by Noel Hynd
Cochrane looked up at the sky as he walked, watching a Gooney Bird navigate the tricky approach to Berlin. He wondered if he knew the selfless pilots who were delivering sustenance to the city. He had come to know more than a dozen of them by now. Then he felt something he hadn’t expected: a surge of pride over what his country was doing, considering all the obstacles put in its path. There was a drizzle. The sidewalks were wet, and rain splashed Cochrane’s face as he walked.
From the periphery of his view, he saw the spire of St. Thomas’s Church. There had been a discussion with city officials about removing the spire to make the air approach to Tempelhof safer. The Communists in the East had called for the destruction of all religious buildings, godless heathens that they were. Now, as a proposal circulated to remove the spire with the Christian cross on top, the same Reds who had wanted the spire and all other religious artifacts removed criticized the Western Powers for wanting “to destroy” a cherished public landmark.
A foolish urge came upon Cochrane as he pondered the far-left hypocrisy. He had a mad impulse to turn toward the man shadowing him — German? Russian? — and give him a glare. Or maybe cross the street and confront him. Or maybe just go over and give him a thuggish sucker punch.
Then, not that he had seriously considered it, Bill Cochrane’s better instincts took over. He had a personal operation rule to never let the opposition be sure of what he knew or what he was thinking. Why give them the smallest tidbit? He retreated to the strategy he had urged upon Helmut. Often the small-time pavement watchers were only in it for the money. They could easily be defeated and turned for chump change.
Cochrane continued along his way. He passed through the outer security gate to Tempelhof. His mind was alive with upbeat notions, not the least of which was an assessment of Kern and Roth. They were big men, former soldiers, disciplined and forthright. Conveniently, they manifested a dislike toward the Soviet occupiers.
Cochrane hadn’t recruited his own network for several years now, but the start of one was staring him in the face. They would make great bodyguards, these guys, and he sensed that the day when he would need them as such was not far in the future. When he checked their stories with Sgt. Pearson, he discovered something fascinating: as well as could be known, Kern and Roth had told him the absolute truth about everything. Such things were good to know when setting up one’s own network in a foreign city.
Another thing that was good to know was how and where to acquire liquor. The next morning, Cochrane stopped by the commissary, dug into his pocket, and purchased four liters of Whyte and Mackay Scotch at the cut-rate, tax-free PX price.
“Going to have quite a party, I’d say,” the clerk, a young quartermaster lieutenant from Philadelphia said. The kid must have been all of twenty-two years old.
“Oh, indeed I am! Aren’t we all?” Cochrane asked. “Berlin is nothing but a party. Say, could you put the four bottles in two bags, two in each? And close the bags so no one can see this.”
“Of course, sir.”
Cochrane traipsed the liquor out of Tempelhof and across the street to Helmut’s where he presented it to the barman.
“Ah! This is wonderful! What do I owe you?” Helmut asked.
“Nothing at all. My gift to you. Serve it with pride.”
Helmut’s gratitude was effusive, but Cochrane waved it away, saying it was nothing, a small favor to do for a man who was so effectively watching his back. Helmut, however, would not be denied some reciprocation.
From a locked cabinet under the bar, Helmut produced a cherished bottle of Asbach Uralt, a German brandy in short supply. He poured out two small glasses. Never mind that it was not yet ten AM.
“To the airlift and to America!” Helmut said in English, lifting his glass, even evoking a smile from Elfriede, his daughter, who was helping him set up for the day.
Cochrane gladly joined him in the toast. The day was off to a good start for both men.
Chapter 46
Berlin - July 1948
The following morning, and two days after the meeting in the mortuary, meticulously prowling through scores of German-language, small-font funeral notices in Die Neus Deutschland, Cochrane spotted what he had hoped to find. A three-line public notice on the classified ads pages stated that interment was scheduled for ten AM the next day at the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery for a woman named Lena Schroeder.
The notice gave the location within the cemetery – plot and section number — of the burial for those who might wish to attend. The paper, founded two years earlier, was the official party newspaper of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. It was dependable on what was happening in the Soviet Sector.
Cochrane knew the burial ground from his previous time in Berlin. Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery was in the borough of Lichtenberg in Soviet-administered East Berlin. The cemetery had first opened in the 1880s when all the existing cemeteries in Berlin had reached their capacity. The then-new central cemetery was open to people of all religions and social strata. The cost of the headstones was paid by the city. It was at first a cemetery for the indigent but soon evolved into the resting place for many of the leaders and activists of Germany's Social Democratic, Socialist and Communist movements.
In 1919, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, co-founders of the Communist Party of Germany, were murdered. Liebknecht was shot in the back by a right-wing assassination squad and Luxemburg was tortured, mutilated, shot, and her remains thrown into Berlin's Landwehr Canal. Bodies identified as theirs were eventually buried in the Berliner Gemeindefriedhof Friedrichsfelde. Architect and one-time Bauhaus director, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, had designed a grand, six-meter-tall red brick “Monument to the Revolution” in 1926. Commissioned by the German Communist Party as a memorial to the 1918-19 Revolution, the monument, complete with bold star and hammer and sickle, had been conceived as a spatial reminder to the brick wall in front of which German revolutionaries had been killed by the pro-Fascist Freikorps in 1918. Every year in January throughout the days of the Weimar Republic, thousands of red carnations had lain in the snow in front of the heavy stone memorial.
The monument was no longer there. A marauding gang of National Socialist street fighters invaded the cemetery in 1935, destroyed the monument, and pillaged dozens of graves, smashing the wall brick by brick. Now, postwar, there was talk about rebuilding the socialist monument, courtesy of the new Soviet administration of the city.
Cochrane had not been to the place since he had left Berlin in haste in 1938. It was a sorrowful place, he knew, filled with its own oppressive history, political tension, and uneasy atmosphere. He looked to his imminent return two days hence with mixed emotions. He considered recruiting Kern and Roth as backups but decided against it, at least this time.
Chapter 47
Berlin – July 24, 1948
Sergeant Pearson on Major Pickford’s command met Cochrane at Pickford’s office on the morning of the funeral. Saying little, the sergeant used an unmarked U.S. Army Jeep – there were so many on Berlin’s roads that they aroused little suspicion — to take Cochrane to one of the emerging market areas along Friedrichstrasse.
The Jeep was closed with a canvas top. Cochrane had no reason to suspect that he was followed as he left Tempelhof. Wearing a dark suit jacket and carrying a brown bag, he emerged from the Jeep in front of a Hess’s department store. Inside, he went to a washroom, made a quick change from the bag, putting on a fedora and switching to a light-colored linen jacket.
He re-emerged on a different side of the store, quickly ducked into a taxi, and gave the driver the address to Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery. There were no restrictions yet on travel between the different sectors, though every day the Russians were threatening to impose them.
Cochrane arrived at the cemetery at quarter to ten in the morning. The cemetery had suffered damage and vandalism during the war, much like St. Thomas’s. But there were administrators on the premises and even some signs of maintenance and rebuilding.
Cochrane found the proposed gravesite without trouble or incident.
Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery had been planned as a public park, so there was more greenery than Cochrane encountered in a typical day in Berlin. A line of fir trees formed a backdrop to the surviving tombs. There was sunshine, too, today, which helped.
But if the cemetery had been a suit of clothes, it would have been described as threadbare. Some of the grass under the trees was sodden from the recent rains, with clouds of small biting black flies hovering over tiny pools of water. Some graves were overturned and others had been overtaken by foliage. A drainage pipe was backed up and smelled of sewage.
But a stone footpath wandered through stands of linden trees and here Cochrane wandered, also, keeping his eyes open, trying to memorize his path. He did this while looking out ahead, hoping he wasn’t walking into a trap, and hoping that Anna would appear.
Mercifully, a directory and map system were intact within the cemetery. Cochrane had torn the public notice out of his copy of the Neus Deutschland because it had cited a plot number. He carefully followed the numbers along the cemetery’s footpath and neared his destination. Finally, he saw ahead of him what had to be the site he wanted. There were people, and the people were waiting for a procedure to begin.
Gingerly, Cochrane touched his elbow to his belt on the right side where he carried his Czech revolver. At the site of the impending burial, there was a middle-aged man who was either a priest or a nonreligious civic functionary. Such was Cochrane’s guess. The man carried a notebook or a binder of some sort. There was a uniformed Berlin policeman, plus a man who turned out to be a city registrar and a small cluster of women in their twenties.
Cochrane counted five women, talking softly among themselves, each of them looking war-weary, but each woman pretty in her own battered way. Cochrane’s eyes raced across the five female faces. He found Anna dead center in the middle of the pack.
Then, from amidst the trees and the grave markers, emerged another small group. Cochrane knew them and what they were there for. There were two young Russians, soldiers without their uniforms, and the two mortuary workers, Volgelsang and Keller, who had helped arrange this.
Cochrane gave a separate nod to each pair. He knew how it worked. They could be loyal or venal, people like this, dangerous or helpful. Without even trying, he had initiated his own little network of people who could assist him if he made them want to.
There was a plain wooden coffin on supports over an open grave. The two gravediggers moved closer to the coffin and stood by, talking quietly, a mound of fresh earth behind them. The diggers were dirty with boots, heavy rubber gloves, and aprons.
Ten o’clock arrived. Cochrane removed his hat. The priest, or state functionary on second assessment, moved in close to the gravesite and beckoned everyone to pull in closer. Everyone did. No one spoke other than the man who would officiate.
For five minutes he spoke in working-class German, which Cochrane took to be not of Berlin, but probably from farther north, possibly closer to the Baltic Sea. He held no Bible and invoked no deity or religion. Cochrane had guessed right. He was a local bureaucrat and probably a Communist party member as well. Cochrane asked himself: who else got a cushy job like this these days in Soviet-occupied Germany?
As the man spoke, Cochrane scanned the other faces. The gravediggers were looking at the girls. So was the registrar. Cochrane’s gaze went to the cop, and he noticed the policeman was staring at him. Cochrane gave him a friendly nod of respect. The cop looked away quickly.
When Cochrane’s gaze went back to the girls, Anna was looking at him. Their gazes locked for one long second. Then she looked down. He could see her mutter something. The girls next to her looked up quickly to Cochrane. He gave her a very faint smile in return.
Mistake.
She looked away again quickly, possibly indignant, and feeling tricked.
Cochrane could see tears on Anna’s face as she twisted a cloth handkerchief in her overly jittery hands. The remembrance ended. The gravediggers clumsily lowered the coffin into the grave. Anna spoke to the registrar while her companions waited. The man who had performed the ceremony stood away from the registrar but was obviously waiting for him.
The policeman withdrew but didn’t leave, looking as if he couldn’t decide whether to watch the girls or Cochrane. Cochrane didn’t like the looks of him. The local cop, possibly one of Markgraf’s people sent there to watch him, was best to be avoided.
Cochrane stepped several meters away from the gravesite. He gave a head nod to the Russians and the mortuary workers, the men he had encountered at the medical clinic a few evenings earlier. They came to join him.
“I think the poor girl got a good send-off,” Cochrane said, feigning personal sadness as the four of them crowded in closer. “Thank you for your help. I have something for everyone.”
Cochrane had arranged packets of cash beforehand. Now he distributed them. He handed each Russian ten dollars in American singles. They looked at him in astonishment, grinned broadly, practically watered at the mouth, and got moving to leave the cemetery before their new best friend could change his mind. Ten bucks were probably more than a month’s wages for them, Cochrane guessed, if they were being paid at all.
He greased the palms of the mortuary workers with twenty dollars each, quickly and efficiently, distributing singles again.
“Where do I find you if I need your help again?” Cochrane asked.
“Same place,” Vogelsang said. He and Keller were suddenly anxious to leave also.
Cochrane felt like a paymaster. Then, turning, Cochrane let his gaze roam the burial grounds, looking for the local cop. He was either gone, however, or had retreated to a less conspicuous spot. That led Cochrane back to Anna. He moved to a position behind her and loitered. He stayed about ten paces behind her, close enough to be unable to avoid, far enough so as to not menace. She signed whatever she needed to sign, turned, and saw him waiting.
She walked near him. He spoke first, again in German.
“Again, my regrets. I’m very sorry.”
“Thank you for arranging this,” she said.
She tried to move past him. Carefully, he extended a hand and held her arm. “I mean you no harm. May we speak privately, you and I?” he asked. She looked at him, then looked to her friends. “I don’t care if the other women remain near you,” he said. “In fact, that would be fine.”
“Talk where?” she asked. “There are no private places near here.”
“Right here, then,” Cochrane said. “All I need is a ten-minute conversation,” he said. “That’s all. And here,” he said, motioning to the bag and showing it to her as he held it open. “I brought some things you might be able to use. Please have a look.”
Cochrane removed his extra jacket and handed her the small shopping bag. She took it and looked in it. From the commissary, he had obtained some fruit, candy, cigarettes, matches, dried milk, three cans of sardines, and three cans of soup. There was also a woman’s summer dress, thin, light blue, new and clean, which astonished her.
“I just want to talk,” he said, moving his hands to his pockets to make it more difficult for Anna to resist the gift. “I’ve brought these things in gratitude with no ulterior motive. I wish to find Frau Schneidhuber. My old friend.”
She nodded almost imperceptibly. “Ten minutes,” she agreed, relenting.
“Ten minutes,” he answered. “Thank you.”
Chapter 48
Berlin – July 24, 1948
In the central cemetery, Anna accepted the bag.
She motioned to a nearby bench nearby, but when they arrived there, the wooden seating slats had been torn up and removed. He then nodded to a raised marble tombstone, a long flat slab of memorial for a now-anonymous departed soul. They walked to it and sat down. It was chipped around its edges, but the vandals had failed to remove it.
Her four female friends gathered about twenty meters away, their eyes fixed on Coch
rane like a pack of terriers. “Your ten minutes starts now,” Anna said. “Don’t waste them.”
“You know Bettina?” he asked.
“I know her.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“I know where you can find her.”
“Will you tell me? Or do you need to ask her first?”
There was a hesitation, then Anna responded. “I will tell you. I already asked her. We work at the same place,” she said.
“How did she know who I was?” he asked.
“I described you. You said you had last seen her in 1943. A foreign man. I suppose there have only been so many.”
“You supposed right,” Cochrane said.
“She had a lover in that era,” Anna said. “She was widowed from the first war, but she had a man.”
“I never met him or saw him,” Cochrane said.
“Of course not. Sure enough, though, he saw you.”
She fished into the bag he had brought. She found a pack of Chesterfield cigarettes. When she searched for matches, he found a pack in his pocket and lit her smoke for her. He wanted to keep her talking and to keep the mood going forward.
When Anna leaned forward, her light outer jacket gave way and he saw a pistol tucked into her belt: one of those small ones that women now carried, probably a Browning, six-inch barrel and three-inch stock. If used properly, a pistol like that could allow a woman to drop a large adversary with a single pop if the pop connected with the head, neck, or heart.
Cochrane had a hunch that Anna knew how to use one properly. She was alive, after all.
“Where does Bettina work?” he asked.
“A club,” Anna said.
“What sort?” he asked.
“Weimarian,” she said.
“I’m not following,” he said. When she wasn’t sure what he meant, he changed his wording. Ich verstehe nicht, he said. This elicited the tiniest of smiles from Anna. Maybe it wasn’t that easy to understand for an American, she conceded, starting to open up.