Flowers From Berlin

by Noel Hynd

  The old Germany, the one he had read about, was still there. The polite, orderly people, the handsome blond children. There were the quaint, aging gingerbread buildings both from the medieval period and the previous century. And there were the stark iron monuments erected to those who had sacrificed "for the Fatherland" in the Great War.

  But then there was the New Germany. Everywhere, particularly upon Il Duce's arrival, there was the new red and black facades. Everywhere Bill Cochrane looked there was a march. Everywhere there were Swastikas, Hitler Youth, evening parades by torchlight, and grandiose, overstated new buildings.

  Once, on a hot afternoon, Cochrane fell into step with the front phalanx of marchers. Wearing a fedora, a suit and tie, he was mistaken for a plainclothes party official and seated on a podium behind the Fuhrer himself as the mad little corporal gave a rousing speech. Had Cochrane felt like sacrificing his own life, he could have shot the little lunatic in the back. In later years, he wondered if he should have.

  Daily in Berlin, along the tree-lined main boulevards were a sea of long vertical banners, proudly alternating with the trees and fluttering. On long poles topped by golden eagles waved the red banners of the Third Reich-with a black swastika in a round white field at the center- and these in turn were interspersed with the red, white, and green banners of Fascist Italy. The displays were powerful and impressive, none more so than from the center of Berlin along the Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse leading to Hitler's new Chancellery in pink marble.

  The pink glint of the seat of power suggested an incongruous touch to Cochrane's American sensibilities. In the cafes he struck up conversations with Germans and discussed the bold new Nazi architecture. Twice Cochrane was told what everyone else in Germany seemed to know.

  "Hitler likes pink," they told him.

  Cochrane pondered this as he found himself an apartment. When he ceased to think about Hitler's predilection for pink, he was struck by the fact that both the United States and Nazi Germany now had an eagle as their symbol. And there, he concluded, the similarities ended.

  About a week after his arrival, Cochrane faced certain disaster. There lived on a side street only a few blocks from the Reichstag a large, smiling, bookish bespectacled tailor named Kuri Kurkevics. The tailor, a Latvian, had been on the F.B.I. payroll for the previous six months. But when Cochrane ambled by Kurkevics' home and then his shop, the tailor was nowhere to be found. The home was locked and dark, the shop boarded up. Cochrane's contact in Berlin had been uncovered and, most likely, executed.

  Cochrane then improvised.

  Two weeks later he opened a brokerage house and spent his free hours lounging around the bar at the Kaiser Wilhelm Hotel. He took into his confidence anyone with whom he fell into conversation, and mentioned that he had inside information on the American stock market. When investors grinned and offered money to him, he at first demurred, then accepted it a few weeks later purely out of friendship. Within two months he had cabled a million and a half dollars worth of investments to the United States. Fortunately, most of them turned out well. More business walked in. Cochrane considered his good fortune to be a gift from a providential God. Until he had arrived in Germany, he had never followed the U.S. stock market. He knew virtually nothing about it, other than having overheard a friend from Chestnut Hill, just before leaving Washington, comment that everything would be going up within a year.

  The businessmen, industrialists, and speculators whom Cochrane met in Germany kept their hearts close to their bank drafts. But as their American friend was making money for them, they drew him into their circle. Soon Cochrane was being invited to the very offices, factories, and gatherings of which the F.B.I. would eventually want a working knowledge. Cochrane's gentle nature and social graces dispelled any suspicion. The very qualities that the F.B.I. had once nearly used to disqualify him were now paying generous dividends.

  German friends, some in the party and some in the government, took him into private offices in buildings on the Tierpitzufer where the supreme intelligence communities were housed. Once he met Himmler and shook hands with him. Another time he was introduced to Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, or intelligence division. Canaris, Cochrane quickly learned, was something of a lightning rod for the few remaining anti-Hitler factions within the government. And on one grand but nerve-shattering occasion, after a performance of Die Walkure, the American was in the same ballroom as Hitler and Goering. Cochrane again worked his way remarkably close to the Nazi ‘brain trust.’ He spent the evening studying the two men in their medal-bedecked black uniforms with red bands and sashes. Cochrane moved close enough to Hitler to smell the overdone Viennese cologne in which the jittery little tyrant bathed. The two men, for one fleeting dazzling moment, even established eye contact, though Cochrane felt it would be presumptuous and risky to initiate a conversation. So he did not. And at another moment in the evening, Cochrane edged near enough to Goering to see the beads of sweat that were ever-present on the man's thick forehead. Cochrane could have, if he had wanted to, brushed away the dandruff that fell like a snowstorm upon the shoulders of the Gestapo's founder. Leaving the hall, that night, he shuddered at how close he had been able to come to the head of state. It was an image that would recur to him for years.

  Always, Cochrane was introduced as a financier willing to do business with Germany. He used his real name and actual passport. Introduced to diplomats and to those with influence within the party, a catch phrase developed. "Our sympathetic American friend," they called him. The diplomats and power brokers would nod, smile, and boast in civilized conversational tones of their plans for a new German empire, a new world order, make that, now that the Jews, Socialists, and Communists were on the run and could no longer pollute the Reich.

  "I personally praise Hitler for that above all," Cochrane would confide to them.

  Then Bill Cochrane complicated his life. He fell for a woman. Her name was Theresia and she said she worked for a prominent man named Otto Mauer in the Interior Ministry. It was Bill Cochrane's first serious involvement since the death of his wife. He still travelled with a framed picture of Heather and kept the picture visible in his Berlin apartment. He did not yet have the heart to place the photograph in a drawer.

  He first met Theresia on an evening in the bustling Rathskeller Keitel, not far from where they both worked. He was already seated when a single woman in her mid-twenties, tall, dark-haired, and with high cheekbones, took the table next to him. She wore a black skirt, a loose pale pink sweater, and around her neck, fastened with a gold pin, was a striking red silk scarf. Bill Cochrane spoke first, admiring the scarf and asking her in German where she had bought it. At first she was reserved, modest, letting him lead the conversation. But the talk blossomed and he joined her at her table.

  Two nights later, they attended a cinema, followed by a late coffee. Then they shared a brandy. He walked her home. She admitted that he fascinated her because there were so few Americans left in Berlin. He told her she fascinated him because she was-quite frankly-so very beautiful.

  They stopped at the entrance to her apartment building. Bill Cochrane kissed her. She turned her cheek to his lips and they said good night. Cochrane walked home knowing that she was toying with him. So for a week he did not telephone.

  On a Friday he called her to take her to dinner. She answered the door of her flat. As he handed her a bouquet of flowers, she huddled behind the door in the unlit foyer. "I'm not dressed," Theresia told him. But she was. Partially. She had showered and dried herself. Clinging to her was a nightgown, thin as gauze.

  "Please be good. Please wait," she asked.

  She motioned to a sitting area off from the foyer, and hurried past him back to her dressing room. As she passed into the light of the doorway of her bedroom, she was silhouetted for an instant. Bill Cochrane caught the first suggestion of what she would look like naked. Then she disappeared.

  Bill Cochrane looked at the dressing-room door. It was still open. A moment l
ater he was standing in it, his head cocked appreciatively, as he watched Theresia before a full-length mirror, wearing only a lavender camisole, perfuming and dusting herself. She saw him and stopped.

  "I'm not good. And I won't wait," he said.

  She pulled her nightgown back to her to cover herself. She turned, but was far from angry.

  "Maybe we could make it a late dinner. Toward midnight," he suggested.

  "Maybe," she answered. She added that she knew a cabaret where the best show started at one. He approached her and she halted him again, letting the nightgown slip away but reaching to the top drawer of a dressing table.

  With a sly smile, she pulled out the long red scarf that had first caught his eye some ten days earlier.

  "I'm told no man can resist a red scarf," she said with a laugh. "No matter how a woman wears it." She tied it neatly around her left thigh, three quarters of the way up from her knee toward the top of her perfect leg.

  "You're told correctly," he said. He reached behind her and easily unlaced the camisole. It slid down her body and she stepped out of it. In clothing, she had been an extremely attractive woman. Completely undressed, she was breathtakingly beautiful. She helped him undress and then they were on her bed. He was kissing her on her lips, on her throat, on her breasts, and everywhere else. He had completely taken control, which was exactly what she had wanted since the first night she had seen him at the Rathskeller Keitel.

  As lovers, they saw each other regularly, went to a dinner here, a public park there, and the occasional long walk on a Sunday. And always a rendezvous would end in a bedroom, one day his, the next day hers. They even realized that they were acting like a pair of sex-crazed university students embarked on their first affair. Both knew that it was far from that for either. But neither could possibly have cared.

  Then, one night about a month and a half after it all began, Theresia spoke out in the middle of the night. It was past 2 A.M. and she couldn't sleep. So she awakened him.

  "What will you do when war breaks out?" she asked.

  She was smoking, lying naked near him, and he could see her figure and the pale orange glow from her cigarette. His eye began an easy, leisurely journey which began with her full, perfect breasts. It traveled past her flat, trim waist and then settled for a few seconds upon the perfection of her slim legs. Bill Cochrane knew he was in love.

  "Stay in Berlin. Sell securities, if I still could," he answered sleepily. As soon as the sentence was out of his mouth, he realized the impoverishment of his lie.

  "Shouldn't you return to America?" she asked.

  "I don't know. Why?"

  "Because you should," she said. "All my friends know there will be another war. One to correct the injustices of the last war. They say the Americans will be our enemies again. Roosevelt is partially Jewish, Hitler says."

  "That's ridiculous, Theresia," he answered too instinctively.

  Somewhere in the far distance, from another apartment, perhaps, Cochrane thought he heard someone playing a flute. Theresia changed the subject unexpectedly, as was her habit.

  "Do you have a wife in America?" she asked.

  “No.”

  "That's something else you should do," she said. "Marry someday. Have a family.”

  "Someday," he agreed.

  "My husband is a lieutenant in the Navy," she said. "I haven't seen or heard from him for six months. The last time, he hinted that he was going to South America. I think he is in a submarine. They never tell the family."

  Cochrane listened, watching her breathe, watching her chest move gently up and down and following the glow of the cigarette until she snuffed it.

  "My husband would kill you if he discovered you to be my lover," she said, turning toward Cochrane and moving into his arms. "And he would kill me if he knew I was in love with you."

  "So we won't tell him," Cochrane answered. Then he kissed her and told her that he was in love with her, husband or no husband. They made love again. He waited for tomorrow and wondered idly if he should see a special contact in Berlin. He needed something small, compact, and thirty-two caliber, in case of some funny sort of emergency.

  "I never knew you had a husband," he finally said through a veil of drowsiness.

  "You never asked," she answered equally.

  *

  Through Theresia, Cochrane met Otto Mauer. Mauer was introduced as a coordinator of labor and industry within the Interior Ministry. Cochrane gravitated toward him as well as he could without arousing suspicion.

  Mauer was between forty and fifty, with brown hair that was silvering instead of graying and a narrow, unfriendly jaw. He wore thin round glasses and had an air of being midway between a dentist and an aristocrat. Cochrane, after a few meetings, began to like Mauer. He quickly learned that the man's appearance was deceiving. Or perhaps it was for show. Independently wealthy, he had gone into the government because it had once been a respectable thing to do in Germany. He had also been to university and enjoyed sharing a schnitzel lunch with Cochrane or an evening in a beer garden talking Hegel or Schopenhauer and maybe even flirting with some Kierkegaard, if the evening became sufficiently sodden.

  "So unusual to even find a man who knows those names anymore," Mauer remarked one evening as they walked through Berlin. "No one going into government now with any education. Not since the Nazis closed the universities. Difficult to find anyone with more than eight years of schooling. Country is run by a bunch of fascist thugs.”

  Cochrane had a suspicion he was being tested. "But the party has rebuilt Germany," he said.

  "Yes. Of course," Mauer answered, lacking any conviction. "Wonderful thing, isn't it? Sieg heil.” He spat on the floor.

  They strolled through a quiet park and came to a commercial section. Three shops were boarded up that Cochrane remembered from the previous week. A tailor, a watchmaker, and a grocer were gone. There were heavy boards across broken storefront windows and enormous swastikas had been scrawled across the jagged woodwork. They passed the shattered storefronts without comment.

  "Germany is in the process of change," said Mauer, given heavily to understatement. "Not everyone is convinced it is for the best."

  "Germany has its historical place in the world," Cochrane answered. "As a power in Europe, for example."

  "Germany," Mauer replied, "has started and lost too many wars already." He turned toward Cochrane as they walked. The German assessed his American friend thoroughly. "Why don't you come visit my family some weekend? Not in Berlin, but down to the south. We have our permanent residence outside of Munich. I would like you to meet my wife and son."

  Cochrane thanked Mauer and accepted. Later, Theresia said something about having to visit an ailing aunt in Baden-Baden, so Bill Cochrane picked the following weekend to be Mauer's houseguest. He caught an express train from the new station in Berlin.

  Mauer had preceded him, taking a personal holiday and leaving on Wednesday. But as the train carried Cochrane southward, he began to notice crated military equipment stacked in increasing volume from one station to the next. At Regensburg, Cochrane stepped off the train during its fifteen-minute stop, ostensibly to smoke a small cigar. It was a damp day, surprisingly chilly for that time of year. Cochrane walked the length of the platform, as if to savor the exercise.

  The supplies carried Wehrmacht insignia and were barely concealed. Had Cochrane wished to look more closely, which he did not want to appear to do, he could have learned which battalions were the intended recipients. But he did pass close enough to the crates and their military guards to actually learn some of the contents. It was the precise war equipment-helmets, rifles, blankets, and knapsacks-Cochrane reasoned, necessary to sustain a light-armored or infantry division.

  A bit farther south, at Freising and at Landshut, Cochrane observed the soldiers who would be using the equipment. By the time Cochrane reached Munich, soldiers were everywhere. But the equipment was nowhere in view and Bill Cochrane knew he had stumbled across a military
secret unknown outside the Third Reich. Germany was fortifying for an invasion of Austria. There could be no other reason for a buildup of troops in that area. Surely, Austria, Switzerland, and Czechoslovakia were not preparing to invade Germany.

  Otto Mauer met Cochrane at the central railway station. Mauer drove a sleek dark blue Mercedes convertible, its top down, since the weather had cleared. Mauer was shown great deference, Cochrane noticed, by the local police. They drove to the chocolate shop in Freising where Natalie Mauer, Otto's wife, was the proprietor and employed a staff of five. Natalie Mauer joined the two men in the car.

  Then they drove twenty minutes out of the city to Mauer's estate, an impressive spread of land featuring a rambling stone mansion behind gates and a brick wall. Inappropriately, a new road had been constructed just outside the estate's walls and a small bus stop had been installed, presumably for the Mauer family's staff.

  Cochrane reasoned correctly that Herr and Frau Mauer had not been on a bus in their adult lives. Just before dinner, Natalie Mauer changed into a delicate pink and blue Chinese kimono. She was ten years younger than her husband and very beautiful in a way typical of German women-tall and strong, with high cheekbones, dark eyes, brown hair, and a perfect smile. Her legs were long and her arms were slim. She introduced her husband's guest to five-year-old Rudy, their son, an angelic blond child with a crown of tousled curly hair. Then a nurse with an Austrian accent guided the boy to his own play area and bedroom.

  Dinner followed. Their cook had prepared a spectacular meal of wild boar, roasted apples and potatoes, and diced chard, all complemented by a 1928 Chambolle Musigny from the cellar.

  "The last good year of the Chambolle Musignys," Mauer lamented with sincerity. He added that he was sadly down to his last two cases.

  After dinner there was German brandy, which Cochrane accepted, and cigars which he declined. He might also have declined the drift of the conversation- contemporary Germany politics. But Natalie Mauer sat in rapt attention, studying Cochrane after they had moved from the table to the salon. And Otto Mauer seemed intent upon the subject. Natalie turned on a radio, which began a broadcast of an evening of Strauss from the philharmonic in Munich.