Flowers From Berlin (25th Anniversary Edition)

by Noel Hynd

  "Second most dangerous. After Hitler," said Cochrane.

  "Ah, yes. Of course. After Hitler," Mauer repeated. For several seconds, a wall of silence passed between them. A hundred meters away, toward the edge of the woods, a stag stepped from the forest, wandered a few steps toward them, and froze as Mauer put his hand to Cochrane's elbow and motioned. The two men stared at the animal. Then it turned abruptly and, like many other images that day, was gone.

  Mauer continued to talk:

  "When general warfare begins in Europe, the Mediterranean will be closed by the Wehrmacht at both ends. Spain will collaborate. Greece and Yugoslavia will be quickly conquered by a Panzer sweep through Bulgaria."

  And: "Reichsmarshall Goering, Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe, personally told me of a new super-long-ranged bomber being developed in Stuttgart. The aircraft will by mid-1942 be capable of bombing New York from Greenland."

  Late in the day, Mauer turned to cases closer at hand. His immediate work within Abteilung Z. The work of his friends. Then he drifted. He mentioned career government servants from his university days that had mysteriously lost their jobs. He spoke of others who had disappeared completely, whether to Switzerland or to a labor camp being a matter of speculation.

  Then, walking back to the manor toward evening, 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, watching a furrow growing on Mauer's forehead. "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 within.

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

  They walked several paces 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. Her initial shyness, then her virtual backward somersault into bed with him the night he arrived to find her undressed.

  All of this had presupposed his own reactions to her behavior.

  "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. But it is an exacting report. She cannot decide whether or not you are a spy. But there is thorough mention of the uses of a red scarf. 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. “Perhaps I might consider doing just that,” he said.

  Mauer said nothing further.

  Dinner was subdued that evening. Natalie Mauer and her husband retired early. Cochrane sat up late thinking and at one point moved to the small curtained window at the front of the mansion. His baby-sitters were still at the bus stop. But now there were three of them.

  Just as Cochrane boarded the train back to Berlin the next morning, Otto Mauer presented him with an envelope containing a photograph of the three members of his family, double the size of a penny postcard and, judging from the size of their son, fairly recent.

  "This is a portrait to remember your friends by," Otto Mauer said lightly. "In case we do not have the opportunity to spend as much time together in the future."

  "Of course," Bill Cochrane answered. He embraced Frau Mauer, who allowed him to kiss her on the cheek. Then Cochrane disappeared to his compartment, knowing that he would not see Munich again.

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

  He filed no dispatch concerning Mauer's revelations.

  Too risky to put anything in writing. Somewhere too much had already gone wrong.

  How had the Gestapo, for example, 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 F.B.I.? Magic? Something was missing which precluded Cochrane completely understanding his situation.

  Then again, was Mauer an actual defector? Or was he a double? If Mauer was legitimate, Cochrane's information was too valuable to transfer by any means other than in person. If Mauer was a double, Cochrane might expect arrest within hours.

  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 F.B.I. mail drop for Frank Lerrick's office.

  The words returned from his training in Washington and Virginia: In this line of work there is no such thing as coincidence. Cochrane searched for the coincidence and couldn't find one.

  Then, in Berlin, there was Theresia. She was strangely absent from her job. When Cochrane called, he was informed that a temporary replacement was doing her work. Meanwhile, Cochrane's tripartite shadow continued. One, two, or all of them were on his trail twenty-four hours a day now. There could be no dispatches slipped to couriers bound for London or Geneva. And he would have to act as though Mauer had told him nothing.

  He wondered idly: could he still make love to Theresia? From his touch, would she know that something was different? I have never deceived a woman in this way before, a voice within him said. But never has one so deceived you, either, another voice answered.

  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. Tonight would be no different. Cochrane's baby-sitters remained downstairs and across the street as he climbed the stairs. When he knocked on her door, there was silence. He reached for the lock and examined it. It was old and rusting and, ominously, showed signs of previous tampering. 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 instinctively 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.

  Cochrane bit hard on his lower lip. Her eyes were wide in terror and her mouth was wide open, as if frozen in a scream. There was no blood of any amount, only various scars and bruises where she had been beaten. A stray cut here. A welt there.

  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.

  He bolted to the window that overlooked the alley. He threw it open, heaved mightily, and vomited. Not just once. Twice. Bill Cochrane had never before come across the brutalized body of someone he had loved. And never before had someone been killed on his account.

  He steadied himself. He returned to the body. She was cold and stiff. Dead for several days, he concluded, probably since the weekend.

  Cochrane returned to the living room, pursued by the ghost of a beautiful laughing woman in a loose sweater and a black skirt.

  His 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 an inquisition. Was she falling for him? Was she hiding something? 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.

  He thought back to the last time he had held her, the conversation they had had.

  Would he be returning to America? Would he someday find a wife? She had been trying to tell him without telling him. Go. Flee. I cannot sign your death warrant, but others will. So leave Germany at once. I can't. You must. Go! Leave!

  Once again, a woman he had loved was dead.

  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 appeared as if he had knocked at her flat but had never entered.

  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. Things became clearer, his perceptions sharper.

  He had begun to hate.

  He understood hatred but had always intellectualized it in the past. He thought he had hated the Sicilian heavies in Chicago who had muscled into the funeral-home business; he had thought he had hated the thick-browed musclemen in New York who thrashed union organizers with lead pipes; he had thought he had hated the two-bit hoods who had stolen produce and meat from the railroad freight yards in Kansas City.

  But he hadn't hated any of them. He had opposed them. He had played the game against them. Some he had arrested. Some he had imprisoned. Others slipped away. But it had been nothing personal. A job. An assignment.

  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.

  The waitress refilled his glass. She was a blond woman like Theresia. Cochrane could only look at her for a few seconds. He sipped a final brandy as he watched two teenage boys, smiling and as blond as the waitress, walk by in uniforms with armbands.

  Was there no way to live honorably? He wondered. Was there no way to combat evil in the world without innocent people being caught in the middle? Did a man have to commit evil to combat evil? There were times when every philosophy failed him completely. Times like right now.

  He finished his drink and gripped the lapels of his overcoat close to him. He left the cafe. The weather outside was now dismal—wet cold rain. A Mercedes taxi passed too near the curb on the Linden Strasse and Cochrane was soaked.

  He cursed all of Germany and fixed the day's date in his mind. He envisioned the Indian summer of the hills of Virginia and he could see the peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains, yellowing and fading with the October season. As he walked on the sidewalks of this foreign country, he was suddenly thousands of miles away and decades into the past. He thought of the old men in faded, tattered gray coats, their fragile chests puffed with pride, telling how it was to serve under Robert E. Lee in what was to them the Great War; he thought of the 1913 World Series, the first one he could remember, and he recalled sitting in his father's office at The Charlottesville Eagle, seeing the game come in play by play on the magical telegraph key; and he saw another day that had long vanished when he and his father had sat on the banks of the Rivanna River outside Charlottesville.

  His father had told him that some bad people in Europe had sunk an American boat called the Lusitania. Soon America would be in the war and soon his father would go to it. And Bill, as a boy, skipped stones into the river and wouldn't look at his father because Bill was nine and crying because he did not want his father to be killed.

  Funny about love and hatred, Cochrane weighed as he turned onto his street in Berlin, passed the woman at the desk, and climbed the stairs. They both could make you cry.

  No matter. His usefulness in Germany had ended. It was now important to complete the business at hand.

  He entered his apartment. In one of the darkest recesses of his mind he had always known that being a spy would lead him to a day like this. What was that phrase he had toyed with in the cafe? Something about having to commit evil to combat evil?

  He closed the door behind him. The first thing he saw was Theresia's red scarf.

  The following Friday morning, Cochrane took a noon train from Berlin and arrived in Stuttgart by 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, once as he dined and again as he toured the ruined castle above the city. On Monday he traveled by train to Freiburg and checked into a hotel that was popular among party members.

  He walked the streets looking for an appropriate restaurant for lunch, studying carefully the front and back approach. He considered several before lunching on schnitzel and a Rhine wine at the Zum Noedler.

  After lunch Cochrane went to a small variety store where he purchased a small 1.5-volt 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 went to a department store and 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 left his key with the concierge. He 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 restau
rant he had studied 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?"

  But Cochrane's hand was extended to the side. "Games?" he asked. "No games. But does this bring back a memory?"

  His palm opened. He unfurled Theresia's red scarf.

  The German took another step. The man was easily four inches taller and four inches wider than Cochrane. "She screamed almost as much as you will," the German said. "It went on for several hours, you know. Maybe four or five before we—"

  In one motion, Cochrane placed the scarf back in his pocket and groped for something. The Gestapo agent's hand went beneath his overcoat and 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. But the lessons of boxing at the National Police Academy remained with Cochrane. Always stay in close when fighting larger men. Get inside their reach. Then hurt them badly.

  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 in to the German's stomach.

  The man bellowed. His eyes went wide with agony. Cochrane pulled back and the men stood eye to eye. The German tried to aim the gun. 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 blade of the pick broke off from the force of the blow and the American stepped away.