by Noel Hynd
"A woman comes in twice a week to clean up and sweep," Jenks explained, trailing Cochrane. "She'll also tend to the laundry, take care of any dirty dishes, and replenish the cupboards with fresh groceries," Jenks said.
Replenish: so Hoover was still hiring English majors as his errand boys, Cochrane thought to himself. It figured.
"Any special grocery requests or maintenance items," Jenks continued, "can be arranged by leaving a note on the kitchen table. She'll take care of it."
"Who will?"
"The woman, sir."
"Ever seen her?"
"Never, sir."
"Do you think she might be one of the Bureau's stable of nymphomaniacs?"
"A what, sir?" Then, realizing, Jenks exclaimed. "Oh, no, sir. Not a chance, sir! Why, to my knowledge, sir, there's no stable of—"
"Just show me the upstairs and all the escapes," Cochrane requested.
Humorless English majors from small, bad Midwestern colleges, Cochrane thought, refining his earlier appraisal.
There was an exit through the kitchen and an exit through the basement. Both led to an alleyway that connected with the street on both ends of the block. And all the downstairs windows opened wide.
Upstairs, a chain fire ladder was poised by a window in each bedroom and there was also one in the hallway. Each of the two bedrooms was furnished as sparsely as the downstairs room: a bed, a night table, one lamp, a dresser, and a chair. Each bed was a single. The Bureau brain trust—Morality Division—had anticipated everything and did their best to discourage it. Bureau safe houses were not to turn into hotels for non-Bureau female guests. The rule wasn't stated, not surprisingly; it was just there. Cochrane opened a night-table drawer and uncovered the final Hooverism: a Holy Bible for light bedside reading.
"And that's it?" Cochrane finally asked, downstairs again and shadowed diligently by Jenks.
"Not entirely, sir."
"What else could there be?"
"Mr. Wheeler wishes you to come straight to Bureau headquarters as soon as your bags are unpacked. I'm to wait."
"Of course," said Cochrane. "It's a workday, isn't it? Saturdays always are, aren't they, Jenks?"
"Usually we get Saturdays off, sir. Today is the exception."
“Wonderful,” said Cochrane.
Jenks drove him an hour later to the Justice Department. At the guard's desk in the lobby was a balding man who flicked through a list of special passes when Cochrane announced his name. Cochrane watched the gnarled, unsteady fingers twice pass his name before finding it.
"Cochrane. Cochrane, William. There!" the man looked up and smiled. "Of course." He handed Cochrane his pass.
Cochrane proceeded to one of three new elevators, swift, smartly polished and chrome, and a black elevator man in a verdant uniform deposited him at Wheeler's sixth floor where yet another assistant was waiting for him.
Hoover was doing a fine job on the Senate Appropriations Committee, Cochrane concluded. Hoover had the F.B.I. wing all polished, modernized, and shining, a veritable temple to America's only federal policy agency. Hoover always knew where bodies were buried, Cochrane reminded himself.
Cochrane was announced and stood for a moment in a reception area, studying a collection of framed photographs on the wall, each depicting J. Edgar Hoover's personal role in the apprehension of various American bandits. Then Cochrane heard something midway between a bellow and a roar.
"Bill! Fine to see you! Thanks for being so prompt, though I knew you wouldn't be anything but."
Cochrane turned away from a portrait of J. Edgar Hoover with a granite-faced President Coolidge to see Big Dick Wheeler hulking massively into the reception area, his hand extended in greeting, a huge smile across his face.
Wheeler, all five feet fifteen inches of him, clad in a gray suit, white shirt, and tie, lumbered to Cochrane's side. He took Cochrane's hand into his paw, crushed it with a welcoming pump, and wrapped his other arm around Cochrane's shoulders.
"Good of you to come by on a Saturday morning," Wheeler said. "You saw your house? Your new residence for the duration?"
"Your driver took me there. Yes. Thanks."
"I know it's not a home, but it will have to do," Wheeler said. "Tell you what. One of these nights the missus and I will have you over for a roast chicken. How's that? A man's got to live, doesn't he?"
Predictably, Dick Wheeler was louder, more garrulous, and more of a dominant force on the sixth floor, his own, than on the second, Hoover's.
"Why am I here today?" Cochrane asked.
"I want to show you through Section Seven," Wheeler said. "Much easier on a Saturday. Fewer interruptions."
"What is Section Seven?"
"Espionage and Counterespionage," Wheeler said, plucking a Missouri meerschaum pipe from a breast pocket. "Call it 'Spying' if you want to use the current profanity."
"I didn't know we actually had such a division."
"Officially, we don't. Fact is, we've been turned down six times since 1935 for congressional funding for it. The money comes out of General Appropriations." Wheeler stuffed tobacco into his pipe with his thumb and struggled to get a fire started. They walked down a hall, closing doors behind them. "You'll feel at home here. I read your reports from Germany last night. Fine work! I'm surprised you're still alive."
"So am I," said Cochrane.
"My office first," said Wheeler, leading Cochrane into the largest quarters on the floor. A picture window looked toward the Capitol. "Have a seat," Wheeler said. "We need to chat first." Cochrane chose an armchair, and Wheeler did likewise, staying away from his desk.
"Just out of curiosity," Cochrane asked, "what are Sections One through Six?"
"They don't exist."
"Then what's this seven?"
"Seven is everyone's lucky number. The number seven symbolizes God's perfection, doesn’t it? His sovereignty and holiness. God created earth in seven days. One seven-day week is a reminder of our Creator. And God blessed the seventh day, making it holy. So. ‘Section Seven.’ Good luck. That's what you're going to need, you know. Luck. Just like J.E.H. to toss a good capable man into an impossible situation. But, come on. It beats banking fraud in Bored-All-The-More, doesn't it? I'll give you the grand tour anyway. You're going to need all the help you can get. Someone's here all the time, of course. That's another reason for the name. 'Section Seven' seven days a week." Wheeler mustered a groan. "One of those assignments. Like Racketeering in the Kansas City office. You remember?"
Cochrane nodded.
Wheeler foraged through a drawer of his desk and produced a bottle of twelve-year-old bourbon. "Want a drink before we start?"
"No, thanks."
Wheeler poured himself a taste of Tennessee's best in a small glass. "You're sure? You and me? We have worked together three times now and I'm in charge here, you know."
"It's all right," Cochrane reaffirmed.
"Okay then," said Wheeler, sipping and positioning himself massively in his chair. "Just remember this is top-secret stuff. You don't even discuss this with any other agent. Only the people you see here."
Cochrane nodded.
"Let me explain," said Wheeler.
SEVENTEEN
As background in Section Seven, there wasn't much. Some counterespionage and intelligence gathering had been done in Europe, Wheeler said, but Cochrane himself had done the best of it and had a working knowledge of the rest. Bill Cochrane nodded. A flood of images came back to him, from Theresia dead on her bed to Engle carefully taking the order for a set of Swiss passports.
As for German espionage within the forty-eight United States, Wheeler continued academically, as his pipe smoldered in the ashtray, it had all been haphazard at best—at least as far as they knew. Cochrane nodded again.
"We've dropped down hard on a ring of sympathizers here and there, gotten the local police to hassle a few others. But there's no war, so there's no law being broken. A saboteur with some bombs is something else. He gets priority. Ro
osevelt is as angry as a wet cat." Wheeler sipped. "If we were just out to run down pro-Hitler groups, we'd be arresting half the Republicans in the Senate, William Randolph Hearst, Charles Lindbergh, and probably eighty percent of the Daughters of the American Revolution."
Cochrane mustered an uneasy grin.
"So you see, we're in a swampy area. Few real rules. The laws we have to enforce are the usual civil and criminal laws. And many of them are state laws, so we don't have jurisdiction. Added to that, we have a peacetime espionage situation. Confusing?"
"No."
"Good." Wheeler drew a breath. "Because that leads us to the radio emissions. And the 'Bluebirds.’"
"The who?"
Wheeler finished his bourbon and poured a refill. He tossed Cochrane a sly smile. "So glad you asked," he said.
The Bluebirds' official name was Monitoring Division and they had been formed in the queasy days of 1937 upon a suggestion by William Donovan. On an evening in Washington, Roosevelt had casually mentioned a marked increase in mysterious radio emissions from the northeastern United States. Triangulation detectors had traced many of them to Newark and Manhattan, particularly Yorkville, in the East Eighties, and Little Hungary, in the East Seventies.
"I can't see that there's too much question what these emissions are," Roosevelt said.
"Why not listen to them?" Donovan asked. "Monitor them. Record them. Then decipher them."
Donovan explained how a skeletal monitoring station could be set up by the F.B.I. on the sixth floor of the Justice Department. FDR signaled to an aide to take notes. Then the notes were typed and organized.
"Have Mr. Hoover do something about this," FDR said to the aide.
Hoover assembled a division called Monitoring under the shadowy umbrella of Section Seven. Those who worked in Monitoring quickly self-administered the nickname of the “Bluebirds.” They were a number of men and women, usually somewhere between twenty- five and thirty in number who spent their time in the hastily constructed plywood stalls of the largest room in the east wing of the sixth floor. These were the foot soldiers of Section Seven.
Day after day, but mostly night after night, they turned dials on an endless succession of shortwave radios. Each man or woman, fluent in the international Morse code, monitored no fewer than three frequencies each, or read a book if nothing was coming across. Anything mysterious was recorded, particularly in the evening when emissions to Europe could be at optimum strength.
Each Bluebird worked a four-hour shift, and most, particularly those who finished between four and eight in the morning, acquired the sunken, narcoleptic look of the truly deranged. But each also emerged with a sheaf of papers, a scramble of notes, and notations of precise time, along with too many spools of wire recordings.
"Everything gets passed along to Deciphering and Cryptology," Wheeler said. "That's one unit, next door to the Bluebirds, on this floor also. I'll give you a look."
Wheeler set aside his bourbon. They rose and went a few paces down the hall. Cochrane was admitted to a large chamber where seven Bluebirds were at work, Saturday morning being a slow time to bounce signals around the clouds. Everyone in the room looked sleepy. No one had much to say, even to Wheeler, and Cochrane and Wheeler were gone from the room in ten minutes.
The next door down was another large room, this one cramped with wall-to-wall files and several large tables at its center. There was no activity whatsoever, because this was the CAR Division, as Wheeler described it. He pronounced it as if it had something to do with automobiles. He explained that the letters stood for Central Alien Registry.
"Everyone here still has weekends off," Wheeler said. "But not for much longer."
Central Alien Registry was a nightmare. Stuffed into the files in varying degrees of order were alien registration forms dating back through the waves of immigration that flooded Boston, New York, and Philadelphia in the 1920s.
"If someone came into this country legally, he's in these files," said Wheeler, motioning. "If he came in illegally," he added with a grimace, "he might be here, also."
Two hundred and sixty thousand names were crammed into the files of the CAR Division, along with any criminal reports or F.B.I. dossiers which might be pertinent. The files were divided into Asian and European—European being vastly larger—and there were cross-references of points of origin, many designated FRIENDLY, such as Britain or Canada or Australia, and others designated as UNFRIENDLY, such as Germany or Hungary.
"Where's Spain?" Cochrane inquired. "Or the Soviet Union?"
"Somewhere in the murky middle," answered Wheeler. "Maybe by the end of 1940 we'll have it all straight."
Cochrane opened a file drawer and fingered a few cards to familiarize himself with the format. Then they were out into the hall again, nearing a right-angle turn in the endless corridor, strolling deeper into the belly of Section Seven, when Wheeler sniffed the air and stopped in his tracks. His feet shuffled, almost in the manner of an Ozark brown bear pawing the ground.
"Who the hell is smoking a cigarette on this floor?" he bellowed. "Standing orders. No cigarette smoking in any section I have anything to do with!" He continued down the corridor and around the corner. "Who is the malefactor?"
The culprit was no less a personage than tiny Mr. Hay himself, who was discovered stuffing a smoldering butt into a potted hallway plant.
"Mr. Hay, you little gnome!" Wheeler roared, not half as angrily or aggressively as he might have. "Are you trying to asphyxiate us?"
"No, sir."
"Then why don't you scramble back upstairs before the cat catches you!"
"Yes, sir," said Mr. Hay, who drew a nasty bead on Cochrane, then returned a terrified defensive gaze to Wheeler. "Right away, sir. Just delivering files for the CAR Division, sir."
"Go!" ordered Wheeler. "Vanish!"
The dwarf scurried back to the elevators.
"But you're smoking," Cochrane said softly to Wheeler.
"I'm smoking a pipe. Pipes, yes. Cigarettes and cigars, no, on my floors. Power is wielded arbitrarily and unfairly in this Bureau."
They arrived at another door. Wheeler pushed it open without knocking. "This is Deciphering and Cryptology," said Wheeler, leading Cochrane into a large room that was a messy warren of desks and small plywood partitions. "Also known as our history and Romance-language department."
Present today were perhaps a dozen loyal workers, most of whom glanced up when Wheeler passed. All were obsessed with various forms of code evaluation, mostly from sequential series of intercepted dots and dashes passed on to them by the pilfering Bluebirds. Many worked with wire recorders, playing back the unidentified blips, and others worked with pens, pencils, papers, notebooks, or improbable-looking little black and gray slide rules.
Among the drones of the D&C Chamber were one civil engineer, two math instructors, one high school history teacher, two housewives who were said to be good at solving mathematical puzzles, and a bespectacled, adenoidal eighteen-year-old chess grand master from Brooklyn, New York, named Lanny Slotkin. The latter was currently pursuing his doctoral studies in chemistry at George Washington University.
"I'm a genius," Lanny said to Cochrane upon introduction, simultaneously munching a cream cheese sandwich. Then he went back to his work.
"I love little Lanny," Wheeler said evenly, moving away from him, "almost as much as I love going to the dentist. But he is smart, the little bugger."
Then they came to a Chinese-American woman named Hope See Ming, who smiled politely. She offered Cochrane a dead fish of a handshake and interrupted her work on an abacus to answer a question in perfectly textured English. Out of her earshot, Wheeler said she was the most able person in the room.
"Hope See Ming is our own little China doll," mused' Wheeler, holding the door open for Cochrane as they departed. "Lanny is our pet Jew. Adam Hay is our pet squirrel. Don’t feed any of them without permission. They have special diets.”
He closed the door and they were back in the c
orridor.
"But you know what?" Wheeler continued. "They're smart as whips, all of them. Never met a dumb Jew in my life, if you want to know the truth, Bill. Anyway, none of them wouldn't be here if they weren't sharp as tacks. Imagine what we could do if we could trade information with other intelligence services. British and Canadian are formidable, but we can't even admit we're in the same line of work."
"Don't you think they might soon figure it out?"
"So what if they do?" Wheeler shrugged. "We still have to lie. Neither Hoover nor Roosevelt are ready to go to the great unwashed American public and admit that we're running a spy service. That's just politics, William."
Wheeler led Cochrane onward, introducing him first to Roddy Schwarzkopf and Elizabeth Pfeifer, known as Hansel and Gretel in Section Seven, and who abruptly stopped talking when they saw Wheeler. Hansel and Gretel were an infiltration team that Hoover and Wheeler were getting ready for something, but no one knew what. Wheeler motioned down the corridor to a private office.
Therein was Bobby Charles Martin, a fingerprint expert formerly of the Ohio State Police, whose hobby was cartography, and who now merrily spent his days assessing recent European maps and navigational charts. "Just in case we have to send a few lucky souls abroad again," Wheeler said as he handled the introduction.
Dora McNeil, the secretary of the D&C Division, looked up as they approached and gave Wheeler a sweet complacent smile. Then she stared at Cochrane and fixed her posture.
Dora, Wheeler explained much later, was the house floozy whom no one had the heart to fire. This month she was a strawberry blonde. She was a more than competent secretary, blessed with an ample bosom, good legs, and a pair of buttocks which, when snugly nestled into a form-fitting skirt, had just the proper air of provocation. Dora, in Bureau parlance, was that good time who'd been had by all. Her blouse never seemed to be buttoned quite properly. At least once a week her eyeliner would be slightly off, or a speck of lipstick would spend several hours on a front tooth.
But no one complained.
So Dora McNeil flounced around Section Seven at will, occasionally typing a letter or reheating coffee. J. Edgar Hoover did not know about her, and Lanny Slotkin was in deep, unrequited love with her. To him, at age twenty-five, she was a classy older woman.
