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 Walkure, 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 black 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. And at another moment in the evening, Cochrane edged near enough to Goering to see the beads of sweat that were ever-present on the man's thick forehead. Cochrane could have, if he had wanted to, brushed away the dandruff that fell like a snowstorm upon the shoulders of the Gestapo's founder. Leaving the hall, that night, he shuddered at how close he had been able to come to the head of state. It was an image that would recur to him for years.
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 wife. He still travelled with a framed picture of Heather and kept the picture visible in his Berlin apartment. He did not yet have the heart to place the photograph in a drawer.
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. Bill Cochrane spoke first, admiring the scarf and asking her in German where she had bought it. At first she was reserved, modest, letting him lead the conversation. But the talk blossomed and he joined her at her table.
Two nights later, they attended a 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-quite frankly-so very beautiful.
They stopped at the entrance to her apartment building. Bill Cochrane kissed her. She turned her cheek to his lips and they said good night. Cochrane walked home knowing that she was toying with him. So for a week he did not telephone.
On a Friday he called her to take her to dinner. She answered the door of her flat. As he handed her a bouquet of flowers, she huddled behind the door in the unlit foyer. 'I'm not dressed,' Theresia told him. But she was. Partially. She had showered and dried herself. Clinging to her was a nightgown, thin as gauze.
'Please be good. Please wait,' she asked.
She motioned to a sitting area off from the foyer, and hurried past him back to her dressing room. As she passed into the light of the doorway of her bedroom, she was silhouetted for an instant. Bill Cochrane caught the first suggestion of what she would look like naked. Then she disappeared.
Bill Cochrane looked at the dressing-room door. It was still open. A moment later he was standing in it, his head cocked appreciatively, as he watched Theresia before a full-length mirror, wearing only a lavender camisole, perfuming and dusting herself. She saw him and stopped.
'I'm not good. And I won't wait,' he said.
She pulled her nightgown back to her to cover herself. She turned, but was far from angry.
'Maybe we could make it a late dinner. Toward midnight,' he suggested.
'Maybe,' she answered. She added that she knew a cabaret where the best show started at one. He approached her and she halted him again, letting the nightgown slip away but reaching to the top drawer of a dressing table.
With a sly smile, she pulled out the long red scarf that had first caught his eye some ten days earlier.
'I'm told no man can resist a red scarf,' she said with a laugh. 'No matter how a woman wears it.' She tied it neatly around her left thigh, three quarters of the way up from her knee toward the top of her perfect leg.
'You're told correctly,' he said. He reached behind her and easily unlaced the camisole. It slid down her body and she stepped out of it. In clothing, she had been an extremely attractive woman. Completely undressed, she was breathtakingly beautiful. She helped him undress and then they were on her bed. He was kissing her on her lips, on her throat, on her breasts, and everywhere else. He had completely taken control, which was exactly what she had wanted since the first night she had seen him at the Rathskeller Keitel.
As lovers, they saw each other regularly, went to a dinner here, a public park there, and the occasional long walk on a Sunday. And always a rendezvous would end in a bedroom, one day his, the next day hers. They even realized that they were acting like a pair of sex-crazed university students embarked on their first affair. Both knew that it was far from that for either. But neither could possibly have cared.
Then, one night about a month and a half after it all began, Theresia spoke out in the middle of the night. It was past 2 A.M. and she couldn't sleep. So she awakened him.
'What will you do when war breaks out?' she asked.
She was smoking, lying naked near him, and he could see her figure and the pale orange glow from her cigarette. His eye began an easy, leisurely journey which began with her full, perfect breasts. It traveled past her flat, trim waist and then settled for a few seconds upon the perfection of her slim legs. Bill Cochrane knew he was in love.
'Stay in Berlin. Sell securities, if I still could,' he answered sleepily. As soon as the sentence was out of his mouth, he realized the impoverishment of his lie.
'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 too instinctively.
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. I think he is in a submarine. They never tell the family.'
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.
'You never asked,' she answered equally.
*
Through Theresia, Cochrane met 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.
