The Proxy Assassin

by John Knoerle

  I gaped up at him. He looked depressed.

  Honest Abe had drawn a fair crowd of visitors for a Tuesday morning in October, mostly school kids on a bus tour. I looked around for Nikolai.

  Ah, there he was, his back to me, about ten yards away. There was no mistaking that dumb floppy hat.

  Only he had shrunk a few inches. And dropped fifty pounds.

  I felt a clutch of dread in my gut as I approached the hat wearer. He was a boy about fourteen. His teacher reached him before I did.

  “Donald, what in the world?”

  “It was just sittin’ there, Miss Hazelton, on the bench!”

  “Well you put it back where you found it.”

  Young Donald galumphed over to the marble bench by the front entrance and threw down the hat.

  He needn’t have bothered. By my reckoning Nikolai Savayenko wouldn’t need it anytime soon. The message from the NKVD was clear. The greatest potential catch in the history of American intelligence was now deceased.

  I felt cold eyes watching as I ankled out the entryway. A thick line of trees bordered the reflecting pool straight ahead, convenient cover for watchers.

  I didn’t give the Blue Caps the satisfaction they sought, didn’t run down the steps in a panic. I took my time, then turned at the bottom of the stairway to stare up at the pillared edifice in which the proudest son of the heartland sat parked on his duff.

  As a fellow Midwestern bumpkin I couldn’t help feeling I had let the great man down.

  I strode the length of the National Mall on a windswept day that couldn’t make up its mind – cloudy one minute, sunny the next. I was angry with myself. I shouldn’t have let Nikolai walk even if it meant putting him in a hammerlock and marching him upstairs.

  The NKVD knew that Nikolai was ripe for ‘imperialist conversion’ because of his wife’s illness. That his family didn’t accompany him to his foreign posting indicated his superiors didn’t fully trust him. He would have been under surveillance. His unauthorized visit to a decadent D.C. watering hole was all they would need to know.

  Maybe. But it was thin gruel. Even the Blue Caps needed more than a visit to the T&C Lounge to justify a wet job in a foreign capital. Someone must have informed the NKVD that Nikolai was headed to the Mayflower in an attempt to establish contact with yours truly.

  Nikolai was dead when he walked in the door. Or, more precisely, when I let him walk out.

  I was Nikolai’s proxy assassin. He was snuffed for the crime of speaking to me. But his real executioner was the person who sent him my way.

  My question to Nikolai had been right on the money.

  Why come to me?

  Nikolai was steered, that’s why. Sidled up to at a diplomatic reception by someone who knew he was frustrated and ripe to cross over, someone saying, ‘I can’t help you personally but may I make a suggestion? Take your case to Hal Schroeder, he has the ear of Frank Wisner, he’s easy to get to. And, by the way, it would be better if Mr. Schroeder thought this was your idea, not mine.’

  A twofer. Eliminate Nikolai and reduce my reputation to a smoking hole. Guy Burgess appeared just in time to flush Nikolai from the plush confines of the Harold Schroeder anti-Communist Command Center.

  Burgess wanted the Russian neutralized because he feared Nikolai would expose him. Burgess wanted me discredited because I knew he was an intimate of Col. Norwood, who fled Berlin after I caught him working both sides.

  Of course the person who sidled up to Nikolai couldn’t be on Nick’s list of known Soviet agents, as Burgess likely was. Burgess would have needed a front man.

  Hard to see how it could be anyone but his roomie, MI6 legend Kim Philby. Philby was beyond reproach. If Philby was dirty Nikolai wouldn’t have known. If Philby was dirty only Lavrenty Beria and Josef Stalin would know.

  Guilt by association, assassination by proxy.

  Well, two can play at that game. The apartment on Nebraska Avenue would be watched. Beria, in his dark and devious heart, had to suspect that this decadent British aristocrat was playing him, that Burgess was that rarest of birds, a triple agent. Reporting to Burgess’ apartment immediately after my big meet went bust would confirm that suspicion.

  Yes, this was a wonderful plan, the new way of the world. Don’t get your hair mussed or your hands dirty, young fella, become a proxy assassin. Enlist today!

  I stopped at a newstand. It was possible I had gotten ahead of myself. Nikolai had been found out but it didn’t necessarily mean he was dead.

  The story on the front page of the Washington Times-Herald quoted the Soviet Ambassador. Embassy attaché Nikolai Savayenko had thrown himself into the Potomac river upon learning of the death of his wife in Leningrad. She had died of heart failure.

  Sure she had.

  This is what we were up against. An enemy willing to kill an invalid to justify the murder of her husband.

  I muttered dark curses and swore bloody vengeance. And not for the Soviet diplomat who had been bundled into a car by NKVD goons and dumped off a pier in the dead of night.

  Anyone who’s tasted combat enjoys poking fun at the blue-sky cookie-pushers in the State Department. There are, however, no blue-sky cookie-pushers in the Soviet diplomatic service. There aren’t even any diplomats, not really. They’re all members of the Cheka, an acronym for Committee to Combat Counter-revolution or somesuch. Imagine the FBI, CIA and State Department all rolled into one tight-knuckled fist.

  So I didn’t swear vengeance for Nikolai Sayavenko. I was angry for the bright-eyed girl in the photograph, little Tina, now consigned to some dreary Soviet orphanage to be fed a diet of cold porridge and correct thinking.

  I dumped the paper in a trash can and continued walking east. Guy Burgess figured to be sleeping it off at half past nine in the morning. Could be he’d slam the door in my face. I had dumped him on his backside at the Conklin’s party.

  Then again I had maintained decorum by not shoving his mug into the tureen of sheep testicles.

  It’s been my experience that scumbags generally keep a strict ledger of these things.

  -----

  4001 Nebraska Avenue NW was a leg-stretcher and then some. I stood on the sidewalk and stretched my back when I arrived, stood there long enough for the NKVD to get a few snaps from whatever apartment window they were holed up in.

  I climbed brick steps and knocked on the door of the apartment I had seen Philby and Burgess enter two nights ago. First floor, on the right.

  I knocked again. No answer. Burgess was probably zzz’ed out with a pillow over his head. I crowded closer to quick pick the cheesy lock while pretending to wait for the door to open.

  I opened the door, made gestures appropriate to being welcomed, entered the apartment and closed the door behind me.

  The parlor was a mess, stuff everywhere. I went to a back bedroom. Chaos. The place had been tossed!

  Maybe not. I heard a toilet flush. My first instinct was to bolt but I told myself to grow some gonads. It would be swell if they got pix of us leaving the apartment together.

  Guy Burgess stepped out of the bathroom in his boxer shorts. His hair and face were wet.

  “Oh good, you’re here,” I said, cheerily.

  Burgess, bleary-eyed, was speechless.

  “I wanted to give you a heads up in case you hadn’t heard. Nikolai Savayenko – Soviet attaché, guy I was trying to recruit in the Town & Country Lounge yesterday – he was fished out of the Potomac this morning. We were among the last people to see him alive. I’m afraid the cops will trace his steps back to me.”

  Burgess shook his head to clear the cobwebs. “What are you doing here?”

  “I just explained that.”

  “Well say it again. Slowly.”

  I walked him through it again, admiring the gutsiness of Burgess’ plan. His walking in on my confab with Nikolai had risked raising my antennae. He covered that by pretending to be a hungover zombie. Well, he was a hungover zombie, but a very timely one.

 
“I don’t remember any of that,” said Burgess.

  “The point is we need to come to an agreement.”

  Burgess went to his dresser and grabbed a starched and folded dress shirt. From his closet he selected a charcoal gray suit and a red bowtie. The dark suit was a good choice. He could spill food down his front all day and night and no one would notice.

  Burgess didn’t speak till he had assembled himself in front of the dresser mirror. “What sort of an agreement?”

  “An agreement that we never saw Nikolai Savayenko in the Town & Country Lounge.”

  “How does that work?”

  “The other patrons were tourists and the barkeep was Winston.”

  “The Negro?”

  “The same.”

  “And he’ll keep his mouth shut?”

  “He will.”

  Burgess affixed black pearl cufflinks and a matching tie tack, chewed up a breath mint, then turned to face me with a smile thin as shaved ice.

  “And pray tell me, Mr. Schroeder, why I should give a flaming fuck?”

  I hung my head. “As a favor to me,” I said, simpered. “I don’t want to be known as the man who let Nikolai Savayenko get dumped in the river.”

  This was all terribly complicated. Me, hat in hand, attempting to win the co-operation of my adversary in order to derail a smear attempt against myself that my adversary himself had engineered. Would Guy Burgess recognize the irony, walk it back and glom that I was in on the joke and messing with him? Or would he simply bask in my humiliation?

  It didn’t much matter, he’d be fish food by tonight. But I wanted to know if Burgess was any good.

  It takes patience. Imagine looking at the reflection of a pleasant someone in a standing full-length mirror, in a long hall of standing mirrors that stretch to infinity. The pleasant someone appears identical in every diminishing reflection until, suddenly, at reflection number thirty-two, say, his appearance changes, his affable grin becomes a fanged snarl.

  Guy Burgess didn’t have the patience for it. He nodded smirking agreement to my pathetic plea, then looked at his watch and cursed.

  “You have a car?”

  “Got a cab waiting,” I lied.

  “I need it.”

  “It’s all yours.” Burgess started for the door.

  “Shoes,” I said, drolly.

  Burgess looked down and busted out laughing.

  We spilled out of the flat, cackling merrily. My non-existent taxi wasn’t there. I cursed the wretched driver and stood on the corner to hail another. Now that Burgess and I were best pals I ventured a question.

  “Frank Wisner is after me to background his Romanian royals, King Michael and Princess Stela. You got anything?”

  This was supposed to be a standard mirror read. The Romanians were dirty in inverse proportion to the degree that double agent Burgess defended their honor. Only he didn’t. Not hers anyway.

  “Stela Varadja?”

  I nodded. He snorted.

  “Better watch yourself with her pretty boy. She’ll suck your blood down to the marrow and you’ll enjoy every delicious moment. Just ask Maurice Thorez.”

  I suppose I could have asked who Maurice Thorez was but I had humbled myself enough for one day.

  A taxi driver saw my raised hand and slid to the curb. Guy Burgess piled into the back seat. I waved him an affectionate farewell as the hackie sped south.

  If you listened hard you could just about hear the NKVD camera shutter clicking below the telephoto lens.

  Chapter Thirteen

  My internal alarm clock failed me. I slept like the dead in the barn stall until my cold shower at the break of day – a bucket of water dumped on my head by one of the young soldiers. He was gone before I could thank him.

  It’s showtime, guv’nor, rise and shine now. No need to memorize your lines because that other Mr. Schroeder, the playwright, ‘e never got round to writing ‘em! ‘Fraid you’ll have to bail him out again, seat-o’-your-pants like.

  I wasn’t sure why an imaginary cockney gentleman was giving me a pep talk just then but it did the trick. I knew what I had to do. When asked a specific question by my interrogators I would deny knowledge, suffer punishment, then cough up some nonsense that I would try to remember for next time.

  I was free to make shit up. They wouldn’t have any NKVD fact checkers up here in the hills.

  A few minutes later I was handcuffed in front and escorted to my customary seat at the table in the country kitchen and given a cup of coffee so strong I couldn’t blink for an hour. The old buzzard, the boss man’s boss, sat at the head of the table, his two heavyset armbreakers stood on either side of him.

  A tableau worthy of a Renaissance master. They looked at me and said nothing.

  Guess it was my turn. I wanted to establish my bona fides to make them more inclined to believe my disinformation so I volunteered intel they already knew, or would figure out.

  “My name is Harold Schroeder. I am a special agent of the Office of Policy Co-ordination, which is a semi-independent covert operations arm of the CIA. I report to Frank Wisner, the director of OPC. I was sent here to liaise with Captain Sorin Dragomir, to assess the readiness of his squad in the event that OPC might want to offer logistical support for a future, yet-to-be-determined mission.”

  I paused to see how this was going over. Blank stares from the armbreakers. Doubtful they knew more English than ‘okay’ and ‘Mickey Mouse.’ But the old buzzard seemed to understand some of what I said. I concluded with, “And that is all I’m prepared to say.”

  The old buzzard used his long ropy arms to push himself up off his chair. His legs were little more than bowed sticks but his upper body was still strong, as if he’d been on crutches most of his life. I saw that his black eyes were afire as he slowly made his way to my end of the table. His armbreakers started to follow but he waved them off. He wanted me all to himself.

  I felt a strong and visceral dislike for this old creep. I knew I should submit to abuse in order to win the opportunity to sow disinformation. I also knew that if this son-of-a-whore raised his leathery mitt to smack me I would jump up, lock my cuffed hands behind his neck and use the peak of my brow to drive his nasal cavity deep into his forebrain which, according to Fearless Dan, our hand-to-hand instructor at spy school, usually does the trick.

  But the old buzzard hadn’t made it to a ripe old age by pushing his luck. He stopped short of throttling range and cleared his throat by way of a ragged cough followed by a putrid belch. He showed me black gums and yellow teeth.

  “Do not concern yourself, Mr. Schroeder, with your preparation.”

  I didn’t take his meaning, looked confused.

  “Your preparation to speak, that is our task.”

  Oh, shit. I pictured pliers and power drills, serrated knives.

  But it wasn’t like that. The armbreakers merely cuffed me to the back of the chair and took turns slapping me silly when I declined the answer the old buzzard’s questions about Captain Dragomir’s nefarious plot.

  They paced themselves this time, dumping water on my head when I pretended to pass out. I would come to and beg for mercy, absorb a few more smacks then blurt out some bullshit the old buzzard wrote down on a pad of paper.

  The whole thing felt like an act, like a dress rehearsal for the real thing. I suffered the abuse okay. It stung like hell until it didn’t. They weren’t doing any permanent damage, that’s all I cared about.

  And laying on a beating isn’t like twisting the dial of a generator that’s alligator clipped to your scrotum. It’s personal, your tormentors feel the impact of each blow. And they get tired.

  The armbreakers ran out of steam after an hour or so and looked to the boss man for further instruction. He had filled three pages of note paper with my ramblings. The old buzzard answered by stumping over to a sideboard and grabbing a bottle filled with dark purple liquid.

  My torture had just begun. The bottle was filled with plum brandy.

&nb
sp; I liked the boss man a lot better after a few pops. He even allowed me a chunk of cheese to quell the bonfire in my empty gut started by the purple gasoline. My ears rung and my cheeks burned but I was okay.

  Come to find out the old buzzard had learned some English during World War One when he worked with the Central Powers against Great Britain and the U.S. He learned some more English in World War Two when he worked with Great Britain and the U.S. against the Axis. But the political winds had shifted once again. The fascists had been defeated. The Yanks and Brits were the new-old bad guys.

  I asked him why that was, why the Magyars subscribed to Marxist-Leninist ideology. He didn’t seem to know what that was so I asked him why his people sided with the Communists. His explanation was straightforward.

  “When Nazişti took power the Iron Guard killed our families. Now it is our turn.”

  He recounted grisly tales of Iron Guard atrocities during the war as we drank Ţuică. I only remember one story. How they rounded up folks in one village and used the electric saws at a meat packing plant to process the entire population, men, women and children.

  Man oh man.

  Frank Wisner’s worldwide clash of ideologies seemed a distant hum out here in the Carpathian Mountains. It seemed to me the real conflict was tribal hatred, and the settling of old scores.

  I was encouraged by our conversation. Why would the old buzzard tell me his people weren’t fire-breathing Bolshies unless he wanted me to pass it along up the chain of command? He was reaching out, he wanted to bridge the gap between the fierce Magyars and the buttoned down warriors of the Central Intelligence Agency. I wasn’t going to be dragged out into a field and forced to dig my own grave.

  That’s what I told myself in my plummy haze. It was a good feeling that lasted until the old buzzard poured himself a fresh one and crowbarred himself off his chair. The armbreakers stood with him. They hoisted their glasses. I hoisted mine in response.

  The old man said something in Hungarian. The only word I recognized was Securitate.

  I drained my glass because that’s what you do when somebody makes a toast, but it made no sense. The infamous greeting to the Emperor given by Roman gladiators as they entered the Coliseum came to mind.