The Proxy Assassin (29 page)

“Hal, I've got my foot in the door. This is my chance to bust it wide open.”

“I understand, but if I'm seen to be buffing my own backside on this I'll be excommunicated.”

“From what?”

“From the dark and devious priesthood of espionage.”

“That's good. Can I use that?”

I sighed, I grumbled. “Knock yourself out.”

“You sound angry. You mind telling me why?”

“Not so long as you're jotting quotes in your reporter's notebook, no.”

“Then we're off the record.”

“Off the record? What am I, Secretary of State?”

“At the moment you're far more newsworthy than the Secretary of State.”

“And that's my doing?”

“Hal, we're talking about
good
publicity.”

“I'm not a politician, Julia, I'm a spy.”

This was a ridiculous statement of course. At this point in the proceedings I was a secret agent like Kate Smith is a toe dancer.

“I should never have let you talk me into…you know.”

“I didn't have to try very hard,” said Julia.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“I wanted to write the story, not be the story.”

“You explained that.” A phone rang in the background. I heard typewriters clacking. She was at the office.

“And what did Hal want?”

Miss Julia had a point. I'd told her I was sick of playing hero and that was true. But playing a hero who got outmaneuvered by a Soviet agent and had to be rescued by a girl reporter figured to be a lot worse.

I sighed,
I grumbled. “Talk to Frank Wisner at OPC. If he clears it we can talk.”

“Frank Wisner, at O…”

“OPC. Office of Policy Co-ordination.”

“OPC, got it,” she said, sweetly. “Do you have Frank Wisner's private line?”

“I'm hanging up now.”

So much for cocktails for two in a secluded rendezvous. Far above the avenue.

I felt bad for the intrepid girl reporter. There was little chance Wisner would give her the go ahead.

I plain felt bad. I'm a Catholic boy, I'd felt the black dog of guilt nipping at my heels ever since I agreed to take credit for dispatching Leonid. For some inexplicable reason I had felt it most acutely when I was repeating made-up details to the oh-so-polite FBI agents in my palatial suite.

I had sold myself a bill of goods, told myself I had mended my ways and now proudly trod the straight and narrow.

But that wasn't strictly true.

Being a
hero can be annoying, as I've said many times. I didn't enjoy it except when I did. Free drinks, fancy hotel suites, thunderous ovations.

But I was now at another annoyance level entirely. The concierge had delivered the afternoon papers to my door. My picture was on the front page of the Evening Star in a story reported by Julia Hammond for the Associated Press.

I shared the page with Harry Truman. He was above the fold, holding up a copy of the Chicago Tribune and grinning ear to ear. The Tribune headline read
Dewey Defeats Truman.

My photo was squeezed into the lower left corner. Just my mug, a caption and a ‘story on page 3.' I was also on the front page of the Washington Post, the Washington Times-Herald and the Washington Daily News.

Miss Julia had stepped up in class. My picture figured to be in every paper in the country.

The photo looked about five years old. I'd never seen it before. I looked like a sap, a smirky half-smile on my face, but that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was the caption.

Hal the Hero.

Hero with a capital ‘H', like I was a professional wrestler. Jake the Snake, Manny the Mauler, Hal the Hero.

Dammit to hell, Julia. Maybe you couldn't keep my dopey mush off the front page but you should never have written that caption.

I studied the photo. I was dressed in civvies, standing in front of a chalkboard. It looked like the photo had been cropped but I could make out the numbers
06/0
above my left shoulder and below that the letter
H
.

Think,
Schroeder. You're standing in front of a chalkboard. 06/0 is a strange number.

Oh yeah. That's the way they write out the month and day in the military, because every box on every form has to be filled in. The photo was taken at Camp X, on my first day at spy school.

06/0 was part of the date. 06/09/1943.
H
was the first letter of my name.

The photo should have been classified. How had Julia's editor gotten his grimy mitts on it? My mind got to wondering.

I turned the page and skimmed the article on page three. Miss Julia had done a good job with the timeline of my career. OSS spy behind German lines, undercover agent for the Cleveland feds and ‘extralegal' operative in post-war Berlin. Good one Jules.

The next paragraph had the subhead ‘The man who saved my life.' I read the quote from Jeanne Pappas of Cleveland, Ohio.

Julia was one dogged newshound. It was Jeannie, my Jeannie!

“Hal was a crazy kid, all over the place. Sure of himself one minute, shy and nervous the next. Like most kids. What set him apart, I think, was that he was absolutely fearless.”

Me? Jeannie came to my rescue on Kelleys Island knowing it was a million to one. Jeannie was the fearless one.

No, that wasn't right. Fearless is another word for stupid. Jeannie was brave, I was fearless.

In my wayward youth anyway. I felt like an old man now, making my way down an icy sidewalk with short slow steps. A little youthful
brio
might be in order.

I had done my duty, I wasn't going out again. But there had to be a better way to join the fight than trading on my phony hero rep on Capitol Hill, a better way to put what I had learned in the field to good use. A way that didn't involve cavorting
with Mata Hari's or sending eager young freedom fighters off to slaughter.

I needed a serious sitdown with William King Harvey.

-----

I had hoped to wow Harvey with my palatial digs but the deep pile carpeting betrayed me.

“Who the fuck are you supposed to be?” he said when the concierge presented him at my doorstep at the appointed hour of seven p.m. “Albert Einstein?”

The concierge looked up at me and darted a quick finger at his head.

I invited Harvey in and checked my appearance in the full length mirror on the back of the door, a last chance for Royals and Prime Ministers to adjust their finery before they ventured out.

I had been padding around the thick carpeting in my stocking feet. My hair was standing straight up.

I went to the bathroom and slicked it down. When I returned to the living room Harvey was nowhere to be seen. I found him on the terrace, peering down at the Capitol rotunda.

“Be a sweet perch for an assassin.”

“Sure. But who's gonna waste a bullet on a congressman?”

Harvey gave me one clipped laugh. “Where's my drink?”

“It's on its way,” I said with a sly smile. Bill Harvey had a treat in store.

We went back inside. Harvey flopped in an overstuffed, floral print chair and looked cross and out-of-place. “Good work on Leonid. He had it coming.”

I mumbled my thanks and changed the subject. “Frank Wisner offered me a job this morning. Congressional liaison.”

“Nice. How much?”

“He didn't say.”

“What else did you talk about?”

“Don't
you want to know if I'm going to take the job?”

“Are you?”

“I don't think Wisner wants to hire me.”

“Why'd he ask you then?”

“Me, he doesn't want to hire
me
. He chewed me out for chasing headlines but now he wants to hire that grinning idiot on the front page.”

“The poor hero in the penthouse suite?”

“Yeah. I hate that bastard.”

“I'd drink to that,” harrumphed Harvey, “but I'm empty handed.”

I picked up the phone to call the T&C Lounge just about the time the doorbell bing-bonged. Winston wheeled in a linen-covered cart bearing a bowl of mixed nuts, an ice bucket, a cocktail shaker, glasses, assorted mixers and what looked like a dark brown apothecary bottle. Try as he might Harvey couldn't keep the astonishment off his face.

I had Winston, mixing cocktails, in my private suite.

“You gennemens are partial to a Jack Daniels' Manhattan so far as I recollect. But if you might allow me…” Winston picked up the brown bottle and showed us the hand-lettered label.

BN /127
.

“We had a gennemen guest from Kentucky, from a family whose name you know, he was kind enough to leave us this gift.” Winston uncorked the almost-f bottle and poured a tiny dram in a shot glass. “It's what they call single-barrel bourbon, uncut, unfiltered. Hol' that glass up to yo' nose.”

I did. It smelled of vanilla beans and smoke. “Umm hmm.”

I passed it over to Harvey who slugged it down. “Tastes good too.”

I asked Winston what
BN
stood for.

“Those are the gennemen's initials,” said Winston, discreetly.

“And the 127?”

“That's the proof.”

“You're
kidding.”

“No suh.”

Harvey gave me a caustic look, as if he expected me to put my hand to my bosom and exclaim,
Oh dear me, no, that's far too strong!

“Shake up two, Winston,” I said.

“Yes suh. Maraschino cherries?”

“Well it's not a proper Manhattan without a cherry, now is it?”

“Not rightly suh,” said Winston with a quick blinding grin.

We watched Winston work his magic in silence. He set the chilled martini glasses on the coffee table and poured right up to the rims and just beyond, the icy surface tension keeping the drink from overflowing.

“I'll be downstairs, Mistah Hal. Give a quick call when you need another,” said Winston and let himself out.

Harvey and I leaned over to sip our drinks, two birds at a birdbath. The cocktails did not disappoint.

“What else did you and Wisner gas about?”

“The weather, Bill. We talked about the weather.”

Harvey told me to do something that is biologically impossible, then sat back and waited for the bourbon to do its work.

‘Trust no one' is what they preach at spy school. But it's unalloyed bullshit, unless you fancy living in a cave with a crate of K-rations and a Browning automatic. At the end of the day you have to trust somebody.

I decided I would trust Bill Harvey. It had something to do with his fondness for food and drink. Hitler was a strict vegetarian who didn't imbibe. Harvey would go to his final reward with a pork chop in one hand and a highball in the other. And I admire that in a person.

“Could be I told Frank Wisner too much,” I said. “I told him that Hoover called me in.”

“He would've heard about that sooner or later.”

“I also
told him I got the sense Hoover was trying to make me his snitch.”

Harvey shook his head, lugubriously. “Now you've done it.”

“What?”

“You've gone and dangled your tender testes in between the two meanest yard dogs in D.C. Now that Wisner knows Hoover's courting you, he'll want to send you back with slop buckets full of disintel that'll have Hoover chasing his tail for years.”

“You have a very active imagination, Mr. Harvey.”

“Like how, smartass?”

I threw Harvey a brush back pitch.

“Well, like ‘Hoover will want to know why you called on Julia at the Dewey rally.' Like ‘Wisner will drop you like a hot rock and Dulles and his black knights will dump you in the Potomac.' Like that.”

Harvey parked my beanball in the upper decks.

“We're wrong about everything in counterintelligence, Schroeder. Until we're right.”

We nibbled our drinks and enjoyed the quiet.

“That mug shot in the newspaper was my OSS induction photo.”

“That jibes with my latest theory.”

“I'm done with guessing games, Harvey. Spit it out.”

Harvey extended his pudgy legs and crossed his ankles. “Frank Wisner secretly authorizes the release of your classified induction photo. All bureaucrats like good press. But what he's really doing is lathering you up with pig fat.”

“You're going to have to explain that one.”

“Bear hunters up in northern Michigan have a trick I saw work a time or two. They smear their lead dog with bacon grease and turn him loose in the deep brush, hoping to scare up a big one.”

“The big one in this case being J. Edgar Hoover.”

Harvey
grunted.

“And I'm the lead dog.”

“Obviously.”

Well, it beat being a prize porker. I guess. The fat bastard might be on to something. Maybe this was why Wisner was giving me the royal treatment.

Harvey fought to lean forward in his pillowy chair. “Lab techs at the Bureau will determine your newspaper shot was classified. Wisner knows that, knows Hoover will conclude that Wisner released the classified photo because he doesn't consider you to be a true member of the secret brotherhood. And Wisner assumes that Hoover will try to get you all hot and bothered about that insult to your sacred honor.”

Bill Harvey gave up and let his overstuffed chair reclaim him. “Wisner will tell you to play along so you have motive, in Hoover's mind, to give the Director a shitpot of highly-classified OPC intelligence.”

I stifled a yawn. “How you do go on.”

“You'll see.”

“I don't wanna see, Bill,” I said, sober as a parson. “I'm no longer interested in working for Frank Wisner. I want you to give me a job in counterintelligence. You said I had CI potential.”

“Convince me.”

“We had a good network of White Russian informers in Berlin until Leonid peached them out to the Blue Caps. We had Nikolai willing to list all the Soviet illegals in country till our MI6 dearies got him tossed in the drink. We even had half a chance to launch an insurrection in Transylvania before Princess Stela blew the whistle.”