Flowers From Berlin

by Noel Hynd

  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.r />
  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."

  But Cochrane did not fail to understand the German language. So he allowed Mauer to continue.

  "There is no such thing as one man working alone,” Mauer said. “Nowhere, I repeat, nowhere in German society today. Particularly in the military. Or in the Abwehr. Or anywhere in the intelligence systems. The entire concept is totally antithetical to the Reich. Look," he said. The German's eyes came alive with intrigue for the first time. "A private in the Wehrmacht, the lowliest private, has a sergeant. The sergeant has a lieutenant. The lieutenant has a major, the major has a colonel, and so on up until you reach the field marshal. But the field marshal has commanders in Berlin, the strategists who plan the war. And they have their commander- Adolf Hitler himself."

  Mauer replenished his shot glass. "Similarly with a spy," said Mauer. "A spy in America will have a command in his region. A spy based here in Pennsylvania, for example, may have a master in Washington. The master may be Portuguese or Spanish. But he is the master, nonetheless. The master would report by courier or by radio to Hamburg. Hamburg reports to the Intelligence Chancellery in Berlin and that agency reports to Admiral Canaris. Canaris reports to Goering. Goering reports to Hitler. Orders go down the chain of command. Reports go up. See? Very simple, very orderly. Very German. No man works alone."

  "But someone is!" Cochrane insisted.

  "Then he is not German," said Mauer sharply.

  Cochrane rejected the notion. He was struck instead by the absurdity of being unarmed and interrogating a man who had a shotgun across his lap.

  "So," Mauer said. "Now. I've told you what you wanted to know?"

  "Only partially."

  "What else?"

  "I'd like to know how you arrived here from Germany. Particularly," said Cochrane, trying to maintain an easy, discursive tone, "if you didn't use the Swiss passports intended for you."

  Mauer fingered the weapon again. "Look in your own files," he said.

  "I want to hear it in your own words," Cochrane said.

  "You, too? Everyone wants to hear my own words. They sat here with a wire recorder and transcribed me." "Who did?"

  "Your superior. This Herr Lerrick."

  Cochrane was thunderstruck and did his best to conceal it. Lerrick?

  "He sat where you're sitting now," Mauer said. Then he motioned across the room to a worn straw chair with a ladder back. "And the other man. He sat over there." Mauer indicated with his gaze.

  "Yes. Of course," Cochrane said, recovering. "And when was this again? Shortly after your arrival, right?" he guessed.

  "About two weeks. I go to New York first of course," the German said, switching back to English for no apparent reason other than that the events recalled themselves that way. "Then to Washington. Then they put me here. Lerrick and the other man, both of F.B.I., badges like yours, come to talk to me here."

  "The second m
an…?"

  "I do not recall a name."

  "What did he look like? Large? Small?"

  "Big and tall. Broad like a bear. Looked German but wasn't. Smokes a pipe. Looked clumsy but wasn't."

  Richard Wheeler, Cochrane realized. "What was discussed?"

  "Everything I previously tell you."

  "Nothing else?"

  A long, hesitant pause, then: "How I escape." Mauer's indignation toward Cochrane returned. "How I lose my family." A vacant, uneasy glare came over the German, thinking back to his escape and its ultimate circumstances.

  "Please, Otto," Cochrane begged. "Run through it once more. It's vital. And I may be able to help. Please believe me."

  "I want my son and my wife back," he said. "Nothing else. Not this house, this gun, not your passports or money."

  "I understand that," said Cochrane with legitimate sympathy. "And as God is my witness, I will do everything to get your family back to you. But you must tell me everything that happened. We're on the same side, you and I. I swear we are."

  For the first time since he had entered the farmhouse, Cochrane felt the relationship rekindling between the two men. Or was it wishful thinking?

  "Please, Otto," Cochrane said.

  "All right," Mauer said at length, looking away resolutely. "All right. We talk. After that, I decide whether to shoot you or not.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The Swiss passports from Zurich never arrived, Mauer recalled. Either Swiss authorities intercepted them at customs or German authorities picked them off. Either was possible. In 1938, like people, things had a way of disappearing.

  "Or, of course," Mauer couldn't help but add, scrutinizing Cochrane closely, "the passports never left Zurich at all. They never existed."

  Failing to receive the help as promised, Mauer continued, he took matters into his own hands. He was under twenty-four-hour watch and the number of thugs had increased to four. Mauer could read the message. It was time to tour Europe.

  He practiced a bit of private capitalism on his own, Mauer admitted, working a deal with a pair of Dresden-born clerks in the Nazi documentation office in Berlin. He had come out of it with a pair of impeccable passports, one for a woman and one for a child and both on thirty-six hours' notice. The passports were Swedish and bore diplomatic numbers. Better than forgeries, they were the real thing, having disappeared from the Stockholm registry and reappeared blank in Berlin. No one admitted exactly how.