Flowers From Berlin

TWENTY-TWO

Cochrane turned predatory upon tiny Mr. Adam Hay, the archivist in the Bureau's musty attic. It began on Wednesday, shortly after nine when Mr. Hay found Cochrane lounging in the small chair near the east file cabinets. Mr. Hay froze when he saw Cochrane, then turned a sour expression upon him and closed the door.

"Morning, Adam." Cochrane had a knee up, folded into his hands, and was rocking slightly in the only chair in the room.

"What do you want?" Mr. Hay answered.

Cochrane motioned to two cups of hot coffee and a tray of fresh doughnuts. "I thought we'd review old times."

The dwarf looked at the food as if it were poison.

"What do you want?" he asked again.

Cochrane got to his feet and ambled through the room, glancing at a file here, a file there, picking up a document, looking at it and discarding it. Mr. Hay eyed the doughnuts. "I grew nostalgic for the time I spent up here, Adam," Cochrane said. "You know they reassigned me to Baltimore. Banking fraud. Then they brought me back. I have an office downstairs."

"Bully for you."

Cochrane took a doughnut and held the tray out to Mr. Hay. The dwarf selected a doughnut. The dwarf munched.

"I remember certain things from when I worked up here," Cochrane said. "The lively conversation, the way the days passed so quickly, the sheer, unbridled inspiration of dealing with… all this." Cochrane motioned toward the files.

"Cochrane, get to the point."

"I remember in particular," Cochrane recalled carefully, "a funny little-you'll excuse the terminology-mannerism of yours. Two, in fact. You used to study the racing form at noon. Hoover goes to the races, too, you know. Were you aware of that?"

"I've seen him at Pimlico. On weekends."

"Then there was that second mannerism of yours," Cochrane said, moving closer. The dwarf slipped into the chair. Cochrane stalked him like a panther. "And this one was the truly endearing one, Adam. When requests came up here for specific files, even those to be redtagged and sealed, you used to open them up, sit there at your desk," Cochrane motioned with his head, "and read them. Start to finish."

Mr. Hay was getting the point. "I don't know what you're talking about," he countered.

"I think you do," Cochrane said. "Further, you have a photographic memory."

"You're wacko, Cochrane. You got your balls slammed in the bank vault once too often."

Cochrane leaned forward onto the arm of Mr. Hay's chair. He menaced the little man. "Otto Mauer," said Cochrane. "The file was requested from this office last week. It got redtagged. I'm betting you looked at it."

"Maybe," fretted the dwarf. "Maybe not."

"Now, you need recall only two things. I want Mauer's new name. And I want his location.”

The dwarf looked petulantly at Cochrane. "Get the file from Lerrick. Or Wheeler. Or ask Hoover, himself," he retorted.

"I want the answers from you. You may whisper them in my ear. Or inscribe them on a piece of paper."

Cochrane leaned over the smaller man. Mr. Hay's eyes raged. "Go piss up a rope, Cochrane," Mr. Hay snapped. Then he stamped with all his eighty pounds on Cochrane's left foot, catching the instep cleanly with the heel of his shoe.

A searing pain shot through Cochrane, exploding upward from the foot. The archivist burst from the chair and took up a defensive position on the other side of a table, a letter opener clenched in his paw.

"Don't come near me, Cochrane," Mr. Hay instructed. "Pull my whiskers again and there'll be bloodshed, I swear it to you."

Cochrane held his temper and looked at his adversary. "Obviously," Cochrane concluded, "you need more time to think."

At lunch that same day Mr. Hay fled to a park bench across the street from the White House. The archivist sat undisturbed, opening a liverwurst sandwich and a thermos of iced tea, for a full and glorious minute and a half before Cochrane appeared from nowhere and sat down next to him.

"Mauer's new name, Adam. Plus town and state," Cochrane said simply. "That's all. Then we'll be friends again."

Mr. Hay choked down his sandwich and could barely concentrate on his racing form. He gulped his tea and fled into the noontime crowds on Connecticut Avenue, then was horrified to see, upon his return to his seventh-floor archives, Cochrane lounging again in the small chair.

"The name. The town. The state," Cochrane repeated as if it were a catechism.

The dwarf was rattled, but compensated. "Blow it out your ass, Cochrane!" he yelped.

Cochrane sighed. "If the Chief could hear your language, Adam.. ." Cochrane shook his head in disappointment.

Cochrane brought an hour's worth of work with him, reports from urban police chiefs in the East. He tried, as he ferreted through several dozen homicide cases, to link something with the Billy Pritchard slaying. He found nothing. Then he prowled uneasily through the Bluebirds' reports from previous evenings.

Nothing there again. Nothing from Siegfried. Deciphering drew a similar blank and so did Cryptology. As Cochrane worked, spreading out his tasks before him on Mr. Hay's table, he raised his eyes and stared at the dwarf every few minutes.

"The name. The town. The state," he repeated. "The name. The town. The state." Toward three in the afternoon, Cochrane got to his feet, winked one eye at his nemesis, and strode from the room.

Adam Hay's spirits soared. Alone at last! Then his spirits were quickly crushed with the arrival of Lanny Slotkin, resident cur of the Bluebirds. Mr. Hay had never in his life encountered Lanny Slotkin or anything like him.

"The name. The town. The state," Lanny said, not even certain of what he had been dispatched to inquire. "Cochrane sent me. I'm supposed to stay here until eight o'clock tonight or until I get answers."

Mr. Hay made himself scarce behind a file, working on the lower shelf. But Slotkin was a bulldog, as well as a high priest of rudeness.

"Come on, you little twerp," Slotkin screamed after only ten minutes. "I don't want to stay up here all day! What is it he wants to know?" Slotkin entertained the urge to pick up Mr. Hay and shake him. But he resisted.

Mr. Hay was married to an Indian woman from Bombay. They lived together in a rear apartment on a grim side street in Georgetown. When he returned hone that night, he found Cochrane sitting on the front steps.

"Name. Town. State." The words shot into Mr. Hay's mind faster than Cochrane could mouth them. Mr. Hay bolted up the shabby staircase and scampered in the direction of an apartment door, from behind which emanated pungent smells of Manipur curry and incense.

Adam Hay jammed his key in the lock, turned it, and slammed the door behind him, thinking himself safe within the sanctuary of his own home. His wife appeared in a saffron and purple robe, kissed him, and spoke.

"We have a guest," she said. "A lovely gentlewoman."

The dwarf shuddered. Mr. Hay crept warily into his own living room where he encountered Mary Ryan, the Virgin Mary herself, all eight point two decades of her. She offered him a lined hand.

"This is Mrs. Ryan. From your Bureau," said Mrs. Hay. "I do think," said Mary Ryan, who would go along with any intrigue if it was either work or fun, "that you really ought to tell us the name, the town, and the state."

The dwarf turned crimson. Unfortunately, Mrs. Hay had already invited Mary to stay for dinner. Mary Ryan loved curry.

Friday was no better. Every time Mr. Hay looked up, there was Cochrane or one of his deputies. Among those Bluebirds whom Cochrane could trust, it became a passing parlor game. Go talk to the archivist. Pick the dwarf for information. It could save us months of work, and don't tell Wheeler.

"I'll take the responsibility," Cochrane had told them all. The name, they demanded. The name. The town. The state. Three quick answers would liberate Mr. Hay from all of this, Cochrane reminded him by telephone a few minutes before Friday midnight.

Totally unnerved, Mr. Hay went to the window and stared downward. And there were the Bureau's two Germans, Roddy Schwarzkopf and Elizabeth Pfeiffer from Section Seven. They stared upward from an alleyway, then waved.

Mr. Hay jerked the curtains shut and moaned.

Cochrane spent Saturday morning in Cartography and Central Alien Registry. With the help of Bobby Charles Martin, late of the Ohio State Police, he marshaled a list of every township within the fifty-mile map radius that the Bluebirds had charted in northern New Jersey. Then CAR Division went through their own files and came up with a list of 256 names of German emigres living within that area. The towns ran from Passaic and Hoboken to little map dots like Bernardsville and Liberty Circle.

"Monday," promised Cochrane, "we get some staff in here from another division. We check out every name." Then a second list was drawn, one comprising immigrants from the other unfriendly nations: Italy and Japan, just in case.

"That's three hundred wops and seventeen Japs," Bobby Charles Martin surmised with his usual egalitarian candor. "Guess those get checked out, too."

"You guess right," said Cochrane, reaching for a jacket and hat. "Let's go watch some horse races."

Mr. Hay was at Arlington Park for all nine races that afternoon. He seemed to wear his own saddle, with Bobby Martin and Bill Cochrane in it. Ditto, Sunday. And late afternoon, the archivist began to crack. But as the ninth race was finished, Adam Hay looked up and they were all gone. Every one of them. No one was breathing down his eleven- inch collar. It was Mr. Hay's custom on Sunday afternoons to relax in the grandstand after the final race. He would peruse the next week's racing card, enjoy the solitude of six thousand empty seats, then amble to his car-an old Ford that rattled in every gear including neutral-which he always parked in the far end of the parking lot.

He thought of many things as he handicapped his ponies that afternoon. Name, town, and state were among them. He studied furlongs, sires, and first quarters, late brushes, jockey changes, and trainers. Name. Town. And state. It was a litany.

He folded the racing form into his pocket a few minutes before six. He walked to his car and, his eyes barely to the height of the window, he unlocked it in the vast, deserted parking lot.

The car door flew open. A human body, strong and powerful, burst upward from low behind the front seat, pushed the seats apart, and rushed from concealment to confront the archivist. The tiny archivist yelped and his eyes went wide as demitasse saucers with two brown marbles at their center.

It was Cochrane! Glaring, menacing, scowling, looking downward with his twenty-four inches of superior height. Cochrane's eyes gleamed. He said nothing. By now the week's catechism spoke for him.

"Name… town… state…" Mr. Hay's heart fluttered somewhere ten feet above his head.

"Otto Mauer is now Henry Naismith," Mr. Hay confessed sullenly. "The town is Ringtown. The state is Pennsylvania. Now leave me alone."