their possessions and spending too much time looking at the souvenirs of the days when they were happier.
The move came in mid-June. It went smoothly. Stephen's new parish was situated in an old white church off a quiet square in a small town. Their new home, which greatly resembled the house in New Haven, was across the street. Stephen addressed his new congregation twice that month. He spoke of Christian responses to totalitarianism. The parishioners accepted him quickly. They liked him, in fact. So Laura booked passage to England again, once more on the SS Panama.
'At least this time I've heard of it,' Stephen observed.
'I don't think that remark is very funny,' she snapped back. 'I'm leaving you for several weeks. You don't seem to care.'
'I didn't ask you to go,' he countered. Always, he had that way of turning things back upon her.
In the days that followed, their relationship assumed an odd formality. They slept on separate sides of the same bed, dressed and undressed at differing times, and generally treated each other with the cordiality of roommates or as a couple who had been lovers very briefly long ago.
On the night before her departure, she lay wakefully in bed and toward 3 A.M. was on the threshold of sleep. She felt him move suddenly and his hand was just below her breasts. She turned more toward him. Delirious words were forming in her mouth and she almost spoke.
Then she realized that his hand was still. She shuddered. It was almost inanimate. Mercifully, he thrashed a second time in his sleep-as if disturbed by some formidably chaotic dream-and his hand flew away. He settled himself facing the other direction and Laura was left alone with her crushed expectations.
All twenty months of her marriage flashed before her in a final fit, off-line and flickering, like an unbalanced film projector gone irretrievably berserk. Then she closed her eyes and clenched her teeth as tightly as she could. She suppressed the fury, the emotion, and the frustration that were within her. After a passage of several minutes, it did not seem that bad anymore.
The consolation of going home was there, at least, so she managed to sleep. She was comforted greatly by a recurrent vision of her happy girlhood in Wiltshire.
On the next day, a frightfully hot one, Stephen saw her to her ship at the Cunard pier in New York. She had no idea when she would ever see America, or her husband, again. That evening in the ship's dining room, she happened to note the date of her sailing. It was printed at the head of the evening's menu:
July 3, 1939.
PART THREE
1934-39
SIX
Like Washington to the south, Baltimore in 1939 sweltered through a dreary, steaming August.
William Cochrane sat studiously in his office and used two fingers to peck at the black Royal typewriter at his desk. His glasses were sloped downward toward the bridge of his nose. He frowned slightly as he peered through them and attempted to finish this second letter. The first one, addressed to the Director of Personnel, Morgan Guaranty Trust Company, New York, was already sealed and stamped. It lay to the right of the typewriter. Bill Cochrane's suit jacket from Dunhill Tailors hung on the back of his chair. It was past four in the afternoon, and though his necktie was straight-there was a line in the F.B.I. manual about always having one's necktie straight-his white shirt was starting to lose its crispness. The room was warm.
Cochrane's fingers held still for a moment as he chose the proper phraseology. One weighed one's words carefully when writing to J. Edgar Hoover himself. Then, he finally decided. Might as well just get on with it. No pleasantries. As few final endearments as possible. Just the facts. He typed the final sentences.
And so it is with reluctance that I submit my resignation from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, effective as of 5 P. m., August 30, 1939. It has been my pleasure to be of service to the Bureau over these past six years. I pray that I have also been of some aid to my country…
He drew a breath and reread. There, he thought to himself, that does it. Just the proper note of humility and patriotism. He studied the letter from the top to bottom again. Why was this so difficult? he wondered. He had made his decision almost six weeks ago.
There was a knock on his door and his secretary entered. She was a thin, earnest girl named Patricia. For a moment she stood in silence, waiting for Bill Cochrane to lift his attention from the piece of paper before him.
The man she watched for those few seconds, the man she worked for, was thirty-three years old with sandy, blondish hair. His eyes were sharp and his complexion slightly ruddy and sun-beaten, the result of long weekend hikes through the Maryland countryside. He looked younger than his years, however. Dwelling upon the typewriter and sheet of paper before him, he looked like a young professor or maybe a law student.
Then he looked up. His preoccupation broke and from somewhere came a handsome smile. 'Yes, Patty?” he asked gently.
'Washington,' she said, indicating the telephone. She spoke in a voice not too distant from a whisper. 'I think it's Mr. Hoover.'
He laughed.
'Doubt it,' he said. 'Unless he's looking for someone to head up a new office in Topeka.'
Patricia smiled and rolled her eyes. She pulled the door closed as she left. Cochrane reached to the telephone, picked it up, and leaned back in his swivel chair. Now that his resignation was typed there were few horrors that a direct call from Washington could hold.
Then he brought the tilting chair back down to earth. Patricia had been right. Cochrane recognized the clipped, nasal-pitched voice of the Devil himself. There was something, Hoover told him, that the F.B.I. needed to discuss with him personally. That evening. In Washington.
'I want you to drop whatever you're doing and get down here immediately,' Hoover ranted. 'I'm having a car sent to take you to the train station.'
Cochrane looked at the cracking green paint on the wall of his office. He thought of his current assignment in Baltimore and his previous one in Washington. He looked at his letter of resignation.
'You bet,' he said.
He was about to add that there were one or two things that he wished to take up with Hoover, too. But by that time, Cochrane was listening to a dial tone.
Twice previously William Thomas Cochrane had addressed a letter to J. Edgar Hoover. The first had been sent in early 1934, about twelve months after an aging Paul von Hindenburg had bestowed the chancellorship of Germany upon a former Austrian house painter. The headlines in the daily newspapers had prompted Cochrane to write.
The letter read:
Dr. Mr. Hoover: I am a banker and an investigator for the international division of the Georgia National Bank in Atlanta. I speak French and German fluently. Judging by the course of world events, it seems to me that your F.B.I. will soon need men for specialized jobs in Europe. Do you think you might find a use for me? I'm bored here. Sincerely, Wm. T. Cochrane
Hoover admired the sender's nerve in writing directly but had little other reaction to the letter. Plenty of people wrote to him asking for jobs. Half of them were certifiable lunatics.
But Hoover noted the official stationery of the Georgia National Bank. The word 'international' did catch his
