The Proxy Assassin

by John Knoerle

  “Hello Frank,” she said in a heavy Eastern European accent. “You seem surprise to see me.”

  Wisner opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out.

  Frank found his tongue once we were inside. He introduced me to his guests. Michael the First, King of Romania, and his wife, Princess Anne of Bourbon Parma.

  “I prefer Prince of the Hohenzollern these days,” sniffed the young king as he shook my hand. His grip was very firm.

  “And you may call me Nan,” said his wife.

  The slight-figured Princess Stela hung back. She was one of those women you can’t take your eyes off of for fear you’ll miss something. Wisner stood to my left and vibrated with kinetic energy. A five-year-old could have told you they’d been lovers.

  Frank ran down his exalted guests’ genealogical charts, just to be saying something.

  “Michael is the great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria. Nan is the daughter of Princess Margrethe of Denmark.”

  I smiled and nodded. Wisner cleared his throat. “And Princess Stela Varadja is a direct descendant of Prince Vlad Tepes.”

  “Vlad the Impaler,” said King Michael, drolly. “Stoker’s inspiration for Count Dracula, though Stela would prefer you didn’t mention it.”

  I saw it instantly. Chalk white skin, devilish brows, a slender nose that dipped like a beak ever so slightly. Shimmering black eyes, purple lips.

  “Vlad Tepes Draculea made Romania a country,” said Princess Stela hotly. “And Bram Stoker was lying fool. Prince Vlad he lived in Wallachia, not Transylvania.”

  I kept my Bela Lugosi impression to myself and marveled at the cast of characters Frank Wisner had assembled in his rustic cottage.

  Polly and the kids presented a welcome dose of down home when they entered a moment later, though I barely recognized the boys. They’d been scrubbed and shampooed within an inch of their lives.

  The children were well schooled. They bowed and curtseyed as introductions were made and conversed easily with their guests. I was impressed. The loftiest visitor to ever grace our home in Youngstown was the parish priest. And he scared me to death.

  Polly showed no sign of resentment or suspicion when she greeted Princess Stela. Of course she didn’t. Frank Wisner hadn’t come this far while married to a woman who didn’t know how to play the game.

  Princess Stela proved not so circumspect however.

  Wisner pulled a jeroboam of champagne from the fridge and popped the cork off the kitchen ceiling to whoops of delight. Polly lined up six glasses on the kitchen counter. Frank filled them rapid fire, right to left, then added a blood red drop of Crème de Cassis to each glass.

  “There,” he said, “a proper Kir Royale.”

  The guests started forward to partake but Wisner waved them off. He placed the brimming champagne cocktails on a serving tray and handed the tray to Wendy, who was all of nine years old. We held our collective breath as she made her way from the kitchen to the parlor with short quick steps. She didn’t spill a drop. Entertaining dignitaries was, apparently, a team sport in the Wisner household.

  King Michael and his wife clucked and cooed at young Wendy’s feat but Princess Stela looked cross. She hadn’t suffered a tedious three-hour car ride to find her dashing wartime swain nestled in domestic bliss. He was supposed to be alone. No self-respecting European aristocrat carried his wife and family to his sporting lodge.

  Wendy presented the Princess with her drink. Stela thanked the girl and looked up.

  “Is no caviar Frank? We always had caviar.”

  The room got quiet. A gust of wind rattled the windowpanes. Polly Wisner’s face froze in mid-smile as Frank did a slow burn. Graham, the youngest boy, broke the tension.

  “We got frogs’ legs. Right from the crick!”

  -----

  After one of the most delicious, gut-busting dinners I ever set a tooth on Polly said good night and took the kids off to bed. Frank went outside to collect the chauffeur, depositing him on a stool in the kitchen with a cold beer and a bowl of gumbo.

  Wisner ushered his regal guests to the parlor for coffee and cognac. As low scrotum on the totem I took the coffee orders – milk not cream for King Michael, one sugar for Princess Nan, black for Wisner, and cream, two sugars and a dash of Crème de Cassis for Stela Varadja.

  I watched my footing carefully as I served them, aware that dumping a cup of scalding coffee on his or her majesty was just the kind of thing Hal Schroeder would do.

  Frank sat next to the royal couple on a well-used chesterfield. Princess Stela and I sat opposite them in cane-back chairs. The fire in the rough stone fireplace burned bright.

  Princess Stela, who looked more gypsy than vampire now that she’d had a few champagne cocktails, began to spin a spellbinding tale.

  She told how King Michael staged a daring coup d’etat against pro-Nazi strongman Ion Antonescu in 1944, throwing him in prison and declaring war against the Axis. She recounted how the King fought Soviet control almost single-handedly after war’s end but was finally forced to abdicate in 1947

  Princess Stela husked her voice as the fire grew low and smoky. She told how the Red Army had rounded up eighty thousand Volksdeutsche, mostly Saxons from Transylvania, in January of 1945. And packed them off in boxcars to Stalin’s work camps to slave and die.

  Stela paused to brush back a damp strand of hair that was plastered to her forehead. She grabbed it between thumb and forefinger and returned the errant tress to its proper place before she concluded her story. How Frank Wisner had racketed around Bucharest like a madman trying to stop the roundup, trying to save anyone he could.

  This was all for my benefit, had to be. Everyone else knew the story. I asked Wisner if he’d had any luck.

  “Well, I saved Hugo.”

  The chauffeur hoisted a beer from the kitchen.

  Chapter Three

  I slept late Sunday morning, swallowed up by the featherbed in the guest cottage. Frank Wisner and family had just returned from church when I joined them in the kitchen. Polly was frying up cornmeal mush in bacon grease.

  “Your timing, Schroeder, is first rate,” said Wisner with a bright-eyed grin, showing no ill effects from the late evening.

  I’d said goodnight once the second bottle of cognac came out and, feeling like a hushed kid at the top of the stair, watched from the window of the guest cottage as Frank Wisner and his royal pals hunkered down for grown up conversation punctuated by peals of laughter.

  “I’ve got a nose for grub sir.”

  “But you don’t show it,” said Wisner, patting my flat belly. “What’s your secret?”

  “What’s yours sir?”

  “Me? I’m fat as a lord,” he said, pooching out his gut.

  Polly laughed at him. “Did you know that Frank was invited to join the U.S. track team for the ’36 Olympics?”

  “Wow.”

  “But his daddy didn’t cotton to such foolishness and marched him off to work. And Frank’s been trying to cross that finish line ever since.”

  Frank and Polly exchanged a sweet, knowing look. I answered his question.

  “It’s true I eat like Henry the Eighth, sir, but I worry like Anne Boleyn. That’s my secret.”

  Wisner shook his head. “Worrying’s my job Schroeder.”

  -----

  Frank Wisner walked me to my waiting Chevy Fleetmaster after breakfast.

  “I have been in contact with the leader of a Romanian anti-Communist cell, a man I know from my time in country. He claims to have a worked-out plan to foment insurrection, claims a secret ally that he can’t divulge.”

  “Do you trust him?”

  Wisner gave me a side door answer. “I was impressed by him. But I don’t know how capable a field leader he is.”

  We walked to the rear of the Chevy, Wisner bent over and put his foot on the bumper. “Romania is critical, it’s the beating heart of the Balkans. A successful uprising there would radiate out in all directions – Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, H
ungary, even the Ukraine.”

  I nodded, dumbly.

  It was then that Frank Wisner popped the question. Popped the question after just one date. Would I consider parachuting into a remote mountain camp to liaise with the Romanian resistance group?

  “I’d want your positive assessment before we got involved.”

  “Why me, sir?”

  “I don’t have anyone else with your behind-the-lines experience.”

  I asked him why that was just to hear him say it.

  “They’re all dead.”

  I had already survived two suicide missions in my lifetime, a third did not appeal. But I told Frank Wisner I would need a few days to think it over. I had some sightseeing to do.

  -----

  We listened to the Cleveland-Baltimore game on the drive back to D.C., Haskell the driver and me.

  Haskell was a serious Colts fan. He didn’t like me so well when I told him I was from Cleveland. The Browns had shut out the Colts last season. Twice.

  Haskell didn’t like me any better when the Browns beat the Colts in Baltimore on that crisp October Sunday, 14-10.

  Chapter Four

  Top secret overseas junkets on USAF aircraft differ from commercial flights in one important respect. There is no scheduled return flight. The airline determines when, and if, you get to return home. I only knew where they would land. OPC had access to a secret airstrip in central Romania near Sibiu.

  Soviet radar and air defense systems were plain lousy in that part of the world so the USAF wasn’t too worried about getting blown out of the sky by ack ack or scrambling Yak-9s. The problem was establishing a line of communication to my hotshot new Joan Eleanor transceiver in order to arrange the time of my retrieval, which depended on how things went with Captain Dragomir.

  We were fighting the last war with new tricks. Himmler’s spycatchers, the Sicherheitsdienst, were expert at triangulating and tracking down alien transmissions. But my hotshot new Joan/Eleanor used a much narrower VHF broadcast band which made intercepting signals next to impossible. Take that, you dirty Krauts!

  Here in Romania, however, where there weren’t any SD trucks tracking and triangulating alien broadcasts, the snappy new technology was more trouble than it was worth. The receiving plane had to be in a narrow overhead window to take my call. Why not use an old fashioned broad-range transceiver just this once?

  I asked the USAF that very question and was given a lollipop and a pat on the head.

  A de Havilland Mosquito would fly overhead at high altitude at zero dark thirty in three days’ time so I could tell them when to come fetch me. If the weather didn’t permit a flight they would come the following night, and so on. But the real nut cutter was what happens when the flyboys get their wheels down.

  ‘Falling down is easy, it’s the getting up that’s hard,’ as the old song says. No one has yet devised a way to shoot a ground agent onto a low-flying airplane. You have to land the damn thing, which tends to attract attention. You can’t fly over enemy territory in broad daylight and the night has a thousand eyes. The Reds might have lousy radar in this part of the world but once the plane is on the ground it’s a sitting duck.

  I was an experiment is what I was. A guinea pig for both Frank Wisner and the United States Air Force.

  My sister Beth kept a pet guinea pig when she was eight or nine. It was too big for its little glass cage and spent its days pacing back and forth through the tangle of wood shavings, going eep, eep, eep.

  My sentiments exactly.

  -----

  The Captain was gone when I rolled out of bed the next morning. His valet told me he would return that afternoon and asked me a silly question. Was I hungry? He served a breakfast much like supper save for a fried egg with a golden yoke. Best egg I ever ate.

  I wandered outside and enjoyed the sunshine. Golden birch shimmered amidst the black firs that crowded the mountainsides. The calendar said fall but it felt like summer.

  I had supposed we were in the middle of nowhere so the rumble of a truck engine pricked up my ears. The road noise led me down a dirt path that led to a dirt road that led to an excavated roadway that may have been paved at some point but was now mostly dust and gravel. And busy with traffic.

  Parked on a tree stump I watched the parade. In the space of half an hour I saw four trucks, half a dozen hay wagons, a babushka lady leading a donkey piled high with bundled sticks, a group of men, scythes slung over their shoulders, smoking and singing as they strode along, two frighteningly pretty gypsy girls in long bright skirts and flowing scarves – hitchhiking – and a man peddling his bike down the road with his horse trotting happily alongside.

  Oh, and a huge bull ox meandering along the shoulder – on the proper side of the road, in the direction of traffic – making his way back to the barn all by himself.

  I walked back to the little fort, wanting to wash off the dust, but found no tub or shower, just a wash basin with a pump handle. I remembered hearing a mountain stream nearby.

  It was down a steep bank, not twenty yards behind the building. I wound my way down a rocky well-worn path, watching every step. I wasn’t going to march ten klicks to an army camp on a twisted ankle.

  The stream roared along at a good clip but I found an eddy pond behind a boulder. I stripped down and jumped in. Damn it was cold. I splashed around for as long as I could stand it then scrambled out, catching my foot on a taut lanyard.

  What was this now? I hauled in the sunken treasure, hand over hand. It was a canvas bag containing a quart of milk and four bottles of beer.

  I didn’t have any cash to place in the sack, I was traveling light. Gun, knife, L-pill.

  While Hal the Younger would have filched a beer in a heartbeat, Harold the Elder, sadly, couldn’t bring himself to take what didn’t belong to him.

  But wait. The old man had served me a glass of cold milk for breakfast though there was no fridge in the little fort. This was his stash, the cold beer was meant for my enjoyment. I was simply saving him the tedious chore of fetching it.

  I shook myself dry best I could, got dressed, uncapped a beer against a rock shard with a smack of my palm and climbed back up the river bank. A wooden stool sat outside the front door of the little fort. I moved it onto the scrubby grass and let the beating sun dry my clothes.

  The beer, Ursus, was crisp and cold. I stretched out my legs and felt, for a man on a suicide mission, quite relaxed.

  I watched a gray-white stork swoop in with a beak full of rags and sticks, which it used to feather its nest atop the fireplace chimney of the little fort. It was big nest, about two feet high. Which raised a question.

  What was a bird’s nest doing on top of a fireplace chimney at a time of year when the nights got cold? And where had Captain Dragomir got to? Probably visiting his actual residence, a house with running water and a furnace.

  Wise up, Schroeder. The little fort is a prop.

  Thanks to Bram Stoker, gullible tourists like me pictured Transylvania as a blood-soaked land of dark castles and vampire bats. But what I’d seen on that main road looked about as scary as Amish country.

  Captain Dragomir, the big man in the little uniform, was simply trying to give the customer what he paid for.

  -----

  The Captain returned late that afternoon, looking pleased with himself. His cheeks were flushed but he didn’t smell of booze. An invigorating interlude with his mistress perhaps.

  I was halfway to cheesed off until he opened his leather satchel to reveal a bottle of homemade red wine and two fat hero sandwiches like you’d find at an Italian deli. My mood improved.

  We talked about that night’s march to the Romanian Army camp. “It’s recon, not combat,” I reminded him. “No rifles, mortars or machine guns. Nothing more than sidearms.”

  “This would be foolish.”

  “That’s the way Frank Wisner wants it.”

  “But there are many Magyars in the area. And they are well armed.”

  �
�What’s a Magyar?”

  “A tribal group, Huns,” sneered Dragomir. “Hungarians.”

  “Okay. And what tribe is your group?”

  The Captain reared back, insulted. “We are Romanians!”

  I was surprised to hear Dragomir faced armed opposition from other natives. My OPC mission briefers said that, in Transylvania at least, the storyline was simple. Oppressed peasants versus hated Reds.

  The Captain nibbled at his sandwich and wiped his chin with a tiny napkin. “The Huns claim they are seeking revenge for Iron Guard atrocities during the war.”

  I remembered that the Iron Guard were Romanian Nazi sympathizers who murdered Jews and suspected Communists during the war. Magyars too for all I knew.

  “But what does that have to do with me?” said the Captain, pouring red wine with abandon. “I worked for King Michael, the courageous young patriot who had Ion Antonescu arrested.”

  “The leader of the Iron Guard,” I said, hopefully.

  Dragomir drank wine and nodded. “The Magyars are Hungarian nationalists and nothing more. They seize hold of any slander against us and use it to advance their goal.”

  “Which is?”

  I feared the Captain was going to perform a spit double take. “To forcibly return Transylvania to the Hungarian Empire!”

  Guess they have long memories in this part of the world. If I remembered my high school history correctly the Austro-Hungarian Empire went bye bye a long time ago.

  I asked the Captain an embarrassing question. “Were any of your men members of the Iron Guard?”

  The Captain shrugged. Maybe, probably, didn’t matter now. “We are monarchists, not fascists.”

  “Admirable, sir. But I have met King Michael.”

  “Is that so? And how did you find him?”

  How did I what? Oh. “I found him well, happy with his new bride.”

  “Princess Anne, I haven’t had the pleasure,” said Dragomir, stiffly.

  “King Michael didn’t express any interest in returning to Romania.”

  “Why would he?”

  “I’m sorry?”