The Proxy Assassin (11 page)

“You can drive this?” said Princess Stela, a question she should have asked before now.

I knew that GAZ manufacturing had begun as a joint venture with the Ford Motor Company in the early 30s, when the Yanks and Reds were on better terms. Ford had since been shown the door. But motor vehicles don't give a shit about politics.

“Sure,” I said, “I can drive it.”

“Make yourself acquainted,” she said. “I am needing to change for our journey.”

Journey to where, I wondered as she hurried back to the cottage in her full-skirted red dress. I put her suitcase in the back seat.

Stela
returned to the carriage house in traveling garb – black slacks, sheepskin boots, a dark gray greatcoat over a white blouse, her black hair piled up under a woolen cap. She looked like a very cute boy.

I had checked the fluid levels and inspected the tires while she was gone. We were gassed up and ready to rumble up the gravel drive.

The GAZ-61 was light on its feet for a car stuck atop a truck bed. When we reached the road I asked Stela which way to turn, thinking she would say ‘right,' the opposite direction from whence we came.

She pointed left.

“Why? Where are we going?”

“Drive the car,” she said, “and I will answer.”

I turned left. The night was clear and moonless. It figured to be about eleven. The stone cottage, like me, was clockless.

I drove a while, getting the feel of the stiff gearbox, enjoying the car's surefootedness on the twisty road, waiting for Princess Stela to say her piece.

“Sorin Dragomir was Captain of Palace Guard in the time of King Mihai,” said Stela. She sounded weary, not keyed up as I was at our daring escape.

The manila envelope handed her by the
Securitate
would have briefed Stela on my Captain Dragomir connection. Her news about Dragomir's job didn't surprise me. He was a spit and polish kinda guy.

“I have a son,” she said. “He was stolen away.”

I drove on as the road climbed, jouncing over potholes.

“He was stolen away when Red Army deposed our king, as the tanks they come along
Calea Victoriei
.”

“To the Royal Palace?”

“Of course.
At that time I am supposing some member of staff has taken him, to keep him far from
Sovietici
.”

“Okay. And then what happened?”

“Nothing then happened!”

“No ransom note? No indication that your son had been kidnapped?”

“No!”

Stela Varadja fell silent. I filled in the blanks best I could. She figured her son had been kidnapped by some member of the royal staff who planned to use him as a political pawn. When she learned that Captain Dragomir and Frank Wisner had big plans, the tumblers clicked. She knew who the kidnapper was.

Frank Wisner told me his contact in Romania had a ‘secret ally' who was integral to his plot to overthrow the government. Sorin Dragomir said he was a monarchist who didn't care if King Michael returned, since he was a Hohenzollern descendant with a Greek mother. It looked like Dragomir had a better, purer candidate for King of all Romania. It looked like his secret ally was the three-year-old direct male heir of Vlad the Impaler.

It occurred to me somewhere after the second harrowing mountain switchback that I didn't have to do this.

“I was not sent here to rescue your son, Stela. I was sent here to assess Captain Dragomir's operational readiness.”

“And kidnap of young boy is part of this…readiness?”

“I don't know. Where I come from kidnapping is as bad as murder.”

“But you are not, now, where you are from,” said Stela, tartly.

“No, ma'am. Not by a long shot.”

My statement was punctuated a short minute later by a sphincter-puckering wolf howl. And not one of those Gene Autry movie wolves neither, keening mournfully from a distant ravine. This sucker was close.

I gave the
car some gas and leaned into the curve. It was better driving these mountain roads after dark I decided. You couldn't see the jagged tombs awaiting you below every turn.

“What is it you expect to happen here?” I said.

“We will go to Secaria, to Sorin Dragomir.”

“Secaria?”

“To the south.”

“How do you know that Dragomir lives there?” She flicked her hand at me, silly question. “Okay, and then what?”

“You will tell Sorin Dragomir to return to me my son.”

“Okay, and then what?”

“You will have some plans, plans to return to USA. We will join you so far as Paris.”

Provided I had a flight out. Plan A was contact the flyboys with my J/E radio. I counted Dragomir as my plan B since he had a back channel to Wisner. If the Captain had headed for the hills after my capture, however, and taken my J/E with him, I was screwed, blued and tattooed.

I had assumed Princess Stela had an escape plan up her sleeve when we piled into the GAZ-61, some romantic anti-Commie underground railroad that smuggled fugitives to freedom across the Balkans to the Adriatic Sea.

Guess not, kinda pissed me off. I kept my eyes on the road and asked PS a rude question.

“Why did you go into Ilinca's bedroom?”

“I am sorry?” she said, deep in thought.

“You went into Ilinca's bedroom after dinner. Why?”

“I went to make certain she was passed away.”

“Passed out?”

“Da
. I had given to her soup dose of Nembutal.”

“And how did that work?”

“Ilinca was, how you say in States,
a gone goose
.”

This was one cold chiquita. I waited until we reached a straight stretch of road to turn and ask another, ruder, question. One that William King Harvey would approve of.

“Stela, do you know anything about the arrest and execution of a large number Romanian expatriates in Bucharest earlier this year?”

“Everyone in
Romania is knowing about it.”

“Did you have anything to do with it?”

Princess Stela gave me a stare worthy of her murderous ancestor. “What…are you saying?”

I stopped the car and met her look. “You have been working with the
Securitate
and the NKVD. You have high-level contacts in U.S. intelligence. It's a logical question.”

“This, in Bucharest, this was something to do with Frank Wisner? How would I know such a thing? Frank Wisner would tell me?”

She had a point.

“The Blue Caps, they use me as whore,” she said, her lower lip trembling, “to take secrets from important men.”

“Okay, sorry I brought it up,” I said. But she wasn't done.

“You are stupid man. Do you not see where I am living? The men they send to me are all
român
, all
Comuni
ş
tii!
'

I wound my way up the mountain, feeling dumb as dirt. What she'd said made sense. The Soviets deployed much more secret police manpower keeping their satellite countries in line than they did worrying about us stumblebum Yanks.

We made the long journey to the town of Secaria without incident, and in stony silence.

-----

There had been no checkpoints on the mountain roads and precious little traffic. But at some point Dmitri or Ilinca would come to and sound the alarm from the radio room. The GAZ-61's distinctive profile would be easy to spot, even now. Come daylight we would draw stares.

So I
was puzzled at PS's insistence that we pull off the main road and onto a lightly-wooded country lane. “Why are we stopping?”

“I am need to sleep.” And with that Stela curled up like a cat inside her fur-lined greatcoat and dropped off.

I fought off the tug of slumber for the better part of an hour by keeping an eye out for traffic on the main road and listening to the howls of a distant wolf pack and the hoot of a nearby owl. Every once in a while the gleaming eyes of a nocturnal beast would flit my way. I hated not having a gun.

Stela stirred just before dawn. She opened the passenger's side door and tumbled out. Apparently even princesses needed to pee first thing in the morning. But that's not what she did. She retched, heaving violently three times, then coughed and spit to clear her throat.

She climbed back in the car, took off her woolen cap and shook out her hair.

“Are you alright?”

“Now I am fine.”

She told me to return to the main road and turn right toward the village. I did that, the GAZ drawing a stare from a peasant woman emptying a chamber pot into the culvert below the road.

All of the houses in the tidy village of Secaria were crowded up against the road, offering no inconspicuous place to park. But Stela directed me off the main road and up a big hill. Captain Dragomir's brick one-story commanded the high ground.

I turned off the headlights for stealth as we approached, as if that would do any good. The GAZ-61 sounded like a twenty-ton bulldozer grinding up that hill.

I parked. A light went on inside the house. An electric light.

The good Captain is not in residence
.

So said the sleepy gray-haired housekeeper to Princess Stela when we knocked at the door. Or so I gathered from the
housekeeper's head shakes and hand gestures. The answer was much the same when Stela demanded to know where Sorin Dragomir had gone. Or so I gathered.

I wasn't any use in this fandango so I slipped past the housekeeper and cased the joint. It was sparsely furnished with bare walls, more like a safe house than a home. There were scant clothes in the bedroom closet and bureau but I scoured the place on the off chance the Captain had left my J/E transceiver behind.

No such luck. I did spy something that Stela would find interesting. In the far corner of a back bedroom stood a hand-hewed bed suitable for a small child. The bed had been stripped and there were no stuffed animals or toys in the room.

But I kept at it. The bureau drawers were empty, ditto a knotty pine toy chest. I got down on all fours and looked underneath it. A small, brightly-painted wooden soldier, his hand raised in salute, looked back at me.

Had the kid done this on purpose, to leave a marker?

Sure he had, Schroeder, kid's a three-year-old superspy. I snatched up the wooden soldier and went to show Princess Stela what I'd found.

She thanked me with a quick squeeze of her hand and shoved the wooden soldier at the housekeeper with a torrent of angry words. The housekeeper responded with Romania's national gesture. She shrugged.

My job description didn't include browbeating elderly housekeepers but it was obvious that Princess Stela had not cowed this obstinate woman. I looked over to Stela but she was out the door.

She returned a minute later holding a drawstring jeweler's bag. She reached in and removed a folded sheet of muslin. She unfolded it slowly as the housekeeper and I watched with rapt attention.

What Princess Stela revealed to us was a small cross, not much larger than a rosary crucifix but considerably thicker,
heavier. It looked like silver but it was badly tarnished and old, very old. Not sure how I knew that exactly. The dark green pits in the metal maybe. The uneven edges indicating it was forged before die casts were mass produced.

The housekeeper took a long look at the silver cross that Stela Varadja held in the palm of her hand – the cross bar was inlayed with elaborate curlicues of mother of pearl – and fell to one knee, her head bowed. The housekeeper spoke briefly.

She must have told Stela what she wanted to know because PS turned on her heel and, with a tug at my elbow, marched back to the car.

I got behind the wheel. Stela took her seat. “He is in Sibiu. With my son.”

“How far is that?”

“As far as it takes.”

This was not a helpful answer. We were low on gas after the long trek and stopping at a petrol station would just give the locals time to stare and ask questions.

But wait, the house had electric lights. I climbed out and looked around for power poles. Not a one. Captain Dragomir had himself a gas-powered generator.

I found it in a tool shed behind the house, complete with a five gallon can of petrol which I promptly added to our tank. Then I fired up the GAZ and rolled down the hill toward the main road.

“What is that?” I said, pointing to the ancient crucifix she still clutched.

Princess Stela declined to answer. I stopped the car at the main road. “The crossbar's engraved with a strange design,” I said, putting the car in neutral, waiting, wasting precious fuel.

Stela sighed. “Wings of
dracul
, to protect the cross.”

I kept my yap shut and waited for more.

“Vlad Tepes Draculea died fighting Ottoman Turks. They take his head as trophy.” She rubbed her thumb gently along
the edge of the silver cross. “This cross, from his breastplate, this was all that was left…”

“To identify his body?”

“Da”

Nice touch that, the trailing off, leaving me to complete the thought. I found it hard to swallow all this historical humbuggery of course, but Princess Stela did sell her part convincingly.

And you can't ask a spy to do any more than that.

My
few days in Romania had given me the impression the entire country was a backwater and driving through the outskirts of Sibiu confirmed that view. Stores made of concrete block huddled next to crumbling gray stucco houses with broken windows.

My impression changed when we reached the center of the ancient walled citadel with its cobblestone streets, broad plazas and brightly-painted buildings with foot-thick walls. Some of the tile roofs had ventilation outlets that looked like oversized eyeballs keeping watch on the bustling crowds below.

Central Sibiu was alive. Gypsy girls in long cotton dresses stood on street corners selling flowers and cakes. Men sold live chickens in cages hung from yokes across their shoulders. A hand-painted banner proclaimed
Recolta de Struguri Fest
which, Stela explained, was the annual grape harvest festival.