pro-Fascists, I'll find you some in the Senate, lurking like a nest of copperheads. Or in the House, where there's about a hundred. Or do you want the more visible ones-Colonel Lindbergh. Ambassador Kennedy. Huey Long. The Silver Shirts. What the hell are you getting at, Bill?'
Several thoughts came together at once: thoughts about Hoover, security, fascism and socialism, communism and democracies, loyalties and betrayals. But Bill Cochrane gave voice to none of them. Instead he sighed.
'Know what I think?' Wheeler confided. 'I think you should take a day off. Collect your thoughts. Get your mind back on the right course. God knows, Bill, no man can eat and sleep this stuff with no respite. Do us all a favor. Take the day. Please. I'll cover for you.'
Prompted by such enticements from an immediate superior, Cochrane took up Wheeler's offer. It was as good a way as any of disappearing for a few hours, then circling back to Bureau headquarters while Wheeler was in the Oval Office on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Cochrane wandered the sixth floor in an ostensibly jovial mood and buttonholed one Bluebird after another, taking them into his confidence. Those he could trust, at least. There was Lanny Slotkin first and then the two house-brand Germans, Roddy Schwarzkopf and Elizabeth Pfeiffer. Then of course there was the Virgin Mary and even Bobby Charles Martin, whom Cochrane found reading an ominous report on Gestapo interrogation techniques.
To each, when drawn aside, he made a grinning offer. 'I'd like you to help me in a little intrigue,' he said. 'Consider it a game. Office politics, really. So don't speak to anyone who's not in on it.'
Each accepted the challenge. And each was equally nonplused to learn that the victim of the intrigue was known to all and stood a full, towering forty-six inches tall.
*
Laura lay in bed beside her husband in the bedroom of their home. Stephen's eyes were closed; Laura's were open. He breathed evenly. She could not sleep. Her mind was teeming with the events of the day.
Laura quietly pulled the sheet off and stepped from the bed. The room was cool and she had no clothes on. She reached to the cotton robe and pulled it on. Sometimes when she couldn't sleep, it helped to walk around.
She went to the dormer window of the bedroom and sat on the plum-colored cushions on the bench within the window. Laura loved that view of sleepy Liberty Circle. She could see the stars, the moon, and the trees. The church across the street left a light on all night and a dim streetlight lit the road and walkway.
She looked out and heaved a long sigh. There was no way around it: it was good to be home. Good to be back with Stephen.
He had met her that morning when the French liner La Normandie had docked. He had embraced her passionately, handed her a two-pound box of Louis Sherry chocolates, and instantly made her glad that she had avoided the shipboard fling with the Swedish businessman who had been arduously chasing her.
Then Stephen had driven her home. The house had been clean and fresh. Stephen had hired a maid. And the little town was resplendent in the burnt orange of September. Stephen's mood was much more loving than when she had left. He behaved as if some burden had been lifted. He said that his parish had taken to him well and that the neighbors had asked about her. Above all, he said that he had missed her horribly.
He apologized in advance on one matter: the Lutheran Council on the East Coast had taken a shine to him and he would have to take the occasional trip to other parishes or other cities. But he would hurry back.
He would not ignore her again. Things, Stephen promised, would be different.
Then it was evening. Time for an early bed. She undressed with all the excitement of a young woman taking a new lover. And he was just as impassioned.
'I've been starving for you!' he had said to Laura at the moment when he climbed on top of her. And she had been starving for him. He led her and himself to a hurried but robust climax, made all the better by the fact that, to Laura's way of thinking, her husband behaved like a man who hadn't touched another woman since her departure.
Yes, she decided as she lay beside him afterward. Some things were still important. Politics were not. Fidelity was.
Laura was deeply within this line of thought when she realized what she was watching through the dormer windows. Across the street was a man. She couldn't recognize him, and would never have noticed him at all because he was moving carefully within the shadows of trees. But she had happened to be staring at his precise location and she had picked up the movement.
He walked toward the church. Laura looked across the room at the clock. It was past 2 A.M. Every tenet of surveillance that Peter Whiteside had impressed upon her came back.
Details. Details. The man was tall and lean and wore a dark coat. She could not tell age and she could not see the color of his hair. She squinted. She watched the man walk and a hunch was upon her.
For some reason-and she couldn't place the genesis of the reason-the man struck her as foreign. He was neither English nor American. Something about his movement told her that. Or was that part of a 2 A.M. fantasy?
For that matter, was the man a fantasy? She stared again. No, he was real. He entered the church.
Laura held her position for ten minutes, barely blinking. Her heart beat so loudly that she thought Stephen could hear it clear across the room. But he did not budge. No lights changed in the church. Nothing went on or off.
She thought back. A light remained on in the vestry and a very dim light in the pews. The altar was dim and visible at night; so was the cross. The man emerged. He went quickly on his way. Nothing indicated that he was anyone she knew.
Several unhappy visions were upon her all at once: the man was from the American government. They were after Stephen-he was a Communist spy. Or, the man she had seen was part of Stephen's network. A fellow traveler along the red road of Bolshevism. Or, she shuddered, had she seen one of her own countrymen? Had Peter Whiteside dispatched someone to watch her?
Or was it none of these? Was she lost in a wilderness of deceptions that, like the smile of the Cheshire cat, receded as she approached them? Was it all too grand for her to even conceptualize?
She felt the wetness of her palms. She drew a long breath. Then a final thought was upon her. The man who had entered the church was a member of the church. He sought solace with God in the lonely, early dark hours of the morning. Somewhere there was illness. Somewhere there was despair. Somewhere there was a need for spiritual strength and a prayer and that need did not observe the conventional rules of time.
Yes, that was it, she decided: a man had simply felt the need for a prayer at an unorthodox hour. Was that not, in fact, why her husband left the church open?
Now the memory of Peter Whiteside was before her, burning with the intensity of a flare. Peter's account of her husband rang shrilly in her ears.
Turned his eyes eastward… offered his services to the Soviet Union and his offer was accepted… Made the pilgrimage to the Kremlin, itself…
Suddenly she had to know. She tiptoed from the bedroom and to the stairs. Then she went down to the library, where she turned on the light on her husband's desk. She began to open drawers, riffling through his papers and belongings and shuffling purposefully through his official licenses and documents.
'So this is spying, Peter,' she mumbled to herself. She felt disgraced. 'I hope you're proud of yourself.'
Then she found what she wanted: his United States passport. Her hands trembled slightly as she opened it. She studied his picture and the date and stamp of issue at New York. Then she flipped to the pages that bore travel stamps.
Entry into the United Kingdom via Southampton: April 20, 1935. Departure to France via Calais. Probably the ferry, she thought on May 3 of the same year. Arrival in New York on board the SS America on the thirtieth of May.
Some Communist agent, she thought. Some pilgrimage to Moscow! She flicked through each page of the passport. No other stamps save their Canadian stamps from their honeymoon in 1937. Where, oh where, Peter Whiteside, Laura asked within her soul, is the vaunted pilgrimage to Red Square?
Stephen's own words returned to her: 'I was sick from the water in England and the cheese in France, so I came home early.' What emerged from his passport was the documentation of a Princeton graduate student seeing the cathedral cities of England and France. Nothing more. His passport was the physical refutation of all that Peter
