'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.'
'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 a very 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 her work was being done by a temporary replacement. Meanwhile, Cochrane's tripartite shadow continued. Either 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.
