by John Knoerle
I surprised myself. For once in my life I didn’t blunder forth. I slunk back down to the basement instead, closed the door behind me, found my overturned crate and sat down and considered the possibilities. Harry Houdini couldn’t wriggle his way up a folded coal chute while hauling a suitcase but there were two windows up at ground level. Transom windows that vented in, at an angle too narrow to climb through. I would have to use my burglar skills. Provided I could get up there.
I looked around for a ladder. Every basement has a ladder somewhere. Every basement except this one.
I scavenged up crates and storage boxes and laddered them against the wall and climbed up to the window that faced the alley. I placed my coat against a window corner and tapped at it with the butt of my Walther, creating a small spider web of cracks. I did this all the way around the window frame. Then I took my knife and sliced through the perforated glass. This was the tricky part. You have to start at the bottom and tease the pane inward as you unzip the window from its frame.
I wrapped the glass in my coat and climbed down my makeshift ladder. I shed the glass, shook out my coat, donned it, grabbed the heavy suitcase and climbed back up. Slowly, cursing Anna with every step. I gathered my strength and shoved the suitcase through the window frame. Which caused my jumbled staircase to collapse.
I grabbed the window sill and hung suspended for a painful second. I hadn’t cleared away all the glass shards.
I dropped to the floor and took a quick minute to wash my bloody mitts at the utility sink. There was an ancient zinc mirror above the sink that I hadn’t noticed before. And a mug in the looking glass I couldn’t have identified in a police blotter. He was wearing a grey felt hat two sizes too small, had dried blood stains on his swollen beezer and bags under his eyes you could pack a lunch in.
I laughed at him and doffed my hat.
I reassembled my rickety stairstep, climbed up to the window, cleared away the glass shards and squeezed, gingerly, through the busted window.
Chapter Thirty-four
I walked down the side alley toward the rear of the building at a deliberate pace, not looking back, listening for footsteps or the sound of an engine, hearing neither. The Blue Caps had outfoxed themselves. I should have been spotted by the rear door watcher as I turned left down the back alley. But the NKVD had sealed the rear door and posted the sentry out front. Leastwise no one objected as I ankled down the back alley and into the sunlit spring, Anna’s suitcase in hand.
I fired up the delivery truck and drove south on a side street, toward Dahlem, keeping an eye on the mirrors.
I had misread Leonid, it seemed to me. What kind of fanatical true believer in world Communism has a wardrobe that Cesar Romero would kill for? Leonid was, it seemed to me, first and foremost, a fanatical true believer in Leonid. It would explain something that had been marinating in that catch basin just above the spinal cord where unanswered questions go to sit and stew.
Why did Leonid have Ambrose snatched?
Ambrose and I didn’t have anything solid on Leonid, he didn’t need to throw down the gauntlet. A true spook, a true true believer would have done nothing but keep watch, confident in his superior knowledge. But we had offended Leonid by daring to suspect him.
So. Leonid was an egotist. That was good. Egotists are a soft target. Egotists have something that can be taken hostage. Their pride.
I would need to set it up just so. Get the CO to play along, listen in as I confronted his counterintelligence officer. Busting the little man wide open would be the easy part. I would explain how hayseed Hal had chumped the sophisticated superspy by betraying him to the very NKVD agent Leonid had instructed to greet me. Leonid wouldn’t like that. If need be I’d slide the gold monogram from his red jacket across the table and let him follow those rails to the station.
None of which would matter if the CO didn’t agree to cooperate. I had been a bad boy. I had undertaken operational initiatives without prior authorization. I would have to confess my sins to Victor Jacobson and then, if he didn’t can me on the spot, convince him to eavesdrop on his prized double agent.
Hoo boy. I did have one piece of solid evidence though. The photo of the sister Leonid claimed not to have.
Shit.
I curbed the truck in a panic. Where was the goddamn photo? I patted my pockets but that was stupid. I hadn’t removed the photo from its frame before I dozed off in apartment K. The suitcase sat on the passenger’s seat. I unbuckled it, pledging my undying fealty to Anna if she had done as I hoped.
She had, God bless her devious soul. The photographic portrait of young Leonid and his baby sister had been removed from its frame and rolled up and tucked into an elastic shoe pocket.
Anna had done something else as well. Taped a piece of sketch paper to the back of the portrait, a deft pencil drawing of a woman with an angular face and thin lips that curled up, impishly, at one corner. I returned the smile. The smartass. She knew that I was going to carry her grip out of the building.
I fastened the suitcase and drove on. A sudden rain spattered the windshield. Traffic slowed to a stop as we approached a major thoroughfare. I got nervous, sitting there. I checked my mirrors. No vehicles behind. My training said I should take a circuitous route, play hide and seek. My gut said get to Dahlem as soon as possible, make my case to the CO before Leonid learned that his building had been evacuated and his wife had flown the coop.
Did the Blue Caps know for sure that I had paid another visit to the apartment building on Spirchenstraße? I had entered the building undetected and left the same way, that much I knew. Everything in between was open to interpretation. Anna’s exit with her basket, the sudden fire alarm and the stream of fleeing tenants. The Blue Caps couldn’t trace those back to me with any certainty. No they couldn’t.
Not till they discovered that the smoldering fire was set in apartment K thirty minutes after Anna left the building. They wouldn’t misinterpret that.
Traffic remained stalled. I opened the door and stood tiptoe on the running board. The rainfall made it hard to see. It looked like a flatbed truck had taken too sharp a turn and dumped empty pallets all across the intersection ahead. The truck driver was arguing with somebody while horns honked. Five’ll get you ten that similar scenes were being acted out along the thoroughfare, to the immediate west of the apartment building on Spirchenstraße. A search perimeter quickly improvised to capture a solo escapee. Me.
Time for evasive action. I checked my sideview mirror. Past time. A big black sedan was closing in behind. The kind of vehicle you’d expect a bunch of NKVD goons to drive. I shoved the truck into reverse and tromped on the accelerator, keeping my eyes on the sideview mirror.
I noticed my mistake a moment too late. The big black sedan was full, but not with Blue Caps.
The sedan hit the brakes. I did likewise but the truck had a head of steam. I skidded backward on the wet pavement and plowed into the sedan’s front grille.
A bald noggin punched a hole in the windshield on the passenger’s side. The horn blared as the driver hit the steering wheel. The other passengers careened around inside the car like bowling pins.
Five men. Wearing Roman collars.
I jumped out to lend assistance, saw the familiar circular logo on the driver’s side door. National Conference of Catholic Charities.
Good Lord.
-----
Catholic priests can be a tiresome lot. For every good shepherd tending to his flock there are two who mumble through Mass and fall asleep in the confessional. Still, they are trained to expect the worst of humankind, and dole out forgiveness. Which is what the good fathers from the National Conference of Catholic Charities did once I apologized profusely and donated my last two gold sovereigns to the cause. I explained that I’d thought they were a carload of Russian spies. They found that amusing.
Their injuries were minor, mostly. The bald priest whose head hit the windshield, well, there must be a lot of vessels up top because he looked like bloody murder. I mop
ped his dome with my hankie and offered him a pack of Luckies. He offered me absolution. We parted on good terms.
The traffic jam at the intersection had melted away. The flatbed truck was gone, the pallets cleared. I had wasted enough time looking over my shoulder. I climbed back into my barely dented delivery truck. It started up without complaint. I drove due south - hot, straight and normal, as the submariners like to say.
I felt good despite my recent idiocy. I felt ready for action. Let the Blue Caps try to stop me and my brawny delivery truck. Just let ‘em try. We would teach them the error of false pride.
As I like to say.
Chapter Thirty-five
“What the hell happened to you?” said Victor Jacobson, looking up from his desk in the garage. He had a phone cradled to his ear and a cigarette in his hand. I waited until he finished his call.
“Bit by a dog sir.”
“On the nose?”
“It’s a long story.”
The CO didn’t ask further, which was jake by me. “How did the Committee meeting go?”
“Very well.”
“What did you learn?”
“A good deal.”
Jacobson blew smoke through his nostrils. “Well?”
“I learned that the Committee to Free Berlin is a Soviet front just like Hilde said it was. I learned that because a founding member greeted me warmly after the meeting adjourned.”
Jacobson balled up his cheeks. “If the Committee’s a front they’d keep their distance.”
“They did. They acted like I smelled bad. All except this founding member.”
The CO stubbed out his cigarette. You could have bought a small house in the country with what was in that ashtray. Something was up.
“I don’t have time to play Twenty Questions Schroeder. Bill Donovan is flying in tomorrow. And it’s not a social visit.”
Wow, Wild Bill himself! Wanting a full report from his fair-haired boy no doubt. I hadn’t smoked in years but I bummed one and took a drag.
“Sir, in my opinion, the founding member approached me because Leonid instructed him to do so, to defuse any suspicions of the Committee we might have. Leonid did this, in my opinion, because Leonid is working for the NKVD, not us.”
“Based on what?” said the CO, just like that. No fireworks, no hard stare.
I laid it out. The evidence of a hidden mike in our apartment, the phony ventilator box, the fresh wad of gum over the wire hole, then the snatch of Ambrose based on intel gleaned from the hidden mike. The CO smoked and listened. Hearing myself run it down I realized how thin my case sounded, how circumstantial.
Ah, but the photo. I had somehow remembered to bring the photo of young Leonid and his little sister. I placed it on the desk.
“Leonid told me he was an only child. What did he tell you?”
Jacobson studied the photo. “Anna give you this?”
“Uh, yeah. Yes she did. She said the sister lives nearby.”
“You went back to Leonid’s apartment?”
The CO’s angry stare said don’t bother repeating that cock and bull about how you haven’t been in her apartment before, how you’d wandered off to drain the snake when Ambrose got snatched.
“Yes sir.”
“Are you nuts?”
“Not to my knowledge,” I said, woozy with nicotine, adding my half-smoked butt to the pile in the ashtray.
The CO addressed his desk blotter. “This is an extremely serious allegation Schroeder.”
“Yes sir.”
“One based on fraternization with the wife of your superior, a fraternization conducted in his home.”
The CO looked up. His stare was no longer angry. It was cold.
“I don’t see how Leonid rates as my superior, sir, but I agree that my comportment stinks. To high heaven. But I’m right about Leonid, I know I am. I just need you to know it too.”
Jacobson spun ribbons of cigarette smoke above his desk. Get to the point.
“I need to confront Leonid in a neutral location. Not here but someplace secure, someplace he’s comfortable.”
“Tall order.”
“There’s more. I need...”
“You need, you need, you need, you need! You need me to listen in. You need me to hide in a closet and eavesdrop while you try to pry some admission of guilt from our counterintelligence officer, a seasoned professional who will tell you nothing! Is that what you need, Schroeder?”
I bit my lip while Jacobson had a brief talk with himself, jaw working, right hand flicking ashes, left hand punishing his receding hairline, every gesture saying why did I ever sign up for this. I realized I had been foolish to question the CO’s loyalty, even in passing. The guy bled red, white and blue.
“He will tell me something sir.”
“He had better,” said the CO grimly, chain lighting a fresh Lucky.
“If I don’t strip the dapper little man naked in your presence you will have my letter of resignation on your desk in the morning.”
Victor Jacobson wasn’t listening. I didn’t take it personally. He wasn’t answering his ringing telephone either. I let him cogitate while I stared at the hairline cracks in the plasterboard that Leonid had found so interesting a week or a month or a year or so ago. Time flies when you’re having fun.
“The back room of the Café Gestern has an armoire. The employees hang their cloaks there.” The CO cleared his throat, and again, like a cat coughing fur. “I could squeeze in, I suppose.”
Yes.
“And how do we go about luring Leonid to the Café?”
Victor Jacobson looked up and smiled, happy to pass the baton of insoluble dilemmas to his underling for once.
“You invite him Schroeder. He’s in the Comm Center last I looked.”
Chapter Thirty-six
The Communications Center was upstairs in the back, in what must have been the master bedroom of the white brick mansion. It looked like a big time bookmaking operation. Banks of telephones, clanking teletypes, a blackboard chalked with columns of numbers. Hell, it was a big time bookmaking operation. Only Wild Bill’s green eyeshade boys were charting the odds on something more important than Gumlegs in the third at Pimlico.
Nobody noticed me when I pushed through the door, the reception desk was unattended. Beyond the desk a shortwave operator hunched over his set, headphones on, transcribing furiously on a clipboard, code book at his elbow. An analyst, his desk buried in periodicals and press clippings, was head down in the latest cable dispatch. Phones rang off the hook and no one to answer them.
Data collection and analysis are not my cup of wax. Rearguard wool gathering is what it is. Still, I thought as the missing receptionist I had seen before brushed past me and clickety clacked her high heels over to the bank of phones, the Global Commerce Comm Crew looked to be gathering a lot of wool this afternoon.
The shortwave operator got up from his desk and crossed to a tin wall-map of Europe. He moved two numbered red magnets west in the Soviet Zone, placing one just north of Hamburg and the other just south.
I studied the map. Red magnets were arrayed all along the eastern bank of the Elbe, from Hamburg in the north to the Czech border in the south. No wonder Bill Donovan was coming to call.
Now, where the hell was Leonid? There wasn’t any big desk in a corner that he wasn’t sitting at. There wouldn’t be. Leonid wasn’t a big desk in a corner kinda guy. He’d want privacy, with a way to keep an eye out. An adjoining office, with a peephole.
The far wall. A pane of smoked glass in a wall of cheap wainscoting that didn’t go with the rest of the room. That would be Leonid’s office. Where the hell was the door? And what in the hell was I going to say to the little creep when I found it?
The red-headed receptionist gave me a nod and a smile when I approached her at the phone bank. I returned the nod and waited till she completed her call.
“Busy day,” I said.
“Very.”
“Will you please tell Leonid t
hat Hal Schroeder is here to see him?”
“Certainly Mr. Schroeder,” she replied in a Scottish burr. “Though I must tell you, he is not one who takes kindly to interruptions.”
I assured her it was important. She pressed an intercom key and did my bidding. Leonid replied with an obscenity.
I scanned the wall for a door hinge or handle. No sign. Must be a pocket door.
It was. Leonid appeared in the doorway, in silhouette, backlit by some kind of superwhite light. He saw me and gestured, hand open, palm up. What?
I gave him a merry wave and held my ground.
Yeah, I know. I’d sworn off winging it at the last minute in favor of dutiful preparation. But there’s one drawback to dutiful preparation. Just ask French Defense Minister Andre Maginot, Saint Patron of the Maginot Line. You can get locked into a plan that doesn’t fit the shifting circumstance.
Red Army divisions were crowding the Elbe, Wild Bill was flying in for an emergency consultation, my appearance at the Committee to Free Berlin had not gone according to Leonid’s plan. I wasn’t going to lure the little man to the Café Gestern. He would smell a rat. It was here and now, or never.
I bent down and huddled with the redhead. She didn’t like Leonid any more than I did apparently because she agreed to my muttered request to get Jacobson up here, and have him eavesdrop via the intercom.
I squeezed her arm in thanks and approached Leonid at a deliberate pace. I entered his office. He slid the door shut.
The room was long and narrow, not six feet side to side. The smoked window was one way glass, offering a clear view of the Comm Center. A large window on the opposite wall looked out on the backyard and the garage. And the door to the CO’s office. A perfect perch. I would have to command Leonid’s attention to insure he didn’t spy Jacobson hurrying out of his office. And find a way to get my mitts on the intercom key.
There was only one chair in the room. His. One of those fancy leather jobs that wheel and swivel. I took it, and put my feet up on his desk for good measure.
“What...do you think...you are doing?”
