A Despicable Profession (11 page)

Wasn't it? Norwood wanted a source inside Global Commerce, he wanted a conduit to Bill Donovan. And he wanted to know what fugitive we were pursuing. Yet when I returned to his salon, ready to reveal the name, the Colonel couldn't be bothered.

I watched Sofie charm the loud men in a language I didn't recognize. I listened to the piano player bang out a very percussive version of “Our Love is Here to Stay.” I felt seven kinds of stupid.

I was starting to feel sorry for myself, sitting alone in a brothel with a glass of lighter fluid and a head full of
huh,
when Ambrose and a young lady tripped down the staircase together, looking like they just stepped out of an Andy Hardy picture. She was a pretty young thing, strawberry blond with rosy cheeks and a lush figure. Ambrose took her hand and pulled her in my direction. I stood up from my table booth.

“This is Eva,” said Ambrose, flushed and out-of-breath. “She has something she'd like to tell you.”

“I'm all ears.”

Eva wasn't quite a dewy young milkmaid on closer inspection. The rose in her cheeks was pancake rouge and she had hard-stamped wrinkles around her eyes. Ambrose nudged her forward. We made eye contact. I felt a flush of embarrassment. Her blue-green peepers seemed to look right through me.

“I have visit your Klaus Hilde,” she said in a thick German accent. “I can take you to him when I'm done work.”

“You're serious?”

Eva smiled most fetchingly. “I am very serious girl.”

She was that. I showed her the photo of Herr Hilde.

“That is him, yes. But he has big beard now.” Eva rubbed her cheek. “Scratchy.”

I didn't know what to say to that. I didn't know what to say period. This was all too good to be true. A tell-the-rich-Yanks-what-they-want-to-hear con job maybe.

“He wants to know how you're sure Hilde is Hilde,” said Ambrose, “since he wouldn't be using his real name.”

Eva listened to Ambrose intently then turned to me. “I knew Herr Hilde from the wartime. When he was big man, General. He was my customer.”

“And you recognized him after all this time?”

Eva held up both hands. “This was wrong to do?”

“No, no. I just wondered how you, well, no offense Eva but I imagine you've had a lot of customers and...”

“I am remember because Herr Hilde did not wanting to having sex. Not at first.”

“What did he want?”

Eva mimed holding a baby to her breast.

“He wanted to suckle?”

Eva nodded. “And to sing baby songs to him.”

“Baby songs?”

Eva sang a little lullaby.

“Schlaf, Kindchen, schlaf / Ich gebe Dir ein Schaf / Und es soll eine Glocke aus Gold haben / Für Dich zum Spielen und zu halten / Schlaf, Kindchen, schlaf.”
Sleep, baby, sleep / I'll give to you a sheep / And it shall have a bell of gold / For you to play with and to hold / Sleep, baby, sleep.

Good Lord.

Ambrose waved his hand in front of my face. “Hey Chief, this is good news. Let's do something about it!”

“Right you are,” I said with more enthusiasm than I felt. I gave Ambrose twenty bucks. “Go find Sofie and tell her Eva is done for the night.”

They scampered off together. I chewed on what was eating me.

Good news. Col. Norwood's bordello was a bottomless font of good news. A basted Gestapo Captain runs his mouth about Yankee gunrunners, the Colonel rescues them from a fate worse than death the following morning, Ambrose Mooney visits the bordello later that day, is led upstairs and trips down an hour later with more good tidings. What luck!

Ambrose and Eva reported back. Eva was cleared for takeoff. I got up and dropped a pack of Luckies into the one-handed piano player's overturned hat. He grunted his thanks. The tune he was pounding out was “Too Marvelous for Words”.

Yes it was.

We left by the side door, walked under the poplar trees, passed beneath the windows of Col. Norwood's noisy salon, crunched down the gravel drive and piled into the delivery truck on
Ernststraße.

I took the wheel, Eva took Ambrose's lap, grabbing and giggling. I didn't get it. In my experience prostitutes will do just about anything but show affection.

“Where are we going?” I said to Eva.

“I don't remember street name but I know the house.”

“What part of town?”

“Dahlem.”

“That's the American Sector Eva.”

“Yet he is there!”

I hung a U in the driveway of a boarded-up bungalow and drove west down the brick street in a cloud of fat snowflakes.

-----

The villa was sealed off by a head-high brick wall. It was a four-chimney job with a grape arbor in front, a steep four-cornered orange tile roof snugged down like a rain hat and a small front balcony suitable for torch lit speeches. The villa wasn't two miles from the CO's residence, not to mention the Berlin Operating Base. Herr Hilde was hiding in plain sight.

The upstairs was lit. We watched for signs of life.

“Did Hilde have bodyguards when you visited?”

“Two men I saw,” said Eva. “Very drunk.”

“They carry guns?”

Eva screwed up her face in concentration. “I don't see them. Guns.”

“What about Hilde? Did he carry a gun?”

“No. No gun.”

I watched the upstairs some more, saw the brief silhouette of a male figure pass by an upstairs window as Eva and Ambrose nuzzled in the seat beside me.

“Eva when you visited Hilde here did he, uh, have a satisfactory experience?”

She had a very expressive face, Eva. At the moment it said she had no idea what I meant. I tried again. “You said he didn't want to have sex at first. Did you have sex later, and did he like it?”

Eva's face said I was a very naughty boy to ask such a question.

“Sorry, I need to know.”

“Y-es. I think so.”

“Was there an intercom at the front door? A radio, so you could call inside?”

“Radio. Yes I think so.”

“Good.”

“What are you cooking up over there?” said Ambrose. “Using Eva as a Trojan Horse?

“Not to send her in. Just to get the drawbridge lowered.”

Eva followed this exchange with narrowed eyes. “Speak English!”

It was a funny thing to say, we should have laughed. But Ambrose was cheesed off that I was putting his lady love in harm's way and I was cheesed off because Ambrose had broken the cardinal rule. They dress it up with fancy phrases like ‘fraternization with civilian assets' but my instructor at spy school said it plainly. Poozle makes you stoopid.

“Eva I would like you to do me a favor,” I said. “I would like you to go to the front door and press the button and say that you would like to speak to Klaus Hilde, or whatever name he used with you. Tell him you have to see him. Tell him you have never had a man like him.”

“I think he will not believe this.”

“Sure he will. Not a man alive that wouldn't.”

Eva giggled. Ambrose glowered. I parked the truck down the block. We walked back to the front door.

I gave Ambrose my handkerchief. “Stuff it in his mouth after we grab him.”

“What if he's got his gun out.”

He would ask that. We couldn't shoot Germany's leading expert on the Soviet military no matter what. “He won't.”

“What if he does?”

Poozle wasn't making Ambrose stoopid, it was making him cautious. And a cautious Ambrose was no good to me. He was worried that Hilde would shoot Eva in the moment after he poked his head out the door and we jumped out to dogpile him. I didn't want the charming Miss Eva to get plugged of course. But I wanted Brigadeführer Hilde more.

What can I tell you, it's a rotten business.

I was racking my melon for a quick fix when Eva said, “If he has gun I will say for him to put away. And he will do as I say.” She said it with a great deal of confidence.

And that's the way the cookie crumbled.

We drove down the block with a bearded man in the bed of the delivery truck, bound and gagged with my belt and handkerchief. Another adventure in ad hoc espionage.

I needed to conduct an in-truck interrogation of our kidnap victim before we pulled up to the white brick mansion. Our snatch was unauthorized, and we had only Eva's word to guarantee that Klaus Hilde was Klaus Hilde. It wasn't that I didn't trust Eva – I didn't but it wasn't that. It's that all this good news was giving me a rash. The bearded man resembled the old photo of Hilde. Same long oval face, same oversized ears. But his eyes and nose were different. Plastic surgery. Or a look-alike impostor.

I turned south on
Koniginstraße
and dragged the delivery truck down the boulevard like a bucket of chum. Eva sat in the passenger's seat and Ambrose kept watch on our guest in the back. I checked the side view mirrors. I turned down a dead end lane. No one followed. I parked the truck and told Ambrose to remove the gag.

The bearded man took a huge draught of air, coughed, took another. I climbed into the back. I explained that we were American agents and apologized for the rough treatment.

“Where have you been?” he demanded in perfect English. “I have sent couriers to your headquarters, to your General Clay. They were turned away.”

This squared with what the CO had told me about Hilde reaching out. I told him we didn't work for General Clay.

“Who then?”

“General William Donovan.”

The bearded man hiked his eyebrows. I asked him his name.

“Klaus Hilde, as you know.”

“Who was your intermediary in Karlsruhe?”

“He called himself Günter. He was to arrange my transport to Toulon, where I would catch a steamer to Lisbon. I was to hide in a manure truck!” The bearded man shook his head at the indignity of it all. “The NKVD had seen me even if your field agents did not. They were tracking me. When Günter contacted your operative it forced their hand. I was caught and captured.”

I didn't bother explaining that the US didn't have any field agents. Too embarrassing. I didn't mention that I was the operative for the same reason.

“You were caught and captured and installed in a fancy villa.”

Hilde shrugged. “I negotiated.”

“If you wanted to reach out to us why didn't you? You were living in the American Sector.”

“I was under guard. And they promised money for my family,” said Hilde. “I was not a true believer. Hitler was a fool, I knew he would be defeated. It is why I kept my files.”

He told a good story. But my neck itched. High value asset Klaus Hilde had got himself got awful easy. I pondered. An NKVD impostor would've been briefed about Karlsruhe. But he wouldn't know the details.

“Günter had something he wore that he was proud of. What was it?”

“I don't understand.”

“Think about it.”

The man stretched his spine, trying to get comfortable. I looked up. Ambrose and Eva were back at it in the passenger's seat. Christ.

“A medal,” said the bearded man after a time. “A bronze infantryman's medal.”

We had our boy. I climbed back into the driver's seat and swatted the two-headed hydra to my right. Ambrose returned to guard duty in the truck bed, Eva pulled down her skirt. I
scratched my itchy neck and fired up the truck, thinking about one of my spy school instructor's pithy proverbs.

One coincidence is just that. Two are suspicious. And three are a conspiracy.

Col. Norwood had rung up two. His happy rescue of Ambrose and me. And the prostitute in his employ who just happened to know Herr Hilde's address. If Norwood operated a brothel to gather intel the first thing he would have asked his ladies was, ‘ Any one have a line on Klaus Hilde?'

I drove back down the dead end lane and turned south on
Koniginstraße.
The Colonel said the Brits were sadly dependent on us cheeky Yanks. Could be Hilde was a gift to win us over, but Leonid said ‘valuable information should be sliced thin and served sparingly.' Klaus Hilde was a full plate, with a side of hash browns. Hard to believe that Col. Norwood would be that generous.

“Pick up the pace, will ya?” said Ambrose from the back of the truck.

I looked at the speedometer. We were doing a respectable thirty. Kilometers per hour. I punched the gas pedal. The great beast gasped and gurgled and snapped my neck back.

Light snow drifted against the curb. I fished around for my string of thought. Oh yeah. What the hell was I going to tell the CO? We were shooting the breeze at the apartment when Herr Hilde stumbled by?

I turned right and drove past the white brick mansion at a good clip. The chain in the driveway was down. I took four right turns and approached again. No one cared. I pulled the truck into the driveway and had a talk with myself. Relax, Schroeder. You're just doing your job. If you get canned you can go back to Cleveland, and defrost.

I told Eva to remain in the truck, told Ambrose to cinch up the prisoner from behind.

The CO's face was a riot of conflicting emotions when we marched Herr Hilde through the front door. Anger at my
insubordination, doubt that Hilde was the genuine article and barely suppressed eagerness to brace him and find out. He told Ambrose to take Hilde to the kitchen.

I gave Jacobson the full report, told him I had authenticated Hilde's ID, told him where Hilde was billeted, even told him how I came to find out, and braced myself for an ass chewing that didn't come. The CO had more pressing concerns.

We pushed through the swinging door to the kitchen and came upon an odd scene. Hilde was supine on the white tile floor, looking pained. Ambrose stood above him, pushing back on Hilde's raised right leg.

“Our Nazi pal's got back trouble,” said Ambrose by way of explanation. “I'm showing him how to get the kinks out.”