But Roosevelt agonized in his reply. Direct American involvement in the European war was politically impossible, even though he personally understood how severely the safety of the United States would be imperiled by the collapse of France and Great Britain.
'Eleanor, I am a tired and weary man,' he told the First Lady one evening in mid-November, following the delivery to the White House of yet another pessimistic dispatch from Churchill: six Soviet armored divisions had been redeployed to the Finnish border and an ongoing build-up of German naval strength in the North Sea and North Atlantic now threatened to cut off British supply lines from Canada and the United States.
'There is only so much I can do,' Roosevelt grumbled darkly.
Politically, he meant. Socially, he meant. With the physical strength that remained in him, he meant.
He was the most powerful man in the world in November of 1939, yet uncertainties were everywhere. He was pinned in by everything from his physical condition to his relations with a recalcitrant Congress. The little ailments plagued him again: his sinuses; his arthritis; his sleeplessness. Franklin Roosevelt was fifty-seven years old, his health was declining, and he deeply feared dying in office. To make matters complete, his third son, Elliott, was in Texas campaigning for John Nance Garner for President.
Roosevelt became bad-tempered and uncommunicative, particularly to those whom he loved and trusted. He took no one into his confidence. The American Communists belittled him and the isolationists sniped at him. Big city bosses withheld their support on major issues until they could be assured what would be in the pork barrel for them in 1940. Southern senators, upon whose support Roosevelt's shaky Capitol Hill coalition rested, were incensed by Eleanor Roosevelt’s embrace of 'civil rights for Negro Americans,”and now balked at the President's every word.
The Negro civil rights groups themselves, who had nowhere to go outside the Democratic Party, criticized Roosevelt's pared-down social budget for 1940. And John L. Lewis, the pugnacious labor leader, savagely assailed FDR for allegedly patronizing him, ignoring his movement, and 'treating the leadership of organized labor as if it has no brains.'
'It doesn't,' FDR snapped in response, but not in public.
The President's insomnia worsened. He took what solace he could find from the bookshelves of the White House. He would frequently rise from bed in the hours after midnight and ask the Secret Service to open the library. Then the President of the United States would don his silk bathrobe, take the elevator to the second floor, and bury himself in histories, biographies, and his collection on the navies of the world.
One evening Eleanor followed him down at 2 A.M. She found him in his favourite reading chair, a single light on beside him. But Franklin wasn't reading. The book was open and folded across his lap. The President of the United States was staring gloomily at a paned window that overlooked a sleeping, unsettled Washington.
'You need desperately to get away, Franklin,' she said, seating herself on the edge of his chair. 'Only so much can be expected from one man.'
The Sequoia was already docked at the Potomac boat basin, she reminded him. As soon as Congress adjourned on the Friday before Thanksgiving, the presidential yacht could take them part of the way to Warm Springs, Georgia, as it had done in every previous year of his presidency.
She saw a flicker of approval in her husband's eyes. She further reminded him that he could then be away from Washington for a full week, surrounded by friends and relatives. If he could keep his spirits up until then, he could draw strength and renewal from the holiday. Roosevelt nodded very slightly. Eleanor's hand gently rested on the back of his neck. She leaned down to Franklin and kissed him on the side of his forehead.
He looked up to her and she saw what she had not otherwise seen for days: a very slight, and very wan, smile.
'I'm so horribly tired,' he said. 'How can I accomplish anything anymore?'
Eleanor, who always had an answer for the press, had none for her husband.
*
Cochrane found a pair of hotel rooms while Peter Whiteside found a ship.
The ship in question was The Fundy Rover, a Canadian freighter out of Halifax that plied a textile trade between Nova Scotia and Bermuda, with the odd stopover in between. Whiteside flew to Bermuda himself both to be a babysitter and to arrange for one of the ports of call.
Whiteside brought Natalie and Rudy Mauer aboard The Fundy Rover himself, abetted by two members of the Royal Bermudian Police, who stayed for the transit and shared the three eight-hour watches with Whiteside. Passage to Philadelphia, and the unscheduled stop there, would take three days.
Cochrane, meanwhile, had driven like a wild man into the hills of north-eastern Pennsylvania. He took no chances on anyone beating him to Mauer, who met him de rigueur at the farmhouse door with a shotgun.
'Is it loaded today?' Cochrane asked in German as he stepped out of the car.
'It's loaded every day now,' Mauer answered. He was unshaven and looked surprisingly older. He weaved slightly, the result Cochrane supposed of his growing predilection for schnapps and brandy for breakfast.
'What other company do you get these days?' Cochrane asked.
'The idiots from Washington called again,' Mauer said, this time in English. 'Told me there would be more questions. A man would come to see me.'
Cochrane felt a chilly tingling through his chest. Dead leaves swirled across the flagstone walkway between him and Mauer. He stopped, looking down the shotgun barrel.
'What man?' Cochrane asked.
'I don't know.'
'Who did you talk to?'
'The sneaky one with the moustache. Herr Lerrick.'
'Otto,' Cochrane said, 'I came here to take you to Philadelphia. British intelligence is bringing Natalie and Rudy into the country by steamer.'
'More lies,' said Mauer. He made a disturbing cocking sound with the shotgun.
Cochrane's anger rose. 'If you don't believe me, blow my head off with that infernal weapon! Then you can stay here and rot until someone comes along to put a bullet in your skull. But if you do believe me, pack one bag and don't plan to come back here. You're moving again, Otto. I've got your family and you know a five-digit additive. Even trade, I’d say. Now go pack your bag and be in my car in fifteen minutes. That's all I'm waiting!'
Cochrane stared for a final second at the nose of the weapon. Then he turned on his heels and walked back toward the car.
'Cochrane! Bill Cochrane!' The German cried out now, his voice fevered, intense, and tortured.
Cochrane stopped and slowly turned, keeping his hands visible. His eyes met Mauer's from a distance of a dozen yards.
The German glared down the site of the firearm, then withdrew slowly.
'I'm already packed,' Mauer proclaimed.
They were gone in six minutes, not fifteen. Cochrane pushed the speedometer as far as he could without risking the Hudson becoming airborne, but such was his desire to escape the highways of the area before any 'official' escort from the Bureau might arrive. He pressed the car around sharp turns on narrow two-lane highways until the road flattened out south of Wilkes-Barre just as the sun set. From there it was a clear sail. Their destination was a place famous for cream cheese, W.C. Fields jokes, hoagies, and Connie Mack’s baseball teams. It was only slightly less famous as the location of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, where Cochrane had already reserved a pair of adjoining rooms. There in Philadelphia he and his German would uneasily spend the night.
And the next night. And the one after that. Mauer's fury mounted, and Cochrane himself began to entertain terrifying doubts about Peter Whiteside, the Bureau, and exactly which direction what sort of operation was leading.
'Now is not the time to panic,' Cochrane explained over the course of their wait. 'If you trusted me ever,' he said as if to read Mauer's darkest thoughts, 'you must trust me now.'
'Must I?' Mauer was asking ominously by three o'clock on the second afternoon.
'Yes. You must.' Cochrane spoke with utter calm, no mean accomplishment for a man himself on the verge of panic. But he had shored some of his own defenses, also. A third room had been rented close by.
Therein resided special agents Cianfrani and Hearn, on leave from the Newark office and willing to act as witness, muscle, and, if need be, firepower for Cochrane.
For her part, Laura Worthington Fowler sat and waited, also. In the empty white house in Liberty Circle, the
