by John Knoerle
Leonid smelled like sweat, like he had run all the way here from the Embassy. Julia was whimpering softly, which didn’t figure for a tough broad like her.
When Leonid swam into focus I saw why. It wasn’t sweat he was covered with. He had a spray of fresh blood all down the front of his coat.
He must have commandeered the apartment across the hall to keep watch. Nosy neighbor ladies always have a peephole.
“Mrs. Rogash,” said Julia in quiet horror.
“I had no intent to do her harm,” said Leonid calmly. “But she chose not to listen.”
“Why?” cried Julia. “Why did you come here?”
“Take two steps back,” said Leonid, gesturing with his gun. He had a Red Army Tokarev this time, single action, semi-automatic. “And ask Mr. Schroeder that question.”
Julia backed up two paces, towards the parlor. Leonid turned his back to the kitchen and backed up four paces. We were an isosceles triangle with Leonid at the vertex. I was on his left, Julia on his right.
I cursed myself for telling Tommy to wait five minutes. Despite his outward calm Leonid was off center, ragged, his gun hand shaky. He had a purple bruise on his forehead from when Julia slammed him to the pavement and Bill Harvey had sapped him a good one after that. And for all I knew the Embassy guard had winged him or Mrs. Rogash had stabbed him with a kitchen knife.
Leonid wasn’t up to a big production tonight. He would be quick.
I had to move him in my direction. If I could distract him for half a second Miss Julia would do her part.
“Lenny’s just ticked cause the grenade he gave his NKVD pal was the one that blew his wife to bits.”
“On your feet Schroeder!”
“No thanks. I’m comfortable here.” That didn’t provoke any movement so I yawned, loud and long.
“On the floor, face down!” said Leonid to Julia.
She looked to me. I nodded. She proned herself out.
Leonid stalked over to me and stood just out of reach. He pointed his gun at my head.
“C’mon, Lenny, you’ve made it this far, don’t screw it up now.”
Leonid hesitated, I sighed. “First the speech, then the girl, then me.”
But Leonid wasn’t buying my bullshit this particular evening. I knew that because he fired his weapon at my head.
He missed, a lucky parlay of his shaky hand and my instinctive last-second roll to the left.
I kept rolling for all I was worth, hoping to topple the little man. But he hopped over me, twisted around and stood with his back against the wall, sucking wind.
Julia had sprung to her feet, ready to clobber Leonid with a four-cornered crystal ashtray from the coffee table. But his little hop and twist had saved him from another drubbing by the scrappy plowgirl.
I should have damn well stood up when he told me to. That way I could have bullrushed him and eaten his bullets while Julia made a run for it.
It was trickier now. He had us triangulated again, his back to the wall, the door to his left. If I jumped up Leonid would have time to cut me down in the two strides it would take to reach him.
Maybe not. The Tokarev was small bore, not much stopping power. I could still mash him against the wall and, with my dying breath, impale his trachea while Miss Julia dashed out the door.
Okay, Schroeder, you’re fresh out of snappy patter. Do it. Leonid’s getting his breathing settled and his gun hand steady. Do it now.
Tommy the cabdriver yelled, “Police, open up!” while hammering on the door so hard it slipped its latch and swung open.
I arched my back, pushed down hard and exploded to my feet.
We had a frozen moment just then, Leonid, Tommy the cabdriver and me. Not a one of us knew what to do, too much had changed in too short a time.
Leonid recovered first. He angled his gun back to its proper bearing. Me.
Which is where the greedy little bastard went wrong. He could have put a couple slugs in my midsection in the split second before I got to him. But Leonid wanted a kill shot. He fired at my forehead with a shaky hand.
I ducked, he missed. I drove my right shoulder into his chest and flattened him against the wall. His gun clattered to the bare wood floor.
I threw him down, sat on his chest and pinned his wrists. I wanted to kill him. Badly. But there were witnesses.
“I knocked a little early,” said Tommy, matter-of-factly, “after I heard the gunshot.”
“Well done, Tommy. You saved our lives,” I said, keeping my eyes on Leonid. He looked done now, half dead.
“Jules, you okay?”
“Yes,” she breathed.
“Then go check on Mrs. Rogash please. Lenny and I want to be alone.”
Julia and Tommy left the apartment and closed the door behind them. Dinah Shore sang Buttons and Bows on the radio.
“You should have killed me when you had the chance,” croaked Leonid.
I grinned. “That’s my line, Lenny.”
“You can’t kill me now.” He took a raggedy breath. Then another. “You are a hero.”
“Only when other people are watching. We’re alone now,” I replied. “Do you remember dear old Col. Norwood’s favorite line? ‘No one asks hard questions of good fortune.’”
Leonid didn’t appear to take my meaning so I said it plain. “The police department isn’t going to give a shit how you died.”
“What,” he gasped, “do you want?”
“An answer to a question. Tell the truth, I let you live. Beria’s gonna punch your ticket anyway.”
“Ask…your question,” said Leonid, barely audible.
It wouldn’t do for Leonid to check out now. The question had been rattling around in the catch basin of my brain ever since I glommed Leonid’s master plan. He knew something I didn’t. Superior knowledge is the brass ring. If Leonid Vitinov kicked off with superior knowledge then Leonid Vitinov wins.
“My question, Leonid, is why are you so intent on avenging the honor of your wife, a woman who ditched you for a dirty Yank like me?”
Leonid struggled to speak, producing only bubbles of spit. I sat up on my haunches, easing the pressure on his chest. But I kept his wrists pinned.
“Anna did not…care for you. She wanted only a better life.”
He was halfway right. Anna had asked me to arrange transport for her to New York. But our affection for one another was unmistakable, genuine.
Leonid’s eyes filled with tears. “Anna wanted only a safe place…to raise our child.”
Oh fuck.
What Leonid said made immediate and terrible sense. Anna had risked her life, and mine, to smuggle out a suitcase crammed with family heirlooms. At the time I’d thought she meant to sell off her silver-framed pictures and fine china for cash. But she didn’t need money, I had her covered. What she needed was something to bequeath to her first born.
Anna was pregnant when I killed her.
Was I the father?
Time had been kind to me. The waking and sleeping image of Anna fleeing the live grenade, the one I tossed back from our truck at Muhlendamm Bridge, had faded from view. But I saw it again now. Anna’s over-the-shoulder look at me as she fled the grenade that would take her life. The puzzled expression that said, Why would you do this to me…
WHANK!
I looked up to see Miss Julia holding the four-cornered crystal ashtray. One of its corners was smeared with blood.
I looked down to see Leonid with the side of his head gouged open, dead as a mackerel, a neck-slicer clutched in his left hand.
How had that happened?
Miss Julia looked down at me. “You okay?”
“I think so. Sure. How’s Mrs. Rogash?”
“She’s gone.”
“Aww shit.”
“Indeed.”
Julia helped me to my feet, put her hand to my cheek and kept it there. “Hal,” she said, “we need to find you a new line of work.”
Chapter Forty
I was more than d
one with the hero routine but Julia had other ideas.
“It makes a better story if you did it,” she said.
I had put Julia in harm’s way and gotten her neighbor killed. Whatever she wanted. But what I’d told Leonid wasn’t strictly true. The cops would ask hard questions of good fortune.
“This is a big deal, Julia, a double homicide, with one of the victims a foreign diplomat. We have solid evidence – Leonid’s coat soaked with your neighbor’s blood, her blood on his knife. Why give the cops a reason to doubt our story by making shit up?”
“Because I don’t want to be known as the ashtray killer the rest of my life. Men find me scary enough as it is.”
I agreed to do it her way. But it meant keeping the FBI at bay. By rights they should get the call, the killing of a diplomat being a federal matter. But G-men have secret potions for tracking footsteps and detecting partial prints and all like that. Better to have the local coppers barge in and trample the crime scene like a herd of cattle. I would make sure they treated Leonid’s blood-soaked coat and knife with care.
We took a moment to contemplate Leonid’s corpse splayed out on the bare wood of the entryway, his deep-set eyes staring skyward, his skull resting in a pool of purpling blood. I had expected to feel joy at vanquishing my stalwart foe. I felt satisfied he was gone, sure, but nothing approaching joy. It’s a peculiar thing to say but somehow my youth – my wild, intemperate, fortune-kissed youth – died with Leonid.
We wiped Julia’s prints from the ashtray and replaced them with mine. We quickly bogused up a story. I got up to call the cops, thinking Leonid was unconscious. Leonid came at me with his knife, we struggled. I grabbed the ashtray and bonked him.
The yarn was well-ventilated. Why didn’t I tie up the suspect before leaving him unattended? How did I grab the ashtray off the coffee table in the parlor when I was wrestling Leonid in the entryway? But I would make it work somehow.
Tommy entered and surveyed the wreckage. “I gave the neighbor lady mouth to mouth,” he said, “but she was too far gone.” He looked down at Leonid. “What happened to him?”
“Go home, Tommy, go home to your wife and kids.”
“I don’t gotta talk to the coppers?”
“I’ll handle it, you’ve done enough for one night,” I said. “Just keep it on the QT for now.”
He turned to go with a quick wave and stopped. “How’d you know I got a wife and kids?”
“You look exhausted.”
Tommy laughed and banged off down the hall.
Julia got out her Kodak and said she wanted to snap my photo for her story. I told her no.
“Hal, you were on television.”
“Yes, but a photo in a newspaper is a document. It’ll go into a thousand file cabinets and come back to bite me someday.”
“I can’t do the story without your photo!”
“I’m in the Chaney High School yearbook, Class of ’43.”
I didn’t really care about getting my picture in the paper, my cloak and dagger days were behind me. But I wasn’t posing for one. Wisner would be cheesed off enough without seeing my dopey mug on the front page.
-----
I got through my late night sweat session at Washington D.C. Police Headquarters in one piece. The graveyard shift watch commander didn’t really swallow my account of what happened but he couldn’t prove different. Miss Julia must have held up her end because the watch commander gave up on me about four a.m.
I got a few hours of blessed shuteye in an empty holding cell and a leftover baloney sandwich. The food in my Romanian barn stall was better.
Chief of Police Hyram Johnson was a beefy man with a Southern twang and thinning rust-colored hair. He wasn’t interested in trying to poke holes in my story the next morning. He wanted the big picture. Who I reported to at CIA. Why a Soviet Embassy attaché had taken such an interest in me and a small time reporter.
I told him enough to make him scuttlebutt king of the PD lunch room for a week. Why not? My life was an open book.
The Chief plied me with coffee and donuts in a most congenial interrogation, in no particular hurry to turn me loose. I wondered who of my many admirers would finally kick down the door and spring me. William King Harvey? Captain Candybar? J. Edgar Hoover?
Turns out it was Chief Johnson’s secretary. She breezed into his office following a cursory tap tap on the door to present him with a newspaper. I was sitting across from his desk, left wrist cuffed to the chair leg, right hand free to sip and chew.
The Chief read the front page and gave out with a low whistle. “Well,” he said, “she shore din’t waste any time.”
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Your girlfriend,” he said with a wink and showed me the headline in the early afternoon edition of the Evening Star.
CIA Hero Bests Soviet Spy in Desperate Fight to the Death!
Good Lord.
“I got a coupla G-men cooling their heels in the lobby who are just itchin’ to talk to you.”
No doubt.
“But I hate them stuck-up cokesackers. What say we smuggle you out the back door and send you down to E Street in Foggy Bottom.”
“Where’s that?”
“I thought you worked for Frank Wisner?”
“I do.”
“That’s where his office is.”
How did he know that? Had Wisner called? So far as I knew he was still in London.
“Never been there,” I said.
“Why not?”
It looked like Chief Johnson was angling for one last dollop of juicy gossip before he’d turn me loose.
“Because, Chief Johnson, I am what the Office of Policy Co-ordination terms a covert agent without portfolio.”
The Chief liked this, but his eyebrows indicated he wanted more. I laid it on thick.
“I’m an off-the-books operative authorized to perform sabotage, subterfuge and, in extreme cases, subject to National Security Council sanction, termination with extreme prejudice.”
Chief Johnson’s eyes narrowed. “Are you funnin’ me?”
“No sir.” I gave him my best hard-eyed stare. “And we never had this conversation.”
I was uncuffed and bundled out the back door in short order.
Chapter Forty-one
A cop in an unmarked car drove me to Wisner’s surprisingly cramped and cluttered office about six blocks from the White House.
“Jesus Christ, Schroeder, you look as bad as I feel.”
He said he had arrived home yesterday from London and had come down with the crud en route.
I was surprised to see him back so soon. I figured he would want to take some time getting Stela and the boy king settled. But I wasn’t going to open that can of worms again.
I gave him a quick summation of events, how I came to have the stitches in my lip, how Leonid was intent on personal vengeance, how I killed him in self-defense. I felt bad about lying to him, though Wisner only half listened to my account. His mind was elsewhere.
“I don’t take issue with your appearance at the Dewey rally, Schroeder,” he said, his voice raw. “As I understand it you didn’t identify yourself as CIA. You are free to express your political preferences as a private citizen, as are we all.”
Wisner gestured to the copy of the Evening Star on his desk. “But this headline terms you a ‘CIA hero.’ There is no such animal. No active agent or operative can have a higher public status than any other. It damages our cohesion.”
Very high-minded I’m sure. I had spent less than a week in D.C. all told yet its bleak cynicism had leached into my bones. I suspected that what Julia’s cover story most damaged was Frank Wisner’s sense of superiority to the crass, headline-chasing FBI.
“I understand your concern, sir. But becoming the CIA’s Melvin Purvis was the last thing I wanted.” Purvis being the G-man famous for gunning down Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger.
I surprised the Director of the OPC with this remark. Leastwise he gav
e me a fresh once over. I sounded a little too big for my britches maybe. Wait till he heard my next little tidbit.
“Change of subject, sir. Last evening I was summoned to the office of J. Edgar Hoover. He wanted to discuss my dubious conduct back in ’45, when I took part in a federal sting operation in Cleveland.”
“The one you were asked about at the Dewey rally.”
Wisner had been kept up. “Yes sir. We got that all squared away, best I can tell. However…” I paused to clear my throat and question my sanity. “I got the feeling that our meeting wasn’t about me so much as it was about you and the OPC.”
An almost imperceptible tightening from Wisner. “How so?”
“Well, by rights Hoover should have read me the riot act about my conduct during the Cleveland sting op – I more than botched it – but he was pleasant, welcoming. I got the distinct impression that I would hear from him again, that he was, well, recruiting me to be a source.”
Wisner sat very still. “Did he ask you any direct questions related to OPC, your recent OS operation or our debrief in Rome?”
Three questions. But I do believe Wisner only cared about the last one. I pictured the headline in the Evening Star if J. Edgar Bulldog found out that Frank Wisner was the father of the heir to the Romanian throne.
CIA Chief Sires Commie King!
Someone once said ‘Be quick with bad news, take your time with good tidings.’ I took my time.
“Sorry, sir, I’m not sure what you mean by ‘OS’.”
“Offshore, overseas,” snapped Wisner.
“Oh, of course,” I said. “And no, sir, the Director asked me no such questions.”
Wisner brightened at this reply and stood up. Too quickly apparently because he had to lean on his desk to steady himself. I got up as well.
“My driver will take you back to the Mayflower. Got everything you need?”
Alas I did not. But I wasn’t about to ask the Executive Director of the Office of Policy Co-ordination for a wad of folding money.
The intercom buzzed. “I’ll be in touch late tomorrow,” said Wisner. “After the election results come in.”
