Return to Berlin

by Noel Hynd

  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 first wife.

  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. Cochrane spoke first, admiring the scarf. He asked her in German where she had bought it. At first, she was reserved, modest, letting him lead the conversation. But the talk blossomed. He joined her at her table.

  Two nights later, they attended the 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 so beautiful, which she was.

  An affair began. Some nights she would sleep over at his place. Other nights he would stay at hers.

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

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

  "Stay in Berlin. Sell securities, if I still could," he answered sleepily

  "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.

  “I know it’s ridiculous,” she said, barely above a whisper. “But we all live with all sorts of lies, don’t we?”

  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. He is in a submarine.”

  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.

  “We are separated. I have a daughter also,” she said.

  “I never knew that, either.”

  "You never asked," she answered.

  “What’s her name?” Cochrane asked.

  “Frieda,” Theresia answered.

  “How old is Frieda?”

  A pause, then, “Ten.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Away. At a school. Near Munich.”

  “Away at school at age ten?” Cochrane asked.

  “It’s much safer,” Theresia said.

  Through Theresia, Cochrane met a man named 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. Eventually, the two men became friendly.

  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. Eventually, Mauer invited Cochrane to visit him and his family on their private estate south of Munich. The train voyage there was an espionage bonanza.

  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, 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.

  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.

  That was the good part. The bad part was that both men realized that one or both of them were under surveillance by the Gestapo. By the end of the visit, Cochrane filled a notebook with classified Abwehr information. In return, he agreed to help smuggle Mauer out of Germany.

  Mauer had a final gift for Cochrane: a gift of information.

  Walking together on Mauer’s estate one night, Mauer was still able to confront Cochrane with the unexpected.

  "My secretary, Theresia," Mauer inquired pleasantly. "You find her attractive?"

  "I do," Cochrane answered.

  Mauer half turned his head. "Are you her lover?" he asked, not missing a step.

  "Sometimes."

  "Do you ever consider taking her back to America after you leave?"

  "Sometimes," Cochrane answered a second time. They were passing through the forest again. Mauer followed a path that was invisible to anyone else.

  "She has a husband, you know."

  "I know." The concept of cuckoldry after prying through state secrets seemed both forlorn and comical to Cochrane. He wished the topic could be avoided. "She told me all about him," he said. "He's a naval man. Been on a submarine for several months, she thinks. Down off South America and so on."

  "That's what she told you?"

  "Yes."

  "You’re a fool! Theresia's husband is a captain in the SS," Mauer said. "He has a greater predilection for adolescent boys than for fully matured women. Accordingly, he allows the Gestapo to employ his wife in certain investigative activities. It advances his career."

  Cochrane felt a sinking feeling.

  "Of course, some such assignments are not totally without pleasure."

  They walked several p
aces and Cochrane saw his entire relationship with Theresia flash before him. The demure response when he first started talking, yet her strategic placement next to him at the restaurant.

  "And you're telling me that I'm one of those assignments?" Cochrane answered.

  "It's not so much that I'm telling you," Mauer concluded. "It's Abteilung Three that is telling me. I pulled the report with your name on it. I will spare you the details. She cannot decide whether or not you are a spy. Tell me," Mauer concluded as they emerged from the woods and the manor loomed in the dusk a kilometer down a hillside, "for the sake of all of us. When will you be leaving Germany? Soon?"

  Cochrane felt something in the depths of his stomach and fell strangely silent. “I might consider doing just that,” he said.

  Mauer said nothing further.

  When he returned to Berlin, Cochrane assessed his situation. He had scored a major penetration of the Abwehr. But the Gestapo had him under a microscope. Arrest had to be no more than days away.

  Somewhere things had already gone wrong.

  How had the Gestapo so quickly picked up his scent? How had they uncovered and murdered the tailor Kurkevics, Cochrane's only liaison, even before his arrival? Luck on behalf of the master race? Blundering by the FBI? Magic? Something was missing which precluded Cochrane completely understanding his situation.

  Cochrane filed a single message to Washington. "Have contacted interesting Russian named Count Choulakoff," Cochrane cabled. "If he wishes to travel, you may wish to buy him a ticket. Fascinating man. I will remain in Berlin for some time."

  The cable went to Bill Cochrane's "Aunt Charlotte," in New York. Aunt Charlotte lived inside a Box 1014 at the General Post Office in Baltimore, an FBI mail drop for Frank Lerrick's office.

  Then, in Berlin, Theresia was absent from her job. Meanwhile, Gestapo agents were now on Cochrane’s trail twenty-four hours a day.

  On Wednesday night, Cochrane bought flowers in a stall near the opera house and walked the seven remaining blocks to Theresia's flat. He always met her at eight in the evening. Tonight would be no different. Cochrane's babysitters remained downstairs and across the street as he climbed the stairs. When he knocked on her door, there was silence. Cochrane used a small file that he always carried and the lock virtually fainted when it first felt the pressure.

  He cautiously pushed the door open. "Theresia?" There was no answer.

  He set the flowers on a table and he walked to the bedroom. At first, when he saw the unclothed body, he thought she was asleep. But he knew she wasn't. Not by the scent of death in the room. And not by the impossible angle at which her neck was twisted.

  He looked closer. He saw the cigarette burns at her breasts. He saw others at her lower abdomen and between her legs. He considered the pain Theresia had endured. Then he saw how expertly her neck had been broken.

  Cochrane’s first thought was that her killer had been her husband. He had discovered her liaison and would deal with Cochrane next. Then it all shifted into place.

  The Gestapo commanders who had ordered her into an affair with Cochrane had come by for a reckoning. Why was she so slow to obtain satisfactory information from this American? Had she betrayed her commander in favor of a satisfying bed? Obviously, they had decided she had.

  Bill Cochrane swept his wet eyes with his hands. He sprang to his feet. He could no longer stay in that memory-infested apartment. He left by the front stairs, closing the door the way he had found it, and carrying the flowers. He opened the door to the street and bumped into his bodyguards. They stood immobile, staring at him, and they smirked. All three were larger than he was. Typical Nazi hoods. Big, strong, and stupid-looking.

  But he looked as if he did not recognize them. "Excuse me," Cochrane said. He stepped by them and walked calmly. When he arrived at the Rathskeller Keitel two minutes later, he ordered a double brandy and sat alone at a table for two.

  Cochrane gradually stopped quaking. He ordered another brandy to steady his nerves, and then another and another. He wished that the liquor would make him drunk. But it did not. He was too shaken. The brandy made him more introspective.

  He had begun to hate. He understood hatred but had always intellectualized it.

  But this was personal. These murderous lunatics in their brown and black shirts and their steel-heeled boots, goose-stepping around Berlin. This, Cochrane now knew, was hatred.

  He finished his drink and gripped the lapels of his overcoat close to him. He left the café and walked into a wet cold rain.

  He cursed all of Germany and fixed the day's date in his mind. His usefulness in Germany had ended. It was now important to complete the business at hand.

  The following Friday morning, Cochrane took a noon train from Berlin and arrived in Stuttgart that evening, traveling with one carefully prepared suitcase.

  In Stuttgart he took his dinner at the restaurant in the train station. He allowed his trailers ample time. Two followed him while the other presumably searched his hotel room.

  When he returned to his hotel he was pleased to see that his suitcase had been searched and carefully repacked. But his visitor had not noted the geometric patterns with which Cochrane had arranged the suitcase's contents—a pen pointing northward, a necktie pointing southeast.

  On the next day he visited Heidelberg and twice again he was searched. On Monday he traveled by train to Freiburg and checked into a hotel that was popular among party members.

  After lunch Cochrane went to a variety store where he purchased a battery and some heavy wire for hanging pictures. Then he asked the proprietor whether he might have an ice pick. The proprietor said he did. Cochrane selected one with a seven-inch blade.

  Next, he purchased a new suitcase, an expensive steel and leather one with heavy, sturdy locks. Cochrane returned to his hotel and set to work, praying that he would not be interrupted. Sweat poured off his face. The game was life and death now.

  From around his left leg, he removed four bars of hollow lead pipe, each about six inches long, that he had kept bandaged to his shin since leaving Berlin. From within a narrow sheath within his belt he removed twenty .22-caliber bullets. He then prepared his suitcase for his next visitors, carefully closing it and leaving it on his bed.

  Cochrane used his file to slit open the false side of his old suitcase. He removed a Swiss passport. He slid it into a folio. He also kept with him the photograph of the Mauer family.

  He then donned his topcoat, casually strolled down the hotel stairs, and walked out the front door. One of his bodyguards followed. Too bad they won't all be going up to the room, he thought.

  He glanced at his watch. It was ten minutes after seven. He was several minutes behind his schedule. He entered the restaurant he had studied earlier that afternoon.

  He darted past the astonished waiters, past the captains, and then out into the kitchen in front of a bewildered staff. He slipped through the back door into a quiet alley. But instead of fleeing, he moved toward the alley's closed end. There he stood, his back flat against the brick wall of the building, until his trailer appeared.

  "Mein Herr?" Cochrane inquired. The man whirled, eye to eye with Bill Cochrane from a distance of five meters. "You are following someone?" Cochrane asked in German. Cochrane's adversary was a thick-browed man who stepped closer.

  "You stupid fool," the man said in a guttural German that Cochrane fixed as Bremen or Leipzig. "You are playing games with us?"

  The Gestapo agent's hand went beneath his overcoat. Cochrane saw a Luger. He bolted forward and crashed into the larger man, bringing his knee upward, hard toward the man's groin.

  The huge German cursed him and pushed off with his forearms. As the Luger came out, Cochrane smashed the man's wrist with his own left forearm. Then Cochrane's right hand came stabbing upward, thrusting the ice pick into the German's stomach.

  The man bellowed. Cochrane kneed the man again, harder than before. Then he knocked the gun away. He pulled back the ice pick, braced himself,
and stabbed upward again, this time toward the heart. The Gestapo agent staggered for several feet, then Cochrane hit him hard from the back, knocking him down onto the garbage-strewn alleyway.

  The body went still. Cochrane picked up the Luger and tucked it into his belt. He stripped the dead man of his Gestapo identification and discarded his own overcoat, which was now covered with blood. He found a taxi and went to the railroad station. At 8:22 he was on the last train leaving Freiburg for Zurich.

  At the same moment as Cochrane's departure, two Gestapo agents tired of fussing with the locks on Cochrane's new suitcase. One of them unsheathed a knife. The blade of the knife protruded through the leather case and triggered the electric circuit that Cochrane had wound around the valise. As the case opened, the four lead pipes exploded simultaneously. The two agents were hardly in position to appreciate Cochrane's makeshift machine gun. Nor were they capable of wishing they had never laid their hands on Theresia Koehler.

  Police were summoned. Within minutes all trains out of Freiburg, particularly the two that were in transit southbound for Switzerland, were ordered stopped.

  Bill Cochrane sat by a window seat in the town of Mulheim, fifteen kilometers north of the frontier at Basel. He saw several dozen Wehrmacht soldiers on the station platform, carrying their automatic rifles at their waists, and knew there would be trouble. The soldiers were going from car to car.

  Cochrane slid a hand beneath his coat to the Luger in his belt. He that they would be looking for an American. The the doors to his first-class compartment flew open and he was faced with two tall, strong, but young soldiers.