at the Bureau at 10 P.M. when it arrived. Frank Lerrick supervised.
'What's going on?' Cochrane asked. 'Is he my suspect?'
'Not until he makes a statement.'
'I'm the case officer, am I not?”
'Cochrane, for once in your life, would you control yourself?' Lerrick snapped. 'We turn him over to you when he's ready. Not before. You get a transcript of everything.'
'I'm so glad,' Cochrane answered.
Hunsicker's arrival coincided with the arrival of two men whom Cochrane had never seen before: Jack Burns and Allen Wilson. 'Burns and Allen,' Dick Wheeler liked to call them. They were from Ohio, knew Bobby Charles Martin from previous intrigues, and were nowhere nearly as funny as the real Burns and Allen.
'Professional interrogators,' Wheeler mumbled to Cochrane toward midnight. They had already guided Hunsicker to a room in the basement. Cochrane shuddered, called it a day, went home, and slept fitfully.
TWENTY-FOUR
Cochrane left Washington in the morning and was driving through Pennsylvania farmland by early afternoon. The sky was clear as vapor, though a few cumulus clouds rolled in toward 3 P.M.
The needle of the gas gauge was perched insistently toward the big white E of empty, so Cochrane pulled his 1937 Hudson into a town called Mahanoy City. It was a town like the others of the area, several churches, factories at each end, an enormous anthracite breaker at the outskirts of town, and mountains of black silt bracketing the highway which led in and out. Farmland had given way to coal country.
Cochrane stepped out of the car at an Esso station. The day was cool. The heat of the summer had finally broken and brown leaves in coiled whirlpools hissed and swirled near the two red and white gas pumps.
'How much farther to Ringtown?' Cochrane asked the attendant, a young man in overalls and a green flannel shirt.
The attendant motioned down the road. 'Bout fifteen miles,' he said. For three dollars, he filled the car's tank, checked the oil and washed the windshield.
MahanoyCity. Frackville. Shenandoah. Shamokin. The towns got tinier as Cochrane drove through them: row houses built by the Reading Coal Company, churches, shops and trees. Ringtown was the smallest, with one main street.
Cochrane stopped at the police station, entered, and found Police Chief Stan Zawadski, a tall thin man with dark hair, with his feet up on the desk. Chief Zawadski glanced to the stranger from the sports pages of the local paper. 'Yeah?' he asked.
Cochrane offered his F.B.I. shield by way of greeting. The chief’s shoes hit the floor as he sat up.
'Don't see many of those around here,' the police chief said.
Cochrane smiled amiably, folded the shield case away, and inquired of a man named Henry Naismith.
Zawadski gave directions to a farmhouse on a road diverging from the main highway.
Cochrane thanked him.
'Now, you do one thing for me,' Zawadski asked. Cochrane listened.
'You tell Mr. Hoover that he should run against Roosevelt next time,' the police chief said. 'Three terms. That's a lot for one man. This ain't a kingdom, after all. You tell your boss he should run for President.'
'I'll tell him,' Cochrane said. He returned to his car. He noted in passing that Chief Zawadski's car was parked at the town's only fire hydrant. No one seemed to care.
*
The farmhouse was five minutes out from town and Cochrane saw it on the dirt and gravel road for a mile before he arrived. The building was big and white, wooden and rambling, with a dark shingled roof that sagged. As he drew closer, he saw that an occasional window was broken and every shade was drawn. More critically, Cochrane observed as he pulled into a semicircular driveway before the house, there were no approaches to the house that were not visible from a distance. He noted, too, that there were two strings of outside lights. He guessed they were illuminated on most nights.
Cochrane parked and had barely stepped from his car when he heard the front door of the house open. Cochrane walked a pace or two and almost did not recognize the man who stood before him.
It was Otto Mauer.
But it was an older, more sober, less-dignified Otto than Cochrane remembered, with more lines and a more hardened, hard-bitten cast to his face. The German stood on the front steps to the house staring at his arrival. He wore a neat white shirt, gray flannel pants, and a cloth tie, as if he had been interrupted while dressing for an afternoon hike in the mountains south of Munich.
But more important was the look of sheer hatred on the man's face. That, and the shotgun cradled like a baby in his arms.
'Hello, Otto,' Cochrane said..
'You…!' said Mauer, breathing low and with evident animosity. 'What the devil are you doing here?' He spoke in English.
'I came to talk to you.'
Mauer's arms unfolded like a soldier's. He held the shotgun across his chest and Cochrane stopped in his tracks.
'I ought to shoot you right here. Right now. No questions, just shoot!'
'Otto…?'
The German pointed the weapon at his visitor, the butt end of the stock poised near the right shoulder in anticipation of firing. Cochrane dared not step in either direction.
'You leave me behind to be butchered! You leave my family to Gestapo and you make your own escape!' The weapon was still trained.
'Otto, I had passports sent to you from Zurich. By courier.'
'No passports. Never any passports. Thanks to you. You were turncoat. Traded us for your own freedom at Freiburg. Why do you come here? To be shot? I bury you out back. No one know. No one care. Tell me, turncoat, you ready to die?'
Cochrane felt his own anger rising to his defense.
'Otto, who's been telling you these things?'
'They tell me,' Mauer insisted, very loud.
'Who in hell is 'they'?'
'No matter to you!'
Cochrane groped for some other angle and tried the most obvious.
'Otto, where's your family?' he asked. 'Have they separated you from your family?' Cochrane saw the German stiffen. He saw, too, from the crooked curtains in the window and the untrimmed shrubs near the door that no woman was on the premises. Further, Mauer hadthe air of a desperate, lonely man.
Cochrane switched into German, seeking any common bond.
'Otto, I trusted you with my life in Germany. I wouldn't come here if I'd betrayed you. We must talk. It's crucial for both of us.'
'Turncoat!' Mauer said again.
The German jabbed the air with the two barrels of the shotgun. Cochrane flirted with the idea of turning and running, but quickly rejected it. One step and Mauer would fire. From twenty feet, the shotgun would tear a hole in Cochrane the size of a watermelon.
'Herr Mauer,' Cochrane tried again, 'I'm here on official business. Bureau business. I can prove it.'
Cochrane made a motion toward a jacket pocket, but Mauer stopped him with another jerk of the weapon.
'Not a move!' Mauer continued in German.
Cochrane kept talking. 'I'm trying to catch a spy. Gestapo, we think. A man who's in America, Otto. Here. Where we are!'
