Return to Berlin

by Noel Hynd

  The front door staff warmly greeted him. The elevator man took him up to the third floor where he lived. He knocked on the door. He fumbled with a key but the door opened.

  He fell into Laura’s arms at the door to their five room apartment.

  The embrace was long and laden with emotion. With the world at war, and both of them players, who knew how long anyone would live? An epiphany was upon him. He suddenly realized he dreaded the war and this assignment. He wished that he didn’t have to return to Bill Donovan’s office or accept the thankless mission being offered.

  He stepped into the apartment. Laura pushed the door shut.

  “Come on,” she said, taking his hand and motioning toward the bedroom. “You’ve been away too long. I’m your wife. We should get re-acquainted before we even talk.”

  Chapter 10

  New York City

  November 1942

  In April of that year, the US Army had determined that the glow from New York City’s lights was silhouetting American ships offshore, making them sitting ducks for German submarines that lurked nearby. Nazi U-Boats had sunk scores of oil tankers and freighters bound for Britain. Under an Army-ordered “dim out,” which was less rigorous than a “blackout,” the brilliant neon advertising signs in Times Square went dark. Apartment houses and office buildings throughout the city were required to veil windows more than fifteen stories high. Stores, restaurants and bars toned down their exterior lighting. Motor vehicle headlights were hooded. Wattage on streetlights and traffic signals was reduced.

  So the Great White Way wasn’t as White or illuminated as it had been in peacetime, but even in wartime 1942, it could still rise to greatness. The overall ‘dim out’ of the city, however, diminished the neon. There was no need to give enemy submarines off the coast or possibly enemy aircraft a way to find their way to an American target.

  Cochrane was always a student of history. He was always conscious, sometime too conscious, of the history of places. It was difficult for him to believe that the most famous thoroughfare in New York, if not the world, had once been little more than a meandering former Native American pathway stretching from Bowling Green near the southern tip of Manhattan Island to Inwood at the northern end of the island. The city’s original theatrical community started in the mid-eighteenth century when modest playhouses opened along Nassau, John, and Chatham Streets in what became the Financial District. The theaters of New York emigrated uptown over the course of decades.

  Laura and Bill Cochrane dined at the Brass Rail, then walked to the Morosco on West Forty-fifth Street. Comedies and musicals were playing well in 1942. People wanted to forget about the chaos of the world, if only innocently and for a few hours. Bill and Laura were in their seats several minutes before the curtain rose at eight thirty PM.

  Blithe Spirit was a hit. The premier had been ten days earlier. The laughs, which everyone needed, had started right after the opening night curtain and had not yet stopped.

  On the stage, a novelist named Charles Condomine, the double entendre of the name being part of the fun, invited an eccentric medium and clairvoyant named Madame Arcati to his house. She would conduct a séance, hoping to help him gather material for his next book.

  The scheme backfired when he was haunted by the ghost of his annoying and temperamental first wife, Elvira, who had been dead for seven years. Madame Arcati departed after the séance, unaware that she had summoned Elvira. Only Charles could see or hear Elvira. His second wife, Ruth, refused to believe that Elvira existed, but then a floating vase of flowers, hilariously rigged with imperceptible wire by some brilliant stage managers, jumped into her hands out of thin haunted air. Elvira’s ghost made several efforts to disrupt Charles's current marriage. She finally sabotaged his car in the hope of killing him so that he might join her in the spirit world, but it was Ruth rather than Charles who drove off and was killed.

  More wonderful chaos and fun continued through the evening. Throughout, Laura and Bill laughed together, even with the invocation of death. Cochrane gave his wife’s hand a tight squeeze several times during the comic haunting. He put his arm around her shoulders and she leaned to him, savoring the evening together.

  The play hurtled toward its conclusion. The curtain came down.

  The four stars of the show, Clifton Webb as Charles, Peggy Wood as Ruth, Leonora Corbett as Elvira and Mildred Natwick as Madame Arcati came out to take curtain calls. Laura and Bill stood and applauded, although with the witnessing of the spiritual world, hilarious as it may have been, the scent of death hung in the area.

  The audience filed out.

  Cochrane refused to let go of his wife’s hand. They looked for a taxi, couldn’t find one, but the night was brisk and clear. They decided to walk home. He wondered if the success of the show had to do with the possibility of laughing at death in a world where death lurked everywhere, from bombings, artillery, rifle squads or bayonets. Through his contacts in the intelligence community, he was even starting to hear stories about concentration camps in Europe. He hoped the stories that were reaching him were not true. But a dark suspicion within him, told him that they probably were.

  They stopped on Fifty-Seventh Street at The Russian Tea Room, which was still open for the evening. Cochrane requested a secluded table where Laura and he could talk with no risk of anyone overhearing.

  They ordered two vodka drinks: two shots straight up with a small plate of black caviar and crackers on the side.

  Until the 1930s and 40s, vodka had been strange, foreign, little known and vaguely seditious. Gin was the white spirit of choice for Americans. Vodka, the “white whiskey,’ as some chose to call it, was a foreign interloper. Many barroom cynics labeled it a first cousin to turpentine. The Russian Tea Room had a better selection than almost anyone else in New York: Russian, Swedish and American. Ironically, just when the Soviet Russian stuff was trending, the war had cut off supplies. So now the best stuff was coming from Canada. The second best was coming from bathtubs in Brooklyn with fake printed-in-Crown Heights Russian stamps that everyone winked at. The caviar was also Canadian, the top stuff having been cut off from Persia and Russia. The drinks arrived: a one and a half ounce shot for each of them at eighty proof.

  “Don’t go away,” Cochrane said to the waiter. “Cheers,” he said to Laura.

  “Cheers!” she said in return. They clicked glasses and each threw back a shot.

  The waiter stood by. He looked on in amusement. “Another round, sir?” he asked.

  “Damned right,” Cochrane said.

  “The lady, too?” the waiter asked.

  “Damned right,” Cochrane said.

  Like the theater, the spirit of the restaurant was light. The war seemed far away. Theater and bars were functioning quietly and efficiently in America’s largest city while miles away millions of troops were preparing for tomorrow or maybe preparing to die.

  They ordered a plate of blinis. It arrived. So did the second round of vodka.

  “I suppose with what we have to talk about, a liberal blast alcohol would be a good idea,” she said.

  “I would not disagree,” he said.

  This time they sipped, working on the caviar and the blinis concurrently.

  When the waiter was well beyond earshot, and when the blinis were half gone, he put his hand on hers.

  “All right. So what did General Donovan have to say?” she asked. “You know I’m not keen on that man, but you might as well tell me what you talked about.”

  A beat, then. “He wants me to be a spy,” Cochrane said. “Again.”

  “Oh, Lord,” she said. She withdrew her hand in horror. She put it back in sympathy, or some emotion that passed for it. “You can’t just go into the infantry and be shot at by a bloodthirsty enemy at like a normal man, is that it? Always these independent one-on-one episodes, right? What else can you tell me?” she asked.

  “Not much.” He gave it a suitable pause. Another sip of Count Smirnoff’s best, then, “You know wha
t General Donovan is like. He comes up with schemes and then says, ‘Let’s give it a try!’ Sometimes he’s brilliant. Other times everyone gets killed.”

  “I know that,” Laura said. “I hear the same stories as you do, just not as many of them.

  Where would you be posted?” she asked.

  “Use your imagination.”

  She grimaced. “I already have. You speak German, you have a history there. It doesn’t take a bloody genius. He wants to send you into Germany.”

  “Yes. I also have to meet with Allen Dulles in Bern.”

  Laura reacted sharply. “Dulles in Bern? Good Christ, Bill! Donovan and Dulles. The two D’s. Mr. Deceit and Mr. Duplicity, that’s what people should call them. Or Death and Destruction. That’s the top bloody table, indeed, isn’t it? I might have known! Damn Wild Bill Donovan and all who sail with him,” she said. “How many times is this war going to make a widow out of me? God!”

  Laura drained her glass and savored the buzz.

  Another suitable pause and, “I haven’t accepted yet,” he said.

  “But you will, I would guess.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I know you and we both know you will, even though maybe you haven’t given him the formal yes he wants. We both know how it works. Your country calls and you would rather be on your own in assignment where you can assess you own information and control your own survival than be at the mercy of a bad commander who’s going to blunder troops in all the wrong directions. It’s that simple.”

  “You know me too well.”

  “Well, I married you, didn’t I?” she answered. “I also know what some of the commanders are like. Couldn’t organize a cat fight in a bag, the majority of them, but someone in Washington gives them ten thousand men to command and they think they’re Caesar, Napoleon, Wellington and Bismarck all rolled into one. Fooey on them,” she snapped as the blood shot to her indignant face.

  “Wars aren’t won, they’re lost,” she continued. “Whoever blunders less wins, meanwhile a generation of young men goes to the meatgrinders or Europe and Asia and the only real numbers game is whether more civilians die than soldiers. Verdun. The Somme. Gallipoli. Look at Dieppe just the other day: three thousand young Canadians dead on the beach in an utterly useless, abjectly senseless and thoroughly unsuccessful raid. But ignore me, I’m a cynical middle-aged lady with unpopular opinions.”

  She finished her drink. Cochrane sat patiently, not disagreeing with anything Laura said.

  “Do you see the waiter?” she asked.

  “Yes. To your left. Over by the giant red samovar, feeding beef Stroganoff to some tourists. Why?”

  “Because we should have a third round, then,” she said. “That’s the type of evening we’ve embarked on, isn’t it?”

  “Fair enough.”

  Cochrane summoned the waiter. He ordered the third round. Laura was quiet and brooding as they waited for the drinks to arrive, which they did in short order.

  She lifted her drink. He lifted his.

  “I wouldn’t be foolish enough to ask any more impertinent questions,” she said. “To our good health.”

  “To surviving the war. Both of us,” he said.

  They drank their final round of vodka. They paid and departed.

  Back out on the street, Laura leaned to him. He placed an arm around her and she buried her face on his shoulder. “Good God,” she said. “I know what happens to us is small in terms of the world. But I’m going to be worried sick until I see you again.”

  “I won’t take this assignment without your blessing,” he said. “I can’t do that to you.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” she said. “I don’t see any reasonable answers. Not in this world that’s run by a bunch of insane belligerent men.”

  Chapter 11

  New York City - Manhattan

  November 1942

  It was past midnight when they stumbled out of The Russian Tea Room, the last couple to leave the dining area. The bar would be busy for another hour: local actors, musicians from Carnegie Hall, grifters, discreet call girls and those who liked to associate with them.

  Laura and Bill were greeted by the night doorman when they arrived home. They stumbled into the elevator, then into their own apartment, Dr. Smirnoff’s prescription working wonders on the nerves and the libido.

  They went for the bedroom first, fell into the bed left unmade from that late afternoon. They made love passionately, knowing that their time as a couple might be nearly at and end, or might last several more decades.

  They drifted off to sleep. A few hours ticked by.

  Cochrane woke shortly before three AM, coming out of an uneasy sleep. Perhaps everything here in New York was too normal. Then again, this was a strange form of torture, being home with the woman he loved, among his books and whiskeys and newspapers, an island of calm when the world was at war, a war that he knew was waiting for him.

  He couldn’t get back to sleep. Next to him, Laura was breathing evenly. He put his hand on her shoulder, felt her respond, still in sleep, then pulled it away.

  He rose from his bed and walked through his apartment. He kept the lights off in his living room. He went to the window and pushed the dark heavy curtain a few inches to one side. He looked down over East Seventy-second Street. The city was sleeping, even if he wasn’t.

  On any night in Manhattan there was usually one respite from activity in most neighborhoods. No taxis or buses. No pedestrians, not even a drunk or a hobo. He glanced at his watch. It was 3:06 AM. Normally, the respite came to his neighborhood around now. Tonight it didn’t. Why?

  He gazed at the street three floors below him. A lone sanitation truck quietly cruised the street like a big peaceful tank, its lights dim. There were two men on the street in overcoats. One was walking a large dog. They stopped to talk to each other.

  A surveillance team? A security detail of some sort? People watching him? A homosexual assignation? Two friends who recognized one another? None of these?

  He tried to dismiss the men on the street and channel his thoughts.

  What else did he know about Wild Bill Donovan’s new operation? Cochrane had more on-the-street experience than most of the other people being recruited into the new spy agency. He had had experience in criminal investigation and, factoring in the episode with the spy named Siegfried that he had thwarted, he had experience in counterespionage, also.

  He had heard back channel stories from peers. He knew the new OSS was informal, iconoclastic, freewheeling and nimble. Donovan was smart and cautious, but sometimes impulsive at the same time.

  Several members of the OSS were officers in one branch of military service or another. But day-to-day the agency had a level playing field: military rank meant little and unorthodox ideas meant a lot. Cochrane also knew that the new American spies were mostly anti-Communist but would cut deals with the Reds, also.

  Well, that made sense, he concluded in his dark apartment. If the enemy of one’s enemy was one’s friends, the filthy Bolsheviks were to be embraced, were they not? They were at war against the Nazis, right?

  It was so quiet that he could hear the ticking of the Seth Thomas clock on his mantle.

  He pondered further. He had heard tales about Donovan’s people having a special place in their hearts, for example, for any warrior who had fought Fascism and Franco in Spain.

  Donovan had also loaded the OSS with so many die-hard Reds that they had become a joke in Washington. To the post of Chief Latin American Division of the OSS, Donovan appointed a man named Doctor Maurice Halperin. Halperin regularly attended CPUSA meetings and altered the information which came across his desk to fit the current party line, sometimes to the point of absurdity. Halperin was secretive. He kept the door to his office locked. When the door was closed, other OSS employees - even his friends - liked to joke that, "Our dear Maurice is having another cell meeting." It was odd, even suspicious to an outsider. But no one on the inside tho
ught it was strange.

  The thought of Halperin reminded Cochrane of Donovan’s mention of Irv Goff, their mutual acquaintance. Cochrane had come to know Goff when they were together at the National Police Academy in Washington in 1933. Subsequently, Goff had been a captain in the US Army and the Lincoln Brigade in Spain. He was later chairman of the Communist Party in Louisiana and New York. His exploits as a guerrilla in Spain had been the inspiration for Ernest Hemingway's novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls.

  Donovan liked colorful characters. So did Cochrane, but not quite as much. Goff was one. He had grown up in Brooklyn and Long Island. As a young man, he had been a body builder. Goff had become famous as the "Adonis" of Coney Island’s Muscle Beach. He had worked as an adagio dancer and professional acrobat before becoming an organizer for the Communist Party in New York.

  During the horrible Civil War in Spain, Goff participated in Battle of Teruel, working behind enemy lines again with Communist-backed Spanish guerrillas who were attacking supply lines and blowing up railroad tracks used by the pro-Franco forces backed by Nazi Germany. He got results. “Say whatever you want about Irv,” said one mutual friend who knew him, “but he’s built like a brick shithouse and blessed with a set of brass nuts.”

  No argument ensued. If you were in a fight, you wanted Goff watching your back.

  In May of 1938, while Cochrane was still in Germany, Goff had commanded part of a successful amphibious operation at on the southern coast of Spain. The raid resulted in the rescue of three hundred Republican prisoners held in the Fort of Carchuna. Far left or not in his political philosophy, Goff got results and that was what Donovan respected.

  Cochrane and Goff and their wives had dinner at Luchow’s one evening in February of 1940. Goff had read all about himself in Hemingway’s novel. He was contemptuous of the book. He was equally disdainful of the proposed movie version of the book, currently in production with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman. By this time, Irv had soured on Hemingway, too, whom he used to call a friend. He didn’t care for anyone very much this evening, present company excluded.