Flowers From Berlin

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.