A Despicable Profession

by John Knoerle

  It sounds like treason to say it now but most fighting men in the European Theater weren’t big fans of Ike and Monty, the four-star heavyweights of the Allied Supreme Command. We considered them back-and-fillers, politicians almost. Our boy was George S. Patton, the human half-track with no reverse gear. He was one hellacious good General. In wartime.

  I had a new appreciation of Ike and Monty now, understood that sometimes you’ve got to put it in neutral, wait and watch and pick your spot. Ambrose wasn’t on the Lubyanka Express, not yet.

  Leonid said his Berlin Bureau Chief was a rival to Beria. The Bureau Chief would want to keep Ambrose in his vest pocket as long as possible. But every day that passed increased the odds that the headstrong Mick would do something stupid and get himself killed.

  I stopped at a corner in Wilmersdorf to fill the tank from a young street vendor with a hundred liter drum of black market petrol and a rubber hose. He employed the suction method we teenage hot-rodders used to use to steal gas. He was good at it. I paid him ten cigarettes and drove on, picturing the young man lighting up a Lucky and exhaling a ten foot flame.

  The sidewalks were crowded with ragtag locals out to enjoy the late-arriving spring. Most wore kerchiefs across their mouths. I’d been foolish to grouse about the constant rain. A spike of wind sprayed brick dust across the windshield. I rolled up the windows.

  The Committee to Free Berlin meeting was fast approaching. Time for a mirror read. The CO said, in Leonid’s presence, that the Committee would keep their distance from a newcomer if they were plotting violence. Which meant I would be welcomed by a friendly Blue Cap in order to demonstrate that the Committee had nothing to hide. If all went according to plan I could sabotage Leonid with his handlers tonight.

  Then what? Wait for him to repent the error of his ways? I would need more and better leverage on the little man. I didn’t know where to find this better leverage but I knew where I wanted to start.

  I hadn’t thought much about Anna since our meeting in her apartment. I had tried not to think about her anyway. Mostly because I had sweet talked her into opening the door when her husband was elsewhere. She would have suffered the consequences. I had to see her again. To apologize. And to tease out some kernel of incriminating evidence I could take to the CO, thereby putting Anna in further jeopardy.

  What can I tell you, it’s a despicable profession.

  I drove north toward the pearl gray apartment building on Spirchenstraße, pondering just how despicable I was willing to be. I would do whatever it took to break Leonid and rescue Ambrose. But I didn’t have to destroy Anna in the process. I was a well-heeled Yank with friends in high places. If Anna played ball I would give her a way to flee Leonid and the NKVD.

  Unless Anna was a co-conspirator. Unless Hal Schroeder had gone poozle stoopid. She had let me in to the apartment. And somewhere along in there, while we were sipping tea, Soviet goons grabbed Ambrose.

  I thought about it long and hard but it didn’t click. Anna seemed as transparent as her blue-veined skin. Horns honked behind me. I geared up and drove on.

  I would need a different way in. If the apartment building on Spirchenstraße wasn’t under constant surveillance before it was now. The front door was out. Ditto the rear fire door. But there had to be a coal chute. It would be on the alley to the north of the building. I could slide in that way in the dead of night, bide my time and knock on Anna’s door the following morning, looking like Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer.

  I racked my noggin for another way to go. No joy. It was a miserable night in a coal bin for old Hal.

  I drove north, across the Kurfürstendamm, the hoity toite shopping district before the war, bullet-riddled signs and busted-out plate glass now. The Red Army would have taken particular pleasure looting decadent bourgeois Kraut clothiers. I pictured weather-beaten Ivans parading down the Ku-damm in vicuna topcoats and double breasted blazers, the more acutely inebriated sporting ladies’ hats and feather boas. Must have been a hell of a party.

  Shoppers buzzed in and out of a ten story building topped by blackened steel girders. A department store, just like Higbee’s in Cleveland. Except this one was missing the top two floors. I parked the truck and went inside. I needed an overcoat and a hat that didn’t make me look like a goatherd.

  I returned to the truck with a black wool topcoat and matching fedora and renewed respect for the almighty dollar. I had gotten change back from a ten.

  I drove east on Bismarckstraße, through the treeless Tiergarten, past the sidewalk vendors and head-high nettles and a clump of refugees clustered around a fire pit where something meaty crackled on a spit. A rabbit by the long ears. Or a dachshund.

  I passed through the Brandenburg Gate, the hammer and sickle snapping in the wind high above. I turned left on Friedrichstraße and hunted der Admiralspalast. I found it just north of the train station.

  It was a big old thing. Half a block long with a peaked roof, four Doric columns embedded in the marble façade. It had suffered some surface damage but looked to be in one piece. I’d thought the CO was mistaken when he told me this was the site of the meeting of the Committee to Free Berlin. Seeing this grandiose old Grande Dame of a theater up close didn’t change my opinion.

  der Admiralspalast was in the Soviet Sector for starters. And it had been, just last month, the site of a big deal meeting of Germany’s two new political parties. The democratic socialist SPD and the Communist KPD. A confab where the two parties had agreed to merge. The English language newspaper suggested it was a shotgun wedding, with Papa Joe holding the twelve gauge.

  Why in the world would anti-Commie freedom fighters choose to meet here?

  I drove on, looking to park the delivery truck out of sight of the building. I found a spot three blocks north, on a street that hugged the twisty banks of the Spree. I parked behind a donkey cart piled high with combustible material, splintered joists, torn-out paneling, chunks of asphalt. The cart driver had gone off somewhere. I killed the engine and watched and waited. Nothing happened.

  The Commies were doing something right, here in the Soviet Sector. Two miles to the west displaced persons would have stripped this unattended cart clean by now. And dug a fire pit to barbecue the donkey.

  The meeting of the Committee to Free Berlin was scheduled for eight p.m. My internal astrolabe calculated the angle of the fading sunlight against the vertical polarity of true north and told me, with admirable precision, that it was somewhere between late dusk and early evening. I climbed out of the truck and set off to find a clock. Preferably one behind a bar.

  I found a corner tavern a block away. The old fashioned kind with stand up tables and no barstools. The cuckoo clock said seven-twenty. I ordered a stein and nursed it and asked myself a question.

  Herr Hilde said the Committee was a Communist front, a fly trap set up to snare unsuspecting freedom fighters. Leonid said that was pure Commie propaganda meant to keep the US from offering assistance to the fledgling group. I preferred the Herr Hilde version. But why would the secret backers of the ruse, the NKVD, permit the meeting to be held in a gaudy showplace in the Soviet Sector?

  I sipped some suds.

  The NKVD were smart, that’s why. They could rally the rank and file with ‘Let’s march into the Soviet Sector and dare the bastards to shut us down’, knowing the Soviet authorities would keep clear. And they could silence any skeptics with ‘If we were a Communist front why would we advertise the fact by holding a meeting in der Admiralspalast?’ They had it covered coming and going.

  I drained the last of my stein. I didn’t need another as the cuckoo clock reminded me, eight times. But a shot of schnapps to smooth out the wrinkles wouldn’t kill me. I asked the barkeep. Peppermint was all he had. I declined. Nobody needs a drink that bad.

  I paid up and ankled out, took my time strolling down Friedrichstraße. I wanted the crowd settled in.

  The lobby of the theater was a neck-craning sweep of sleek Art Deco curves, adjoining an empty clo
akroom big as a roller rink. The place was clean but smelled bad, smelled of soot and burnt cork. Conventional bombs leave a cordite smell. der Admiralspalast had been hit by incendiaries.

  The doors to the auditorium were closed. I could hear a loud voice declaiming inside. The curtain was up, the production underway. I got my reporter’s notebook in hand and barged in.

  Chapter Thirty

  The auditorium was immense. About a thousand floor seats, a big mezzanine above and two balconies above that. Ritzy too. Crushed velvet seats and gilded loges that towered above the stage. The Committee to Free Berlin - the charter members sitting behind a long table on the stage, maybe forty supporters in the audience - looked dwarfed, silly, out of place. The stage was lit, the house lights dim. The man who had been declaiming in a loud voice shut his yap as I came into view. Everyone turned to follow his look. I doffed my fedora in greeting.

  “Bitte nehmen Sie Platz,” said the man on stage. Please take a seat.

  “Danke, aber ich habe bereits eins!” Thanks, but I already have one!

  All right, it was a lame joke. But even Groucho would have been hard pressed to tease a smile from this school of trout.

  I sat down, in an aisle seat. I sat and listened to a series of speeches by the charter members. They hit the high notes, called for democratic self-determinism and such but nobody in the gallery said boo. The meeting had all the rough and tumble of a show trial.

  Good. I wouldn’t have to stand up and make a fool of myself. I’m a spy. We do our best work offstage. And if you think I’m lousy at adlibs you oughtta hear me give a speech.

  This was wishful thinking, of course. I had come here to sabotage Leonid with his handlers. That required getting up on my hind legs and addressing the group.

  The charter members droned on about multiparty coalitions of coagulating interests, best I could make out. When the chairman thanked the last speaker and asked if there were any questions I got my feet organized underneath me and stood up.

  I introduced myself as a reporter for Stars’n’Stripes interested in doing a story on the Committee to Free Berlin.

  Glacial silence.

  I said I was a German-American who had fought against the Nazis, said I wanted to see the land of my ancestors return to the democratic ideals of the Weimar republic.

  Pin drop silence.

  I said I wanted to tell their story, said I was interested in interviewing any and all members of the Committee and their supporters.

  The Chairman banged his gavel. Show over. The actors left the stage, the audience streamed toward the exits. I stood and watched them go. Herr Hilde’s intel was accurate. This was a group no longer open to outsiders.

  I returned to my aisle seat and waited, confidently. I had played my part. The NKVD had heard me. They would come calling, on orders from Major Leonid Vitinov.

  No one showed.

  I got up and walked toward the lobby. How was I supposed to sabotage Leonid with his handlers if I didn’t get to speak to them? Had Leonid outthunk me on this? The CO dispatched me to the Committee meeting to see if Herr Hilde’s allegations against it were true. Leonid heard him. Therefore, ergo, ipso facto, Leonid would dispatch one of the NKVD infiltrators to give me a face to face regarding pertinent circumstances.

  Unless I was wrong about the Committee. Unless Hilde was the lying sack, not Leonid. No, Leonid was definitely a lying sack. Which didn’t mean that Hilde wasn’t also. Christ.

  I pushed open the door to the lobby. A blond man about thirty held it open for me. He looked more like a boy scout than a Blue Cap. He needed a knife scar across those apple cheeks maybe, more squinty calculation in those bright blue eyes.

  “I wanted to apologize to you on behalf of the members of the Committee,” he said in English. English with a German accent.

  “Why is that?”

  The man released the door and walked with me toward the exit. “My name is Gerhard Dunkel. I am a founding member.”

  “Good for you,” I said and kept walking.

  “We have charted a noble, yet dangerous, course.”

  “Yes you have.”

  “The members of the Committee are shy about publicity.”

  I stood still and looked around at the gaudy Art Deco lobby of the biggest theater I had ever seen. “Hell of a spot to turn bashful.”

  Gerhard’s eyes followed mine. He waxed nostalgic. “I saw a show here one time, in ’34. My 21st birthday. It was a revue.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Naked ladies.”

  “What fun.”

  Maybe this guy really was German. He sure looked it. A Kraut Blue Cap? How did that work? I asked a question.

  “What was it about, the Revue? Who was in it?”

  Gerhard shrugged. “It was a long time ago.” I resumed walking. “If you would like I can arrange a private meeting with some of our members.”

  A man in a custodian’s uniform pulled a janitor’s cart on the other side of the lobby, emptying ashtrays that didn’t need emptying.

  “That won’t be necessary. And you don’t have to apologize. I expected a cool reception.”

  “Why is that?”

  I reached the exit door and put my hand on the push bar. It budged. I would be able to drop my bomb and blow.

  “Because, Gerhard, I have heard that the Committee to Free Berlin is a Communist front organization.” I stood toe to toe. “Any truth to that?”

  “Of course not! Who would say such a lie?”

  “I wonder.”

  The blond man’s breath came in little gasps. He was all kinds of upset.

  “I know what you’re thinking Gerhard. If I believe that why didn’t I say so? Why didn’t I stand up like a man and make my accusation to the group?”

  “Yes indeed! Why did you not?”

  I pushed open the panic bar, felt cool spring air on my face. The custodian wheeled his cart in my direction. Time for my exit line.

  “Call it a professional courtesy. Comrade.”

  I walked out the door and beat feet. No one followed.

  Spirited back-patting propelled me down the sidewalk for about two blocks. I had done what I came to do, with a touch of style if I do say so. Gerhard the phony Kraut would now tell his NKVD superiors that Leonid wasn’t doing what he was paid to do – debunk and defang Herr Hilde’s intelligence. Gerhard would do this right away.

  And he wouldn’t risk a phone call.

  Crap on toast, Schroeder. The man can lead you right to the target, right to the top secret NKVD hideout where Ambrose, for all you know, is being held in chains. Tail him!

  I ran the two blocks to the delivery truck, kicking myself all the way. I jumped in and drove back to the theater.

  der Admiralspalast had an underground parking garage, the exit next to the front door. I parked half a block shy and watched and waited. I waited and hoped and waited some more.

  God did not smile. Gerhard was already gone. I had screwed up.

  I told myself all was not lost. I told myself that so long as we had Leonid we had a way to find Ambrose and set him free. I told myself all kinds of crap, even believed some of it.

  I drove south down Friedrichstraße and fought back urges. The urge to get stinking drunk. The urge to blast my way into the pearl gray apartment building, kick the door to Leonid’s apartment and beat him to a clotted pulp. These were good solid All American urges, don’t get me wrong. But they would have to wait. I had a late night date with a coal bin.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  The coal chute was shut tight. It didn’t have a handle or any way short of a crowbar to pry it open. And there’s never a crowbar around when you need one.

  I was huddled in the dark alley north of Leonid and Anna’s apartment building, unfollowed and unobserved, best I could tell. I groped around for a lock cylinder, found it on the side of the chute cover. A crude contraption fit for a skeleton key. The coal chute was locked, not sealed. I whipped out my folding knife and poked and prodded. It was the simplest lock i
maginable and it took me a sweaty ten minutes and a busted blade tip to tumble it.

  I opened the cover slowly. It creaked. It creaked like Dracula’s coffin lid.

  I listened for approaching footsteps, heard none. I studied the coal chute in the moonlit dim. It was narrow and it didn’t plunge straight down. The chute had a bend in it. A twist. Like everything else in this town.

  I weighed my options. It had to be after midnight by now. No one had come running at the sound of the creaky cover. Odds were slim that the front and back doors of the building were still under active surveillance.

  Tough shit. The chute was big enough to accommodate me, provided I stripped down and covered myself with hog grease. Jimmying my way in the front or back entailed an extra measure of risk. Not just to me, the hell with me. The risk was to Ambrose. And to whatever noble half-baked enterprise we were embarked on here in post-war Berlin.

  I shrugged off my new coat and stuffed it down the coal chute. I braced myself with my right hand and held the chute cover with my left as I stuck my legs inside and questioned my sanity. I pushed off with my right hand and swung the cover shut with my left as I plunged downward.

  I made it through the bend in the chute with a great deal of wriggling and muffled curses, then dropped like a rock into an empty coal bin. My topcoat cushioned the fall. Sort of. The chute cover was creaky because no one used it. The apartment building on Spirchenstraße, I noted as I climbed out of the coal bin, slowly, in stages, had acquired a shiny new gas furnace.

  I shook the coal dust from my coat and searched out a utility sink. I was gritty as a ranch hand and wanted to wash up. Which risked the groan of old pipes. I had made enough racket for one evening. I found an empty crate, turned it over and sat there all night long.

  I killed time by asking myself questions for which I had no answers. How to talk my way into apartment K this time? How to determine if Anna was a co-conspirator? If she wasn’t a co-conspirator how to convince her to give me something tangible to prove to the CO that Leonid was dirty? And, if she did that, how to give her a way to flee and where to?