Flowers From Berlin

by Noel Hynd

  "From his point of view, that was quite enough. He also wanted to know if he had be executed for treason. He said he thought he would be. I told him he was probably right."

  Lerrick's anger flashed. "What'd you tell him that for?"

  "Because that was the truth. And he knew it long before I told him."

  Bill Cochrane took a final look at the dead man on the floor. For a moment he winced at the pain that Wheeler must have known before dying and for another moment he felt sorry for him. Then he gave Frank Lerrick a final sour look.

  "I'll be out of the Twenty-sixth Street house by noon tomorrow," Cochrane said. "Not a minute earlier." Then he departed.

  With him went the lesson he had learned so well years ago at the National Police Academy, then under Wheeler's own command in Kansas City.

  In this line of work..

  In Cochrane's career, Dick Wheeler had always been the coincidence, but Cochrane had never seen it. Chicago and Kansas City, then Berlin and Washington. Always it had been Dick Wheeler, giving the silent orders, pulling the unseen strings.

  When the Gestapo had known ahead of time of Cochrane's arrival, he hadn't seen the coincidence. When Siegfried somehow had learned who was on his trail, and where that "who" lived, Cochrane had only begun to sense the coincidence.

  Now Wheeler was dead by his own hand and Bill Cochrane was off the Bureau. At last, coincidence had been eliminated.

  FORTY-FIVE

  There were two other ghosts to lay to rest.

  Cochrane flew to Atlanta on Saturday morning, and early on a chilly afternoon found himself walking through the tall grass of a hillside cemetery at Stone Mountain. Not far from a memorial to the Confederate Civil War dead, Bill Cochrane came to a granite marker of another tragedy: a smaller tragedy, perhaps, but one of equal intensity.

  The tombstone read:

  Heather Powers Cochrane

  1912-1933

  He leaned forward and laid a modest bouquet across the grave. Inadvertently, the flowers reminded him of the bouquet she had thrown as a young girl in a white wedding gown on the afternoon of their marriage.

  Funny about life, he thought to himself. Had Heather not died, he would never have applied to the F.B.I.. And he would never have met Laura. Bill Cochrane was only occasionally a religious man, and the grand designs of life-what was meant to be, what was not meant to be-perplexed him endlessly.

  "I'm getting remarried, Heather," he said softly, as if as a confession. "The second half of my life has begun. I've chosen the woman I want to spend it with."

  For more than half a minute he stood in silence, thinking not praying, observing, putting things in order. He looked at the burial plot on the peaceful Georgia hillside. His eyes focused on the bouquet he had just placed. Life's absurdities and contradictions came toward him in a final rush.

  Flowers, he thought, for weddings.

  Flowers. For funerals.

  Flowers, he could not help but recall from the insane hours in Code Breaking with the Bluebirds. Flowers like Siegfried's, planted in a homicidal pattern across the north-eastern United States.

  He turned and was gone.

  He took the next available flight to Philadelphia. From there it was just a short hop on the Reading Railroad out to Bala Cynwyd, where Bill Cochrane called upon the family of the late Stephen Fowler. Cochrane found what had been overlooked for too long.

  Walter Fowler, Stephen's father, still shared his bereavement with his family. But he agreed to speak with Bill Cochrane. Neither mentioned the circumstances of Stephen's death. It barely mattered now. Only the death itself was significant.

  Walter Fowler was a tall handsome man in his seventies, and from a certain angle struck an image of his departed son. Fowler spoke of Stephen's life and, in doing so, shed the light that Cochrane sought.

  "We lost just about everything during the Depression," Walter Fowler recalled at length. "In January of 1929 I was worth more than a million dollars. By the end of October, I was worth a few hundred. It was that fast. The family rallied, of course. Our business didn't go under. The railroads still had to use tracks. But we learned how quickly the enemies could destroy you if hey wanted to."

  "Sorry," Bill Cochrane said. "What enemies? I'm not following."

  A strange cast came over Walter Fowler's eyes. Wars and depressions come from the same source," he explained succinctly. "There isn't one that isn't inspired, fomented, and promoted by the great international banking combines. And these, of course, are entirely controlled by Jews. Have you ever read a pamphlet by Henry Ford called The International Jew?"

  "No, sir. I haven't."

  "I'll find you a copy. You should read it."

  "Uh huh."

  And on it went for another hour until Stephen Fowler made sense. Cochrane then excused himself, saying he wished to catch the 7:23 express from Thirtieth Street Station to Washington.

  So inevitably, in a perverse sort of way, all the recent events created their own scheme of logic.

  *

  Cochrane sat in the window of the Transworld DC-3 as it lifted off the runway of National Airport on Monday morning. The woman who sat next to him was always nervous when flying; she had been in aircraft only twice before in her life. She fidgeted her hands andCochrane placed his hand on hers.

  Stephen Fowler remained something of a cipher, but Cochrane now understood enough to close his own mental books. The only son in a distinguished, wealthy family, Stephen Fowler made his peace with fascism early in life. Probably at Princeton, Cochrane reckoned, among the elite, among the other moneyed sons of Nassau, and among the eating clubs and playing fields of the American upper classes.

  The Depression came an threatened to take all this from Stephen Fowler and those like him. Fowler reacted to Roosevelt's democratic-socialism with some -isms of his own. Fascism. Fanaticism. Deism. It was not, as Reverend Fowler himself might have remarked, like St. Paul falling off a horse. The force of Paul's conversion was said to propel him from saddle to roadside, where he sat basking in his new faith.

  With Fowler it had to have been a longer process, prompted by what the young minister perceived to be the forces of evil in the world. Jews. Leftists. Moderates. Atheists. Democrats.

  First, at Princeton he openly opposed all of them. Only later did he develop his cover. By that time he had been contacted. Summoned to grace, as it were. The network of Fritz Duquaine was in the business of fascist talent spotting, and Stephen Fowler was talent pure and simple. Thus followed the months of brooding, then the striking swing leftward to cover the man within.

  And what about the church? Cochrane thought to himself. And what about his marriage?

  More cover? Or true love?

  Cochrane weighed it carefully. Surely Fowler must lave believed at least somewhat. Surely there was a time in Fowler's life when he believed in Jesus Christ and a divine Christian God. Cochrane wanted to believe that this aspect of the man represented the one shred of decency in Laura's husband. But how could Christianity have been reconciled to murder and Hitlerism?

  Similarly with his marriage: could any man have aura's love bestowed on him and remain impassive? Then Cochrane thought of the knife that had once been held at Laura’s throat, the steel point to her jugular. He shuddered, grew angry, and looked out the window of the DC-3.

  His boyhood flashed before him. He saw stretched it beneath him the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and as he peered very carefully he could see the Rivanna River. He turned excitedly to the woman next to him.

  "Look, look," he said to Laura, taking her hand and towing her. "That's Virginia. That's where I grew up." She unbuckled the seat belt and rose slightly, leaning forward toward the window and looking down. Even in December, there were blue mountains capped with white, the land was extraordinarily beautiful.

  There was ice on the Rivanna. Cochrane could see it. But then, in a quick flash, time spiraled and he saw himself barefoot and in dungarees some thirty years earlier, pitching stones into th
e river, watching the circles form in the water, and his own father was standing beside him.

  The vision faded and was replaced by ones of the College of William and Mary, his first wife, and his lonely first days at the Police Academy.

  Then white clouds suddenly covered Virginia and inevitably Cochrane saw in them the billows of cotton, smoke that were always present from Dick Wheeler’s pipe.

  Wheeler's fascism had been on a more sophisticated level than Reverend Fowler's, Cochrane decided. That perplexed him, because Fowler seemed the more sophisticated man.

  But where Fowler had rejoiced in Hitlerism, the late Dick Wheeler had wrapped himself in stars and stripes.

  "A patriot," as he had termed himself in the final hours before his suicide. Where Fowler was a disguised monster of international terrorism and totalitarianism, Dick Wheeler was nothing more than a dark mirror held up to the American psyche: racism and lynching, isolationism and gun-wielding violence, all with a genteel cover.

  Roosevelt had betrayed Americanism, Wheeler had concluded, and that, like horse theft in the Old West, was a transgression worthy of hanging. Frontier justice.

  Where Cochrane had grown up there had been man in Charlottesville named Jim Horsely. Jim Horsely was a deputy sheriff and owned a candy store. By day he tipped his hat to ladies in the street and gave penny candies to the children who flocked to his store By night, he was the most notorious Ku Klux Klansman in Albemarle County. After his own death the stories surfaced: Jim Horsely had personally beer responsible for the deaths of at least a dozen black people over the last two decades.

  Cochrane as a teenager had been struck with that realization.

  There had been two Jim Horselys, just as now there had been two Dick Wheelers. And two Stephen Fowlers.

  "You're very quiet," Laura said as the DC-3 banked to the southeast.

  He turned to her. "I'm sorry. Just thinking. And I'm very tired."

  She nodded. So was she. Physically and spiritually drained. They were nearing Havana two hours later when she spoke again.

  "Do you think Stephen believed in God?" she asked.

  "In his way, yes. I think he did."

  "If there is a God," she continued, "I hope He's merciful."

  "We all do," Bill Cochrane said.

  She was silent again for many minutes, then bravely asked, "What about me? Do you think Stephen ever loved me?"

  He replaced his hand on hers. "I know I do," was his only answer.

  Then the airplane began its descent for buoyant dazzling Havana.

  *

  As almost all Americans know, almost five and a half years later, at 3:35 in the afternoon of April 12, 1945, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirty-second President of the United States died of a sudden cerebral hemorrhage. When stricken, he was having his portrait painted at the Little White House in Warm Springs.

  The explosion on the presidential yacht in November of 1939 took no fatalities at all. But it might have changed history, had it not been for a quirk of events.

  Mrs. Roosevelt disliked ocean voyages of any sort in November. At the last moment, she decided to stay behind in Washington for the weekend, appear at a pair of political functions for her husband, and travel to Warm Springs by train the following Monday.

  The President himself, on the night the explosion mysteriously erupted off the Sequoia, was safely off the forward port side of the vessel -- as far from the explosion as possible -- in the ship’s reading room. His insomnia had kicked up again; or, more accurately, it had never abated.

  Someone from the F.B.I. had sent him a copy of a naval volume entitled The Fighting Liners of The Great War, published in London and not yet available in the United States. Roosevelt had been transfixed by the notion of the great ocean liners becoming troop ships. He was halfway through the book when the explosion rocked the Sequoia.

  Mike Reilly, the head of the President’s Secret Service detail, was the first to locate the president. Bursting into the reading room in his pajamas, and bearing a handgun, Reilly was stunned to see Franklin Roosevelt calm and engrossed in his book. Finally at sea, in fact, the President looked better than he had in weeks. His face was fresh, his body relaxed, and his eyes twinkled.

  “Now, Mike, my friend,” asked the President, looking up with a sly grin, “I know this silly world is at war, but unless we are several thousand miles off course, we are a long way from a battle zone. So what the blazes was that?”

  For a moment, Reilly could not bring himself to speak. “A boiler malfunction, I’m told, Mr. President,” Reilly answered at length. “Possibly a serious one.”

  Roosevelt nodded. “Michael, this is a fascinating volume,” he added. “You must find out who at the F.B.I. sent it to me.”

  “Yes, of course, Mr. President.”

  Reilly stared at the Commander in Chief. He awkwardly nestled his revolver to his pajama pocket. He wondered at what point the President would have to be told that his bed chambers had been destroyed and that two US Navy vessels were about to evacuate The Sequoia.

  Finally, when Reilly did not move, Roosevelt looked up again.

  "Are you all right, sir?" Reilly pressed, still staring.

  "I'm just splendid, Michael!" Roosevelt answered with a huge grin and a laugh. "Good to get out of Washington! How are you?"

  "I'm okay, sir." Reilly answered. "Fine, actually. Thank you."

  Then the President of the United States returned to his reading. As everyone knew, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's fascination with naval matters was one of the paramount concerns of his life.

  PART EIGHT

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  May 1984

  FORTY-SIX

  On the wall of Memorial Hall, the hour, minute, and second hands of the clock came together at the twelve. Dr. Cochrane had run ten minutes past his time. But few students had complained.

  He looked to his left and the Englishwoman with the gray hair smiled and motioned to her watch. Suddenly Bill Cochrane was aware of the time. He apologized to the class. They were in a forgiving mood.

  Over the last two hours Bill Cochrane had told them about what might have been. It had gone like this, or so Dr. Cochrane had speculated:

  With Roosevelt dead or disabled on the presidential yacht, the 1940 election might have been between Wendell Willkie, the bright young star of the Republicans, and John Nance Garner, who had split the Democratic Party by wresting the nomination away from Henry Wallace.

  Willkie, the internationalist, had defeated Garner. The Republicans had gone into office. Lend-Lease had happened anyway, only it had come several months later and only in time to repel an invasion of Great Britain.

  "The English are people of great tenacity," Cochrane had stressed in his lecture, "as are the American people. Politics of the extreme come and go in both nations. What you must remember is that both peoples will always rally at a point of moderation. Great leaders are important, but never forget-in a democracy the great leaders are allowed to lead only because they are elected."

  Hitler, Cochrane postulated further, had asked his Japanese allies to refrain from attacking Pearl Harbor until England could be defeated. When the R.A.F. and British Navy refused to buckle, Japan attacked anyway on February 21, 1942. A Sunday morning, naturally. America entered the war. It ended by January of 1946. By that time, Thomas Dewey was the President of the United States, having assumed office when an overweight, chain-smoking Willkie suffered his fatal heart attack in 1944.

  "The United Nations happened anyway, as did the atomic bomb," Dr. Cochrane theorized. "These, like the war, were events set in motion, more than the actions of a single man. Harry Truman never left the United States Senate and MacArthur never became President because of his dispute with President Dewey over Korea in 1951. Eisenhower became President the next year-running as a Democrat, he defeated Senator Taft-and the McCarthy era happened anyway. Again, events were set in motion. American history always drifts toward the center course, no matter who the pe
rsonalities involved."

  Dr. Cochrane then wrapped up. He told the old joke that had made its rounds of the Harvard Faculty Club since the 1970s: A woman falls into a coma in 1954, and comes out of it in 1980. "How is Senator Taft?" she asks. "Senator Taft is dead," she is told. "How is Senator McCarthy?" she next asks. "Senator McCarthy died," she is told. "Well, then," she inquires at last, "how is President Eisenhower?" "President Eisenhower is dead," she is informed. To this she finally reacts in horror. "Oh, no!" she cries. "That means Nixon is President!"

  The class erupted in laughter. Bill Cochrane, at the spot of his yearly triumph, closed his notebook, held a hand aloft, and waved. The class stood appreciatively and applauded, as was the custom on the last day of lectures.

  Some started to file toward the exits but others stayed in place and applauded for several minutes. Bill Cochrane stepped away from the lectern, slightly embarrassed by the outpouring of approval, and his wife Laura came to him. He tried to wave a final time to the class, to dismiss them and send them on to their next sessions.

  And gradually the applause did begin to die. But Bill Cochrane was distracted again, because he caught something in Laura's eyes, something he had seen so many times over the decades, something he had seen so long ago: pride, strength, integrity, and tenacity. All the things he had fallen in love with within this woman, in addition to the woman herself: all the things that had made a successful marriage endure forty-three years.

  The applause was distant and then neither of them heard it at all. They were somewhere else, remembering.

  "You absolute ham," she said to him. "You should have been an actor."

  "I was, you know," he teased her. "Many years ago. In Provincetown, Massachusetts. Eugene O'Neill used to come see us."

  "Of course, dear," she said. "And I was a spy."

  They both laughed. He took Laura's hand and they walked toward the exit at the right of the lectern. He gave the class a final wave and did in fact savor the moment, as she had always accused him.