and white photo. Cochrane looked down at it as Mauer rubbed his own eyes. In the photo Natalie Mauer stood with her son, Rudy, an image in black and white at Plaza Mayor in Madrid. Natalie looked happy. The young boy looked sorrowful, as did the city in the background, which bore scars from the civil war.
Cochrane returned the photograph to Mauer, who tucked it into his pocket.
'They tell me I must wait,' Mauer said. 'I ask for asylum and they give me this house. I ask for a bodyguard and they give me this gun.' He shook it with controlled venom and Cochrane leaned backward slightly. 'I ask them to move my family immediately; Madrid crawls with Gestapo and SS and Franco's national police. But they give me excuses. I ask them to use Major Asena in Gibraltar and the Americans say they know of no such agent. So I sit here. I know nothing. Helpless. I've told everything I know.' He took his longest pause yet. 'God in heaven,' he said as a benediction.
An absolute silence enshrouded the two men, the isolated farmhouse, and Mauer's whole black story. Slowly, as if it made no difference anymore, the German set aside his weapon and stood. He got to his feet slowly, as if battling a stiffness in the legs, and walked fretfully across the room. Cochrane watched him go. Mauer was in the kitchen and drew himself a glass of water. Cochrane glanced back to the shotgun. He was closer to it than the German. But now it barely mattered.
In the fading light from the outdoors, Cochrane watched Otto Mauer. A wave of commiseration swept over him. Despite the risks, Cochrane knew that he had enjoyed their first meeting much more. Back then, just a short year ago, Mauer was a dashing senior Abwehr officer of substantial influence. Now he was an aging defector, broken in spirit, separated from the things that he loved, and drifting into an uncertain murky future. Worse, he knew it. Stripped of his nationality and his influence, he remained a husband and a father. But even his family had been taken from him,
Cochrane broke the depressing spell of the room by reaching to a lamp and lighting it. Mauer returned, carrying a glass, obviously lost in thought. The German sat down.
'Anything else?' Cochrane asked.
Mauer looked up. 'I told you, you know everything.'
'Well, it simply occurs to me,' the American said. 'You've been driven from your country by a bunch of cutthroats, separated from your family, placed here by people you don't know and can't trust…'
Cochrane probed the German's narrowing eyes for some resonance. He thought he found some.
'You must have done some time thinking, Otto,” Cochrane said. You must have theorized on what went wrong. And where.'
Mauer looked at him glumly and his own voice was defensive again. 'No theories,' the German said. 'I know.'
'Then tell me.'
'From the very start, young William Cochrane,' Mauer said, 'Gestapo had your number in Germany. And I should have known. But Abwehr didn't know at all. Only Gestapo. Trouble is, how do they have you before you even set foot in the Reich? How are they watching you every step of the way?'
'Exactly,' Bill Cochrane answered.
'Better still, how did you escape when few others do?'
'I don't know.'
'Then I tell you.'
'Go ahead.'
'You got very lucky, boy,' Mauer said. 'That's all. Like I said, Americans are bumbling amateurs in matters of intelligence and security. No match for Germans at all. When you get into the war-and make no mistake, England and France will drag you in again-you're all in great trouble. No doubt.'
'We'll see.'
'Ah.' Mauer waved his hand contemptuously and dismissively again. 'I show you!' he snapped, very angrily.
Impulsively he grabbed the shotgun again and whirled it upward as he remained in his chair. The moment seemed frozen in both time and horror to Cochrane because when the gun came up it was trained directly at Cochrane's upper chest, where it would blow a hole where his heart was. 'I show you for sure!' the German said.
The German snapped the weapon open to check the ammunition and then clacked it shut again. 'Ready?' he asked, and Cochrane did not have a half second to move before both triggers of the double-gauge were squeezed. There were two clicks. Two of the loudest clicks Cochrane had ever heard in his life. He stared at Mauer.
'When your Bureau gave me a weapon, they gave me no ammunition,' Mauer said. 'Fools!' He reached to his jacket pocket and pulled out a pair of shells. He opened the weapon and slid them in. 'Now, you go. You help me if you think you can. But you remember. When I am ready to shoot someone, I will be prepared, also.'
A long final silence and then: 'Remember, I could have shot you. You owe me your life. Bring me my family in return. Your own words once, 'One gentleman to another.' Now, go. We still have our agreement.”
*
Silence, darkness, and loneliness were the three great interrogators. Before them, a man's soul was bare and vulnerable. All three worked upon Cochrane as he drove the winding, black highway through the hills of northeastern Pennsylvania. It was night now and he had left Mauer standing on the farmhouse doorstep, cradling the shotgun, seeing his visitor off. The image stayed with Cochrane. But now the entire sky was the color of Mauer's eyes and mood. And the darkness accused.
The headlights of the Hudson shone a frail yellow beam on the road ahead, but Cochrane saw the road only absently. Other visions descended. Distant voices asked questions.
Why had his own Bureau endeavored so carefully to keep him away from Mauer? Similarly, why had he been discredited in Mauer's eyes?
Why was Hoover personally guarding Mauer's file?
Was Mauer telling the truth? If so, how much? If not, how much? Why had neither Lerrick nor Wheeler ever admitted that Mauer was in the United States in Bureau custody?
Cochrane worked the stories forward and backward, and turned everyone's account inside out. He searched for the details that did not fit, the subtle imperfections or the gross inconsistencies. He found none. He found instead only other images and other voices. And other questions.
Along the dark two-lane interstate, a vision came to him from somewhere deep in his own childhood. He was a boy again on a muggy summer day and he was skipping flat rocks across the river outside Charlottesville. Every once in a while he would throw wrong. The rock would plunge and not skip.
A smooth circle would emerge on the water, followed by another and another, round and concentric from the point where the rock had disappeared.
The perplexities now before him reminded him of the rocks that did not skip-disappearing into a fathomless surface, with other, deeper concentric questions rippling out from the epicenter.
At what point in 1937 had Cochrane actually been compromised in Berlin? And by whom? And how? Or was Mauer's 'defection' a clever design to suggest just such unnerving questions? The purpose? To provoke America's embryonic intelligence service into jumping at its own shadow?
Cochrane turned on the car radio, trying to cleanse his mind of Otto Mauer, Germany, Siegfried, and how they linked together, if they did at all. He lowered the window to draw some fresh air into the car, and, as the radio warmed, first there was a rush of static and then a high pure swath of big band music from some ersatz ballroom in New York or Philadelphia.
Glenn Miller filled the car and Cochrane felt a momentary joy, almost a euphoria, disconnected from all the thoughts of this and previous days. It lasted for several minutes as, seemingly in a dark void, propelled by the evenness of the car's engine, and drawn forward apparently by the two yellow beams of light, he sailed smoothly through a universe separate from any other.
But then the purity of Glenn Miller's sound receded, just as Mauer's story had, and it was replaced by a screaming all-night preacher on KDKA in Pittsburgh who wanted to tell Bill Cochrane about salvation.
It occurred to Cochrane that he should be tired and he considered stopping. But then he realized that he wasn't tired at all, so instead of looking for lodgings, he drove like a banshee past the sleeping coal towns, figuring he could see the Washington Monument by dawn.
The static began to suffocate the preacher, too, and Cochrane took his eyes off the road long enough to look
