The Proxy Assassin (24 page)

And there we were, Lenny and me, engaged in a grotesque make-out session in the back seat. I was reluctant to pull away and lose a chunk of lip so I pushed him against the seat back and hammered his temple with my fist.

This was unwise on two counts. One, I was too close to get much heft on my punches and, two, it hurt me worse than it did him. Bill Harvey whipped out a leather sap but he didn't have a clean shot.

Miss Julia saved the day once again. She pinched Leonid's nose closed. He had to open his mouth to breathe.

I pulled back and Harvey put him out with a quick sap to the forehead. I dumped him back on the floorboard.

“Are you okay?” asked Julia.

“I sshink so,” I burbled through a froth of blood, holding my lip in place with a handkerchief.

Bill
Harvey took a mental snapshot of my distress. “I am going to dine out on this story till the day I die.”

It hurt to smile so I nodded. Dutifully.

-----

Harvey used side streets to crisscross back to Julia's neighborhood across town. He parked in an alley a block from her apartment.

“Stay away from the hotel,” he said to me. “Call tomorrow, eight a.m. Use a rubber.” Which meant find a pay phone.

Harvey turned to Julia. “Write what you want to write, but keep my name out of it and give us 48 hours.”

“I'll give you 24,” said Julia. “And your name is William King Harvey.”

Harvey and Miss Julia faced off over the black leather banquette.

I didn't feel like playing referee so I tended to Leonid. He was face down on the floorboard, making whistling noises through his nose. Out like a light. Yet the belt that bound his hands behind his back was loose.

Tradecraft, Schroeder. Secure the prisoner, search for weapons.

I cinched up the belt, then groped Leonid from head to toe. I found an Exacto knife in his sock garter. The world turns but nothing changes. He'd had the same get-up in Berlin.

I handed the knife to Bill Harvey without comment. He grunted. I carried Leonid's limp body out of the back seat while Harvey opened the trunk. We dropped him in.

I gave Harvey Leonid's still-warm Beretta. Harvey drove off.

Miss Julia and I faced each other in the cold dark alley. The pinprick rain started up again.

“Now what?” she wanted to know, standing there, getting wet.

“If
Leonid was planning to pitch you a hot story about Dewey why didn't we find any photos and documents on him?”

“Maybe they were in that bag he carried off the streetcar?”

“Maybe.”

He might have set the bag down while he was stalking us on 28
^th
Street. But not if it held his precious evidence, without documentation Leonid had nothing. He wouldn't part with the pigskin till he crossed the goal line.

“We need to get you stitched up.”

“I'm not going to a hospital.”

“Hey, I'm good with a needle and thread,” said Julia, taking my hand, pulling me along. “And applejack makes a great anesthetic.”

She
was good with a needle and thread, Miss Julia. I held my flap of lower lip in place while she stitched me up with a great deal of furrowed concentration and sharp warnings to
keep still
. Moonshine and an ice bag worked wonders.

We were almost done putting my face back together when I heard a knock at the door. The businesslike thump-thump-thump, thump-thump-thump of a person who was not going to go away.

I got up to go see, a needle and thread dangling from my lower lip. I stood to one side of the plywood laminate door. “Who's there?”

“It's me, Schroeder,” said a male voice I knew but couldn't place. “Open up.”

“Identify yourself.”

No response. This was someone in the biz. He wouldn't give his name till he knew I was, in fact, Schroeder.

“I do fifty three times a day,” said the voice.

Schram?! It was Special Agent Robert Schram of the Cleveland District Office of the FBI. He did fifty pushups, three times a day, or so he told me back in '46.

“What do you want Agent Schram?”

“I want you to open the damn door.”

“Are you alone?”

“Yes. And I'm not leaving till I talk to you.”

“I can hear you fine.”

“Oh for Chrissakes.”

I didn't know why I was playing so coy, I wasn't afraid of the man. He'd been my immediate superior when I was recruited to infiltrate Cleveland's Fulton Road mob. I opened
the damn door. Schram eyed the blood-soaked hankie I was holding to my chin.

“The last time I saw you, you was bleeding like a stuck pig.”

“I believe you had something to do with that, Agent Schram,” I replied, amiably. He looked the same – gray, buzz cut, trim and angular.

“Yeah, sorry I socked you, Schroeder. I remember doing it, don't remember why.”

Our last meeting had been at an Army asylum outside Cleveland where he'd been sent after his WWII shell shock finally got the best of him. I didn't remember why he socked me either.

“Ancient history, sir. Glad to see you doing better.”

“No choice, had to. There were crazy people in there.”

I smiled, briefly. “What are you doing here?”

“Sorry for the interruption, young lady,” said Schram to Julia, remembering his manners all of a sudden. “I can wait out in the hall while you finish…whatever it is you're doing.”

“She's sewing my lip back on and you can talk to me here or not at all.” I didn't know what game was afoot but it never hurts to have a witness. Schram didn't care for my suggestion but neither did he leave.

I returned to the operating table – a hardback chair in the kitchen. Julia offered Schram a drink which he declined and invited him to make himself comfortable on the couch. He followed her into the kitchen instead.

“You a nurse?”

“No sir, I'm a farm girl with three brothers. I've patched up a few scrapes.” Schram watched her work with a grimace and an inquisitive tilt of the head. “Since Hal is indisposed for the moment I wonder if I might ask you a question,” she said.

“Ask it and find out.”

“How did you come to find us?”

“Saint
Lucy herself could tail Bill Harvey in that fatass hearse of his. Pardon my French.”

“Saint Lucy?”

Schram took a beat to tee up the punchline. “The patron saint of the blind.”

And there you have it, ladies and germs. Harold Schroeder had now, in his scant twenty-eight years, seen and heard everything there was to see and hear. Humorless, paranoid Robert Schram, a casualty of the brutal Leyte campaign in the Philippines, had told a
joke
.

Miss Julia finished me off with a deft triple knot and swabbed my mouth with a washrag doused in applejack. I was in heaven for half a second.

“The Director wants to see you,” said Schram.

“Now? Tonight?”

“Yes.”

“What about?”

“That's not for me to say.”

The Director was, of course, J. Edgar Hoover. That he had sent the one FBI agent I had some respect for meant it was a friendly invitation, one I could refuse.

Sure I could.

I went to the kitchen sink and washed up, cleaned the blood off my shirt and coat best I could. They weren't going to let me sit down with the Bulldog with a gat in my pocket so I handed Julia my pearl-handled six shooter.

“Get some sleep. Put this under your pillow and don't answer the door.”

For once she didn't argue. And that's how I came to meet the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation wearing fifteen stitches of white cotton thread in my lower lip and a brown maintenance man's uniform with a name patch that read
Tony
.

-----

Schram
had a trail car. Two feebs in a Ford Sedan Coupe were parked behind his Buick Roadmaster. He walked over and spoke to them briefly while I waited on the street. The one in the passenger's seat picked up the radio mike.

Our motorcade proceeded south towards Pennsylvania Avenue and the Department of Justice. My lip throbbed in time to the drumbeat in my temples. The warmth of the moonshine and Julia's touch were gone, it was cold out and I was off to meet the Bulldog, late on a Sunday night.

“You're a smart kid, Schroeder,” said Schram at the wheel, driving fast on the deserted streets, one hand on the wheel. “We hate your guts but we give you that.”

“Thanks.”

“Did you spot our tail on the streetcar? I bet the Director five bucks you'd sniff it out.”

I had not, but it seemed like Schram had a lot invested in my alleged criminal genius. Well, I
had
bested the Cleveland FBI and I suppose nobody likes being outsmarted by a dope.

I ran down the suspects in my head – the rowdy kids, the driver, the Negro maid.

“The maid. She looked tired after a long day's work. But she was going the wrong direction, heading into all-white Georgetown, not away from it.”

Schram looked pleased, vindicated. But just as quickly his face tightened. “Let me be clear, Schroeder. That's how I got my mind back in order, I got clear on the facts.”

“Okay.”

“I want to know your angle in all this, your payday.”

“Don't have one, Agent Schram. I'm not that smart anymore. Figuring all the angles, playing both sides against the middle…it plumb wore me out.”

But Schram wasn't listening. He was looking in the rearview mirror and growling. “Dumbshits.”

I
turned around. The trail car had stopped at a red light. Schram took a hard right on two wheels. I clung to the door handle to avoid spilling into his lap.

“So what side did you come down on?” he shouted over the roar of the engine.

We weren't so different, him and me. Two men scarred by war who tried to make sense of it in any way they could. He went bats, I got greedy. That we were now engaged in civil conversation while tearing down a side street at sixty miles an hour was a stirring tribute to something or other.

“I came down on our side,” I shouted.

“Why?”

The way he spat out the question gave me the feeling he was fed up, hellbent to outrun his trail car and keep heading south to Tierra del Fuego.

“Slow down and I'll tell you.”

To my surprise Schram throttled back and let his trail car close distance. I repeated, in different words, what I'd told him in that puke-smelling Quonset hut in Parma, Ohio two years ago.

“They're all bastards, Schram, you know that. The chest-thumpers and the speechifiers, the Commissar General of State Security and the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. They're bastards, they have to be,” I said. “But at least our bastards get swapped out every few years.”

Schram nodded along with my speech, then added an important clarification.

“Except for Hoover you mean.”

I
pictured the Bulldog sweating me under hot lights, his face an inch from mine, lips curled, breath foul, barking questions about the Fed Bank Robbery. And what bullcrap were Julia and I up to, embarrassing the Agency in front of the national press?

But it wasn't like that.

Two leather wing chairs sat in front of a desk the size of a pool table. J. Edgar Hoover sat behind the desk, his tie cinched up despite the late hour, shirt starched, hair parted. He had taken time to freshen up for my visit. Hoo boy.

This was about more than a few stray questions from a girl reporter. This was a full on sitdown at the adult table.

Frank Wisner's wartime affair with Princess Stela was a barely-kept secret. Hoover figured to know about Wisner's trip abroad and his arrival in London with the Vampire Princess. Did he know about the boy king and put two and two together? That would give the Director one helluva hole card.

Well, he wasn't going to learn anything from me.

An aide escorted me to the chair on the right. Hoover didn't look up from the important documents he was studying which, I noticed as I got closer, were late editions of several newspapers.

I sat there in silence for an eternity. Thirty seconds. When J. Edgar Hoover raised his meaty, marbled face and offered me a sawtooth grimace my blood ran cold. He really did look like a bulldog.

“Would you like a cocktail, Mr. Schroeder? I'm partial to Jack Daniels,” he said in an accent I couldn't place, a potpourri of down south and nor'east.

“Me too. Sir.”

Hoover's
aide went to a credenza and used the small side of a jigger to measure something less than one fluid ounce into each highball glass. No ice. He served the Director first. I wasn't sure whether to drink mine or dab it behind my ears. Hoover looked me over but didn't comment on my odd appearance.

It was okeydoke so far. Except for that empty chair next to me.

“I'll wager you didn't know the Bureau's pre-decessor agency was founded by a direct de-scendant of Napoleon.”

“No sir. I did not.”

“Attorney General Charles Bonaparte was the grandson of the French Emperor's younger brother, the Prince of Westphalia. He established a force of special agents in 1908. He was quite a character, the AG.”

Hoover leaned back and unbuttoned his suit jacket. He was wearing, at close to midnight on Sunday night, a vest. “Teddy Roosevelt once boasted to him that he made all his Border Patrol applicants pass a marksmanship test. Charles said that he had a better idea.”

“And what was that sir?”

Hoover took a tiny nip of his JD neat. “He told Roosevelt to have the applicants shoot at each other and award jobs to the survivors.”

I laughed along with Hoover's aide, who had doubtless heard this chestnut a hundred times. I was surprised. Even the Bulldog would have to slop on the charm now and then, if only for Presidents and Budget Chairmen. I was surprised that he thought me worth the effort.