The Proxy Assassin

by John Knoerle

  “Why? What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll walk you to the front like we’re both leaving. I’ll escort you down the steps and out the door, then duck down in the stairwell. Leonid will have his face pressed to the window by then, trying to make sure we both got off, which will give me a few seconds to slip back down the aisle and grab him.”

  Julia examined me closely. “That’s a very stupid plan.”

  “I agree with you. Got any better ideas?”

  “I’m not going, I’ll wait here.”

  “No, Julia…”

  “Hal, I’m a reporter. I report things.”

  “Not if you’re dead, you don’t.”

  The streetcar slowed down just then. I looked out the window. A young couple was waiting at the corner ahead. Our timing was plain lousy.

  “Forget it, stay put,” I said. “Leonid should make his exit right here.”

  “I thought you wanted to grab him on the streetcar?”

  “I do.”

  “What’s keeping you?”

  “You are.”

  “The hell with me. Do your job.”

  This was not what I wanted to hear. I suddenly realized that I had very little interest in sacrificing my life so that Thomas Dewey could win an election. And who was to say the papers and wire services would run a sensational muckraking story on election eve? I had plenty good reasons to keep my seat and let Leonid duck out.

  I heard the soft rustle of a shopping bag well behind me. Leonid would have carted a change of clothes around with him – clean topcoat, fresh shirt – for his late night sitdown with Miss Julia. He was moving toward the rear door, preparing to exit.

  I got up and sprinted toward the rear exit as the streetcar rattled to a stop at the corner of M and 29th.

  I would like to think that I did this because I wanted to capture and present to Bill Harvey an NKVD Major with intimate knowledge of Soviet spy networks in the U.S. and not because Hal the hero was afraid to look like a punk in front of a girl reporter.

  I arrived a few steps late. Leonid had bulled his way out the rear door while the car was still moving. He tripped on the curb, steadied himself and took off running.

  The rear doors snapped shut, snagging me at the elbows. I fought my way through and stumbled onto the sidewalk. Leonid had a good head start but I anchored the 880 relay on my high school track team. Piece o’ cake.

  “He’s getting away,” said a familiar voice at my ear. Miss J, who else? “Go, go, go!”

  I went. I wasn’t great at short sprints, my long legs took too long to get churning. But I could make up a lot of ground over a middle distance. A middle distance Leonid didn’t give me when he turned left at the next corner.

  It was glimmering dark on 28th street. Quiet, residential. No streetlamps.

  Leonid was nowhere to be seen or heard, though I could feel the presence of the Napoleonic little prick. He was laying in wait behind a parked car, or tucked inside a doorway. I was backlit by a streetlamp on M Street so I stepped back, peered around the corner and waited for Julia to catch up.

  “Where…is…he?” she said between breaths.

  “Up the street.”

  “Why are you standing here?”

  “Because I…”

  But she was gone, darting across the street, keening like a banshee, giving me cover to turn the corner. In combat it’s always nice to have a crazy person on your squad.

  It was possible that Leonid had used this brief time to steal away up the street. That was the logical move on his part. Why then did it take such a monstrous effort to put one foot in front of the other? Creeping up the side street felt like climbing Breakneck Ridge.

  Where was Julia?

  She wasn’t huddled on the far corner where I’d last seen her. The only sign of her was a pair of pumps that had been kicked off. Christ, she was crazy.

  My eyes adjusted. I started to make out the dim outlines of parked cars and brick buildings. What was taking so damn long? I should’ve been dead by now.

  I had my answer soon enough. The whizzing hum of a nine millimeter round fired from a gun with a silencer. It split a brick in the large house behind me.

  No follow up fire commenced. A feint. Leonid was trying to make me dive for cover while he finished off Julia. I killed his wife, he owed me one. Julia’s perfume would make her easy to find.

  I didn’t dive for cover. I crept across the dark street, .44 in hand. Being a hero requires this sort of ass-puckering activity from time to time.

  All Leonid had to do here was kill people. I, on the other hand, had to protect Miss Julia, take Leonid prisoner without fatally wounding him and find a way to call Bill Harvey and tell him that there had been a change in plans. How was that fair?

  I crawled under the fat chrome bumper of an Oldsmobile and looked up and down the brick sidewalk. I listened, hard. I heard the shuffling of shoe leather up the block.

  Leonid, hunting Julia. I craned my neck again, couldn’t see him.

  Time to do something, Schroeder.

  “Hey, Lenny.” He hates it when you call him Lenny. “You know I can’t kill you, you’re too valuable. So let’s square off in the street, you’n’me. I aim for your leg, you aim for my head.”

  No response from Leonid, but his shoe leather stopped shuffling. Probably trying to figure out where my voice was coming from. Speaking from underneath the hollow bumper bounced my voice around in all directions.

  A clever diversion, for two seconds. Leonid resumed his shuffling.

  “I changed my mind, Lenny,” I said and rolled out from under the bumper and jumped to my feet in front of the Oldsmobile. “I think I will kill you.”

  I fired a round from my hand cannon into the sidewalk, shattering the quiet night and kicking up red sparks that presented a flash photo of Leonid Vitinov crouched on the sidewalk not ten yards away.

  He looked much the same as the last time I saw him in Berlin. Stunned.

  But he recovered quickly. His nine mill Beretta was steady in his hand as it rose up to greet me.

  I remember thinking why is a Soviet agent packing an Italian pistol just before he squeezed off the first round.

  It missed, badly. Something to do with an intrepid girl reporter in stocking feet rushing up from behind and slamming him to the pavement.

  I rushed forward and scooped up the fallen Beretta as Julia grabbed Leonid by the hair and began bashing his face into the sidewalk. I said something I had never anticipated having to say.

  “Jules, ease up. We don’t wanna croak the guy.”

  She dropped his head to the pavement. I stripped off his belt and lashed his hands behind his back. Leonid offered no resistance.

  I rolled him over. His eyes were blank, unseeing.

  Shit.

  I put my finger to his carotid. Leonid Vitinov was still ticking. I turned to Julia.

  “What were you thinking, sneaking up the sidewalk like that?”

  “I felt bad about putting you in the soup, I did what I could to help,” said Miss Julia with a pretty frown. “I thought we were a team.”

  I guess we were at that.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Lights had come on in the big houses on the block. Curtains were parted, the cops had been called. I threw Leonid over my shoulder and started up the block under watchful eyes. Julia padded alongside in stocking feet.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I have no idea where I’m going but I suggest you grab your shoes and go home.” Distant sirens rent the night. “Now.”

  Julia kept trudging alongside. “We haven’t broken any laws, Hal, I don’t see the problem.”

  “We’re breaking a law right now.”

  “What law?”

  “The law against kidnapping a foreign diplomat.”

  Julia broke stride, I kept on, the little man’s head bouncing off my back. He was groaning now. Another half-block and he’d be trying to scissor strangle me with his thighs.

&nb
sp; I heard the squeal of tires behind me. I heard Julia say, “Holy shit.”

  The vehicle that roared up and smoked its whitewalls to a stop was a Cadillac Fleetwood flying a small American flag from its radio antenna. Bill Harvey was at the wheel.

  How in the world?

  I cranked open the back door and pushed Julia inside before I ducked in and laid the semi-conscious Leonid at our feet. Harvey gunned the Caddy north on 28th as the approaching sirens came together in an operatic climax.

  Harvey didn’t speak, just drove the hilly streets of Georgetown like a blue bat out of hell, puzzling his way north and east to a quiet street that dead ended at a stand of trees. ‘Rock Creek Park’ read the wooden sign.

  Harvey swung the big car around, parked and killed the engine. I heard the squawk of a police scanner from underneath the dashboard. That was how he knew where to find us. Harvey had gotten my message after all and was on his way to Bonnie’s Diner when he heard the dispatcher report shots fired in the 1200 block of 28th Street, Northwest.

  There were other possible explanations why Bill Harvey showed up to rescue us in the nick of time, none of them good and all of them complicated. It was late, I was tired. The police scanner under the dashboard would do for now.

  The D.C. cops were het up this Sunday night, the scanner spewed nonstop argle bargle. I guess they didn’t get many shootings in hoity-toit Georgetown.

  Leonid lay face down on the floorboards, cantilevered over the transmission hump. Harvey twisted around from the driver’s seat. “He still out?”

  “Not sure.”

  “We need to talk,” said Harvey.

  “Understood.”

  We should have locked Leonid in the trunk just then but I had one of my patented and unfortunate bright ideas. I grabbed the collar of his grimy topcoat and hauled the groggy little man, hands still lashed behind his back, onto my lap, sideways. Then I pulled the brim of his felt fedora down and clapped my hands over his ears so he couldn’t eavesdrop.

  Sitting on my lap, his eyes crossed and his hat pulled low, Leonid looked like a ventriloquist’s dummy, like Mortimer Snerd with a full set of teeth.

  “This your comrade from Berlin?”

  I didn’t bother asking Harvey how he guessed that. “Yes, Major Leonid Vitinov, NKVD.”

  “I know his thumbnail – father worked for the Czar, used his perfect English and knowledge of the West to bat his way up the ladder. Till you came along.”

  “Correct on all counts.”

  “Any chance he’ll cross over?”

  “Sure,” I said, dandling Leonid on my knee. “He’ll cross over and back again so fast it’ll make your head spin.”

  “You sure about that? Why would he want to return to Beria at this point?”

  “He doesn’t, last thing he wants is to be shipped back to the Lubyanka.”

  Harvey glowered at me, something he was quite good at. “Then how do you know he won’t play ball?”

  “All I know is that if Leonid Vitinov becomes a useful asset to the USA after being captured by Hal Schroeder then, in his mind, Hal Schroeder wins. And that can’t happen. Not now, not ever.”

  Could be Leonid heard me say that. Anyway his eyes popped open and his expression turned distinctly odd – flirtatious, come hither. It distracted me for an instant.

  An instant Leonid used to strike, fangs bared. Only my instinctive recoil kept him from sinking his teeth into my nose as he intended. What he got instead was my lower lip, which he bit clean through.

  And there we were, Lenny and me, engaged in a grotesque make-out session in the back seat. I was reluctant to pull away and lose a chunk of lip so I pushed him against the seat back and hammered his temple with my fist.

  This was unwise on two counts. One, I was too close to get much heft on my punches and, two, it hurt me worse than it did him. Bill Harvey whipped out a leather sap but he didn’t have a clean shot.

  Miss Julia saved the day once again. She pinched Leonid’s nose closed. He had to open his mouth to breathe.

  I pulled back and Harvey put him out with a quick sap to the forehead. I dumped him back on the floorboard.

  “Are you okay?” asked Julia.

  “I sshink so,” I burbled through a froth of blood, holding my lip in place with a handkerchief.

  Bill Harvey took a mental snapshot of my distress. “I am going to dine out on this story till the day I die.”

  It hurt to smile so I nodded. Dutifully.

  -----

  Harvey used side streets to crisscross back to Julia’s neighborhood across town. He parked in an alley a block from her apartment.

  “Stay away from the hotel,” he said to me. “Call tomorrow, eight a.m. Use a rubber.” Which meant find a pay phone.

  Harvey turned to Julia. “Write what you want to write, but keep my name out of it and give us 48 hours.”

  “I’ll give you 24,” said Julia. “And your name is William King Harvey.”

  Harvey and Miss Julia faced off over the black leather banquette.

  I didn’t feel like playing referee so I tended to Leonid. He was face down on the floorboard, making whistling noises through his nose. Out like a light. Yet the belt that bound his hands behind his back was loose.

  Tradecraft, Schroeder. Secure the prisoner, search for weapons.

  I cinched up the belt, then groped Leonid from head to toe. I found an Exacto knife in his sock garter. The world turns but nothing changes. He’d had the same get-up in Berlin.

  I handed the knife to Bill Harvey without comment. He grunted. I carried Leonid’s limp body out of the back seat while Harvey opened the trunk. We dropped him in.

  I gave Harvey Leonid’s still-warm Beretta. Harvey drove off.

  Miss Julia and I faced each other in the cold dark alley. The pinprick rain started up again.

  “Now what?” she wanted to know, standing there, getting wet.

  “If Leonid was planning to pitch you a hot story about Dewey why didn’t we find any photos and documents on him?”

  “Maybe they were in that bag he carried off the streetcar?”

  “Maybe.”

  He might have set the bag down while he was stalking us on 28th Street. But not if it held his precious evidence, without documentation Leonid had nothing. He wouldn’t part with the pigskin till he crossed the goal line.

  “We need to get you stitched up.”

  “I’m not going to a hospital.”

  “Hey, I’m good with a needle and thread,” said Julia, taking my hand, pulling me along. “And applejack makes a great anesthetic.”

  Chapter Thirty-six

  She was good with a needle and thread, Miss Julia. I held my flap of lower lip in place while she stitched me up with a great deal of furrowed concentration and sharp warnings to keep still. Moonshine and an ice bag worked wonders.

  We were almost done putting my face back together when I heard a knock at the door. The businesslike thump-thump-thump, thump-thump-thump of a person who was not going to go away.

  I got up to go see, a needle and thread dangling from my lower lip. I stood to one side of the plywood laminate door. “Who’s there?”

  “It’s me, Schroeder,” said a male voice I knew but couldn’t place. “Open up.”

  “Identify yourself.”

  No response. This was someone in the biz. He wouldn’t give his name till he knew I was, in fact, Schroeder.

  “I do fifty three times a day,” said the voice.

  Schram?! It was Special Agent Robert Schram of the Cleveland District Office of the FBI. He did fifty pushups, three times a day, or so he told me back in ’46.

  “What do you want Agent Schram?”

  “I want you to open the damn door.”

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yes. And I’m not leaving till I talk to you.”

  “I can hear you fine.”

  “Oh for Chrissakes.”

  I didn’t know why I was playing so coy, I wasn’t afraid of the man. H
e’d been my immediate superior when I was recruited to infiltrate Cleveland’s Fulton Road mob. I opened the damn door. Schram eyed the blood-soaked hankie I was holding to my chin.

  “The last time I saw you, you was bleeding like a stuck pig.”

  “I believe you had something to do with that, Agent Schram,” I replied, amiably. He looked the same – gray, buzz cut, trim and angular.

  “Yeah, sorry I socked you, Schroeder. I remember doing it, don’t remember why.”

  Our last meeting had been at an Army asylum outside Cleveland where he’d been sent after his WWII shell shock finally got the best of him. I didn’t remember why he socked me either.

  “Ancient history, sir. Glad to see you doing better.”

  “No choice, had to. There were crazy people in there.”

  I smiled, briefly. “What are you doing here?”

  “Sorry for the interruption, young lady,” said Schram to Julia, remembering his manners all of a sudden. “I can wait out in the hall while you finish…whatever it is you’re doing.”

  “She’s sewing my lip back on and you can talk to me here or not at all.” I didn’t know what game was afoot but it never hurts to have a witness. Schram didn’t care for my suggestion but neither did he leave.

  I returned to the operating table – a hardback chair in the kitchen. Julia offered Schram a drink which he declined and invited him to make himself comfortable on the couch. He followed her into the kitchen instead.

  “You a nurse?”

  “No sir, I’m a farm girl with three brothers. I’ve patched up a few scrapes.” Schram watched her work with a grimace and an inquisitive tilt of the head. “Since Hal is indisposed for the moment I wonder if I might ask you a question,” she said.

  “Ask it and find out.”

  “How did you come to find us?”

  “Saint Lucy herself could tail Bill Harvey in that fatass hearse of his. Pardon my French.”

  “Saint Lucy?”

  Schram took a beat to tee up the punchline. “The patron saint of the blind.”

  And there you have it, ladies and germs. Harold Schroeder had now, in his scant twenty-eight years, seen and heard everything there was to see and hear. Humorless, paranoid Robert Schram, a casualty of the brutal Leyte campaign in the Philippines, had told a joke.