by John Knoerle
‘We who are about to die salute you.’
-----
I ate a last supper of cold beans and crusty bread. And more plum brandy. I was permitted a spoon this time. Then they dumped me in a swayback bed in a tiny upstairs bedroom, cuffed to the bedposts wrist and ankle.
I should have killed myself when I had the chance. I should have made a mad dash for it and got myself shot, or wrestled the gun away from my pursuer and done the deed myself. The Securitate weren’t going to play patty cake like the Magyars. They would get down to business.
The human body is such a cantankerous machine. The brain can’t make the heart or the other vital organs stop producing consciousness. The brain needs the co-operation of the extremities to do that via gun, knife or L-pill. Kinda makes you wonder who’s in charge.
I would have one last chance. They had to uncuff me in the morning. I could follow Fearless Dan’s instructions for quickly debilitating an opponent. Simultaneous knee to the groin and under-the-chin palm shot followed by a two-thumb eye gouge.
Yes siree. And I would do the same to the other half a dozen security goons in attendance provided they waited their turn.
Fearless Dan also taught us how to painstakingly roll a newspaper into a lethal dagger. Perhaps I could ask for the latest edition of The Times of London when served my morning tea.
I rolled over and passed out.
God bless plum brandy.
Chapter Fourteen
My proxy assassin gambit was a bust. Guy Burgess’ NKVD minders didn’t know, or care, that I’d paid him a visit.
I checked the papers the following morning, had a late breakfast, then called the British Embassy about eleven. Posing as a reporter I asked to speak to the Second Secretary. Guy Burgess was on the line in no time, sounding decidedly undead. I hung up in his ear.
I couldn’t figure it. I knew Burgess was a two-timing rat.
Smarten up, Schroeder, the Blue Caps knew it too, knew that Burgess was, in fact, a human train wreck. They would take what he gave them with a fat grain of salt and wouldn’t bother with surveillance. If my suspicions were correct they had someone else to keep an eye on him. His roommate, Kim Philby.
I was now, it must be admitted, a complete and utter screw-up. Nikolai was dead, Guy Burgess free as a bird. I could slink back to Cleveland and hide in the back stacks of the Public Library. Or I could confess my sins to Frank Wisner and take the Romanian job as penance.
I suspected it had to be the second option. I had sworn bloody vengeance for Nikolai’s bright-eyed young daughter. But I wanted to butt heads with Bill Harvey one last time. Maybe he could talk some sense into me.
Harvey hadn’t been in touch since he left my hotel room to try and patch things up between me and Frank Wisner. I had no way to call him. He wouldn’t want me calling through the CIA central switchboard and he hadn’t given me his private line.
I found the D.C. phone book in a desk drawer and paged through on the off chance that Harvey’s home number was listed.
An instructor at spy school enjoyed telling the story of a Turkish agent for the Axis powers whose cover was professor of archeology at some prestigious university in Constantinople. The Abwehr provided him with elegant, gilt-edged business cards to that effect, which he passed out enthusiastically. The Professor could not, however, resist adding a sticker on the reverse side of the card that promoted his real business. Ali Babba’s Carpets.
The moral of the story was don’t assume your adversary isn’t an idiot.
Sadly, William King Harvey was not. He wasn’t listed in the phone book. I would have to get to him some other way.
Harvey worked in counterintelligence but I had no idea where the CI unit was housed. They wouldn’t be in the phone book either. I sat at the desk in my room at the Mayflower and stared at the telephone and spun fanciful scenarios. The phone stared back at me. It had nicely labeled buttons. Front Desk. Room Service. Bellhop. Concierge.
I wasn’t sure what a concierge was but it was the only one with a red button so I picked up the receiver and pushed it.
“Good morning, Mr. Schroeder, how may we assist you?”
I had the address of the counterintelligence offices of the CIA twenty minutes later.
I got dressed and went down to the lobby at a quarter to five, shielding my eyes as I passed the Towne & Country Lounge. Executing proper tradecraft, I zigzagged several blocks on foot. Didn’t matter. No one liked me anymore.
I hailed a taxi at the corner of 17th and N Street. I gave the hackie the address of the CI building and waved a five dollar bill at him.
“Hope your wife can wait dinner, Mac, I might need you for a while.”
The driver, a slight man with greasy salt and pepper hair, said, “My wife’s been waitin’ dinner since we got hitched.”
“You log a lot of overtime?”
“That’s one reason.”
“What’s another reason?”
“She can’t cook.”
We found the address on Euclid, an old box that looked like a leftover army barracks. We turned left, saw the parking lot in back and set up shop on the far curb. The street was one way with corner stop signs as far as the eye could see. Excellent.
I shot the breeze with my driver and settled in for a long wait. Harvey didn’t figure to be the type who clocked out at closing time.
But he waddled out the back door not ten minutes later and motored out of the parking lot a minute after that. He drove a black Cadillac Fleetwood, the Stars and Stripes flying from the radio antenna.
“Okay, Mac, here’s the drill. We tail the Caddy at a distance for two blocks, then close in quick at the third stop sign and lean on the horn. Our guy will turn around to look and I’ll jump out.”
“Sure thing.”
That was the plan. In fact Harvey gunned his V-8 down the one-way street and slid through the first two stops sign so quick my driver had to floor his old Plymouth to keep pace.
Apparently Harvey remembered his training. Wanna know if you’re being tailed? Start running!
Harvey busted the third stop sign completely and fishtailed right. A slow-moving sedan that followed him through the intersection kept us at bay for precious seconds. I stuck my head out the window when we made the turn. The Fleetwood was gone.
My driver was game, preparing to whip around the sedan and continue pursuit. But we weren’t going to run Harvey to ground in this heap.
“Forget it, we lost him.”
He eased up on the accelerator and slumped back. “What now?”
“My fin get me back to the Mayflower Hotel?”
“Sure.”
The cabbie started to swing a U-turn and almost got broadsided by a fast-moving Caddy flying the American flag.
Crap on toast. I would never hear the end of this.
I gave the cabbie the fiver and climbed into the front seat of the Fleetwood. We drove north.
“Nice shag job,” grunted Harvey.
I gave him a minute to gloat before I said, “Does the most powerful man in America plan to have me clipped or doesn’t he?”
“No. As it turns out, your quote about us losing the Cold War strengthened Frank Wisner’s hand.”
“Nice of you to let me know.” We struggled through cross traffic for two blocks, half the town going home for dinner, the other half going out. “I’m taking that Romanian job.”
“Suit yourself,” said Harvey, left hand on the wheel, right hand drumming against his thigh. “But don’t forget the Cold War is fought mostly on the front page. The Reds have a fairytale they want to peddle to the poor and miserable the world over. Only Commies care about proles, peasants and peons.”
“Bill!” I said at the sight of a teen girl crossing in the middle of the block.
“I see her.”
Harvey laid on the horn. Or horns. The Fleetwood sounded like the Queen Mary sailing into New York harbor.
The girl flapped her arms and ran screaming across the street. We dr
ove on.
“You see what I mean?” said Harvey.
“Not really.”
“If I had run over that girl in my big black Caddywacker while gassing about my heartfelt concern for the little people, you’d think me a fat bag of wind.”
I bypassed the obvious reply and thought it through.
“You’re saying Frank Wisner plans to cram local freedom fighters into the Red Army meat grinder just to score a PR coup?”
“I’m asking a question,” said Harvey. “Does he back every wild ass bomb thrower who comes along? How is anyone, even a God-fearing man like Frank Wisner, supposed to make the right call about supporting anti-Communist insurgents when he knows that he wins a military victory if they win and a propaganda victory if they lose?”
Bill Harvey had a valid point. A point of morality. Not what you’d expect from a drunken wildebeest.
He punched the cigarette lighter, fished out a crumpled pack of Pall Malls and tossed them over. “There’s one left.”
“I don’t smoke.”
Harvey’s irritated wheeze rumbled deep in his chest. “Extract the last remaining cigarette, Harold, straighten it up and hand it back.”
“Oh. Sure.”
Harvey lit his wobbly Pall Mall with some difficulty and settled back at the wheel. We drove a block at twenty-five miles an hour.
“I’d bypass all that in-country horseshit if I was Director of OPC,” said Harvey. “You’re not gonna beat the Red Army in their own backyard. The better way to play it would be to round up some poor dumb ex-pat bastards, misbrief them and drop ‘em in.”
I got the misbriefing reference. USAF daylight B-17 bombing runs over Germany in ‘43 had no cover, the distance to target was too great for the fighter planes of that time. The result was a brutal rate of attrition. There were rumors that bomber crews were given phony intel about future targets in the likely case they were captured and interrogated.
“That’s poor dumb bastard, singular. I’ll be the one with the parachute.”
Harvey checked his watch. “Better hurry over to Frank’s office then, don’t want to be late for your misbriefing.”
“You’re a riot, Harvey. Maybe you can drop me off on your way to your daily squeal session with J. Edgar Hoover.”
Bill didn’t like my joke for some reason. He smoked the Cadillac to a stop in the middle of the street. Horns honked.
“Out of my car asshole.”
I climbed out and leaned down. “Sorry Bill, I…”
He sped off. I hoofed it back to the Mayflower, thinking that Harvey hadn’t talked any sense into me whatsoever. He’d given me a reason to go, not stay.
I might save some lives. Wisner’s Romanian resistance group wasn’t going to get a thumbs up from me unless they were crackerjack and battle-tested, unless their leader was up to the task.
I wouldn’t say no just to say no. They deserved the benefit of the doubt. A scrappy middleweight can KO a top-ranked heavyweight every once in a great while. Ask Gene Tunney about Harry Greb.
But I didn’t expect to find a scrappy middleweight in Romania. I expected to find a money-grubbing fight manager touting a flyweight with a glass jaw.
Chapter Fifteen
I was hauled into the backseat of a khaki-colored four-door sedan the following morning by three Securitate bruisers. They cuffed me behind my back but didn’t bother with a blindfold. We drove further north, deeper into the mountains, crawling up gravel roads beneath sheer rock walls papered with gray-green lichen.
My minders, two in front, one in back, behaved as if they were on a ski vacation, passing a thermos of spiked coffee around, laughing and joking, oblivious to the plunging canyons that crowded the narrow road and scared the bejesus out of a flatlander like me.
I was being taken, I concluded, to a remote location. A place where my screams would not be overheard, a place where my corpse would draw no notice. A grim prospect to be sure. Why then did the bruiser in the passenger’s seat, when we reached a lush green valley on the other side of the mountain, twist his hairy neck around to give me a wink?
My question was answered a short time later when we turned into a well-maintained, down-sloped driveway lined with trees. We drove a bit before rounding a bend and pulling up to a most unexpected structure. A stone cottage. A one-story building with walls of pink granite veined with gray and a roof of black slate, a small blue lake shimmering behind it.
The driver parked the car. His pals smoothed their hair and otherwise made themselves presentable. They walked me to the rounded oaken door and used a heavy iron door knocker to announce their presence.
The woman who yanked open the door wore the drab uniform of a domestic. She was broad-shouldered and sour-faced. She said something curt in Romanian. The men shrugged and shuffled, then snapped to when the lady of the house appeared.
I can’t say I was expecting her exactly but a pink granite cottage on a lake was clearly not a Securitate holding pen so I didn’t faint over when the lady of the house, looking splendidly relaxed in open-toed sandals and a mid-calf dress with diagonal stripes that highlighted her tiny, belted waist, said, “Monsieur Schroeder, hallo. It is again my pleasure to see you.”
“Thank you, Princess Stela, but I beg to differ. The pleasure is entirely mine.”
Chapter Sixteen
Princess Stela regarded me with frowning concern. I must have looked as bad as I felt. The driver pulled a folded paper from his coat pocket and handed it to her. I was a package that had to be signed for.
She said something to the man in Romanian, her tone sharp. He patted his pockets furiously. So did his comrades. No pen.
The hardbitten Securitate thugs squirmed under the gimlet stare of a young woman who couldn’t ring up 110 on the bathroom scale if she jumped up and down soaking wet.
The maid produced a pen from somewhere. Stela unfolded the paper and spun her finger in a circle, slowly. The driver grumbled and turned around. The Princess used the back of his coat as a desk.
Well, well. It looked as if I was going to be spared Lavrenty Beria’s iron fist in favor of Princess Stela Varadja’s velvet glove. No complaints here. But knowing the how and why of this stunning turn of events would have to wait. The last few days had suddenly caught up with me. It was all I could do to keep vertical until the Securitate handed over a manila envelope and lumbered off.
The broad-beamed maid must have seen my knees a-knockin’ because she took hold of my arm and half-carried me through the living room, down a hall past the kitchen and into a small bedroom on the left. A small bedroom with a big window that looked out over the blue lake and the green and purple mountains in the distance.
The maid – Ilinca I think Stela called her – plunked me down on the foot of the bed and set about unlacing my boots. Stela breezed in and asked if I needed anything.
“Glass of milk,” I wheezed. “Biggest glass of milk you ever saw.”
Stela breezed off, leaving Ilinca to the task of stripping my clothes off and rolling me into bed. I tried to help but I was spent. You don’t realize how much energy it takes to hornswaggle yourself into believing you’ve got a shot at survival until you actually do have a shot at survival and you feel your body shed its armor and collapse in a heap.
A man appeared with a tall glass of milk after I was tucked in. Though he wore a white chef’s tunic, a stained apron and blousy checkered pants, he didn’t look like a chef. He was skinny and pale, with cold eyes that took pictures of everything they saw.
Time to armor up again, Schroeder. The chef is an NKVD agent. So’s the maid. Bill Harvey’s suggestion that Princess Stela had Communist sympathies was correct. It’s why I was here. Stela Varadja was a Soviet Mata Hari.
Princess Stela breezed in again, in that gliding ballet slipper way she had. She sized up the situation. Me casting a wary eye, the chef proffering the glass of milk, the maid hovering.
Stela stood behind them and held a white finger to her purple lips. She flicked a gla
nce at the dome light on the ceiling.
I was to shut my yap and keep cool. We were being listened to. She was not a Red Mata Hari, she was on my side.
I sat up and drank the glass of milk. It smelled funny but tasted great, warm and creamy. Goat’s milk maybe.
Stela ushered her minders out of the room and closed the door behind her. I conked.
-----
I woke up at dusk, feeling like a new man. Like I say I’m a good bouncer-back. I gazed out the window as the last of the sunset gilded ripples on the lake.
What the hell was Princess Stela doing here? Had Frank Wisner sent her on ahead to act as my guardian angel in the event I was collared? That would mean Wisner was running his former mistress as a double agent and had orchestrated her surprise appearance to his Maryland farm so that we could get acquainted.
That, it seemed to me, was too cute by half. Then again Wisner hadn’t asked me to jump out the joe hole until after Stela’s surprise appearance at his Maryland farm.
Speculation, Schroeder. Stick to what you know. Princess Stela ran some sort of salon in Paris. And a beautiful royal would never want for dough. Why return to the wilds of Romania unless she was a Commie zealot? A Commie zealot with a taste for caviar and champagne cocktails.
There were, no doubt, a host of Commie zealots in Paris with similar tastes. And in Paris they happily remained.
I looked up at the dome light on the ceiling, the one Stela indicated held a hidden microphone. Her bedroom would have another such device. This charming stone cottage had all the markings of a classic honey pot, a secluded place where fetching young women extract state secrets from lust-drunk government functionaries. Why would Princess Stela need to stoop that low?
Bucharest was notorious as a den of prostitution. One of my mission briefers had quoted Churchill. ‘Romanian is not a nationality, it’s an occupation.’
Princess Stela might well be selling her services to the Communists but I didn’t think that’s why she was here.