The Proxy Assassin (20 page)

I was
surprised he knew my name. The makeup gal went to work on me while Captain Candybar lit a Camel and put me in the know.

“The cameras are below stage, so look down, not up. Work the mike from an angle so you don't pop. Keep your answers short and sweet, and no jokes. Heroes don't crack wise.”

I'd been gee'd up to dislike this guy but I found I had the opposite reaction.

“And one more thing. When you get sweaty under those klieg lights pat your forehead with your hankie, don't wipe it. Smears the makeup.”

“Very
good
, Captain,” said the makeup gal.

Al the press flack darted in about then, handed me a red silk tie and matching handkerchief, then turned and left without a word. A brass band started up a Sousa march. The Captain clapped me on the shoulder and made for the door.

“Those cameras out there,” I said, “they don't look right.”

The Captain turned at the doorway. “How's that?”

“They don't look like newsreel cameras.”

The Captain unzipped a hundred watt smile. “We're working without a net tonight, Schroeder.”

It took me a minute to decode his comment. Oh shit, oh dear. That wasn't a newsreel crew out there. We were going to be on television. Live television.

I donned my red tie and handkerchief and told my hands to quit shaking. I went over the lines Al had given me. I looked in the mirror and checked my teeth for spinach. The makeup made me look like I'd been embalmed.

I told the face in the mirror to grow some gonads. Told him he'd faced down murderous foes and grim death. It didn't help. I had butterflies the size of barn owls.

The speechifying commenced. A VFW bigwig was introducing the candidate. I left the green room. It was dark behind the curtain, lit only by a solo spot with a blue gel. An
odd juxtaposition to the bright lights and glory on the other side.

Captain Candybar was watching from the wings but the candidate was nowhere to be seen. I didn't mind endorsing Dewey for President, I didn't have much use for Truman. But it would have been nice to meet the guy.

I went and stood behind Captain Candybar to peek a look. The rousing introduction of Governor Dewey produced only a polite round of applause. The grizzled vets looked to be a tough crowd.

Dewey started out low key, said his thank you's and poked fun at his reputation as a cold fish. He had a powerful baritone that filled the hall. Then he launched into an hour-long stem-winder that was interrupted several times by applause.

Well, ‘interrupted' may be the wrong word. Dewey would come to the end of a stirring call to action, pause and wait till the audience supplied the expected ovation. He was hitting all the patriotic high notes but the vets were cool to him.

Could be it was because Dewey was in that awkward, in-between generation – too young to serve in the Great War, too old for action in WWII. He wasn't one of them. Which was why Captain Candybar and I and were here.

Al the press flack scuttled over to me. He was chewing an unlit cigarette and muttering to himself, unhappy that his boy was laying an egg. “Get ready,” he said, putting a hand in the small of my back. A fat bead of sweat ran down my spine.

“And now, my friends,” said Governor Dewey, “I have a little surprise for you, some last minute guests who would like to make your acquaintance. The Hero of Muhlendamm Bridge, OSS agent extraordinaire Hal Schroeder!”

Al shoved me, blinking, into the blazing light. The vets seemed to know who I was, the applause was solid. I grinned and waved. I walked over and stood next to Dewey and waved some more.

“And
the man they call Captain Candybar,” said Dewey. “The hero of the Berlin Airlift, Captain James Jenkins!”

Dewey and I looked left, the direction from which I'd entered and the wing where the Captain had been standing. A few titters from the crowd caused us to look in the other direction. When we did the vets let loose with hoots of raucous laughter.

The Captain had entered stage right while we were looking left and, by putting his finger to his mouth and tiptoeing across the stage, had the crowd in the palm of his hand before he ever spoke a word.

Dewey clasped both our hands, held them up and shouted, “These are the kind of men who will serve in a Dewey White House!”

The veterans gave us a thunderous ovation.

I hate the entire ridiculous hero rigmarole. But I loved every second of that ovation.

Governor Dewey thanked the crowd, shook our hands and left the stage on a high note. Press flack Al stayed behind to birddog the newsies. They wanted to talk to Captain Jenkins.

Jenkins fed them a couple well-chewed anecdotes in between praising the Governor's
unimpeachable strength of character
and his
lifelong dedication to the cause of constitutional democracy
.

All they trusted me to say was that Dewey hates Commies.

I did get to answer a question eventually, the one that the Dewey campaign wanted asked. Did I really think the United States was losing the Cold War?

I said that I did, but that a
President
Dewey could turn the tide of history and preserve our God-given right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Not sure where that last bit of cornpone came from but Captain Candybar gave me a wink and Al immediately thanked the members of the press and started to usher us offstage. We had hauled Thomas Dewey's ashes out of the fire.

“Mr.
Schroeder! Excuse me, Mr. Schroeder!”

What was this now? My eyes searched out the location of the familiar voice. She was at the back of the pack, Miss Julia, my fetching tormentor.

Al tugged at my sleeve but I was flush with victory. I brushed his hand away and called on the intrepid girl reporter.

“Are you the same Harold Schroeder who worked as an undercover operative for the FBI in December of 1945? The man hired to infiltrate the Fulton Road Mob?” she shouted for all to hear.

I hemmed, I hawed, I jacked my jaws.

“The mob that successfully robbed the Federal Reserve Bank with the help of three Irish hoodlums? Hoodlums who have never been apprehended?”

How in the name of J. Edgar Hoover did she know about the Mooney Brothers? They never made the press reports.

Captain Candybar interceded. “Young lady, I don't know who sent you but I can assure you that my friend Hal Schroeder is a straight shooter and a patriot. His service behind German lines made our successful wartime bombing runs possible. His courage at Muhlendamm Bridge paved the way for our victorious airlift over Berlin.”

I was Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote in other words. Fine, he gave me cover to slink offstage. I peeked through the curtain to see if the baying newshounds were coming after me but they were still clustered around the Captain, who was signing autographs.

Press flack Al appeared and jabbed a bony yellow finger at me behind the curtain. “What the hell was that?” he hissed. “You're s'posed to be an authentic American hero!”

“Sorry.”

Al wandered off, muttering obscenities. I stood there in a daze, prize porker to canned ham in record time.

I
thought I'd gone round the bend for sure when I saw Miss Julia come marching backstage, reporter's notebook in hand. Didn't she know I was duty bound to kill her?

“I wanted to give you a chance to answer my questions, set the record straight,” she said, pencil poised.

“How ‘bout you answer
me
a question? In our first interview you got me to endorse Dewey, now you're pitching rude questions at a Dewey rally. Who the hell are you working for?”

“Myself. I'm trying to make it in a business that thinks I should be covering baby christenings and flower shows.”

I cast about for villains. Harvey and I had parted on bad terms.

“Did Bill Harvey put you up to this?”

“A good reporter doesn't reveal his sources.”

“Don't quote me scripture, missy, answer the damn question!”

“Bill Harvey was not my source.”

“Was it Hoover?”

Julia laughed at me. “And you don't get a third question.”

Shit. This raised two very unpleasant possibilities.

“Tell me where I was wrong,” said Julia.

I should have read her the riot act but I couldn't muster it. She was just doing her job. And she smelled good.

“You got the gist,” I admitted. “I was a bitter young shit on the make who managed to cover his tracks. Till now. But the ‘Irish hoodlums' were just dumb kids dragged along by yours truly. Leave ‘em alone.”

“In exchange for what?” said Julia.

“I'll give you all the gory details your little heart desires,” I lied. “After the election.”

“I'll expect your call on Wednesday,” she said crisply, handing me her card.

I looked it over. “Is this your home address?”

“Yes.”

“Your
building have a doorman?”

“No.”

“Then move.”

“Why would I do that?”

“You've gone and ticked off some powerful people.”

“I'm used to that.”

I chewed my lip. How to say this?

“Julia, despite your relentless campaign to destroy me, I like you.” She fanned her face in mock humility. “But the people you've ticked off aren't city council candidates or utility board commissioners. They're among the most powerful men on earth. You need to be very careful.”

Julia studied me carefully. “On
earth?”

“Yes.”

“I've ticked off foreigners?”

“I believe the term you want is ‘foreign powers.'”

Julia bit her lip most fetchingly.

“I don't have any inside dope, Julia. All I know is that sometimes who gets elected President of the United States is more important to our enemies than it is to us.”

I
decided to walk those six extra-long blocks back to the Mayflower in order to clear my head. I hiked west on K Street. The White House figured to be somewhere nearby but I couldn't catch a glimpse of it.

The night had taken a turn for the worse, a jagged wind whipped pinprick rain. I put my head down, my collar up and trudged on, telling myself that nothing much had happened.

I'd been asked a few embarrassing questions by a cub reporter, been robustly defended by Captain Jenkins and hadn't been pursued by any other reporters. The press was zeroed in on the big election and I didn't matter a whit in the larger scheme of things.

But Miss Julia had exhumed a corpse I would have just as soon stayed buried. She knew details of the Federal Reserve bank heist that never made the papers.

She had an inside source. And I had two possibles in mind.

Both men harbored a deep and abiding hatred for yours truly and who could blame them? But only one of them was likely to follow me down a dark alleyway on a cold ragged night in an attempt to top me off.

I looked around for a dark alleyway to test my theory but K Street didn't co-operate. It was too early for the Shakespearean Act Five anyway.
When that ghost and the Prince meet/And everyone ends in mincemeat
.

We had just concluded Act Three, best I could tell. Prince Hal now had to determine the identity of the ghost. And whether this low rent production was tragedy or farce.

The rain stiffened into needles. By the time I arrived at The Mayflower twenty minutes later my mug felt like a cube steak.
I took the elevator up to the sixth floor, changed into dry clothes and rode back down.

I was unsurprised to find William King Harvey parked on a barstool at the Towne and Country Lounge. He wouldn't pass up an opportunity to have a hearty laugh at my expense.

But it wasn't like that. I almost fell over backwards when Harvey said, “That was a wrong thing that girl did to you.”

“Excuse me?”

“A man gets precious few opportunities in life to enjoy the tribute of his colleagues. That was a wrong thing she did.”

I figured this for a drunken jibe but Harvey didn't smirk and he had a cup of black coffee on the bar in front of him.

Christ. A sober sympathetic Bill Harvey was more than I could take at the moment. Where the hell was Winston?

I don't want to say he descended from heaven on cottony clouds amid beams of rosy light right about then, but that's the way it seemed to me.

“Good evening, Mr. Schroeder.”

“And a good evening to you, Winston. One of your perfect Manhattans if you please.”

“Certainly, sir.”

I watched Winston perform his mixing, shaking and pouring ritual before I leaned in. “I've got a choice piece of dirt for you, Bill, but it comes with a price. You tell me some deep dark FBI secret first.”

Bill Harvey did not reply, not right away.

Winston served me. I nipped at my cocktail while I waited to find out how much Harvey valued me. Was I a crystal blue cat's eye or just a plain ball bearing? I got a surprising answer.

“You remember Igor Gouzenko, the NKVD coding officer?”

“Think so. He defected in Ottawa, early '46 I think it was.”

“That's when the press broke the story. But Hoover was briefed on the defection by the Canadian MPs in September of '45, just a few weeks after the A-bomb finished off the Japs.”

“Didn't
know that.”

“You remember anything else that happened around that time?”

“Sure, Truman disbanded the OSS by executive order. October first, 1945.”

“Something he would have had a tough time doing,” said Harvey, nostrils flaring, “if Wild Bill Donovan had been able to report to Congress that the Soviet Union, our stalwart ally in war and peace, had an extensive spy ring in place to steal our atomic secrets.”

Harvey lowered his voice to a rumble. “Igor Gouzenko provided hard evidence that GRU, Soviet military intelligence, had twenty agents in
Canada
, in 1945.”