by Noel Hynd
*
His connecting flight would not be leaving for Geneva for two more days. He registered at a hotel in the city and kept as low a profile as possible. On the first day in Lisbon, he took two long walks in the afternoon and one more in the evening, just to observe and to listen. It wasn’t unusual to see military uniforms, Luftwaffe and RAF, Abwehr, Vichy French and Royal Navy.
He bought four books to read, two in German including a biography of Richard Wagner, the composer, Vol de Nuit in French. He had seen the great 1933 film based on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s brief novel about the early days of night flight in Argentina but had never read the book. Then he selected one in English, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night, which he had also never caught up with. Fitzgerald had dropped dead in Hollywood two Decembers earlier. The clerk wrapped the four books in two bundles to protect them from the rain. The bookseller was pleased to receive payment in American dollars.
Cochrane knew Lisbon superficially, having visited one three occasions during his previous time in Europe. At a flea market he purchased some shirts, two ties, a belt and an extra pair of slacks, and a rugged pair of hiking pants in case he was pushed to terrain tougher than city sidewalks. All of these he chose to help him blend in. At one table in the market there was an old man selling toys and games. The man had a handsome collection of used games: checkers, dominos and playing cards.
The merchant was a small man with beige skin and a hooked nose. He was gracious and polite. He struck Cochrane as an Arab of some sort, as were many of the merchants in the market. Cochrane’s attention settled upon an antique set of dominos. The merchant came to him. There was some fumbling over which language in which to converse, but the conversation quickly settled into English, Portuguese being a tongue that Cochrane had never attempted to master.
“May I examine these?” Cochrane asked.
“Of course, sir,” the seller said with a slight nod.
“They’re quite beautiful.”
Cochrane picked up a domino tile. The game pieces were ebony and bone with a fine patina of age and wear. The tiles had wear but were free of damage. The set was contained in a wooden box with a sliding top. The box served as the carrier for the pieces. In faded lettering, there was an English language street address in Cairo. There was co-equal lettering in Arabic.
“This particular set is perhaps a hundred years old, carved and created in North Africa,” the merchant said gently. “Egypt it would appear. Early in the reign of Queen Victoria or perhaps around the time of the American civil war. The 1860’s. You’re English? American?”
“Canadian,” Cochrane said.
“A pleasure to meet you. My name is Masud. My family was from Cairo. These would have been quite common in the cafes of the City of a Thousand Minarets.” He paused. “The tiles are carved from animal bones, probably a camel’s, inlaid with ebony. Quite exotic, don’t you think?”
“Very much so,” said Cochrane. “Fascinating, sir.”
“A gift?”
“No. I’m looking for things for diversion during hours of travel or hotel stays. I already have some books. These might be good.”
“They may also bring you good fortune,” Masud said. “In China, you know, dominos have long been used for prediction. Divination. In the West, Gypsies of the Romany empire, have told fortunes with dominos from the seventeen hundreds to this day.”
“In what manner do they do that?”
“I’m told that in the same way that Tarot cards have an intimately connected divinatory significance, so dominos have a mystic meaning in divination and fortune telling. It is conveyed through their comparative values revealed by their spots.”
“And you can do this?” Cochrane said with a smile. “Tell the future?”
“Not always. But we can do it together.”
“The future interests me, sir. How would we do that?”
“You reach to the box without looking and select a tile. If you are to have good fortune, if God is to smile upon you, the domino will have dots that total an even number. An uneven number will indicate that you are on your own and must create your own beneficial fortune. Night must fall and the sun must rise to the midpoint of the sky before you draw again.”
“I see,” Cochrane said with an amused smile. “Let’s see how it works.”
Masud smiled and watched. Cochrane looked away. He reached to the box and drew a tile. There were two sets of three dots. Six, an even number.
Masud, an excellent salesman, bowed.
“The higher the even number,” he said, “the better the good fortune. Possibilities range from two to twelve. You are in the middle.”
“Seven would the middle.”
“I consider six the middle,” Masud said with a wink. So should you. And in the world we live in, any moderate good fortune is better than none.”
“Agreed, sir,” Cochrane said. “Very true. This is a beautiful set. How much are these?”
“What currency do you have?”
“Swiss francs.”
“Most excellent. Fifteen francs.”
Cochrane guessed that Masud had named a high price to be negotiated down. But why mess with good luck?
“I’ll take them,” Cochrane said. “You’re an excellent salesman, Masud.”
“And you are a gentleman, sir.”
Masud wrapped the set in heavy paper and placed it in a bag. Cochrane gave a final nod and turned to go. Masud placed a hand on his arm, stopping him.
“Ah! I must tell you,” Masud said.
Cochrane turned to listen.
“I must beg you to please indulge my one superstition with this set of dominos. I know the location in Cairo where these were created. Many craftsman have worked there for centuries at a market such as this one near Saints Sergius and Bacchus Church. It is believed to have been built in an area where the Joseph, Mary and the infant Jesus rested at the end of their journey into Egypt.” The man raised his finger. “When you are finished with this set, if it brings you good fortune, pass it along to someone you care about, perhaps someone you love. You will be passing along the good fortune that accompanies it. Will you remember that?”
“Masud,” Cochrane answered. “I would have difficulty ever forgetting that.”
“Good day, sir.”
“And to you, also.”
Cochrane returned to his hotel, took dinner in a nearby restaurant, examined his books and dominos and slept. Already, the good fortune was working, he felt.
*
On the second day, he wandered the city again. On the second evening, he stopped for a drink in the bar at the Hotel Aviz. He lingered over several glasses of port. The Armenian oil mogul, Calouste Gulbenkian, a former petroleum engineer who had become rich from Iraqi oil, was present at the hotel, complete with two bodyguards with not-so-subtly-concealed Lugers sitting behind him while the oil baron conducted meetings. The bodyguards sat at a table behind their employer, each holding a pistol across his lap. It didn’t take long for Cochrane to spot the third bodyguard, sitting by the entrance to the bar, a newspaper across his lap, watching everything, the nose of a particularly large pistol poking out from under the paper.
Gulbenkian was buying up as much of Henry Rothschild's art collection as he could cart away. Negotiations were going on at the end of the bar in the Aviz. The trained spy in Cochrane insisted that he listen in.
As he strained to hear the conversation, with hundreds of thousands of British pounds and Swiss francs tossed around like playing cards, Cochrane suddenly realized that a small jazz band was playing in an adjoining room. Perhaps the music had been going for an hour and he only noticed it now. He didn’t know. He heard it only in imperfect fragments, same as the many conversations upon which he had eavesdropped.
Cochrane’s old instincts started to kick in and kick in fast. By design, he fell into casual conversation with anyone who would talk to him. Everyone knew something. Less than two days on the street and it was obvious that the
British and the Germans had ramped up their intelligence activities under the surveillance of the Portuguese secret police. The locals got in on the act as informers. Desk clerks, cleaning staffs and bartenders at hotels reported gossip. Prostitutes used pillow talk to extract shipping movements from drunken sailors. Rumor was rampant. The streets ran with paranoia. It was a hell of a place.
He finished his port. My God, he thought to himself, two weeks ago he was set to become a signal corps officer. Now he was right back in the midst of things, from the FBI frying pan into the OSS fire, in a place rife with spies and killers, swindlers and con men, all in the employ of some country’s treasury.
Anything was possible. Anything that could happen could and would. There was no avoiding it. An English woman came to the extra seat at his table and sat down, unrequested.
“Buy me a drink?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said. “One. How’s that?”
“That would be good,” she said.
She said her name was Victoria, but half the women in England of her age were named Victoria. He gave his fake name. She wore a dress with a hem well above the knee and Cochrane knew where the direction would eventually go. They started a brief conversation about the war. She confirmed much of what he had gleaned about the city, already. She casually proposed sex in a nearby hotel where she had a room and said it would only cost twenty American dollars. He politely declined, as which time she finished her drink with a long gulp, got up, shot him a disparaging glance and left without saying anything.
His reaction went from mild resentment to sympathy for the poor woman, who looked as if she had been reduced to this by the war. She had sounded educated, her accent middle class. Had her husband been killed? He wondered. He finished his drink. He missed Laura and his home. He set out for a short walk by the river back to his own hotel. There was a curfew and a glance at his watch told him he could beat it
At first the stroll was uplifting. In Bairro Alto, the nightlife-rich bohemian quarter, Cochrane took in a view of Baixa, the area that was comprised of magnificent plazas, wide avenues and tremor-proof Pombaline architecture that rose after the city was destroyed by an earthquake in the eighteenth century. The area sparkled with movement as did its surrounding hills. To his right, the Tagus River swirled ominously toward the Atlantic Ocean and who knew how many lurking submarines. Then a fog and river mist reminiscent of London rolled in as he walked. The low cloud gave a distinctly film noir atmosphere to the city.
Unavoidably, such was a perfect setting to kick his mind fully into reverse gear and force him to review the events of 1937 and 1938 when he had been in Nazi Germany the first time. He had barely lived to come back to the United States and tell about it and mumbled a whispered prayer that he would come back again.
As he arrived back at his hotel and as he went to sleep that night, the full events of his first tenure in Germany played out in the front of his mind.
There was no stopping the events. The past unraveled before him much like the way the events had first occurred.
Chapter 17
United States and Europe
1934 – 1939
In June of 1934, Bill Cochrane entered the National Police Academy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He neared completion of the five months of training that had a dropout rate of 43 percent. He drew excellent marks in all fields: crime scene analysis, visual memory, forensic chemistry, firearms, description, identification, unarmed attack, and self-defense. From his days as a US Army ordnance officer, he knew enough about high level explosives to practically teach the course himself.
Upon graduation, Cochrane was sent to Kansas City, where he was soon going cheek-to-jowl with a gang of railroad-yard thieves. Then he was reassigned to Chicago, where he passed six weeks. Some Sicilian gorillas were edging into the funeral home business at the expense of some honest German-American undertakers on the North Side, making substantial contributions to the overall funeral industry at the same time.
Next, Bureau headquarters in Washington sent Cochrane swimming into some deeper water. He went to New York posing as a County Antrim gunrunner for the Irish Republican Army. In lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, Cochrane put together a good infiltration effort among the Jewish mobsters along Delancey, Hester, and Canal streets - Meyer Lansky, Waxey Gordon, and Whitey Krackauer - and from the nether side of the Brooklyn Bridge, Lepke Buchalter, Gurrah Shapiro, and Mendy Weiss. These were the presiding experts at running weapons in and out of New York. And there was no shortage of customers. Everyone, back in those days, had someone he wanted to shoot. Sometimes, even an entire group of people.
While he was at it, Cochrane uncovered and blew the whistle on several middle-range operations associated with the same gangs, mostly shlom jobs in the garment centers that had to do with sash weights and lead pipes massaging the skulls of labor organizers.
By mid-1937, President Roosevelt himself was concerned about access to information in Europe should the United States be drawn into another world war. The US, after all, had never engaged in espionage abroad.
He asked a Wall Street lawyer and world war hero named William Donovan to travel to Europe and study how an intelligence service might be established. And second, he launched a personal directive to J. Edgar Hoover to establish a foreign branch posthaste.
At the invocation of the word "foreign," J. Edgar Hoover remembered a letter of application Bill Cochrane had sent to the FBI in 1934. He abruptly recalled Cochrane to Washington to prepare for European service.
Cochrane traveled by the Polish liner Pilsudski from Washington to Bremen, working under the cover of an American businessman sympathetic to Hitler's National Socialist Party. His only orders from the FBI were, "Find out what you can, and don't get caught. More than likely, we won't be able to get you out."
Bill Cochrane's arrival in Berlin in 1937 coincided with a state visit by Mussolini. Cochrane was grateful for the public activity. Easier for him to move around the city and become oriented. Better for him to observe.
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 themselves "for the Fatherland" in the Great War.
But then there was the New Germany. Everywhere, particularly upon Il Duce's arrival, there were the new red and black facades. Everywhere there was a march. Everywhere there were swastikas, Hitler Youth, Hitlerjugend, 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 Fuehrer 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 was 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. 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 coffee and tea shops 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 S
tates 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 Kurt Kurkevics. The tailor, a Latvian, had been on the FBI 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. 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 US 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.
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 Walküre, 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 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.
