Flowers From Berlin (33 page)

THIRTY-SEVEN

As Thanksgiving 1939 approached, the mood at the White House was grim. Liberals pleaded that Roosevelt must run again to preserve eight years of the New Deal. Added now, however, was the powerful and irrefutable argument that no true leader could walk away from the nation's most serious crisis since the Civil War.

Yet Roosevelt was, in many ways, a conservative and a traditionalist. A third term flew in the face of established American political custom. So, the pressures mounted.

The German and Russian armies had met at the confluence of the Bug and Muchavec rivers; Poland had been successfully partitioned within four weeks. With peace on his western front, Stalin looked toward Finland. And with the Soviet Union neutralized, temporarily at least, Hitler turned his attention toward Western Europe.

A desperate French Premier, Albert Lebrun, begged Roosevelt daily to issue a declaration of war against Hitler. An equally impassioned but more restrained Prime Minister Chamberlain asked for more aircraft and more heavy artillery for Great Britain. Winston Churchill, who returned to Chamberlain's coalition cabinet at the outbreak of war as First Lord of the Admiralty, exchanged a private series of letters with the American President. The two men had met only once, in London in 1920, but each had long been impressed with the other. They had occupied parallel positions during the World War and had each opposed Hitler since the early 1930s. Now they exchanged confidential correspondences through the office of Ambassador Joseph Kennedy. Each letter from Churchill underscored the urgency of Chamberlain's requests.

But Roosevelt agonized in his reply. Direct American involvement in the European war was politically impossible, even though he personally understood how severely the safety of the United States would be imperiled by the collapse of France and Great Britain.

"Eleanor, I am a tired and weary man," he told the First Lady one evening in mid-November, following the delivery to the White House of yet another pessimistic dispatch from Churchill: six Soviet armored divisions had been redeployed to the Finnish border and an ongoing build-up of German naval strength in the North Sea and North Atlantic now threatened to cut off British supply lines from Canada and the United States.

"There is only so much I can do," Roosevelt grumbled darkly.

Politically, he meant. Socially, he meant. With the physical strength that remained in him, he meant.

He was the most powerful man in the world in November of 1939, yet uncertainties were everywhere. He was pinned in by everything from his physical condition to his relations with a recalcitrant Congress. The little ailments plagued him again: his sinuses; his arthritis; his sleeplessness. Franklin Roosevelt was fifty-seven years old, his health was declining, and he deeply feared dying in office. To make matters complete, his third son, Elliott, was in Texas campaigning for John Nance Garner for President.

Roosevelt became bad-tempered and uncommunicative, particularly to those whom he loved and trusted. He took no one into his confidence. The American Communists belittled him and the isolationists sniped at him. Big city bosses withheld their support on major issues until they could be assured what would be in the pork barrel for them in 1940. Southern senators, upon whose support Roosevelt's shaky Capitol Hill coalition rested, were incensed by Eleanor Roosevelt’s embrace of "civil rights for Negro Americans,”and now balked at the President's every word.

The Negro civil rights groups themselves, who had nowhere to go outside the Democratic Party, criticized Roosevelt's pared-down social budget for 1940. And John L. Lewis, the pugnacious labor leader, savagely assailed FDR for allegedly patronizing him, ignoring his movement, and "treating the leadership of organized labor as if it has no brains."

"It doesn't," FDR snapped in response, but not in public.

The President's insomnia worsened. He took what solace he could find from the bookshelves of the White House. He would frequently rise from bed in the hours after midnight and ask the Secret Service to open the library. Then the President of the United States would don his silk bathrobe, take the elevator to the second floor, and bury himself in histories, biographies, and his collection on the navies of the world.

One evening Eleanor followed him down at 2 A.M. She found him in his favourite reading chair, a single light on beside him. But Franklin wasn't reading. The book was open and folded across his lap. The President of the United States was staring gloomily at a paned window that overlooked a sleeping, unsettled Washington.

"You need desperately to get away, Franklin," she said, seating herself on the edge of his chair. "Only so much can be expected from one man."

The Sequoia
was already docked at the Potomac boat basin, she reminded him. As soon as Congress adjourned on the Friday before Thanksgiving, the presidential yacht could take them part of the way to Warm Springs, Georgia, as it had done in every previous year of his presidency.

She saw a flicker of approval in her husband's eyes. She further reminded him that he could then be away from Washington for a full week, surrounded by friends and relatives. If he could keep his spirits up until then, he could draw strength and renewal from the holiday. Roosevelt nodded very slightly. Eleanor's hand gently rested on the back of his neck. She leaned down to Franklin and kissed him on the side of his forehead.

He looked up to her and she saw what she had not otherwise seen for days: a very slight, and very wan, smile.

"I'm so horribly tired," he said. "How can I accomplish anything anymore?"

Eleanor, who always had an answer for the press, had none for her husband.

*

Cochrane found a pair of hotel rooms while Peter Whiteside found a ship.

The ship in question was
The Fundy Rover
, a Canadian freighter out of Halifax that plied a textile trade between Nova Scotia and Bermuda, with the odd stopover in between. Whiteside flew to Bermuda himself both to be a babysitter and to arrange for one of the ports of call.

Whiteside brought Natalie and Rudy Mauer aboard
The Fundy Rover
himself, abetted by two members of the Royal Bermudian Police, who stayed for the transit and shared the three eight-hour watches with Whiteside. Passage to Philadelphia, and the unscheduled stop there, would take three days.

Cochrane, meanwhile, had driven like a wild man into the hills of north-eastern Pennsylvania. He took no chances on anyone beating him to Mauer, who met him de rigueur at the farmhouse door with a shotgun.

"Is it loaded today?" Cochrane asked in German as he stepped out of the car.

"It's loaded every day now," Mauer answered. He was unshaven and looked surprisingly older. He weaved slightly, the result Cochrane supposed of his growing predilection for schnapps and brandy for breakfast.

"What other company do you get these days?" Cochrane asked.

"The idiots from Washington called again," Mauer said, this time in English. "Told me there would be more questions. A man would come to see me."

Cochrane felt a chilly tingling through his chest. Dead leaves swirled across the flagstone walkway between him and Mauer. He stopped, looking down the shotgun barrel.

"What man?" Cochrane asked.

"I don't know."

"Who did you talk to?"

"The sneaky one with the moustache. Herr Lerrick."

"Otto," Cochrane said, "I came here to take you to Philadelphia. British intelligence is bringing Natalie and Rudy into the country by steamer."

"More lies," said Mauer. He made a disturbing cocking sound with the shotgun.

Cochrane's anger rose. "If you don't believe me, blow my head off with that infernal weapon! Then you can stay here and rot until someone comes along to put a bullet in your skull. But if you do believe me, pack one bag and don't plan to come back here. You're moving again, Otto. I've got your family and you know a five-digit additive. Even trade, I’d say. Now go pack your bag and be in my car in fifteen minutes. That's all I'm waiting!"

Cochrane stared for a final second at the nose of the weapon. Then he turned on his heels and walked back toward the car.

"Cochrane! Bill Cochrane!" The German cried out now, his voice fevered, intense, and tortured.

Cochrane stopped and slowly turned, keeping his hands visible. His eyes met Mauer's from a distance of a dozen yards.

The German glared down the site of the firearm, then withdrew slowly.

"I'm already packed," Mauer proclaimed.

They were gone in six minutes, not fifteen. Cochrane pushed the speedometer as far as he could without risking the Hudson becoming airborne, but such was his desire to escape the highways of the area before any "official" escort from the Bureau might arrive. He pressed the car around sharp turns on narrow two-lane highways until the road flattened out south of Wilkes-Barre just as the sun set. From there it was a clear sail. Their destination was a place famous for cream cheese, W.C. Fields jokes, hoagies, and Connie Mack’s baseball teams. It was only slightly less famous as the location of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, where Cochrane had already reserved a pair of adjoining rooms. There in Philadelphia he and his German would uneasily spend the night.

And the next night. And the one after that. Mauer's fury mounted, and Cochrane himself began to entertain terrifying doubts about Peter Whiteside, the Bureau, and exactly which direction what sort of operation was leading.

"Now is not the time to panic," Cochrane explained over the course of their wait. "If you trusted me ever," he said as if to read Mauer's darkest thoughts, "you must trust me now."

"Must I?" Mauer was asking ominously by three o'clock on the second afternoon.

"Yes. You must." Cochrane spoke with utter calm, no mean accomplishment for a man himself on the verge of panic. But he had shored some of his own defenses, also. A third room had been rented close by.

Therein resided special agents Cianfrani and Hearn, on leave from the Newark office and willing to act as witness, muscle, and, if need be, firepower for Cochrane.

For her part, Laura Worthington Fowler sat and waited, also. In the empty white house in Liberty Circle, the minister's wife bolted awake at night with every creak in the floorboards or at every tree branch that scratched its November fingers against a windowpane. Her husband was gone, absent, vanished. He was somewhere but he was everywhere. And though the M.I.6 agents Fussel and McPherson maintained twenty-four-hour sentry duty from the church, how did she know that Stephen wouldn't materialize suddenly and unobserved on the dangerous inner side of the bolted doors?

Laura slept fitfully when she slept at all. Twice she sprang upright from a half-sleep in her bed, convinced that her husband was standing above her with a knife. Twice there was a scream in her throat. Both times when she threw on the bedside light, the room was still, quiet, and safe. One time she cried, feeling herself alone and betrayed. But she rallied her spirits, telling herself, as Bill Cochrane had told her, that in the days ahead there would not be time for fear.

Laura saw herself at the center of a triangle at whose corners stood three men: Stephen, Peter Whiteside, and Bill Cochrane. They threatened to pull her apart if she did not maintain a tenacious grip on her sanity. She settled in to sleep, her hands beneath her pillow, a small steel paring knife from the kitchen beneath her mattress.

On both fronts it ended as if with a single jolt.

The Fundy Rover
churned without fanfare into the port of Philadelphia late in the afternoon on its third day out of Hamilton. The Mauers were traveling now on two of the crispest, finest, freshest Canadian passports that Ottawa had never issued. The ship docked at a Cunard pier a few slips away from the United States Navy Yard in South Philadelphia. Whiteside guided mother and child off the freighter, through customs, and into a red and white taxi for the ride up Broad Street.

They arrived at the Bellevue-Stratford at a few minutes past five. Whiteside rang Cochrane's suite from the lobby.

"I've got your visitors," he said. "We've had a wonderful voyage. Little chilly for a cruise this time of year, don't you think? Do you have our Hun?"

Cochrane, on his feet with the telephone to his ear, turned and looked at Mauer, who stood and stared expectantly at him. "Got him," said Cochrane, who gave Mauer the thumbs-up signal at the same time. "Bring them up."

Cochrane set down the telephone.

"No tricks? Natalie and Rudy? They're here?" Otto Mauer asked in deteriorating English.

"No tricks. They're here."

"I can't believe."

"See for yourself, Otto. An agreement between gentlemen, remember. I haven't lied to you."

The doorbell rang a few seconds later. Mauer's instinct was to rush to the door and throw it open, but Cochrane took the final precautions. Holding his service pistol in his hand, he went to the door and peered through. It was Whiteside, as expected. And Cochrane recognized Natalie and Rudy from several months earlier in Berlin.

He opened the door.

There was one moment made up of too much emotion for anyone to bear, then the woman and the child rushed into the room. The boy was noisy, his mother was tearful. Somehow, Otto Mauer magically shed ten years. His face was alive and joyful. He managed in one movement to sweep up his son in his arms and embrace his wife.

Cochrane watched from the doorway. Whiteside sauntered into the room a few steps behind his guests. Cochrane gave a nod to the peephole across the hall, through which either Cianfrani or Hearn was watching. Then he closed the door. He and Whiteside sat and exchanged idle chatter over the merits of steamer travel from Bermuda as they allowed the Mauer family to reacquaint themselves with one another.

Then Whiteside looked up at the Germans. "You know of course that we'll have to move them again," he said.

"Can you keep them?" Cochrane asked.

Whiteside nodded thoughtfully.

"I have a safe house ready on Spruce Street here in this city," he said. "Two blocks from the British Consulate. It should serve well for a few days. I want to move them to Canada as soon as I'm able."