A Despicable Profession by John Knoerle Page B

treatment. Not that he noticed.
    â€œHelluva setup he’s got there. Rolls Royce, snooty butler, and you should see the wine rack in the bedroom. Plus a bleedin’ – what’d he call it? – bordello. A bleedin’ bordello in the back yard! Man oh man, the feckin’ Brit’s got it knocked.”
    â€œInteresting to hear you say that. Because you didn’t show him much respect.”
    Ambrose waved me off. “That’s just part of the routine.”
    I stopped at the intersection with the main north-south thoroughfare. I turned south, towards Dahlem, with no clear idea how to get from here to there. The CO would be wondering what the hell happened to us. And our cache of weapons.
    â€œWhat routine?”
    â€œThe nip and nack. My brothers and me used to run it. They’d nip, I’d nack.”
    â€œAh. Well. Glad we cleared that up.”
    â€œDon’t be a dope, you know what I mean.”
    I crawled down the thoroughfare. The sidewalk in this block was buried in rubble. We shared the road with one-legged men on crutches and old women pulling two-wheeled grocery carts. I did know what Ambrose meant. Cops and crooks do it all the time. The brash rookie grabs the suspect by the lapels, the grizzled vet calls him off. How I got stuck being the grizzled vet at the tender age of 25 I couldn’t tell you.
    â€œI wonder what those tickets were for?” said Ambrose. “The ones the Colonel gave out to the Russians.”
    I jammed the brake pedal to the floor in front of a bone skinny old man who had either lost his balance or was attempting suicide. The truck smoked to a stop just a foot shy of his prostrate figure. A passerby hauled him to his feet.
    I turned to Ambrose and poked my right index finger in and out of the hole in my left fist.
    â€œYou think?” said Ambrose with a grin.
    â€œYeah,” I said. “I think.”
    Ambrose’s wide-eyed leer made his words redundant. “We need to get us a couple of those tickets.”
    I agreed with him. We drove south down the thoroughfare, two young men with sap in their veins and lead in their pencils, buzzed with the exhilaration that only dodging a fatal bullet can bring. I felt great for about five seconds. Then I remembered what we were hauling in the bed of the truck.
    â€œUncrate that Browning AR and jack in a magazine.”
    Ambrose climbed into the back of the truck without comment or question. I checked the mirrors and settled in for a long nervous drive.
    -----
    The CO ticked off our failures on long blunt fingers. “Your cover is blown, you failed to do a deal with the Gestapo Captain, and you told the head of a rival agency that we’re hunting Klaus Hilde.”
    Ambrose and I were standing in front of Victor Jacobson’s desk in his windowless office at the white brick mansion in Dahlem. In back of the mansion actually. The garage. The long drive south had been uneventful. The delivery truck and its load of weapons was now parked in the driveway, secured by a single chain across the entrance. Henka, the foul-tempered Polish cook, would doubtless beat back any approaching teams of Soviet sappers with her soup ladle.
    â€œWe never identified the fugitive sir.”
    â€œNorwood will figure it out.”
    â€œCould be, but we didn’t tell him. I told the Colonel that we were pursuing a fugitive as a professional courtesy, seeing as how he risked his neck to save us.” That no one on our side was capable of doing likewise I left unsaid.
    That was the crux of it. The Brits might be ‘defeated by victory’ but their MI6 put our OSS and CIG to shame. Always had. We were the country cousins come to the big city to see how it’s done. That the Berlin Bureau Chief of MI6 had to rescue Victor Jacobson’s raggedy-ass operatives was the reason the CO was clutching a pencil so hard his fist got white.
    â€œKlaus Hilde is still at large, intelligence from