Flowers From Berlin (40 page)

Cochrane called it a day, said good-bye, and left.

*

On the drive back to Washington, Cochrane realized how much the afternoon had depressed him. There had been a morose, condemned air to his entire meeting with Dick Wheeler. He wondered very deeply, weighing the entire intrigue involving Wheeler and Fowler, whether anything had been gained by anyone. Like a war itself, there seemed nothing but waste and destruction everywhere one looked.

Cochrane drove directly to the Shoreham, anxious to redeem the day in any way possible. He arrived toward 8 P.M.

Laura, when she came downstairs to meet Bill Cochrane, took his breath away. She was in a slim, tailored dark blue gown that featured the most interesting neckline that he had seen in ten years. Or maybe that was simply because it was beautiful Laura in that gown and the day had otherwise been so beastly.

The Shoreham dining room was grand and ornate, patterned after the great hotel dining rooms of England and the continent. The room was a sea of white tablecloths and floral arrangements beneath a high-beamed ceiling. Waiters and captains in black formal attire scurried from party to party. The room was busy. Washington scuttlebutt and policy were bandied from diner to diner. Men were in dark suits and their female companions wore their finest gowns and jewelry. Earlier that week, Soviet Russia had attacked tiny Finland.

As the maitre d' showed them to their table, the piano player in the corner sang
Anything Goes
. Laura and Bill sat and looked at each other for a moment.

"Heck of a day," he said. And as he spoke, he realized one of the things that had brought him through the day was the prospect of seeing her this evening. "Do you mind if we don't talk about it?"

"I'd prefer we didn't. Want a better subject?"

"I could use one," he answered.

"One of your Bureau errand boys," she said archly, "came by the hotel today. Brought me an airline ticket to Havana. Imagine that. Institutionalized immorality."

"It happens in the best of democracies," he joked. He cleared his throat. "I thought we might get away for a few days. If you're interested."

"When would we leave?"

"Monday of next week," he said. "Ever been to Havana?"

She shook her head. "I hear Señor Battista is very charming and highly pro-American. Casinos and night clubs. Very romantic."

"You hear correctly," he said.

A waiter brought a menu and took orders for drinks. Bill Cochrane thought of all he had to put in order. His house. His office. His non-government career. His life.

"I suppose I should be making some other travel plans soon, too," she said at length.

"Back to England?"

Laura nodded. "I have to face the facts. I'm at loose ends here. Further, there must be something in England I can do to help. My country's at war."

She heard an echo from long ago: For England. But she did not repeat it. Nor did she need to elaborate. Bill Cochrane understood.

"You'll certainly be welcome to visit me any time," she said. "I want you to, of course."

"Of course." He was nodding unconvincingly as their drinks arrived. His and hers: a good stiff bourbon and a dry sherry.

"You don't look terribly enthused," she said.

"Well," he said, looking downward for a second, then meeting her soft brown eyes with his, "your scenario isn't exactly the same as mine."

"It's not?"

"I thought maybe," he began, "that I should talk you into staying on a bit in the United States—"

And she was thinking, not saying, Oh, Peter Whiteside! What a schemer you've made me! What an outstanding subversive!

"I'm sure"—Cochrane continuing—"you could find a job in Washington. Travel's dangerous these days, and, uh . . ."

For the first time since he had known her, he groped for words. He looked away, then boldly back at her.

"Look, Laura!" he said. "It's very simple. I'm not letting you leave."

*

The next evening they found an informal little French bistro in Georgetown called Chez Lucien. The owner, Lucien himself, was from Normandy and practically embraced Bill Cochrane as a long-lost brother when Cochrane spoke fluent French to him.

A bottle of the best Margaux appeared, compliments of the house, and the waiter, Julien, also from Normandy, directed the attention of Bill and Laura to the roast duck, which is what they ordered.

Crepes suzette, made specially by Lucien with a startling flourish of liqueur and flame that nearly singed the ceiling, followed the duck. An Armagnac from 1897 completed the memorable evening. Or so it seemed.

Emerging from the restaurant past ten, full and satisfied, they walked back to Twenty-sixth Street, only to find a jeep of the United States Army Military Police, a black Plymouth belonging to the F.B.I., and a D.C. police car all lining the curb. Half a dozen armed men stepped from various vehicles.

"William Cochrane?" an MP sergeant asked.

"Yes?"

"We have orders to take you to Fort Meade."

"Now?" Cochrane asked, more conscious than ever that Laura was on his arm.

"Yes, sir. Now."

"Am I under arrest?"

"No, sir," the soldier said.

"But you have 'orders'?"

"We're to ask nicely, sir, then bring you anyway, sir."

Laura looked at him in disbelief. Then someone in a suit spoke from an unmarked Plymouth. The man held up something that looked very familiar to Bill Cochrane.

"Bureau business, Mr. Cochrane," the agent said. "Assistant Director Lerrick sent us."

"Naturally," said Cochrane with a groan. "Can we drop the lady back at the Shoreham on the way?"

"Not a chance!" said Laura. "I'm coming with you."

Bill and Laura stepped into the back of the Plymouth and the green and white D.C. police car led the way, its lights flashing but with no siren. Halfway there he began to get the idea. Something had happened. And fifteen minutes later, after a harrowing fast ride across slick Maryland highways, Cochrane knew what it was as Laura waited outside the army guardhouse.

The MP's checked Wheeler twice an hour, they said, and it never occurred to them how quickly a man could bleed to death. From somewhere he had obtained a Coca- Cola bottle—strictly against regulations—and he had shattered it against the cement walls of his cell. He had sharpened the big round shard that came off the heel of the bottle. Then he had set it to both wrists as well as his throat and ankles.

Dick Wheeler's body lay on the floor of the cell in a pool of blood that was immense. Cochrane gagged when he saw it, wanted to throw up, did not, and turned with undue vehemence upon Frank Lerrick, who stood with him.

"So what's this? Something for my memory scrapbook?" Cochrane demanded. "What'd you bring me here for? You fired me, you know. Or did you forget?"

"Well, uh, he killed himself."

"So it appears."

"Well, uh, why?"

"Why?
You're Hoover's handpicked detective.
You
find out why."

"Cochrane," Frank Lerrick said, "you were the last one he talked to. In your own way, you were the only one in the Bureau who he, uh, had any respect for. What did he say to you yesterday afternoon?"

"He said he was deeply depressed. He said we were going into the war on the wrong side. He said we'd end up fighting the Russians by 1955." Cochrane paused. "He also specifically said that you and Hoover were a pair of feather-brained assholes."

Lerrick was obviously disappointed. "That's all?"

"From his point of view, that was quite enough. He also wanted to know if he had be executed for treason. He said he thought he would be. I told him he was probably right."

Lerrick's anger flashed. "What'd you tell him that for?"

"Because that was the truth. And he knew it long before I told him."

Bill Cochrane took a final look at the dead man on the floor. For a moment he winced at the pain that Wheeler must have known before dying and for another moment he felt sorry for him. Then he gave Frank Lerrick a final sour look.

"I'll be out of the Twenty-sixth Street house by noon tomorrow," Cochrane said. "Not a minute earlier." Then he departed.

With him went the lesson he had learned so well years ago at the National Police Academy, then under Wheeler's own command in Kansas City.

In this line of work . .

In Cochrane's career, Dick Wheeler had always been the coincidence, but Cochrane had never seen it. Chicago and Kansas City, then Berlin and Washington. Always it had been Dick Wheeler, giving the silent orders, pulling the unseen strings.

When the Gestapo had known ahead of time of Cochrane's arrival, he hadn't seen the coincidence. When Siegfried somehow had learned who was on his trail, and where that "who" lived, Cochrane had only begun to sense the coincidence.

Now Wheeler was dead by his own hand and Bill Cochrane was off the Bureau. At last, coincidence had been eliminated.

FORTY-FIVE

There were two other ghosts to lay to rest.

Cochrane flew to Atlanta on Saturday morning, and early on a chilly afternoon found himself walking through the tall grass of a hillside cemetery at Stone Mountain. Not far from a memorial to the Confederate Civil War dead, Bill Cochrane came to a granite marker of another tragedy: a smaller tragedy, perhaps, but one of equal intensity.

The tombstone read:

Heather Powers Cochrane

1912-1933

He leaned forward and laid a modest bouquet across the grave. Inadvertently, the flowers reminded him of the bouquet she had thrown as a young girl in a white wedding gown on the afternoon of their marriage.

Funny about life, he thought to himself. Had Heather not died, he would never have applied to the F.B.I.. And he would never have met Laura. Bill Cochrane was only occasionally a religious man, and the grand designs of life—what was meant to be, what was not meant to be—perplexed him endlessly.

"I'm getting remarried, Heather," he said softly, as if as a confession. "The second half of my life has begun. I've chosen the woman I want to spend it with."

For more than half a minute he stood in silence, thinking not praying, observing, putting things in order. He looked at the burial plot on the peaceful Georgia hillside. His eyes focused on the bouquet he had just placed. Life's absurdities and contradictions came toward him in a final rush.

Flowers, he thought, for weddings.

Flowers. For funerals.

Flowers, he could not help but recall from the insane hours in Code Breaking with the Bluebirds. Flowers like Siegfried's, planted in a homicidal pattern across the north-eastern United States.

He turned and was gone.

He took the next available flight to Philadelphia. From there it was just a short hop on the Reading Railroad out to Bala Cynwyd, where Bill Cochrane called upon the family of the late Stephen Fowler. Cochrane found what had been overlooked for too long.

Walter Fowler, Stephen's father, still shared his bereavement with his family. But he agreed to speak with Bill Cochrane. Neither mentioned the circumstances of Stephen's death. It barely mattered now. Only the death itself was significant.

Walter Fowler was a tall handsome man in his seventies, and from a certain angle struck an image of his departed son. Fowler spoke of Stephen's life and, in doing so, shed the light that Cochrane sought.

"We lost just about everything during the Depression," Walter Fowler recalled at length. "In January of 1929 I was worth more than a million dollars. By the end of October, I was worth a few hundred. It was that fast. The family rallied, of course. Our business didn't go under. The railroads still had to use tracks. But we learned how quickly the enemies could destroy you if hey wanted to."

"Sorry," Bill Cochrane said. "What enemies? I'm not following."

A strange cast came over Walter Fowler's eyes. Wars and depressions come from the same source," he explained succinctly. "There isn't one that isn't inspired, fomented, and promoted by the great international banking combines. And these, of course, are entirely controlled by Jews. Have you ever read a pamphlet by Henry Ford called
The International Jew
?"

"No, sir. I haven't."

"I'll find you a copy. You should read it."

"Uh huh."

And on it went for another hour until Stephen Fowler made sense. Cochrane then excused himself, saying he wished to catch the 7:23 express from Thirtieth Street Station to Washington.

So inevitably, in a perverse sort of way, all the recent events created their own scheme of logic.

*

Cochrane sat in the window of the Transworld DC-3 as it lifted off the runway of National Airport on Monday morning. The woman who sat next to him was always nervous when flying; she had been in aircraft only twice before in her life. She fidgeted her hands andCochrane placed his hand on hers.

Stephen Fowler remained something of a cipher, but Cochrane now understood enough to close his own mental books. The only son in a distinguished, wealthy family, Stephen Fowler made his peace with fascism early in life. Probably at Princeton, Cochrane reckoned, among the elite, among the other moneyed sons of Nassau, and among the eating clubs and playing fields of the American upper classes.

The Depression came an threatened to take all this from Stephen Fowler and those like him. Fowler reacted to Roosevelt's democratic-socialism with some
-isms
of his own. Fascism. Fanaticism. Deism. It was not, as Reverend Fowler himself might have remarked, like St. Paul falling off a horse. The force of Paul's conversion was said to propel him from saddle to roadside, where he sat basking in his new faith.

With Fowler it had to have been a longer process, prompted by what the young minister perceived to be the forces of evil in the world. Jews. Leftists. Moderates. Atheists. Democrats.

First, at Princeton he openly opposed all of them. Only later did he develop his cover. By that time he had been contacted. Summoned to grace, as it were. The network of Fritz Duquaine was in the business of fascist talent spotting, and Stephen Fowler was talent pure and simple. Thus followed the months of brooding, then the striking swing leftward to cover the man within.

And what about the church? Cochrane thought to himself. And what about his marriage?

More cover? Or true love?

Cochrane weighed it carefully. Surely Fowler must lave believed at least somewhat. Surely there was a time in Fowler's life when he believed in Jesus Christ and a divine Christian God. Cochrane wanted to believe that this aspect of the man represented the one shred of decency in Laura's husband. But how could Christianity have been reconciled to murder and Hitlerism?

Similarly with his marriage: could any man have aura's love bestowed on him and remain impassive? Then Cochrane thought of the knife that had once been held at Laura’s throat, the steel point to her jugular. He shuddered, grew angry, and looked out the window of the DC-3.

His boyhood flashed before him. He saw stretched it beneath him the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and as he peered very carefully he could see the Rivanna River. He turned excitedly to the woman next to him.

"Look, look," he said to Laura, taking her hand and towing her. "That's Virginia. That's where I grew up." She unbuckled the seat belt and rose slightly, leaning forward toward the window and looking down. Even in December, there were blue mountains capped with white, the land was extraordinarily beautiful.

There was ice on the Rivanna. Cochrane could see it. But then, in a quick flash, time spiraled and he saw himself barefoot and in dungarees some thirty years earlier, pitching stones into the river, watching the circles form in the water, and his own father was standing beside him.

The vision faded and was replaced by ones of the College of William and Mary, his first wife, and his lonely first days at the Police Academy.

Then white clouds suddenly covered Virginia and inevitably Cochrane saw in them the billows of cotton, smoke that were always present from Dick Wheeler’s pipe.

Wheeler's fascism had been on a more sophisticated level than Reverend Fowler's, Cochrane decided. That perplexed him, because Fowler seemed the more sophisticated man.

But where Fowler had rejoiced in Hitlerism, the late Dick Wheeler had wrapped himself in stars and stripes.

"A patriot," as he had termed himself in the final hours before his suicide. Where Fowler was a disguised monster of international terrorism and totalitarianism, Dick Wheeler was nothing more than a dark mirror held up to the American psyche: racism and lynching, isolationism and gun-wielding violence, all with a genteel cover.

Roosevelt had betrayed Americanism, Wheeler had concluded, and that, like horse theft in the Old West, was a transgression worthy of hanging. Frontier justice.

Where Cochrane had grown up there had been man in Charlottesville named Jim Horsely. Jim Horsely was a deputy sheriff and owned a candy store. By day he tipped his hat to ladies in the street and gave penny candies to the children who flocked to his store By night, he was the most notorious Ku Klux Klansman in Albemarle County. After his own death the stories surfaced: Jim Horsely had personally beer responsible for the deaths of at least a dozen black people over the last two decades.

Cochrane as a teenager had been struck with that realization.

There had been two Jim Horselys, just as now there had been two Dick Wheelers. And two Stephen Fowlers.

"You're very quiet," Laura said as the DC-3 banked to the southeast.

He turned to her. "I'm sorry. Just thinking. And I'm very tired."

She nodded. So was she. Physically and spiritually drained. They were nearing Havana two hours later when she spoke again.

"Do you think Stephen believed in God?" she asked.

"In his way, yes. I think he did."

"If there is a God," she continued, "I hope He's merciful."

"We all do," Bill Cochrane said.

She was silent again for many minutes, then bravely asked, "What about me? Do you think Stephen ever loved me?"

He replaced his hand on hers. "I know I do," was his only answer.

Then the airplane began its descent for buoyant dazzling Havana.

*

As almost all Americans know, almost five and a half years later, at 3:35 in the afternoon of April 12, 1945, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirty-second President of the United States died of a sudden cerebral hemorrhage. When stricken, he was having his portrait painted at the Little White House in Warm Springs.

The explosion on the presidential yacht in November of 1939 took no fatalities at all. But it might have changed history, had it not been for a quirk of events.

Mrs. Roosevelt disliked ocean voyages of any sort in November. At the last moment, she decided to stay behind in Washington for the weekend, appear at a pair of political functions for her husband, and travel to Warm Springs by train the following Monday.

The President himself, on the night the explosion mysteriously erupted off the
Sequoia
, was safely off the forward port side of the vessel --- as far from the explosion as possible --- in the ship’s reading room. His insomnia had kicked up again; or, more accurately, it had never abated.

Someone from the F.B.I. had sent him a copy of a naval volume entitled
The Fighting Liners of The Great War,
published in London and not yet available in the United States. Roosevelt had been transfixed by the notion of the great ocean liners becoming troop ships. He was halfway through the book when the explosion rocked the
Sequoia.

Mike Reilly, the head of the President’s Secret Service detail, was the first to locate the president. Bursting into the reading room in his pajamas, and bearing a handgun, Reilly was stunned to see Franklin Roosevelt calm and engrossed in his book. Finally at sea, in fact, the President looked better than he had in weeks. His face was fresh, his body relaxed, and his eyes twinkled.

“Now, Mike, my friend,” asked the President, looking up with a sly grin, “I know this silly world is at war, but unless we are several thousand miles off course, we are a long way from a battle zone. So what the blazes was that?”

For a moment, Reilly could not bring himself to speak. “A boiler malfunction, I’m told, Mr. President,” Reilly answered at length. “Possibly a serious one.”

Roosevelt nodded. “Michael, this is a fascinating volume,” he added. “You must find out who at the F.B.I. sent it to me.”

 “Yes, of course, Mr. President.”

Reilly stared at the Commander in Chief. He awkwardly nestled his revolver to his pajama pocket. He wondered at what point the President would have to be told that his bed chambers had been destroyed and that two US Navy vessels were about to evacuate
The Sequoia
.

Finally, when Reilly did not move, Roosevelt looked up again.

"Are you all right, sir?" Reilly pressed, still staring.

"I'm just splendid, Michael!" Roosevelt answered with a huge grin and a laugh. "Good to get out of Washington! How are you?"

"I'm okay, sir." Reilly answered. "Fine, actually. Thank you."

Then the President of the United States returned to his reading. As everyone knew, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's fascination with naval matters was one of the paramount concerns of his life.