upon a suggestion by William Donovan. On an evening in Washington, Roosevelt had casually mentioned a marked increase in mysterious radio emissions from the northeastern United States. Triangulation detectors had traced many of them to Newark and Manhattan, particularly Yorkville, in the East Eighties, and Little Hungary, in the East Seventies.
'I can't see that there's too much question what these emissions are,' Roosevelt said.
'Why not listen to them?' Donovan asked. 'Monitor them. Record them. Then decipher them.'
Donovan explained how a skeletal monitoring station could be set up by the F.B.I. on the sixth floor of the Justice Department. FDR signaled to an aide to take notes. Then the notes were typed and organized.
'Have Mr. Hoover do something about this,' FDR said to the aide.
Hoover assembled a division called Monitoring under the shadowy umbrella of Section Seven. Those who worked in Monitoring quickly self-administered the nickname of the “Bluebirds.” They were a number of men and women, usually somewhere between twenty- five and thirty in number who spent their time in the hastily constructed plywood stalls of the largest room in the east wing of the sixth floor. These were the foot soldiers of Section Seven.
Day after day, but mostly night after night, they turned dials on an endless succession of shortwave radios. Each man or woman, fluent in the international Morse code, monitored no fewer than three frequencies each, or read a book if nothing was coming across. Anything mysterious was recorded, particularly in the evening when emissions to Europe could be at optimum strength.
Each Bluebird worked a four-hour shift, and most, particularly those who finished between four and eight in the morning, acquired the sunken, narcoleptic look of the truly deranged. But each also emerged with a sheaf of papers, a scramble of notes, and notations of precise time, along with too many spools of wire recordings.
'Everything gets passed along to Deciphering and Cryptology,' Wheeler said. 'That's one unit, next door to the Bluebirds, on this floor also. I'll give you a look.'
Wheeler set aside his bourbon. They rose and went a few paces down the hall. Cochrane was admitted to a large chamber where seven Bluebirds were at work, Saturday morning being a slow time to bounce signals around the clouds. Everyone in the room looked sleepy. No one had much to say, even to Wheeler, and Cochrane and Wheeler were gone from the room in ten minutes.
The next door down was another large room, this one cramped with wall-to-wall files and several large tables at its center. There was no activity whatsoever, because this was the CAR Division, as Wheeler described it. He pronounced it as if it had something to do with automobiles, and explained that the letters stood for Central Alien Registry.
'Everyone here still has weekends off,' Wheeler said. 'But not for much longer.'
Central Alien Registry was a nightmare. Stuffed into the files in varying degrees of order were alien registration forms dating back through the waves of immigration that flooded Boston, New York, and Philadelphia in the 1920s.
'If someone came into this country legally, he's in these files,' said Wheeler, motioning. 'If he came in illegally,' he added with a grimace, 'he might be here, also.'
Two hundred and sixty thousand names were crammed into the files of the CAR Division, along with any criminal reports or F.B.I. dossiers which might be pertinent. The files were divided into Asian and European- European being vastly larger-and there were cross-references of points of origin, many designated FRIENDLY, such as Britain or Canada or Australia, and others designated as UNFRIENDLY, such as Germany or Hungary.
'Where's Spain?' Cochrane inquired. 'Or the Soviet Union?'
'Somewhere in the murky middle,' answered Wheeler. 'Maybe by the end of 1940 we'll have it all straight.'
Cochrane opened a file drawer and fingered a few cards to familiarize himself with the format. Then they were out into the hall again, nearing a right-angle turn in the endless corridor, strolling deeper into the belly of Section Seven, when Wheeler sniffed the air and stopped in his tracks. His feet shuffled, almost in the manner of an Ozark brown bear pawing the ground.
'Who the hell is smoking a cigarette on this floor?' he bellowed. 'Standing orders. No cigarette smoking in any section I have anything to do with!' He continued down the corridor and around the corner. 'Who is the malefactor?'
The culprit was no less a personage than tiny Mr. Hay himself, who was discovered stuffing a smoldering butt into a potted hallway plant.
'Mr. Hay, you little gnome!' Wheeler roared, not half as angrily or aggressively as he might have. 'Are you trying to asphyxiate us?'
'No, sir.'
'Then why don't you scramble back upstairs before the cat catches you!'
'Yes, sir,' said Mr. Hay, who drew a nasty bead on Cochrane, then returned a terrified defensive gaze to Wheeler. 'Right away, sir. Just delivering files for the CAR Division, sir.'
'Go!' ordered Wheeler. 'Vanish!'
The dwarf scurried back to the elevators.
'But you're smoking,' Cochrane said softly to Wheeler.
'I'm smoking a pipe. Pipes, yes. Cigarettes and cigars, no, on my floors. Power is wielded arbitrarily and unfairly in this Bureau.'
They arrived at another door. Wheeler pushed it open without knocking. 'This is Deciphering and Cryptology,' said Wheeler, leading Cochrane into a large room that was a messy warren of desks and small plywood partitions. 'Also known as our history and Romance-language department.'
Present today were perhaps a dozen loyal workers, most of whom glanced up when Wheeler passed. All were obsessed with various forms of code evaluation, mostly from sequential series of intercepted dots and dashes passed on to them by the pilfering Bluebirds. Many worked with wire recorders, playing back the unidentified blips, and others worked with pens, pencils, papers, notebooks, or improbable-looking little black and gray slide rules.
Among the drones of the D amp;C Chamber were one civil engineer, two math instructors, one high school history teacher, two housewives who were said to be good at solving mathematical puzzles, and a bespectacled, adenoidal eighteen-year-old chess grand master from Brooklyn, New York, named Lanny Slotkin. The latter was currently pursuing his doctoral studies in chemistry at George Washington University.
'I'm a genius,' Lanny said to Cochrane upon introduction, simultaneously munching a cream cheese sandwich. Then he went back to his work.
'I love little Lanny,' Wheeler said evenly, moving away from him, 'almost as much as I love going to the dentist. But he is smart, the little bugger.'
Then they came to a Chinese-American woman named Hope See Ming, who smiled very politely, offered Cochrane a dead fish of a handshake, and interrupted her work on an abacus to answer a question in perfectly textured English. Out of her earshot, Wheeler said she was the most able person in the room.
'Hope See Ming is our own little China doll,' mused' Wheeler, holding the door open for Cochrane as they departed. 'Lanny is our pet Jew. Adam Hay is our pet squirrel. Don’t feed any of them without permission. They have special diets.”
He closed the door and they were back in the corridor.
'But you know what?' Wheeler continued. 'They're smart as whips, all of them. Never met a dumb Jew in my life, if you want to know the truth, Bill. Anyway, none of them wouldn't be here if they weren't sharp as tacks. Imagine what we could do if we could trade information with other intelligence services. British and Canadian are formidable, but we can't even admit we're in the same line of work.'
'Don't you think they might soon figure it out?'
'So what if they do?' Wheeler shrugged. 'We still have to lie. Neither Hoover nor Roosevelt are ready to go to the great unwashed American public and admit that we're running a spy service. That's just politics, William.'
Wheeler led Cochrane onward, introducing him first to Roddy Schwarzkopf and Elizabeth Pfeifer, known as Hansel and Gretel in Section Seven, and who abruptly stopped talking when they saw Wheeler. Hansel and Gretel were an infiltration team that Hoover and Wheeler were getting ready for something but no one knew what. Wheeler motioned down the corridor to a private office.
