Flowers From Berlin

NINE

In Zurich, Cochrane scanned streets before he walked them and searched crowded places for faces he might have seen before. He sat in cafes with one arm to the wall and facing the entrances, and he walked only on sidewalks that could take him down one-way streets against the traffic.

When he was certain that the Gestapo was not on his back, he looked for an address that he had memorized months previously in Washington: a print shop in a prosperous residential neighborhood five minutes' walk from the lake. From the flowers and public gardens still in bloom at lakeside, a man might never suspect that all hell was breaking loose in every neighboring nation. But Cochrane knew that Gestapo agents made regular forays into Switzerland, primarily to snoop on German Jews with foreign bank accounts. Cochrane's sense of being followed had been honed to a gleaming edge over the last weeks. He never ceased to wonder when he would unexpectedly see the same face twice.

It was almost the Eleventh Commandment: In this line of work, there is no such thing as coincidence. He knew somewhere they were behind him.

The print shop was on a side street, nestled between an antique dealer and a dressmaker. The proprietor, according to the window, was a man named Engle. Cochrane entered and found a diminutive man with white hair, wire glasses, and a sallow complexion. The man, he learned upon initial inquiry in German, was Herr Engle. Conveniently, the shop was empty. So Cochrane switched to English.

"I have some friends who wish to travel abroad," Cochrane said, slipping into a prearranged patter.

"But, Mein Herr," Engle replied with a sorrowful smile, "I do not handle travelers. I am an engraver."

"I must be mistaken then." Cochrane smiled, knowing he was not mistaken at all. "My Uncle Edgar tells me he has an account here."

Engle's eyes drifted to the window at the front of the shop. "Your Uncle Edgar is a dear friend of mine," he said softly. "Please have a seat."

Cochrane chose a chair near Engle's desk. Engle went to his door, pulled down the shade, and put a sign in place indicating that he would reopen in an hour.

Then Engle turned. "You are certain you were not followed?"

"Certain," answered Cochrane.

Engle shook his head very slightly. "Today everyone is followed. Not good for a man of my years. Please. You come to the back."

Moments later, Cochrane was in the rear of Engle's shop, the doors closed for greater security. Cochrane needed three passports made urgently and smuggled back into Germany. Engle sighed. Cochrane informed him that Uncle Edgar in Washington would handle the reimbursement.

"These passports," Engle inquired. "Swiss? Canadian? What must they be?"

"Swiss would be excellent."

"I cannot work without photographs."

Cochrane withdrew the portrait of the Mauer family from his inside pocket. With a pair of scissors, he trimmed it into three single photographs. These he handed to Engle. Cochrane next printed the address of Frau Mauer's chocolate shop in Munich.

"The passports," Cochrane continued, "must be sent by private courier from within the Reich and in an envelope that will appear to be a business correspondence. It should be marked 'Personal Attention of Frau Mauer.' And I should stress," Cochrane concluded, "that there may be a certain urgency to this order."

Engle raised his eyes slightly. "These days, Mein Herr," he said, "there is always great urgency. The world rushes headlong with great urgency. And toward what end?" The old man hunched his shoulders. He sighed. "We will do what we can do," he said philosophically.

"Nothing more." Engle cocked his white head. "You are in trouble with the Nazis?"

"A bit."

"Gestapo?" asked the old man.

"I’m certain of it."

Engle studied his visitor. "Did you kill one? A Gestapo agent?"

"Probably more than one."

Engle arched an eyebrow. For the first time a crafty smile danced across the merchant's face. "I see," he said. "I suppose then, we must give your order top priority."

"I'd appreciate it."

Engle steepled his fingers, then drummed them slightly against each other. "Be very careful, my American friend," he said. "Zurich is alive with Gestapo and SS. Just in the last day or so there has been a marked increase. Normally there is the usual activity. A German expatriate is found dead here, a wealthy Jew disappears there. But right now they seem to be looking for someone." Engle's gaze alighted on Cochrane. "Maybe an American."

"I've spent the last two days covering my back. They haven't found me."

"May an old man give a young man some advice?"

"Feel free," Cochrane said as Engle's eyes glimmered.

"Continue home immediately," said Engle. "Take the circuitous, least predictable route. I will see that your three friends"-and here the old man glanced down to what Cochrane had written-"the Mauer family, is taken care of."

"Thank you, Herr Engle."

Bill Cochrane offered Engle his hand, which turned into a clasp with both of the engraver's hands. "Filthy bloody Nazis," the old man murmured. "Animals."

*

Cochrane boarded an express for Geneva that afternoon. It was five-thirty when the train pulled away from the station. In the dining car that night, Cochrane's attention focused on an auburn-haired woman of maybe forty dining alone. He took her to be Swiss, and twice when she looked up she saw him watching her, but against his instincts, he decided that amorous pursuits were not worth the trouble. Not this night. So he suffered through the agonizingly bumpy eight hours alone in his sleeping berth, agitated rather than soothed by the churning of the train, and haunted by every footfall in the corridor. He awoke the next morning to notice that the woman had passed the journey just a few berths from him, accompanied indiscreetly by a man who, as Cochrane learned from a casual inspection of the contents of the man's baggage, was a married sales representative for the Renault Corporation, European Division.

In Geneva, Cochrane took the first plane out, which went to Tehran, where the Gestapo crawled in alarming numbers and where he again changed passports, becoming Canadian and using an English-language bookstore as a dead drop for his new identity. He dyed his hair black, acquired glasses, and found an ill-fitting brown suit in a flea market.

Then he grew a moustache, stuffed himself with figs, dates, and rice, and gained eight pounds in one week, puffing out his cheeks. Then he returned to the airport.

He flew to Palestine and enlisted as a cook's assistant on a British freighter bound to Bermuda. The trip was laborious, encountering the fickle mid-Atlantic weather of the late fall, and the temperatures in the galley reminded him of Calcutta or, worse, Savannah or even Washington in midsummer. But the vessel arrived safely.

He presented himself to the United States Consulate in Hamilton and talked a skeptical undersecretary into placing a telephone call to Washington. On the next day, Washington brought him home, telling him that it all had been worth it, even before they learned what it all had been.

It was November 12, 1938. He had been away for fifteen months. For the next six weeks he was debriefed personally by Frank Lerrick, who generally named only topics, allowing Cochrane to guide him through the Abwehr at Cochrane's own pace. A stenographer recorded everything, and on one day two generals from the Joint Chiefs of Staff showed up also, sat quietly, and listened. Cochrane's testimony filled three locked filing cabinets.

By that time, even the dour Frank Lerrick was grinning like a gargoyle. Cochrane was exhausted, of course, both spiritually and physically, and tended toward an unhealthy loquaciousness. But what did it matter? The F.B.I. had scored a staggering intelligence coup, so it seemed, and Bill Cochrane had done it.

"I can see great things for you in this Bureau," Lerrick concluded warmly when all questions had been asked. "What assignment do you want next?"

"What do I want or what can I have?" Cochrane asked, much too smugly.

"Either. Just tell me."

So Cochrane told him. Lerrick paled slightly and shifted the topic to college football. Bill Cochrane smiled. Again, much too smugly. "Now you tell me something," Cochrane said. "If I can," Lerrick answered.

"What happened to Otto Mauer? And his family? I promised to get them out of Germany."

Lerrick's face went colder than a tombstone. Cochrane lost his smile.

"Come on, Lerrick!" Cochrane snapped. "I've been talking to you for six weeks. Would you answer my one question?"

"They alive. We got them to New York. That’s all I can tell you right now. Bill Cochrane exhaled an enormous sigh. He thought of Mauer, his lovely wife and their son. "Thank God. That's all I asked," Cochrane said.

*

A few days into 1939, Bill Cochrane reported for work and awaited a new assignment. No decision had yet been made on his future.

"He's in good health, has a wealth of talent, and his work has greatly impressed the President on behalf of the Bureau," Lerrick had informed Hoover in the director's office one morning in December. "There's only one thing wrong with him."

"If I recall," the chief said, "he's too much of a gentleman."

"Not anymore. And he really hates those Nazis.”

Hoover thought for a moment. "He's a fairy?" Hoover's eyes narrowed. "Communist?"

Lerrick shook his head.

"What, then?" Hoover inquired.

"He's ambitious. He, uh, wants your job."

"My job?" J. Edgar Hoover's cheeks flushed.

"And he says that within five years, he'll have it "

"Is that a fact?" Hoover asked ruminatively. "Well, we’ll fix him, won’t we?"

Lerrick, director of personnel for the Bureau, did just that. Cochrane was assigned to the top floor of the F.B.I.'s wing of the Justice Department building. He was to review a six-month backlog in the files on interstate automobile theft.

"What is this? A joke?" Cochrane asked Lerrick when he literally button-holed him in the lobby on the first Thursday. Cochrane knew it wasn't.

"Well," Lerrick said in lame mollifying tones, "your face and name are known in Chicago, Kansas City, New York, and Berlin. It's not the easiest thing, you know, uh, finding a position for someone with your experience."

"Why don't you create one? Something good."

"I'll get back to you."

Lerrick did not get back to him. Cochrane shared a stuffy, cramped top-floor office with a glum, dark- haired, olive-complexioned, gaunt, flatulent little dwarf named Mr. Hay, who hummed to himself, sneezed a lot, and plodded from one file to another. The office had no window and smelled of stale paper, mildew, paint remover, and, naturally, the dwarf. During the initial two weeks here, Cochrane was spoken to by Mr. Hay only when the latter needed Cochrane's help in removing something from the top rear of one of the files.

Mr. Hay was fortyish, with a face that could appear simultaneously young and old. He was trapped somewhere between boyhood and old age and wore an absurd brownish-gray wig. His teeth were yellow and his socks were checkered. His three suits came from the boys' department at Hamburger's. For Bill Cochrane, this was something new.

But Mr. Adam Hay was more than a sum of his parts. He had curious habits, too, most of which surfaced during the next few days. For no apparent reason, the diminutive archivist would not answer when addressed by his Christian name, which was Adam. He preferred instead to be always summoned by a clipped military "mister." He brought lunch with him, ate it alone on a public park bench, and indulged himself in his one passion at any free moment: horse racing.

Mr. Adam Hay was an inveterate handicapper, studying all aspects of a horse race and its factors before driving to Arlington Park in Virginia or Pimlico in Maryland on weekends to place his bets.

Bureau folklore had it that Mr. Hay made tons of money on the races and passed his picks along to J. Edgar Hoover himself, the Bureau's best-known horseplayer. But if there was validity in such rumors, it remained elusive. Adam Hay lived a quiet conjugal existence in a gritty section of Georgetown, surviving from one paycheck to the next. And he and J. Edgar had never been seen "within six furlongs of each other," as Dick Wheeler, the Bureau wit and diplomat, had phrased it.

Mr. Hay's other foible was of a different color. Normally alone with his files and archives, he had free run of them. If a request came from downstairs for anything for which the Bureau kept records, it was Mr. Hay, who would scuttle along from one file drawer to another and draw out everything on the subject. Next-totally without authorization-he would read the files from start to finish. Then he would send them downstairs.

"You read everything, don't you? I've been watching you." Cochrane inquired as he viewed this procedure on his second Monday morning in Bureau Siberia.

"Bugger off, Cochrane," the – dwarf replied, settling down to a file on Langston Hughes and an even thicker one on Albert Einstein. "It's none of your business."

"No, no," said Cochrane, who smiled and shook his head. "I don't care and I won't tell. I'm just amused by the procedure."

"Treat your amusement like your dick. Keep it to yourself."

"You read very quickly, too," Cochrane further observed.

There was a pause. Mr. Hay studied Cochrane. "I'm memorizing," Mr. Hay declared.

"Uh-huh," Cochrane answered.

"You don't believe me?"

"Frankly, no."

"I have a photographic memory," said the elfin one.

"No such thing."

"Bet?"

"Sure."

"Let's see your money, Cochrane."

Cochrane laid a five-dollar bill on the archive table. Adam Hay matched it. "Pick a file, any file," the smaller man challenged.

Cochrane found one in a bottom drawer in the B section: Patrick C. Barrie, a ringer of race horses and a fixer of races who worked for the Capone syndicate in Chicago in the 1920s. He handed the file to Mr. Hay, who flicked through a page a minute, then handed it back to Cochrane seven minutes late.

Cochrane took it in his hand and opened it. "Page four," he requested.

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."