The Proxy Assassin (3 page)

Soviet radar and air defense systems were plain lousy in that part of the world so the USAF wasn't too worried about getting blown out of the sky by ack ack or scrambling Yak-9s. The problem was establishing a line of communication to my hotshot new Joan Eleanor transceiver in order to arrange the time of my retrieval, which depended on how things went with Captain Dragomir.

We were fighting the last war with new tricks. Himmler's spycatchers, the
Sicherheitsdienst
, were expert at triangulating and tracking down alien transmissions. But my hotshot new Joan/Eleanor used a much narrower VHF broadcast band which made intercepting signals next to impossible. Take that, you dirty Krauts!

Here in Romania, however, where there weren't any SD trucks tracking and triangulating alien broadcasts, the snappy new technology was more trouble than it was worth. The receiving plane had to be in a narrow overhead window to take my call. Why not use an old fashioned broad-range transceiver just this once?

I asked the USAF that very question and was given a lollipop and a pat on the head.

A de Havilland Mosquito would fly overhead at high altitude at zero dark thirty in three days' time so I could tell them when to come fetch me. If the weather didn't permit a flight they would come the following night, and so on. But the
real nut cutter was what happens when the flyboys get their wheels down.

‘Falling down is easy, it's the getting up that's hard,' as the old song says. No one has yet devised a way to shoot a ground agent onto a low-flying airplane. You have to land the damn thing, which tends to attract attention. You can't fly over enemy territory in broad daylight and the night has a thousand eyes. The Reds might have lousy radar in this part of the world but once the plane is on the ground it's a sitting duck.

I was an experiment is what I was. A guinea pig for both Frank Wisner and the United States Air Force.

My sister Beth kept a pet guinea pig when she was eight or nine. It was too big for its little glass cage and spent its days pacing back and forth through the tangle of wood shavings, going
eep, eep, eep
.

My sentiments exactly.

-----

The Captain was gone when I rolled out of bed the next morning. His valet told me he would return that afternoon and asked me a silly question. Was I hungry? He served a breakfast much like supper save for a fried egg with a golden yoke. Best egg I ever ate.

I wandered outside and enjoyed the sunshine. Golden birch shimmered amidst the black firs that crowded the mountainsides. The calendar said fall but it felt like summer.

I had supposed we were in the middle of nowhere so the rumble of a truck engine pricked up my ears. The road noise led me down a dirt path that led to a dirt road that led to an excavated roadway that may have been paved at some point but was now mostly dust and gravel. And busy with traffic.

Parked on a tree stump I watched the parade. In the space of half an hour I saw four trucks, half a dozen hay wagons, a babushka lady leading a donkey piled high with bundled sticks,
a group of men, scythes slung over their shoulders, smoking and singing as they strode along, two frighteningly pretty gypsy girls in long bright skirts and flowing scarves – hitchhiking – and a man peddling his bike down the road with his horse trotting happily alongside.

Oh, and a huge bull ox meandering along the shoulder – on the proper side of the road, in the direction of traffic – making his way back to the barn all by himself.

I walked back to the little fort, wanting to wash off the dust, but found no tub or shower, just a wash basin with a pump handle. I remembered hearing a mountain stream nearby.

It was down a steep bank, not twenty yards behind the building. I wound my way down a rocky well-worn path, watching every step. I wasn't going to march ten klicks to an army camp on a twisted ankle.

The stream roared along at a good clip but I found an eddy pond behind a boulder. I stripped down and jumped in.
Damn
it was cold. I splashed around for as long as I could stand it then scrambled out, catching my foot on a taut lanyard.

What was this now? I hauled in the sunken treasure, hand over hand. It was a canvas bag containing a quart of milk and four bottles of beer.

I didn't have any cash to place in the sack, I was traveling light. Gun, knife, L-pill.

While Hal the Younger would have filched a beer in a heartbeat, Harold the Elder, sadly, couldn't bring himself to take what didn't belong to him.

But wait. The old man had served me a glass of cold milk for breakfast though there was no fridge in the little fort. This was
his
stash, the cold beer was meant for
my
enjoyment. I was simply saving him the tedious chore of fetching it.

I shook myself dry best I could, got dressed, uncapped a beer against a rock shard with a smack of my palm and climbed back up the river bank. A wooden stool sat outside the
front door of the little fort. I moved it onto the scrubby grass and let the beating sun dry my clothes.

The beer,
Ursus
, was crisp and cold. I stretched out my legs and felt, for a man on a suicide mission, quite relaxed.

I watched a gray-white stork swoop in with a beak full of rags and sticks, which it used to feather its nest atop the fireplace chimney of the little fort. It was big nest, about two feet high. Which raised a question.

What was a bird's nest doing on top of a fireplace chimney at a time of year when the nights got cold? And where had Captain Dragomir got to? Probably visiting his actual residence, a house with running water and a furnace.

Wise up, Schroeder. The little fort is a prop.

Thanks to Bram Stoker, gullible tourists like me pictured Transylvania as a blood-soaked land of dark castles and vampire bats. But what I'd seen on that main road looked about as scary as Amish country.

Captain Dragomir, the big man in the little uniform, was simply trying to give the customer what he paid for.

-----

The Captain returned late that afternoon, looking pleased with himself. His cheeks were flushed but he didn't smell of booze. An invigorating interlude with his mistress perhaps.

I was halfway to cheesed off until he opened his leather satchel to reveal a bottle of homemade red wine and two fat hero sandwiches like you'd find at an Italian deli. My mood improved.

We talked about that night's march to the Romanian Army camp. “It's recon, not combat,” I reminded him. “No rifles, mortars or machine guns. Nothing more than sidearms.”

“This would be foolish.”

“That's the way Frank Wisner wants it.”

“But there
are many Magyars in the area. And they are well armed.”

“What's a Magyar?”

“A tribal group, Huns,” sneered Dragomir. “
Hungarians
.”

“Okay. And what tribe is your group?”

The Captain reared back, insulted. “We are Romanians!”

I was surprised to hear Dragomir faced armed opposition from other natives. My OPC mission briefers said that, in Transylvania at least, the storyline was simple. Oppressed peasants versus hated Reds.

The Captain nibbled at his sandwich and wiped his chin with a tiny napkin. “The Huns claim they are seeking revenge for Iron Guard atrocities during the war.”

I remembered that the Iron Guard were Romanian Nazi sympathizers who murdered Jews and suspected Communists during the war. Magyars too for all I knew.

“But what does that have to do with me?” said the Captain, pouring red wine with abandon. “I worked for King Michael, the courageous young patriot who had Ion Antonescu arrested.”

“The leader of the Iron Guard,” I said, hopefully.

Dragomir drank wine and nodded. “The Magyars are Hungarian nationalists and nothing more. They seize hold of any slander against us and use it to advance their goal.”

“Which is?”

I feared the Captain was going to perform a spit double take. “To forcibly return Transylvania to the Hungarian Empire!”

Guess they have long memories in this part of the world. If I remembered my high school history correctly the Austro-Hungarian Empire went bye bye a long time ago.

I asked the Captain an embarrassing question. “Were any of your men members of the Iron Guard?”

The Captain shrugged. Maybe, probably, didn't matter now. “We are monarchists, not fascists.”

“Admirable, sir. But I have met King Michael.”

“Is that
so? And how did you find him?”

How did I what? Oh. “I found him well, happy with his new bride.”

“Princess Anne, I haven't had the pleasure,” said Dragomir, stiffly.

“King Michael didn't express any interest in returning to Romania.”

“Why would he?”

“I'm sorry?”

“He was forced to abdicate. And he is a Hohenzollern, whose mother was a Greek.”

“So you are a monarchist…who doesn't care if your monarch returns to his kingdom?”

“That is not true,” said Captain Dragomir, wiping his mouth. He had somehow managed to munch his sandwich down to a nub during our brief conversation.

“Then I'm confused.”

Captain Dragomir gave out with a deep-chested snort and raised his glass. “Welcome to Romania!”

Haskell
the driver returned me to the Mayflower Hotel after my visit to the Frank Wisner's Maryland farm. I was having a Sunday evening beer in the Towne and Country Lounge – a thousand square feet of low lamped, leather upholstered, walnut paneled heaven – when a big-gutted man with thyroid eyeballs took the barstool to my right. William King Harvey, terminated by the FBI, now working for the CIA. I'd heard him described and there couldn‘t be two.

The Negro bartender looked to Harvey who nodded, then ticked his head toward me. The bartender got busy. Harvey lit a cigarette and gave me a pop-eyed once over.

“You take that Romanian job Wisner's been shoppin'?”

“No comment.”

“I'm Bill Harvey.” He had a Midwestern handshake, firm, quick and dry.

“I know.”

“Interesting that Wisner invited the Romanian royals out to meet you.”

This got my full attention, but I was wary. I had never heard of an FBI agent going to work for the CIA. Word was that Hoover had forced Harvey out for some minor infraction – showing up late, wearing his tie loose – but for all I knew Bill Harvey was Hoover's mole. He sure didn't look CIA. He looked, in fact, like J. Edgar Hoover's fat bastard son.

“Thank you Winston,” said Harvey as the barkeep served him a brimming Manhattan. I was surprised to see Winston serve me one as well. “Drink up,” said Harvey, “the man's a genius.”

I took a bite.
Yeow
.

Harvey
didn't find an ashtray handy so he flicked his cigarette ash into his cupped left hand. “What do Commies hate worse than capitalists?”

“Beats me. Fascists?”

“Monarchies. Ask the Romanoff's, you don't believe me.”

“That would be difficult.”

“You in a yank?”

“Nope.”

Winston the barkeep slid a clean ashtray Bill Harvey's way. Harvey dumped the ashes from his cupped hand and leaned his bulk on the bar.

“Bulgaria was ruled by a boy king during World War II. His uncle Prince Kirill was installed as regent to cover the king's tender ass seein' as how the king's tender ass was about six years old at the time. After the Red Army rolled in the Prince was executed, along with the royal staff, hundreds of people. This was early '45.”

“What's your point?”

“Bulgaria's neighbor to the north is my point. Why was the King of all Romania permitted to remain in power till late '47, and then allowed to pack up his gold cufflinks and leave? Why didn't the Reds give
him
a cigarette and a blindfold?”

“Because he stood up to the Nazis?”

“He was the monarch of a Balkan republic that's been conquered more times than.…shit, I dunno, what's been conquered more times than a Balkan republic?”

Harvey laughed at my reply. “Mount Campbell, tallest peak in Ohio, 1550 feet.”

“Small country monarchs can't afford to stand up, not for long. Some people of an overly-suspicious nature might wonder what side the Romanian royals are really on.”

I nibbled my perfect Manhattan and waited to hear what Harvey was after.

“There was a woman in the front seat I couldn't make.”

I
didn't hesitate. Wisner hadn't sworn me to secrecy, and I was aggravated that he'd asked me to go all the way on the first date. “Princess Stela Varadja.”

“Ooh la fucking dah. Bet that was fun.”

“It was all pretty civilized.”

Harvey snorted. “Well it would be, wouldn't it?”

“You gonna give me something now?”

“You first.”

“I just went first.”

“That's just bullshit backstopping. Tell me something worth hearing.”

“I don't have anything, I…”

Harvey waggled his caterpillar eyebrows.

What the hell, in for a penny, in for a pound. “Wisner said they ran an operation in Eastern Europe earlier this year, ex-pat agents from the war, blown from day one.”

Harvey flicked ashes in the general direction of the ashtray. “That must have been Bucharest, mid-June.”

“Bucharest? Bucharest, Romania?” Harvey didn't answer my dumb question. “Are you shittin' me a pound?”

Harvey drained his Manhattan. “I never lie when I'm drinking, too complicated.”

“Wisner wants me to find out if his Royal pals are playing both sides?”

“Sure. But he won't say that out loud because he wants to deny ever giving that order if they come up clean.” Harvey stubbed out his cig. “He's an honorable guy, Wisner. A gentleman of the old school in the wrong line of work.”

Harvey looked at his watch, threw down a fin, nodded and waddled off. I got to wondering.