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, meine Herren,' 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 and 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 Lindenstrasse 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 very 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 very 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 seveninch 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 restaurant 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 and 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.
