrose by himself. Gun or no gun, Ambrose would have wiped the floor with the little man or died trying. Leonid had help. He must have convinced his superiors that Ambrose was a hothead who was threatening to go public about the Committee to Free Berlin.

  Or something like that.

  Take a breath, Schroeder. Take another. Don’t outrace the facts for once. Nail it down. You have a lot of questions on your tick list. The only one you’ve checked off is how Col. Norwood came to know that you and Ambrose would be on that loading dock and even that answer stank of rank convenience if you thought about it which you are not going to do right now because you need to answer more immediate questions.

  There was only one. Okay two. Ambrose and I had hoofed it, meandered, tarried, doubled back. We hadn’t been shagged. How did Leonid know we would be paying a visit to his wife on this particular afternoon?

  That was the second question which in some corkscrew way led to the first. Why had the German boy, demanding der Deckel to his family’s Topf, suddenly bolted down the stairs at the sight of Leonid Vitinov?

  Stand up, Schroeder. Stand up, towel off and nail it down.

  I got dressed and went to the kitchen, grabbed the lid to the cooking pot. I scrambled down the stairs and headed for the Heidelberg Platz. And stopped. I needed a peace offering. The pot lid wasn’t enough and a sawbuck was too brashly Yank. I needed something real.

  Meat. I had passed a butcher shop a couple blocks down. I went there.

  The blinds were drawn, the door locked. I didn’t know what time it was but it wasn’t late. Six o’clock at most. Goddamn Krauts are so one way. My old man would lock the door of his candy store at the tick of six every night even though he could have sold cartons of cigs to well lit factory workers stumbling home from the corner tap. They would tap on the porthole window after closing time, waving dollars. And here I was, tapping on the porthole window after closing time.

  A small brown man with a mop in his hand looked up. A Spaniard or a Portugee. He waved me off, then recognized what I had pressed to the glass. The international badge of American authority in all matters great and small. A pack of Lucky Strikes.

  The door swung open. Miguel had plenty of raw bratwurst and knockwurst he was willing to trade me but that wasn’t what I wanted. It took some haggling but he came across with the good stuff. Two pounds of smoked bockwurst. He wrapped it in butcher paper, I stuck it in my coat.

  -----

  You can bomb a city down to the nubs but you can’t keep songbirds quiet in spring or dogs from barking at the setting sun. The lone surviving tree in Heidelberg Platz was hung with drying laundry and the air was thick with the smell of baking potatoes. Spuds were the staple now, dumped on street corners by US Army trucks as payment to the Trummerfrauen. They sat around fire pits, the rubble women, roasting potatoes on long sticks, watching their children chase each other across piles of rubble sprouting dandelions.

  It was a stirring testament to the resilience of the human spirit and so forth but I had a little Kraut peckerneck I needed to find and pronto. I advanced toward the piles of rubble. The kids saw me coming and took off.

  I approached the fire pits. The women kept their heads down. I wandered around like a dope, my Deckel in my hand. So to speak. I was looking for the matching Topf. I found it.

  “Ich glaube dies gehört Ihnen.” I believe this belongs to you.

  She looked up at me from underneath a curtain of dirty hair. Was this the boy’s mother? Or grandmother? She looked old as the hills, save for her eyes. Her eyes were young. She made no move to take the pot lid. I set it down on the grass next to her, squatted down and gestured to the bubbling stew of potato chunks and grass clippings.

  “Es sieht dünn aus.” It looks thin.

  The woman grunted. No shit.

  I removed the precious parcel from inside my coat and took my time unwrapping the butcher paper, fold by fold, to reveal the luscious contents within. The woman watched me closely but without expression. I sliced off a hunk of bockwurst with my folding knife, eyed the pot. “Darf ich?” May I?

  The woman’s look said this was a ve
ry stupid question. I plopped the chunk of sausage into the pot, cut up some more and did likewise. The aroma of rendered pig wafted out over the Platz, quieting conversation, drawing hungry stares.

  I had an apology I wanted to make to this woman about displacing her family from her apartment, how it wasn’t my idea and all that. But I flushed it. This woman had had a bellyful of the pieties of men. I told her I needed to talk to her son, that he wasn’t in any trouble but he had seen something and I needed to talk to him about it.

  She looked away. “Was hat er gesehen?” What did he see?

  I said I believed he had seen a stranger enter my apartment. Her apartment. The apartment on the fourth floor.

  “Wer ist dieser Fremde?” she said with a shiver. Who is this stranger?

  I scratched an ear and said I plumb didn’t know. Which is why I needed to talk to her son.

  My Huck Finn act bought me a look of utter contempt and why not? I was the Yankee Doodle Dandy who had commandeered her apartment, banished her to a lean-to in a public park, bombed her husband to smithereens and likely her fair-haired daughter too. There were two parents and two kids in the family photo above the stove, but only two beds in the apartment. Best guess the boy was all she had left. She wasn’t going to put him at risk for a slice of sausage.

  I told her that I had been dispatched to Berlin by the President of the United States to help prevent a Russian takeover of the city. The woman kept her head resting on her tented knees for that part. She raised it up after the second part. The part where I said her son was in grave danger.

  “Falls der Mann den Mann gesehen hat, von dem ich denke, das er ihn gesehen hat.” If the man he saw was the man I think he saw.

  She shot to her feet and called, sharply, “Martin.”

  Martin came trooping up a moment later, arms at his sides, head down. He had raw red spots on his scalp. His mother instructed him to answer my questions. She said it sternly. Martin nodded his hung down head.

  I held out my hand. “Martin, ich bin Hal.”

  Martin took hold of my forefinger. We shook. I cut a piece of bockwurst, speared it on my knife and handed it over. He gnawed the sausage in small bites, savoring it. I told his mother that Martin and I needed to talk.