Flowers From Berlin (13 page)

To which the dwarf recited the page word by word. Then he pocketed Cochrane's five dollars.

"Let's try again," Cochrane said. "Game?"

“Sure.”

Cochrane took out another five. Mr. Hay matched it with the one he had just won. Cochrane found a file on Carla Tresca, an anti-Fascist newspaper publisher in New York. Thirteen pages. Mr. Hay repeated word for word after ten minutes of study. Then he duplicated the procedure for racketeer Dion O'Banion and for balladeer Woody Guthrie. Cochrane, meanwhile, was four fives poorer.

"Convinced?" the small one finally inquired.

"Convinced," Cochrane said. "My only question is, why?"

"Why what?"

"Why bother?"

Mr. Hay's dark brow furrowed. "You'll laugh," he grumbled.

"I just lost twenty dollars," Cochrane said. "I won't laugh."

Mr. Hay pursed his lips. "I figure," he explained slowly, "that if this place ever burns down, I'll be the most valuable man here. I can become an assistant director. I know everything, Cochrane!"

Cochrane blinked. There was eye contact, then Cochrane smirked.

"All right!" Mr. Hay exploded. "Laugh if you want, but that's my game plan! What's yours?"

"I don't have one," Cochrane admitted, wiping a tear from his left eye.

"Then leave me be, Cochrane!" howled the Bureau's only potential three-foot-eleven assistant director.

"I shall. I shall."

Thereupon followed a silence that lasted through the third week of Cochrane's sixth-floor exile and into the fourth. Mr. Hay obtained from Requisitions a stepladder, which enabled him to reach any top rear file on the entire floor. "I used to have this whole place to myself," he then pronounced. "And soon again I will."

"I hope so, Adam," Cochrane answered. But Mr. Hay was finished talking to Bill Cochrane. Forever. Or so it seemed. Or so, at least, they both hoped.

*

For the Bureau itself, it was the best of times and it was the worst of times, depending whose opinion one sought. The desperado bandits and bank robbers of the Depression era were gone, either dead or imprisoned or somewhere in between; Hoover himself had garnered much of the credit. But the gangland fortunes that had been weaned on Prohibition gin and basement beer were placing a stranglehold on the cities from Illinois to New York. The Bureau, to any intelligent observer, seemed outmanned, outgunned, and outmaneuvered. Or just plain outfoxed.

Two foreign agents, personally dispatched by Hoover, had returned from Moscow via Khartoum with no luggage and figurative bullet holes in their hats. Another had been buried in Rome by jubilant Fascisti, and yet another was missing and presumed dead in the Suez. It was a time when Hoover's agents were running into the ground, sometimes literally, all over the globe.

"Innocents abroad, version 1939," Dick Wheeler ruminated angrily over a triple Jack Daniel's one night in his Alexandria home. Most of the American boys, tough as they seemed coming out of the National Police Academy, hadn't known how to play hard ball with the locals.

As for Cochrane's escapade in Berlin and Munich, there were two ways of viewing it: One: Cochrane had scored a major intelligence coup. Every bit of information checked and double-checked. The F.B.I. had penetrated a foreign spy service for the first time. The mission was a success.

Or, two: Cochrane had left Germany at the speed of light with every contact apparently—How? Why?— compromised and scrambling for cover. The mission was, in the end, a disaster.

As for domestic Bureau politics, Hoover had arm-wrestled increasingly plump sums of money out of the congressional coffers. Frank Lerrick had solidified his position as Hoover's top spear carrier and Big Dick Wheeler had come East from the Chicago and Kansas City outposts to act as Hoover's emissary to the rest of the world. This triumvirate—Hoover, Lerrick, and Wheeler—sat firmly astride the Bureau. And rumors, no, the truth of the situation, had it that the Democratic Roosevelt would no sooner challenge Hoover's flourishing authority than he would have his photograph taken in his wheelchair. The President had enough problems with his reelection --- a potential third term --- or in choosing a successor.

As for Bill Cochrane, time passed slowly as he engaged in mortal, silent combat with tiny Mr. Hay in the Bureau archives. Cochrane suffered the middle-aged and mid-life agonies of the grounded professional. He went about his work, but entertained debilitating self-doubts.

He knew he had done something wrong, but did not know whether it was a homicide in Berlin or a misplaced adjective during his debriefing. He did know that he had gone to Germany, done his best, become a killer for his country and had left Germany in his socks. And all this was rewarded by six weeks in a stuffy attic with a cranky elf.

The weeks were totally joyless, despite even a passionless quick affair with a bosomy, blond-haired sub literate secretary from Texas. Her name was Mary Sue and she was on the rebound from a bad first marriage and was looking for a second, better one. Bill Cochrane was not.

There was now something chilling about his relationship with women. Both the women he had loved were dead. Perhaps passionless affairs were what he deserved, he told himself, as well as what he was doomed to for the rest of his life. Love was much too dangerous. Trouble was, affairs like the one with Mary Sue left him feeling so empty.

So he tried to bury himself in his work, as he had done after his wife's death. But work only conjured up images of dusty wooden filing cabinets and the diminutive sourpuss who reigned in the archives. Further, the current image of Frank Lerrick, who could have changed the situation, was of a somber, preoccupied man who shuffled quickly, silently and without raising his eyes from one office of power to another. Dick Wheeler was inaccessible. The prevailing sound of the day was that of doors closing.

Cochrane might have stayed shelved in the Bureau attic forever, except the Bureau had work to do. Good men were eventually needed.

Frank Lerrick finally reassigned Cochrane to the Baltimore office, where First Maryland National Bank had uncovered a chamber of horrors in, of all places, their auditing room. Cochrane's reception by the other agents in Baltimore was downright frosty. It was common currency that Cochrane and Hoover had locked horns over something or other. No one, including Cochrane, knew exactly what. But whatever Cochrane had, none of the other agents wanted it, either.

So as the months passed in Baltimore, Bill Cochrane felt the final days of his youth slipping away. If his services were not appreciated, he could not give other adults lessons in common sense.

He sought a job in private enterprise. He was, after all, a banker by profession, spoke a foreign language or two, and knew he could count on the Bureau to barter him a fine letter of recommendation in exchange for his resignation.

In confidence, he applied for work at three New York banks. Morgan Guaranty made him an outstanding offer. That settled it.

He would move to New York. He would receive a salary that was more than fair. He would find himself a comfortable apartment and, he hoped against hope, a special woman. He would settle down, remarry, acquire an inch or two around the waistline probably, and mind his own business while the rest of the world tumbled sublimely into hell in a Fascist basket. He had made his contribution. Who could blame him in his position for now settling on a little peace and quiet?

So on a steamy summer afternoon, he typed out his letter of resignation from the Bureau, a chore he had been putting off for several days. And it was at that very moment, as luck would have it, that his secretary, Patricia, entered the room with an outlandish suggestion: J. Edgar himself was on the line, beckoning him, summoning him, no, ordering him to Washington as soon as humanly possible.

"Fine, indeed," Cochrane thought to himself, setting down the telephone and gazing at the completed letter on his desk. He looked at the calendar and made a mental note. August 3, 1939. "I'll deliver my resignation in person."

PART FOUR

August-September

1939

TEN

". . and captured as soon as he is discovered," J. Edgar Hoover droned on into the night. "This man must be put out of operation quickly and by whatever means possible. We are acting upon the orders of the White House, itself, Mr. Cochrane. This Bureau's very reputation is at stake."

"Meaning," thought Bill Cochrane as he listened to Hoover, "your own reputation." But after seventy-five minutes of briefing around the oak conference table at Bureau headquarters, Cochrane distilled Hoover's rumblings down to their most simple component: Cochrane was to perform a miracle. He was to catch the most dangerous and elusive of Hitler's spies in America. Period.

Cochrane could feel his letter of resignation sitting heavily in the inside pocket of his suit jacket. It had been his intention to let the Chief have his say, then present the letter.

It was eight o'clock. Cochrane searched the impassive faces of the two other men at the table, one to Hoover's right, the other to his left. He felt his mood darken. Two hours earlier he had had a great job lined up in New York. Now, this.

Directly on Hoover's right, appropriately, was Frank Lerrick, who still carried the lofty title of Assistant Director—Personnel. It was commonly known within official Washington that aside from Clyde Tolson, Hoover's lifelong friend and companion, Lerrick was the man closest to Hoover's ear and heart. Sometimes even literally, as at this moment. Lerrick, at age fifty, was six years older than Hoover and a product of the ever-malevolent New York office. He was said to be even-tempered—always in a bad mood—and if he had ever laughed, it was by accident and no one caught him. Frank Lerrick was tight, hard, and silent. He played his college football at Loyola of Chicago, had served with General Pershing in both Mexico and Flanders, and had since 1923 been married to a stunningly beautiful former debutante from Manhasset, Long Island, who was ten years his junior. Lerrick and his wife lived in a spacious remodeled farmhouse in Chevy Chase, where they raised their three children.

J. Edgar Hoover loved him; most everyone else in the Bureau hated him, for reasons real and imagined.

The other man in the room, Richard Wheeler, had left a strategically empty chair between himself and the director when he had chosen his own place. Wheeler was now in charge of budget appropriations within the F.B.I.. He had long held some cryptic title to match, but no one ever knew exactly what it was. Wheeler was the big, rugged, affable, round-shouldered Missourian who had graduated with honors from the Bank Robbery Division of the Indianapolis office seven years earlier and went on to become Cochrane's immediate superior in the fang-and-claw operations in Chicago and Kansas City. And, if Bureau rumor could be believed, it had been Wheeler's recommendation that had dispatched Cochrane to Germany in 1937.

At age forty-two, Wheeler was now in Washington because Hoover had needed a liaison between the Bureau and Capital Hill. Blond, articulate, and conservative, his usual style—a good-ole-boy grin, a slap on the back, and lunch at a chili parlor—masked his needle-sharp intellect. On the Hill he was much loved, a development that had given rise just that previous week to a second title thrust upon him by the director: Coordinator of Domestic and International Security Operations, which meant counterintelligence, which, as everyone knew, the F.B.I. was not involved in.

This second crown upon Wheeler's head was a master stroke: Hoover had put his most popular employee in charge of espionage, then dispatched him to the Hill to drink beer and eat chili with the various chairmen of committees. In one move, Hoover had outflanked any other intelligence service that Roosevelt might create.

But more immediately for Bill Cochrane, Wheeler was again his direct superior—not such a bad development. Wheeler seemed to be a fair-minded man whose opinions Hoover actually sought and trusted. Given the proper circumstances, Wheeler could be the most important ally a field agent could have.

"You'll be reporting to me each week on your progress, Bill," Wheeler drawled as Hoover paused. "Monday mornings, I'd think. Got to start the week off to a start some way, right?" He shrugged, mustering a belated grin.

"Of course, Bill," interjected Lerrick slippery politeness, "you'll have to drop everything you're, uh, doing in Baltimore. Turn the paperwork over to your assistants."

"That won't be difficult, Frank," Cochrane answered without a blink. "I have no assistants. And, uh, I've been given virtually nothing to do."

Lerrick smarted sharply and looked like he had swallowed a bad piece of poultry, feathers and all. Big Dick Wheeler's grin broadened like a bear's. Meanwhile, Hoover rambled discursively. A bomb at the naval depot in Brooklyn. A fire at the Frankford arsenal in Philadelphia. That devastating bomb that sank the
Wolfe
. Yes, yes, yes, Cochrane thought. He read the newspapers, too.

Then Hoover moved toward a conclusion. The F.B.I. had next to nothing on the bomber. The Bureau had a few theories, but no witnesses and no clues. Nowhere to even start the investigation.

"Originally we thought this man was part of a network headed by a German agent named Duquaine. Fritz Duquaine, I think," Dick Wheeler volunteered politely. "But apparently he is not."

"How do you know?"

"We have every major ring infiltrated, to one degree or another," Wheeler said. "There's no mention of this man anywhere. He had shown up in a rumor somehow if we had something."

Cochrane nodded. It was just like the F.B.I. to tell him who or what the spy wasn't. He thought of the other letter he had typed that afternoon, the one to Morgan Guaranty. He wondered whether Patricia had mailed it.

At length, Hoover pushed some files together and Lerrick quickly came to his assistance, energetically arranging them in two piles for no visible reason.

"So then," Hoover said in conclusion, "Agent Cochrane, I'm confident that you'll be successful. Quick and successful."

Then Hoover was out the door with not so much as a benedictory parting word. Lerrick was on the director's heels. They left Cochrane alone with Dick Wheeler, who exhaled a long breath, rose slowly, and with some effort buttoned the front of his jacket. His gaze moved slowly across the table to Cochrane and settled there.

"Got a fine one for you, don't we?" said Wheeler.

"Yes. Naturally," Cochrane answered, examining a dozen tattered file folders. "I can keep these?"

"They're yours now. Course, I'll warn you straight off, Bill,” Wheeler said. There's not much in them. The investigation was completely spotty until the President called the Chief over to the White House. Ever since then, the Chief’s been behaving like he's got a hornet in his underwear."

"I thought he always behaved that way."

"Sometimes it's just two hornets." Wheeler smiled, ever the diplomat.

"Just tell me this. Do we know anything at all about the man we're looking for?"

"Well," Wheeler allowed, "we're pretty sure he's German."

"Thank God for that much."

Wheeler gave Cochrane a supportive touch on the shoulder as he departed. Cochrane listened to Wheeler's footsteps diminish down the corridor. He looked at his watch. He had two hours before the last train departed for Baltimore. He reached for the files, picked one at random, and began to read.

*

Bill Cochrane walked slowly down the concrete platform at Union Station. It was a few minutes past eleven. He was grateful to be sprung from the stultifying assignment in Baltimore. It would take only a day or two for indictments there to be drawn up, anyway. It was the type of case that could easily be passed along to others.

Why then, he wondered, was he depressed? Because he had been more set on leaving the Bureau than even he had realized? Because he actually feared getting back into the spy game? Because in mid-life he could actually do without this type of thing?

He looked down the empty tracks. He scrounged a penny from his pocket and bought himself a ball of gum from a machine. The gum refreshed his stale mouth, so he bought two more and chewed them, too.

He strolled down the platform and listened to the sound of his own feet. Then his footsteps were drowned out by a chorus of upraised voices.

A trio of uniformed British sailors appeared on the platform and began to move toward him, singing raucously and off-key. They filled the rafters of the old train with their intoxicated voices. They braced each other with interlocked arms and sang:

"Twenty-eight bottles of beer on the wall,

Twenty-eight bottles of beer. . ."

Their voices grew louder as they weaved in his direction, singing twenty-seven, twenty-six, twenty- five bottles, one insufferably after another, all doomed to slip and fall. Then they were right next to him. The sailors were little more than boys, fresh-faced and cleanly shaven, the oldest probably being no more than twenty-one. On their caps they wore the markings of the HMS Adriana. They grinned at Cochrane.

"I'd buy you all a beer," Cochrane said in return, "but I don't think you need it."

They laughed.

"Where you all from?" Cochrane asked.

"I'm from the capital of Ireland," said the first sailor. "We all are," said the younger boy to his left, a rosy cheeked youth with short brown hair.

"The capital of Ireland!" shouted the third, much too loudly.

"Dublin?" Cochrane asked.

"Bloody Liverpool!" exclaimed the first. All three broke up and Cochrane laughed with them. The sailors continued down the platform, lurching, supporting each other and occasionally throwing Cochrane an uncaring dumb smile as they continued to sing:

"If one of the bottles should slip and fall-1-1,

Twenty-four bottles of beer on the wall-1-1, Ooh-h-h…"

Cochrane walked a few feet to a newsstand where he read the headline of the final evening edition of the Washington
News
. Hitler was demanding Danzig now and the Poles were trying to negotiate. Elsewhere there was a suggestion from a Republican senator that the framers of the Constitution would never have approved a third term for any President.

Cochrane turned away. The sailors lost count of how many bottles were left and were burying their fears in a very real pint of brandy. How many more months, Cochrane wondered, before these boys would be at sea? Hitler would have Danzig, just as he had had Austria and Czechoslovakia. If no one gave it to him, he would grab it. Hitler's own words: Today Germany, tomorrow the world. When was someone going to stop him?

"The only ones who want America to enter a European war are the Jews, the English, and Franklin Roosevelt," Colonel Charles Lindbergh had told a rally of America First legions at Madison Square Garden earlier that same week.

If only it were that simple, Lindy, Cochrane thought. If only the politics of Europe were as rudimentary and predictable as the six-cylinder engine of a monoplane.

Cochrane suddenly realized: it was Hoover who had depressed him. In his usual crafty way, the F.B.I. director had manipulated him into a no-win position. Catch the saboteur, and Hoover would grab the credit. Fail, and Cochrane would take the blame.

"Hey!" thundered one of the sailors from a hundred feet down the platform. "What did the Belgian amputee say to the German farmer's daughter?"

Cochrane tuned them out. Besides, his train was coming now, chugging up from the south end of the track, its lone headlight like a giant Cycloptic eye casting a blinding yellow beam along the two rails.

All right then, Cochrane decided. Just this one final assignment. The people in New York would have to wait for him. National interest and all that. High priority. Totally secret. This job would be within the borders of America, he told himself. No Gestapo pursuing him into Switzerland, no long boat rides from Palestine to Bermuda. Nobody trailing him or ripping through his luggage.

The things he held dear would count: cleverness; judgment of character; intuition. He would combat the enemy on his own home ground this time, and that would make a world of difference.

This time, he reasoned with great confidence, things would be much easier. The assignment was more finite: catch a spy. There would be no murders, he told himself, and he would not get involved with the wrong woman at the wrong time.

The red and gold cars of the Pennsylvania Railroad rolled by as the locomotive chugged past him. Even the voices of the sailors from the Adriana were drowned away. The wheels squealed and the engine wheezed as the long night-train ground laboriously to a halt. Cochrane boarded, his ticket back to Baltimore stuck in his jacket pocket. He found a seat and was secure in his decision.

His spirits were magically lifted. He was back in the spy game for a final time. And now, he concluded foolishly, he would be the master of his own destiny.