'And he says that within five years, he'll have it '
'Is that a fact?' Hoover asked ruminatively. 'Well, we’ll fix him, won’t we?'
Lerrick, director of personnel for the Bureau, did just that. Cochrane was assigned to the top floor of the F.B.I.'s wing of the Justice Department building. He was to review a six-month backlog in the files on interstate automobile theft.
'What is this? A joke?' Cochrane asked Lerrick when he literally button-holed him in the lobby on the first Thursday. Cochrane knew it wasn't.
'Well,' Lerrick said in lame mollifying tones, 'your face and name are known in Chicago, Kansas City, New York, and Berlin. It's not the easiest thing, you know, uh, finding a position for someone with your experience.'
'Why don't you create one? Something good.'
'I'll get back to you.'
Lerrick did not get back to him. Cochrane shared a stuffy, cramped top-floor office with a glum, dark- haired, olive-complexioned, gaunt, flatulent little dwarf named Mr. Hay, who hummed to himself, sneezed a lot, and plodded from one file to another. The office had no window and smelled of stale paper, mildew, paint remover, and, naturally, the dwarf. During the initial two weeks here, Cochrane was spoken to by Mr. Hay only when the latter needed Cochrane's help in removing something from the top rear of one of the files.
Mr. Hay was fortyish, with a face that could appear simultaneously young and old. He was trapped somewhere between boyhood and old age and wore an absurd brownish-gray wig. His teeth were yellow and his socks were checkered. His three suits came from the boys' department at Hamburger's. For Bill Cochrane, this was something new.
But Mr. Adam Hay was more than a sum of his parts. He had curious habits, too, most of which surfaced during the next few days. For no apparent reason, the diminutive archivist would not answer when addressed by his Christian name, which was Adam. He preferred instead to be always summoned by a clipped military 'mister.' He brought lunch with him, ate it alone on a public park bench, and indulged himself in his one passion at any free moment: horse racing.
Mr. Adam Hay was an inveterate handicapper, studying all aspects of a horse race and its factors before driving to Arlington Park in Virginia or Pimlico in Maryland on weekends to place his bets.
Bureau folklore had it that Mr. Hay made tons of money on the races and passed his picks along to J. Edgar Hoover himself, the Bureau's best-known horseplayer. But if there was validity in such rumors, it remained elusive. Adam Hay lived a quiet conjugal existence in a gritty section of Georgetown, surviving from one paycheck to the next. And he and J. Edgar had never been seen 'within six furlongs of each other,' as Dick Wheeler, the Bureau wit and diplomat, had phrased it.
Mr. Hay's other foible was of a different color. Normally alone with his files and archives, he had free run of them. If a request came from downstairs for anything for which the Bureau kept records, it was Mr. Hay, who would scuttle along from one file drawer to another and draw out everything on the subject. Next-totally without authorization-he would read the files from start to finish. Then he would send them downstairs.
'You read everything, don't you? I've been watching you.' Cochrane inquired as he viewed this procedure on his second Monday morning in Bureau Siberia.
'Bugger off, Cochrane,' the – dwarf replied, settling down to a file on Langston Hughes and an even thicker one on Albert Einstein. 'It's none of your business.'
'No, no,' said Cochrane, who smiled and shook his head. 'I don't care and I won't tell. I'm just amused by the procedure.'
'Treat your amusement like your dick. Keep it to yourself.'
'You read very quickly, too,' Cochrane further observed.
There was a pause. Mr. Hay studied Cochrane. 'I'm memorizing,' Mr. Hay declared.
'Uh-huh,' Cochrane answered.
'You don't believe me?'
'Frankly, no.'
'I have a photographic memory,' said the elfin one.
'No such thing.'
'Bet?'
'Sure.'
'Let's see your money, Cochrane.'
Cochrane laid a five-dollar bill on the archive table. Adam Hay matched it. 'Pick a file, any file,' the smaller man challenged.
Cochrane found one in a bottom drawer in the B section: Patrick C. Barrie, a ringer of race horses and a fixer of races who worked for the Capone syndicate in Chicago in the 1920s. He handed the file to Mr. Hay, who flicked through a page a minute, then handed it back to Cochrane seven minutes late.
Cochrane took it in his hand and opened it. 'Page four,' he requested.
To which the dwarf recited the page word by word. Then he pocketed Cochrane's five dollars.
'Let's try again,' Cochrane said. 'Game?'
“Sure.”
Cochrane took out another five. Mr. Hay matched it with the one he had just won. Cochrane found a file on Carla Tresca, an anti-Fascist newspaper publisher in New York. Thirteen pages. Mr. Hay repeated word for word after ten minutes of study. Then he duplicated the procedure for racketeer Dion O'Banion and for balladeer Woody Guthrie. Cochrane, meanwhile, was four fives poorer.
'Convinced?' the small one finally inquired.
'Convinced,' Cochrane said. 'My only question is, why?'
'Why what?'
'Why bother?'
Mr. Hay's dark brow furrowed. 'You'll laugh,' he grumbled.
'I just lost twenty dollars,' Cochrane said. 'I won't laugh.'
Mr. Hay pursed his lips. 'I figure,' he explained slowly, 'that if this place ever burns down, I'll be the most valuable man here. I can become an assistant director. I know everything, Cochrane!'
Cochrane blinked. There was eye contact, then Cochrane smirked.
'All right!' Mr. Hay exploded. 'Laugh if you want, but that's my game plan! What's yours?'
'I don't have one,' Cochrane admitted, wiping a tear from his left eye.
'Then leave me be, Cochrane!' howled the Bureau's only potential three-foot-eleven assistant director.
'I shall. I shall.'
Thereupon followed a silence that lasted through the third week of Cochrane's sixth-floor exile and into the fourth. Mr. Hay obtained from Requisitions a stepladder, which enabled him to reach any top rear file on the entire floor. 'I used to have this whole place to myself,' he then pronounced. 'And soon again I will.'
'I hope so, Adam,' Cochrane answered. But Mr. Hay was finished talking to Bill Cochrane. Forever. Or so it seemed. Or so, at least, they both hoped.
*
For the Bureau itself, it was the best of times and it was the worst of times, depending whose opinion one sought. The desperado bandits and bank robbers of the Depression era were gone, either dead or imprisoned or somewhere in between; Hoover himself had garnered much of the credit. But the gangland fortunes that had been weaned on Prohibition gin and basement beer were placing a stranglehold on the cities from Illinois to New York. The Bureau, to any intelligent observer, seemed outmanned, outgunned, and outmaneuvered. Or just plain outfoxed.
Two foreign agents, personally dispatched by Hoover, had returned from Moscow via Khartoum with no luggage and figurative bullet holes in their hats. Another had been buried in Rome by jubilant Fascisti, and yet another was missing and presumed dead in the Suez. It was a time when Hoover's agents were running into the ground, sometimes literally, all over the globe.
'Innocents abroad, version 1939,' Dick Wheeler ruminated angrily over a triple Jack Daniel's one night in his Alexandria home. Most of the American boys, tough as they seemed coming out of the National Police Academy, hadn't known how to play hard ball with the locals.
As for Cochrane's escapade in Berlin and Munich, there were two ways of viewing it: One: Cochrane had
