'There is no Gestapo in America,' Mauer retorted.
Cochrane's anger rose again to the occasion. 'Are you crazy,' he demanded, 'or just uninformed? They sit in New York and Newark all night with radios. They blow up ships, they sabotage plants. They derail trains and they kill people.'
'Saboteurs,' the German answered. 'A few insane people. Malcontents.'
'I'm looking for a very dangerous man,' Cochrane said. 'I can prove it. But you and I have to talk.'
Mauer peered at him for the longest fifteen seconds of Cochrane's life, straight over the double barrels of the shotgun. Cochrane half-expected to see the flash and the eruption from the nozzle of the gun. He would feel the agonizing pain for only a second or two, then there would be darkness.
For some reason, as all these black thoughts coalesced at once, Cochrane thought of the country graveyard in Virginia where his family was buried. He wondered if he would be returned there. He fought off the thought. It had never occurred to him before.
And worse, he was out of words. Long ago at the National Police Academy they had taught him: always keep a gunman talking. They don't shoot when they're talking.
But Cochrane's mouth had gone desert-dry. He had said everything. There was no further appeal. All he could do was glare at Mauer. If the German was to kill him, he would have to look him in the eye.
Mauer still spoke in German. 'You have a gun?' Mauer asked. Cochrane nodded.
'Loaded?'
'It's not much use unloaded, Otto.'
'Very slowly. You drop it.'
Very slowly, Cochrane reached with his right hand.
'Left hand! Left hand! Thumb and forefinger!' the German shouted.
Cochrane's right hand drew back and he reached his service weapon. He pulled the gun from the holster and he tossed it gently away.
'Now,' said Mauer, his own weapon never budging, 'if you're with the F.B.I., let's see identification. Again, left hand. Very slowly.'
Again Cochrane obeyed. He removed his shield case from a pocket and tossed it toward the German. Mercifully, it landed open, the bronze shield facing upward. Mauer crouched down and picked it up. He stared at it so hard that Cochrane thought he was trying to memorize it.
Then Mauer looked back to his visitor. He spoke in tones that were not apologetic. 'You come inside,' he said.
Cochrane felt the moment slowly defuse. He moved forward. Mauer stepped back a little and kept his distance, just in case. In Cochrane's experience, however, shotguns were rarely used indoors. Too messy. Frightfully noisy. Mauer appreciated that, too.
If he were going to kill me, Cochrane later recalled thinking, he would have done it there. Right there. While I was holding the gun.
He entered the farmhouse at shotgun point and later recalled a second thought: I've been wrong before, he reminded himself.
*
But Cochrane was not wrong.
As the men entered the house, Mauer retreated to a stuffed, fading armchair on one side of the room. Beside it was a bottle of bourbon, already open and half consumed, a carving knife, and a pair of shot glasses. The German motioned to a sofa across the room. He indicated that he had be happiest if Cochrane sat there. Cochrane did. Then Mauer eased into his own chair, cradling his shotgun across his lap, like a dog or a small blanket, and he stared at his visitor.
No one spoke. It was a time of observation. Cochrane noted first the shabby state of the house's interior, the walls crying out for paint, the furniture that had outlived its brighter days. An odd number of coffee cups and plates presided upon nearby tables and a pallor of imprisonment hung ponderously upon everything within the room, particularly Mauer.
Mauer had lost weight since Cochrane had seen him last. Patches of his hair were gray, like a small animal's.
Mauer scrutinized his visitor, trying to read what lurked behind Cochrane's eyes. He was unable, and his own eyes lost their menace and retreated into anxiety.
Cochrane rushed to a new conclusion about Mauer. Here before him was a lonely, broken man. A former officer of the Abwehr, Mauer now dwelt in the professional purgatory of the exiled defector, untrusted where he was, reviled where he came from. With the final days of his middle years slipping away, Mauer spent his weeks in isolation, fearing the advance of a lonely old age. He had the look of a man under siege.
'I want you to know at the outset,' Cochrane began, 'that I’ll help you in any way I can. But I need to know certain things. You must be honest with me, as I believe you always have been.'
Mauer's glare was unyielding. Then it broke into a rueful smile and a scoff laced with cynicism.
'Me help you?' Mauer answered, switching into English. 'Almost as funny as you helping me.'
Cochrane saw no humor and was about to open his mouth when Mauer reached for a week-old Philadelphia Bulletin.
'See this?' Mauer asked. 'War already.' He shook his head sadly. 'I do not know if Germany can win. Not with its current leadership.' He glanced at the headlines and a newspaper map on the front page, a map bedecked with firm black arrows showing paths of German invasion.
'Poland,' Mauer said with contempt. 'Imagine England going to war over a corrupt, backward, ill-educated dictatorship of idiot colonels. Imagine Chamberlain complaining that Hitler has taken another part of Czechoslovakia when it was Chamberlain who agreed to its partition one year ago.'
Mauer poured himself bourbon and sipped. 'Imagine England taking a stand on the so-called Polish city of Danzig when Danzig was part of Prussia from 1793 until the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Are you a student of history, Herr Cochrane?'
'I try to be.'
'Would you not agree that the Allies themselves created Hitler when they partitioned Germany and wrote such an odious settlement to the Great War? It was such a settlement that built up the resentment in Germany that gave credibility to Hitler.'
'I wouldn't disagree. Not completely.'
'An insane document, the Versailles treaty. We are, in a sense, fighting the same war. A sad, oppressive settlement.'
Forgetting the weapon across Mauer's lap, Cochrane took issue. 'Similar to the settlement the Kaiser inflicted upon the Czar two years earlier. Wouldn't you say?'
Mauer, savoring a sip, set down his shot glass. His reaction surprised Cochrane. 'Point,' he said philosophically. 'Now, tell me why you are here so I might decide whether or not to shoot you.'
For the first time, in sunlight reflecting through the door, Cochrane caught a glimpse of the stock of the shotgun. Upon the stock was a beautifully carved scene of two men cornering a bear, the penultimate act of a presumed hunt. Then Cochrane's gaze slipped to the knife near the bourbon bottle. There were wood chips and slivers on the floor. Mauer was marking time by engraving the stock of his own weapon.
'I want to talk about Abwehr operations within the United States. Anything covert. Anything at all.'
'It won't take time too much. I know nothing.'
'But you were in the Abwehr. You know the procedures if not the specifics.' When Mauer said nothing, Cochrane forged ahead. 'I'm after a single man. I think he's working alone.'
Mauer replied loftily. 'Absolutely impossible,' he said.
'The man exists.'
“ In your mind perhaps, mein Herr.'
Cochrane thought of Billy Pritchard's corpse rotting in the New Jersey woods. 'No. The man is real,' he answered.
'You've seen him?' Mauer asked quickly, switching back into German.
'I've seen his work.'
'But you haven't seen him?'
