The Proxy Assassin (8 page)

I opened the door, made gestures appropriate to being welcomed, entered the apartment and closed the door behind me.

The parlor was a mess, stuff everywhere. I went to a back bedroom. Chaos. The place had been tossed!

Maybe not. I heard a toilet flush. My first instinct was to bolt but I told myself to grow some gonads. It would be swell if they got pix of us leaving the apartment together.

Guy Burgess stepped out of the bathroom in his boxer shorts. His hair and face were wet.

“Oh good, you're here,” I said, cheerily.

Burgess, bleary-eyed, was speechless.

“I wanted to give you a heads up in case you hadn't heard. Nikolai Savayenko – Soviet attaché, guy I was trying to recruit in the Town & Country Lounge yesterday – he was fished out of the Potomac this morning. We were among the last people to see him alive. I'm afraid the cops will trace his steps back to me.”

Burgess shook his head to clear the cobwebs. “What are you doing here?”

“I just explained that.”

“Well say it again. Slowly.”

I walked him through it again, admiring the gutsiness of Burgess' plan. His walking in on my confab with Nikolai had risked raising my antennae. He covered that by pretending to be a hungover zombie. Well, he
was
a hungover zombie, but a very timely one.

“I don't remember any of that,” said Burgess.

“The point is we need to come to an agreement.”

Burgess went to his dresser and grabbed a starched and folded dress shirt. From his closet he selected a charcoal gray suit and a red bowtie. The dark suit was a good choice. He
could spill food down his front all day and night and no one would notice.

Burgess didn't speak till he had assembled himself in front of the dresser mirror. “What sort of an agreement?”

“An agreement that we never saw Nikolai Savayenko in the Town & Country Lounge.”

“How does that work?”

“The other patrons were tourists and the barkeep was Winston.”

“The Negro?”

“The same.”

“And he'll keep his mouth shut?”

“He will.”

Burgess affixed black pearl cufflinks and a matching tie tack, chewed up a breath mint, then turned to face me with a smile thin as shaved ice.

“And pray tell me, Mr. Schroeder, why I should give a flaming fuck?”

I hung my head. “As a favor to me,” I said, simpered. “I don't want to be known as the man who let Nikolai Savayenko get dumped in the river.”

This was all terribly complicated. Me, hat in hand, attempting to win the co-operation of my adversary in order to derail a smear attempt against
myself
that my adversary
himself
had engineered. Would Guy Burgess recognize the irony, walk it back and glom that I was in on the joke and messing with him? Or would he simply bask in my humiliation?

It didn't much matter, he'd be fish food by tonight. But I wanted to know if Burgess was any good.

It takes patience. Imagine looking at the reflection of a pleasant someone in a standing full-length mirror, in a long hall of standing mirrors that stretch to infinity. The pleasant someone appears identical in every diminishing reflection until, suddenly, at reflection number thirty-two, say, his appearance changes, his affable grin becomes a fanged snarl.

Guy
Burgess didn't have the patience for it. He nodded smirking agreement to my pathetic plea, then looked at his watch and cursed.

“You have a car?”

“Got a cab waiting,” I lied.

“I need it.”

“It's all yours.” Burgess started for the door.

“Shoes,” I said, drolly.

Burgess looked down and busted out laughing.

We spilled out of the flat, cackling merrily. My non-existent taxi wasn't there. I cursed the wretched driver and stood on the corner to hail another. Now that Burgess and I were best pals I ventured a question.

“Frank Wisner is after me to background his Romanian royals, King Michael and Princess Stela. You got anything?”

This was supposed to be a standard mirror read. The Romanians were dirty in inverse proportion to the degree that double agent Burgess defended their honor. Only he didn't. Not hers anyway.

“Stela Varadja?”

I nodded. He snorted.

“Better watch yourself with her pretty boy. She'll suck your blood down to the marrow and you'll enjoy every delicious moment. Just ask Maurice Thorez.”

I suppose I could have asked who Maurice Thorez was but I had humbled myself enough for one day.

A taxi driver saw my raised hand and slid to the curb. Guy Burgess piled into the back seat. I waved him an affectionate farewell as the hackie sped south.

If you listened hard you could just about hear the NKVD camera shutter clicking below the telephoto lens.

My
internal alarm clock failed me. I slept like the dead in the barn stall until my cold shower at the break of day – a bucket of water dumped on my head by one of the young soldiers. He was gone before I could thank him.

It's showtime, guv'nor, rise and shine now. No need to memorize your lines because that other Mr. Schroeder, the playwright, ‘e never got round to writing ‘em! ‘Fraid you'll have to bail him out again, seat-o'-your-pants like
.

I wasn't sure why an imaginary cockney gentleman was giving me a pep talk just then but it did the trick. I knew what I had to do. When asked a specific question by my interrogators I would deny knowledge, suffer punishment, then cough up some nonsense that I would try to remember for next time.

I was free to make shit up. They wouldn't have any NKVD fact checkers up here in the hills.

A few minutes later I was handcuffed in front and escorted to my customary seat at the table in the country kitchen and given a cup of coffee so strong I couldn't blink for an hour. The old buzzard, the boss man's boss, sat at the head of the table, his two heavyset armbreakers stood on either side of him.

A tableau worthy of a Renaissance master. They looked at me and said nothing.

Guess it was my turn. I wanted to establish my bona fides to make them more inclined to believe my disinformation so I volunteered intel they already knew, or would figure out.

“My name is Harold Schroeder. I am a special agent of the Office of Policy Co-ordination, which is a semi-independent covert operations arm of the CIA. I report to Frank Wisner, the director of OPC. I was sent here to liaise with Captain Sorin
Dragomir, to assess the readiness of his squad in the event that OPC might want to offer logistical support for a future, yet-to-be-determined mission.”

I paused to see how this was going over. Blank stares from the armbreakers. Doubtful they knew more English than ‘okay' and ‘Mickey Mouse.' But the old buzzard seemed to understand some of what I said. I concluded with, “And that is all I'm prepared to say.”

The old buzzard used his long ropy arms to push himself up off his chair. His legs were little more than bowed sticks but his upper body was still strong, as if he'd been on crutches most of his life. I saw that his black eyes were afire as he slowly made his way to my end of the table. His armbreakers started to follow but he waved them off. He wanted me all to himself.

I felt a strong and visceral dislike for this old creep. I knew I should submit to abuse in order to win the opportunity to sow disinformation. I also knew that if this son-of-a-whore raised his leathery mitt to smack me I would jump up, lock my cuffed hands behind his neck and use the peak of my brow to drive his nasal cavity deep into his forebrain which, according to Fearless Dan, our hand-to-hand instructor at spy school, usually does the trick.

But the old buzzard hadn't made it to a ripe old age by pushing his luck. He stopped short of throttling range and cleared his throat by way of a ragged cough followed by a putrid belch. He showed me black gums and yellow teeth.

“Do not concern yourself, Mr. Schroeder, with your preparation.”

I didn't take his meaning, looked confused.

“Your preparation to speak, that is our task.”

Oh, shit. I pictured pliers and power drills, serrated knives.

But it wasn't like that. The armbreakers merely cuffed me to the back of the chair and took turns slapping me silly when I
declined the answer the old buzzard's questions about Captain Dragomir's nefarious plot.

They paced themselves this time, dumping water on my head when I pretended to pass out. I would come to and beg for mercy, absorb a few more smacks then blurt out some bullshit the old buzzard wrote down on a pad of paper.

The whole thing felt like an act, like a dress rehearsal for the real thing. I suffered the abuse okay. It stung like hell until it didn't. They weren't doing any permanent damage, that's all I cared about.

And laying on a beating isn't like twisting the dial of a generator that's alligator clipped to your scrotum. It's personal, your tormentors feel the impact of each blow. And they get tired.

The armbreakers ran out of steam after an hour or so and looked to the boss man for further instruction. He had filled three pages of note paper with my ramblings. The old buzzard answered by stumping over to a sideboard and grabbing a bottle filled with dark purple liquid.

My torture had just begun. The bottle was filled with plum brandy.

I liked the boss man a lot better after a few pops. He even allowed me a chunk of cheese to quell the bonfire in my empty gut started by the purple gasoline. My ears rung and my cheeks burned but I was okay.

Come to find out the old buzzard had learned some English during World War One when he worked with the Central Powers against Great Britain and the U.S. He learned some more English in World War Two when he worked with Great Britain and the U.S. against the Axis. But the political winds had shifted once again. The fascists had been defeated. The Yanks and Brits were the new-old bad guys.

I asked him why that was, why the Magyars subscribed to Marxist-Leninist ideology. He didn't seem to know what that
was so I asked him why his people sided with the Communists. His explanation was straightforward.

“When
Nazi
ş
ti
took power the Iron Guard killed our families. Now it is our turn.”

He recounted grisly tales of Iron Guard atrocities during the war as we drank
Å¢
uic
ă
. I only remember one story. How they rounded up folks in one village and used the electric saws at a meat packing plant to process the entire population, men, women and children.

Man oh man.

Frank Wisner's worldwide clash of ideologies seemed a distant hum out here in the Carpathian Mountains. It seemed to me the real conflict was tribal hatred, and the settling of old scores.

I was encouraged by our conversation. Why would the old buzzard tell me his people weren't fire-breathing Bolshies unless he wanted me to pass it along up the chain of command? He was reaching out, he wanted to bridge the gap between the fierce Magyars and the buttoned down warriors of the Central Intelligence Agency. I wasn't going to be dragged out into a field and forced to dig my own grave.

That's what I told myself in my plummy haze. It was a good feeling that lasted until the old buzzard poured himself a fresh one and crowbarred himself off his chair. The armbreakers stood with him. They hoisted their glasses. I hoisted mine in response.

The old man said something in Hungarian. The only word I recognized was
Securitate
.

I drained my glass because that's what you do when somebody makes a toast, but it made no sense. The infamous greeting to the Emperor given by Roman gladiators as they entered the Coliseum came to mind.

‘We who are about to die salute you.'

-----

I ate
a last supper of cold beans and crusty bread. And more plum brandy. I was permitted a spoon this time. Then they dumped me in a swayback bed in a tiny upstairs bedroom, cuffed to the bedposts wrist and ankle.

I should have killed myself when I had the chance. I should have made a mad dash for it and got myself shot, or wrestled the gun away from my pursuer and done the deed myself. The
Securitate
weren't going to play patty cake like the Magyars. They would get down to business.

The human body is such a cantankerous machine. The brain can't make the heart or the other vital organs stop producing consciousness. The brain needs the co-operation of the extremities to do that via gun, knife or L-pill. Kinda makes you wonder who's in charge.

I would have one last chance. They had to uncuff me in the morning. I could follow Fearless Dan's instructions for quickly debilitating an opponent. Simultaneous knee to the groin and under-the-chin palm shot followed by a two-thumb eye gouge.

Yes siree. And I would do the same to the other half a dozen security goons in attendance provided they waited their turn.

Fearless Dan also taught us how to painstakingly roll a newspaper into a lethal dagger. Perhaps I could ask for the latest edition of The Times of London when served my morning tea.

I rolled over and passed out.

God bless plum brandy.

My
proxy assassin gambit was a bust. Guy Burgess' NKVD minders didn't know, or care, that I'd paid him a visit.

I checked the papers the following morning, had a late breakfast, then called the British Embassy about eleven. Posing as a reporter I asked to speak to the Second Secretary. Guy Burgess was on the line in no time, sounding decidedly undead. I hung up in his ear.

I couldn't figure it. I
knew
Burgess was a two-timing rat.

Smarten up, Schroeder, the Blue Caps knew it too, knew that Burgess was, in fact, a human train wreck. They would take what he gave them with a fat grain of salt and wouldn't bother with surveillance. If my suspicions were correct they had someone else to keep an eye on him. His roommate, Kim Philby.