Flowers From Berlin (21 page)

Cochrane nodded. The Virgin Mary remained at her desk. Cochrane went by Bobby Charles Martin's cell in Section Seven. Together, Cochrane and the cartographer from Ohio spread out a huge map of the states of New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.

Martin, creeping forward with the minimal new results obtained from triangulation, motioned with his finger and drew a circle with a fifty-mile radius around the area of New Jersey just south of New York City.

"He's somewhere in here," the former Ohio state trooper announced solemnly. "But that's all I can say."

A few minutes later, Wheeler passed Cochrane in the hallway. "Hoover's still screaming bloody murder," Wheeler said routinely as he passed. "I can keep him at bay for another couple of days."

Mr. Hay chose that moment to pass both of them in the hallway, concealing a lit cigarette in his palm. He knew better than to even look up.

*

It was Hermann Goering, himself, founder of the Gestapo and currently Minister of the Air Force, who had the pleasure of passing along the report from the nervous Hamburg station to Hitler.

War meetings at 9 A.M. were common in early September. Each day the Wehrmacht made extraordinary progress in every direction, pulverizing anything that stood in its way. The Luftwaffe, meanwhile, softened any potential resistance through its merciless aerial bombardment. Already, Warsaw was in ruins, Danzig had been taken, and Hitler had received ebullient reports on a potentially swift victory in France and a tougher but eventual victory over the Royal Air Force.

Goering found Hitler in the map room of the Berlin Chancellery. Hitler wore a gray shirt, black tie, black trousers, and the mandatory armband. Goering noticed for the first time since he had ever known Hitler that the Fuehrer's eyes looked drawn and tired.

There were a dozen men there, cabinet members and generals, to discuss war preparations. The mood of the men in the room, considering Nazi successes in the field and in the air, was suitably cheerful.

Goering waited until noon when the meeting was adjourned and when all others had departed. Then he spoke privately to Hitler. He showed him the record of transmissions from AOR-3 in Hamburg. He recounted the successes of Siegfried in the United States.

Hitler's eyes narrowed and sparkled at the same time. "Ah, yes," he said in his soft Austrian whine, "you have spoken of this man before." Hitler scanned the previous successes of the agent in America. Hitler's eyebrows were raised. "He has sunk two English ships? Once by himself, once with the help of our Navy."

"He has always succeeded in whatever he has tried. I'm sure the Fuehrer recalls the bombing in Birmingham, England, a few years ago."

"Ah, yes. Of course." Hitler's eyes were merry. "And now," Goering continued, nodding to the report before them, "he proposes—"

"I see what he proposes," Hitler said softly. He pursed his rosy lips. "Do you think this is possible?"

Goering quoted from Siegfried. "’Americans have no other leader of significance,’" he said slowly in German. "’Can easily plant flowers from Berlin for President F.D. Roosevelt.' The man has never yet been wrong," Goering said.

Hitler still considered it. "Where did we find this man?" he asked.

"We didn't, Mein Fuehrer," Goering said. "He came to us. He is completely outside all of our services. If we authorize him to proceed, then even we cannot stop—"

"Completely outside?" Hitler asked abruptly, looking Goering in the eye. "Then he could never be conclusively traced to us?"

"No, Mein Fuehrer."

"Then let us wish him luck," Hitler concluded. He reached for a fountain pen with a brisk single movement of his ivory-hued wrist.

Hitler had entertained a savage hatred of Roosevelt since 1937 when the American President had made a speech in Chicago urging a world "quarantine of dictators and aggressors." Hitler had taken that speech to have been aimed directly at him—which it only partially had been—and had since borne Roosevelt nothing but venom. Hitler insisted that Roosevelt was partially Jewish and attributed all of Roosevelt's actions to "this basic fact."

Now he initialed with great fervor a document which would dispatch a homicidal Siegfried toward Roosevelt.

"Let us hope this will be the end of that Hebrew cripple in the White House," Hitler muttered, withdrawing his pen and musing cheerfully. "You know, of course, Goering, that Roosevelt suffers from syphilitic paralysis, not infantile paralysis. This, too, is a basic fact."

"Of course, Mein Fuehrer," Goering answered.

Goering clapped the file shut and raised his hand in a salute. Hitler returned to his battle maps. Goering was halfway out the door when Hitler, almost as an afterthought, jerked his head up.

"Goering!" he shrieked suddenly.

The Air Minister turned.

"It is more urgent than ever that we obtain a victory in England before the Americans become involved." Hitler motioned toward the folder in Goering's hand. "This 'Siegfried' is more crucial than ever. See that he succeeds."

"We will do everything to assist him," Goering said. Then he saluted again, turned, and departed.

That evening in his radio chamber, four thousand miles to the west, Siegfried swooned in happiness and rejoiced in the unqualified authorization from Berlin that he had dreamed of for years:

FLOWERS FROM BERLIN:

PROCEED!

ADOLF HITLER

PART FIVE

September-October

1939

TWENTY

"Not very pretty to look at, Mr. Cochrane, sir," said Chief Martin Kugler of the Red Bank, New Jersey, Police Department. The two men stepped from a rusting green and white police car on the curb. Nearby there already stood an entire delegation of police vehicles. Men in various uniforms—local police, county sheriff's office, state police—stood with folded arms and waited. Police Chief Martin Kugler led Cochrane through a trail in the woods. The ground steamed with unexpected September heat, and a cloud of gnats pursued them.

Kugler's tones were apologetic. "We knew a boy was missing from the navy yard, but they get AWOL's all the time. Generally they turn up a thousand miles away at their parents' home. Wish it had been the same with this one, right?"

"Right," Cochrane mumbled, looking ahead. Kugler's waddling, measured steps set the pace. The police chief was a squat, sincere, balding little man with thick arms, an imposing paunch, and a .45 that hung like a cannon at his left side. This was Chief Kugler's second homicide in nine years, and the first that did not fit into a neat pattern of victim-knowing-killer. He and Cochrane neared a group of men standing around a body in the center of the woods.

Kugler continued. "We read all the F.B.I. circulars, you know. Read them carefully. Think they had your name on them."

"They did," Cochrane answered.

"Well, you know. Since the
Adriana
went down we been looking for anything funny around here. Then this morning two kids are playing in the woods and they find this."

Billy Pritchard's corpse was in a middle stage of decomposition. The skin was dark and ulcerated, the teeth horribly accentuated by the rotting flesh of the lips, and the hair matted badly from dirt and rain. The entire corpse crawled with insects.

Cochrane stared. The body of an American boy in his underclothes was more real than a thousand ships exploding at sea.

Kugler stared also. The last few hours had been unpleasantly unique in his experience. First the body had been discovered in the woods. He had immediately filed the homicide report with the state police in Trenton. The state police—noting the proximity of the body to the navy yard, that an American sailor was still AWOL, and the events surrounding the
Adriana
—called it in to Washington.

Moments later, Chief Kugler had found himself talking long distance to someone named Special Agent Cochrane who wanted more of the specifics.

"See, I don't want to make something out of nothing, Mr. Cochrane, sir," Kugler had offered, "but the boy's uniform is gone. Now, you know that British boat that blew up? I was thinking. . ."

"Don't touch anything," answered Cochrane. "I'll be there in three hours."

Cochrane telephoned the Newark Bureau office and asked for two special agents, Mike Cianfrani and Jim Hearn, whom Cochrane knew from New York, to be placed on local special assignment. As Cochrane took a taxi to Washington's Union Station, Cianfrani and Hearn took their own car to Red Bank to safeguard the crime scene.

Kugler broke the deep silence that enshrouded the dead sailor. "Awful hot out here, ain't it?" the police chief said. "Poor kid. Body stinks to high hell."

"How do you know it's the sailor?" Cochrane asked, still looking down. The eye sockets were dark and discolored.

"Dog tags." Kugler motioned toward what used to be the boy's neck.

"Yes," said Cochrane softly, seeing the flat gray shape of something metal. "Of course."

"That's all that was touched here, sir," Kugler rushed to reassure. "Absolutely all. Rest of the area's as virgin as a Girl Scout tea party."

"I'm sure," Cochrane muttered.

Cianfrani and Hearn supervised the search of the area. Meanwhile, Cochrane excused himself to wander the area on his own. He had seen enough of the victim. The local police placed a sheet across the corpse.

Moments later, Cochrane heard a body bag unzipping. Cochrane walked farther into the woods, looking for the odd item—a scrap of cloth, a bottle, a button, anything — which might yield a fingerprint or a clue. He found nothing.

The gnats pursued him but his thoughts focused upon Billy Pritchard. It was doubtful that the young man had been taken to the woods and strangled. So where had the crime been committed? And why? Had Siegfried simply wanted a uniform to gain access to
The Adriana
? Or was this homicide one of those maddening coincidences that sends a detective in the wrong direction for months?

Cochrane pondered as he continued to walk. He saw a clearing ahead and, when he reached it, was surprised to come upon an old gravel and dirt parking lot. He stood perfectly still for a full minute and stared at the abandoned diner and the lonesome telephone booth.

He took a few more steps forward and noted that a road wound down the other side of the hill toward Red Bank. "Accessible by car," he said to himself. Then he walked back to where Billy Pritchard's remains were now in a yellow canvas body bag on a stretcher.

Chief Kugler, looking more and more shaken, glanced up to Cochrane. "Don't get much of this around here," said the police chief. "This is a family region. Worst thing that'll normally happen is a man will take a deer out of season."

"This incident didn't happen, Chief," Cochrane said. "The boys who made this discovery actually found a wino sleeping in the woods. That's all."

Several heads turned.

"Oh, well, that's just dandy," Chief Kugler snapped. "As soon as the county medical examiner gets the body—"

Cochrane interrupted. "The corpse is going to Newark for a postmortem. F.B.I. forensics lab," he said. Cochrane nodded to Cianfrani and Hearn. "Twelve hours should be sufficient for a thorough autopsy. If there are any doubts or delays, this is upon the authority of J. Edgar Hoover's office. Any questions?"

There weren't.

Two state troopers accompanied the Newark agents down the hill with the yellow canvas bag. Cochrane turned back to Kugler.

"Did this Pritchard boy have friends?" Cochrane asked.

"A boatload. Down at the yard." Kugler paused. "Parents, too."

"I'll start with the friends," Cochrane answered.

*

What emerged that afternoon was a portrait of a homesick, clean-cut, dutiful young naval officer, half-man and half-boy, and totally naïve to the malevolence of the world beyond Kansas.

"Is he dead?" asked one shipmate.

Cochrane wasn’t happy with a lie, but he was stuck with it. "This is a standard investigation. Ensign Pritchard is AWOL from a sensitive installation. Now, perhaps,"

Cochrane nudged firmly, "you could recall your friend's daily routine?"

At Reilly's, Pritchard's friend recalled, the young man liked to hobnob with the local females, and even shoot a round of darts with some of the English sailors, to whom he always lost.

"A terrible dart player!" another of Pritchard's friends remarked. "The worst in the house."

"Second worst," Buck Reilly, the bartender and owner, recalled that evening as he removed the padlock from his front doors and opened for business. "The worst was Pritchard's pal. The old man."

"What old man?" Cochrane asked.

"Elmer," said Buck Reilly, his ham-hock arms swinging at his sides as Cochrane followed. "And come to think of it, he's disappeared, too."

Cochrane took up a place at the end of the bar. "Elmer who?" he asked.

"I don't know Elmer who," said Reilly. "I don't learn last names unless a customer is behind on his tab. Elmer used to hang around here at nights."

"Continue," Cochrane asked.

Reilly blew his breath into a glass and polished the glass with his apron. "Well, he was an old guy. I don't know how old, but he said he fought in the last war. Tall, but up a bit. Sallow complexion. Gray hair. Looked like a thousand other old men."

"Nothing strange about him?"

"Not that I recall."

"How did he get here?"

"What? To the bar?"

"Yes. Walk? Car? With friends?”

"Darned if I know."

"You never saw a car? Or a bicycle?"

"No, but I wouldn't have. Hey, I'm busy serving when this place is open. Stay around. You'll see."

"If he didn't live around here, he couldn't have walked," Cochrane said. "Particularly if he was old."

Reilly shrugged. "Now you tell me something," he said.

"If I can."

"Is Rosenfeld going to get us into the war? He is, isn't he? Franklin D. Rosenfeld?"

"I only work for the F.B.I.," Cochrane answered, a sudden fatigue overtaking him. "I've never been to the White House."

"Seems to me there's still eleven thousand Americans buried in France from the last war," Reilly said. "And for what? Know what I think? I think Mussolini is just what the dagos deserve. I can't buy a drop of liquor in New Jersey without paying the Don Macaronis. I hear Mussolini put them all out of business in Italy. That's why they all come here. And as for Hitler . . . as for Hitler," he repeated for emphasis, "well if there's anything worse than the Jews it's those filthy English. So I say, let Adolf eat them both alive."

Cochrane felt anger swelling inside him and did not understand how he suppressed it. Maybe it was professionalism, because his overwhelming instinct was to knock the flintyeyed Reilly squarely in the jaw.

Instead, he flipped shut the palm-sized notebook in which he had been writing and recognized that it was time to leave. To his abiding shame, he answered Reilly. "Who knows, Buck? Maybe you're right."

“Of course I am,” Reilly muttered. “Ask anyone around here. They’ll tell you the same thing.”

A pair of brutal thunderclaps toward five in the afternoon shook the very foundations of everything that was standing. There followed a few heartbeats later a deluge and all Cochrane could think about was, there goes any clue that we missed in the woods this morning. Cochrane had taken refuge in a Red Bank guest house.

He sighed and a depression was upon him. Billy Pritchard was dead as were scores of other people. Cochrane bought an afternoon
Newark Star
, and lost himself in the sports.

Not surprisingly, the Washington Senators baseball team had been thrashed a second day in a row by the formidable Yankees: home runs by Joe DiMaggio, Charley Keller, and the newcomer Tommy Henrich. Then he found himself laughing out loud.

DiMaggio, Keller, and Henrich. Wait till he told Hoover, he fantasized. An Axis connection on the New York Yankees!

The rain continued. Mike Cianfrani telephoned from Newark in the evening.

"The killer used a hard, flexible tool. There were scars on the neck," said Cianfrani. "Strangled the Pritchard kid."

Cochrane lay restlessly in bed much of the night. A sense of Siegfried was beginning to emerge:

A six-foot German. Young. Strong. A talent with disguises, explosives, and probably dialects, too. The man had a car. He could work ably with a wireless and was privy to a complex code. Cochrane was certain that young Pritchard had been lured from Reilly's, murdered, conveyed to the parking lot, and dumped in the woods.

On his way back to Washington, a vision of Bobby Charles Martin, the cartographer, was before Cochrane. He thought back to the circles Martin had drawn on the maps of New Jersey, courtesy of the Bluebirds' triangulation.

Red Bank was within the circle. The saboteur had spied on the United States Navy by day and transmitted to Germany at night.

Cozy, Cochrane concluded. FDR would be apoplectic.

Cochrane returned to his office and telephoned Newark again, ordering reports of the Pritchard slaying to be sent to all town police chiefs in northern New Jersey, as well as the chief homicide investigators of all principal cities between Washington and Boston. Somewhere, Cochrane prayed, the Pritchard killing might strike a parallel with something else. Moments later, Dick Wheeler lumbered into Cochrane's office.

"Hoover's called a meeting for Monday morning," Wheeler said. "The Chief wants all the Indians present. All three of us tribe members. You, me, Lerrick."

Wheeler curled an upper lip. So did Cochrane.

"Now, more bad news," Wheeler added. "For you, that is."

"Let's have it."

"The LKW you requested. Last Known Whereabouts of one Otto Mauer."

"Yes?"

"No can do," Wheeler answered. "The Bureau slapped a red tag on them just forty-eight hours ago. From your own happy days working with that smelly little gnome up in the seventh-floor archives, you know what that means."

"Removed to Hoover's own personal files," said Bill Cochrane.

"Where they will probably sit until icicles hang in hell," surmised Wheeler. A pensive silence shrouded them both, then Wheeler concluded. "Monday morning early," he reminded Cochrane. "Second floor conference room."

Wheeler left and Cochrane suddenly felt himself very alone. The sensation made him think of Heather. He stared out the window for a moment. That odd question was upon him again. If she came back for five minutes, what would he say?

I've missed you . . .

I love you . . .

I've been given the most perplexing problem, and I cannot solve it. . .

"Then you had better keep working on it," he could almost hear her answer in her proper, magnolia-scented way. "Work comes first. Fun comes later."

But, Cochrane recalled, there would be no fun. Not today. Mourning ends, he reminded himself, pain sometimes doesn't. He sympathized with the family of Billy Pritchard, who that day was attending the twenty-two-year-old's funeral. The burial was in Kansas, where Berlin was something very distant. All the Pritchard family knew was that their son was dead. On the death certificate the circumstances had been "redefined," as Bureau parlance tactfully put it. Mike Cianfrani, from the Newark office, had taken care of everything.

Billy Pritchard had died, the report said, when a stockpiled harbor mine had accidentally been detonated. The military was dangerous even in time of peace, the family was begged to understand. These things did occur on the odd occasion. And everyone was so terribly sorry.