Flowers From Berlin (24 page)

TWENTY-THREE

It was raining in Manhattan the day Charlotte next saw her mysterious clock manufacturer. Her face still smarted when she thought of the way he had struck her last time. But that was in the past. Perhaps she had been too forward with him. He did seem like a very proper man. If only she knew more about him. . . .

She saw him as she stepped out of a taxi on West Thirty-second Street, near Macy's. The man who so fascinated her was disappearing into a sporting-goods store. Charlotte was wearing a wide-brimmed rain hat and a heavy trench coat, so she arranged the hat slightly more over her eyes. Then she moved to the window of the store and peered in. What type of sports did her man like? she wondered. She watched him carefully. He was examining some diving equipment. Diving suits. Snorkels. Charlotte was surprised. Equally, she was surprised when he kept looking up and surveying the people around him. It was as if he thought someone might be spying on him.

Perhaps he was embarrassed, she concluded. Perhaps he was just learning about deep-sea diving. But no. He bought an elaborate combination of equipment. A complete wet suit. A diver's knife. A mask. Then he paid with cash and turned toward the door.

Charlotte crossed the street. The intrigue now excited her. She would follow him and find out what she could. But she would have to behave cleverly, she told herself. Otherwise he would see her.

He was an easy mark, a man wearing a tan trench coat and carrying a large shopping  bag. He crossed Seventh Avenue at Thirty-fourth Street, then oddly reversed himself and walked south. If he was going to Pennsylvania Station, she wondered, why hadn't he walkedthere directly?

She followed from a distance of half a block. Sure enough, he went into the train station. She lost him. She darted through
.
the gates and looked in every direction. "Really, girl," she giggled to herself, "there's a war beginning and you make such a lousy spy!" But her spirits were high now. The game was on. For a change, Charlotte could stalk a man, rather than lie passively beneath one.

But her Mr. Bolton was gone. She scanned the huge lobby. Then she spotted him walking toward the Lackawanna Railroad Line. She pursued and saw him glance at his watch. The gate for his train was already open. He hurried through it, then stopped short. He turned and Charlotte stopped also. Much too obviously, she thought. Then she made a point of examining a billboard for the new movie,
Gone With the Wind
.

She looked back a moment later. Maybe he had noticed her, maybe not. He would have to have excellent vision to recognize her from that distance beneath her hat, she told herself. She saw him getting onto a train. Less than thirty seconds later, the conductor standing at the rear signaled up the track to the flagman. The train gave a slight lurch. Charlotte made a split-second decision. She bolted for the rear of the train.

"Hey, lady!" the conductor barked. "Make up your mind!" He almost had the doors closed when she hopped on.

"Oh, I . . ." She admitted breathlessly, "I wasn't sure whether this was my train."

"Where you going?" he asked.

She had no idea. "Um . . . end of the line," she decided.

"That's Liberty Circle."

"Can you sell me a ticket?"

The conductor was a white-haired man named Jeffrey, who looked at Charlotte very strangely. She was heavily perfumed and very overdone. Perhaps, he sensed what she was. He sold her a ticket, breaking a five-dollar bill. "You're very kind," she said.

Charlotte found a seat in the rear car. She knew Mr. Bolton was three cars up. The train was only five cars. She wondered what to do.

Mr. Bolton solved her problem for her. He did something strange again. Ten minutes into the trip she saw him slowly walking down the aisle of the next car. Then he entered her car. Charlotte borrowed a Newark Star from the man sitting next to her. She buried her face in it as Mr. Bolton walked to the rear and stared out over the tracks. Then he returned up the aisle. What was he doing? Looking to see if he knew anyone? Or just getting a walk?

He left the car. Then a few minutes later, he returned carrying his shopping bag. He sat a few rows in front of her on the opposite side of the aisle. Was he trying to tell her something? There would be no mystery at all where he got off.

The train stopped in Newark and East Orange. Then Madison, New Providence, and Far Hills. Only one stop left. There were only a handful of passengers left. Mr. Bolton was one of them. Charlotte was another.

At Liberty Circle, Mr. Bolton rose. He went to the exit and descended the steps onto the railroad platform. Charlotte followed. Mr. Bolton pulled his coat close to him against the rain, then quickly paced down a flight of steps that led to an underpass. Charlotte pulled her own hat and coat tightly to her body. It was teeming. She followed him.

And suddenly the idiocy of it all struck her. What in hell had propelled her so blindly onward? He had been right when he had slapped her. She was a whore! And he was, like most of her customers, a family man. How dare she follow him to his home! What on earth did she think she was doing?

Charlotte slowed her pace and a wave of desolation was upon her. The underpass was starting to flood and her shoes were being ruined. She knew, because she was looking downward and crying.

Mr. Bolton, any man like Mr. Bolton, was the unattainable for Charlotte. She could only be his whore. She could never be a wife or the mother of such a man's children. She ascended the steps on the other side of the tracks. She walked very slowly, the chase finished. All she wanted now was the next train back to the city.

She stood in the rain. At the far end of the platform was a small building where the tickets had to be sold. She walked in that direction, hoping to find a timetable.

She opened the door and there he was. Standing behind the door, holding his shopping bag, gazing into her eyes from six feet away.

"Charlotte?" he said softly.

She was speechless. She stammered for words.

"I can't believe this," Mr. Bolton said. He seemed genuinely glad to see her. "I thought it was you on the train. So I came back." He reached to her. "I'm sorry I hit you," he said. "I never should have."

She could hardly believe it. Away from the tensions of the city, he was a different man. So friendly. So relaxed. He took her in his arms.

"My wife is away for a week," he whispered. "Come to my house. Come right now. We can make dinner and make love all night."

It sounded so wonderful. It was almost dark outside now and the rain was torrential.

"Do you have a car?" she asked.

"No need," he said. "I live near here. I always walk to the station. There's a short cut."

"You must get soaked," she said.

"We'll get toweled off together," he said. He took her arm. "Of course," he added suggestively, "it will take some time for your clothes to dry out. You won't be getting dressed again right away."

Charlotte was thrilled. And his wife was away. Maybe the Boltons were separating. Maybe the world wasn't so cruel after all.

He led her down a quiet country lane where there were no houses. Then he motioned to a pathway just off from the road.

"I'm sorry about this part," he said. "The path cuts through a few feet of woods. We're behind an old churchyard. But this saves us about a quarter mile of hiking."

Like a gentleman, he offered her his hand. There was just enough daylight left to see. "Watch your step, Charlotte," he said, leading her. "Don't twist an ankle."

It hardly seemed like a path at all. The footing was treacherous, filled with twigs and stones. Suddenly her man was very quiet. Seconds earlier it had all been a thrill. But now she felt herself turning against this. This was no path at all. And now he was stopping. Why? He turned. They were far from a road and she saw no church and no churchyard. There was just a man standing before her, his hands on her shoulders. And suddenly she was very cold and very wet. She was very aware of the rain and very frightened. There was something horrible in his eyes . . .

"Fred . . . ?' she asked. She was aware of his size; His strength. His hands. He was touching her differently now. There was a scream brewing if only she could summon up the courage to—

"You should never have come here, Charlotte," he said in perfect English. "I don't know what possessed you to follow me. All the way from Thirty-fourth Street. Foolish bitch!"

The scream was in her throat now but hardly any of it rose beyond her lips. His hands were beneath her jaw, and it felt as if someone were wrapping a steel pipe around her neck.

She scratched at his face but he pulled back a hand, formed a fist, and punched her directly in the face. The pain was excruciating. She felt something warm and wet dripping to her mouth. Her whole head throbbed.

But all that was secondary. No air! He is killing me! The horror of it wrenched hersoul and for a moment she saw her girlhood again. She imagined the family that she would never have, and then a vile vision was upon her of Brooklyn, alcohol, and a thousand ugly, dirty men defiling her.

And this man, she thought as she died, was the ugliest and dirtiest of them all.

*

The orders for arrests were issued above J. Edgar Hoover's signature, though drawn by Frank Lerrick. They were confined to the East: Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and the occasional freight stop in between.

Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation struck in the early morning while their targets slept. In Boston, the owner of a small bakery was taken into custody, as was his wife and younger brother. They protested that they knew nothing about Bund activities. Their warrant said otherwise.

Similarly, a mechanic in Philadelphia, a film importer and distributor in New York, and the owner of a small foreign-language bookstore in Bridgeport, Connecticut were all arrested for espionage-related activities.

There were others, too. But the only one of significance was arrested two days later when the
SS Panama
docked at Pier Thirty-four on the Hudson River. He was the chief butcher on the ship and had long been suspected of being a Gestapo courier. His name was Wilhelm Hunsicker.

He was on the deck at the time of his arrest, speaking to a South African who had been born with the name of Fritz Duquaine but who had been through various aliases since.

Duquaine stepped away when he saw the federal agents approach. And when Hunsicker put up a vicious fistfight, Duquaine valiantly offered to call the city police. The city police never received the call, and Duquaine, unrecognized by the agents to whom he had spoken, drifted into the pedestrians on Twelfth Avenue and disappeared.

A team of four special agents drove Hunsicker by armored van from New York to Washington. Cochrane was at the Bureau at 10 P.M. when it arrived. Frank Lerrick supervised.

"What's going on?" Cochrane asked. "Is he my suspect?"

"Not until he makes a statement."

"I'm the case officer, am I not?”

"Cochrane, for once in your life, would you control yourself?" Lerrick snapped. "We turn him over to you when he's ready. Not before. You get a transcript of everything."

"I'm so glad," Cochrane answered.

Hunsicker's arrival coincided with the arrival of two men whom Cochrane had never seen before: Jack Burns and Allen Wilson. "Burns and Allen," Dick Wheeler liked to call them. They were from Ohio, knew Bobby Charles Martin from previous intrigues, and were nowhere nearly as funny as the real Burns and Allen.

"Professional interrogators," Wheeler mumbled to Cochrane toward midnight. They had already guided Hunsicker to a room in the basement. Cochrane shuddered, called it a day, went home, and slept fitfully.

TWENTY-FOUR

Cochrane left Washington in the morning and was driving through Pennsylvania farmland by early afternoon. The sky was clear as vapor, though a few cumulus clouds rolled in toward 3 P.M.

The needle of the gas gauge was perched insistently toward the big white E of empty, so Cochrane pulled his 1937 Hudson into a town called Mahanoy City. It was a town like the others of the area, several churches, factories at each end, an enormous anthracite breaker at the outskirts of town, and mountains of black silt bracketing the highway which led in and out. Farmland had given way to coal country.

Cochrane stepped out of the car at an Esso station. The day was cool. The heat of the summer had finally broken and brown leaves in coiled whirlpools hissed and swirled near the two red and white gas pumps.

"How much farther to Ringtown?" Cochrane asked the attendant, a young man in overalls and a green flannel shirt.

The attendant motioned down the road. "Bout fifteen miles," he said. For three dollars, he filled the car's tank, checked the oil and washed the windshield.

MahanoyCity. Frackville. Shenandoah. Shamokin. The towns got tinier as Cochrane drove through them: row houses built by the Reading Coal Company, churches, shops and trees. Ringtown was the smallest, with one main street.

Cochrane stopped at the police station, entered, and found Police Chief Stan Zawadski, a tall thin man with dark hair, with his feet up on the desk. Chief Zawadski glanced to the stranger from the sports pages of the local paper. "Yeah?" he asked.

Cochrane offered his F.B.I. shield by way of greeting. The chief’s shoes hit the floor as he sat up.

"Don't see many of those around here," the police chief said.

Cochrane smiled amiably, folded the shield case away, and inquired of a man named Henry Naismith.

Zawadski gave directions to a farmhouse on a road diverging from the main highway.

Cochrane thanked him.

"Now, you do one thing for me," Zawadski asked. Cochrane listened.

"You tell Mr. Hoover that he should run against Roosevelt next time," the police chief said. "Three terms. That's a lot for one man. This ain't a kingdom, after all. You tell your boss he should run for President."

"I'll tell him," Cochrane said. He returned to his car. He noted in passing that Chief Zawadski's car was parked at the town's only fire hydrant. No one seemed to care.

*

The farmhouse was five minutes out from town and Cochrane saw it on the dirt and gravel road for a mile before he arrived. The building was big and white, wooden and rambling, with a dark shingled roof that sagged. As he drew closer, he saw that an occasional window was broken and every shade was drawn. More critically, Cochrane observed as he pulled into a semicircular driveway before the house, there were no approaches to the house that were not visible from a distance. He noted, too, that there were two strings of outside lights. He guessed they were illuminated on most nights.

Cochrane parked and had barely stepped from his car when he heard the front door of the house open. Cochrane walked a pace or two and almost did not recognize the man who stood before him.

It was Otto Mauer.

But it was an older, more sober, less-dignified Otto than Cochrane remembered, with more lines and a more hardened, hard-bitten cast to his face. The German stood on the front steps to the house staring at his arrival. He wore a neat white shirt, gray flannel pants, and a cloth tie, as if he had been interrupted while dressing for an afternoon hike in the mountains south of Munich.

But more important was the look of sheer hatred on the man's face. That, and the shotgun cradled like a baby in his arms.

"Hello, Otto," Cochrane said..

"You . . . !" said Mauer, breathing low and with evident animosity. "What the devil are you doing here?" He spoke in English.

"I came to talk to you."

Mauer's arms unfolded like a soldier's. He held the shotgun across his chest and Cochrane stopped in his tracks.

"I ought to shoot you right here. Right now. No questions, just shoot!"

"Otto. . . ?"

The German pointed the weapon at his visitor, the butt end of the stock poised near the right shoulder in anticipation of firing. Cochrane dared not step in either direction.

"You leave me behind to be butchered! You leave my family to Gestapo and you make your own escape!" The weapon was still trained.

"Otto, I had passports sent to you from Zurich. By courier."

"No passports. Never any passports. Thanks to you. You were turncoat. Traded us for your own freedom at Freiburg. Why do you come here? To be shot? I bury you out back. No one know. No one care. Tell me, turncoat, you ready to die?"

Cochrane felt his own anger rising to his defense.

"Otto, who's been telling you these things?"

"They tell me," Mauer insisted, very loud.

"Who in hell is 'they'?"

"No matter to you!"

Cochrane groped for some other angle and tried the most obvious.

"Otto, where's your family?" he asked. "Have they separated you from your family?" Cochrane saw the German stiffen. He saw, too, from the crooked curtains in the window and the untrimmed shrubs near the door that no woman was on the premises. Further, Mauer hadthe air of a desperate, lonely man.

Cochrane switched into German, seeking any common bond.

"Otto, I trusted you with my life in Germany. I wouldn't come here if I'd betrayed you. We must talk. It's crucial for both of us."

"Turncoat!" Mauer said again.

The German jabbed the air with the two barrels of the shotgun. Cochrane flirted with the idea of turning and running, but quickly rejected it. One step and Mauer would fire. From twenty feet, the shotgun would tear a hole in Cochrane the size of a watermelon.

"Herr Mauer," Cochrane tried again, "I'm here on official business. Bureau business. I can prove it."

Cochrane made a motion toward a jacket pocket, but Mauer stopped him with another jerk of the weapon.

"Not a move!" Mauer continued in German.

Cochrane kept talking. "I'm trying to catch a spy. Gestapo, we think. A man who's in America, Otto. Here. Where we are!"

"There is no Gestapo in America," Mauer retorted.

Cochrane's anger rose again to the occasion. "Are you crazy," he demanded, "or just uninformed? They sit in New York and Newark all night with radios. They blow up ships, they sabotage plants. They derail trains and they kill people."

"Saboteurs," the German answered. "A few insane people. Malcontents."

"I'm looking for a very dangerous man," Cochrane said. "I can prove it. But you and I have to talk."

Mauer peered at him for the longest fifteen seconds of Cochrane's life, straight over the double barrels of the shotgun. Cochrane half-expected to see the flash and the eruption from the nozzle of the gun. He would feel the agonizing pain for only a second or two, then there would be darkness.

For some reason, as all these black thoughts coalesced at once, Cochrane thought of the country graveyard in Virginia where his family was buried. He wondered if he would be returned there. He fought off the thought. It had never occurred to him before.

And worse, he was out of words. Long ago at the National Police Academy they had taught him: always keep a gunman talking. They don't shoot when they're talking.

But Cochrane's mouth had gone desert-dry. He had said everything. There was no further appeal. All he could do was glare at Mauer. If the German was to kill him, he would have to look him in the eye.

Mauer still spoke in German. "You have a gun?" Mauer asked. Cochrane nodded.

"Loaded?"

"It's not much use unloaded, Otto."

"Very slowly. You drop it."

Very slowly, Cochrane reached with his right hand.

"Left hand! Left hand! Thumb and forefinger!" the German shouted.

Cochrane's right hand drew back and he reached his service weapon. He pulled the gun from the holster and he tossed it gently away.

"Now," said Mauer, his own weapon never budging, "if you're with the F.B.I., let's see identification. Again, left hand. Very slowly."

Again Cochrane obeyed. He removed his shield case from a pocket and tossed it toward the German. Mercifully, it landed open, the bronze shield facing upward. Mauer crouched down and picked it up. He stared at it so hard that Cochrane thought he was trying to memorize it.

Then Mauer looked back to his visitor. He spoke in tones that were not apologetic. "You come inside," he said.

Cochrane felt the moment slowly defuse. He moved forward. Mauer stepped back a little and kept his distance, just in case. In Cochrane's experience, however, shotguns were rarely used indoors. Too messy. Frightfully noisy. Mauer appreciated that, too.

If he were going to kill me, Cochrane later recalled thinking, he would have done it there. Right there. While I was holding the gun.

He entered the farmhouse at shotgun point and later recalled a second thought: I've been wrong before, he reminded himself.

*

But Cochrane was not wrong.

As the men entered the house, Mauer retreated to a stuffed, fading armchair on one side of the room. Beside it was a bottle of bourbon, already open and half consumed, a carving knife, and a pair of shot glasses. The German motioned to a sofa across the room. He indicated that he had be happiest if Cochrane sat there. Cochrane did. Then Mauer eased into his own chair, cradling his shotgun across his lap, like a dog or a small blanket, and he stared at his visitor.

No one spoke. It was a time of observation. Cochrane noted first the shabby state of the house's interior, the walls crying out for paint, the furniture that had outlived its brighter days. An odd number of coffee cups and plates presided upon nearby tables and a pallor of imprisonment hung ponderously upon everything within the room, particularly Mauer.

Mauer had lost weight since Cochrane had seen him last. Patches of his hair were gray, like a small animal's.

Mauer scrutinized his visitor, trying to read what lurked behind Cochrane's eyes. He was unable, and his own eyes lost their menace and retreated into anxiety.

Cochrane rushed to a new conclusion about Mauer. Here before him was a lonely, broken man. A former officer of the Abwehr, Mauer now dwelt in the professional purgatory of the exiled defector, untrusted where he was, reviled where he came from. With the final days of his middle years slipping away, Mauer spent his weeks in isolation, fearing the advance of a lonely old age. He had the look of a man under siege.

"I want you to know at the outset," Cochrane began, "that I’ll help you in any way I can. But I need to know certain things. You must be honest with me, as I believe you always have been."

Mauer's glare was unyielding. Then it broke into a rueful smile and a scoff laced with cynicism.

"Me help you?" Mauer answered, switching into English. "Almost as funny as you helping me."

Cochrane saw no humor and was about to open his mouth when Mauer reached for a week-old
Philadelphia Bulletin
.

"See this?" Mauer asked. "War already." He shook his head sadly. "I do not know if Germany can win. Not with its current leadership." He glanced at the headlines and a newspaper map on the front page, a map bedecked with firm black arrows showing paths of German invasion.

"Poland," Mauer said with contempt. "Imagine England going to war over a corrupt, backward, ill-educated dictatorship of idiot colonels. Imagine Chamberlain complaining that Hitler has taken another part of Czechoslovakia when it was Chamberlain who agreed to its partition one year ago."

Mauer poured himself bourbon and sipped. "Imagine England taking a stand on the so-called Polish city of Danzig when Danzig was part of Prussia from 1793 until the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Are you a student of history, Herr Cochrane?"

"I try to be."

"Would you not agree that the Allies themselves created Hitler when they partitioned Germany and wrote such an odious settlement to the Great War? It was such a settlement that built up the resentment in Germany that gave credibility to Hitler."

"I wouldn't disagree. Not completely."

"An insane document, the Versailles treaty. We are, in a sense, fighting the same war. A sad, oppressive settlement."

Forgetting the weapon across Mauer's lap, Cochrane took issue. "Similar to the settlement the Kaiser inflicted upon the Czar two years earlier. Wouldn't you say?"

Mauer, savoring a sip, set down his shot glass. His reaction surprised Cochrane. "Point," he said philosophically. "Now, tell me why you are here so I might decide whether or not to shoot you."

For the first time, in sunlight reflecting through the door, Cochrane caught a glimpse of the stock of the shotgun. Upon the stock was a beautifully carved scene of two men cornering a bear, the penultimate act of a presumed hunt. Then Cochrane's gaze slipped to the knife near the bourbon bottle. There were wood chips and slivers on the floor. Mauer was marking time by engraving the stock of his own weapon.

"I want to talk about Abwehr operations within the United States. Anything covert. Anything at all."

"It won't take time too much. I know nothing."

"But you were in the Abwehr. You know the procedures if not the specifics." When Mauer said nothing, Cochrane forged ahead. "I'm after a single man. I think he's working alone."

Mauer replied loftily. "Absolutely impossible," he said.

"The man exists."

“
In your mind perhaps, mein Herr."

Cochrane thought of Billy Pritchard's corpse rotting in the New Jersey woods. "No. The man is real," he answered.

"You've seen him?" Mauer asked quickly, switching back into German.

"I've seen his work."

"But you haven't seen him?"

"Otto, I wouldn't be here if I'd been that close."

Mauer laughed mirthlessly. "You were a banker once. Probably not even a bad one. But, if you'll excuse me, you have no aptitude for intelligence work whatsoever."

Cochrane felt the rebuke like a schoolboy, but kept quiet. "You are like most other Americans. This is what I tried to tell you a year ago in Berlin. You fail to understand Germany. And when you fail to understand Germany, you fail to understand Hitler or German methods of doing things."